The Six Burgesses of Calais

The blog BibliOdyssey, one which awakes in me a sense of wonder, has compiled The Comic History of England. One of the engravings particularly calls a certain passage:

The Siege of Calais, or rather the blockade (for it was shut up both by land and sea), was the most memorable, as it withstood the efforts of Edward the Third a whole year, and was not terminated at last but by famine and extreme misery; the gallantry of Eustace de St. Pierre*, who first offered himself a victim for his fellow-citizens, has ranked his name with heroes.

* Eustace de St. Pierre (1287 - 1371), leader of the six burghers of Calais who, bareheaded and barefoot, with hopes around their necks, presented themselves to Edward III of England as hostages for the safety of Calais; they were pardoned at the instance of Queen Philippa.

From The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne

Hyper High-Tech

Walter Isaacson is optimistic about the "print" technology, in Edge's World's Question Center. And he is not veering towards a metaphor. Future electric energy outages will be more usual as no wasting water programs. So, books and moleskines should be the new trend in advanced technology. Everybody should stop the machines, sit onto a comfortable chair and, at a reach distance of natural light source, read post-post modern literature, as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (past-post-post, I admit) or the best sci-fi book ever written: Codex Seraphinianus.

Digression

What kind of motivation forces someone to spend hours looking for a supposedly Utrillo’s reproduction which has been shown in a scene of The Last Man on Earth (1964)? I was grasped by the remembrance feeling when I saw it at the first time behind Vicent Price… But the closest the free association of ideas could get was an Eglise de Pont-Saint-Martin: There is the spike, but not the two stories alley.

Nightmare City

Paul Theroux: In India a few months ago, as I was leaving my hotel in Chennai, I noticed a hotel employee shadowing me. He warned me that the sidewalks were so packed with people I would be swallowed up and stifled. He was right. And I was unable to cross the main street in Bangalore, a leafy city of under a million people in 1973 and now a hectically improvised sprawl of seven million. Mumbai’s population of nearly 20 million rivals that of São Paulo, Brazil, and Lagos, Nigeria — nightmare cities. (in The New York Times)

Brazilian Roots

This is the Spanish flu virus in 3D. Spanish? It was a Brazil fan?

Revelation

Daler Mehndi could be Dr Wickramasinghe's proof of concept...

From Kottke to SoAP

Anti-Semite and Control Freak

You are a new Latin American leftist? Then you better to recheck some of your myths. Begin with Salvador Allende, who was accused of being anti-Semite, mainly due to the fact of not taking in a famous Nazi. Thanks to Matt Webb, I’ve discovered that Allende was also a control freak, to the point of call Stratford Beer to develop the spurious Project Cybersyn.

This post is part of my new project: BLOG EVENTUALLY, DIE RESPECTABLY.

VW Bug is a Blobject!

Don Stewart, a visual artist, received a cease and desist letter from a law firm claiming to represent Volkswagen of America. You know why? He has made the following art over a VW Bug.


The VW Bug is an icon of America culture - it is an object. More precisely, it is a blobject. Here is a case of Copyright claim gone too far. Tooooooo far!

Toad Prince

Hey Mom! I'm inside a DECsystem-10, thanks to the PDP Planet, a Paul Allen project. The OS? It is a Tops-20 (Toad-1). It is very cool be personally inside of one of the machines described in the book "Hackers", by Steven Levy.

Unbelievable!

Real Fiction II

Life imitates art, as the evidences abound one more time. At least it is what one might deduct over the group of consultants established by FEMA "to complement traditional intelligence-based threat projections by taking an 'out of the box' approach that is achieved by drawing on the talents of a broad range of individuals, such as best-selling authors, academics, the military, and pop musicians." Well, the fictional character Turner belonged to a group exactly likewise...

Real Fiction

In a dense singularity times, scientists should pay more attention to sci-fi writers, as they seemingly are the only ones capable of previewing to where technology are going to. Take a look at this obscure line, written by an obscure sci-fi writer from the 60's: Heading towards the mountains Drover switched the car radio to YBM*Sonic, which, in the interests of safe driving, transmits a 24-hour programme of shifting electronic patterns ("A Landscape of Shallows", Christopher Finch, Best SF Stories from New Worlds 5, edited by Michael Moorcock, Phanter Books, 1969). This dream comes true almost 40 years after, for Toyota Motor Corp. has announced that it has improved its pre-crash safety system by adding a driver-monitoring function that recognizes the orientation of the driver's face and warns of a collision. The system will be mounted on the new model of Lexus slated for launch in spring 2006. The principle is the same... Instead of a radio station that transmits anti-hypnotic beats in brain waves frequencies, a face recognition system.

