RAMBLING/RAMBLEJANT

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!

2012-01-10T06:43:00.000-08:00

To my disappointment, Catalonia has become an utterly boring place, crammed with the least of all interesting people on Earth. I loved my country and I never thought to come to that conclusion but unfortunately, this is what I feel now. This is not what it used to be or could have been!

I hate myself for being contaminated by the common pessimism that apparently is fulfilling the people. If we follow that way we are going to become a Soviet of the People's Republic of Ill Temper, the RDA of the Mediterranean, the North East Korea of Europe. Why is that?

After ten years letting the idiots drive the country and the economy, private, public, and domestic, now, the army of those who amazingly believed that their whole existence boiled down to buying a shitty apartment and getting a life-time mortgage, have turn into the most gloomy and depressing humor in centuries.

In the same way it was not true then their narrow-minded heaven of house owners and micro-bourgeoisie, it is not true now that we are living in a permanent Doom's Day. I am really revolted against those who feel relieve by casting on the rest of us these stupid point of view.

This is not the way, guys! Not in those tones! Nicht diese Töne! Stop weeping and whining like little girls and stand up and fight! Change your life, be clever, invent and be brave to endeavor it. Are you expecting politicians to redeem your lives? Be happy and sort up your own life, since it is yours!

Welcome 2012!

2011-12-31T17:54:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, year 2000 seemed something far and almost impossible to reach. And look now! This is 2012!!!! Well, be it welcome hoping this is going to be a turning point year.

What do I expect for this new year? Personally, I haven't thought about it. I never thought beyond the year 2000, and "apart" from the Internet and smart stuff around us, little has been achieved of what we were expecting to come.

No trips to the moon, no end to wars or plagues or world famine. Well, the greatest thread at that time, nuclear war and posterior nuclear winter, has been partially vanished and the cold exchanged into global warming. Anyway, as one guy said once, we all just believe in stereotypes and lies. And both are human fabrication.

What about 2011? Didn't run any marathon (apparently the latest mass entertainment among the breed of well-thinkers/doers that live in Barcelona/Catalonia), didn't discovered anything worth being mentioned, didn't climb any important mountain, or went to discover the South-east Asian jungle looking for red-haired monkeys or venomous reptiles. Lost time? No time being lived happily is totally lost, and I must say that 2011 was a pretty happy year, specially from November 23rd.

Summing it up, 2011 has been a decent year for me and my closest ones. However, I'm planning in doing something really astonishing before the end of 2012, as I used to do when I was 10 years younger. What? Don't know yet.

I went into Wakamaru Mode

2011-11-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

My profile image disappeared. I found this one, a robot called Wakamaru. When I worked in Japan, we used to have some strolling around us. They pretended to make them useful. They are not, and never will be. Just toys. There used to be an specially annoying one uttering "ne~~, ne~~!!!" with a child's voice. This one is at Advanced Technology Exhibition Hall @ TEPIA, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation.

καὶ σὺ τέκνον, Et tu, Brute? And you, Brutus?

2011-11-06T03:19:00.000-08:00

What Caesar's last words were? apparently, kai su, teknon?, in Greek, the language high society in Rome used to speak. The meaning? the obvious, you too, son of a bitch? Another interpretation: you too, dear, will die soon ;)

In any case, this is the place where it is supposed this scene happened, in the center of Rome, in a squared excavated by Il Ducce, looking for the roots of il poppolo romano. The funny thing is that the last words of Euro might also be said in Greek...σκατά!

Btw, Roma's city hall should take a bit more care of this important place!

The Pantheon and its Oculus

2011-11-06T02:56:00.000-08:00

Well, with a bit of delay, some pictures of my favourite monument in Rome, the Pantheon, from my trip last August. Perfection of geometry and architecture.

Old Leather Or a Pair of Big Chinese Reasons

2011-09-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

Near where I live there use to be huge store specialized in selling leather to tourists. I had always found comical that they were selling leather to German and French tourists that came to the Golden Coast (La Costa Daurada, south of Barcelona, around Tarragona) to go to the beach and enjoy the mild weather and our sun. Why buying a fur coat in August? It's just too hot, dude!

Neverthless, my mother used to remind me that ours was a cheap country and these tourists, a part from the sun, were also buying our bon marche products, like those thick leather coats and jackets.

This was a well-known place, even frequented by locals (in Winter, of course), right by one of the jewels of the ancient Roman province of Tarraconensis, the Bara Arch, a triumph arch built around the I century A.D. on the Via Augusta, or at least this is what I learnt at school.

Time passed by and, aparently, tourists' tastes changed. Maybe they now prefer to buy at Lidl or Decathlon, but the point is that I entered this place a year ago and it was just a shadow of what it used to be. And as an expected decease by innanition, this placed shut down after a history of more than 40 years. Not as long as that of its venerable neighbour, but a respectable one for a tourist-oriented business.

Was it a result of the world crisis? Bollocks! It was just an outdated store with clothes that didn't interested anybody. The amazing thing is that the witness has been taken swiftly by a new breed of merchants, and a new business open recently: a wok restaurant.

These restaurants are, how to explain, a summary of what Spaniards think Asian food is, at very reasonable prices. They are a mixture of Chinese, Japanese and other undefined Asian cuisines, served galore , as in all-you-can-eat buffets. And, guys, Spanish love eating when food is cheap, no matter what.

I've got to say that food was not bad. Nevertheless, what stroke me was its name, Oki. Chinese restaurants usually have more poetic names, like Happy Whatever or
The Great Wall III. However, those representative of the latest Egyptian plague of Japo-Chino restaurants, i.e., fake Japanese restaurants managed by happy Chinese citizens, usually have Japan-related names, like Sakura or Yuki, written as it appeares in their dictionary: in latin characters and hiragana.

This one was written just like this, Oki; no hiragana. Ookii, in Japanese, means big (大きい), a meaning that really describes the restaurant, both in size and amount of food processed. Was that the idea and they just made one of those mistake Chinese make when writting? Or why repeating two letters if nobody here would care of?

In any case, I will definitely pay another visit to this place, even though it is only to see again the girl at the cashier, who convinced me with her 大きい personality and smile.

Oyaji Dancers Strike Back!

2011-08-30T00:55:00.000-07:00

I know...I have nothing to say and I'm just copying a video I've found somewhere else, but my brain is not amazingly performing during Summer time. Maybe next time!
Meanwhile, let's enjoy the unbearable lightness of being living in a silly country on the brink of bankruptcy while moving swiftly towards the end. Cheers!

I'm becoming a "ojiji" by the day, but I feel I still treasure more manliness than these oyaji, hahaha!!

From Spain to Spainstan

2011-06-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

The Spanish Revolution

2011-05-20T02:50:00.000-07:00

One of the causes of what has come to be known as "The Spanish Revolution" are things like the corruption of politicians, in all levels and parties. Just have a look at the next list:

RELACIÓN DE POLITICOS IMPUTADOS POR CORRUPCIÓN QUE SE PRESENTAN EN MAYO

1- Francisco Camps (PP), Valencia, IMPUTADO Caso Gürtel
2- Ricardo Costa (PP), Valencia, IMPUTADO Caso Gürtel.
3- Xicu Tarres (PSOE), Baleares IMPUTADO Caso Eivissa.
4- Francisco Cuenca (PSOE), Granada, IMPUTADO Caso Morelábor
5- Carlos Penit (IU), Pinto - Madrid IMPUTADO Cohecho.
6- Ferrán Falcó (CIU), Barcelona, IMPUTADO caso Adigsa.
7- Jesús Machín (C. Canaria), Canarias, IMPUTADO Operación “Unión”.
8- Marc Moreno (ERC), Vilaller - Lleida, IMPUTADO corrupción urbanística.
9- Antonio Rodrigo Torrijos (IU), IMPUTADO Caso Mercasevilla.
10- Raimundo González (BNG), Pontevedra, IMPUTADO caso Naturgalia
11- Jose Manuel Traba (PP), Fisterra Galicia, IMPUTADO Operacion Orquesta
12- Jose Manuel Santos (PP) Mazaricos Galicia,IMPUTADO Operacion Orquesta
13- Jose Antonio Cacabelos (PSOE), O Grove - Galicia, IMPUTADO diversos delitos.
14- Juan Jose Diaz Valiño (PSOE) -IMPUTADO caso Castro de Rei
15- Rafael Gómez (Unión Cordobesa), Córdoba, IMPUTADO caso Malaya
16- Esteve Ferrán (UTpS), Salou Tarragona, IMPUTADO delitos varios
17- Antoni Banyeres (NSP), Salou Tarragona IMPUTADO delitos varios. (enlace recomendable )
18- Ignacio García de Vinuesa (PP) (Alcobendas)
19- Jose Ignacio Fernández Rubio (PP) (Las Rozas)
20- Miguel Rodríguez Bonilla (PP), Guadarrama Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
21- Miriam Rabaneda (PP) Pinto Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
22- Luis Partida (PP) Villanueva de la Cañada Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
23- Clara Torres (PP) Torres de la Alameda Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
24- Raúl López (PP) Coslada Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
25- Íñigo Henríquez de Luna (PP) Madrid
26- Trinidad Rollán (PSOE), Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
27- Carmen Toledano (PSOE), Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
28- Cristina González (PSOE), Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
29- Jose Joaquin Ripoll (PP), Alicante Valencia, IMPUTADO caso Brugal.
30- Carlos Fabra (PP), Castellón Valencia, IMPUTADO caso Fabra
31- Mariano Arévalo (PSOE) Carabaña Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
32- José Miguel Govantes (PSOE) Pinto Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
33- Carmen Toledano (PSOE) Galapagar Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
34- María Isabel Peces-Barba (PSOE) Colmenarejo Madrid, IMPUTADO delitos varios
35- José I Fernández (PP), Las Rozas Madrid, IMPUTADO delito contra la ordenación del territorio
36- Miguel Rodríguez (PP), Guadarrama Madrid, IMPTADO prevaricación
37- Ignacio García de Vinuesa (PP) , Alcobendas Madrid, IMPUTADO malversación, prevaricación y negociaciones prohibidas
38- Clara Torre (PP), Torres de la Alameda Madrid, IMPUTADA malversación
39- Miriam Rabaneda (PP,) Pinto Madrid, IMPUTADA prevaricación
40- Raúl López Coslada (PP), Madrid, IMPUTADO prevaricación
41- Luis Partidad (PP), Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, IMPUTADO tráfico de influencias
42- Ana María Pinos Belmonte de Tajo (PP) IMPUTADO delito contra la ordenación del territorio
43- Ángel García Guadalix de la Sierra Madrid (PP), IMPUTADO negociaciones prohibidas
44- Íñigo Henríquez de Luna (PP), Madrid, IMPUTADO tráfico de influencias
46- Mariano Arévalo González Carabaña Madrid PSOE condenado por no presentar las cuentas municipales en los ultimos 10 años, etc.
47- José Miguel Govantes (PSOE)Alcorcón Madrid, IMPUTADO condenado por acoso laboral
48- Natalia de Andrés (PSOE) Alcorcón Madrid, IMPUTADA y condenada por un delito de injurias contra el portavoz popular
49- Isabel Peces-Barba (PSOE) Martínez Madrid, IMPUTADO prevaricación
50- María del Carmen Toledano Rico (PSOE) Madrid, IMPUTADO prevaricación
51- Cristina González (PSOE) Getafe Madrid, IMPUTADO prevaricación
52- José María Fraile Parla (PSOE) Madrid PSOE prevaricación
53- Manuel González Rojo (PSOE) San Fernando de Henares Madrid , IMPUTADO prevaricación
54- Hans Antón Bock Galapagar (PSOE) Madrid IMPUTADO prevaricación
55- Jesús Dionisio (PP) Madrid, IMPUTADO prevaricación y tráfico de influencias
57- Pedro Ángel Hernández (PP), Torrevieja, IMPUTADO caso torrevieja
56- Jorge Bellver (PP) Valencia IMPUTADO casos urbanismo
56- Antonio Rodríguez (PP) Orihuela Alicante IMPUTADO caso Brugal
57- Domingo Salado (PP) Alcalde de Espartinas Sevilla IMPUTADO delitos urbanísticos, cohecho o malversación de fondos.

