They say, "sing while you slave," but I just get bored.

Posts, aka, Boobage Indeed!

2008-08-12T03:01:00.005-04:00

Down.

	August 2008:
500.	That's it, that's all, there ain't no more!	Atlantic, Google, Internet, Devolution, Andressa Soares, Dançarina do Créu, Mulher Melancia, Garota Melancia, Boobage, HAL, Dave Bowman, Stanley Kubrick, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Cheech & Chong, Liminality, Communitas, MUF DVR, Denis Leary, Leonard Cohen, The Future.
499.	All he believes are his eyes	Bob Dylan, License To Kill, Adam & Eve, Brancacci Chapel, Masolino, Masaccio, Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd, Yvonne (wife), Green Queen of the Night, Marc Chagall, Bella, Victor Turner, Liminality, Communitas, Officer Krupke, West Side Story, Ivan Illich, The Good Samaritan, Preta Gil, Boobage.
498.	Sobe a classe média	José Sarney, Malvados, André Dahmer, Hartmann, Atlantic Peace, Vila Mimosa, Taser, Aeron Hall, Tim McLean, Vince Weiguang Li, André Salcedo, Giovanna, Boobage.
497.	palavra do dia 'proparoxítona'	Oxítono, Paroxítono, Proparoxítono, Dom Ináfio, Ota, Construção, Chico Buarque, Fernanda Lima, Grande Rio, Mariana Aristóteles, Gaviões da Fiel, Boobage.
496.	Anteater / Global Wierding	Andrew C. Revkin, Thomas L. Friedman, Paul Krugman, Graziele Massafera, Grazi, Grande Rio, Boobage.
495.	Polar Bears, Psychoanalysis & Dinosaurs	Alaska, Dirk Kempthorne, Endangered Species, Sarah Palin, John McCain, McNasty, Republican, Psychotherapy, Psychiatrists, Ramin Mojtabai, Mark Olfson, Malana, Brazil's Next Top Model, Priscilla Parreira, André Salcedo, Boobage.
494.	tiras, também antídoto	Jellyfish, Nematocyst, Cnidocyte, Cnidoblast, Nematocyte, Phylum Cnidaria, Cnidocil, Novaes, Os Silva, Tiago Rodrigues, Irukandji, Portugese Man o War, Gulf of Mexico, Mississippi, Dead Zone, Cris Vianna, Grande Rio, Duas Caras, Sabrina, Sheron Menezes, Adriana Alves, & Juliana Alves, Boobage.
493.	Carnival Antidote / Antídoto Carnaval	Jan Miel, Pieter Bruegel, Charles Taylor, Bloco da Ansiedade, Henry Miller, Clichy, Victor Witter Turner, Edith Turner, Liminal, Polysemy, Polysemous, Anti-Structure, Immanent, Transcendent, Mark Kingwell, Michael and Dorothea Schmidt, Unpasteurized Milk, The Milk War, Pérola Negra, Camila Barbosa, Adriana Alves, Boobage.

	July 2008:
492.	duh? doh! Doha?	Subsidies, Externalities, Klimawandel, Erderwärmung, Grêmio Recreativo e Cultural Escola de Samba Vai-Vai, Musa Valquíria Ribeiro, Rainha de Bateria e Musa do Caldeirão e Princesa da Corte Renata Souza, Bailarina e Rainha da Bateria Ivi Mesquita, Tati Lira, Diva Persi, Boobage.
491.	São Cristóvão	Agora O Jornal do Sul, O Informativo Vale do Taquari, Rádio Verdes Vales FM, SMSTT, The Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine, Viviane Castro, São Clemente, Musa do Carnaval do Rio de Janeiro, Boobage.
490.	'entails some engagement with text'	Clean Electron Wildcatters, Jesse Winchester, Alexandre Pires, Desaparecido, Manu Chao, Cadillac, Haynesville Shale, Louisiana, Taser, Saskatchewan Police Commission, Literacy, Ilderton, Stanton, University of Guelph, Anthony Clarke, Boobage, Raíssa de Oliveira, Rayssa, Rainha de Bateria, Beija-Flor de Nilópolis.
489.	Othello, Desdemona, Iago	Othello, Desdemona, Iago, Laurence Fishburne, Irène Jacob, Kenneth Branagh, Mekhi Phifer, Julia Stiles, Josh Hartnett.
488.	Valeska Reis, Rainha do Carnaval	Valeska Reis, Carnaval, Salvador, Rainha do Carnaval, Unidos da Vila Maria. Boobage.
487.	The Heart Attack Machine.	Johnny Nash, Bob Dylan, Desolation Row, Mark Twain, Disraeli, Quitéria Chagas, Samba, Rainha de Bateria, Império Serrano, Águia de Ouro, Boobage.
486.	SNAFU	Angra dos Reis, Angra 3, Nuclear, Allan Kardec, Carlos Minc, Ibama, Fernando Jordão, Roberto Messias, Exigências Brutais, Spiritual Ecology, Ecologia Espiritual, Eletrobras, Eletronuclear, Olivia Judson, DR. TATIANA, Boobage, Valéria Valenssa, Nubile, Samba, Breast, Spiral, Taser, Michael Langan, Métis, Sharon Shymko, Brian Minchin, David Chartrand, Winnipeg, Keith McCaskill.
485.	Chupeta / Soother	Malvados, André Dahmer, Desmemória, Peitos, Chupar, Boquete, Minete.
484.	vanity ... cute	Al Gore, Brian Collins, Cute Green Logo, Cute Younger Man, Lawrence Downes, Steven Heller.
483.	tempest in a teapot	Barack Obama, Barry Blitt, Bill Burton, New Yorker Magazine, 2004 Democratic National Convention, Pundit Jizz, Ryan Lizza, Simon Houpt, Bill Carter, Philip Kennicott, Maureen Dowd, Rick Salutin, Rex Murphy.
482.	Omar Hassan al-Bashir & Luis Moreno-Ocampo	Omar Hassan al-Bashir, UN, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.
481.	Sunday meditation, Pierrot Le Fou (?) :-)	Le Rendez-vous, Gilles Vigneault, Claude Léveillée, Jean-Luc Goddard, Jean Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Nathalie Tardivel.
480.	não sei	Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers, China Brasil, Image Mode, Heartbreak.
479.	Be there! Or be square!	G8, Climate Change, Global Warming, Lovelock, Nuclear, T Boone Pickens.
478.	Cidadão / Citizen	Pato, Ciça, Shaking Tent.
477.	Taylor & Thomas Hardy & Spiritwood Saskatchewan	Charles Taylor, Thomas Hardy, God's Funeral, Spiritwood, Saskatchewan, Art Dagenais, Curtis Dagenais, Herb Jaster, Marc Bourdages, Robin Cameron, Wolf Statute, Que polícia é essa, João Roberto Amorim Soares, Paulo Roberto Barbosa Soares, Alessandra Amorim, José Mariano Beltrame.
476.	Don Cherry & What. Ever.	Way!, Wellhouse Door, JB Online, Novaes, G8, G5, Snake & Stick, Malvados, André Dahmer, Cidade do Medo, Cachorrinho, Order of Canada, Rex Murphy, Henry Morgentaler, Don Cherry, Rafe Mair, Kari Simpson, Lloyd Candow, Pasadena, Newfoundland.
475.	Sunday meditation - ultimamente ...	One more 'last gasp' that wasn't really, Communion, Corinthians, Anhedonia, Chaka Khan, Rufus, Tell me Something Good.

	June 2008:
474.	Charles Taylor - And more, and more!	Charles Taylor, Gérard Bouchard, Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles, CCPARDC, Inamori Foundation, Kyoto Prize, Kazuo Inamori, Passion for Success, Malvados, André Dahmer, Walrus, Carpenter, Oysters, Edward Lear.
473.	Carro na Garrafa	Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Edward J. Markey, James Hansen, United States Senate Committee on Energy and natural Resources, NASA, Goddard, Aptera, The Age of Abundance, Michael Warren.
472.	the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River	Kolokolo, The Elephant's Child, Rudyard Kipling, Zimbabwe, Celia W. Dugger, Barry Bearak, Robert Mugabe, Sally Hayfron, Grace Marufu, Morgan Tsvangirai, Augustine Chihuri, Boniface G. Chidyausiku, UN, United Nations, Grace Kwinjeh, ZANU-PF, Thabo Mbeki, South Africa, Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, Dadirai Chipiro, Abigal Chiroto, Harare, Emmanuel Chiroto, Tonderai Ndira.
471.	arco-íris	Sáo José do Norte, Noiva do Mar.
470.	If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break	The Levee's Gonna Break, Bob Dylan, Modern Times, Joe Blair, Iowa River, Vinton, Iowa City, Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Antioch, Fort Wayne.
469.	yet more Charles Taylor	Charles Taylor, Durkheim, Robert Bellah, Secular Imaginaries Conference, The New University, Templeton Prize 2007, Aube Billard Taylor.
468.	Pay it forward.	Benjamin Webb, Benjamin Franklin.
467.	Truth? Reconciliation? Who knows I wonder?	Bee Gees, Words, Stephen Harper, Phil Fontaine, Chuck Strahl, Jim Prentice, Philip Mayfield, Jack Layton, Rick Salutin, Rex Murphy, Margaret Wente, Three Stooges, Talking Heads, David Byrne, Travelling Wilburys, Dirty World, Bob Dylan, ee cummings, Brand New.
466.	three that made me laugh today	Malvados, André Dahmer, Pato, Ciça, Ota, Dom Ináfio.
465.	Cunning Stunts - Fathers 4 Justice	Fathers 4 Justice, Batman, Robin, Superman, Father Christmas, Captain America, Spiderman.
464.	Sunday Meditation in Burnaby - D Words.	Bill Reid, Denial, Defiance, Delightful, Mister D, Kevorkian, Keizer, Iron Man, Robert Downey, Gwyneth Paltrow.
463.	Atlantic City	Bruce Springsteen, Thomas Pynchon, Entropy, Rubin Carter, After the Goldrush, Neil Young.
462.	Barack Obama	Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Iowa, South Carolina, Perfect Union, Minnesota.
461.	sense on Biofuels	Donald Smith, McGill.
460.	1000 square Kilometres per month	Floresta Amazônica, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, Inpe, Brasil, Mato Grosso.
459.	making sense	Transcendence, Immanence, Keith McMillan, Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion, Understanding.

	May 2008:
458.	Death & Unrelated Statistics	Zimbabwe, Tonderai Ndira, Steve Biko, Plaxedess Mutariswa, Statistics Canada, Statscan, Commuting Patterns.
457.	Lennie Cone in old St. John's	Leonard Cohen, Sharon Robinson.
456.	more Charles Taylor	Gérard Bouchard, Charles Taylor, Jean Charest, Social Imaginaries, Quebec, Anticlimax.
455.	Old Chunk of Coal	Billy Joe Shaver.
454.	more shit around the RCMP	Mike Webster, RCMP, Robert Dziekanski, Richard Bent, Denman Island,
453.	Marina Silva, ex-Ministra do Meio Ambiente	Marina Silva, Lula, Carlos Minc.
452.	Origins	Malvados, André Dahmer, Jenkins, SUV, Ethics, Ethical, Moral.
451.	Mr Know All	Somerset Maugham, Max Kelada, Mrs Ramsay.
450.	polemic	Polemic, Conversation, Taylor, A Secular Age.
449.	Yossi Harel / Exodus 1947	Yossi Harel, Exodus, Israel, 1947.
448.	acabar em pizza	Dorothy Stang, Bida, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, Fogoió, Rayfran das Neves Sales.
447.	Solar Thermal Electicity	Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), Ausra, David Mills.
446.	Prayer	Gretta Vosper, With or Without God.
445.	close to home	Malvados, André Dahmer, Jararaca, Pit Viper.
444.	May Day	Memory, Biofuels, Desmatamento na Amazônia, Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), Sahara, MENA, Desertec, High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission.

	April 2008:
443.	Ideology is Madness	Northrop Frye, Gretta Vosper, Pronoun.
442.	Sunday Meditation: Oral Sex & Death	CDC - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, AIDS, HIV, Boobage, Wanda, Paul Gauguin, Tehura, Isis, Patch, Darfur, Cohen, Alzheimer's.
441.	still busy I guess	Lula, Celso Amorim, Ethanol, Brasil.
440.	Stelmach / Greenpeace	Stelmach: the best Premier oil money can buy.
439.	more deadly sins	Speculators, Futures, Global Food Crisis, White Woman riding Black Man.
438.	St. George / São Jorge	Saint George, São Jorge, Snidely Whiplash, Dishonest John, Dudley Do-Right, Nell Fenwick, Horse, Gretta Vosper, Giuliano Zacardelli, Barbara George.
437.	With or Without God	Gretta Vosper, Progressive Christianity, James Rowe Adams, James Murray, United Church of Canada.
436.	busy ...	Biodeisel, Lula, Ban Ki Moon, PAC, Arco de Fogo, Petróleo Verde.
435.	Benny & The Jets	Benny & Bush, what a pair?.
434.	Pará & Papa	Sexual Slavery, the Limbic Lobe, Michael Valpy, the Pope, Ivan Illich, the AntiChrist.
433.	Smile when you say that!	The Virginian, Owen Wister, Highschool Memories, Immanence vs Transcendence in the OED.
432.	Berlin & Beijing	Interesting.
431.	Things / Coisas ... &etcTibetera	Anais Nin, Henry Miller, China & Tibet, Social Imaginary, Dick Tracy, Dragnet, Jack Webb, Harry Morgan, Gargantua, François Rabelais.
430.	A Mixed Bag	Johann Kresnik, Giuseppe Verdi, A Masked Ball, Ethanol, Food Shortages, America, Southern Cops, George Soros, Mormons.
429.	sometimes we agree	Melons.
428.	The Good Samaritan
427.	Casa Ecológica?	Ambiente Brasil with an incomplete effort. China Olympic Torch joke.

	March 2008:
426.	hopeful Sunday	Centro de Demonstração para Uso de Energias Renováveis.
425.	the contagion of ostentatious do-goodism	Rex Murphy on Earth Hour.
424.	Beijing 2008	On the creation of the Beijing Olympic Logo.
423.	Flimflam	Good Bush, Bad Bush, Stephen Johnson.
422.	The Eightfold Path	Buddhism.
421.	Lu San	Another FPSO coming along - Frade.
420.	Umbigo / Bellybutton	Travails in Tibet.
419.	Greenpeace	Greenpeace on Carbon Sequestration, & Homer-Dixon ranting.
418.	Queen of the North	No justice for the politically correct.
417.	Southern Baptists - "supreme standard"	Southern baptists get around to climate change.
416.	Rumours of Glory	Bruce Cockburn. You plunge your hand in, and draw it back - scorched! Beneath it's shining - like gold - but better.
415.	in the whole wide universe	Bob Dylan, Chimes of Freedom.
414.	Declare independence! ... well ... yes	Bjork, Tibet.
413.	okokok ... RCMP & Solar	It doesn't take much.

	February 2008:
412.	Não sou de Ninguém	what to say? Bye for now. Things that love night love not such nighs as these. And in cases of disobedience the minister is ordeinit to proceed to the censure of the Kirk against the contumacious and outliers.
411.	Darfur, Darfur, Darfur	rat's ass.

	January 2008:
410.	Recycling / Reciclagem	Ambiente Brasil, Mônica Pinto, Wisewood, Itatiba, São Paulo, Vladimir Kudrjawzew, Rogério Igel, Inpev, Eloísa Mano, Elen Vasques Pacheco, UFRJ.
409.	Who benefits from it?	cows.
408.	Litoral Sulista	low lands on the south coast of Brasil.
407.	which way the wind blows	nuclear renaissance, oh yeah.
406.	a hopeful message	Gwynne Dyer, Bali, Anthony Westell.

	December 2007:
405.	Roses	William Blake, T.S. Eliot.
404.	Só	Alberto da Costa e Silva, Easter.
403.	starting with Six Degrees	Six Degrees, Mark Lynas
402.	Calvin meets the Golden Toad	Calvin & Hobbes, Golden Toad, United Online.
401.	Questions	Dom Luiz Cappio, Pituaçu, Salvador, Bahia, Canada & the Axis of Evil, Robert Dziekanski, RCMP, Elliott.
400.	Canada?	CCPI, Climate Change Performance Index.
399.	what to do?	the age-old question - fish or cut bait: Ian Bush, Paul E. Kennedy, Paul Koester, Gary Mason, George Feenstra, United Church, Technorati Bullshit, Mary Fearon, Salvador, Ouroborus.

	November 2007:
398.	nasty rhetoric	No fuck the Technorati Tags, they dont work!
397.	Sunday Meditation	IPCC, AR4, Ban Ki-moon, Rajendra Pachauri, Andrew Revkin, Tupi, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar, José Maurício Bustani, Richie Havens, Robert Dziekanski.
396.	Epitome / Paragon	Epitome, Paragon, Gilbert & Sullivan, Northrop Frye, Jay MacPherson.
395.	Robert Dziekanski	Zosia Cisowski, Robert Dziekanski, RCMP, Taser, Paul Pritchard, Sima Ashrafinia, THX 1138.
394.	Defeat, Deduct, Defence, Detail & ... Denial	Betty Fletcher, Charles Miller, Eugene Siler, Michael Hawkins.
393.	Counterpoint, sort'a	Cargoes, John Masefield, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay.
392.	Every soldier's very finest remembrancer	Wilfred Owen, Rex Murphy.
391.	Bar da Boa	Karla Caprali, Antartica, Ambev, Boobage, Juliana Paes, Viradouro, Teresópolis, Therezópolis Gold, MST, Vale do Rio Doce, CVRD, Carajás, Benjamin Steinbruch.
390.	What does it mean?	Leonard Cohen, Susan Sontag, Hermeneutic, Exegesis, Mimetic.
389.	one day recently in k-k-k-Canada	Canada, Matthew, Mateus, Light, Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, Gabriel García Márquez, Melancholy Whores.

	October 2007:
388.	Cães de Guerra	Dahmer, Malvados, Bob Dylan, Sudan, Darfur, Genocide, Bangkok, Thailand, Smith Dharmasaroja, China, Chemicals, Drugs.
387.	Pigs, Death ... & stuff	Verlyn Klinkenborg, Pigs, Death, Zosia Cisowski, Robert Dziekanski, RCMP, Taser, Gwynne Dyer, Global Warming, Denial, Evasion, Bob Dylan, Cadillac.
386.	Cousin Caterpillar	Incredible, String, Band.
385.	Lap Dancing	Geoffrey Miller, Oestrus, Estrus, Estrous, Boobage, Pamela Anderson.
384.	és mais meu amigo	Prayer, Bahai, Bahá'í.
383.	Compra Solidária	Cabo Frio, Compra Solidária, Leon Corrêa, Tamoios, Kurt Vonnegut.
382.	forgiveness	Michael Sandy, Denise Sandy, Ezekiel Sandy, John Fox, Gary Timmins, Ilye Shurova, Anthony Fortunato, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gods Grandeur.
381.	Small Is Beautiful (continued)	Small Is Beautiful, EF Schumacher, Nuclear Energy.
380.	a few words I found on the Internet	Words, Few.
379.	Total sales, in BILLIONS	Matthew, EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Eduardo Arias, Panama, Diethylene Glycol.

	September 2007:
378.	Namasté	Burma, Mudra, Namasté, Anjali, Aung San Suu Kyi, Kenji Nagai.
377.	'threats without borders'	Mohamed ElBaradei, IAEA, Nobel.
376.	Laugh so as not to Cry	Darfur, Australia, China.
375.	uh huh	Hanna Arendt, Changeling, Changelyng, Thomas Norton, Peer Gynt, Ibsen, Solveig.

	August 2007:
374.	Cardinal	Cardinal, Temperance, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Apocrypha, Solomon, Augustine.
373.	Amen.	Northrop Frye, Double Vision.
372.	Rush Hour	Ocre, Gilmar.
371.	Lembranças	EF Schumacher, O Eco.
370.	Lies, Damned Lies, etc.	Google, Yahoo, Morro da Pena, Casa.
369.	te merece	Gilberto Gil, Banda Larga, Circo Voador, Get Back, De Leve, David Chew, Cello Encounter, Cecília Meireles, Petrobras.
368.	Rue Morgue Avenue	Verlyn Klinkenborg.
367.	who cares?	Aquafina, Pepsi, Dasani, Coke, Malvados, Andre Dahmer.

	July 2007:
366.	Epiphany, wise or otherwise	Sexual Arousal, Homunculus, Chakra, Hemisphere, Equator, María Angeles Bárcena, Northrop Frye, Apocalypse, Epiphany, Lloyd Candow, Pasadena, Newfoundland, Robert Sptizer, Kama Sutra, Cindy Meston, David Buss, G spot, Grafenberg, Collagen, Marcio Custódio, Chico Buarque, Acalanto, Lullabye, Boobage, Cuíca.
365.	couple it with something ...	Tybalt, Mercutio, Romeo Juliet, Cansei, Flirt Gills, Skains Mates.
364.	Rules of Thumb	Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, India, Suicide, Lester Brown, Gwynne Dyer, Ishwar Bandharkawda, Arnaldo Jabor, Tonspi, José Silva Pinto.
363.	Jeremiah	Jeremiah, Jeremias, Susan Antler, Raqib Burke, Mafalda, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Steve Erkel (Urkel).
362.	Almost Like ...	Tirinha, Inutilidades Públicas, Daniel Lafayette, Stephen Leacock, Mark Kingwell, Boobage.
361.	Rigidity Attracts Moments	Miyagi, Niigata, Kashiwazaki, Kariwa, Earthquake, Nuclear Energy, Krümmel, Vattenfall, Infraero, Congonhas, TAM, 3054.
360.	Construção	Chico Buarque, Construção.
359.	Giddy Al Gore	Al Gore, Live Earth.
358.	Rivers	Rio Madeira, Santo Antônio, Jirau, Odebrecht, Furnas, Camargo Corrêa, Suez, Light, Alusa, Rio São Francisco, Velho Chico.
357.	How to boil a frog.	Frog.
356.	Excuses	Vatican.
355.	Sunday Morning	Wallace Stevens.
354.	Pig-circus	Ian Bush, Shane DeMeyer, Howard Rubin, Paul Koester, Joseph Slemko, Brian Gilson, Helen Roberts, Sharon Smith, Sheila White, RCMP, Wallace Stevens, Morro do Estado.
353.	Lies	Ian Bush, Shane DeMeyer, Howard Rubin, Paul Koester, Joseph Slemko, Brian Gilson, Helen Roberts, Sharon Smith, Sheila White, RCMP.
352.	PCC / Marcola	A hoax maybe? Marcola, PCC, Dante, Hell, Inferno.

	June 2007:
351.	Radicals / Rebeldes	Olavo de Carvalho, Antioch.
350.	Nuclear Waste	Nuclear Waste, UNEP, Lawrence Lessig.
349.	Rua Visconde de Itaboraí	just a few little stories.
348.	Bone Heads	Hazard, Liability, Sarnia, Lethbridge, Bruce Springsteen, Terrorism, Kieran King, Wawota, Saskatchewan, Jo Anne Euler, Susan Wilson, Don Rempel, South East Cornerstone.
347.	Goddamatch?	Goddamatch, Occam, Ockham, Wondercum.
346.	What to call it? Potpourri?	Potpourri, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Meadowlark, Coalition, RCMP, Doris Day, David Brown, No-Fly, Congo, Kristof, Ethiopia, Ogaden, Chinese Oil Field, Security Forces.
345.	Identity	Identity, Metaphor, Metáfora.
344.	O Google da energia	Daniel Yergin, Veja.
343.	World Government Might Work (!?) wtf?	Spiegel, Markus Feldenkirchen, Dirk Kurbjuweit, Christian Reiermann, G8, Bono, Geldof, wtf.
342.	Luiz Inácio da Silva / Getúlio Dornelles Vargas	Lula, Getúlio Vargas, Fritz Utzeri.
341.	on the 31 bus	Jacob, Jacó, Chagall, Kafka.
340.	Heilsgeschichte	Northrop Frye, Double Vision, Numbers, Zephaniah, TS Eliot, Stéphane Mallarmé.