Outer Space Pyrites

A catchy briefing of "Piritas siderais", found in "Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future", by M Elizabeth Ginway, thanks to Google Print: In Piritas siderais (1994), the title of which refers to the gold-colored nuggets commonly known as "fool's gold", black American Berzelius Baldwin makes a pact with the devil to be immortal, with his soul to be places in the body of a Brazilian black who happens to be the twin brother of Zé Seixas, the protagonist of the story. However, when that twin dies in utero before the reincarnation can take place, the attempt fails. In order to keep his end of the bargain, the devil improvises a genetic chip which renders Baldwin's body immortal, but only if it is nurtured with a constant supply of gold, an abundant supply of which Baldwin has located on an as-yet-uncharted planet, ruled by an Afro-Brazilian deity. Baldwin believes that he can secretly obtain the gold from the planet by channeling. Maria, the priestess, claims that her chicken, Leda, has the power to provide part of this service by imitating the goose that laid the golden eggs. Zé and his friend Terêncio, who also happens to be an excellent medium, volunteer to go along with the plot. When the Afro-Brazilian god Oko magically appears, Terêncio, in an act of recalling Zeus's seduction of Leda the swan, channels Oko's powers so that the chicken is able to lay golden eggs. Of course, like the god's name, Oko (oco or hollow in Portuguese), the victory is hollow because Terêncio, after his orgiastic night with the chicken Leda, is famished and cannot resist roasting her in order to satisfy his hunger, thus completing this satiric fairy tale and justifying the title, "Outer Space Pyrites".

Sunday's Balsam

Last Studio 360 show was about conspiracies. Kurt Andersen had interviewed the journalist Jon Ronson, who uncovered Daved Icke's horrid tactics of calling Jews as lizards. His books, along with Henry Ford's The International Jew should be thrown into a pyre. NPR's Studio 360 is the best radio show ever; it is not obnoxious and it is not obvious, as a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang miniature. By the way, next week Kurt Andersen talks with Terry Gilliam about why darkness, fear, and the fantastic are good for kids.

Everything Has Its First Time

Well... Resistance is futile. My first podcast is up and running. Thanks to Ourmedia and FeedBurner. Go and listen Renato Carosone, Donald Duck, Monty Python... For now, it is in Portuguese. Adam Curry and Sirius: watch out!
UPDATE (08-07): I was obliged to withdraw my acknowledgement to Ourmedia, because they simply fade away my two podcasts shows. I recognize that nobody is perfect in this event - as my podcasts are not podsafe at all - but I was expecting a minimal decorum of them. Ourmedia is a free service and, for that reason, attracts a lot of freeloaders. As one of them, I can't complain, but I can send to them ketchup packets with tiny holes, as suggests my friend David Blumenstein, who kindly had offered a hosting space for me. Thank you, David!

Good Bye Rock Combat Years

Maybe the years of charity rock concerts are over. Maybe Bob Geldof and the Live Aid concert were just a dream within a dream. But it is impossible be apathetic to "Unplayed Piano", Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan's last song composed in homage to Aung San Suu Kyi, a political prisoner in Burma. It is a honest outcry wrought in pure stanza, as: Unplayed pianos / Are often by a window / In a room where nobody else goes / She sits alone with her silent song / Somebody bring her home. Those are the kind of words that makes me feel relived of having transcended the rock combat years.

The Dictatorship of Objectivity

Much have being said about Joseph Ratzinger's opinions against relativism. For the new Pope, this view epitomizes the cultural confusion of our times, in which a bubblegum pop is placed in the same hierarchic position as a Bach's fugue. Ratzinger prefers the secure harbor of an Aristotle’s universal or an absolute entity that imposes itself through a "winner-take-all" method. I've been scratching my head over this issue for a long time and I'd like to make some points. I don't think, for example, that the relativist position should lead to the idea that anything goes morally, like prejudge the Aztecs because they sacrificed children. The Brazilian historian Boris Fausto had quoted last week, in a local paper, the differences between relativism and pluralism made by Isaiah Berlin. With due respect, I think the two categories are intertwined, because both grant as valid people’s cultural differences. For all matters, it is easier figure out this peculiar concoction in the anthropologic field, specifically in the brawl between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere over the death of Captain Cook. For the first, Cook was confounded with a Hawaiian war god, and this clearly reflects an autochthon rationality; for the second, he was condemned to death for have took as hostage the native chief of a tribe, and this reflects a practical rationality. The anti-relativists argue that the so-called "Western" rationality, expressed at least partially by science and technology, is not locked up in itself, differently of, say, Zande witchcraft. This is the typical argument that makes me believe more enthusiastically that different cultures have different rationalities.

Swing Forever

This is the story: A grandchildren asked her grandpa to make rearrangements over classic rock swings from bands as Nirvana, Soundgarden and (how odd!) Spandau Ballet. Lucky us the grandpa was nothing more than Paul Anka. What about the results? "Sonically amazing, musically impeccable, vocally superb".

Sexual Healing

As everybody knows, John Paul II's Holy Spirit has taken Bush and his John Birch Society acolytes. What everybody doesn't know (and when I say everybody I say the Brazilian media in general) is that Pedro Chequer, the director of Brazil's HIV/Aids programme, had rejected the faith-based AIDS funding, a variation of the infamous condom ban promoted by almighty Vatican.