¡Ánimo coleccionemos a nuestros amigos los corruptos! ¡Hazte con todos!

Bonus:

RELACIÓN DE POLITICOS IMPUTADOS POR CORRUPCIÓN EXCLUIDOS POR SU PARTIDO
Jesús Javier García García (UPyD) Seseña Toledo, IMPUTADO por cohecho EXCLUIDO por su partido.

Kasparov versus the World

2011-05-18T02:23:00.000-07:00

"Crowd wisdom is best suited for problems that involve optimization, but ill suited for problems that require creativity or innovation". In Kasparov versus the World, Kasparov won more than 50.000 participants. However, if not any Kasparov in the room, a crowd would suffice to solve problems.

ノルウェイの森 or Rinko's Bush

2011-04-29T03:56:00.000-07:00

Two Fridays ago, a loud voice from an arm-waving guy attracted my attention some minutes before leaving for lunch. He was on the sidewalk in front of my office talking on the phone. I realized in a fraction of a sec. who the guy was. He was Sergi Lopez, the actor.

I don't like his acting or movies that much, but I like the way he is, expansive, loud, and pretty rough and straightforward. Besides, we share similar anatomic roundness around the belly, making our look close to adult gorillas.

He had the privilege of being among Rinko Kikuchi's legs in Map of the Sound of Tokyo, which makes him kind of a demi-god for me!

Today another movie showing Rinko is premiered in Spain, Norwegian Wood, the adaption of Murakami's book by Anh Hung Tran. Yesterday night I saw an advance on TV and the Vietnamese director has brought a lot color and sensuality to an otherwise pretty bleak and dim story. The movie seems visually very beautiful, which has increased my desire of watching it, despite I found the book nothing more than a shortly written diary of a youngster with too many mental wanking. Let's see the movie and Rinko's woods.

They all do it too!

2011-04-28T03:07:00.000-07:00

Sex is a vital part of human's life and when it can't be practiced with somebody else, a good and easy way is doing it with one self. As Capote once said, “The good thing about masturbation is that you don't have to dress up for it”. Well, in fact, you have to dress down for it a bit, basically around the hot spots.

It is granted that all men masturbate, as much as possible, any time, any where, since the day they become sexually active, which usually begins at 11 or 12 y.o. Yeah, that's true! Besides, it is quite usual to talk about it among men, specially among friends. Some teenagers, even do it in company of friends while watching some porn. But, what about girls? They do too, I'm not so naive; but they deny it most of times.

While in Japan, I was astonished about the degree of such denial. No girl I asked virtually admitted to do it EVER in her life. But they seemed to be sexually very active, even if they used to claim not to have such drive in their lives. That was a contradiction, from my point of view. I learned with experience, however, that they had a slightlier different approach to sex wrt Western girls; a more indirect one. They used to care more about pleasing thant being pleased, in general. This way, they said, they couldn't reach an orgasm when doing it alone since it was 持っていない, that is, it had no use.

But what it seems is not what it really is, as most things in Japan. Despite it is true that some women can have long sexless periods in their lives (even couples, popularly called sexless couples), they do find relieve by themselves more often and more viciously than expected. Why then denying the obvious? Well, I guess this is another silly social constraint of the country. In fact, the younger, the more interested in being pleased than in pleasing.

In fact, most of girls in college (or even earlier) have a pretty crazy and casual sexual live, even more than western girls. Though this belongs to the 裏 (ura-backside) part of the Japanese life, sex has far less prejudices there than in apparently more open-minded Spain, also wrt Spanish girls, which still have an ingrained Catholic moral whispering behind their ears.

International Papanates

2011-03-25T15:40:00.000-07:00

One central concept to understand Catalonia is that of papanates. Catalonia, Barcelona specially, is the land of papanates. A papanates is a person who make his/her living of saying obvieties or common places. In politics it is full of them. The city mayor of Barcelona is a clear example. I was listening his speech the other day and after 5min talking, he just used vague and bogus words to define what he is going to do if he wins next election. He talks about believing, confidence, and other pseudo-religious shitty concepts recovenverted into the new dogmatic faith of his party. Papanatism. Barcelona mayors are known to be papanatas: Hereu, Clos, Maragall...until the best of all, Pich i Pon, who was so pro in the art of spoonerism that in Catalan there is a category of them called piquiponades, like when he mentioned the Nippo-Japanese war or the Anglo-English relations.
But unfortunately papanates are not only into politics. Most of them are in business. There is a universal believe that making money save one from all his sins, but this one is to big to be redeemed from. Some of the former presidents of FC Barcelona have been egregious business men, and also illustrious papanates. Nuñez, Gaspart, Reyna, Laporta...even the present one, the pijito Sandro, whose only difference is that he can utter a whole sentence without ashaming his language teacher.
However, there is a new breed of papanates invading the country recently. As a fruit of the recesion we are in, a new cult has appeared in our land, that of entrepreneurism. Even the word they are using is probably wrong (emprenedor) and a papanatada in itself. Now, it seems that the only and true credo that will save us from the recession is that we all become entrepreneurs of technological companies in a night. This is like opting for using bicycles for mass transportation: since we can't build a proper transportation system, get a third-world vehicle and risk your life in crazy-driving Barcelona. Now, since economy is totally dead, the brightest mind of the country, thouse who have an MBA or have been a posh diletant in California while at University, the sons and grand-sons of the elite, have come to think that we all must be Steve Jobs. "We have talent, and we are born leaders", they think, "and also the money", what could stop them from being successful entrepreneurs?
Catalonia exports papanates in fancy and trendy cardbroard boxed for all the world to buy; FC Barcelona, Custo, Desigual, Pans&Co. Nothing original, just better packaged.

Piotr, the Mushroom Grower

2011-03-16T15:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry to insist, but the farm owner is just like Jertzs Balowski

Zame aczent, zame zcspirit!

Mushroom Shining

2011-03-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know where I am. I'm in a business trip to Poland. We must make the vision system for a robot that will automatically pick mushrooms, so we came to a farm in Poland to study how the people who we are going to take their jobs from do that. So far so good, though I don't know where I am. I feel like being in the middle of the woods and that wolves will appear at any minute from the frozen lake in front of the hotel to eat us all.

My mobile phone says I'm in Koczala, that I've heard it sounds like Kochawa, but the hotel is in Dymi, a spa-tourist resort called Aquarius by a frozen lake. Google map say this is here. Not to be mistaken with Dymi 2, the complex of soviet concrete buildings at the entrance of the village painted in sound colors that just remember me the danchi I was living in for 3 years in Japan.

The farm is in a special place, a 450Ha piece of land that once was an old military airport with a 2.5 Km landing airstrip and camouflaged hangars for soviet air fighters, that can be also seen in Google maps. We are staying at a hotel only for us (5 people) which is closed for being out of season. This morning, as a joke, I said to the Greek guy who also participates in the project that this places looked very much like resort in The Shining. He answered "watch the child in the big wheel!". The funny coincidence is that tonight I've seen that child in a big wheel...on TV. I'm watching The Shining in German in a crappy TV set with only channels in Polish and German.

We're gonna stay until Friday. Hope my door will resist the ax!

GANBARO NIPPON!!!!!!!!!

2011-03-14T02:29:00.000-07:00

Boooooooooring!!!!!!!!

2011-03-02T14:57:00.000-08:00

Spanish TV is soooooo damn boring that I've thought about that episode of the Young Ones

With a performance of Madness (Welcome to the House of Fun)
Isn't Jerzy Balowsky nice?

Monica del Raval

2011-02-20T14:43:00.000-08:00

The craziest and most surreal movie (documentary) I have seen in years, about an old and iconic whore from El Raval, the formerly named Chinese Quarter in Barcelona, despite no Chinese was living there at that time.

A More Real Barcelona

2011-01-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

AKB48

2011-01-26T06:04:00.000-08:00

Unbelievably, this song has become a great seller, more than one million copies sold,

A bit more hip-hop than this ultra-sweet teenage soft porn video,

No wonder why some of these girls ends up making adult movies

Lost in Translation

2011-01-18T08:49:00.000-08:00

Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.^[1] It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start.". (from Wikipedia)

This is how I feel sometimes...

A Homo Shopping Christmas Carrol

2011-01-10T06:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I saw an interesting documentary about the planned obsolescence. The idea can be summarized by saying than most of things which surrounds us basically break because they have been engineered to break at a precise moment, as it is explained in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2KLyYKJGk0. They showed some examples of this, such as an Epson printer that stopped working after a certain number of printings, the nylon stockings, which had to be made weaker so they broke earlier and more stocking could be sold.

Buying-throwing, buying-throwing, that was the cycle we were supposed to follow, like cows munching grass in a stable. Is that our purpose as a species? as a being? as a citizen? I find it very sad that we are not up to more important and interesting things. Christmas had just finished and as a mental diet starting after the winter binge, with a great deal of hypocrite remorse, TV showed us a maybe more clever way of thinking. Too late for some. We are all too fat, too silly, too helpless to start thinking cleverly and critically, it is not cool.

From Homo sapiens to Homo shopping; from living in the savanna to dwelling in malls. A monkey could do that.

A Fishy Curse

2011-01-07T01:50:00.000-08:00

Shocking Times, Shocking Truths

2010-12-29T03:44:00.000-08:00

As I'm reading this book, the future is becoming more and more uncertain and scary to me. The same awakening I had during the invation of Iraq, while I was reading Orwell's 1984, I'm having it now with this book, which is blowing my mind away. One might argue that there is nothing really new in some of the facts exposed by Naomi Klein in this book, which are most of them already known to any informed reader. However, what is really interesting in this book is the point of view she takes to understand what has been happening around us for latest 30 years. We are being scared, by means of the shock therapy in her terms, and by being frightened, we accept, willingly or by force, to get rid of our rights, our wealth, and ultimately our freedom.

There is a very disturbing concept, planned misery, which captured my attention: our loss of wealth is ultimately a result of a strategy. And, at the same time, I am reading in the papers lots of articles about cutting lots of citizens' rights, rights which time ago had only been won by long and fierce struggleling, and now simply are being vanished as smoke. And it is not just in these countries often refered to as PIIGS, who are sinking amidst a devastating debt storm, it is also in other richer parts of the world, like Japan. The bottom line is that we are all being fooled on the sake of being saved from whatever nonsensical perils said to be hovering us. I know it sounds kind of paranoid, but it doesn't mean there is not any truth in it. Watch out!

Camel Balls, Liquid Filled!

2010-12-07T13:15:00.001-08:00

These are the chewing gums I've seen in my bakery. Funny, aren't they?

Kim Jong Il's and Montilla's or the Art of Eternal Idiocy

2010-11-29T06:40:00.000-08:00

Finally, the nullity is gone! The "Pazideng", aka Tontilla, aka Lost in Translations, aka Dumb&Dumber, aka Dude, where is my brain?, aka Vente pa' Cataluña, Pepe!, lost the elections yesterday, obtaining the worst results for the PSC-PSOE ever!

Yesterday, while I was watching a report by Jon Sistiaga on Cuatro about North Korea, one of this countries whose president has a weird hairdo and is always wearing green sport wear, like Cuba, Iran or Venezuela, I could see that misterious guy appearing as a "special representative" of the Foreign Ministry, being kind of agent assisting groups of foreign visitors in North Korea, and keeping two eyes on them so nobody could cross the dangerous line of touching the reality of this country with his/her own senses.