	May 2007:
339.	Nuclear (again, again)	Nuclear Energy.
338.	Shiraz Dossa	Shiraz Dossa, Iran, Tehran, Holocaust, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Faurisson, Fredrick Toeben, Rasoul Mousavi, David Duke, Ku Klux Klan, Zahra Kazemi, Francis Xavier, Nova Scotia, Canada, John Ibbitson, Doug Saunders, Sean Riley, CAUT, APCCU, Raymond Lahey, Juan Cole, Jonathan Steele, Rex Murphy.
337.	Tommy Douglas & Chicken Little	Tommy Douglas, Chicken Little.
336.	The Bride	Bride, Ring Them Bells, Oh Mercy, Revelations, Queen of the North, Ian Bush, Paul Koester, RCMP, Paulo Lacerda, Polícia Federal, Sandro Torres Avelar, Cláudio Avelar, Gilmar Mendes, Gautama, Zuleido Veras, Eliana Calmon, Antonio Fernando de Souza, Márcio Thomaz Bastos.
335.	Is that a chicken joke?	Henny Penny, Foxy Loxy, Little Red Hen, Jo Anne Worley.
334.	Kierkegaard's Clown	Leonardo Boff, Kierkegaard, Palhaço, Gaia, IPCC, Northrop Frye.
333.	The 11th Hour	Annie Leibovitz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jökulsárlón, Pai Nosso, Our Father, Vanity Fair, Rex Murphy.
332.	Broken Heart Hotel	Niterói, Gilmar, Alcione, Ana Carolina, kd lang.
331.	Doh (!?), Erm ... Ack!	IPCC, Spiegel, Independent, Deforestation.
330.	Manifest Absurdity	some funny, some not so funny Randall Tobias, Pamela Martin, Paris Hilton, Elliot Mintz, Roy Pearson, Chris Manning, Tyrone Butler, Rex Murphy, Shane Doan, Hockey Canada, Official Languages.
329.	Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI	Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Brasil, Brazil, Liberation Theology, Leonardo Boff, Leonardo Boff, Ernani Diniz Luca, Nani, Jens Glüsing, Geraldo Majella, Erwin Kräutler, CNBB, Larry Rohter.
328.	Northrop Frye - The Double Vision	No good waiting for UofT to get this on-line, have to do it myself. Northrop Frye, Double Vision.
327.	Duck Dick. Duck!	Genital Morphology, Patricia Brennan.

	April 2007:
326.	Opheera McDoom / Mohamed Omer Abdelati	Opheera McDoom, Mohamed Omer Abdelati, Sudan.
325.	Notes	Blooger, FcukIt, ShitCan.
324.	Mary Magdalene meets Brasil	Os Malvados, André Dahmer, Magdalene.
323.	Angra 3	Angra.
322.	O Rio reza pela paz
321.	Lineaments	Spiral, William Blake, Rote Zora, Adrienne Gershäuser, Karim Nayernia, Artificial Sperm, Baader Meinhof, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Samson Sor Siriporn, Ayaka Miyano, Blacksburg, Cho Seung Hui, Cho Seung Hu, Rick Salutin, Nikki Giovanni, Lucinda Roy, Lisa Norris.
320.	not just one ... a Fleet!	Alexander Rumyantsev, Sergei Kiriyenko, Akademik Lomonosov, Sevmash, Oleg Samoilov, FNPP, Severodvinsk, FNPP.
319.	May-be so, May-be not	Green Party, Elizabeth May, Liberal Party of Canada, Stéphane Dion, NDP, Jack Layton.
318.	so it goes ...	Kurt Vonnegut, Mata Atlântica, Alagoas, Pernambuco, São Francisco, Uganda, Scoul, Sugar.
317.	More bad drugs - Bisphenol A	Bisphenol A, BPA, Martin Mittelstaedt, Polycarbonate, Patricia Hunt, Steven Hentges, GE Plastics, Sunoco Inc, Bayer AG, Dow Chemical, Hexion Specialty, Rick Smith, Frederick vom Saal, Margaret Wente, Fernando Pessoa.
316.	Easter Sunday	Alzheimer, Nahum Sonenberg, McGill, Charly, Algernon, HIV, Aids, Kevin Dowling, Rustenburg, South Africa, JB Ecológico.
315.	Hard Rain	Bob Dylan, UN, United Nations, WMO, UNEP, IPCC, AR4, WG2, Arthur Max, Rajendra Pachauri, Duluth, Lake Superior, Old Woman Bay, Jay Austin, Gerald Traufetter, Angela Merkel, Ana Raquel Martins, IDH, ISA, James Hansen.
314.	Ransom Myers	Ransom Myers.
313.	Modest Proposals	Climate Change, Global Warming, Philip Bethge, Christian Wüst, Supreme Court, Vancouver, Toronto, Garbage, Oysters, Rowan Jacobsen, Chesapeake, Afghanistan, Taliban, Opium, Nangarhar, Welthungerhilfe, Börnsen, Walter Heisch, Joachim Reuland, SunNight, Mark Bent.
312.	Honey Bee / Honeybee	Honey Bee, Apis mellifera, Fall Dwindle Disease, CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder, VBS, Vanishing Bee Syndrome, GM, Genetic Engineering, Genetically Modified, Bacillus thuringiensis, Bt, Jimmie Rodgers, April Fool.

	March 2007:
311.	another kick at the can	Canada, RCMP, Zaccardelli, Ron Lewis, Maher Arar, Gary Stevens, Nancy Sulz, Kevin St. Arnaud, Ryan Sheremetta, Greg Sorbara, Marc Bourdages, Robin Cameron, Ian Bush, Paul Koester, Juliet O'Neill, Justin Harris, Thierry Jacques, Sheila Fraser, Leo Johnston, Anthony Gordon, Brock Myrol, Peter Schiemann, E8060, Richard Young, Bev Busson, Barbara George, Fraser Macaulay, Paul Gauvin, Rosalie Burton, Stockwell Day, Jeff Sallot, Paul Marsh, Victoria Cliffe, Ken Smith, Calvin Lawrence, Robert Creasser, Laura Young, Gag Orders.
310.	Situação de Emergência - n° 09-2007	Salvador, Bahia, Brasil, Cabuçu, Saubara, CRA, Petrobras, Todos os Santos, Operação Carapeba, Ronaldo Martins, Beth Wagner, Nádya Argôlo.
309.	accentuate the positive	Incandescent, Fluorescent, John Howard, Fidel Castro, Gwynne Dyer, Climate Change, Tim Flannery, Margaret Wente, Matthew, Johnny Mercer, Jose Socrates.
308.	Talking Darfur to Death	Darfur, John Holmes.
307.	rackets, ho hum	Insurance, Conseco, Glenn Hilliard, Racket.
306.	casting crowns	Revelations, John Wesley, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, William Blake.
305.	it ain't me babe (!)	Bob Dylan, Babe, Shakespeare, Tempest, Prospero, Ariel, Meredith Oakes, Cyndia Sieden.
304.	Campanha da Fraternidade	Amazônia, Campanha da Fraternidade, Annie Lennox, Madonna, Jornal do Brasil, Ecologico, Bob Dylan.
303.	Dread, Chris Alexander, Heisenberg	Christopher Alexander, Guy de Maupassant, Goderville, Hauchecorne, Malandain, Werner Heisenberg, Hesiod, Aeneas, Sibyl.
302.	Tirinhas	Tirinhas, Os Malvados, André Dahmer, Brasil, Brazil, Blogging, Dom Ináfio, Ota, O Pato, Ciça, Joan Armatrading.
301.	Visita ao inferno / Visit to Hell	Siro Darlan, Instituto Padre Severino, Brasil, Brazil, Circo Pequeno Tigre.
300.	Lent / Quaresma	Lent, Quaresma, Noah, Noé, Titanic.

	February 2007:
299.	done (like dinner)	Quaresma, Lent, Bob Dylan.
298.	Ash Wednesday / quarta-feira de cinzas	none yet.
297.	more-or-less upright (!?)	Mudanças Climáticas, Climate Change, Susan Solomon, NOAA, ee cummings, Amos Oz, Teaspoon, Amos Klausner, Vincenzo Ricardo.
296.	Rapture	Ian Brown, Rapture, Apocalypse, Drake Landing, Okotoks, DABDA, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, John Calvin, Calvin & Hobbes, Ron Graham, Handel, Messiah, Job.
295.	Lunar New Year / Year of the Pig	Lunar New Year, Year of the Pig.
294.	Lunar New Year / Carnaval	Carnaval, Samba, Newgrange, Spiral, Celtic, Olivier Marc, Kyoto, Boobage.
293.	Lunar new Year / Ocean Ranger	Ocean Ranger, Mekhanik Tarasov, Seaforth Highlander, Boltentor, Nordertor, Sedco 706, Zapata Ugland, Hibernia, Newfoundland.
292.	Lunar new Year / Valentine's	Valentine, Viagra.
291.	Petrobras, bigger than Lula (!?)	Petrobras, Almir Barbassa, Dilma Rousseff, José Sergio Azevedo.
290.	Dorothy Stang, February 12, 2005	Dorothy Stang, Nova Esperança, Rodney Dangerfield.
289.	Violence in Rio de Janeiro	João Hélio Fernandes, Ronei Candido Rezende.
288.	Real Politic in k-k-k-Canada	Rex Murphy, Alberta, Ontario, Tar Sands, Muggles.
287.	Misunderstandings	Houaiss, Websters, OED, Michael Quinion.
286.	Acho isso bom	Brasil, Brazil, Lula, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
285.	McDonalds & Greenpeace	McDonalds, Greenpeace, Manaus, Brasil, Brazil, Cargill, Santarém, Pará, Mato Grosso, Amazonas, Paulo Adario, Felicio Pontes.
284.	Love never faileth	Andrew Weaver, Leonardo Boff, Country Joe, Revelations, Gentileza.
283.	Fugue, Yeeee Haaaah!	JS Bach, King Lear, Dylan Thomas, Vonnegut, Ice Nine, Rex Murphy, Slothrop, Dr. Strangelove, Pointer Sisters, Slim Pickens, King Kong.
282.	Consciência Brasileira	Brazil, Brasil, ACNielsen, Global Warming, Patrick Dodd, André Madeira.
281.	can't stop Progress eh?	Brazil, Brasil, Amazônia, Carlos Terrana, Photographer.

	January 2007:
280.	Watchtower	Blogging, Michael Keren, Bill Graveland, Bob Dylan, Watchtower, Ken Kesey, Oscar Wilde, Dengue.
279.	RCMP - not fixed yet	Canada, RCMP, Gary Mason, Kevin St Arnaud, Ryan Sheremetta, Colleen Erickson, BC, John Les, British Columbia.
278.	Stephen Lewis, NDP, Twaddle	Stephen Lewis, NDP, United Nations, UN, Elizabeth May, Greens.
277.	A menina afegã, de Steve McCurry	Photographer, Steve McCurry, Sharbat Gula, Afghanistan.
276.	Tide	Climate Change, Global Warming, Canada, Rex Murphy, Edward Greenspon, Margaret Wente, Jeffrey Simpson, Bahai, IPCC.
275.	Javier Silva Meinel	Javier Silva Meinel, Amazon, Peru, Boobage.
274.	Araquém Alcântara	Brazil, Brasil, Araquém Alcântara, Amazon, Amazonas, Amazônia.
273.	evidence of something ...	Peter Ritchie, Stéphane Dion, Donald Bell, Matthew Wald, Neil Reynolds, Gary Lunn, Stephen Harper, Elliot Morley, Ralph Goodale, Gary Mason, Allan Gregg.
272.	Kerry Emanuel: Phaeton’s Reins	Kerry Emanuel, Phaeton, Boston Review, Climate Change, Jeffrey Simpson, Justin Webb, USCAP.
271.	Nova Esperança	Brasil, Niterói, Icaraí, Nova Orquidea, Nova Esperança, Barzinho.
270.	Percy Saltzman, expurgated	Percy Saltzman, Michael Valpy, Sandra Martin, Canada, Muggles, Correctitude, Prude, No More Nudies.
269.	America	Patrick Leahy, America, Maher Arar.
268.	The Swallow
267.	odd number	Orangutan, iti Energy, Refocus Weekly, Aberdeen, Ker Munthit, Phnom Penh, Rochom P'ngieng, Oliver Moore, Texas, Banana, Cesar Saez, Montréal, Patrick White.
266.	Flamboyán	Flamboyán, Flamboyant, Flambouyant, Flame Tree, Royal Poinciana, Delonix regia, Delonix, Caesalpinioideae, Madagascar, Brazil, Brasil.
265.	WAR IS PEACE	George Orwell, 1984, Julia, Winston Smith, Room 101, Global Warming, Armageddon, Nuclear Energy.
264.	Ai Ai Ai	Global Warming, Stephen Harper, Canada, Philip Thornton, Michael McCarthy, Stephen Castle, Brazil, Brasil, São Paulo, Metrô, Pinheiros, e.e. cummings, Luke, Samaritan.
263.	Integração / Integration	Leonardo Boff, Magi, Amazônia.
262.	Alberta Oil Sands	Canada, Alberta, David Ebner, Robert Mansell, Stephen Harper, John Baird, Rona Ambrose, Kyoto Protocol, Marcel Coutu, Syncrude, Suncor, Clive Mather, Shell Canada, EnCana Corp, Drew Zieglgansberger, Nexen Inc, OPTI Canada, Eric Lloyd, PTAC, Google, Picasa, Pecos Bill.
261.	Pedras Portuguêsas	Google, Picasa, Bloggerbot, Brazil, Brasil, Niterói, Icaraí, Climate Change, Global Warming, Lula, Möbius Strip, Klein Bottle, Zeca Pagodinho, Maneiras, Páginas da Vida.
260.	Gathering Storm	Thomas Pynchon, Entropy, Meatball Mulligan, Callisto, Aubade, Duke di Angelis, Ian Herbert, Ben Russell, Andy McSmith, London, Glasgow, Gordon Brown, Richard Blackwell, Canada, Wind Power, CanWEA, Robert Hornung, Tom Adams, Energy Probe, NIMBY, Global Warming, Muggles, Hobbits, Quixote, Chagall.
259.	P.D. James, The Lighthouse	PD James, Lighthouse, Kate Miskin, Saddam Hussein.

	December 2006:
258.	Handel's Messiah in Vancouver	Vancouver, Handel, Messiah, Jean-Marie Zeitouni, Laura Pudwell, Margaret Wente, Rex Murphy, Neil Reynolds.
257.	Darfur, two more views	Darfur, Genocide, Peter Boehm, Gwynne Dyer.
256.	Rex Murphy / Holocaust Deniers	Rex Murphy, Holocaust, Ahmadinejad.
255.	Amazônia / Pará / Feminismo	Cândido, Candide, Voltaire, Amazonas, Amazon, Amazônia, Pará, Amapá, Marina Silva, Rona Ambrose, Ana Julia Carepa, Jari, CADAM, Simão Jatene.
254.	Grande Fóssil Canadense	Canada, Rona Ambrose, Stockwell Day, Penticton, Climate Change, Global Warming, Jeffrey Simpson.
253.	Zaccardelli	Zaccardelli, RCMP, Canada.
252.	Nova moralidade / New Morality	Leonardo Boff, Global Warming, Climate Change, Brazil, Brasil, Jornal do Brasil, Mauro Santayana.

	November 2006:
251.	Words	Global Warming, Neil Young.
250.	Ônibus 174, Ônibus 499	Brazil, Brasil, Ônibus 174, Ônibus 499, Reféns, Hostages, André Ribeiro, Cristina Ribeiro, Mart’nália, Zelia Duncan, Claudio Jorge.
249.	Two Views of Climate Change	Climate Change, Global Warming, Rex Murphy, Gwynne Dyer, Canada, Newfoundland, Memorial University of Newfoundland, MUN, David Sorensen, Thomas Homer-Dixon.
248.	Notícias do Brasil / News from Brazil	Mãos Limpas, Brazil, Brasil, Lula, Pesca Predatória.
247.	Two Views of Darfur	Sudan, Darfur, Jan Pronk, Eric Reeves, UN, United Nations.

	October 2006:
246.	Bankrupt	WWF report tells it like it is, still an optimistic outcome if big changes are made WWF, Canada.
245.	St. James United Church, Montréal	United Church of Canada, UCC, Montréal, Arlen John Bonnar, Batia Bettman.
244.	Harold Scott MacDonald "Donald" Coxeter 1907-2003	Coxeter, Siobhan Roberts, Geometry, Boobage, Tetrahelix, Lindalee Tracey, Alanis Obomsawin.
243.	two versions of Jonah and the whale	Jonah, KJV, Rudyard Kipling.
242.	Muhammad Yunus / Grameen Bank of Bangladesh	Muhammad Yunus, Grameen, Bangladesh, Nobel Peace Prize, Preston Manning, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Micro Credit.
241.	As if everybody knows	Paul Simon, Grace, Boobage.
240.	This is the day which the Lord hath made	Psalm 118, Benjamin Spock, Jan Pronk, Eric Reeves, Robert Frost.
239.	P-53 Marlim Leste	Marlim Leste, Brasil, Brazil, Petrobras.
238.	RCMP, bungling incompetence & malice	Canada, RCMP, Justin Harris, John Ward, Amanda Zhao, Mindy Tran, Shannon Murrin, Ian Bush, Giuliano Zaccardelli, Maher Arar, David Ramsay, Lawrence MacAulay, Wayne Easter, Bill Dingwall, Stockwell Day, Stephen Harper, Benedetto Soave, Ben Soave, Nina Iwanowich.
237.	Na Estrada Própria	Boobage
236.	On the Avenue, too	Thunder Bay, Terry Fox, Saskatchewan, Lashburn, Alberta, Hinton, Boobage
235.	Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva 2006	Brasil, Brazil, Eleições, Elections, Lula, Alckmin

	September 2006:
234.	Giuliano Zaccardelli the Weasel !!	Canada, Maher Arar, RCMP, Stockwell Day, Dennis OConnor, Giuliano Zaccardelli, Michel Cabana, Franco Pillarella, Garry Loeppky, Leo Martel, Gar Pardy, Bill Graham, Rick Flewelling, Jack Hooper, Ward Elcock, Paul Cavalluzzo
233.	On the Avenue	Newfoundland, Caribou, Orion, Edmundston, Sun Dogs, Ottawa, Correctitude, Metcalfe
232.	Safia Ama Jan	Safia Ama Jan, Mullah Sadullah, Taliban, Afghanistan, Kandahar
231.	What to do?	what i want is as clear as the nose on my face, but instead of going, i dither Boobage, Brasil, Brazil, Tatiane, Darla.
230.	City of Death	Baghdad, Iraq, Doom and Gloom, Zimbabwe, Parintins, Comma
229.	Handbasket	Environment, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Trafigura, Claude Dauphin, Jean Pierre Valentini, Abidjan, Probo Koala, Meera Selva, Joe Hall, Continental Drift, Vampire Beavers, Guy Fournier, CBC, Fort Dork, Eric Reguly, Ethanol.
228.	Maher Arar	SHAME! The maggotty bureaucrats & politicians were all deliberately covering their own fat maggotty arses while an innocent man & a good man was being tortured and ruined and possibly permanently broken. Poor wee naive & innocent Canadians. Shame on us all! Canada, Maher Arar, RCMP, Stockwell Day, Dennis OConnor, Giuliano Zaccardelli, Michel Cabana, Franco Pillarella, Garry Loeppky, Leo Martel, Gar Pardy, Bill Graham, Rick Flewelling, Jack Hooper, Ward Elcock, Paul Cavalluzzo
227.	bottom? fundament? must be Muladhara	Musing on the fundament(al), Chakra, Muses, Black Beauty, Thandie Newton, Boobage, Kimveer Gil, Darryl Gauthier, Eric Giroux.
226.	... and Keep On Laffin'.	Boobage, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, Canada, Michael Ignatieff, SNAG, Adrienne Clarkson, Correctitude, Bob Dylan
225.	... and laff ...	Pope Benedict XIV, Lula, Kimveer Gill at Dawson College, a-and a beautiful young woman, who calls herself Naomi
224.	Have'ta Laff	laughter is the best medicine even when you are tracking down uncomfortable stuff like the latest from Jim Hansen at NASA or Sean Penn smoking in Toronto the Good.
223.	Darfur, can't look away	ai ai ai, it looks to me like these people are doomed, but I can't look away
222.	Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazzà	a tale much like that of Mike Frastacky, killed for doing it right in the 3rd World
221.	9/11/2001	Thomas Homer-Dixon of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto
220.	Codfish, Newfoundland, Iceland, Canada	the Cod Wars, Iceland sets the example we should follow Newfoundland, Canada, Codfish, Iceland, Cod Wars, Garrett Hardin, Tragedy of the Commons, Margaret Wente, Ransom Myers.
219.	Art and Life	Pearls Before Swine, Banksy, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, Nick Ut
218.	Mistaken Moral Muddlers	New Democratic Party, NDP, Correctitude, CUPE, United Church of Canada, UCC, wankers all of 'em
217.	Harpy's kiss	The Rainbow, DH Lawrence, Ursula Brangwen, Anton Skrebensky
216.	That's a wrap on Ian Bush	now we can wait a few more months for the inquest Ian Bush, RCMP, Mounties, Paul Koester, Canada, BC, British Columbia, Wally Oppal, Shane DeMeyer, Mike Ferguson, Darren Varley, Ged Hawco, Pincher Creek, Adelle Fruman
215.	Tensegrity Architecture	all old guys now; Jim Strutt, Gulzar Haider, Michael Burt, Zvi Hecker, Kenneth Snelson, but one new kid on the block, Tristan d'Estree Sterk
214.	It's over, it ain't goin' any further	thinkin' about the Sirens, Seirenes, Naiads, Sea Nymphs, Terpsichore, Melpomene, Graces, Muses, Pleiades
213.	Bob Dylan Modern Times Lyrics	Love is all there is, it makes the world go 'round, love and only love, it can't be denied

	August 2006:
212.	dialogue: talking, listening, hearing	Jihad on the web - proper thing! Jihad, Al Quaida, Hizbollah, Hamas, UCC.
211.	Gertrude Kearns	Canadian artist with a vision Canada, Gertrude Kearns, Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, Afghanistan, Lewis MacKenzie, Somalia, Shidane Arone, Clayton Matchee, Kyle Brown, Darfur.
210.	Newfoundland Wind	lots of wind and some hot air Canada, Newfoundland, Wind Power, Renewable Energy, Gerry Skinner.
209.	Poincaré	Poincaré, Coxeter, Siobhan Roberts, Grigory Perelman.
208.	jerkin' boat	Bob Dylan, Dignity, Dignidade
207.	Whirrled Ends	T.S. Eliot, Paris Hilton, Alicia Keys, Bob Dylan
206.	Correctitude	Inigo Wilson gets sacked for speaking out Correctitude, Inigo Wilson.
205.	Sarin - under control? yeah right	leaky nerve gas, taking care of WMD Sarin, Oregon, Umatilla, Nerve Gas, WMD, Nuclear Weapons, Security.
204.	Alexandra Morton	she must'a been around when I was up in Ocean Falls Canada, British Columbia, Raincoast, Alexandra Morton, Salmon, Patrick Moore, Sea Lice, CAIA, Ocean Falls.
203.	Western Movie	Canada, Global Warming, Climate Change, Charles Montgomery, Friends of Science, Tim Ball, Morten Paulsen, Fleishman Hillard
202.	André Glucksmann	thinking about Israel & Lebanon
201.	So long, and thanks for all the fish	turning into a long goodbye Correctitude, Douglas Adams, Humpback, Rolling Stones, Pisgah, DH Lawrence, Amos Oz, Boobage.
200.	Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, 8:15 AM	61 years and nothing learned yet
199.	Jack Diamond	Toronto architect speaks the truth
198.	Euripides - Hippolytos	thinking about Medea and Goblins
197.	like a mournin' dove	August digest

	July 2006:
196.	Not so easy huh	into digest mode
194.	Uncle David thank you very much.	Letícia, July 10, 5:22 PM, 2006, uma graça, obrigado Senhor
193.	Yeah ...	the end of the blog per se
192.	10,000, approximately	then again, maybe I should ...
191.	Mike Frastacky	story of the end of a good man
190.	Ian Bush - Not Good Enough By Far	useless, silly, but I can't stop ...
189.	Rose Corrêa da Silva	two documentary films by Tete Moraes somehow tell me something true
188.	War in the Middle East	Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Amos Oz, Canada, Stephen Harper.
187.	Curt Dagenais - Spiritwood	correctitude and wandering astray among the Mounties, Curt Dagenais, Spiritwood, RCMP, Saskatchewan, Arthur Dagenais.
186.	Nickel	film festival in St. John's
185.	Make	wondering and mystery
184.	Nines - Bahá'í Temple of Light	some thoughts around the Bahá'í temple planned for Santiago Chile
183.	More Drugs!	reality a la carte
182.	Zidane-anigans	oafs and louts, humour crosses at least one of the great divides
181.	Elevenses	what about terrorism?
180.	Forget Darfur ... ?	hand wringing, sorry
179.	Ruby on Rails	giving it a try WebApp, Programming, Ruby, Rails, Apache, MySql.
178.	Menina Apurinã	against all odds a little girl nine years old has a healthy baby Brazil, Brasil, Apurinã, Amazon, Amazônia, Juliana Schiel, Christiane Rodrigues Marie, Manaus, Jatuarana, Manacapuru.
177.	Organ 'Harvesting' in China	China, Organ Harvesting, Falun Gong, Canada, David Matas, David Kilgour,
176.	A Candle in the Wind	back and forth counting Mexican election results, role of the IFE Mexico, Obrador, Calderón, IFE, Luis Carlos Ugalde.
175.	Valencia	personal grief
174.	Life, the Universe, and Everything	meditations on self-improvement, nudes by Flor Garduño Photographer, Bromides, Douglas Adams, 42, Frank Zappa, Dinah-Moe Humm, Flor Garduño, Boobage, Polka Dots.
173.	Dorothy Stang	more than a year later, has to make you wonder Brasil, Brazil, Pará, Dorothy Stang, Amazônia, Amazon.
172.	Elections in Mexico & Bolivia	a couple of close calls, Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa vs Andrés Manuel López Obrador goes to the Conservatives, Bolivia - not clear yet, an interview with Evo by Spiegel Mexico, Obrador, Calderon, IFE, Bolivia, Morales.
171.	The most brutal of days	Rex Murphy (slightly edited), Canada Day (?) Not! Newfoundland, Beaumont Hamel.

