“story”

I love the anecdote because it makes the point so well and it rings so true. The statistic surpassed even my dire expectations. And yes, major labels should have acted years ago. May we learn something from their example.

A recent, furious storm marked the likely end of a particularly relentless rain season. Two stories from the (d)rain.

The first one has all the marks of an urban legend but my father claims it was a very notorious case, appearing in all the major newspapers of the time. Some ten or so years ago, two daughters of a famous doctor returned from a party late at night. A storm having raged not long ago, traffic was a deadlock and the streets were quite literally rivers. To save their friends from a long, slow detour, they got off at the sidewalk opposite their home, not minding overmuch the drench.

They never crossed. They never came home. Their bodies were found in the sewer. An open, overflowed manhole having sucked them that night.

The second story is neither as gruesome nor, really, a story, it’s just a droll scrap from the past. It comes down from my mother who, back in Guzman, her hometown, attended a relatively posh, nun-ran school where the good girls were raised. On rainy days a man used to wait at the school’s exit with the simplest of carts—a wheeled platform with handrails front and back. Booted, he would push the cart himself, across the main avenue and back, charging his passengers some cents of a peso in exchange of a dry crossing. Prim catholic schoolgirls crowded.

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.

A Fair Ellen (noun) could be a roundabout, inefficient, sometimes extravagant and always pathetic behavior to get around a bug in a product. Particularly when it lingers on long after said bug has been fixed. From Bruce Tognazzini’s inspired collie metaphor.

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…

A weird happening today, a phone call, has got me paralyzed and deep in soul-searching. In my rambling thoughts I remembered Dragon Ball, my all-time favorite story as a child. You know, one of the most magical things of this most magical anime, perhaps even its central theme, is how almost every enemy, minor or major, eventually becomes part of the gang, a friend and perhaps even a wife or a husband—there’s Oolong, Yajirobe, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Kuririn, Android 18, the Ox King, Yamcha, Piccolo, Vegeta, Majin Buu, and even Mr. Satan, but I’m sure I’m forgetting many.

Let’s see if it works.

After an afternoon of sumptuous, unrestrained culinary indulgence, bursting at the seams, a friend of Ureña, one of dad’s best friends, liked to say, in fantastically black humor: ”Ojala hubiera muerto de niño—para no sufrir tanto.” (“I wish I’d died a child—to save myself from so much suffering.”)

”Trabajo que no da para levantarse a las 11[AM], no es trabajo.” (“A job that doesn’t pay enough for sleeping after noon is no job.”) Used to say another, rather too fond of the good life, friend of Dad’s.

People usually said goodbye to my grandgrandmother Aurora—who is now just over a hundred—with a formulaic, yet earnest, “Take care!” To which she promptly responded, ”You take care! I’m over ninety years old, what I want to do now is die!”

”Que puedes esperar Parra,” (“What can you expect Parra”) used to say Ureña jokingly to my father, ”yo me crie con tortillas de sal y chile. Yo no comi pescado, ni leche, ni jamon.” (“I was raised on tortillas with salt and chile. I didn’t get to eat fish, nor milk, nor ham.”)

There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera Mechanism^WP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).

Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track^AM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.

Of late (and not a minute too late, some will say), I’ve been studying tact. Here are two nice anecdotes I’ve stumbled on.

Do you know more?