Who is that guy? His name is Alejandro Cao de Benós de Les i Pérez and the funny thing is that he is from Tarragona, my born city. How a guy from Tarragona ends up being an agent serving the DPRK? Who knows! But he wouldn't be the first Catalan serving a crazy tyrant who enslave his fellow citizens. Let's remind the audience that the murder of Leon Trotsky, Ramon Mercader, was also Catalan from Barcelona, whose family was originated in my father's tiny village also in Tarragona.

And where did George Orwell get the inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four? From the Spanish Civil War (Homage to Catalonia)? Maybe, but despite he would be most probably appalled to see an actual Asian version of his 1984 is staged everyday in North Korea, I think he wouldn't be too surprised to see a Catalan guy, like Alejandro Cao, having something to do with such Big Brother-like regime to the foreigners. Please, visit Alejandro's blog, though you won't be able to make any comment.

Unlike North Korea, in Catalonia we can get rid off most of idiots in the government, by something as old as elections. Good-bye, Montilla!

A Dream for Catalonia

2010-11-21T06:48:00.000-08:00

We're, finally, (immaterial) World Heritage.

The nazi-Pope finally speaks Catalan at the Sagrada Familia

And, hopefully, the "Pazigeng" Tontilla will lose the elections next week

What else can a Catalan expect from the Providence?
Barça winning 5-0 to R. Madrid forever?
The Independence from Spain?
Nope.
I have a dream that my little children will one day live in a nation where they will arrive on time by train and they will be able to get to the airport by train more than two squalid times per hour

Well, maybe the Independence is a more realistic dream than a RENFE on time, unless it is burnt to the ground, I mean, re-foundated.

RENFE, Fent Llenya!
RENFE, Fem-ne Llenya!
RENFE, Fotem-li Llenya!

Tourism and Stereotypes

2010-10-24T10:45:00.001-07:00

Stereotypes are simplifications, reductions that mind generates in order to understand the complexity of the world. Unlike many alleged intellectuals think, stereotypes are not a bad thing, existing only in the minds of less able or uninformed people. A word, for example, in itself holds a single stereotype which defines at the same time, though it helps humans to understand each other by sharing and combining them into sentences, and roughly describing ideas. "Car" is a stereotype of all possible and existing cars, and when I say "I saw a red car", most of people identify what I mean. It helps me to generalize and refer to any possible car without specifying which one I am talking about.

However, sometimes, stereotypes are wrong identifications of categories in reality. They don't correspond to anything existing in the world, or they are misleading and wrongly specified, being a bad tool to understand any given situation. The balance between the error provided by a certain generalization and its correctness should be a good measure of the utility for a given stereotype. "All French people stink" is probably a wrong stereotype, while "all pigs do stink" is certainly a helpful one.

Traveling is a good way to break a priori stereotypes about places and people or, at least, it used to be. Nowadays, due to tourism, I guess the omelette has flipped around and most people just travel to confirmed a priori real or invented stereotypes. They travel to Kyoto to see geishas in the same way they travelled to Spain to meet bullfighters, and they basically don't care or don't know whether there is almost no geisha left or that bullfighting has been banned in some areas of Spain.

Each language and nationality has their own "lonely planet" kind of books, and it seems that all of them have read the same, over and over, repeating ad nauseam the same common places, stereotypes, misunderstandings and, sometimes, lies. After a couple of decades trying to teach German, French and English lumpen tourists that most of Spanish were not whole-day flamenco-dancing paella-eating sangria-drinking bullfighters -at least, not in Catalonia, the area surrounding Barcelona-, now it seems that the tale has started all over again with other kinds of tourists, like asian ones.

However, after so many years of uninformed visitors asking to attend to a "tablao flamenco", and to eat tapas and paella, we have finally made up places where they can find such things, as they had imagined, such in Les Rambles; not as they really are. I am not saying that there was no flamenco in Barcelona before the tourists came. Yeah, there was, in gypsy camps on the beach, an awful place called Somorrostro. Tapas? Yeah, though never heard of them before the Spanish immigration in the 60's and always associated with Andalusian-style bars on the periphery of Barcelona. And paella? Well, strictly, a paella is a frying pan, and also the way Valencian people call a type of rice-based dish. We call it "arros a la paella" to distinguish it from other kinds of dishes such "arros a la cassola", for example. When talking in general, we just say "arros" (rice).

So what do tourists get when they visit Barcelona? Fake flamenco, with Argentinian dancers (true!), bad and pricy tapas (they should taste those in Madrid, Andalusia and/or the Basque Country!), and awfully yellow and oily paellas. Have these things anything to do with Barcelona? Nope, just about the character of Catalan people, who would try to cheat even Christ telling him they are jews to book him a room.

However, we have a new breed of connoisseurs, these tourists who think they know something about us because they have been informed by Argentinean bartenders. Those guys know (or think at least they know) about Catalan things such as "pa amb tomaquet" or "all-i-oli", but they can't see the difference between dry bread soaked in grated tomato or garlic-fied plain mayonnaise and the true dishes, which in Barcelona are almost impossible to find. But we shouldn't blame them! We should blame us, who allow to sell in souvenir shops Mexican hats and let ignorant bartenders to give advise about our local cuisine.

So, for the sake of truth, I suggest to anyone really interested in knowing anything about Barcelona, just burn immediately all tourist guides and books about the city, and when coming here, avoid anywhere with a density of non-locals higher than 5%, if you really can tell the difference. Nevertheless, if what you want to find is just a bunch of wrong stereotypes like in an attraction park, then Barcelona is your place. Welcome onboard!

The Best Shop in the World?

2010-10-16T02:40:00.000-07:00

Though Barcelona is my mother's city, it keeps being a bitch, a dirty bitch. In some areas, it is becoming a gutter, specially in the older part of the city. I totally agree with that sign. The problem is that the owners of the city use her as their private business, exploiting her as they like, and tourisms seems it is the oldest and simplest way. Poor thing, Barcelona!

Dokyo or a Tofu Ensaimada

2010-10-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

Look what I've just seen on Spanish TV, a dorayaki made out of chocolate

The problem with the original, the Japanese one, is its filling, azuki (小豆), a red bean paste, allegedly sweet.

The funny thing is its name, Dokyo, that sounds like Tokyo. But what is glorious is its slogan: "mola asako". It means "it kicks ass", where "mola" digs in the stereotype that asian people pronounce "R" as "L" (it is the opposite!!), and "asako" stands for "a saco", i.e., a cool way to say "a lot", with a more Japanese writting.

Anyway, the ad is as ridiculous as if a Japanese counterpart, let's say, a tofu ensaimada, would be anounced with something like this

My Teeny-Weeny City

2010-10-09T03:17:00.000-07:00

My teeny-weeny city, by the sea, being bombed by an Italian squadron during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Marcello, Marcello...Come Here...Hurry Up!

2010-10-09T02:57:00.000-07:00

Botticelli's Birth of Venus in a shell

Fellini's Dolce Vitta's Venus in a fountain

I've found always them pretty similar. A Baptism.

Foreigners Working in BCN

2010-10-06T01:01:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to have helped somehow to my beloved Ch. to find a job in Barcelona, specially in such difficult times. For a foreigner it is not that difficult to find a job here provided that he/she is European and his/her level of Spanish is enough so as to deal with a normal day's life. Since I came back, I've astonishingly discovered how many foreigners are in fact living in Barcelona.

Without trying to be derogatory, I'm not referring to those commonly identified as immigrants, which were already numerous before I left 5 years ago, but a sort of different kind of new dwellers of the city which would be better named as working tourists. If you speak any European language, plus Spanish, then it will be easy for you to find a job in some of the various contact or call centers which are outsourcing this service to important European companies and banks. I had never imagined so many Polish and Hungarian girls living in Barcelona.

For Asian people, apart from Chinese, which are another case, it is far complicated. For instance, Japan, which is the case, on the one hand, their companies land here with the whole staff in a parcel. On the other hand, very few local companies actually have contact with them in Japan and, therefore, they don't require the service of native Japanese to intercede for them from here. This awkward situation would improve if Japanese companies were more flexible with their staff and there were also more Catalan companies exporting or trading with Japan, which is difficult due to the customary Japanese rigidity.

In brief, one only needs to get a working permit to stay and work in Spain, which is only valid to stay in any other Schengen countries but not to work in there, and some hints of Spanish. I guess the three only legal ways to get that permit are by getting a contract before coming, a student visa (which might allow you only to work in part-time jobs) or by marrying a UE citizen. The rest, just tenacity and good luck.

American Dad!

2010-10-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

That show is simply great! If something similar would be ever tried in Spain, I foretold no more than a couple of episodes on the air: one can't make fun of fundamental idiotic symbols of the State in Spain, as the king for example, as it is done here with the CIA.
That's my favorite character. His verbiage (swish) is just as peculiarly funny as it is his obsession with role-playing and wigs. Being an amoral drunker, in a kind of Bender-like way, also helps in becoming my favorite one.
And there she is, Haley, the slut of the family. Not that her mom wasn't a total bitch too when she was young, but Haley is it in a totally new different way: bossy, crazy, stoned and a political wannabe, like most of twentiagers. However, the most contemptible of the show, even more than she and Roger, is her dad Stan, a massively-jawed retarded republican bigot. Funny, isn't it?

What's New, Pussycat?

2010-10-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

That's my pussy cat, Miu-ko chan, sleeping, as usual.

ちょっとポンポコリンくなってると思うんだよね

And that's a funny song from a crazy movie!

Once Upon a Time, a Barbie Girl

2010-10-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

I spent Saturday afternoon at my friends' place signing with PSP's SignStar Karaoke. Was kind of funny. Giving I didn't go to karaoke since August last year in Japan, I've got to say that I missed signing for a while. Unhopefully, I discovered the songs which I could remember some part of were anchored back in the 80's at most. By the way, I laughed a lot signing that song,

Lyrics are hilarious: "...you can brush my hair, undress me everywhere..." or "...I can act like a start, I can bend on my knees...". So true in a plastic world!!!!
--Oh, I've having so much fun!!!
--Well, Barbie, we'll just getting started!!!

Ecce Homo, Eixe Home

2010-08-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

I fell against the pool border when trying to get out. Thanks to my aracnid sense, I was fast enough to avoid kissing the pool wall at a too high and deadly speed. I trade my blood for my teeth. That was the minor price I've got to pay in my first vacation day.

Festes de Gracia 2010

2010-08-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

Goog God, Good Bye

2010-08-17T01:31:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a book a friend recommended me long time ago. For him, it seems like it was kind of a revelation, though I had read some of the previous books by the same writer during a period of my life, a decade ago, where I used to be extremely interested in science books.

The guy is Richard Dawkins and the book, The God Delusion, which I bought at Stansted Airport at 4 for 3. I haven't finished all of 420 pages of that log yet, but I'm right in the middle. I had previously read The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. These are books about how evolution works, which is the only plausible explanation so far grounded on facts that explains what he calls the climbing of mount improbable, that is, the diversity and adaptability of the existing species.

The God Delusion is a book against religion, hilarious in some chapters, which aim is deconstructing point after point a great deal of arguments for the existence of personal god(s), as he says, or any kind of super-natural being used to explain the existence and functioning of reality. It is very directed towards fighting views such as creationism and intelligent design as an answer, I guess, to their belligerence with respect to science in the educational arena in the US.