	June 2006:
170.	Liverworts, Lichens, and the United Church	Anti-Semitism in the United Church, Canada, Toronto, United Church, Frances Combs, Correctitude, CUPE, Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Terrorism.
169.	Sisters	some good news for a change, Ejegayehu and Tirunesh Dibaba from Ethiopia, Cindy, Ada, Dina, Rita, Irene (mother), and Linda Maxwell, Dibaba, Ejegayehu, Tirunesh, Ethiopa, Beijing 2008, Maxwell, New Brunswick, Canada.
168.	Climbing down Pisgah	Scripture, Deuteronomy, Moses, Pisgah, Nebo, DH Lawrence.
167.	Darfur is about Water	Another excuse to publish that wonderful smile, Darfur, Sudan, United Nations, Zoellick, Al-Bashir, Minnawi, UNMIS.
166.	An Inconvenient Truth	Al Gore's film on Global Warming, America, Al Gore, Global Warming, Newfoundland, St.John's, Canada.
165.	Nuclear, floating this time	Floating NPPs, wow! Russia, Severodvinsk, Nuclear, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Atomic Energy, Sergei Kiriyenko, Sevmash.
164.	Saving Margarets	Correctitude on campus, ongoing controversy, her new book The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit, contact at McGill, Toronto, Ryerson, Margaret Somerville, Margaret Wente, Correctitude, Lawrence Summers, Harvard, Canada, Newfoundland, Memorial.
163.	Summer Solstice, longest Day	still nothing on Ian Bush, nor anything forthcoming, Ian Bush, RCMP, Stockwell Day, Canada, BC, British Columbia, Paul Koester.
162.	Derivative (remember? calculus?)	musing on entropy, with angst, Pynchon, Derivative, Scorcese, Camus, Virtual, Entropy, Maxwell.
161.	Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen	ice in the hearts, Hans Christian Andersen, Snow Queen, Ice Maiden, Fairy Tales, Boobage, Flor Garduño.
160.	Queen of the North update	Darin Bowland sues BC Ferries, Bob Beadell quit in 2000 over similar issues, updated with a report by Mark Hume, Darin Bowland has given up, BC, British Columbia, Ocean Falls, BC Ferries, Wright Sound, Hartley Bay, Canada, David Hahn, Darin Bowland, Gil Island, Gerald Foisy, Shirley Rosette, Prince Rupert, Deborah Marshall, TSB, Transportation Safety Board, Queen of the North, Jackie Miller, Victoria, Vancouver, ECS, Grenville Channel, Colin Henthorne, RCMP, Karen Bricker, Karl Lilgert, Keven Hilton.
159.	What has truth?	my Brasilian Anima Amazônia, Amazon, Amazonas, Benzedeiras, Healers.
158.	Two Nuclear Thoughts	more disfunction Nuclear, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Canada, Ontario, Darlington, America, Iran, Proliferation, Greenpeace, PETA, Naked, Boobage.
157.	Dithering in Darfur	the UN version of the Hokey Pokey, Sudan, Darfur, UN, United Nations, Guehenno, Dallaire, China, Arms Trade, Bashir, Bredjing, Chad.
156.	No Man is an Island	meditations on unworthiness John Donne, Immanuel Kant, Charles Taylor,Desiderata, Depression, CBC.
155.	Senegal Salt	near the coast of Senegal, picking up salt, Senegal, Salt, Womens Work, Kaolack, Ziguinchor, Survival, Finbarr O'Reilly.
154.	Masters of War	photograph of Alfried Krupp, Dylan, Arnold Newman, Alfred Krupp.
153.	Newfoundland	flying the colours, Newfoundland, IRA, Space.
152.	AIDS Misinformation in Africa	Lucy Kibaki in Kenya, Kenya, Kibaki, AIDS, Sex, Morality, Correctitude, Zuma.
151.	Blog Navigation	upside-down inside-out and backwards, hahahaha, Blogging, User Interface, Blogger, Google, Cognitive Map, HTML.
150.	Charles Menezes, remember him?	Brazilian killed in London subway, Menezes, Ian Blair, Brasil, Brazil, Scotland Yard.
149.	Hamas - National Reconciliation Document	Hamas and Fatah fighting over what exactly? Hamas, Israel, Palestine, CUPE, Rex Murphy.
148.	As I Roved Out	Newfoundland folk music, mostly tame for some reason, but not all tame, Newfoundland, Anita Best, Kelly Russell, Ron Hynes, Graham Wells.
147.	Slugs and Maggots	official opinions on Global Warming, treatment of Afghani Taliban prisoners and Nuclear Waste, official bullshit!
146.	Sabine Hilschenz - Jornal do Brasil
145.	Raising the Bar	illegal immigration through Morocco, then Western Sahara, then Mauritania, and now Senegal, Red Cross' compassionate responses

	May 2006:
144.	Canada, Fascism, Public Evil	Fascism, Canada, Northrop Frye, Demotic, Virtue, Vice, Canute.
143.	What all schoolchildren learn	Canada, Afghanistan, Geneva Conventions, Taliban, Nichola Goddard, Auden.
142.	RCMP - Shame!	RCMP, Ian Bush, Paul Koester, Gary Mason, Canada, British Columbia.
141.	The Gods Must be Crazy	Cgao Coma, Nixau, Kalahari, Betinho, Beija Flor, Brasil, Brazil, Theodicy.
140.	Hansel & Gretel	Grimm, Hansel, Gretel, Fairy Tales, Pynchon.
139.	Muslim Persecution of Bahá'ís	Iran, Muslim, Islam, Bahai, Bahá'í, Hojjatieh.
138.	Cod Fish	Newfoundland, Cod, Canada, Cavalcanti, Scripture, Genesis.
137.	Estatuto do PCC : Law of the PCC	Brasil, Brazil, PCC, São Paulo, Marcola, Comando Vermelho, CV, CBRC, Guerra Urbana, William Langewiesche.
136.	Trojan	Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Trojan, Ranier, Oregon, Simpsons, Portland, Hanford, and, last but not least, Sex, & Boobage.
135.	Got it, needed 'Sex' !	Sex, Technorati, Blogging, Spam, Porn, Boobage.
134.	OK then, here ya go - SEX!	Sex, Aphrodisiac, Viagra, Cialis, Bremelanotide, PT 141, Palatin, Leonore Tiefer, Dylan, Feminism.
133.	Nuclear Power Controversy	Christine Todd Whitman & Patrick Moore & James Lovelock go for Nuclear Power, who's to argue? Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Greenpeace, Chernobyl, Tim Flannery, Donna Cansfield, Gwynne Dyer, James Lovelock, EFN.
132.	Haiti	Haiti, Michaëlle Jean, Google, Picasa.
131.	Yea, Yea; Nay, Nay.	Scripture, Matthew, James, Northrop Frye, Pynchon, Coxeter.
130.	RCMP - Still No Answers	RCMP, Gary Mason, Ian Bush, Paul Koester, Nathan Cullen, NDP, Canada, British Columbia, John Les, Jack Layton.
129.	Another Genocide?	the Karens in Myanmar Genocide, Myanmar, Burma, Karen, India.
128.	O Primeiro Comando da Capital	Sao Paulo gang war on Mother's Day, when the smoke clears the bourgeois pimps try to blame it on the Left
127.	Pour ne pas vivre seul	8 Femmes
126.	Ontario Energy Minister Donna Cansfield
125.	RCMP - Stonewall !
124.	Spells	Tyrone Slothrop's handy all-round spell.
123.	Kalma, Darfur	will the Abuja treaty work? not looking good.
122.	RCMP - Arrogant? Frightening?	the plot thickens.
121.	Spam
120.	Virginia Slims	Jacob Zuma aquitted.
119.	Darfur, Hope?	Photos by Claire Soares.
118.	Caviar	Zeca Pagodinho.
117.	RCMP - Rights?	The death of Ian Bush.
116.	Kenya, Sister Mae Kierans.
115.	Sexual Suicide
114.	Darfur ...
113.	Yes ...	J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K.
112.	May 1 in Bolivia	ALBA, ALCA, FTAA, NAFTA, TLC, TCP, oil nationalization.

	April 2006:
111.	Jane Jacobs, Citizenship.
110.	Darfur
109.	Yad Vashem
108.	Entrenched Mediocrity	Camille Paglia.
107.	Words
106.	Rat's Ass / Denial / Great Divides	Fuck it! with help from Leonard Cohen, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch.
105.	Eldorado	Edgar Allen Poe, murder in Brasil.
104.	Renascimento
103.	A River Runs Through It	Chernobyl & Pripyat 20 years later, trying to understand radiation, Viktor speaks the truth.
102.	What a Hero Looks Like	Mine rescue.
101.	Charles Taylor	home at last

	March 2006:
100.	Sem Teto, Sem Terra, Inmigrantes Ilegales	desperation
99.	Earthlights	squandered
98.	Basque Peace - Alec Reid	tale of a peacemaker, maybe a failure Basque, Spain, Bietan Jarrai, Alec Reid, ETA, Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Batasuna.
97.	Queen of the North sunk in Wright Sound	gale of wind, dark of night, brave men, all but two rescued
96.	Michaëlle Jean and Redemption	the Governor General shows herself
95.	Atta Boy Stevie!	Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visits Kandahar, Afganistan - "Right On!"
94.	False Priests	epitome or exception?, Hasids, Rex Murphy
93.	Talking to Terrorists, Robin Soans	What to do? What to do? What to do?
92.	Jagdalpur & Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India	maps and pictures of life in Chhattisgarh, the poorest Indian state, and around Allahabad, Maoist Naxalites in Dantewada district, poor people being killed, government programs like Salwa Judum for peace, Sant Kumar Paswan - a policeman, Holi festival, drying chillies, fashion show
91.	Baby Seals (again, again, again)	Hilton paris, Brigitte Bardot, Paul McCartney, Lady Heather the shrew, Rex Murphy, Danny Williams, Larry King, rubbish! Brigitte Bardot weeping in Ottawa, playing silly buggers on the ice, Pamela Anderson
90.	Bogus Newfoundland!	bogus literature from E. Annie Proulx and Donna Morrissey, the Ode, Don Quixote, crows
89.	Jolo Island	a remote island in the Phillipines, Muslim girls carrying flags, maps

	February 2006:
88.	'Mere' Tribalism in Nigeria	Ijaw Nigerian militants, a spiral galaxy and associations, Macon Hawkins from Texas, Muslims and Christians, an email from the Sea Eagle, Collins Ihekire, Opheera McDoom, Biafran rebels turn the census into an excuse for a bloodbath, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Marianne Faithful
87.	Haunts: Signal Hill / Cape Spear	my daily routine
86.	The United Church of Canada?	a letter to the Imams from the United Church, the lights are on but nobody's home
85.	Busy days in Istanbul	fashion, nuclear, flag burnings, and Kurds, all in the space of a few days
84.	Gaia	melting glaciers, the northeast passage, water mythology, african lakes drying up, Mt. Kilimanjaro melting, Lovelock, Teilhard de Chardin, Gwynne Dyer, Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina, looking at Lovelock's book (ai ai ai), Tim Flannery's is more like it, Sweden going to wood chips, Lake Dal in Srinagar, India, political and entrepreneurial responses, Ecuador's Mama Cotacachi
83.	Complicit	Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Cisco in front of Congress, the OED, ee cummings, Nebuchadnezzar's dream, feet of clay, a remarkable tensegrity
82.	Briar Rose - Lucky 13!	two versions of the story
81.	Elihu - Kingfisher continued	the book of Job, Chagall, United Church, a continuation of Righteous Anger - Kingfisher, Bill Clinton in Ottawa
80.	Scatterheart	TS Eliot's Waste Land, Dostoyevsky's Idiot, Ecclesiastes
79.	Last Exit to Brooklyn	Hubert Selby Jr., Northrop Frye and David Byrne on 'making sense', isolato vs communal
78.	Domestic Geothermal Heating	some thoughts and links towards a simple residential system
77.	Mukhtaran Bibi / Mukhtar Mai / Mukhtiar	official gang-rape in Pakistan
76.	Iemanjá, dia 2 feveiro	the afro-brasilian goddess of the sea Iemanjá, Yemanjá, Yemojá, Yemanya, Lemanjá, Yemaya, Aphrodite.
75.	State of the Union	a look at Bush's State of the Union speeches, the Pope's letter on love, and Northrop Frye's Epochs

	January 2006:
74.	Tensão entre macuxis Tension among the Macuxis	translation of some Brasilian articles into English, Makuxis vs rice growers, Kayapó tribe with similar problems, some indian myths, pictures and maps
73.	Wanda Young - Political Correctitude	Memorial University of Newfoundland treats an innocent young woman to a decade of grief, a lesbian professor, a herd of inept social workers and bureaucrats
72.	To remember - Para lembrar	Dylan, Sub-Comandante Marcos, the Pope's letter on love, optimism that the spirit is blowing free
71.	Brasil - Election coming in October
70.	Nairobi - Real International Aid	building collapse, international efforts, drought in Kenya, Turkana, Lokitaung river project, Aro Koriang, maps
69.	Ho Hum - another Canadian Election	Canada, Harper, Pundits.
68.	Kungsleden - The King's Path	Movie, Höglund, Wodak.
67.	Lest we forget Freira Dorothy Stang	all of my pictures of Dorothy Stang Brazil, Brasil, Dorothy Stang, Para.
66.	Sem Vergonha, Garota?	the street girls of Rio and their web presence, some interesting ideas from Spiegel on re-training Brazil, Brasil, garotas, programma, Sex, Prostitution, Prostituição.
65.	The Fat & Final Truth	my bigotry around weight exposed, some hope from Rome Houston, Newfoundland, Bigotry, Death.
64.	Chile - Michelle Bachelet
63.	Breasts, a Light in the East	connection between light and breast cancer
62.	T for Texas, T for Tennessee	Jimmie Rogers and flight from Houston to St. John's, Le Petit Prince & Baobab trees
61.	Jose Padilla, Habeas Corpus
60.	Um Nidal - is this real?	this started looking at Um Nidal and expanded as a catch-all for Muslim issues, the October Crisis in Canada, Ariel Sharon, Spielberg's Munich, United Church twits, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and bombing Israel off the map, official lunacy, Farhat elected, Hamas, Sheik Mohammed Abu Teir, Khaled Meshaal, the Danish cartoon imbroglio, Ayann Hirsi Ali, Ahmed Akkari, some sense from the Globe and Mail, Wafa Sultan telling it like it is
59.	Everyone Knows ... - Todo Mundo Sabem ...	Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like translated into Português

	December 2005:
58.	Just So Stories - Histórias Assim Mesmo
57.	Haiti, Brasil, Jordan	I saw the way the Brasilian soldiers were treating the people of Haiti and got caught up, through the trials to the election of Preval, Aristide might return? Wyclef Jean, runoff delayed
56.	Tsunami & Dragonflies	Ao Nang, Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Mangrove, Tibang Village, Khao Lak, Thailand, Tilly Smith, Maikhao Beach, Phuket, Thailand, Myanmar, Ban Nam Khem Village, Phang Nga Province.
55.	For unto us a child is born	Wenceslas.
54.	Righteous Anger - Kingfisher	Kingfisher, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Ceyx, Alcyone, Ovid, Coyote, Fairy Tales, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Pleiades, Orion, Graces, Simon Charlie, Anthony Quinn.
53.	Bolivia - Evo Morales	Bolivia and Evo Morales from just before the election, Manu Chao, electricity, bombers, LAB airline strike
52.	Marshall McLuhan - Tribal Spiral	McLuhan, Tribalism, Weltschmerz, Alexander Calder, Boobage.
51.	Paul Martin - The Gingerbread Boy	Canada, Paul Martin, Fairy Tales, Gingerbread Boy, Pancakes, Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Carnaval.
50.	Mastermind ?	Canada, Cambodia, Siam Reap, Maxim Michalik, Vann Touch Sopheak, Chen Chem aka Chim Chem aka Ty Sokha, Chea Sokhom, Sum Tha aka Sim Thol aka Mann Thol, Judge Plang Chlam aka Chalaarm aka Chhlam, Blogging.
49.	Stones & Beatles Saints & Sinners	Miami, Taser, Stones, Beatles, America, Miami, Troy Rigby, Rigoberto Alpizar, Charles Menezes, Dylan Thomas, Pynchon, Watts, TS Eliot, Khepera. Troy Anthony,
48.	Jumblies under the red sky
47.	clean rat, painted bird

	November 2005:
46.	Allegory for a Canadian Election	Walrus, Carpenter, Lewis Carroll, Michaëlle Jean.
45.	Building in a bag.	Descon, Tensegrity, Kenneth Snelson, Bucky.
44.	Lakewood Church	Houston, Lakewood, Osteen, Evangelist.
43.	Ideology & Compassion, Mediocrity	Houston, Crossroad, Cock Robin, Blake, Scripture, Daniel, Psalms, Nebuchadnezzar, Pynchon, Apocheir.
42.	Cobol-E, Laing, Tau, stuff	RD Laing, Golden Mean, Debra Lafave, Boobage.
41.	Surviving Bad Software	Marie Antoinette, Sun King, 4GL, OOPS, DARPA, Apollo, Daphne, Microsoft, Adobe, RealPlayer, Google Earth, Brian Mulrooney, DVD, Jean Baptiste Colbert, Rochefoucauld.
40.	Liberia / Sierra Leone	UP Unity Party, CDC Congress for Democratic Change, Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, George Weah, Gwynne Dyer, Charles Taylor, Sierra Leone, Claire Soares, UN Special Court.
39.	Amazonas - voltando para normal	flood on the river Acre, back to normal in November but what is normal? Bruce Cockburn, Lamarck, Darwin, Genesis, Intelligent Design, Amazonas, Amazon, Brasil, Brazil, Scripture, Genesis, Efésios, Ephesians, ætiology.
38.	Boycott SONY?	SONY, DRM, Rootkit, Anti-Piracy, Copyright, Intellectual Property.
37.	Ser diferente é normal.	Bicho, Pynchon, Kenosha Kid, Vheissu, Preterite, Little Piggy, Mindinho, Fairy Tales, Palimpsest.
36.	Bill the Cat - Born Again!	Bill the Cat, Fugs, Clichy, Bloom County, Nine-Oh-Nine, Lennon, McCartney.
35.	Braço Forte - Mão Amiga	Brazil, Brasil, Exército, Newfoundland, Anthems.

	October 2005:
34.	Leaders of the free world	Cheney's chief-of-staff Lewis Libby is charged with obstruction, the thing drags on and on, justice delayed America, Libby, Cheney, Fnord, Plame, Apocalipse, Scripture, Revelations, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Neil Young, Yeats.
33.	Amazonas - O Rumo Mas Perdido	Amazonas, Amazon, Brasil, Brazil, Estiagem, Drought, Ilha Trindade, Manaus.
32.	I am fixing my window	David Blackwood, Colville, Dylan, Houston, Montreal, Rosa Parks.
31.	Mon pays - Gilles Vigneault	Vigneault, Québec, Chansons.
30.	H5N1 Bird Flu	Thailand, China, wild populations, around the world, ubiquitous, silly culling, dogs, best outcome, cooking doesn't kill it?, some close-up pictures, Egypt - 2 dead H5N1, Bird Flu, Egypt, Denmark, Israel, Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Greece, Italy, China, Turkey, Indonesia.
29.	Abu Ghraib and illusion.	Abu Ghraib, Cheney, Murtha, McCain, America, Guantanamo, Shame, Torture, Geneva Conventions.
28.	Honour
27.	Sunday with L'il Orphan Annie	Bunnatine Greenhouse, Orphan Annie, Warbucks, Daddy, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath.
26.	Bunnatine Hayes Greenhouse	Bunnatine Greenhouse, Warbucks, Halliburton, Whistleblower, General Joe Ballard, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock.
25.	Quality - John Galsworthy	Galsworthy, Quality, Gessler Brothers, Boots.
24.	Arthur Kroker - in the vanguard?	Arthur Kroker, Marilouise, McLuhan, Stuffer, SWLABR, She Was Like A Bearded Rainbow, Cutting Edge of Culture, Alvin Toffler, Ira Bassin, Paul Gingrich, CBC Sensibility, Performance Art.
23.	from Wimpy to Strangelove	Wimpy, Strangelove, Robert Aumann, Kubrick.
22.	Amazonas - O Rumo Perdido	Amazonas, Amazon, Brasil, Brazil, Manaquiri, Manu Chao.
21.	Negrume da Noite - ai ai ai!	Venezuela, Caracas, Wayuu, Bari, Yukpa, Virginia Rodrigues, Scripture, Proverbs, Provérbios, Modest Proposal, Garrett Hardin, Tragedy of the Commons.
20.	No Dia Em Que Eu Saí De Casa	Zezé di Camargo, Lula, Brasil.
19.	Amazonas - Geography Lesson	Amazonas, Amazon, Brasil, Brazil, Scripture, Job, Matthew, Drought, Estiagem, Rudyard Kipling, Butterfly.
18.	Amazonas - Pogo	Amazonas, Amazon, Brasil, Brazil, Pogo, Drought, Estiagem.
17.	Amazonas - Poder de Deus	Amazonas, Amazon, Brasil, Brazil, Drought, Estiagem, Rio Negro, Solimoes, Manaus, Milankovitch, Terra, Caetano Veloso, Altamira, Anima, Raimundo Paccó.
16.	Ditado de Zeca	Zeca Pagodinho, Cachaça, Ditado, Brasil.
15.	Lord, Protect my Child	Dylan, Hunter S Thompson.
14.	Chiquita, Lime in the Coconut	Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Chiquita, Harry Nilsson.
13.	bugles calling from sad shires	Dylan, Northrop Frye, Wilfred Owen.

	September 2005:
12.	let them eat HTML	the trials and tribulations of learning HTML, frustrating? I guess so! some lessons learned - HTML, Blogger, Span, Popup, Pop Up, Counter Intuitive.
11.	History & Myth	Hannah Arendt, Christian X, Denmark, Holocaust.
10.	Bob Dylan - No Direction Home	Dylan, PBS.
9.	Architectural Photographs	Architecture, Bluffton, Mennonite, Mary Ann Sullivan.
8.	Rita - aftermath	Houston, Rita, Victor Fruge, Aretha Johnson, Liberty Island, NOAA.
7.	Rita - 4 pm Friday	Houston, Rita, Cicada.
6.	Rita - up and down the block	Houston, Rita.
5.	Rita - stuck inside of Mobile	Houston, Rita, Lovely Rita Meter Maid.
4.	Bonne Bay	Bonne Bay, Newfoundland, Jokes.
3.	Profeta de Gentileza	José da Trino, o Profeta Gentileza, moved by a fire at a circus in Rio many years ago he left everything and preached in the streets of Rio de Janeiro until he died, he wrote his texts on expressway supports around the Rodoviario Novo Rio (Rio bus station) where I photographed some of them in 2003. Eu já fiz novo site sobre o Profeta / I have made a new site on Gentileza: José Datrino, Profeta de Gentileza.
2.	a few poems ...	on the theme of relations between men and women, and a Portuguese translation of Wyatt's poem, one of my favourites, Robbie Burns' Day, Ian Brown, The Wife of Bath's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Question Answered, William Blake, Which is real, Wallace Stevens, They flee from me that sometime did me seek, Thomas Wyatt.
1.	Welcome	Outland, Berkeley Breathed, Bill the Cat.

Down.

That's it, that's all, there ain't no more!

2008-08-11T18:59:00.001-04:00

Up, Down.

Well, this is it. Smoking is next, already underway actually.

I posted an article from the latest Atlantic yesterday, Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr. The author seems to be more affected by the phenomenon than I have been so far, but I am very conscious of it, and my mind (he says 'brain' but I am not as sure of my brain as I am of my mind) has certainly changed with using the Internet so much, and not for the better neither.

From that article:
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep - space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

Later on I will see if I can say anything about this.

Meanwhile there is Watermelon Girl to look at ... she does take off all of her clothes, but nothing so explicit as to solve the riddle :-) Which riddle is that? Well ...

