david rees hits the nail on the head. btw, can’t help but feel powerfully sorry for a dude like sanford after reading his e-mails to his mistress. like, all joking aside – a pretty shitty situation to be in.

i’ve seen you guys refer to the wsj opinion page as the darkness of dumbness (i, of course, disagree), but this showed up today:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597314928257169.html

not exactly in line with what you might expect from the journal editors, so i think you have to give them some credit for publishing it.  anyway, couple of thoughts on this.  what i don’t get is how humanists elevate the ability to reason as some almighty power, but then when it comes to behavioral traits the fallback seems to be comparing humans to the rest of the animal kingdom like we’re no better (e.g., the old whip tailed lizard argument we had).  that seems to me contradictory at best, no?  second, why does Christianity always seem to be the primary target?  sure, the author makes mention of Iran, but don’t any mullahs get invited to these science vs. religion panels?  guys get murdered for drawing cartoons of muhammed…are scientists scared of what might happen in a science vs. religion debate with a muslim?  third, isn’t faith the belief in that which we don’t understand?  i agree that our ability to reason is what helps make us special, but i also think we’re way too egotistical in regard to what we think we know.  a professor i had (behavioral scientist/economist) had a list of rules that i think are pretty profound.  two of them read something like this:   rule 1) you don’t know as much as you think you do; rule 2) rule 1 is true even if you are aware of rule 1.

* = closing line from a local news broadcast from Providence, RI. The anchor said this just before cutting to footage of a horse swimming in a pool, which ran for 2-3 seconds before the commercial break.

When I was in São Paulo last week, one of the TV stations I got in my hotel room was CNN’s international service.  I’m not sure if this was CNN International under a new guise, or some other version of the network directed at international audiences.  Regardless, what disturbed me was first, the idea that CNN would present two different newscasts under the same name (“CNN”) with no mention of them differing from one another, and second, just how much smarter the version aimed at non-Americans seemed to be.  Instead of snarky tidbits and frothy lifestyle stories presented by former runway models, this international version of CNN featured long-format round-table discussions about the situation in Iran, and an entire show devoted to global press coverage.  And best of all, Lou Dobbs was nowhere to be seen.  After watching this CNN for a few minutes, I felt like I had actually learned something. (more…)

reading the comments to this wildly off-base michelle malkin post is like gazing deep into the swirling eye of madness.

money quote, from commenter no2pcbs1:

zero [common play on Obama's "O" -- z.] is a disgusting individual. if he was on fire in the middle of the desert on a clear day, I wouldn’t even piss on him to put him out.

For zach, who may not be able to view this, this is a trailer for the avatar movie.

I just heard a Brazilian cover version of Foreigner’s classic power ballad, “I Want to Know What Love Is,” sung entirely in Portuguese, I think by Marcelo Neves, who seems to specialize is cheesy música sertaneja (a Brazilian equivalent to country music).  The radio version had a pretty sweet eighties-style guitar solo at the end – definitely brightened up my trip to a pizza parlor in Campinas. Not exactly Seu Jorge covering Bowie classics, but interesting.  Here’s an iffy live version.

here’s a few photos from my first week, spent in beijing.

(more…)

It seems that as I get older, the thrill of the new, at least in terms of culture, comes along less and less.  Maybe my tastes are maturing, or maybe I’m getting pickier now that I’m well past the moment during my teenage years when I first took a real interest in music, movies, books, etc., and in which everything seemed new and exciting.  Another problem in terms of music, at least, is that the last band I could rely on for consistently great albums (Sleater-Kinney), beginning with my college-era love affair with the album The Hot Rock, broke up about four years ago. 

I don’t think my current pickiness necessarily has to do with any sort of lack of interesting cultural offerings in the last few years – there seems to be much more going on musically now, for example, than during the late 1990s/early 2000s.  And I regularly come across recent novels I’d add to my list of favorites – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz, is the latest.

In any case, I saw the movie The Brothers Bloom shortly before leaving for Brazil, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, more so than any other new “adult” movie I’ve seen in some time –Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control was conceptually interesting and visually appealing, but was so slow that sitting through it amounted to watching some particularly beautiful and well-crafted paint dry, maybe on a painting by Mondrian. 

(more…)

I spent the last four days or so in Rio de Janeiro, mostly at an academic conference. Some interesting changes since the last time I was there:

1. The dog of choice for the carioca middle class now seems to be the chow-chow, as opposed to the generic white miniature poodle that I saw on the end of so many leashes the last time I was in Brazil.  The chow-chow has the advantage of still being “fofinho” (soft/cute), but it just might tear a criminal’s leg off.  

2. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the English words so often inserted into Brazilian Portuguese, whether spoken, written, or in advertising, shouldn’t be confused with English as we know it.  Sure, Brazilian cultural nationalists probably complain about slavish adoption of U.S. terms, but in many instances, it feels more like selective adoption and repurposing than imitation as such.  

Take “x-tudo,” which means “cheeseburger with everything.”  How, you ask?  You start with “hambúrguer,” add the English “cheese,” which sounds approximately like the Portuguese sound “sheesh” (represented by the letter x), go to “x-búrguer,” add “everything” (tudo), and you get “x-tudo.”  Derived at some point from English, but nothing like what we’re used to.

3. Copacabana beach is approximately 4 km long.  There are approximately one million opportunities to buy a coffee, coconut milk, McDonalds, bottled water, a figurine of the Christ the Redeemer statue, or a really ugly beach blanket contained in the Copacabana beach area.

4. An açaí shake can give you brain freeze.