The book is well written (as anyone would expect of a Cambridge scholar), full of facts and scientifically well based. For me, it is a bit reiterative and extensive, and I think he could have explained the same in a more succinct way without losing any important argument. Sometimes he drifts too much from the central point of chapters and he tends to sprinkle the text too much with his own interpretation of other's words and personal anecdotes, which are of difficult rebuttal, but I guess this is the price to pay in science best-sellers.

I, personally, am also an atheist, of the hardest dyed-wool type, as he calls himself. I think I was born without the lobule in the brain that make people "gullible" to religions. As far as I remember, I have never believed in anything, not even Santa Claus. Why? When I was a child, I felt it was a waste of time to pray to a cross with a wooden guy hanging on the wall. Never understood the causal relation between praying and reality.

Later, for a while, I was amused by the Biblical stories the priest in my church (where I was baptized) explained using slides. They were really formidable, kind of unbelievable, like the one of Abraham said to kill his own son and told not to do so on the last moment. "What would it happen if the guy had been deaf?", I asked to myself, would he had been guilty of son-cide or would it have been god himself guilty of homicide? What a dilemma. And then, my big question: why those extraordinary things were never on the news nowadays? Why only happened in a desert 3.000 years ago? Was god now taking a rest?

Stories in the Bible were just like those in comics for me, really unreal. Never took them seriously, specially because of the darkness and weird smell surrounding churches, a mixture of wax, smoke, closeness, and smell of old people, which by itself it is enough to prevent anyone to enter. Then, one summer, I discovered Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, and my vision of the whole world changed for ever. I have always wanted to know how things worked, but that was different: there was a way that made possible to know how the world worked, and there was no need of god, just pure thinking, mathematics, and measures. Clear, clean, open, bright. That's science.

That was all I needed. I've never been a genius, on the contrary, a pretty normal type of guy, but if only I have a quality is that of being extremely skeptic. My grandmother used to say "better believing something rather that checking it". For me, even if I see it, I might not believe it is true.

Summer Time...

2010-08-03T01:12:00.000-07:00

Summer time is here. Augustus' month. Leisure and dolce far niente. Not for me, though; at least, not yet. Late months have been exhausting. Up and down, finishing deadlines and reports. I have earned the daily bread with my very sweat, I swear. Not an easy single cent. R&D is not a business for nitwits, specially when the UE commission and a bunch of square-headed Germans are involved. And yet, so much to do, so much to try and so much to improve. Those deaf-language signs don't translate by them selves!

If childhood is said to be the golden age for most people, I think summer is the best period among these heavenly days. It was, at least, for me. It was time of beach, sea, sand, jumping, playing outdoors, bikes, football, friends, dogs, bugs, storms, girls, naps, crackers, ice creams, coca-cola, dirt, excruciating heat, sweating, thirst, mountain, dust, walking, singing, firebones, stars, crickets, vivac, and most of all, freedom. First time I noticed I was actually growing older was when I discovered I unavoidably had to work in summer. Childhood was over, and sweet summer vacations too.

Now, I'm already accustomed to, and since I was living in Japan, having just a week long summer vacation seems fair to me. Nevertheless, last year I had a long month of vacation, and this year, adding up all my unused vacation days, I have accummulated almost five weeks, which I will distribute from now to the end of the year. I can't leave the project I'm involved in ungarded, my manager could discover I'm not that important!

What am I gonna do? Nothing: sleeping, reading, going to the beach and the pool, strolling, and maybe some short escape to the Pyrenees. I'm tired of traveling, airports, flights, connections, trains, subways, crowds. I'm starting to think that tourism is a great hoax with no interest at all. What's the point of going to Paris if you can't even order a café au lait? Culture, people say. Yeah, maybe. But I'm really surprised to verify that the only few days people is interested in culture coincide with the same period they leave their own places. Strange, isn't it?

Some also use the argument of learning different ways of living. Really? In France? Sorry, I don't think so. It might be true in the Crusade ages, but nowadays, there are not much differences within the whole Europe, apart from local languages, and some regional specialities in McDonalds.

Besides, most apparent differences come from basic unawareness. That's why some naively travel to exhotic lands to discover new frontiers. Another rip-off, but in their own delusion, they still think they have reached some revealing and unknown teaching. Bogus. They can't even tell the difference between a tourist trap and a life-losing trap. See what happened to these Catalan guys in Mexico while trying to cross an unbridled river in a precarious canoe.

This kind of travelers are the most laughable to me, and think of themselves as new editions of Pedro de Alvarado or Aguirre while buying their gear at Decathlon. In this open-to-the-world city Barcelona is there are plenty of them. Always ready to "discover the Americas". What it is funny is that in America there are some other super cool guys that envisage coming to Europe to discover our strange ways of living to re-edit the feats of Hemingway or their own grandpa in WWII.

What's the point of tourism, then? None, unless we stick to some genuine one, like having some rest and fun in our free time and, if lucky, finding whatever true treasure might still remain under the tones of vulgarity, triviality, easiness, common-places, and non-sense we are living in, which I fear is kind of difficult in places such as attraction park Barcelona. Good luck.

I saw Kenneth Branagh in Barcelona!

2010-05-28T14:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, maybe three, I saw Kenneth Branagh in front of Deutsche Bank in Barcelona. I was going down from work to catch my train and he and his wife were walking along the Diagonal on the lateral sidewalk. We passed by just in front of the DB. I was quite astonished by his presence. Looked directly upon his eyes and bowed my head slightly. I didn't want to bother him.

He was probably staying at a famous hotel not quite far from the point where we met. He's been one of my favourite actors since I first saw him and his former wife, Emma Thompson, in Too Much Ado about Nothing. I've always unfruitfully tried to wear as well trimmed a beard as he in this movie. The funny things about this movie is that there is a character with my very surname, which happens to sound gross in English, played by Ben Elton, writer of The Black Adder, and that the real Don Pedro (Denzel Washington) is in fact Peter The Great, King of Aragon, burried in Santes Creus, just by my father's village. Nice coincidences!

By the way, his hair is a little longer now than in the picture.

Porn Happens in Malta Sometimes

2010-05-26T01:25:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm getting older too fast, but traveling for me is becoming each time less exciting to me. I don't know what's the reason, but I guess the fact that anywhere in Europe is converging towards the same kind of thing is helping quite a big deal. One might expect that places so marooned such as Malta would still seem pretty different, but then, I discover that it is not, at least, due to the kind of landscape my eyes are used to observe.

Malta is a minuscule island in the very center of the Mediterranean, our sea, and has a pretty interesting history, which in many aspects quite defines the nature of Europe, but in a far smaller scale. It is a fortress on the sea which once was ruled by knights of seven nations who control the marine paths of trade and peoples crossing the sea, restricting the incursions of infidels into the heart of European Christendom.

What is it now, Malta? To me, it is just a rock, almost half of it totally urbanized in the most bizarre way. The word I'd would use to define Malta is small, too small. It can be completely seen in a couple of days; and then, the only thing that one can do is just sitting in a terrace and drinking its mild beer Cisk. I bet that my opinion of Malta would be better if I owned one of the yachts moored at the harbor, and had spent my days partying on board with half a dozen of Easter European beauties, as Berlusconi, but unhopefully that was not the case.

However, what started in the dullest way, that of treating the most unfriendly people on Earth, Maltese, turned little by little into more enjoyable days and nights, until the last one, when being all the work done, we started the afternoon by doing an improvised cruise around the creeks of Malta and continued the evening and night feasting the unexpected victory of the Maltese football league by La Valletta F.C. At that point things became more and more surreal.

From a square where supporters were celebrating the victory, we went to the football team's bar, where horrendous music of football anthems were played once and again while drunken supporters jumped like loonies. That was hotter than hell, and we kept drinking water-down beer to maintain our liquid balance stable. And when the party here was over, we followed a very peculiar character resembling Sandokan to a club in the docks, from where we left with time to sleep a couple of hours before catching our flight back, through Munich, to Barcelona.

That was the story of my trip to assist to a meeting and workshop in Malta dealing with automatic sign language recognition and translation, the project I'm currently involved in, that end up dancing in La Valletta docks with a pretty and clever English girl, a funny German from Oxford, a Cameroonian from Aachen, my boring co-worker, and a Belgian guy with a T-shirt saying that "Porn Happens". Yeah, it probably does!

Conference Trip to Malta

2010-05-25T01:55:00.000-07:00

Bones or Teeth!

2010-04-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

Personally, I think most of these crime series are on the verge of absolute nonsense. A doctor that solves crimes? a mathematician? Why not a violoncellist? or maybe a noodle cook working in a fast-food court? Anyway. One of the most nonsensical one is CSI: why all laboratories are in complete darkness? Are they expecting to find anything there? I heard once that they looked more like a disco rather than a lab, with all such glooing lights and big boobed girls.

Bones is a classic one, and the creepiest one to my taste. It is a classic one because all its characters are so archetypical that turns out to be as childish as A-Team or the Kight Rider. All espisodes follow the same structure, and the different set of couples are as shallow as the encephalogram of one the corpses laying on their lab. A FBI agent and a brainy antropologist doctor? a couple of geeks, a rat of lab and a kind of compter genious? So clichee! It is so foreseenable that it makes me laugh.

What it is worst, though, in that series, which makes me laugh even louder is the size of the teeth of most of the actors there! In most of the series, the people who appear are so fake: guys tend to be over-sized in gym, while girls' nose-jobs and boob-jobs are terribly apparent. But in this one, it seems like if all of them had had dental implants for free, but dentists run out of teeth of their own size and they had to use teeth which were too big. Completely hilarious!

Chernobil or Facebook

2010-04-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

There's nothing on TV, just idiots and a re-run of Bond's Moonraker. I've just watched again another IT Crowd episode, after a documentary on Chernobil disaster, which amazingly seems to have happened a day like today back in 1986, 24 years ago! Wooow, tempus fugit! I was 12 y.o. going on 13. That was my last year in elementary school -- or maybe was it the next one?

Many things happened on these years: my family moved from a tiny apartment to a bigger flat, where I got my own room. We bought, finally, a color TV set, and I won a computer with an essay I wrote about the Roman monuments in my city. It was my first PC, and it was kind of a pain in the arse. I couldn't play at all, since there were no games for such machines. And above all, I couldn't read the instructions, which were in English, nor understand the OS guide book. I was 13, I wanted to have fun playing, and all I had was a log talking about assembler's hexadecimal code. I felt frustrated. Now, things are completely different. Computers are for fun and everyone can use them.

Tonight I was watching IT Crowd's episode about Friendface, something similar to Facebook. It is defined as "basically a disease based on friendship". Roy is re-meeting an old girlfriend (the Joker) with whom he had already split up, and Moss is accompanying Jen to her reunion party where they unrealistically show off in front of her old school girlfriends. It is a bloody mess and turns out to be a total disaster.

I personally don't see much the use of Facebook, besides fucking around or wasting time sneaking around friend's friend's friend's photo albums. Apart from the fact that some people seem not to understand the basic principles of privacy, my main curiosity is to figure out what is the point of having 1500 friends, way beyond human capacity to remember names or faces. What kind of friendship is this? Does it generates any real activity?

I've made some tests and it seems that most people don't even enter into their accounts for months, or they lose their interest soon after the first exchanges of posts. If FB's fiendship is not backed with a previous real and close friendship, it soon disappears. So, what's the point of it on the first place?

Sant Jordi, Amor, Roses i Llibres

2010-04-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

Dóna'm la mà que anirem per la riba,
ben a la vora del mar bategant,
tindrem la mida de totes les coses
només en dir-nos que ens seguim amant.

Hold my hand and we will walk along the shore
very close to the sea which is beating,
we will have the measure of all things
just by telling us that we keep on loving to each other.

At least once in a year, something different from drugs and beer is sold in les Rambles de les Flors.