1. Having Cancer, and Finding a Personality, Ruth Pennebaker, August 11. This could be called 'Liminality 101.'

2. Harmony and the Dream, David Brooks, August 11. He has got it entirely wrong. Happens to be there for the games and finds his typically limited American scope slightly expanded and begins to think - and gets it wrong. But, the process and the kind of statement he comes up with could be the subject of a companion course 'Communitas 101.'

A friend, a girlfriend in fact, sent me a picture of the latest craze - Andressa Soares, the Dançarina do Créu. Créu is a fad dance ... like the Twist or the Loc-o-motion, but connected with a single pop-song, Funk, also called Créu, by a one-hit wonder - and even though I spent a good part of the day snagging these photographs, I still do not know his name. :-) They call her Mulher Melancia / Watermelon Woman, or Garota Melancia / Watermelon Girl. The picture she sent was #10 from the top - a remarkable rump by any standard. John Steinbeck lamented that, "the thighs of women have lost their clutch," I think it was Steinbeck (not going to Google it right away either, maybe later), and though I can't speak for their clutch, the woman certainly has thighs! and a glorious bunda to boot! She is already the ex-Dançarina do Créu, having moved on and up (I suppose it is up) to Playboy and other pursuits. Maybe it will come to be known as The Return to the Substantial. There is an antecedent, Preta Gil being Queen of the Drummers for Mangueira in the last Carnaval - but, though she is substantial, Preta definitely does not smile as much, (but is nonetheless waaaaay more interesting, that's what happens with these scions of the middle & upper-middle classes ... they get interesting :-).

Creu / Créu turns out to be favela slang for 'fuck' - and Andressa turns out to be fatter and slacker and piggier in video than in the gracefully re-touched photos in Playboy and so on that I picked up - rumours of liposuction (?) oh well ...

*************************************************************
Having Cancer, and Finding a Personality, Ruth Pennebaker, August 11.

They say cancer changes you. They may be right. When I found out I had breast cancer 12 years ago, I became a comedian.

Not the kind anyone paid to see. Just the kind who lurked around hospital corridors and examination rooms offering offbeat opinions, wiseacre remarks, outrageous commentary.

To my oncologist — a short, brisk woman who informed me my tumor had been “fairly aggressive” — I complained about the title of the pamphlet she had given me, “Chemotherapy and You.” I said I’d prefer it if the title were “Chemotherapy and Somebody Else.”

I complained, too, about the little marketing-friendly write-up that listed her family and her hobbies. The family was fine. But hobbies? I didn’t want a doctor who had time for hobbies. I wanted her to spend all her waking hours focusing on curing cancer, particularly the type indicated on my own nasty little pathology report.

To everyone else, especially the people wearing white coats and carrying big needles, I announced I was writing a book about cancer. I tried to look rabidly litigious whenever I spoke.

In the midst of all this — the comebacks, the wisecracks, the flapping mouth — I had a dim idea of what I was doing. I wanted to be someone, a recognizable personality, a full-blooded, memorable human being, and not just a cancer patient. I had already lost the person I used to be, that healthy, energetic 45-year-old woman. I wasn’t capable of losing more.

Other friends had their own spins on claiming individuality in the cancer world. One, a psychiatrist, questioned every medical decision that was made. Another, never timid to begin with, terrorized the technicians. “You get one chance to stick me and find a vein,” she told them. “If you can’t do that, find me somebody who can.”

I also took comfort from Anatole Broyard’s beautifully written, intermittently hilarious account of his own cancer treatments in “Intoxicated by My Illness,” published in 1992, two years after his death from prostate cancer. Mr. Broyard, a book critic and editor at The New York Times, had fired a prominent surgeon because he hadn’t liked the way the man wore a cap in the operating room. It looked, he wrote, “like a condom stuck on his head.”

The way Mr. Broyard saw it, : “A critical illness is like a great permission, an authorization or absolving. It’s all right for a threatened man to be romantic, even crazy, if he feels like it. All your life you think you have to hold back your craziness, but when you’re sick you can let it go in all its garish colors.”

Yes! That’s what I was experiencing, too. Those garish colors, that craziness and freedom, that painfully stark clarity about what was important and what was not. It was as if, I sometimes felt, I had lived my life half asleep. But now, now, I was wide awake.

As my treatments wore on, though — the catheter in my chest, the chemotherapy, the anti-nausea drugs, the baldness, the fatigue, the radiation — my high spirits and sense of clarity began to wane. One night at a play, I noticed a woman across the room. She was attractive, middle-age, vibrant. Completely unlike me, as I had become over the past few months. I huddled in my seat, feeling spent and empty and old.

The last time I visited my oncologist after my treatments were over, I felt lost. The image that kept recurring in my mind was that someone with a gigantic pair of tweezers had picked me up, shaken me and tossed me back down. Now what?

“I feel as if I want to ask you,” I told my oncologist, “how to live.”

She told me I could live as I had before — working, taking care of kids, exercising, traveling, enjoying life. Anything, really. I could lead a normal life.

As I left her office, I realized how completely I’d lost myself over the past several months. I needed to be reminded who I was.

Can you tell me who I am now? I never asked my oncologist that question. Probably she would have thought I was joking, the way I always was.

*************************************************************
Harmony and the Dream, David Brooks, August 11.

Chengdu, China: The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies — like the United States or Britain — on one end, and the most collectivist societies — like China or Japan — on the other.

The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.

Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others. Some say that Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece, with its emphasis on individual heroism, while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies. Recently, some scientists have theorized that it all goes back to microbes. Collectivist societies tend to pop up in parts of the world, especially around the equator, with plenty of disease-causing microbes. In such an environment, you’d want to shun outsiders, who might bring strange diseases, and enforce a certain conformity over eating rituals and social behavior.

Either way, individualistic societies have tended to do better economically. We in the West have a narrative that involves the development of individual reason and conscience during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then the subsequent flourishing of capitalism. According to this narrative, societies get more individualistic as they develop.

But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.

The opening ceremony in Beijing was a statement in that conversation. It was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.

The ceremony drew from China’s long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one — drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We’ve seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present — a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China’s miraculous growth.

If Asia’s success reopens the debate between individualism and collectivism (which seemed closed after the cold war), then it’s unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep the field or even gain an edge.

For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts.

Scientists have delighted to show that so-called rational choice is shaped by a whole range of subconscious influences, like emotional contagions and priming effects (people who think of a professor before taking a test do better than people who think of a criminal). Meanwhile, human brains turn out to be extremely permeable (they naturally mimic the neural firings of people around them). Relationships are the key to happiness. People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide.

The rise of China isn’t only an economic event. It’s a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream.

It’s certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats.

From Lennie Cone,
"Your servant here, he has been told
To say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going any further.
And now the wheels of heaven stop,
You feel the devil's riding crop.
Get ready for the future - it is murder."

A-and finally, in the immortal (almost) words of Cheech & Chong,
"Dave's not here man."

Be well. ("Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, raaar raaar." Denis Leary, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Down.

All he believes are his eyes

2008-08-09T21:30:00.001-04:00

Up, Down.

aka, Sunday meditation on 'brisa suave' / soft breeze.

Now, he's hell-bent for destruction,
He's afraid and confused,
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies.
     Bob Dylan, License To Kill, Infidels, 1983.

Before & After the Fall. Bookends. Like Genesis & Revelations.

It could be that the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega as it were, has always been physical loving. Once is forever. Though modern histories require transcendence of the simple categories of faithfulness ... and then some!

There is more to it than 'fazendo a coisa', 'doing the business' ... fucking. Raising children being an intense physical intimacy too, and not unconnected with the genitals.

Getting above those first few chakras is a big step, mostly determined (I would hazard) by capabilities, personality colours, (what's that word? ...) oh yeah! temperament - in this case making principles of your capacities rather than your incapacities, but still ... and then, maybe it is no step at all, yet another snake eating yet another tail that turns out to be its own.

Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd, Expulsion:

Estimados irmãos e irmãs, sejam bem-vindos à Celebração da Eucarista. Rendamos graças ao Pai por nos ter dado um sinal, a Palavra de seu Filho e a sua voz: tende confiança, sou eu, não tenhais medo! É a presença do Deus da brisa suave, o Deus da mansidão em nossas vidas.

Hoje, é o domingo dos pais, da sua vocação à paternidade. Rezemos para alcançar, cada vez mais, um coração de filhos e filhas. Aclamemos nosso Deus.
     Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Carmo, Rio Grande, 10 de agosto de 2008.

Marc Chagall, Temptation:

(The woman in the third photograph is not Bella, who died in 1944.)

Liminality
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.

Liminal entities, such as neophytes in initiation or puberty rites, may be represented as possessing nothing. They may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system - in short, nothing that may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands. Their behavior is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life. Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop an intense comradeship and egalitarianism. Secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homogenized.
...
Communitas
What is interesting about liminal phenomena for our present purposes is the blend they offer of lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship. We are presented, in such rites, with a "moment in and out of time," and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties. These are the ties organized in terms either of caste, class, or rank hierarchies or of segmentary oppositions in the stateless societies beloved of political anthropologists. It is as though there are here two major "models" for human interrelatedness, juxtaposed and alternating. The first is of soociety as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of "more" or "less." The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.

I prefer the Latin term "communitas" to "community," to distinguish this modality of social relationship from an "area of common living." The distinction between "secular" and "sacred," or that, for example, between politics and religion. Certain fixed offices in tribal societies have many sacred attributes; indeed, every social position has some sacred characteristics. But this "sacred" component is acquired by the incumbents of positions during the rites of passage, through which they changed positions. Something of the sacredness of that transient humility and modelessness goes over, and tempers the pride of the incumbent of a higher position or office. This is not simply a matter of giving a general stamp of legitimacy to a society's structural positions. It is rather a matter of giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society. Liminality implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low.
...
     Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, Structure and Anti-Structure,
     Aldine Transaction 2008 (publisher), p95-97.

He does not go on to immediately define Anti-Structure (as I would have wished), but it is becoming implicitly clearer to me.

Matthew 14, 22-33: And straightway Jesus constrained his disciples to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side, while he sent the multitudes away. And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone. But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased. Then they that were in the ship came and worshipped him, saying, Of a truth thou art the Son of God.

Mateo 14, 22-33: Logo a seguir, compeliu Jesus os discípulos a embarcar e passar adiante dele para o outro lado, enquanto ele despedia as multidões. E, despedidas as multidões, subiu ao monte, a fim de orar sozinho. Em caindo a tarde, lá estava ele, só. Entretanto, o barco já estava longe, a muitos estádios da terra, açoitado pelas ondas; porque o vento era contrário. Na quarta vigília da noite, foi Jesus ter com eles, andando por sobre o mar. E os discípulos, ao verem-no andando sobre as águas, ficaram aterrados e exclamaram: É um fantasma! E, tomados de medo, gritaram. Mas Jesus imediatamente lhes disse: Tende bom ânimo! Sou eu. Não temais! Respondendo-lhe Pedro, disse: Se és tu, Senhor, manda-me ir ter contigo, por sobre as águas. E ele disse: Vem! E Pedro, descendo do barco, andou por sobre as águas e foi ter com Jesus. Reparando, porém, na força do vento, teve medo; e, começando a submergir, gritou: Salva-me, Senhor! E, prontamente, Jesus, estendendo a mão, tomou-o e lhe disse: Homem de pequena fé, por que duvidaste? Subindo ambos para o barco, cessou o vento. E os que estavam no barco o adoraram, dizendo: Verdadeiramente és Filho de Deus!

Ivan Illich looked at the story of The Good Samaritan, and discovered there a network of agape, spiritual love, based upon touch, based in flesh.

Imagine for a moment that you are Peter, in a stormy sea in the darkness of night, and for some reason you step out onto the waves to go to Jesus when He calls you, but you begin to sink until He stretches out His hand and pulls you up.

Is it just possible that He was smiling when He chided, "O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?"

Or, if you read my last post carefully, imagine that you are a prostitute working in Vila Mimosa, and one night for some reason you let yourself come, maybe it happens to be the Dia Mundial do Orgasmo - and the next thing you are marrying the guy and leaving 'the life' (as they call it).

Born again? Is that it? :-) Be well.

Liminal: Of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process. Of or pertaining to a ‘limen’ or ‘threshold.’
Limen: The limit below which a given stimulus ceases to be perceptible; the minimum amount of stimulus or nerve-excitation required to produce a sensation. Also called 'threshold'.

Even, say, "Put the Lime'n the coconut ..."

A-and, lest I be accused of kitchen-sink-ism, I specifically did not mention neither Judges 19:27, nor Luke 13:25, nor even Revelations 3:20, nor Leonard Cohen's, "So I knelt there at the delta, at the alpha and the omega," nor Brother Bob and his, "Should I leave them by your gate?." There!

More on Arthur Boyd at Galeria Aniela, on Marc Chagall at Mirol Art.

Well, maybe just a bit of the kitchen sink eh? Here's Gee Officer Krupke from West Side Story (the relation is through the line, "I'm depraved on account'a I'm deprived!"):

Tiger, Imitating Krupke:		Hey you!
Riff:		Who me, Officer Krupke?
Tiger, Imitating Krupke:		Yeah you, gimme one good reason for not draggin' ya down the station house, ya punk!
Riff:		Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke You gotta understand It's just our bringin' upke That gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks, Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks.
Jets:		Gee, Officer Krupke We're very upset. We never had the love That every child oughta get. We ain't no deliquents. We're just misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good!
Riff:		There is good!
Jets:		There is good, there is good. There is untapped good. Like inside, the worst of us is good.
Tiger, Imitating Krupke:		That's a touching good story.
Riff:		Lemme tell it to the world!
Tiger, Imitating Krupke:		Just tell it to the judge!
Riff:		Dear kindly Judge, your Honour, My parents treat me rough, With all their marijuana They won't give me a puff. They didn't wanna have me But somehow I was had. Leapin' lizards, that's why I'm so bad!
Snowboy, Imitating Judge:		Right! Officer Krupke You're really a square. This boy don't need a judge He needs an analyst's care. It's just his neurosis That oughta be curbed. He's psychologically disturbed.
Riff:		I'm disturbed
Jets:		We're disturbed, we're disturbed, We're the most disturbed. Like we're psychologically disturbed.
Snowboy, Imitating Judge:		Hear ye, hear ye. In the opinion of this court, this child is depraved on account he ain't had a normal home.
Riff:		Hey, I'm depraved on account'a I'm deprived!
Snowboy, Imitating Judge:		So take him to a headshrinker. You!
Action:		Who me?
Riff:		My daddy beats my mommy. My mommy clobbers me. My grand'pa is a commie. My grand'ma pushes tea. My sisters wears a moustache. My brother wears a dress. Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!
Action, Imitating Headshrinker:		Yes, Officer Krupke He shouldn't be here. This boy don't need a couch He needs a usefully career. Society has played him a terrible trick And sociologically he's sick!
Riff:		I am sick!
Jets:		We are sick, we are sick. We are sick sick sick. Like we're sociologically sick!
Action, Imitating Headshrinker:		In my opinion, this child does not need to have his head shrunk at all. Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease.
Riff:		Hey, I got a social disease!
Action, Imitating Headshrinker:		So take him to a social worker!
Riff:		Dear kindly social worker, They tell me get a job. Like be a soda jerker Which means I'd be a slob. It's not I'm antisocial I'm only anti-work. Glory Osky, that's why I'm a jerk!
A-Rab:		Eek, Officer Krupke You've done it again. This boy don't need a job He needs a year in the pen. It ain't just a question of misunderstood, Deep down inside he's no good!
Riff:		I'm no good!
Jets:		We're no good, we're no good We're no earthly good. Like the best of us is no damn good! The trouble is he's lazy. The trouble is he drinks. The trouble is he's crazy. The trouble is he stinks. The trouble is he's growing. The trouble is he's grown. Krupke, we've got troubles of our own! Officer Krupke, We're down on our knees!
Riff:		'Cause no one wants a fella With a social disease!
Jets:		Dear Officer Krupke What are we to do? Gee, Officer Krupke, Krup you!

Preta Gil, daughter of Gilberto Gil now the ex-Minister of Culture, and was Rainha da Bateria de Mangueira. Her blog, and another blog (the same blog?) with lots of photographs. She is reported to have said, "Estou gorda mas estou linda e gostosa." / "I may be fat, but I'm beautiful and tasty." Indeed, if she didn't say it she should have :-)

Down.

Sobe a classe média

2008-08-08T11:39:00.000-04:00

Up, Down.

Sobe a classe média (The middle class is rising),
aka, Classe média numa boa (Middle class on a roll).

All of this on or about Dia Mundial do Orgasmo / International Orgasm Day, July 31.
(Tive orgasmo uma vez e vou casar com ele. Estou largando isso aqui. / I had an orgasm one time and I am going to marry him. I'm leaving this.)

1. Opinião - Classe média numa boa, José Sarney, 8 agosto.
2. OUR RAVAGED SEAS, Thomas Schulz, August 8.
3. Trawler 'Atlantic Peace'.
4. Corpo-a-corpo na Vila Mimosa, Marcelo Migliaccio, 01 de agosto de 2008.
5. Rio Prostitution, photos of Vila Mimosa by Lorenzo Moscia.
6. Tasering of disabled native decried, Terri Theodore, May 30.
7. Decapitated bus passenger, man was 'totally calm', Joe Friesen, July 31.
8. Eye-witness accounts of bus slaying, Cody Olmstead & Garnet Caton, July 31.
9. Beheading victim 'never got into a single fight ...', August 1.
10. Beheaded man identified, Gabrielle Giroday and Ian Hitchen, July 31.
11. Alleged bus butcher quiet in court, Joe Friesen, August 1.
12. Suspect called friendly, reliable employee, Josh Wingrove, August 1.
13. 'Please kill me,' accused pleads, Joe Friesen, August 5.

Malvados - André Dahmer:
Children in the suburbs killed like cockroaches. Poverty becomes a crime and the State has to come out and hunt them.

But even in times of horror the middle class fulfills their historical role ...

... and stand firm, collecting their little cups of cream cheeze.

Everybody wants into the middle class. Chinese, Brasilians, everybody's lining up. There's probably not enough to go around anyway, and what there is will vacuumed up and gone within a few generations so the people standing in line may not get any, oh well, ho hum. They may get upset. There may be wars, but then maybe it's relative. Perceptions and expectations change more quickly than you think. Within a generation or two whatever is going on will seem normal however nasty it may look from here. All good.

Meanwhile I would be quite happy to be out of the middle class, or at least away from it. Outside shitter, bit of a well for water, garden to dig in ...

(Coming up on post #500, also coming up on 30,000 visitors. I think it's going to stop.)

José Sarney is no better than the nitwit who said to me once, "Well, you can't stand in the way of progress." No, you can't, more's the pity. The guy was a town councillor and I was asking who benefitted from covering all the farm lanes with asphalt. Luddite.

Sarney says, "O passaporte definitivo para o bem-estar e para o desenvolvimento de nosso país passa pela educação e pelo melhor consumo de cultura." / The definitive passport to well-being and development of our country is through education and better consumption of culture. Nevermind that the sentence is nonsense - it embeds the myth of development sold to an eager and expanding middle class - ai ai ai!

And if you do take the time to read the story about the fish disappearing soon - keep in mind that this Captain Hartmann, pitiful exhausted Sensitive New Age Guy, is running a DRAGGER - this boat called 'Atlantic Peace' is a fucking DRAGGER! Someone may come here and see these things that I post and perhaps think that I somehow agree or concur or some such thing but quite often the sensibility appalls me, and I post it here as an object lesson.

Maybe a look at the gritty grimy streets and tiny rooms of Vila Mimosa will tweak your sensibility, or the story of Aeron Hall.

Or, finally, the story of Tim McLean & Vince Weiguang Li, a beheading on the Trans k-k-Canada Highway.

*************************************************************
Opinião - Classe média numa boa, José Sarney (ex-presidente da República), 8 agosto.

Entre as notícias de crise no mundo inteiro, com os Estados Unidos comandando os receios de recessão, o Ipea e a Fundação Getulio Vargas trazem as boas notícias de que a classe média já é maioria na população brasileira, chegando a 51,89% das pessoas, e que 3 milhões de brasileiros deixaram a faixa da pobreza absoluta. É uma importante etapa vencida e uma grande mudança, causada pela queda do desemprego, pelo aumento do número de trabalhadores com carteira assinada, pela melhoria do salário mínimo e pelos grandes programas sociais.

Como a unanimidade não existe – parafraseando o nosso sempre lembrado Nelson Rodrigues, de irresistível memória – alguns economistas de uma universidade do Rio de Janeiro reconhecem que houve melhoria de renda, mas afirmam que o processo de aferição dos números divulgados não é tão confiável.

Vamos ficar com o bom senso e reconhecer que, com métodos de pesquisa confiáveis ou nem tanto, a vida melhorou e a melhor pesquisa está nos nossos olhos. A demanda aumentou, come-se melhor e cada vez mais gente ingressa no mundo da sedução dos anúncios de produtos sofisticados, outrora fora do alcance das pessoas. Lula agora colhe o que plantou.

Fala-se numa nova classe média, a exemplo do que Clinton diagnosticou, ao designar como nova economia o advento da bolha das companhias pontocom. E então somos chamados a pensar o que essa mudança significa para o Brasil. Primeiro, viramos um país de classe média, como sentenciou um grande jornal brasileiro. Segundo, a classe média sempre foi uma força social e uma alavanca para insatisfações e desejos. Seu primeiro sonho, ao ganhar mais dinheiro, é render-se ao consumismo hedonista e incorporar a seus hábitos celular, carro, viagens, grifes e toda essa parafernália milagrosa que é anunciada nas polishops. Outro sonho é possuir uma conta bancária que desfrute de status especial, fora da vala comum dos depositantes que são perseguidos pelo vermelho. Para não falar daquele que é um dos hábitos históricos da classe média: malhar o governo.

Mas com a diminuição das classes D e E, a boa notícia também chega para os ricos, que cresceram em número de 11,61% para 15,52% da população e passam a sonhar, não com carros, mas com lanchas e temporadas de esqui nos Alpes Suíços. Pelos dados divulgados da economia, estamos no melhor dos mundos. Mas não soltemos foguetes. Os números dizem muito e mostram pouco. Escondem o flagelo da insegurança, o medo da sociedade acuada pelos bandidos e o desespero das filas da saúde. O passaporte definitivo para o bem-estar e para o desenvolvimento de nosso país passa pela educação e pelo melhor consumo de cultura.

*************************************************************
OUR RAVAGED SEAS, Thomas Schulz, August 8.

Part 1: Globalization Is Destroying the World's Oceans

The oceans are a primary source of food for mankind, and fishing provides 200 million people with income, as meager as it may be. But growing demand and the industrial-scale exploitation of the seas are destroying global fish populations. The European Union's quota system is partly to blame.

Dawn creeps across the horizon as the Pinkis brothers' cutter returns to the harbor at Kühlungsborn. The Baltic is still calm, but wind from the northeast has already picked up sharply, a sign of the storms in the evening forecast. The Pinkis brothers and their crew have been out since 2 a.m., 10 nautical miles off the coast of northeast Germany's Mecklenburg region, in a spot where they had staked hundreds of nets into the sea floor the previous afternoon, hoping the fish would come.

The brothers' cutter is small, less than 10 meters (33 feet) long, with a tiny bridge on top and a large fish tank in the hold below. Two stake-net fishermen stand on the deck, wearing bright orange oilcloth clothing. The boat has hardly docked at the wharf before they begin shoveling the catch from the hold, mostly flounder and codfish, even a lone turbot. The catch amounts to 200 kilograms (440 lbs), the fruits of a day's labor -- a day that can sometimes last 20 hours. Six days a week.

They're the only fishermen docked in Kühlungsborn harbor this morning, a lone cutter among sailboats and yachts. The fishing harbors along Germany's coast have been emptied. There are about 3,700 ocean fishermen left in Germany today, many of them getting on in years. The Pinkis brothers are among the youngest members of the Wismarbucht fishing cooperative. Uwe Pinkis is 45, and his brother Klaus is 42. Fishing, in Germany, is a dying profession.

When Klaus Pinkis is asked whether it's possible to make a living from 200 kilos of fish a day, he puts down his dip net, pushes his cap up from his forehead and takes a deep breath. He looks at his brother for a long moment and says: "We're doing well, but there are others, many, in fact, who are getting really nervous and are on the verge of qualifying for welfare."

The Pinkis brothers are their own supply chain. They catch, process and sell the fish themselves in the courtyard behind their tidy little house just off the beach in Rerik, a town in the Salzhaff region of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in the northeasten corner of Germany. "The more you do, the more you keep," says Klaus Pinkis. His brother nods. The two men are proud of what they do for a living.

Together, they gross €60,000 ($93,000) a year. No one does this just for the money, says Uwe Pinkis. The work is too grueling, especially in bad weather, when the cutter "rocks back and forth like crazy all day long" and when the brothers "consume nothing but magnesium all evening" to deal with cramps in their calves. Fishing is not just a dying profession but a difficult one.

Overfished, Overexploited

About one-fourth of all known fish populations are already overfished to the brink of extinction, including once-abundant species cod and tuna. According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), another 50 percent are considered completely exploited. No one can, or is even willing, to predict the consequences for the complex ecosystem, and yet it is clear that the oceans are gradually being ravaged.

Is this all just fear-mongering? Environmentalist propaganda? No, not at all.

German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel soberly expressed what scientists have been convinced about for years: If the oceans continue to be ransacked the way they are today, fish populations, and fishing along with them, will disappear -- completely, worldwide -- by the middle of the century.

The news from last week alone was alarming: US authorities had, for the first time ever, imposed a ban on salmon fishing along the country's entire Pacific coast. The European Union also banned tuna fishing in the Mediterranean, while experts recommended banning cod fishing in the North Sea.

Even the Institute of the German Economy, not exactly a leftist bastion of environmentalism, has issued urgent warnings that an entire "branch of industry is literally threatened with extinction."

Billions of people depend on fish as a staple food and need it to survive, especially in parts of the Third World, where fish makes up 20 percent of the diet and is thus the key source of animal protein. Fishing provides an income for close to 200 million people.

The demand for fish has been rising steadily and steeply for decades, and fisherman do nothing but satisfy that demand. As boats have become larger and more efficient, the worldwide catch volume has grown more than sevenfold between 1950 and 2005, to more than 140 million tons a year.

The consequences were recognizable early on, especially in the waters of industrialized nations, with their well-equipped fleets and well-heeled consumers. In the North Sea and Baltic Sea, for example, herring populations were in dramatic decline by the 1960s.

Germans, in particular, have felt the effects. Today there are only half as many ocean fishermen in a united Germany as there were in West Germany alone in 1970. In the '80s, fewer than 30 deep-sea fishing vessels from Germany ventured to Greenland (instead of fishing off the North Sea and Baltic Sea coastlines). Today there are seven, and only one is not owned by foreign corporations.

That vessel, the "Atlantic Peace," is 57 meters (187 feet) long, has a crew of 24, and is currently wedged between two container ships along the quay wall. Streaks of rust mar the ship's once gleaming, blue-and-white paint finish. This last German deep-sea fishing boat is no attractive cutter, but a steel vessel so powerful that its crew can even work in eight-meter (26-foot) waves.

The morning lights of Reykjavik shimmer through wisps of fog in the background. It took the "Atlantic Peace" two days to struggle back from its fishing grounds to the Icelandic capital, the base for North Atlantic fishing vessels, in storm-force winds.

Captain Klaus Hartmann, his face showing signs of exhaustion, stands on the bridge. It is six a.m. and raining heavily. "When is the container finally going to get here?" he asks, staring at the rear deck. A crane lifts pallets from the hold, each tightly packed with boxes full of black halibut. The catch totals more than 400,000 fish, cleaned and trimmed, frozen and packaged for sale. The "Atlantic Peace" is a factory ship.

It was at sea for 70 days, a highly efficient catching and processing machine that only docks in the harbor to spit out cargo as quickly as possible. It will sail again in three days, headed for fishing zone XIVb off the coast of Greenland once again, where the Germans have traditionally had large quotas.

Why Greenland, of all places? "Because Germans have always fished there," says Hartmann. The European Union pays Greenland more than €40 million ($61 million) each year so that they can continue to do so.

Documented catches from earlier days are the basis of the quota system. Because the British caught the most cod in the North Sea before there were any regulations, the EU assigns them the largest quotas each year. And because the Spaniards have always fished for anchovies in the Mediterranean, they are permitted to do so today.

When a fish species suddenly turns up in ocean regions where there was no quota for that species in the past, it sets off a mad rush. Last year, for example, a new ocean perch population was discovered northeast of Iceland. The relevant regulatory agency issued a quota for 15,000 tons. Then the race began. It's called "Olympic fishing." Whoever manages to catch the most fish as quickly as possible emerges as the winner -- two times over, because future quotas for individual ships are based on this first catch.

Part 2: 'Everything Was Gone'

More than 70 boats descended on the schools of ocean perch. "Everything was gone within two weeks," says Hartmann, who disapproves of the practice.

Hartmann is also the chairman of the Association of German Deep-Sea Fisheries. He is familiar with the problems surrounding the current reputation of fishermen, including their supposedly relentless greed for the catch and their lack of concern for the environment.

This is why he spends a lot of time talking about fishing practices designed to preserve populations and about the need to cooperate with scientists and environmentalists. He says restrictions are indispensable, "for reasons of conscience," but also for economic reasons. "I still want to have this job in 20 years. That'll only happen if there are still fish."

When he talks about such changes, Hartmann uses expressions like "paradigm shift" and "ethical necessity." He is not your stereotypical seaman, not someone who, with a deeply tanned face and hands battered by the elements, likes to tell fishermen's yarns. Sometimes he seems almost out of place on the bridge, peering at his laptop through his angular designer glasses. There is a stark contrast between Hartmann and his surroundings where, despite the open doors, there is an unbearably rancid stench, a fatal mix of fish, machine oil and old sweat.

Hartmann didn't even grow up on the coast, but in Cologne. He bought his first cutter in 1977 for 100,000 German marks, using money borrowed from friends. Since then his ships have become a little larger every few years. The "Atlantic Peace," which Hartmann bought used seven years ago for 18 million German marks, is his crowning achievement.

But Hartmann hasn't gone out himself in years. These days he prefers to leave the fishing up to his partners. The "Atlantic Peace" is a limited partnership consisting of three captains. One has to stay on land, says Hartmann, "to make sure that we weren't put out of business, as a one-ship operation." The threats to his business include the EU bureaucracy, competitors who often operate dozens of ships, and market fluctuations that stopped having anything to do with daily prices at the fish auction in the port city of Bremerhaven long ago, but instead are determined by exchange rate fluctuations between the yen and the dollar.

Two weeks before the "Atlantic Peace" entered the port of Reykjavik, Hartmann had sold its entire catch -- 19,851 boxes of black halibut, with a little ocean perch mixed in -- for a price of €1.4 million ($2.14 million), negotiated with a Danish wholesaler that primarily supplies Asian food companies.

Hartmann does well when fish is in short supply in Japanese supermarkets, because he's paid more money for his halibut. His business does poorly when the Chinese economy falters, because that prompts the Chinese to shift from buying Hartmann's expensive ocean perch to cheap fish from Vietnam. But one thing is constant: Not a single fish caught by the last German deep-sea fishing vessel goes to Germany.

Globalization has reached the fishing industry in full force. "Anyone who doesn't recognize this," says Hartmann, "is quickly out of the picture."

Germans Prefer it Frozen

For most domestic fishermen, selling their catch in Germany is no longer worth the trouble. These days they supply only 15 percent of the fish on German supermarket shelves. This is not for any lack of demand: Germans are eating more fish every year, with per capita consumption up to 16 kilos (35 lbs.), a 20-percent increase over ten years ago. But Germany is a country of inexpensive fish, where even twice-frozen packaged fish, once spurned, is a top seller. One variety is Alaskan pollock, caught by Russian trawlers, frozen, sent to China to be filleted, refrozen and then shipped off to German supermarkets.

Hartmann gets €3.37 ($5.16) for a kilo of halibut. This is decent, but less than the going rate for cod, which has become rare. Because cod can only be sold in filet form, two-thirds of the catch volume is discarded. In the case of halibut, on the other hand, heads and fins are used. "The Chinese go for that," says Hartmann.

These factors make it worthwhile to target black halibut, "even though it's damned hard to fish." Black halibut swims at great depths, down to 1,500 meters (4,920 feet), and it takes an experienced captain as well as sonar, plotters and 3D underwater monitors to fish it up.

The bridge of the "Atlantic Peace" is reminiscent of a navy frigate more than a fishing boat. Deep-sea fishing today is equal parts high tech and manual labor: Hardly any fish in the ocean is safe anymore.

Traveling at two or three knots, the "Atlantic Peace" drags a long (70-meter) net across the ocean floor, even through drifting ice and during storms. Halibut sweeps into a giant net opening, which is 30 meters (98 feet) wide and 12 meters (40 feet) tall. After only half an hour, up to 20 tons of fish can be crowded into the end of the net. The net has to be reeled in after four hours, "otherwise the fish are quickly limp and descaled."

A giant stern winch pulls up the net. The process can take up to 30 minutes, and then the catch -- tens of thousands of fish squeezed into the green net, with mesh no smaller than 140 millimeters, to let young fish escape -- is brought on deck. The crew quickly opens the net and lets the fish slide down to their deaths. The entire lower deck of the "Atlantic Peace" is a processing factory consisting of metal conveyor belts and flashing circular saws.

When the fishing is good, the machines run 24 hours a day, performing an endless cycle of beheading, gutting and freezing. There is no daylight on the lower deck. It's a cold, crowded space with an unsteady floor. Working in this on-board processing plant is a back-breaking job, no matter how much technology there is to make it easier.

A seaman can earn €5,000 ($7,650) a month for the work -- good money, and yet the industry lacks new blood. "The aging workforce is a problem" says Hartmann, adding that some ships are practically manned with retirees.

Meaningless Quotas

There is still money to be made in fishing. The "Atlantic Peace" grosses about €8 million ($12.2 million) a year, while returns fluctuate between one and 15 percent. The industry will remain profitable for as long as the quotas exist, but that could change any year. Hartmann always carries around the EU's most current quota distribution list, in the form of a huge Excel table, dozens of columns that reflect, in condensed form, EU fishing policies.

There is a number for every country, every fishing zone, every fish species and every boat or fleet. According to the table, the "Atlantic Peace" is entitled to a quota of 4,500 tons of halibut, cod, Pollock, ocean perch and shellfish.

But with the exception of the total catch volume, the numbers are meaningless. Fishermen trade with one another, depending on what types of fish they specialize in. Hartmann, for example, has just traded his 800 tons of cod off the Norwegian coast for 600 tons of halibut from an Icelandic vessel off Greenland.

The quotas are revised each year, in months of negotiations among the EU countries and with their neighbors. "We never know what'll happen," says Hartmann, "and if things don't go our way, we can end up with only half as much fish the next year."

Part 3: Pirate Fishermen and Big Multinationals

Unlike Norwegians or Icelanders, EU fishermen are not involved in the negotiations. Politicians and bureaucrats get together to set the quotas.

In 2007, German fishermen were allotted 225,000 tons. The quota, which belongs to the German government and not the fishermen, is essentially lent to them.

In Iceland, as in many other fishing nations, this is handled differently. The Icelandic quota is owned by the fishermen, which gives them competitive advantages when it comes to planning and securing financing. Icelandic fishing companies have expanded for years, buying up bigger and bigger fleets and increasing their market share.

Deutsche Fischfang Union, based in the northern German port city of Cuxhaven, was once Germany's largest deep-sea fishing company. Today it belongs to Samherji, an Icelandic company, which also owns fleets in Poland, England and Spain. A slow but constant wave of consolidations has rolled across the fishing industry for years. The number of players is decreasing, but those that remain are getting bigger, more global and more powerful. This is bad news for the millions of small family fishing operations. Today, one percent of the world fishing fleet is already responsible for 50 percent of the catch.

Last summer Samherji acquired a fleet of six factory ships just so that it could fish the West African coast. The EU pays Mauritania more than €80 million ($122 million) a year so European industrial fishing companies can drain the African coastal waters of fish. In many cases, this doesn't leave Mauritanian fisherman with enough to make a living. Others, like the Dutch fishing corporation Parlevliet & Van de Plas, are already sending their ships to locations deep in the South Atlantic and off the coasts of Chile and Peru.

More and more often, the global struggle for dwindling resources is turning violent. French longline fishermen are attacking Spanish drift net fishermen with Molotov cocktails, accusing them of depleting their fishing grounds. English fishermen have taken to throwing frozen fish at Icelandic coast guard vessels. And German stake-net fishermen are at each other's throats in the Baltic for fishing to close to one another.

But at least all can agree that they have one common enemy: pirate fishermen. They catch without licenses, without quotas and without paying any heed to a global fisheries policy designed to preserve populations. The so-called IUU, or "illegal, unregistered and unregulated" fishing industry, already pulls about one third of the world's annual catch from the sea.

"Unfortunately the IUU is in fact out of control in some areas," says Stefán Ásmundsson. He is the chairman of the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC), whose members include the EU and most of the other countries that fish in this ocean region. Similar multinational organizations also exist in other ocean regions. They represent an attempt to manage fishing in largely unregulated international waters. This only works if countries abide by the rules, but many don't.

"The problem is that, under international maritime law, enforcing the rules is up to the flag state of the fishermen," says Ásmundsson. And many deliberately enforce no rules at all. More than 1,200 fishing trawlers are registered under flags of convenience -- Cambodia, say, or Honduras. Another 1,600 trawlers, the pirate fishermen, sail the oceans under no flags at all.

Many pirate fishermen are known and their ships are on blacklists. But in international waters they can simply forbid inspectors from coming on board.

This is why the international community is increasingly trying to forbid the pirates access to ports, make it impossible for them to unload their fish, and deny them food and diesel fuel. But even these sanctions don't always work.

The five biggest trawlers owned by Piro-Fisch, a German-Russian charter company, were long known as impudent pirates when they entered the port of Rostock in northeastern Germany in the fall of 2005. They are on all relevant blacklists. But the ships remained untouched -- despite the fact that even the Icelandic foreign minister asked the EU Commission to prevent them from leaving the port. The trawlers left Rostock in March 2006, unobstructed and with their supplies on board. In April, after another raid, they entered the Russian seaport of Kaliningrad, where they were promptly detained.

Even in legal fishery, politicians often fail to live up to their responsibility. The EU's cod quotas, for example, are still 50 percent higher than the catch volumes scientists consider barely justifiable. Sharp disputes keep erupting in the EU because some countries, instead of fishing less, push to have their quotas raised.

The problem stems from the fact that in traditionally strong fishing nations, like France and Spain, no politicians want to alienate whole coastal regions. The recommendations of experts, like those with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, are all too often ignored. In the world struggle for resources, fish are usually the losers.

Many German fishermen are now searching for environmentally justifiable methods, to avoid being vilified as "fish murderers" or "environmental pigs" -- the sorts of names they are repeatedly called on coastal esplanades. For more than five years, the German fishing industry and seafood retailers have supported the Marine Stewardship Council's eco-label, which identifies seafood caught legally and in an environmentally responsible way.

There is also a growing trend to provide more exact details about the origin of fish, such as whether halibut was caught off the coast of Iceland or Norway. This can make a big difference, because a fish species can be virtually wiped in one ocean region while flourishing in another.

In addition, organizations like the NEAFC are attempting to establish an international monitoring regime. But the oceans are enormous and there are few inspectors.

Germany has three fisheries protection vessels to monitor its territorial waters in the North Sea and Baltic Sea, as well as to take part in international patrol to places as far away as the Arctic and Canada.

Monitoring on the High Seas

Shortly before midnight, the "Seeadler" slips out of a naval base near Warnemünde on the Baltic Sea. The German authorities have learned that dozens of Polish fishermen, who exceeded their quotas long ago, are on their way to German territorial waters. When the ship reaches the open sea, its main diesel engines roar into action as the massive, 72-meter (236-foot) coastguard ship heads toward the island of Usedom at full speed. But by the next morning there are no Poles in sight. False alarm.

Instead, the "Seeadler" has set its sights on a Danish trawlnet cutter. The inspectors could force the fishermen to haul in their net for inspection immediately, but not without reason. "We don't want to obstruct fishing," says Raik Thomas, the Seeadler's captain. On its tours through the Baltic, each lasting about two weeks, the unarmed "Seeadler" typically completes about 30 inspections.

The Danish ship agrees to bring in its net, voluntarily, and then things move very quickly. Four men put on survival suits and jump into an escort speedboat, which is suspended from a crane above the "Seeadler' deck. Within seconds the inflatable boat is hoisted overboard and dropped the last few meters, hitting the water with a slapping noise. It rushes across the gray waves of the Baltic toward the 15-meter (49-foot) cutter, blue light flashing through the drizzling rain and spray.

The German inspectors have hardly stepped on board before the net emerges from the water. A sack full of plaice and codfish gasping for air hangs above the deck, gills wide open and their mouths pushing through the mesh. The fishermen and inspectors wade, knee-deep at times, through 150 kilos of fish flapping around on the deck. The "Seeadler" team inspects nets and mesh sizes, licenses, fish species and the bycatch. It takes all of 45 minutes for the Germans to give the "Line Charlotte" a seal of approval. "In truth, we rarely run into any problems," says Captain Thomas.

But environmental groups like Greenpeace disagree. They argue the inspections are inadequate. According to Greenpeace officials, too much of what happens on the ocean goes unpunished, and worldwide fishing capacities should be reduced by 50 percent. Greenpeace wants to see conservation zones where fishing is banned altogether established in many ocean regions.

Greenpeace repeatedly tries to deliver at least symbolic messages. This is the case as the "Rainbow Warrior II" sails in the Mediterranean near Naples in the midsummer heat. Its goal is to address one of the most dramatic chapters in the overfishing debate -- the threat of eradication of bluefin tuna. Mediterranean fishermen made a living catching the predatory fish for two millennia, but now it has all but disappeared from the region.

The craving for sushi is the main reason behind this threat to the tuna population. Nowadays some are even willing to pay more than $100,000 (€65,000) for special specimens. The tuna business alone turns over €4 billion ($6.1 billion) in annual revenues.

The combination of high profits and illegal methods has attracted the underworld, too. The Japanese and the Italian mafia are believed to be deeply involved in the tuna business. Horror stories are making the rounds in the fishing community about EU fisheries inspectors who found return air tickets in their hotel rooms upon arriving in Sicily, or the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) activist who found a white lily on her bed -- a mafia death threat.

The tuna farms that have begun to appear off many Mediterranean coasts in recent years also play a growing role in the industry. Young fish caught in the wild are fattened in farms until they're big enough for slaughter. Many of these farms are operated illegally. "It usually isn't clear who exactly is behind these operations. In many cases they are backed by bogus companies," says Alessandro Gianni, a fisheries biologist on board the Rainbow Warrior.

'It looks like "The Swarm" Down Here'

For documentation purposes, Gianni wants to send a diving team into a farm off the Neapolitan coast. But before the Greenpeace boats can reach the underwater cages, they are surrounded by the Italian coast guard. Nevertheless, the Greenpeace team decides to make the dive.

Three men disappear into a cage, where thousands of tuna are crowded together, frantically swimming around in a circle. Even the experienced divers are outraged. "It looks like 'The Swarm' down here," one of them calls out.

Despite such excesses, fish farms could be the salvation of worldwide fish population. Aquaculture, or artificially raising fish and seafood, is one of the world's fastest-growing forms of food production. The industry has grown by an average of 10 percent a year since the early 1990s.

Scientists are already alluding to a "blue revolution" similar to the "green revolution" in agriculture in the 1950s, when new methods quadrupled food production within a short period of time.

A little less than a third of the 1.2 million tons of farmed salmon sold worldwide comes from the farms of the Norwegian company Marine Harvest, the world's largest fish producer, with 7,500 employees in 18 countries. "It won't stay that way," says Leif Frode Onarheim, the company's acting president and CEO. "We have big ambitions."

Marine Harvest's model salmon farm is about an hour by boat from Stavanger, a city on Norway's west coast. A small red, wooden building and 14 cages, each of them 24 meters (79 feet) long, 24 meters wide and 30 meters (98 feet) deep, float in a fjord that is 400 meters (1,312 feet) deep. The cages contain 800,000 salmon, at a market value of about €10 million ($15.3 million).

Salmon are relatively easy to farm. They are well developed by the time they hatch, and they can be fed with industrially produced dry feed, which consists primarily of fish meal. Onarheim is convinced that successes with salmon can be repeated with other species, such as halibut, the South American tilapia and red snapper. The industry is also becoming more adept at dealing with the environmental problems of fish farming.

It takes one year to grow the fish from 100 grams (3.5 oz.) to five kilos (11 lbs.), when they are ready for slaughter. The salmon are pumped out of the cages and into transport ships, which take them to the processing factory at the other end of the fjord. A counter that hangs above the slaughtering machinery provides a running tally of the number of salmon that have been processed on a given day. The red digital numbers change every few seconds: 7,904, 7,905. It is only 11 a.m.

But for Onarheim this is still not fast enough. "We compete with chicken and beef," he says. He wants to see the farms enlarged, producing more and increasingly farther out to sea. Onarheim envisions annual production levels of two or three million fish -- per farm.

This is the reverse of the world of the northern German Pinkis brothers, for whom all of this must be lunacy -- the Pinkis brothers, with their daily catch of 30 or 40 cod, lined up in crates on their garden wall, between rosebushes and a neatly trimmed lawn. A kilo of the Pinkis's codfish sells for €2.50 ($3.83), cheaper than a Big Mac. The Pinkis brothers, who pluck each fish individually from the net and work at temperatures as low as -10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit), when it's so cold that the codfish are frozen to the net.

No, says Klaus Pinkis, fish will not die out on their account. The brothers have trouble understanding why the people "over in Brussels," the ones who set the quotas, make their lives so difficult. Why can't they just be allowed to fish, without all the rules and regulations? They would know when to stop, would know the right amount of fishing so that both sides, the fisherman and the fish, could survive.

"It's such a wonderful profession, and I don't regret it for a minute," says Pinkis. "But I can't say whether anyone will be doing it after us."

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Corpo-a-corpo na Vila Mimosa, Marcelo Migliaccio, 01 de agosto de 2008.

Ontem foi o Dia Mundial do Orgasmo, mas a rotina na Vila Mimosa, área de prostituição na Praça da Bandeira, teria sido a mesma – sujeira, mau cheiro, mulheres deprimidas, clientes sujos e música alta – se o candidato a prefeito Vinícius Cordeiro (PTdoB) não aparecesse para um rápido corpo-a-corpo.

– Estou visitando a cidade que ninguém vê – disse Cordeiro, enquanto entregava um panfleto a Michele, "26 anos", barrigão de sete meses.

Depois de pegar o folheto, ela saiu apressada. Nem quis ouvir a pregação que o candidato fez a clientes e profissionais durante cerca de meia hora.

– Quando chove, as ruas aqui enchem por causa das galerias entupidas. Como em toda a cidade, a limpeza urbana é deficiente – criticou o político, que garantiu, no entanto, nunca ter estado ali antes.

Vivian, "30 anos", duas filhas e três carnavais na Vila, tinha outra reivindicação ao improvável futuro prefeito, um dos lanternas nas pesquisas.

– Deveriam fechar a rua e cobrar entrada. Tem homem que só vem para olhar, passar a mão na gente e encher o saco.

Ao seu lado, a sílfide Carla, pele e cabelos judiados – mas belos olhos – concorda:

– Fechar a rua seria bom, passa criança e vê gente bêbada, mulher com peito de fora...

Da Baixada, Carla, "23", sustenta a filha ali há três anos.

– Mas só venho porque estou desempregada.

Cordeiro garante que não sabia que havia agendado a visita à tradicional zona de meretrício no Dia do Orgasmo.

– Foi coincidência. Espero que os cidadãos que freqüentam este lugar tenham outra espécie de orgasmo quando o virem recuperado.

– E o outro tipo de orgasmo? – perguntou alguém ao candidato, que mostrou a aliança com um sorriso de colegial.

Nas biroscas da Vila Mimosa, mulheres de todos os tipos oferecem seus corpos – nunca suas bocas – por R$ 40. Pela expressão amarga delas, orgasmo ali, só masculino.

– Às vezes até acontece, mas é raro, não é uma coisa muito profissional – confirma Vivian.

A sorte, entretanto, parece ter batido em sua porta.

– Tive orgasmo uma vez e vou casar com ele. Estou largando isso aqui.

Mais otimista, só Vinícius Cordeiro, que comentou as pesquisas antes de ir embora:

– Já passei o Filipe Pereira e agora vou atrás do Molon.

Foi bom pra você?

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Tasering of disabled native decried, Terri Theodore, May 30.

VANCOUVER — Aeron Hall admits he'd had a few drinks before walking home one spring night four years ago in Merritt, B.C. But Mr. Hall, 35, who is disabled, said it was his limp and not intoxication that attracted the attention of the RCMP and set off a chain of events that ended with him being tasered seven times, including once to the testicles.

His experience has angered the head of the B.C. Coalition of People with Disabilities, which wants police better trained.

Mr. Hall had a brain aneurysm as a child and his weak leg swings as he walks. He is on a government disability pension. He says that on his way home from drinking beer with friends in June of 2004 he was confronted by a female police officer in front of the Merritt RCMP detachment and taken in. He was told to remove his clothing and jewellery, but the native man wouldn't take off one necklace because his spiritual adviser had told him never to take it off.