Elkano in Passeig de Gracia

2010-04-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

I said once that in this blog I would be talking about Barcelona. I admit that this hasn't happened as often as I promised, since I tend to talk about what happens to me and my circumstances. But today, for a change, I will talk about something about my mother's city.

I was waiting at the station surroundings, wasting some minutes until the moment came to go to the dungeons where this station is located, an infernal and ghastly place, where I try to stay the shortest time possible. Outside the evening was wonderful, inviting me to stay for longer, sitting at some terrace having a drink and, perphas, a talk with one of the many visitor that like swallows in Spring appear in the streets of Barcelona.

I looked up, while standing in front of the mouth of the station, and I saw an unexpected statue. Who was that guy? On its base it is written "Elkano". Elkano? Juan Sebastian Elcano? What is he doing up there? And a little to the right, over the threshold of the main entrance to the building, the answer. Two marble engraved stones, with the same text, in Catalan and in Basque.

Etxe honetan egon zen 1936-tik 1939-arteko gerrate bitartean euzkadiko ordezkaritza katalunian bi herrien arteko anaitasunezko eta adiskidetasunezko harremanak bultzatu eta giza-aldezko ekintza eskergarri bat burutu zuena.

Something like that during the Spanish Civil war, a delegation of the Basque Government was housed here, which closely and fraternally collaborated with the Catalan Government in humaniratian tasks. I imagine those humanitarian tasks had to do with the help to all the people who had to flee from the fascist army from the Basque Country to Republican zone caused by the breaking of the front war line into two pieces and the fall of San Sebastian and Bilbao very early in the war.

At the end of the war, though, the Catalan President was shot dead by the fascists and all our laws, government and language, banned. However, by selling their soul to the devil, they managed to keep theirs, along with their sovereignty and taxes. Even now, April 2010, the flimsy statute that should be ruling the Autonomy -- this humbug that was invented in the 70's to shut up our demands -- is stuck in the Constitutional Court just because it says that Catalan people exist and, maybe, we should be managing our own taxes.

And where is the fraternal and friendly help of the Basques now? Lost, as usual, and minding their own business. So, mutatis mutandis, I'm sorry to say that your people and you, Elkano, can go and get a little lost fishing some bacalao!

A Lousy Chiringuito Called Endesa

2010-04-20T13:21:00.000-07:00

There are monkies in the deepest and unknown areas of the Amazon rainforest which would be more precise in giving an estimation of my electric consumption than Endesa. I don't believe in hell out of this world, but there should be one for the delinquents who manage this unefficient and monopolistic chiringuito.

The Shame in Spain is Mainly on Telecinco Frames

2010-04-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

Television in Spain is deadly rotten, and the stinkiest channel of all is Telecinco, the sewage of these dregs. Take all it is dead, all it is dreadful, all it is vile and vulgar, low and denigrating, putrefied and narrow-minding, and put it in a garbage bag, let it decompose for some weeks under a tropical sun, and then, maybe, then, you will have a glimpse of the size of the stench such channel spreads over the Hertzian waves. If the whole channel would disappear all of a sudden, the IQ of Spain, as incurable as it may appear to any objective observer, would recover immediately from the present lobotomized brain-mangled retard level to the able-to-breath-without-explicit-assistance coma level.

What does this shit look like? Basically, it is Berlusconi's Italian Tele 5 alla espagnola, which means less bellinas and more Belenes. Belen Esteban is the personification of this channel, or at least of the kind of people who find it amusing, the standard garru-guarras, aka Yolis, Vanes and Veros, and their male counterparts, the garrulators, Yonatans, Frans and Cristians. This TV channel provides them with all they need to be nourished, apart from bread and narcotics, and I'm not sure about the latter.

All I can see in its programming is Big Brother, talkshows about Big Brother, other side programs about people (to use a euphemism commonly accepted) in Big Brother or the like, and more talkshows featuring Belen Esteban and her infra-world. And from time to time, a movie. For example today, they took advantage of the recent release of Tim Burton's Alice and, guess what, they put a 3rd-rate Alice; more cheating the audience with rubbish. I'm waiting for a movie about volcanos, Pompey, plane crashes, or all together, according to their flee-leaped logic.

The other source of TV crap is Cuatro (5, 4, is it like a countdown to A-bomb-like blast of brain nullifying?). While Tele Cinco deals with fishy junk celebrities, Cuatro has democratized the exposure of utter vulgarity and has invented (woow, Spain finally invents something!) a whole new breed of TV programs where total scum explains its pointless life on TV. The origin is the program Callejeros, street dwellers. In their minds, they think, it is a research documentary about the tough lives of common people; in practice, it is just rambling around degraded suburbia interviewing junkies, whores, and all sorts of lumpen. And there have been a lot of spin-off programs, like Callejeros Viajeros, and the like in other channels.

I was not at all any gourmand of TV. I swear I could gobble any kind of junk; but now, after the time spent in Japan, a country with a TV as pointless as Spain (though not as filthy nor rotten) and with the aggravating that I had no clue of what they were saying, I got used to living without TV, apart from some series and movies; in original version if possible. I know, it sounds snobbish and elitist, but my stomach can't digest McTV anymore as it used to do. Am I getting old? No, just an ulcer.

Fuck Telecinco! Fuck Berlusconi!
A Duomo, a Duomo, my Kingdom for a Duomo!

Work in Spain, a Flower in a Desert

2010-04-17T11:49:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been involved in the selection of a candidate to cover a position in the company where I work. It is been the first time for me I chose a person for a job, I must confess; but I also must admit it has been an interesting and tiring experience.

I started working in my present company almost one year ago. I underwent two interviews by Skype, since I was not in Barcelona at that time. Somehow, I managed to convience them about my adequacy without even being personally there. Maybe that was the trick! I remember they asked me to write down a whole report about how I would focus the project they were hiring me to work for.

It took me three days to complete it and a lot of coffees at チョコクロ. I even had to turn down a promising afternoon of crazy fun with the boring and gorgeous "so+adj." girl in order to finish the bloody report on time. At the end, I got the job, though exceptionally I had to be on trial for 6 months, which is the double of what it is normally required in the company.

Now, I was on the other side of the table, and in front of me, the three guys that were selected to have an interview with out of 25 possible candidates who were turned down straightforward for not even fulfilling the most basic requirements we were asking them to get the job. And it was I who had to carry the burden of interviewing them, since I am the only expert in Computer Vision in the company. So, there I was, peppering them with all sort of questions about their knowledge, background, and future prospectives.

First, a Colombian guy with an interesting CV, perfect for what we were looking for. PhD in Computer Vision, international experience in research, command in English, good aptitude and attitude. He is the one who got the position, by the way. It seems kind of an interesting and optimistic guy, runs Marathons and speaks a perfect Catalan with a sweet accent inherited from his particular Colombian Spanish.

The two other guys clearly show how bad the situation in the working market is nowadays in Spain. Both came from the UAB (Autonomous University of Barcelona). I had references of the first guy because he worked by the first Computer Vision spin-off company created within this University. They dealt with the automatic quality control for corks in the bottles of cava. I even use some of his code for analysing blobs in binarized images. That's why I was astonished when I saw his resume applying for the position. It turned out that the recession had bring the company to bankruptcy and he had not being paid for the last couple of months. Shameful.

The other guy was a part-time assistant professor of Computer Science at the same University. He was the least fit for the position. He lacked the basic background, poor reseach experience, almost no real-world struggle, no international exposure, poor English, and what was the worst, a completely misguided attitude towards solving problems. He would probably be a good elementary school teacher, but by no means a cutting-edge professional. The worst for me was the wrong scale he used at grasping the world's measure, the money. He asked a ridiculously low salary. The salary is the measure of your work and it is something that it has to be negotiated. If it is too high, you won't probably get the job, but if you put it so low, it means you don't value your own work. So, I won't buy it.

In conclusion, what is the working market situation in Spain? The traditional sectors, i.e., construction and turism, are nearly dead and, in the case of construction, on its way to the cementery. They must be obliterated from any further serious analysis of a future economic growth in Spain for some decades, if ever. What about technology and science? They would be a possible solutions for the current situation if there were, on the one side, a clear and fair interest on them from the Spanish political and financial world, which has never existed nor will, and a pool of good professionals, on the other side, which pathetically doesn't exist.

As a result, only small private companies, national or foreigner, are able to appear in those areas offering work to highly skilled professionals, national or foreigner. Science will keep being monopolized by the burocratic and intranscendent declining public research institutes and universities, and technology, by huge conglomerates which only provide with monopolized facilities and services at high costs, but with no real innovation. So, I guess I will keep being a traveling engineer for long time, playing my music to those who can pay me, here and there.

London, Under the Volcano

2010-04-17T03:17:00.000-07:00

These are just a few of the lot of pictures I took last weekend in London. Every time I go there, it seems I bring the sun with me since the skies are always fulgently blue. Nevertheless, like a spell cast by an envious old witch, just after I left the Isles, this monumental eruption in Iceland, recently renamed as Dustland, appeared and all flights from UK were cancelled. I was lucky, again: last time I travelled to London, the mother of all snow storms stroke the northen part of Catalonia, bringing it back to the stone ages; no electricity for a week.

Portobello Rd. in Notting Hill, with lots of antiques shops and street markets. Lovely and charming, as they like to say in London. Somewhere down this street, I ate some Jolof food, from Gambia. I cried, so hot it was! First time I eat some African food from beneath the Sahara.

I know it is a very silly picture, just like these Japanese tourists routinely take in front of the signs and the billboards showing the name of the places they are visiting. What can I do? Too long living in Japan!

Oxford! Finally, I could see with my own eyes what it was all about. I shared for 6 months the room at work while I was in Sweden with two former Oxford students, a mathematician Irish girl and an electrical engineer, just like Rowan Atkinson. Most of the English I know I got it from them. Today, however, I was just a mere tourist taking pictures in an extraordiary stage and marveling at these phenomenal buildings, the wrapping of Oxford.

I found signs like this in the frontispiece of a number of doors around the central yard of this Oxfordian College utterly intriguing. "Beware, you will learn about Natural Philosophy on the other side!", like a warning before a tunnel advertising you of what you are going to find on the other end side of the hole. "Don't blame us if you learnt anything. We warned you!"

This magnificient ceiling is just in front of the Christ Church College's dinning hall, the one that appears in Harry Potter's movies, though the real one is not as big, but more grounded on the reality and far less sillily magical. What is magical to me is this achitecture. They could manage to build an almost flat ceiling with very few archs using tangencial circles instead. Notice there is no diagonal arch sustaining the squared parts of the roof flanked by groups of four columns. Magic!

This old chap in a bonnet hat was one of the friendly guardians of Christ Church College in Oxford. People were so excited about being in this cloister, also appearing in Harry Potter's first two movies, that he had to tell them repeatedly not to go onto the lawn. I could enter by paying just half of the ticket fare after convincing the funny head of guardians at the entrance I was a student.

This ceiling is just glorious! It spans like a fan from a virtual column which literally hangs on the sky. Amazing!

The symmetry is so perfect here, excluding the clouds, that it seems there is only one side facing a mirror. Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, used to teach logic around here and, as I read, used to look through the glasses of the windows in the library building that stands behind where I took the picture, maybe looking for a smiling pussy cat from Cheshire.

Trafalgar Sq. from the National Gallery's staircase. First on the foreground, Lord Nelson's commemorative column. On the far background, Big Ben and the Parliament. I tried to emulate Turner's stormy skies I had just observed in the museum.

The National Gallery from outside, since I could not take any interesting picture inside. I was warned twice by a Japanese-looking guardian, so I desisted. Later I could see how an Italian girl with a better technique was taking a smuggled picture of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the museum. These cunning Italian girls!