He says two large, male officers approached him. "One was holding a taser behind his back and they reached for my necklace to rip it off. I stepped back and he pulled out the taser ... and I started defending myself. ... They started tasering me in my privates and on my back and my legs."

Mr. Hall was released the next day without charge. His mother, Norma, later received a copy of a police report that concluded the officers had done nothing wrong. The story angers Margaret Birrell, executive director of the B.C. Coalition of People with Disabilities. "What is this intolerance about? she asked. "If we heard about this in another country, we'd be appalled. It's abuse of power."

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Decapitated bus passenger, man was 'totally calm' during attack, Joe Friesen, July 31.

BRANDON, MAN. - A young man travelling on a Greyhound bus was stabbed to death and beheaded by a stranger in a horrifying act of apparently random violence.

The incident occurred on a bus travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg just before 10 p.m. Wednesday.

A man of about 18 who was sleeping with headphones on was attacked by his seat mate, according to the man who sat in front of them.

He was stabbed repeatedly with a large hunting knife, sending blood spraying across the interior of the bus. The driver quickly pulled over and passengers fled out the front door.

The attacker then sawed off the victim's head and carried it to the front of the bus.

The two did not apparently know one another. The victim boarded the bus in Edmonton, one witness said, and the attacker boarded in Manitoba.

A standoff with police ensued until about 1 a.m. local time.

A 40-year-old man was taken into custody.

Garnet Caton, 26, was sitting in the seat in front of the attacker.

"I was just reading a book and all of a sudden I heard a guy screaming. I turned around and the guy sitting right beside me was standing up and stabbing another guy with a big Rambo knife," he said.

"Right in the throat. Repeatedly."

The man wielding the knife had a shaved head and was wearing sunglasses, he said.

"He looked totally calm. He didn't say a word I don't think to anybody on the bus ... nothing. Just totally calm."

Mr. Caton said most passengers were sleeping at the time and didn't realize what was happening.

"I screamed 'stop the bus!' ... Everybody got the hell off, and people at the front of the bus didn't really understand what was going on. It almost turned into a trample scene there, everybody trying to get off the bus. But the guy didn't care at all. He wasn't concerned with anybody but the guy he was stabbing.

"The guy was totally calm. When he brought the head he looked at us and dropped it. It was like he was having a day at the beach. He couldn't be bothered by anything else."

Passenger Cody Olmstead from Kentville, N.S., said he had just smoked a cigarette with the victim at the last stop in Brandon. He said he believed the victim had gotten on the bus in Edmonton.

"We just left the town of Brandon and we were watching Zorro and the next thing I know I hear somebody scream and I look back and there's some big guy holding this little fellow up between the bathroom door and the seat," Mr. Olmstead told CBC News.

After passengers fled the bus and braced the door to keep the attacker inside, he returned with the victim's head, Mr. Olmstead said.

"His hand come out the door with the knife," he said. "He went back on the bus and then they [passengers] brace the door and he come back standing in the doorway with the head, looked at them, dropped the head, went back and started cutting buddy back up."

As night fell and police surrounded the bus, the suspect taunted police officers, Mr. Olmstead said.

"He comes up and he picks the head up and he's waving it in the window. I just smoked a cigarette with this man [the victim] earlier, the head, and he's shaking it back and forth at the window and it's ... intense right, it's sickening."

RCMP Sgt. Steve Colwell provided few other details at a press briefing Thursday afternoon. He referred to the crime as a stabbing, but refused to confirm whether or not the victim had been decapitated. Sgt. Colwell said the suspect was arrested just before 1:30 a.m. when he tried to escape through a broken bus window after a prolonged standoff with police.

Sgt. Colwell said the suspect, who has yet to be charged, is believed to have been from out of province. He refused to name him or the victim. He also refused to confirm the victim's age or where he is from.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the violent attack is a "horrific" incident and his heart goes to the family of the victim.

However, Mr. Day played down the possibility of enacting tough security measures in Canada's bus terminals, similar to what already exists in airports.

“People should always be open to looking at precautionary measures. But let's keep in mind that as bizarre and tragic as this is, it is extremely rare,” Mr. Day said.

He also dismissed talk by some opposition MPs of a “knife registry,” saying that millions of them are bought each year simply for kitchen use. He added that there are already provisions in the Criminal Code against crimes and assaults.

Speaking at a Conservative caucus meeting, Mr. Day said he does not want to jeopardize the investigation, but added he wants to see the killer “convicted in court.”

“We want to make sure that the process is followed as aggressively as possible, a full legal process, and the perpetrator is definitely dealt with the full force of the law,” he said.

Greyhound called the event tragic but isolated.

A company spokeswoman said bus travel is the safest mode of transportation, despite the fact bus stations do not have metal detectors and other security measures used at airports.

“Due to the rural nature of our network, airport-type security is not practical. It's a very different type of system,” Abby Wambaugh said from Greyhound's corporate offices in Texas.

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Eye-witness accounts of bus slaying, Cody Olmstead & Garnet Caton, July 31.

Cody Olmstead

I was sitting on the bus and we just left the town of Brandon and we were watching Zorro and the next thing I know I hear somebody scream and I look back and there's some big guy holding this little fellow up between the bathroom door and the seat. And he was moving. It kind of looked like a fight but somebody said a knife, so we all run off the bus – he was getting stabbed. So I'm making sure everybody's okay right outside and these other guys are containing the door. Then they went back on the bus and come off the bus and told everybody to get back 'cause they thought he was coming out. His hand come out the door with the knife, looked like it was trying to cut their... He went back on the bus and then they brace the door and he come back standing in the doorway with the head, looked at them, dropped the head, went back and started cutting buddy back up.

So they make us leave and go up by the tractor trailer and I'm standing by the tractor trailer and it's starting to get dark and the cops are there and he comes up and he picks the head up and he's waving it in the window. I just smoked a cigarette with this man [the victim] earlier, the head, and he's shaking it back and forth at the window and it's ... intense right, it's sickening.

Garnet Caton

He put his bags in the overhead compartment. He didn't say a word to anybody. He seemed totally normal. He had sunglasses on. He sat down. And then, about a half an hour later, we heard this blood-curdling scream and turned around and the guy was standing up, stabbing this guy repeatedly, repeatedly, like, I dunno, must have been 40, 50 times in the neck and in the chest area. When he was attacking him, he was calm as like, it was like he was at the beach. He (was) totally calm, he didn't say anything. There was no rage or, or anything. He was just like a robot stabbing the guy.

We exited the bus. Everybody got off the bus. But a few of us, me and the trucker and one of the Greyhound drivers went back on the bus to go see what was going on and that's when we saw ... he had the guy on the ground, he was cutting his head off and pretty much gutting him.

That trucker ... he had a crowbar and we ran and got a hammer and stuff. Me and the other bus driver, there, tried to guard the door; put our bodies up against the door and, you know, waiting for him to come out and whatnot.

And he went back and brought the head to the front and pretty much, you know, displayed it to us like that and then dropped it on the ground in front of us. Very calmly, all very calmly, he was wearing sunglasses and like, you know, it was no big deal to him.

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Beheading victim 'never got into a single fight in his whole life', August 1.

PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, MAN. — A man accused of beheading a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus uttered not a word in court Friday and the victim's friends were still at a loss as to how anyone could have attacked someone they say never hurt a soul.

"There was nothing in the world that could set him off or [make] him do anything wrong to anybody," said William Caron, who knew Tim McLean, 22, since Grade 7.

"As far as I've known him, he'd never got into a single fight in his whole life."

The victim of the vicious attack on a Greyhound bus has not officially been identified. But friends have started a Facebook memorial group that includes his name, Tim McLean, and this photograph. (From Facebook)

Police had no answers Thursday as to what prompted a man on a Greyhound bus to suddenly stand up and repeatedly stab his seatmate and behead him in front of horrified passengers.

There were no answers from a courtroom in Portage la Prairie, Man., where Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton, made his first court appearance on a charge of second-degree murder.

Mr. Li — his face bruised, one hand bandaged and his legs shackled — quietly shuffled into the room with his head bowed. He did not make eye contact with anyone the entire time he was before the judge.

He would not even reply when the judge asked him if he was going to get a lawyer and only nodded slightly when asked whether he was exercising his right not to speak.

The accused, wearing a grey T-shirt and prisoner's vest, appeared to be about five-foot-eight or nine with a stocky build.

Passengers had described Mr. McLean's attacker as a big man who weighed at least 200 pounds.

The Crown asked for a psychiatric assessment, but the judge said he wanted to give Mr. Li a chance to talk to a lawyer about that.

"It's early and I think the judge just wants to respect his rights to ... speak to counsel and he's giving him that opportunity," Crown prosecutor Larry Hodgson said outside court. "I don't think it will be very long that they'll allow him to do that [be without a lawyer]."

Mr. Li was charged after Mr. McLean died in a gruesome attack on a Greyhound bus that was travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg.

Police did not release details about his death. But passengers said the young man died in an appalling attack in which his seat-mate silently stood up and repeatedly stabbed him before severing his head and carving up his body.

Friends say they simply cannot understand why anyone would attack the thin young man, just five-feet, five inches tall, and by all accounts easy-going.

"He was just such an amazing guy. He had a great personality," Mr. McLean's long-time friend and Mr. Caron's wife, Jodi Lang, said on the lawn of their Winnipeg home.

Mr. McLean had been working at carnival booths and was coming home from Edmonton to be with his family. He led a mostly quiet life, preferring to spend time playing cards and the board game Risk, Mr. Caron said.

His friend liked to travel, which was the reason he spent three summers working the carnival circuit, Mr. Caron added.

"He never cared for sitting around, unless it was for a weekend with the guys playing Risk. He was always big on travelling. He didn't like to sit in one place."

Mr. McLean and Mr. Caron got their first tattoos together. Mr. Caron opted for a ghost riding a motorcycle. Mr. McLean chose a joker — a theme he would use for his Myspace web page under the name Jokawild, where he described his interests as "playin vids, chillin', havin a good time."

Mr. Hodgson couldn't offer many details about Li.

"I know he was from Edmonton. I don't know why he was on the bus. That's still under investigation."

The RCMP said Mr. Li has no known criminal record.

Mr. Hodgson said if Mr. Li doesn't get his own lawyer, the court could appoint one or the case could proceed anyway.

Mr. Li's next court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday in Portage la Prairie.

Meanwhile, tributes to the victim were pouring into social networking and media websites. A Facebook website called "R.I.P. Tim" quickly sprang up after news of the attack.

"I can't believe this is happening," wrote Leah Dryburgh of Winnipeg. "Tim, you were the best guy ever. You didn't deserve this at all."

It was on Tuesday night that Greyhound bus 1170 rolled across the darkening prairie. Passengers were dozing off as The Legend of Zorro played on the television screen.

A man of about 20, making his way home to Manitoba from Edmonton, was sitting on his own in the back row, headphones covering his ears, sleeping with his cheek resting on the window pane.

He barely acknowledged the 40-year-old man in sunglasses who, having boarded the bus in Brandon, first sat near the front, then walked down the aisle, slid his bags into the overhead bin, and sat down next to him.

The strangers sat together in silence for a half hour or more, said Garnet Caton, a 26-year-old seismic driller who was in the row ahead.

Then the calm of an otherwise unremarkable bus ride was shattered by a sound so chilling it could only be described as somewhere between a dog howling and a baby crying.

"It was a blood-curdling scream," he said. "I turned around and the guy sitting right [behind] me was standing up and stabbing another guy with a big Rambo knife … Right in the throat. Repeatedly."

Mr. Caton said the attack was utterly unprovoked.

He watched in horror as the man, described as tall and well-built with close-cropped hair, plunged his hunting knife into the victim eight or nine times, sending blood spraying across the back of the bus.

The driver, hearing the screams, pulled to the side of the road and opened the doors, allowing passengers to flee. They scrambled over one another and, in their haste, knocked an elderly woman to the floor. One mother, who was seated near the back, threw her toddler forward several rows to get the child away from danger, a witness said.

Mr. Caton, who served five years in the Canadian Forces and was closest to the attacker, paused before leaving, torn momentarily between concern for his own safety and the thought of abandoning the bleeding victim. He turned to another man nearby and asked for his help.

"I said, 'Give me a hand and let's get this guy.' And the other guy took off," he said.

It was only moments later that the victim's screams went silent. Mr. Caton knew he was too late.

Mr. Caton jumped off the bus, and was met by a trucker who had stopped after seeing the commotion. The trucker grabbed a crowbar and Mr. Caton got a hammer and they tried to contain the attacker on the bus. The attacker swung his knife at them through the partially closed bus door.

Then the incident became even more macabre. The attacker returned to the victim's side and began sawing through his neck. A few moments later, he walked to the front of the bus holding a decapitated human head, displaying it to the 34 passengers and the bus driver standing outside.

"I got sick after I saw the head thing," Mr. Caton said. "Some people were puking, some people were crying, some people were shocked."

The killer, meanwhile, appeared unfazed.

"He just looked at us and dropped the head on the ground, totally calm," Mr. Caton said.

Reports from the scene indicate the man then ate pieces of the corpse.

It was at that point that the RCMP arrived and a standoff developed, with armed officers surrounding the bus.

For more than three hours the man taunted police, moving around the bus and cutting away at the corpse. Around 1:30 a.m. local time, he broke a window and tried to jump out but was quickly arrested.

At the scene Staff Sergeant Steve Colwell could offer no explanation for what prompted the attack, and had no information on whether the attacker was known to police or had a history of violence or instability.

Police did not release the victim's name because they had not been able to notify his family. But CTV reported Friday that his family learned of the attack through the media.

Police praised the reaction of the bus driver and passengers, which they say may have averted further injuries.

"They were very brave. They reacted swiftly and calmly in exiting the bus and as a result nobody else was injured," Staff Sgt. Colwell said. "It's not every day that someone gets stabbed on a bus. I imagine it would be fairly traumatic for the other passengers on the bus and the way they reacted was extraordinary."

The passengers were eventually taken to an RCMP station in Brandon to be questioned, and then put up for the night in a local hotel. Most stayed up late, bleary-eyed strangers gathering in small groups, talking through a horrifying event that defied rational explanation.

"I tried to lay down at 4 o'clock this morning and I was up 10 minutes later, because every time I close my eyes I see this man in the window with some guy's head I just smoked a cigarette with an hour before," said passenger Cody Olmstead, who was on his way home to Nova Scotia.

Mr. Olmstead may have been the last person to speak to the victim before he was killed. He said they exchanged pleasantries, but not much more. The young man, who was about 5 foot 8 and 150 pounds, was dressed in baggy, hip-hop clothing, passengers said.

"He seemed to be all right. I didn't get to know him," he said. "He just told me where he was going. I told him where I was going."

At first, Mr. Olmstead said, he thought it was a regular fistfight. But when somebody yelled "knife," everyone started to run.

"What can you do when a man's got a knife the size of, you know, it's a big knife. So we just tried to stay out of the way," he said.

He said he didn't notice any tension between the two men beforehand, or even a minor incident that could have sparked a confrontation.

"No, there was no tension. The guy got on the bus, sat down beside the fellow. The fellow offered him the seat, woke up, said, 'Yeah, go ahead,' fell back asleep. Next thing you know, he's getting stabbed repetitively," he said. "And then I guess he cuts buddy's head off, and he walks up to the door, holds the head in the door and just looks at him, crazy like, and just drops the head."

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day called Thursday's incident horrific and said his heart goes to the family of the victim. However, he played down the possibility of enacting tough security measures in Canada's bus terminals, similar to what exists in airports.

"People should always be open to looking at precautionary measures. But let's keep in mind that as bizarre and tragic as this is, it is extremely rare," Mr. Day said.

He also dismissed talk by some opposition MPs of a "knife registry," saying that millions of them are bought each year simply for kitchen use. He added that there are already provisions in the Criminal Code against crimes and assaults.

Speaking at a Conservative Party caucus meeting, Mr. Day said he does not want to jeopardize the investigation, but added he wants to see the killer "convicted in court."

Grief counsellors from the Brandon Regional Health Authority were made available to the passengers at the hotel Wednesday night. They were eventually allowed to complete their journey to Winnipeg, even though all their possessions had to be left on the bus while police continued their search of the crime scene.

Greyhound paid for them to buy clothes Thursday, and later transported them into Winnipeg, where some were reunited with anxious family members late in the afternoon.

The bus remained parked at the side of the Trans-Canada Highway Thursday, about 20 kilometres west of Portage La Prairie, as forensic teams sifted through evidence.

With reports from Joe Friesen in Winnipeg and Daniel Leblanc in Lévis, Que.

*************************************************************
Beheaded man identified, Gabrielle Giroday and Ian Hitchen, July 31.

BRANDON, Man. - Screaming passengers fled in terror from a Greyhound bus as an unidentified fellow passenger suddenly stabbed a man sleeping next to him, decapitated him and waved the severed head at horrified witnesses standing outside.

The apparently unprovoked assault left 36 men, women and children stranded Wednesday night on the shoulder of the darkening Trans-Canada Highway near Portage la Prairie, Man., about 85 kilometres west of Winnipeg, watching while the bus driver and a driver of a nearby truck shut the crazed attacker inside the bus with the mangled victim.

A number of tribute groups on the social networking website Facebook identified the victim as 22-year-old Tim McLean.

Tim McLean, 22, has been identified in various Facebook tribute pages as the victim in Wednesday's stabbing and beheading aboard a Winnipeg-bound Greyhound bus in Manitoba. This photo is from Maclean's myspace page.

At a news conference Thursday afternoon, RCMP confirmed they have a suspect - who is not believed to be from Manitoba - in custody, but offered few new details about this baffling homicide. The suspect is expected to be formally charged Friday.

"By the time the police arrived, the driver and the remaining passengers had all safely exited the bus," said Sgt. Steve Colwell.

He said officers could see the man walking around inside the bus, but said he refused to exit. The standoff lasted for hours.

"At 1:28 a.m., the suspect . . . attempted to jump out of the bus after breaking a window. He was immediately subdued and arrested without incident and is currently in RCMP custody," Colwell said.

The suspect's name has not been released.

"He didn't do anything to provoke the guy. The guy just took a knife out and stabbed him, started stabbing him like crazy and cut his head off," said Garnet Caton, 26, a passenger on the Edmonton-to-Winnipeg bus.

"Some people were puking, some people were crying, other people were in shock. . . . Everybody was running, screaming off the bus."

Caton said the attacker was only on the bus for a brief time, after boarding in western Manitoba.

Passenger Cody Olmstead said he had been watching a movie on the bus just before the attack began.

"We were watching Zorro; next thing I know, I hear someone screaming."

Olmstead, 21, told reporters he had smoked a cigarette earlier in the trip with the victim, who got on the bus in Edmonton.

He said the victim said he was going to Winnipeg.

After the bus pulled over and the terrified passengers fled, Olmstead said the attacker was taunting those outside with the victim's severed head.

"He came back, standing in the doorway with the head, looked at him, dropped the head and went back and started cutting buddy back up."

He said when police showed up, the taunting continued.

"He come up and picks the head up and he's waving it in the window. I just smoked a cigarette with this man earlier - like, the head. He's shaking it back and forth in the window."

Caton said he and other passengers prevented the attacker from getting off the blood-soaked bus by threatening him with makeshift weapons - a hammer and a crowbar.

"We were telling him, 'Stay put, stay put, stay there, don't try to come out.' He tried to get the bus working and the bus driver disabled the bus somehow in the back. I'm not sure how he did it, and at that point, I think the police showed up," he said, adding officers rushed them away.

Caton and other passengers said the attacker and his victim, who was listening to music on headphones, were sitting together at the rear of the bus, and the attack appeared to be unprovoked; no words were exchanged.

He told a TV station the attacker had actually changed seats to sit next to his victim just before the killing.

Caton described the man who attacked the passenger as bald and wearing sunglasses. He seemed oblivious to others when the stabbing occurred, said Caton, adding he was struck by how calm the man was.

"There was no rage or anything. He was like a robot, stabbing the guy," he said.

Caton said the victim boarded in Edmonton, was wearing hip-hop clothing and appeared to be around 20 years of age.

After the killing, the other passengers were later taken to Brandon, Man., to be interviewed by police and to stay overnight at a hotel there.

Crisis counsellors were also at the hotel to provide support to the passengers, and counsellors could be seen chatting with them outside the hotel as groups went out to local stores for snacks or to smoke cigarettes.

One small boy, who was with an adult man and woman, was given a plush teddy bear by a crisis health worker.

"The first thing I heard was something like a terrible type (of) yowl, and that was from the guy who got stabbed," said an elderly woman on the bus, from Winnipeg.

The woman and her adult daughter said they were three or four rows in front of the man when the attack began.

"(My daughter said) 'Oh my God,' and everybody else started screaming," she said. "They had terror in their eyes."

Two other passengers on the bus, a 22-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman from France, said they were heading to Winnipeg after visiting the woman's father in Whitehorse. The 22-year-old man said in French that he saw a man holding a long knife repeatedly stab another passenger. He and his girlfriend said they were shocked by the attack, and the isolation in the middle of the prairie when it occurred.

"There was nowhere to go," she said.

Speaking in Quebec City, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the issue of safety on buses may need to be examined more closely once the legal process of this case is over.

"We're never closed to looking at how Canadians can be more safe and more secure," Day told reporters in Quebec on Thursday. "This particular incident, as horrific as it is, is obviously extremely rare."

Greyhound spokesman Eric Wesley, speaking from Texas, said drivers are trained to get help as soon as they can when incidents occur.

"This is very rare, unique occurrence. Bus transportation is one of the safest modes of transportation. This is highly unique that something like this happened," he said. "Our drivers are trained to provide the safest travel for all our passengers, and every time an incident occurs, they know to pull the bus over and call 911."

Wesley said counselling will be provided and monetary compensation will be determined on an individual basis.

"We are going to do whatever we need to provide the passengers with counselling or any other measures to make sure they're taken care of."

*************************************************************
Alleged bus butcher quiet in court, Joe Friesen, August 1.

PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, MAN. -- The man accused in the beheading of a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba uttered not a word when he made his first court appearance Friday.

Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton, his feet shackled, shuffled into a courtroom in Portage la Prairie, Man., with his head bowed. He did not make eye contact with anyone the entire time he was before the judge.

He would not even reply when the judge asked him if he was going to get a lawyer, and only nodded slightly when asked whether he was exercising his right not to speak.

The Crown asked for a psychiatric assessment, but the judge said he wanted to give Li a chance to talk to a lawyer about that.

“It's early and I think the judge just wants to respect his rights to ... speak to counsel and he's giving him that opportunity,” Crown prosecutor Larry Hodgson said outside court. “I don't think it will be very long that they'll allow him to do that.”

Mr. Hodgson said if Mr. Li doesn't get his own lawyer, the court could appoint one or the case could proceed anyway.

Mr. Li's next court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday in Portage la Prairie.

Mr. Li is charged with second-degree murder in the gruesome slaying of Tim McLean, 22, on a Greyhound bus that was travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg. Police have not identified the victim, but friends say it was Mr. McLean.

Passengers say the young man was stabbed repeatedly before he was beheaded and his body carved up. Police have only confirmed that a man was stabbed.

Some passengers also described Mr. McLean's attacker as a big man who weighed at least 200 pounds.

The man who appeared in court Friday wearing a grey T-shirt and prisoner's vest appeared to be about five-foot-eight or nine with a stocky build.

Mr. Hodgson couldn't offer many details about Mr. Li.

“I know he was from Edmonton. I don't know why he was on the bus. That's still under investigation.”

The RCMP said Mr. Li has no known criminal record.

Meanwhile, tributes to the victim were pouring into social networking and media websites. A Facebook website called “R.I.P. Tim” quickly sprang up after news of the attack.

“I can't believe this is happening,” wrote Leah Dryburgh of Winnipeg. “Tim, you were the best guy ever. You didn't deserve this at all.”

Friends described Mr. McLean as a quiet, easy-going carnival worker who was heading home to Winnipeg after a job in Edmonton.

It was on that night that Greyhound bus 1170 rolled across the darkening prairie. Passengers were dozing off as The Legend of Zorro played on the television screen.

An aboriginal man of about 18 or 20, making his way home to Manitoba from Edmonton, was sitting on his own in the back row, headphones covering his ears, sleeping with his cheek resting on the window pane.

He barely acknowledged the 40-year-old man in sunglasses who, having boarded the bus in Brandon, first sat near the front, then walked down the aisle, slid his bags into the overhead bin, and sat down next to him.

The strangers sat together in silence for a half hour or more, said Garnet Caton, a 26-year-old seismic driller who was in the row ahead.

Then the calm of an otherwise unremarkable bus ride was shattered by a sound so chilling it could only be described as somewhere between a dog howling and a baby crying.

“It was a blood-curdling scream,” he said. “I turned around and the guy sitting right [behind] me was standing up and stabbing another guy with a big Rambo knife … Right in the throat. Repeatedly.”

Mr. Caton said the attack was utterly unprovoked.

He watched in horror as the man, described as tall and well-built with close-cropped hair, plunged his hunting knife into the victim eight or nine times, sending blood spraying across the back of the bus.

The driver, hearing the screams, pulled to the side of the road and opened the doors, allowing passengers to flee. They scrambled over one another and, in their haste, knocked an elderly woman to the floor. One mother, who was seated near the back, threw her toddler forward several rows to get the child away from danger, a witness said.

Mr. Caton, who served five years in the Canadian Forces and was closest to the attacker, paused before leaving, torn momentarily between concern for his own safety and the thought of abandoning the bleeding victim. He turned to another man nearby and asked for his help.

“I said, ‘Give me a hand and let's get this guy.' And the other guy took off,” he said.

It was only moments later that the victim's screams went silent. Mr. Caton knew he was too late.

Mr. Caton jumped off the bus, and was met by a trucker who had stopped after seeing the commotion. The trucker grabbed a crowbar and Mr. Caton got a hammer and they tried to contain the attacker on the bus. The attacker swung his knife at them through the partially closed bus door.

Then the incident became even more macabre. The attacker returned to the victim's side and began sawing through his neck. A few moments later, he walked to the front of the bus holding a decapitated human head, displaying it to the 34 passengers and the bus driver standing outside.

“I got sick after I saw the head thing,” Mr. Caton said. “Some people were puking, some people were crying, some people were shocked.”

The killer, meanwhile, appeared unfazed.

“He just looked at us and dropped the head on the ground, totally calm,” Mr. Caton said.

Reports from the scene indicate the man then ate pieces of the corpse.

It was at that point that the RCMP arrived and a standoff developed, with armed officers surrounding the bus.

For more than three hours the man taunted police, moving around the bus and cutting away at the corpse. Around 1:30 a.m. local time, he broke a window and tried to jump out but was quickly arrested.

At the scene Staff Sergeant Steve Colwell could offer no explanation for what prompted the attack, and had no information on whether the attacker was known to police or had a history of violence or instability.

Police did not release the victim's name because they had not been able to notify his family. But CTV reported Friday that his family learned of the attack through the media.

Police praised the reaction of the bus driver and passengers, which they say may have averted further injuries.

“They were very brave. They reacted swiftly and calmly in exiting the bus and as a result nobody else was injured,” Staff Sgt. Colwell said. “It's not every day that someone gets stabbed on a bus. I imagine it would be fairly traumatic for the other passengers on the bus and the way they reacted was extraordinary.”

The passengers were eventually taken to an RCMP station in Brandon to be questioned, and then put up for the night in a local hotel. Most stayed up late, bleary-eyed strangers gathering in small groups, talking through a horrifying event that defied rational explanation.

“I tried to lay down at 4 o'clock this morning and I was up 10 minutes later, because every time I close my eyes I see this man in the window with some guy's head I just smoked a cigarette with an hour before,” said passenger Cody Olmstead, who was on his way home to Nova Scotia.

Mr. Olmstead may have been the last person to speak to the victim before he was killed. He said they exchanged pleasantries, but not much more. The young man, who was about 5 foot 8 and 150 pounds, was dressed in baggy, hip-hop clothing, passengers said.

“He seemed to be all right. I didn't get to know him,” he said. “He just told me where he was going. I told him where I was going.”

At first, Mr. Olmstead said, he thought it was a regular fistfight. But when somebody yelled “knife,” everyone started to run.

“What can you do when a man's got a knife the size of, you know, it's a big knife. So we just tried to stay out of the way,” he said.

He said he didn't notice any tension between the two men beforehand, or even a minor incident that could have sparked a confrontation.

“No, there was no tension. The guy got on the bus, sat down beside the fellow. The fellow offered him the seat, woke up, said, ‘Yeah, go ahead,' fell back asleep. Next thing you know, he's getting stabbed repetitively,” he said. “And then I guess he cuts buddy's head off, and he walks up to the door, holds the head in the door and just looks at him, crazy like, and just drops the head.”

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day called Thursday's incident horrific and said his heart goes to the family of the victim. However, he played down the possibility of enacting tough security measures in Canada's bus terminals, similar to what exists in airports.

“People should always be open to looking at precautionary measures. But let's keep in mind that as bizarre and tragic as this is, it is extremely rare,” Mr. Day said.

He also dismissed talk by some opposition MPs of a “knife registry,” saying that millions of them are bought each year simply for kitchen use. He added that there are already provisions in the Criminal Code against crimes and assaults.

Speaking at a Conservative Party caucus meeting, Mr. Day said he does not want to jeopardize the investigation, but added he wants to see the killer “convicted in court.”

Grief counsellors from the Brandon Regional Health Authority were made available to the passengers at the hotel Wednesday night. They were eventually allowed to complete their journey to Winnipeg, even though all their possessions had to be left on the bus while police continued their search of the crime scene.

Greyhound paid for them to buy clothes Thursday, and later transported them into Winnipeg, where some were reunited with anxious family members late in the afternoon.

The bus remained parked at the side of the Trans-Canada Highway Thursday, about 20 kilometres west of Portage La Prairie, as forensic teams sifted through evidence.

With reports from Joe Friesen in Winnipeg and Daniel Leblanc in Lévis, Que.

*************************************************************
Suspect called friendly, reliable employee, Josh Wingrove, August 1.

It was last summer when Vince Weiguang Li first gave Vincent Augert a call.

Mr. Li was responding to an advertisement for Vinco Newspaper Distribution, a company contracted to deliver newspapers in Edmonton. He was looking for part-time work to supplement his income from another job at a local McDonald's restaurant.He got the job, delivering to homes in the city's northeast end.

Mr. Li was a “quiet” man who spoke quickly, often making his English difficult to understand, Mr. Augert, 42, remembered. But he was friendly and a reliable employee.

Mr. Li, 40, showed up dutifully in the wee hours each morning for 13 months.

“He just came, picked up his papers, didn't talk to anybody. Picked up his papers, and did his things,” Mr. Augert said.

In early July, he asked Mr. Augert for a day off at the end of the month, for a job interview.

“ …He indicated he'd need a day off at the end of the month, and he had to go to Winnipeg for an interview, and he would get back to me when he knew the day.”

He didn't get back to Mr. Augert. Then came Monday, the last day Mr. Li showed up for work. On Tuesday, wondering where his trustworthy employee had disappeared to, Mr. Augert called his cellphone. A woman called back saying she was Mr. Li's wife.

“Monday morning he picked up his newspapers, and that was it. He picked up his newspapers, and fell off the face of the earth,” Mr. Augert said.

Mr. Li didn't show up Wednesday or Thursday, the same day reports of a gruesome attack aboard an eastbound Edmonton-to-Winnipeg Greyhound bus began to surface. Thursday evening, Mr. Augert spoke again with the woman he believed to be Mrs. Li. “She basically just said that she didn't know where he was, and that he had told her he'd left out of town on an emergency,” Mr. Augert said.

Throughout Thursday, the bus investigation progressed. A man was thought to have stabbed another man dozens of times.

Mr. Augert and his fellow newspaper distributors recognized the name and photo of the alleged killer the next day, and couldn't believe it was the Mr. Li they'dworked with.

“It was just a total shock. I would have never thought this would ever happen,” Mr. Augert said. “There was nothing to believe or suggest that he would have it in him to do something like this.”

Mr. Li appeared in court Friday, his feet shackled, not uttering a word. His wife couldn't be reached for comment.

*************************************************************
'Please kill me,' accused pleads, Joe Friesen, August 5.

ERICKSON, MAN. — Vince Li stood in a Manitoba courtroom Tuesday pleading for it all to end.

“Please kill me,” he said quietly, in a court packed with journalists and members of the victim's family.

Mr. Li, 40, is accused of stabbing and beheading 22-year-old Tim McLean, a complete stranger, who was sleeping next to him on a Greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg on July 30.

The judge ordered a psychiatric assessment to determine whether Mr. Li is fit to stand trial and whether he can be held criminally responsible for his actions. He has so far refused to speak to a lawyer.

Court was told Mr. Li spent four days in a Canadian psychiatric facility at some point, but the Crown is still trying to determine where and when. Crown lawyer Joyce Dalmyn said Mr. Li has not yet offered any explanation for what occurred aboard Greyhound 1170.

“No explanation, no note, almost nothing verbal,” Ms. Dalmyn said. “There is nothing to indicate it's anything other than a random and unprovoked attack.”

Meanwhile, new details have emerged about how Mr. Li spent the 24 hours before Mr. McLean was killed, including that he spent a night on a public bench, sold a laptop to a teenager that contained personal letters and photos, as well as a note that expressed feelings of guilt at leaving China, and confusion about life in Canada.

Mr. Li first stepped off the Greyhound bus from Edmonton in the tiny western Manitoba town of Erickson, population 456, just before 6 p.m. last Tuesday, July 29.

He strode across the street from the convenience store, which doubles as a bus depot, carrying five pieces of luggage under his arms. He was wearing small black sunglasses, a green shirt and a hat, and looked perfectly put together, like a businessman, said Darren Beatty, a 15-year-old student who works at a local gas station.

“The whole time I seen him he never took off his sunglasses,” Mr. Beatty said.

He watched him sit down on a shaded wooden bench next to the Co-Op grocery on Main Street, arranging his bags around him and resting his arms as though he were sitting in an arm chair.

He didn't move for the next three hours.

Around 9 p.m., he walked into the M and M store, where David Dauphinais's husband Darren was working alone.

Mr. Li hung around for what felt like ages, making Darren extremely uncomfortable. He called his husband, saying he was afraid to walk home.

“He was really freaked out,” Mr. Dauphinais said. “He said there was something about this guy that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

“Darren's a treaty Indian. When Darren gets nervous about somebody, I listen.”

Mr. Dauphinais rushed back from a meeting, only to find that Mr. Li had left the store when another customer walked in.

That night neither could sleep, fretting about the mysterious stranger. Mr. Dauphinais got out of bed at 3 a.m. and went down to check on his store. He saw Mr. Li sitting across the street, bolt upright on the bench, eyes wide open.

The following morning, Mr. Beatty was riding his bike when he saw a laptop on the curb. The screen was open and a hand-written sign said “$600 for sale, or best offer.”

He circled on his bike, noted the brand-new Acer 4200, and approached Mr. Li.

He offered $100, then immediately lowered it to $50. Mr. Li contemplated for a moment.

“That's probably enough to get you a bus ticket,” Mr. Beatty said. They settled on $60, plus a bag.

“I just thought he was a guy having a hard time,” he said, adding he never felt threatened. “He seemed lost. As I was talking to him about [the laptop] he muttered something about America. He had a thick accent so it was hard to understand.

“He seemed really happy to get some money in his hand.”

Mr. Beatty brought the computer home, and, after returning to get the password from Mr. Li (it was 7777), he unwittingly opened a window on the world of a man who would soon become one of Canada's most notorious accused killers.

He found more than 20 resumes, each tailored to a specific job application. One was for a police service, one for McDonald's, one for Wal-Mart. He also found dozens of photos that he assumed were taken by Mr. Li, including several of a black military plane that he thought were taken by an amateur in mid-air. There were photos of a formal Chinese military parade, and others of Chinese models in clothes, and some of mountains in British Columbia.

There was a letter in Mandarin, translated with Google translator, which seemed to be addressed to someone back in China. It said he was happy to be free, living under beautiful, free skies, but that he felt guilty for leaving China, and that everything in Canada was not as he expected, Mr. Beatty said.

Mr. Li, who recently worked as a newspaper deliveryman, immigrated to Canada in 2001 under the federal skilled worker program, though it's not known whether it was Mr. Li or his wife Anna who qualified. He's believed to be a Canadian citizen.

On the morning after the attack, Mr. Beatty got a call from the RCMP at work, saying an incident had occurred involving the man who sold him his laptop. An officer visited his home and seized the computer, saying he might get restitution but wasn't likely to get the laptop back.

“I asked the cop, “Did he use my money to buy a weapon? But he said, ‘No, not that we know of,' ” Mr. Beatty said.

Mr. Li returned to the M and M store around 1:30 p.m. Mr. Dauphinais said he stood waiting in an alley behind the store for the next 41/2 hours for the bus to arrive.

Just before 6 p.m., he boarded the Greyhound in Erickson, not Brandon as several witnesses reported, and sat down near the front. After a cigarette break in Brandon, he moved to the back and sat next to Mr. McLean.

Court was told Tuesday that when he was arrested, Mr. Li was carrying a plastic bag containing a human nose, ear and part of a mouth, believed to be Mr. McLean's, and that police officers saw him hacking at and eating the corpse. During the ensuing standoff RCMP officers heard him say, “I have to stay on the bus forever.”

Mr. Li's next court appearance is Sept. 8.

The nut of the story, by my lights, is right here:

Mr. Li first stepped off the Greyhound bus from Edmonton in the tiny western Manitoba town of Erickson, population 456, just before 6 p.m. last Tuesday, July 29.
...
“The whole time I seen him he never took off his sunglasses,” Mr. Beatty said. He watched him sit down on a shaded wooden bench next to the Co-Op grocery on Main Street, arranging his bags around him and resting his arms as though he were sitting in an arm chair. He didn't move for the next three hours. Around 9 p.m., he walked into the M and M store, where David Dauphinais's husband Darren was working alone. Mr. Li hung around for what felt like ages, making Darren extremely uncomfortable. He called his husband, saying he was afraid to walk home. “He was really freaked out,” Mr. Dauphinais said. “He said there was something about this guy that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “Darren's a treaty Indian. When Darren gets nervous about somebody, I listen.”
...
The following morning, Mr. Beatty was riding his bike when he saw a laptop on the curb. The screen was open and a hand-written sign said “$600 for sale, or best offer.” He circled on his bike, noted the brand-new Acer 4200, and approached Mr. Li. He offered $100, then immediately lowered it to $50. Mr. Li contemplated for a moment. “That's probably enough to get you a bus ticket,” Mr. Beatty said. They settled on $60, plus a bag. “I just thought he was a guy having a hard time,” he said, adding he never felt threatened. “He seemed lost. As I was talking to him about [the laptop] he muttered something about America. He had a thick accent so it was hard to understand. “He seemed really happy to get some money in his hand.” Mr. Beatty brought the computer home, and, after returning to get the password from Mr. Li (it was 7777), he unwittingly opened a window on the world of a man who would soon become one of Canada's most notorious accused killers. He found more than 20 resumes, each tailored to a specific job application. One was for a police service, one for McDonald's, one for Wal-Mart.
...
Mr. Li returned to the M and M store around 1:30 p.m. Mr. Dauphinais said he stood waiting in an alley behind the store for the next 4 1/2 hours for the bus to arrive. Just before 6 p.m., he boarded the Greyhound in Erickson, not Brandon as several witnesses reported, and sat down near the front. After a cigarette break in Brandon, he moved to the back and sat next to Mr. McLean.

1. There is a difference between the resume you give to Wal-mart and the one you give to McDonald's?

2. For a full 24 hours he sat on the street of a tiny prairie town and nobody engaged him beyond ripping off his computer?

These photographs by André Salcedo are anything but a litle cup of cream cheeze and they are also nothing at all like the thumbnails - click on the thumbnail for a higher resolution image, worth a closer look, more than mere boobage:

Down.

palavra do dia 'proparoxítona'

2008-08-07T19:05:00.000-04:00

Up, Down.

oxítono - sílaba tônica é a última
paroxítono - sílaba tônica é a penúltima
Ex.: Os paroxítonos formam o padrão predominante na língua portuguesa.

proparoxítono - acentuação tônica cai na antepenúltima sílaba
Ex.: Chico Buarque terminou com proparoxítonos todos os versos de sua música Construção.

oxítona = palavra oxítona, paroxítona = palavra paroxítona, proparoxítona = palavra proparoxítona

Dom Ináfio - Ota:
These olympics are touching. The day before yesterday a swimmer showed naked photographs of herself in protest!

Naked women are always good for my tired old eyes!

But better than that would be a live execution. And the Chinese are the best at that!

Construção - Chico Buarque

Amou daquela vez como se fosse a última
Beijou sua mulher como se fosse a última
E cada filho seu como se fosse o único
E atravessou a rua com seu passo tímido
Subiu a construção como se fosse máquina
Ergueu no patamar quatro paredes sólidas
Tijolo com tijolo num desenho mágico
Seus olhos embotados de cimento e lágrima
Sentou prá descansar como se fosse sábado
Comeu feijão com arroz como se fosse um príncipe
Bebeu e soluçou como se fosse um náufrago
Dançou e gargalhou como se ouvisse música
E tropeçou no céu como se fosse um bêbado
E flutuou no ar como se fosse um pássaro
E se acabou no chão feito um pacote flácido
Agonizou no meio do passeio público
Morreu na contramão atrapalhando o tráfego ...

Amou daquela vez como se fosse o último
Beijou sua mulher como se fosse a única
E cada filho seu como se fosse o pródigo
E atravessou a rua com seu passo bêbado
Subiu a construção como se fosse sólido
Ergueu no patamar quatro paredes mágicas
Tijolo com tijolo num desenho lógico
Seus olhos embotados de cimento e tráfego
Sentou prá descansar como se fosse um príncipe
Comeu feijão com arroz como se fosse o máximo
Bebeu e soluçou como se fosse máquina
Dançou e gargalhou como se fosse o próximo
E tropeçou no céu como se ouvisse música
E flutuou no ar como se fosse sábado
E se acabou no chão feito um pacote tímido
Agonizou no meio do passeio náufrago
Morreu na contramão atrapalhando o público ...

Amou daquela vez como se fosse máquina
Beijou sua mulher como se fosse lógico
Ergueu no patamar quatro paredes flácidas
Sentou prá descansar como se fosse um pássaro
E flutuou no ar como se fosse um príncipe
E se acabou no chão feito um pacote bêbado
Morreu na contra-mão atrapalhando o sábado ...

Chico Buarque, Chico Buarque, Saternus(?), Infierno, Syd Vinícius, Junkbox, Banda Vega.

I also posted this before: Construção, with some pictures and a translation.

Fernanda Lima grávida de gêmeos desfilando pela Grande Rio, e Mariana Aristóteles, Princesa da Gaviões da Fiel:

Down.

Anteater / Global Wierding

2008-08-06T07:30:00.001-04:00

Up, Down.

aka, Blah, blah, blah, ... Bang! (see article in previous post Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’?, Andrew C. Revkin, August 4.)

1. Learning to Speak Climate, Thomas L. Friedman, August 5.
1. Know-Nothing Politics, Paul Krugman, August 7.

I'm not sure ... but the invitation said that it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience!

*************************************************************
Learning to Speak Climate, Thomas L. Friedman, August 5.

Ilulissat, Greenland: Sometimes you just wish you were a photographer. I simply do not have the words to describe the awesome majesty of Greenland’s Kangia Glacier, shedding massive icebergs the size of skyscrapers and slowly pushing them down the Ilulissat Fjord until they crash into the ocean off the west coast of Greenland. There, these natural ice sculptures float and bob around the glassy waters near here. You can sail between them in a fishing boat, listening to these white ice monsters crackle and break, heave and sigh, as if they were noisily protesting their fate.

You are entirely alone here amid the giant icebergs, save for the solitary halibut fisherman who floats by. Our Greenlandic boat skipper sidles up to the tiny fishing craft, where my hosts buy a few halibut right out of his nets, slice open the tender cheeks and cut me the freshest halibut sushi I’ve ever tasted. “Greenland fast food,” quips Kim Kielsen, Greenland’s minister of the environment.

We wash it down with Scotch whiskey cooled by a 5,000-year-old ice cube chipped off one of the floating glacier bits. Some countries have vintage whiskey. Some have vintage wine. Greenland has vintage ice.

Alas, though, I do not work for National Geographic. This is the opinion page. And my trip with Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, to see the effects of climate change on Greenland’s ice sheet leaves me with a very strong opinion: Our kids are going to be so angry with us one day.

We’ve charged their future on our Visa cards. We’ve added so many greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, for our generation’s growth, that our kids are likely going to spend a good part of their adulthood, maybe all of it, just dealing with the climate implications of our profligacy. And now our leaders are telling them the way out is “offshore drilling” for more climate-changing fossil fuels.

Madness. Sheer madness.

Most people assume that the effects of climate change are going to be felt through another big disaster, like Katrina. Not necessarily, says Minik Thorleif Rosing, a top geologist at Denmark’s National History Museum and one of my traveling companions. “Most people will actually feel climate change delivered to them by the postman,” he explains. It will come in the form of higher water bills, because of increased droughts in some areas; higher energy bills, because the use of fossil fuels becomes prohibitive; and higher insurance and mortgage rates, because of much more violently unpredictable weather.

Remember: climate change means “global weirding,” not just global warming.

Greenland is one of the best places to observe the effects of climate change. Because the world’s biggest island has just 55,000 people and no industry, the condition of its huge ice sheet — as well as its temperature, precipitation and winds — is influenced by the global atmospheric and ocean currents that converge here. Whatever happens in China or Brazil gets felt here. And because Greenlanders live close to nature, they are walking barometers of climate change.

That’s how I learned a new language here: “Climate-Speak.”

It’s easy to learn. There are only three phrases. The first is: “Just a few years ago ...” Just a few years ago you could dogsled in winter from Greenland, across a 40-mile ice bank, to Disko Island. But for the past few years, the rising winter temperatures in Greenland have melted that link. Now Disko is cut off. Put away the dogsled.

There has been a 30 percent increase in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet between 1979 and 2007, and in 2007, the melt was 10 percent bigger than in any previous year, said Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, which monitors the ice. Greenland is now losing 200 cubic kilometers of ice per year — from melt and ice sliding into the ocean from outlet glaciers along its edges — which far exceeds the volume of all the ice in the European Alps, he added. “Everything is happening faster than anticipated.”

The second phrase is: “I’ve never seen that before...” It rained in December and January in Ilulissat. This is well above the Arctic Circle! It’s not supposed to rain here in winter. Said Steffen: “Twenty years ago, if I had told the people of Ilulissat that it would rain at Christmas 2007, they would have just laughed at me. Today it is a reality.”

The third phrase is: “Well usually ...but now I don’t know anymore.” Traditional climate patterns that Greenland elders have known their whole lives have changed so quickly in some places that “the accumulated experience of older people is not as valuable as before,” said Rosing. The river that was always there is now dry. The glacier that always covered that hill has disappeared. The reindeer that were always there when the hunting season opened on Aug. 1 didn’t show up.

No wonder everyone here speaks climate now — your kids will, too, and sooner than they think.

*************************************************************
Know-Nothing Politics, Paul Krugman, August 7.

So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part.

And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.

What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”

Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.

Remember how the Iraq war was sold. The stuff about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds was just window dressing. The main political argument was, “They attacked us, and we’re going to strike back” — and anyone who tried to point out that Saddam and Osama weren’t the same person was an effete snob who hated America, and probably looked French.

Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”

It wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina — when the heckuva job done by the man of whom Ms. Noonan said, “if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help” revealed the true costs of obliviousness — that the cult began to fade.

What’s more, the politics of stupidity didn’t just appeal to the poorly informed. Bear in mind that members of the political and media elites were more pro-war than the public at large in the fall of 2002, even though the flimsiness of the case for invading Iraq should have been even more obvious to those paying close attention to the issue than it was to the average voter.

Why were the elite so hawkish? Well, I heard a number of people express privately the argument that some influential commentators made publicly — that the war was a good idea, not because Iraq posed a real threat, but because beating up someone in the Middle East, never mind who, would show Muslims that we mean business. In other words, even alleged wise men bought into the idea of macho posturing as policy.

All this is in the past. But the state of the energy debate shows that Republicans, despite Mr. Bush’s plunge into record unpopularity and their defeat in 2006, still think that know-nothing politics works. And they may be right.

Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.

The headway Republicans are making on this issue won’t prevent Democrats from expanding their majority in Congress, but it might limit their gains — and could conceivably swing the presidential election, where the polls show a much closer race.

In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

Graziele Massafera (b 1982), aka Grazi, this year Rainha da Bateria with Grande Rio, a while ago coming out of Big Brother Brasil (big pronounced big-gee), a sketchy reality contest, then Miss Brasil, spread for Playboy in 2005, bunch of other nudie mags, Rolling Stone in 2007, a princess to be sure, maybe coin a new term? BSP? Brasilian Samba Princess? ... and she swans about with her (plastic) tits hangin' out and a certain smile that becomes increasingly strained, even thin, as the years go by ... or is it just my imagination?

Down.

Polar Bears, Psychoanalysis & Dinosaurs

2008-08-05T11:49:00.001-04:00

Up, Down.

The state of Alaska sued U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Monday, seeking to reverse his decision to list polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Governor Sarah Palin and other state officials fear a listing will cripple offshore oil and gas development in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in Alaska's northern waters, which provide prime habitat for the only polar bears under U.S. jurisdiction.