Lord Nelson, the admiral who defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar. He lost one eye and one hand, as it is very amusingly pictured in Blackadder when saying something like "this is the worst idea since Lord Nelson bet his hand on the virtue of Lady Hamilton", who is well-known to have been his famous mistress, or showing him awaking from drunkenness and desperately shouting "I'm blind, I'm blind!", not noticing his eye patch was covering the wrong eye.

London Eye from St. Jame's Park at dusk. The sun was bathing the buildings of the Ministries, but the ducks on the lake were just unaware of it.

And Big Ben, again and again, from near the War Rooms, where Churchill directed the WWII.

パパヤ鈴木〜〜〜大好き！！！

2010-04-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when I get up in the morning I really look like パパヤ鈴木, a guy I really don't dislike. He is so funny! I used to watch him on TV while in Japan, in a program where the goal was to go to some remote restaurant and order the biggest meal they had, and eat it to the last drop.

Belive it or not, he is a dancer, who, I imagine, unhopefully underwent through the same metamorphosis as John Travolta. However, he still dances and sings with his old chaps, the オヤジ. That's a funny song!

Today it was the case. Even after a shower, my hair is so crazy and curly, I got a hairdo!
Papaya's power has come to me!
So, I'll try to dance before going to sleep
今なん時？

Sugar, the Sweetest Thing on Earth

2010-04-08T02:31:00.000-07:00

My sweet Aya has sent me this song...

She's the sweetest thing on Earth, isn't she?

I Threw My Sad Nets to Your Oceanic Eyes...

2010-04-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

...and almost got drown!

Images of a Great City, The City

2010-04-04T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Sun Sets and the London Eye Wheels

2010-04-02T01:06:00.000-07:00

The Flying Cathedral or the Wobbly Bridge

2010-04-01T06:44:00.000-07:00

I took this picture in the Millennium Bridge, facing St. Paul's cathedral and having the Tate Modern at my back. Doesn't it look like St. Paul were just flying on the river Thames?

I'm more than sure I'm not the first one to take such picture, but I wonder if the architect was concious about the impression he was creating when thinking of a ramp which would go down in between the ramp itself, or it was just a lack of space left by the massive Tate Mordern's monolithic brick building and the need for a gentle slope to get on the bridge without a staircase which prevented him from building a ramp in a more orthodox way.

Seriously, I have my doubts, since this guy managed to design a pretty ugly and scary bridge after all, known among Londoners by the nickname of the Wobbly Bridge, a bridge that wobbles more than the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Who is the architect, then? Norman Foster. He also designed the Collserola's Tower in Barcelona, a huge curved triangular prism hanging from a pole like a mainsail. In the first design, he forgot a way to keep the sail stable, leaving the whole structure free to rotate along the pole. In my first year at university in 1991, I assisted to a lecture given by the group of engineers who had fixed that problem with cables attaching the sail onto the firm ground.

Who on earth needs a castle flying in the sky? Just a swift Laputa, maybe.

The Beauty of Knowledge, The Knowledge of Beauty

2010-03-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

It is free and one can even touch the heads of people like Perikles, Homer, or Alexander the Great

What else can one ask? Maybe a segway...it is so vast!

You Falles or You Work?

2010-03-22T02:00:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I was in Valencia for Falles! Last year, despite of living there, I wasn't able to see them since I used the holidays to fly to Japan. But this year, there was no excuse and I accepted the kind invitation of my friends in Valencia, specially that of AAAndres, whose house I've been at for three days. Today I'm completely and physically devastated. We did a hat trick, three days party in a row.

First night was an apotheosis. Leaving Barcelona after work at 19:00h and arriving in Valencia at 22:00h. 350Km in 3h by car. Meeting my friend AAAndres, who by the way was completely dead after arriving from a 10 day's stay in a Caribbean tourist resort with a goddess. We started the night with some Cuba-litros and a huge firework.

Then, we headed for a street party with orchestra, one among many in almost every crossing in Valencia. There we met the rest of people, who had just finished doing botellon near the river. By then, we were all already toasted, both sides. Next step, a club, where the pretty girls were. I must confess that girls in Valencia are particularly beautiful and nice.

We ended up at 7 in the morning and we had a sausage-based breakfast at a very handy street stand. Every time I go out until dawn in Valencia, we end up eating some old-style sausage bocata, whereas in Barcelona, it's a less traditional durum at some crappy and overpriced Turkish place. Valencia is still authentic.

Anyway, we took a taxi and went back home. 8:30h in the bed in coma until 15:00h. Then, waking up again, having a shower, lunch and back to work. Now, visiting the Falles. Convent, Russafa, el Carme, etc. We didn't go to Nou Campanar, the one winning the first prize to the Best Falla for the last years. Last year it costed 900.000 euros, but this year, the crisis has reduced the budget up to just 600.000 euros, and they couldn't win.

The luminary in the streets reminds me that in Kobe, around Christmas time, where the tako-yaki and yaki-soba stands had changed into stalls selling churros and bunyols. It was totally packed and at some point, impossible to walk, getting stuck frequently like a traffic jam of people around the main falles. That was the night of la cremà, when all 650 falles in Valencia burn to the ground; only the winner is spared. We saw 3 falles, and one of them, from very close; so close I could feel the fire burning my face.

I love bonfires and firecrackers, but as a stingy Catalan, I can't see the point in spending so much effort and money building such pieces of art for just setting them on fire eventually. We have bonfires at St. John's night, which can be as big and last longer than these fires in Valencia, but they are just a huge pile of wood and useless old things, bound to be burnt; a catharsis, a getting-rid-of-old-things for a new from-the-scratch rebirth. We ended the night eating chocolate and bunyols at the most famous place in Valencia, watching how the fire was consuming a falla in front of us.

Saturday was "de tranqui". We were all dead in the morning and slept until past midday. After having lunch and watching a movie at home, we went to stroll along the streets of Valencia and visited la cheperudeta, the Virgin Mary next to the Cathedral, which is a huge statue covered with flowers, an offering from all the crying falleras in the previous days. It is an impressive view, a pyramidal tower of flowers topped with the torso of a hunchbacked woman carrying a massive headed baby Jesus. It seems like flying above our heads among clouds of roses. Truly creepy!

After some beers and an unscheduled visit to the dizzying top of the Serrans' Towers, the impressive pair of towers facing the Turia's old river banks, similar to those in the Poblet Monastery, which are, together with those of Quart, the last remains of the medieval walls that used to enclose the city, we joined Pasku's friends for a diner at a pizzeria, and later, again, party. But for a shorter time: AAAndres was still feeling sick and I skipped the girl hunting routine, which seemed promising, and we both headed back home, where we spent the rest of the night talking and watching some crazy documentaries in his enormous TV set.

Sunday, despite the air was pretty warm and was bringing the fragrance of the Spring that has just started, was a gray and rainy day. It was time for saying bye-bye to Valencia and heading north, back home. These were some very good days!

Iago, Giacomo, Jacme, Jaume, James

2010-03-05T15:26:00.000-08:00

How am I then a villain...

...I'll pour this pestilence
Into his ear
That She repeals him for
Her body's lust
And by how much She strives
To do him good
She shall undo her credit
With the Moor.
So will I turn her virtue
Into pitch.
And out of her own goodness
Make the net
That shall
Enmesh them all.

I have it. It is engendered.
Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth
To the world's light.

Nights and Days in Liege

2010-03-04T16:59:00.000-08:00

Being Trendy as Being Empty

2010-03-03T02:22:00.000-08:00

I'm not very interested in fashion, but I'm not blind and, believe it or not, my visual memory is pretty sharp. Recently, I'm quite astonished at a new kind of fashionable type appearing in the streets of Barcelona. The guy in the little shaky picture below is a clear example.

How can I explain it? First of all, I'd say that this is the least creative fashion style in the history of the world, besides the fact that it seems there is a factory cloning such kind of guys somewhere in suburban Barcelona. What this trend consists of? A guy, of a patently unclear sexuality, pretty skinny and less manly than a parcel of pink teddy bears, dressed in thin dark denim pants, wearing 50's canvas sport sneakers, though not having practiced any sport ever, not even ballet.

The rest of the costume includes a black jacket, like that in the picture, but most of the times, a shiny dark down jacket, kind of trendy this winter, and a well trimmed full scale beard, which is kind of an oxymoron, like a pacifist wearing a war helmet. Haircut is very particular, and is halfway between a pompadour and a psychobilly: the top is usually longer and has a great toupee, while sides are cut pretty shot, almost like a soldier, from which they lack everything else. Nevertheless, the most distinctive decorative element of such guys is their glasses, retro black frame Ray Ban eyeglasses. Why??? These are glasses for guys like Woody Allen or Peter Sellers, not for the bearded queer sister of Snow White fairy.

Separately, the style takes elements from late 50's and early 60's, and others from beatniks, and I also feel a bit the taste of decadent NYC during the 70's, at least from the movies I've seen featuring the city during that period. However, the ensemble is kitsch and ridiculous, anachronistic and tacky, and what's worst, utterly decontextualized: it is all totally and completely wrong!

What is more ridiculous to me is the uniformity of such "new" and "fashionable" trends, that classify people in clichés, stereotypes, and groups with the same look. They all look like equally, wear the same clothes, speak and move in the same way. The difference between these trends and the old ones is that now, there is no substance (whatever it might be) behind a look. Now, it is just a look, a pose, an appearance! Nothing else. It is completely arbitrary and next season will change and forgotten, like a dry leave falling in autumn. The emptiness of the image, just a reflection on a shapeless and colorless surface. That's the sad part of the story, the emptiness of it all, of this stupidity!

The Reader or The Writer?

2010-02-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, when I went to the airport, I entered to the bookstore to buy something to read. I already had a book in my pocket, but I thought Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil was too a heavy read for a flight, so I bought another one. The Reader captured my attention. I remembered a former friend mentioned the movie to me some time ago, so I thought it would be soft read for a day's trip.

I've just finished this afternoon, while having a sandwich and two coffees at an indoor terrace facing a huge window in a mall in the center of the town. The sun was illuminating the place and I felt it would be a nice place to have a rest after a morning rambling around the old city. The book is pretty easy to read, with big letter case and 3 pages top chapters. I must say I read a very bad translation, with some typos and elementary school's grammar errors, like a wrong tendency in using preposition "en" instead of "a" in Catalan, not pretty advisable unless one is from Valencia. What can I get for just 7 euros?

I've enjoyed the story. It starts being an intimate small fable of an unbalanced love, but it develops into a wider range story with more serious implications. What first was something puerile, it turns out to be in the middle of the gravest and worst crimes in recent European history; and the trigger of it all? Just the most futile one. This small thing puts everything upside down and changes in a very disgraced way the lives of the two main characters, Berg and Hanna.

I've made myself some of the questions Berg asks to himself, shared some of the fears and felt some of the pains he describes. Probably, most people has, at some scale. I've used the same words he uses to describe his grief, "abandoned, cheated and used". I've felt also narcotized and unable to feel anything at the sight of the author of such pain. He makes the mistake of falling in love with a woman with an issue that put her apart from him, while he can't see farther from his nose. She is too proud and self-centered to admit her flaw and crime and accepts a bigger one, though false, like privately expiating for her sins.

He reads to her, and keeps reading to her more as a kind of revenge and to relieve his pain than for a true love towards her, which doesn't exist anymore. And she also takes revenge on him, or at least it seems so for what she does at the end. I started writing this blog for similar reasons, though now the goal has entirely changed. It is also sarcastic to me that he even mentions the Odyssey as his favorite book and at one point he talks about Nausikaa, asking to himself who his Nausikaa is, Sophie or Hanna.