War Hero, Pretty Woman as your VP, Pro-Life, Pro-Nuclear, Pro-Oil ... all good. Weasel whizz & pundit jizz ... whatever ... and boobage forthcoming after a while, Malana.

1. Alaska sues over listing polar bear as threatened, Dan Joling, August 5.
2. American voters should beware the 'McNasty' in McCain, Jonathan Zimmerman, August 5.
3. Pills taking over from psychotherapy, Julie Steenhuysen, August 4.
4. Fewer shrinks are doing talk therapy, Carla K. Johnson, August 4.
5. National Trends in Psychotherapy by Office-Based Psychiatrists, Abstract, Ramin Mojtabai & Mark Olfson, August 2008.

"Psychiatrists get more for three, 15-minute medication management visits than for one 45 minute psychotherapy visit."
Dr. Ramin Mojtabai

*************************************************************
Alaska sues over listing polar bear as threatened, Dan Joling, August 5.

ANCHORAGE — The state of Alaska sued U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Monday, seeking to reverse his decision to list polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Governor Sarah Palin and other state officials fear a listing will cripple offshore oil and gas development in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in Alaska's northern waters, which provide prime habitat for the only polar bears under U.S. jurisdiction.

“We believe that the Service's decision to list the polar bear was not based on the best scientific and commercial data available,” Ms. Palin said in announcing the lawsuit.

Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead author of the petition that led to the listing, said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists addressed skeptics' objections during the listing process. She called the lawsuit “completely ridiculous and a waste of the court's time.”

“This lawsuit and her head-in-the-sand approach to global warming only helps oil companies, certainly not Alaska or the polar bear,” Ms. Siegel said. “Gov. Palin should be working for sustainable, clean energy development in Alaska instead of extinction for the polar bear.”

Mr. Kempthorne announced the listing May 14. The process started with the filing of the petition in 2005, a yearlong initial review, another year of public comment and additional studies, and court action to force a final decision.

Mr. Kempthorne concluded that sea ice was vital to polar bear survival, that sea ice had dramatically melted in recent decades and that computer models suggest sea ice likely will further recede in the future.

Summer sea ice last year shrank to a record low, about 1.65 million square miles, nearly 40 per cent less than the long-term average between 1979 and 2000.

The lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C., claims the federal analysis did not adequately consider polar bear survival through earlier warming periods centuries ago.

Alaska objects to the conclusion that polar bears could be endangered within the “foreseeable future,” a timeline the Fish and Wildlife Service put at 45 years, or three generations of polar bears. The state called that number arbitrary.

The state contends there are no real differences between the bears in the 19 subpopulations identified in Mr. Kempthorne's decision, and that the population as a whole is healthy. That would undermine the argument that ice loss off Alaska would affect world polar bear population.

The lawsuit contends federal officials did not consider the best scientific evidence demonstrating bears' ability to survive and adapt to changing climate conditions.

That view is rejected by most polar bear experts, who say the animals need ice to hunt seals and will not win a territory fight with grizzly bears that already inhabit northern Alaska.

*************************************************************
Pills taking over from psychotherapy, Julie Steenhuysen, August 4.

CHICAGO — U.S. psychiatrists are trading in the analysis couch for a prescription pad, a study released on Monday says after finding that fewer psychiatrists offer psychotherapy.

The shift to briefer visits for medication management, reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry, appears to be linked to better psychiatric drugs and pressure from managed care companies, which offer richer financial incentives for brief office visits.

"Psychiatrists get more for three, 15-minute medication management visits than for one 45 minute psychotherapy visit," said Dr. Ramin Mojtabai of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and formerly of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, where he did the research.

Various forms of psychotherapy, either alone or in combination with medications, are recommended to treat depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric illnesses.

Yet Dr. Mojtabai and colleagues, who analyzed data from national surveys of office-based psychiatrist visits from 1996 through 2005, found a significant drop in the number of office-based psychiatrists providing psychotherapy.

He said only 29 per cent of office-based visits to psychiatrists involved psychotherapy in 2004-5, down from 44 per cent in 1996-97.

One major impact is that patients who need to receive psychotherapy must obtain it from other professionals, if they can get it at all, dr. Mojtabai said in a telephone interview.

That can result in disjointed service, in which a patient sees a psychologist or social worker for therapy and a psychiatrist or a general physician for drugs.

"Whether it has any impact on the outcome of the disorder, we don't really know," Dr. Mojtabai said. "I don't think necessarily that it is harmful. It might not be as efficient."

Brain age

Dr. Eric Plakun, who leads an American Psychiatric Association committee on psychotherapy, said he noticed a shift away from psychotherapy beginning about 10 years ago, when more psychiatrists began to embrace "the age of the brain."

He said medical schools began to focus more on the biology of mental illness than on traditional psychotherapy and that is now reflected in practices across the United States.

Dr. Plakun said in a telephone interview that it is not clear if patients are getting therapy from other providers, or not at all.

"Either way, I'm worried about our patients," he said. "Patients need the best help we can give them."

For Dr. Plakun, that means offering a range of services, including psychotherapy, and not just medication.

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," he said.

Dr. Mojtabai thinks patients are getting therapy from others, but he said the focus probably is different from the analysis that psychiatrists have traditionally offered.

"Psychologists and social workers are more likely to provide short-term cognitive behavioural therapy," which focuses on changing harmful behaviours, he said.

As for the type of analysis featured in movies, particularly in Woody Allen films, it is available – to a very few.

"If you have some hard feelings about your childhood and you live in New York and have a lot of money, you can still find psychiatrists who provide long-term psychotherapy," Dr. Mojtabai said.

*************************************************************
Fewer shrinks are doing talk therapy, Carla K. Johnson, August 4.

CHICAGO - Cartoons about the psychiatrist's couch were recently the subject of a museum exhibition. Now, the couch itself may be headed for a museum.

A new study finds a significant decline in psychotherapy practised by U.S. psychiatrists.

The expanded use of pills and insurance policies that favour short office visits are among the reasons, said lead author Dr. Ramin Mojtabai of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

"The 'couch,' or, more generally, long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, was for so long a hallmark of the practice of psychiatry. It no longer is," Mojtabai said.

Today's psychiatrists get reimbursed by insurance companies at a lower rate for a 45-minute psychotherapy visit than for three 15-minute medication visits, he explained.

His study found that the percentage of patients' visits to psychiatrists for psychotherapy, or talk therapy, fell from 44 per cent in 1996-97 to 29 per cent in 2004-05. The percentage of psychiatrists using psychotherapy with all their patients also dropped, from about 19 per cent to 11 per cent.

Psychiatrists who provided talk therapy to everyone had more patients who paid out of pocket compared to those doctors who provided talk therapy less often. And they prescribed fewer pills.

As talk therapy declined, TV ads contributed to an "aura of invincibility" around drugs for depression and anxiety, said Charles Barber, a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University and author of "Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation."

"By contrast, there's almost no marketing for psychotherapy, which has comparable if not better outcomes," said Barber, who was not involved in the study.

The findings, published in Monday's Archives of General Psychiatry, are based on an annual survey of office visits to U.S. doctors. Of more than 246,000 visits sampled during the 10 years, more than 14,000 were to psychiatrists. The researchers analyzed those psychiatrist visits.

The study did not survey visits to psychologists or other mental health counsellors who are not medical doctors, but who also practice talk therapy.

Psychotherapy uses verbal methods to get patients to explore their emotional life, thoughts or behaviour. The goal is to ease symptoms, sometimes through getting the patient to change behaviour or mental habits.

Its benefits can be seen in brain imaging studies, said Dr. Eric Plakun, who leads an American Psychiatric Association committee working to restore interest in psychotherapy by psychiatrists.

"The couch is far from dead," Plakun said. "The couch turns out to be an effective 21st century treatment."

Talk therapy can be done by psychiatrists less expensively than split treatment, where a patient sees a doctor for pills and a counsellor for talk therapy, Plakun said, citing two prior studies.

It also works better than drugs for some patients, such as those with chronic major depression and a history of childhood trauma, he said.

Accreditation requirements for psychiatric residency programs are putting more emphasis on talk therapy, Plakun said. That may slow the decline of the couch.

The new study doesn't answer an important question: whether other professionals are picking up the slack, said psychologist David Mohr of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Psychologists and social workers provide counselling but most cannot prescribe drugs, so it's possible that for patients who require both talk and pills, some co-ordination in care may be lost, Mohr said.

*************************************************************
National Trends in Psychotherapy by Office-Based Psychiatrists, Abstract, Ramin Mojtabai, MD, PhD, MPH; Mark Olfson, MD, MPH

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008;65(8):962-970.

Context: In addition to prescribing medications, providing psychotherapy has long been a defining characteristic of the practice of clinical psychiatry. However, there are indications that the role of psychiatrists in providing psychotherapy may have diminished in recent years.

Objective: To examine recent national trends in the provision of psychotherapy by office-based psychiatrists.

Design: Data from the 1996 through 2005 cross-sectional National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey were analyzed to examine trends in psychotherapy provision within nationally representative samples of visits to office-based psychiatrists. Multivariate analyses examined the time trend, adjusting for patient, visit, and setting characteristics. Practice-level analyses examined time trends in the percentage of psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy to all, some, or none of their patients during a typical week.

Setting: Office-based psychiatry practices in the United States.

Participants: Patients with psychiatric diagnoses visiting outpatient psychiatrists.

Main Outcome Measure: Provision of psychotherapy in visits longer than 30 minutes.

Results: Psychotherapy was provided in 5597 of 14 108 visits (34.0% [weighted]) sampled during a 10-year period. The percentage of visits involving psychotherapy declined from 44.4% in 1996-1997 to 28.9% in 2004-2005 (P < .001). This decline coincided with changes in reimbursement, increases in managed care, and growth in the prescription of medications. At the practice level, the decrease in providing psychotherapy corresponded with a decline in the number of psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy to all of their patients from 19.1% in 1996-1997 to 10.8% in 2004-2005 (P = .001). Psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy to all of their patients relied more extensively on self-pay patients, had fewer managed-care visits, and prescribed medications in fewer of their visits compared with psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy less often.

Conclusions: There has been a recent significant decline in the provision of psychotherapy by psychiatrists in the United States. This trend is attributable to a decrease in the number of psychiatrists specializing in psychotherapy and a corresponding increase in those specializing in pharmacotherapy—changes that were likely motivated by financial incentives and growth in psychopharmacological treatments in recent years.

Author Affiliations: Departments of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Medical Center (Dr Mojtabai), and College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University (Dr Olfson); and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (Dr Olfson), New York. Dr Mojtabai is now with the Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland.

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American voters should beware the 'McNasty' in McCain, Jonathan Zimmerman, August 5.

In November of 1986, the Arizona Republican Party held an election night celebration at a Phoenix hotel to toast its victorious candidates. The marquee attraction was a two-term congressman named John McCain, who won the Senate seat vacated by GOP icon Barry Goldwater.

Mr. McCain delivered a rousing speech and then retired to his suite at the hotel, where he watched a replay of the address on television. But someone had failed to erect the speaking platform high enough for the 5-foot-9 senator, so only part of his face was visible on TV.

That unfortunate someone was Robert Wexler, the 20-something head of Arizona's Young Republicans and the chief choreographer of the evening's events. A livid McCain went back downstairs to look for Mr. Wexler, confronting him in the hotel ballroom.

"I told you we needed a stage," Mr. McCain screamed at the young man, jabbing a finger in Mr. Wexler's chest. "You incompetent little [expletive]. When I tell you to do something, you do it."

John McCain's biography is full of episodes like this. As far back as high school, peers nicknamed him "McNasty." He's been known to fling f-bombs at fellow lawmakers when he doesn't get his way. And in a 2006 poll, Capitol Hill staffers ranked him as the Senator with the "second hottest temper," after Alaska's Ted Stevens.

Should we care? I think we should. The most important measure of a human being is the way he or she treats other people, especially those under his or her power. By many accounts, Mr. McCain degrades and demeans them. And there's no excuse for it.

He's not the only one, of course. In Congress, abusive behaviour toward underlings is eminently bipartisan. Remember Cynthia McKinney, the ultra-liberal Georgia representative who allegedly struck a Capitol police officer when he tried to stop her at a security checkpoint?

Ms. McKinney eventually got voted out of office, but most of Congress's bullies are still going strong. Consider four-term representative Anthony Weiner, a rising Democratic star and a leading candidate to replace Michael Bloomberg next year as mayor of New York. When staffers don't measure up to his standards, Mr. Weiner reportedly throws telephones and kicks furniture.

No wonder Mr. Weiner has experienced more office turnover than any other representative in his state's delegation. Since early 2007 alone, Weiner has had three different chiefs of staff. Roughly half of his 20-odd employees have served for less than a year.

We've all met people like Anthony Weiner; some of us have worked for people like them, too. You don't want a boss who degrades, harangues and humiliates you. So why would you vote for one?

Here you might reply that public officials are elected to, well, serve the public. So if their arrogant and domineering style gets staffers to work harder, it's good for all of us.

Let's leave aside the question of whether this style actually produces better results. Even if it did - and I have my doubts - it would still be wrong. Our lawmakers do more than simply make laws; they're supposed to represent us, in every sense of the word. By electing officials who demean employees, we also demean ourselves.

How much does personal virtue matter in a public office? During the impeachment of U.S. president Bill Clinton, some of my liberal friends told me that it didn't matter at all. The president's extramarital affairs bore no relation to his public duties, so the public should just butt out.

Really? Let's suppose, then, that a president struck his wife instead of simply cheating on her. Would one still deem his personal behaviour irrelevant?

I don't think one would. And that's because our leaders - more than anybody else - serve as symbols of all of us; they embody our deepest beliefs, values and principles. We would never elect people who did physical harm to those under their charge. But we continue to elect verbal and emotional bullies, who can do just as much damage.

And that brings us back to John McCain. During the 2000 GOP primaries, operatives for George W. Bush whispered that Mr. McCain's notorious temper made him a dangerous choice for president: After all, no one wants a madman with his finger on the nuclear button.

That's absurd. There is no reason to question Mr. McCain's good judgment, which he has honed over many years of public service. But there is every reason to question his behaviour, especially toward subordinates, which speaks badly of his basic values - and of the voters'. If Americans don't want bullies in their schools and workplaces, then they shouldn't vote to put one in the White House.

Most of these were lifted from Priscilla Parreira's fotoblog.

Malana is a twenty year old from São Paulo entered in the 'Brazil's Next Top Model' contest - contest, reality TV, whatever, something to do with Sony. 2,500 try outs, 20 finalists, 13 semi-finalists, some lawyer won the first round. Malana is still in for the second round which starts in September. The only comments I have seen are negative - Brasilians think she looks like a man, all good, ok.

In the group shots she seems to like to hide in the back. 'Like'? who knows anything about what she likes? Who even knows her real name?

Very last photograph is by André Salcedo.

The fastest, cheapest, easiest and cleanest step toward a sane energy environment is the powerful combination of efficiency and conservation. We know what we should be doing. What we don’t have is the leadership, the common sense or the will to get it done.
(from a Spiegel article today)

Down.

tiras, também antídoto

2008-08-04T14:21:00.000-04:00

Up, Down.

A nematocyst (aka cnidocyte, cnidoblast, nematocyte) is a type of venomous cell unique to the phylum Cnidaria (which includes jellyfish). Each cnidocyte cell contains an organelle called a cnidocyst, which comprises a bulb-shape capsule containing a coiled hollow thread-like structure and a hair-like trigger called a cnidocil. The nematocyst capsule stores a large concentration of calcium ions, which are released from the capsule into the cytoplasm of the cnidocyte when the trigger is activated. This causes a large concentration gradient of calcium across the cnidocyte plasma membrane. The resulting osmotic pressure causes a rapid influx of water into the cell. This increase in water volume in the cytoplasm forces the coiled nematocyst to eject rapidly. This discharge is very quick taking only a few microseconds - nematocysts are very efficient weapons. The common antidote is vinegar.

1. Stinging Tentacles Offer Hint of Oceans’ Decline, Elizabeth Rosenthal, August 3.
2. Death in the Gulf of Mexico, NYT Editorial, August 4.

Novaes

Hello! I am the candidate in the upcoming elections ...

You can take everything. But please don't hurt me!

(This is the recommended approach if you are mugged in the street.)

Os Silva - Tiago Rodrigues
Honey! I can't sleep!

Sweetheart, what if we ...

That always works. Zzzzzzzzz.

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Stinging Tentacles Offer Hint of Oceans’ Decline, Elizabeth Rosenthal, August 3.

BARCELONA, Spain — Blue patrol boats crisscross the swimming areas of beaches here with their huge nets skimming the water’s surface. The yellow flags that urge caution and the red flags that prohibit swimming because of risky currents are sometimes topped now with blue ones warning of a new danger: swarms of jellyfish.

In a period of hours during a day a couple of weeks ago, 300 people on Barcelona’s bustling beaches were treated for stings, and 11 were taken to hospitals.

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.

“These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’ ” said Dr. Josep-María Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

These problems are pronounced in the Mediterranean, a sea bounded by more than a dozen countries that rely on it for business and pleasure. Left unchecked in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, these problems could make the swarms of jellyfish menacing coastlines a grim vision of seas to come.

“The problem on the beach is a social problem,” said Dr. Gili, who talks with admiration of the “beauty” of the globular jellyfish. “We need to take care of it for our tourism industry. But the big problem is not on the beach. It’s what’s happening in the seas.”

Jellyfish, relatives of the sea anemone and coral that for the most part are relatively harmless, in fact are the cockroaches of the open waters, the ultimate maritime survivors who thrive in damaged environments, and that is what they are doing.

Within the past year, there have been beach closings because of jellyfish swarms on the Côte d’Azur in France, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and at Waikiki and Virginia Beach in the United States.

In Australia, more than 30,000 people were treated for stings last year, double the number in 2005. The rare but deadly Irukandji jellyfish is expanding its range in Australia’s warming waters, marine scientists say.

While no good global database exists on jellyfish populations, the increasing reports from around the world have convinced scientists that the trend is real, serious and climate-related, although they caution that jellyfish populations in any one place undergo year-to-year variation.

“Human-caused stresses, including global warming and overfishing, are encouraging jellyfish surpluses in many tourist destinations and productive fisheries,” according to the National Science Foundation, which is issuing a report on the phenomenon this fall and lists as problem areas Australia, the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, the Black Sea, Namibia, Britain, the Mediterranean, the Sea of Japan and the Yangtze estuary.

In Barcelona, one of Spain’s most vibrant tourist destinations, city officials and the Catalan Water Agency have started fighting back, trying desperately to ensure that it is safe for swimmers to go back in the water.

Each morning, with the help of Dr. Gili’s team, boats monitor offshore jellyfish swarms, winds and currents to see if beaches are threatened and if closings are needed. They also check if jellyfish collection in the waters near the beaches is needed. Nearly 100 boats stand ready to help in an emergency, said Xavier Duran of the water agency. The constant squeal of Dr. Gili’s cellphone reflected his de facto role as Spain’s jellyfish control and command center. Calls came from all over.

Officials in Santander and the Basque country were concerned about frequent sightings this year on the Atlantic coast of the Portuguese man-of-war, a sometimes lethal warm-water species not previously seen regularly in those regions.

Farther south, a fishing boat from the Murcia region called to report an off-shore swarm of Pelagia noctiluca — an iridescent purplish jellyfish that issues a nasty sting — more than a mile long. A chef, presumably trying to find some advantage in the declining oceans, wanted to know if the local species were safe to eat if cooked. Much is unknown about the jellyfish, and Dr. Gili was unsure.

In previous decades there were jellyfish problems for only a couple of days every few years; now the threat of jellyfish is a daily headache for local officials and is featured on the evening news. “In the past few years the dynamic has changed completely — the temperature is a little warmer,” Dr. Gili said.

Though the stuff of horror B- movies, jellyfish are hardly aggressors. They float haplessly with the currents. They discharge their venom automatically when they bump into something warm — a human body, for example — from poison-containing stingers on mantles, arms or long, threadlike tendrils, which can grow to be yards long.

Some, like the Portuguese man-of-war or the giant box jellyfish, can be deadly on contact. Pelagia noctiluca, common in the Mediterranean, delivers a painful sting producing a wound that lasts weeks, months or years, depending on the person and the amount of contact.

In the Mediterranean, overfishing of both large and small fish has left jellyfish with little competition for plankton, their food, and fewer predators. Unlike in Asia, where some jellyfish are eaten by people, here they have no economic or epicurean value.

The warmer seas and drier climate caused by global warming work to the jellyfish’s advantage, since nearly all jellyfish breed better and faster in warmer waters, according to Dr. Jennifer Purcell, a jellyfish expert at the Shannon Point Marine Center of Western Washington University.

Global warming has also reduced rainfall in temperate zones, researchers say, allowing the jellyfish to better approach the beaches. Rain runoff from land would normally slightly decrease the salinity of coastal waters, “creating a natural barrier that keeps the jellies from the coast,” Dr. Gili said.

Then there is pollution, which reduces oxygen levels and visibility in coastal waters. While other fish die in or avoid waters with low oxygen levels, many jellyfish can thrive in them. And while most fish have to see to catch their food, jellyfish, which filter food passively from the water, can dine in total darkness, according to Dr. Purcell’s research.

Residents in Barcelona have forged a prickly coexistence with their new neighbors.

Last month, Mirela Gómez, 8, ran out of the water crying with her first jellyfish sting, clutching a leg that had suddenly become painful and itchy. Her grandparents rushed her to a nearby Red Cross stand. “I’m a little afraid to go back in the water,” she said, displaying a row of angry red welts on her shin.

Francisco Antonio Padrós, a 77-year-old fisherman, swore mightily as he unloaded his catch one morning last weekend, pulling off dozens of jellyfish clinging to his nets and tossing them onto a dock. Removing a few shrimp, he said his nets were often “filled with more jellyfish than fish.”

By the end of the exercise his calloused hands were bright red and swollen to twice their normal size. “Right now I can’t tell if I have hands or not — they hurt, they’re numb, they itch,” he said.

Dr. Santiago Nogué, head of the toxicology unit at the largest hospital here, said that although 90 percent of stings healed in a week or two, many people’s still hurt and itched for months. He said he was now seeing 20 patients a year whose symptoms did not respond to any treatment at all, sometimes requiring surgery to remove the affected area.

The sea, however, has long been central to life in Barcelona, and that is unlikely to change. Recently when the beaches were closed, children on a breakwater collected jellyfish in a bucket. The next day, Antonio López, a diver, emerged from the water. “There are more every year — we saw hundreds offshore today,” he said. “You just have to learn how to handle the stings.”

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Death in the Gulf of Mexico, NYT Editorial, August 4.

Every year for the past couple of decades, scientists have tried to estimate the size of the dead zone that forms where the Mississippi River enters the Gulf of Mexico. Some years it is several times as large as Lake Pontchartrain. Last year it was the size of New Jersey. This year, it may well be as large as Massachusetts, possibly even exceeding the size it was in 2002 — nearly 8,500 square miles where almost nothing lives.

Go to The Board » The dead zone is technically an area of hypoxia, or low oxygen content, first detected in the early 1970s. A decade later scientists realized it was caused largely by agricultural nitrogen — and some urban effluent — washed downstream from farms throughout the Mississippi watershed. That feeds algae, which consume the oxygen in the water as they decompose and lower oxygen levels to a point where life cannot be sustained.

The mechanisms that create the dead zone are entirely natural — algae feeding and dying — but there is nothing natural about the zone itself. It is almost entirely an artifact of modern agriculture, accompanied by treated and untreated sewage and industrial runoff. Most years the hypoxic zone dissipates in winter and re-forms in spring. At depth, the water is simply vacant of life and has the characteristic rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide. The size of the zone depends on many different conditions. But this spring was extraordinary. There were widespread floods across the Midwest, mostly after the fields had already been fertilized. The result is a plume of fertility washing out into the Gulf of Mexico, where it fertilizes only death.

The dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi is not the only one. There are dozens of smaller hypoxic zones around the American coastline where rivers spill into the sea. The same is true at river deltas around the globe, where the nitrogen load from fertilizer may be lower but the load of urban runoff — including partially treated and untreated sewage — is much higher. There could be no starker reminder of the tragic human tendency to treat the oceans as dumping grounds. And there is no better symbol of the paradox of American agriculture — the very richness applied to the fields is the source of ecological death hundreds of miles away.

Cris Vianna walking, dancing, for Grande Rio, one of the Rio de Janeiro Samba Schools. An actress in the soaps, at the moment (or maybe it has already ended? not sure) it is 'Duas Caras' / Two Guys, where she plays a maid called Sabrina who falls in love with the rich man's son and marries him. And then below with her co-stars; Sheron Menezes, Adriana Alves, & Juliana Alves.

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