Anyway, I'd like to say some more intelligent and funnier things, but tonight I can't since I drunk too much wine for dinner and my brain is shut down for maintenance. Read the book or watch the movie.

Belgian Sakura

2010-02-26T06:46:00.000-08:00

I've just gotten an email that has brought this song to my head

It happened again. The girl who intoxicates rats with cocaine brought Orwell's 1984 to lunch, and she will be having a cinéma soirée at her apartment showing a Passolini's movie (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom). She is definitely angry at the world.

Oh, my sweet Sakura, where are you now?

Lunch Talk or Conversations avec des Frites

2010-02-26T00:59:00.000-08:00

Today is the last day in the lab, though I predict that either I'll be traveling here again in some months time, or they will go to Barcelona to keep on working closely together. With this "they" I'm referring to Wei and Thomas, the two guys whom I'm working with in Liège. Both of them have kindly welcome me, specially Thomas, who has friendly introduced me to his friends and sister, with whom we have had lunch most of the days.

Wei is a more reserved Chinese guy, from Manchu area. He's been here for five years and, currently, is living with his wife, also Chinese, who is pursuing her PhD in the same department. Yesterday afternoon we had a pretty long conversation about Asia, in general, and China, in particular. We talked about Japanese occupation of Manchu region and the way Japanese are still perceived there or in Korea. He has a pretty interesting theory about why Europe is not as united as China but just a bunch of similar independent nations, fighting each other most of times.

We need a powerful Emperor, in the Chinese way, that merciless and ruthless remove differences. According to him, China became a single nation due to the tyrannic rule of her emperors, who did not hesitate sacrificing enormous portions of the population on behalf of the construction of the country. He, though, agreed with me that in Europe, where the individual is more important than the group, this is pretty impossible. I told him that I had had such an impression in Japan, and he mentioned the Taoism and its influence also in Japan, since she had taken most of her culture from China.

Thomas, on the other hand, a tall blond blue-eyed handsome Belgian guy, still a bit ingenuous and shy due to his countrysideness, but terribly good-natured and friendly. He explained me how successful he was with girls in Spain. He was astonished when girls came straight to him in the club. "Of course! You are the blue prince stereotype guy for them!". Never happened to him in Belgium. Girls, always prefer the "foreigner" to the local, and I know what I'm talking about.

His sister is also a real beauty. A biologist, finishing her PhD in deep sea crustaceans, she was trying to explain me why these animals are that interesting so as to have had a radio interview from Australia about her work. Her skin is so pale, it turned red anytime she couldn't find the right word in English and asked help from his brother. Her friend was also an interesting type.

A heavy smoker, angry with the world girl, she tests the effects of cocaine and amphetamines on rats. I asked her if she had open access to such substances. "Yes", she had, though they have a protocol. As much "pure white and sticky cocaine" as she wanted, she kiddingly told me, "better than that in Las Ramblas". She should go and extend her tests there, plenty of drugs and rats!!

Boulets a la Liègeoise avec des Pommes Nature

2010-02-25T02:00:00.000-08:00

I'm writing from Liège, in Belgium. I've been here since last Sunday and I'll be here until next Sunday. I came to work in the European project I'm involved in. Going to Liège is like going to the center of Europe. Bruxelles is an hour away by train, Maastricht is just some kilometers across the border and Aachen too. Aachen was once the capital of Charlemagne's Empire, which was so vast that reached Barcelona, that was reconquered from the Moors by his army. I can't just imagine how this empire huge could be governed by a blond Germanic barbarian from here during the Middle Ages.

But what astonishes me the most those days is how similar we are. To me, these European regions, despite the big distance across them, are amazingly similar. I don't wanna say that there is some kind of historical and social continuities that tie them up, it is just that nowadays Europe is converging into the same kind of society in a fast pace wherever one may go.

I'm laying on the bed at the hotel, watching TV. Same series. Same programs. Same comedies. Even the news opening music at BBC and F2 are almost the same. I walk in the street. Same chains. Same supermarkets. Same shops. Same cars. I enter in a shop, a supermarket. Same brands. Same cookies. Same drinks. I talk with guys at the lab. I make a joke and they laugh. Same background. All of them have been in Barcelona. Have gotten drunk in the same places. Have smoked shit and gone crazy at the same squares, streets, and visited the same monuments and museums. Gone to the same beaches.

Can't I tell the difference between them or other people in the streets, either be it in Barcelona, or in Liège? Is that true? Is it just my perception? Do I just filter people out in a way that the only set remaining contains people who just look the same? Maybe. However, I also think that there is a huge tendency into a European convergence that makes us more and more similar. The EU is making us more Europeans, in fact.

Only language makes us different, unless we can understand each other in some common way. I can make myself understood in French, which puzzle them about my origin until they see my credit card. Food is also a little different, but not that much. Frites, frites, frites, and boulets a la liègeoise. But no surprise about that. And what about social manners? Well, guys here kiss each other's cheeks when they meet. I was really surprised at first, but now it seems normal.

On the one hand, traveling abroad is becoming as easy as going from one city to another inside our own country, provided you understand the language. This is positive for many reasons, basically because it makes us more aware of each others and spreads our physical and mental boundaries. However, on the other hand, this makes traveling abroad a trivial thing, just as uninteresting as visiting an old aunt in a lost village in winter.

Traveling is pretty much like eating sushi: I really love it, but I don't share the puerile exotic feeling newbies experiment anymore. It is just another usual thing for me, like eating a piece of bread. The good thing is that I'm not a tourist anymore either, which I'd hate.

Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll

2010-02-18T05:41:00.000-08:00

That's a powerful starting sentence: "Choose life...I chose not to choose life".

I know time doesn't pass by in vain, and that some of the things pictured in this movie (and book) are now just recreational holidays for spoiled and bored middle class children, like the gorgeous disco bitch, Diane, in the movie.

I never chose drugs. Drugs are just for idiots, and I've seen enough of them to say this categorically. The correlation is far to high for not taking it into account, unless one is to high for not even noticing it. Anyway, the movie, worldwide known (I'm not discovering America here), worth watching one more time. I chose not to choose...drugs.

PS: I really think ad "creative" should be a little more creative and stop sniffing coke while co-opting music and movies to sell their shit. Look at this ad of a governmental program to create business; doesn't it sound familiar? Lame. "Have an idea?"...NO, YOU DON'T!!

Graf Lleida, En Pau Descanseu

2010-02-11T03:57:00.000-08:00

This is not fiction. The video corresponds to the situation that the firefighet squad Graf Barcelona lived during the big fire in Horta de Sant Joan (Tarragona), July 21st 2009. 100m from them, Graf Lleida perished completely. Now, this case is on trial.

These are the last words of Graf Lleida:

15.57 horas: "Ahora vemos subir el fuego... Sube con muy mala leche"
16.04 horas: "Necesitamos una descarga, estamos mucha gente aquí"
16.06 horas: "¿Me copias... que me copias?".
16.09 horas: "Quemados, tíos quemados... Por favor. que venga alguien... Por favor, hostia. Subid".
16.12 horas: "Que nos suba a buscar alguien, por favor, estamos a punto de cascarla. Hostia. Graf Lleida, un acorralamiento".
16.13 horas: "¿Viene alguien a buscarnos, o no?".
16.15 horas: "Estoy solo y quemado. Hijos de puta, venidme a buscar".

A partir de las 16.20 horas llegan los primeros efectivos de Barcelona a la zona donde estaban sus compañeros de Lleida. Algunos bomberos aún respiraban y un par estaban muertos. Más tarde se hallaría a los otros dos –en uno de los casos se tardó una hora y tres cuartos en localizar el cuerpo–. Huyeron corriendo de la zona segura en un intento desesperado por huir de las llamas.

(Excerpt from "La Vanguardia")

Catching a Liar Is Easier Than Catching a Lame Person

2010-02-09T15:41:00.000-08:00

I've been lied many times, mostly, by women. I don't have any mercy for liars though, at some point, it is funny to see how they try to make you believe their own delusions. It is pretty easy to detect such lies, provided I can see their faces, specially, their eyes. I wouldn't call myself a lie detector, not beyond the only expertise I've gained after years of listening those silly lies, but it's been a need for me to become one: the function causes, by selection, a character to appear, as known in Biology.

How to catch a liar? People make some uncontrolled micro-movements, specially saccades with their eyes. In that moment, the lie is being cooked. Others touch their hair, wink, purse their lips or look somewhere else. Voice differences are also palpable, like small changes in volume, intonation or speed. Some girls are specially good at lying, since they believe what they say. Then, they tend to focus only on their story, which in the best occasions have a good logic behind, and cut any attempt to make things more clear. In such cases, some external facts must be collected to proof any of the statements wrong, and make the whole logical structure collapse.

Pia fraus, for me, are the worst, since the liar supposes some kind of mental weakness in the person who receives the message, which will make him/her unable to resist the consequences of exposing the naked truth and, therefore, justifies the lie somehow. Pious lies are said to be chosen for not hurting other's feelings, ironically and falsely turning a compulsive liar into a benevolent savior. However, when the lie becomes evident, the destroying effects are devastating. This is the common lie employed when being dumped, of which I'm a real expert!

The two more recurrent pious lies I have had to face are "I really do care about my boyfriend" and "I like you, but just as a friend". Who the hell is still so dork to keep saying such bullshit? A bad liar treats the victim of his/her lies as stupid, whereas the good liar doesn't, and adapts the lie to the listener, in the same way a good communicator adapts his speech to the audience. In communication, truths and lies don't exist by themselves beyond the perception listeners have of them.

Two of the best I've ever been said were these. One girl after being somehow disappointed at the expectations she had upon me (perhaps being tall, blond and blue-eyed), told me that she wanted to become a flight attendant and, therefore, at that moment of her life, she wouldn't have time for seeing me. The lie was obvious from the fact she could never reach the standards of any air company and that she even offered herself to pay for the dinner, an evident consequence of her feeling of guilt. So, I had a free meal that night.

Another one told me she was a lesbian and not interested in men, in general. "Why then you accept meeting me?" I thought. I told her I didn't care and I groped her the whole night long while she kept on saying "you know, I don't mind, since I don't feel anything". What a silly girl, falling caught in her own lie! The hilarious part was observing her trying to keep the composure and pretending a sophisticated woman while I was holding her big tits under the shirt. And yes, she felt something, I could notice she had lied!

When the Shark Bites with His Teeth, Dear

2010-02-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear,
And he shows 'hem pearly white
Just a jack-knife has Macheath, dear
And he keeps it out of sight.

When the shark bites with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves, though, wears macheath,
So there's not a trace of red

On the sidewalk, Sunday morning,
Lies a body oozin' life
Someone's sneakin' 'round the corner
Is that someone, Mack the Knife?

From a tugboat, by the river
A cement bag's, droppin' down
Yeah, the cement's just for the weight, dear
Bet you Mack, he's back in town

Looky here Louie Miller, disappeared dear
After drawing, out his cash
And Macheath spends, like a sailor
Did our boy do, somethin' rash?

Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver
Lotte Lenya, Sweet Lucy Brown
Oh, the line forms on the right, dears
Now that Macky's back in town

There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight

Have, Little One, a Dream of Us

2010-02-07T16:11:00.000-08:00

Life; great word. I've visited my friends' baby at the hospital. I went two weeks ago too. He's been born on the 28th week and his weight was below one kilo, and yet, he is a complet person, a little big piece of throbbing life. Five fingers in each hand. Two eyes, two ears; the correct amount of limbs in his minute body. And yet, he needs help to breath; too small lungs.

He was born two weeks ago, but early, too early. So far, so good, though. No big problem. His brain works, his heart is a precission clock, ticking at an amazing rate, 170 beats per minute. His liver, fine. And yet, he forgets to breath from time to time, like if he was still tired of having been born so unanticipatedly and was skipping his too-early responsability to do it by his own. Don't forget breathing, my little baby!

Alive, he is hopefully alive. It seems trivial, since it is a natural proces: a baby is born, and it lives. But at that stage, where he should still be in his mother's womb, it appears to my eyes like a miracle. He is still covered with prenatal hair, but already makes some noises and move his hands by his own while sleeping on his mother's breast, like dreaming. What a baby is dreaming of?

We say to children going to sleep, "have a good night and dream of the angels", but this little angel, what is he dreaming of? He's never seen the sea nor the sky; the rain nor the sun; not yet. But by sticking to life, he's a big dream coming true, day after day. No need to be dreaming, since we are all dreaming of him.

Good Doesn't Beget Good, but Evil Always Brings More Evil

2010-02-04T01:23:00.000-08:00

Life is a weird place. It's a plain and crazy contradiction, and we, little ants here, keep trying to make sens out of it. Maybe I feel too philosophical when I sleep too few; it happens due to some unbalanced levels of some neurotransmitter, I heard. But the fact is that it doesn't need too much to look around to figure it out, unless one is another lobotomized of the herd.

I've just read "La Contra", and there is this interview to a journalist who survived to the Israeli attack to Gaza in December 2008. As he says, 1000 hours of horror, 65h recorded, 2h shown. 380 people were killed in the very first 7min of the attack. He's made a documentary, To Shoot an Elephant, to show to the world the horrors of this military action on civil population. It is so real (what a meaningless word!), it has been qualified as gore: He shows how two children die in a hospital. The movie can be seen in YouTube.

His conclusions: "war is ugly and avoidable, and those who make it, are bad people. That simple". Unfortunately, I think he is wrong. War is part of Human nature, part of Nature itself, and thus, difficult to avoid. War is part of a mechanical cause to produce some gains. That's why is unavoidable. As long as it is easier for a government to obtain its desires by means of war, war will exist. And there is nothing easier than war, specially when the opponent is disarmed.

By chance, so far, I've never been involved in a war, so I speak from ignorance. But I've met people who has. My grandfather did the whole Spanish Civil War on the first line, and was injured in the Battle of the Ebro. His brother, too. His father, too, 4 years in Cuba. It seems that people get used to live surrounded by death as people get use to smoke and noise in big cities. He explained how people blew out by grenades or mines, fell down by machine guns (sewn, he said), or were just shoot in the head or executed at dawn. Atrocities were their every day bread.

In Japan, I met an ex-Marine who had been in the first war of Iraq; he told me people can't imagine what it is to be in a battle: people paralyze and crap their shit out of them, literally. My grandfather told me the same thing, and how they had to kick the younger ones to move somewhere safer most of times. The journalist also say he shit his pants several times. War is shit and blood.

Were them good or bad? They were just normal people. For me, there is no good or bad, standing alone like two single objects that can be labeled with a word. They are mixed and they depend on the context. Both are part of the same nature, and we all share it. Are these Israel soldiers bad? I don't know.

Recently, I happened to meet a very friendly Jewish old woman in London, Ela. She lives in the suburbs, near Cannon's Park, in a neighborhood with the highest level of Jewish population in the city. Her ex-sister-in-law is living with her at home. She is a 27 year-old girl from Israel, who just moved back to London because she wants to go to college. And, as all young Israeli, she did 3 years of compulsory military service, and we all know what it means.

Is she somehow guilty? Naively, one could think so, but I don't. If she had skipped the military service, she would lose everything, freedom, citizenship and rights. In Spain, I skipped mine; but my father did his military service, 18 months in Africa. For me, it was easy; for him, impossible without losing too much: deserters faced either martial court and prision, or exhile. Life seems to be a cost minimizing-benefit maximazing problem, sometimes.

Once I heard in a documentary a Russian prisoner saying that there would never be a stop for evil in the world, since "good not necessarily begets good, but evil always gives birth to more evil". Good/evil, love/hate, peace/war, truth/lie; doublethinking accepts them as the same. I think they are disctinct degrees of the same, which is something completely different. And people should accept reality more often. Now it rains.

Puris or Pooris?

2010-02-03T15:34:00.000-08:00

This is the menu we found in a Punjabi restaurant near our hotel, close to Euston Station. I've got to say I couldn't understand most of it, so I asked the waiter for some suggestions. The guy told us to order Shankar Thali, on the upperside of the rightmost column. Since the place was called Ravi Shankar, like the sitar player, I guess thali means something like "meal" or "set".

The picture below corresponds to the Shankar Thali, with dal soup papadam (??), bhajias (??), ralta (??), and the most intriguing thing, puris or pooris, according to a varying orthography all around the menu. The dish by the chapatti is the one called Behl Pooris. There I discovered what puffed rice was: rice krispies. First time I eat krispies in a dinner starter.

Other specialities were khadi (??), paneer muttor (??), achaar (??), gulab jamun (??), shrikhand (??), paratha keer (??), malai kofta (??), sambhar (??), dahi vada (??), and more pooris and chutney. I really missed some pictures in the menu, to know at least what I was about to order. And not only us were totally lost, the couple by our table was also looking at the menu for 10min before having a little chat with the oldest waiter about what would be advisable to eat.

The food, after all, was delicious and so spicy and hot I felt like having a piece of flaming hell in my mouth, but I like it hot! However, what were the pooris? It turned out to be a crispy fried round piece of indian bread, on the dish near the lower rightmost corner of the picture. I must confess I completely ignore Punjabi cuisine since the only Punjabi I've ever met was called Anthony, had been born in Oxford, and the only thing he used to eat while in Japan, where I met him, was Sato's Gohan (サトウのご飯) with mayonnaise, fried chicken and chips, clearly a more English food.

Blitz Trip to London

2010-02-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

What a lovely city, isn't it, Darling?

Train Readings, Running Coincidences

2010-01-28T00:48:00.000-08:00

Recently, I'm reading quite a lot in the train on my way to work. Coincidentally, the last three books I've read are somehow related with Japan. I have only bought one, by the way, which means the rest of them came to me as a present and, therefore, I couldn't chose.

The first one was a present from my friend JM. He visited me in Japan and has always been interested in the country. Hopefully, he's not an otaku nor one of these newbies that can't say the difference between a fake Japanese restaurant and a real one. His other passion is economy and the book, "The Bubble Economy", is about the Japanese bubble and its burst on the 90's. This book is like reading into the future of Spanish economy. I'll finish it within this week.

When I came back from Japan in October 2008, I felt kind of alone in Valencia, missing Japan somehow, so I bought Murakami's "Norwegian Wood", in English. It turned out that I got to know very nice people there and in short I literally had no time to read at all. Besides, the book was not that interesting: a long mental jerk-off of a 20-ager explaining how he masturbates and fucks airhead girls and falls in love with one who is totally nuts. I know that story. Besides, his prose is dull and he seems just to be interested in the description of girls' clothes and weather, while praising himself and showing off the usual phony European pose among Japanese college students pretending to be different from the herd. At the end, everybody suicide, which is very Japanese. I finished the book before Christmas. The best chapter, the last one.
The last book, Mishima's "Thirst for Love " (Ai no Kawaki), has a personal side story. I'm teaching Spanish to my beloved Ch. but she wanted to read a book by herself. I looked for some bilingual books at "La Casa del Llibre" (the Zara of books) but didn't find any interesting one (only Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide??? WTF!!). So, she went to FNAC in Pl. Catalunya and found that one, in Spanish. She bought it because it happened in Osaka. It is funny to read in Spanish about places I know pretty well in Japan, like when someone talks about your relatives without knowing it. The book was far to difficult for her, so she gave it to me saying "you gotta read it and tell me the story". "Sir, yes, Sir!", and I read the book.

It was a punch in my stomach. It happens in Osaka right after the WWII. Etsuko, a young widow, is living with her in-laws in a country house on the outskirts of the city, in Maidemmura, near Okamachi station. She hides her cruelty and sadism behind a mask of calm and elegance. Her husband had been cheating on her as a rule, so she found an extreme pleasure watching him dying from typhoid fever. In Maidemmura, she secretly falls in love with Saburo, a young servant while becoming a kind of mistress of Yakiichi, her father-in-law. Her sadism lies in the pleasure she obtains from her jealousy, since Saburo doesn't give a fig about her, and the repulsion of being possessed by old Yakiichi. This keeps her alive, she says. At the end, her jealousy becomes madness when she discovers a young maid got pregnant from Saburo, and abruptly kills him in the most virulent and bloody way. "Nobody has the right to hurt me!", she claims.

I've got to say that, despite the fact I'm not very comfortable at the historical figure of Yukio Mishima and the translation into Spanish is a little dated, to me, Mishima is a superior writer than Murakami. His characters are more complex and his prose, far more powerful. However, there is an excess of trivial bucolic comparisons and the whole book, which in case of being originally an English or Spanish novel would have been a tragedy in 500 pages with all sort of nasty details, is too succinct, being both signs of either Japanese literature style or a bad translation.

The irony was that of unintentionally getting from Ch. such a book, where the main character's name and origin are exactly the same as these of the despicable girl. I don't believe in coincidences, but unfortunately this was a big one. Both women are equally detestable and selfish, and by unconsciously giving me that book, Ch. clearly stated that in front of my face. Thanks!

Never Been in England or Why My English is so Poor

2010-01-27T01:26:00.000-08:00

This weekend I'm going to London!!!!!!!

This is the first time I'll actually be in England. I visited Scotland for a couple of weeks back in 1999. My friend J.M. was living for a year in Cambridge to learn English and since he said his place was obnoxiously boring, we went up there on February (!!??) for a crazy car trip circumnavigating Scotland. I drove 3,500 Km along glens and lochs, sheep and cattle, top gear in one-lane roads, under the snow, ice, rain, fog and a strong wind, often, everything at the same time. It was unforgettable.

While I was in Japan, people was always surprised I had never been in England. By speaking some amount of lousy English people assumed I certainly had stayed there, while in fact, I've never studied English abroad, never could. I learned English in a language school with native teachers; and what a bunch of weirdos!!!

The first one, Steve from Coventry, was totally nuts. He had studied Spanish literature and history at college and apparently spoke Spanish pretty well, though I never heard him uttering anything else but, incomprehensible at that time for me, English. He was like the chubby and pop-eyed brother of Rick Astley, and was obsessed with Franco and the impersonation of Basil Fawlty and his famous Nazi's goose-step ("Don't mention the war!").

Robert, an incredible shy and stuttering bald Irish man who had been living in my city for more that 10 years not speaking neither Spanish or Catalan. Roy, another Irish guy who smoked pot and from whom I could never understand a single word. And Mark, a Londoner who came to his first class right from the airport, without knowing anything about anything. We never studied grammar, but listen to songs. I still remember most of them, Rick Astley's included (Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down,....).

I only started being a bit fluent after staying for half a year in Sweden. I shared office at work with an Irish girl, Josephine, and an English-Norwegian guy, Erik, both former Oxford students. It was like being in Harry Potter, and that was the turning point. First, I had the worst two weeks ever, but then, one night, I had a dream in English, and from that day on, magically, I could understand them both. Bloody Jo, her 'O' was as rippled as her dark long hair!

My last English teacher, while preparing my TOEFL exam, was a funny American ex-pat from Chicago. His Catalan was almost perfect and was obsessed with only two things, Micheal Moore, a demi-god for him, and beer. Because of him, I read all Michael Moore's books and watched his movies, and later I decided not to go to the States for a post-doc: I didn't want to get as fat as him and Michael Moore. I went to Japan instead.

Now I have a very different point of view, less negative about the States. However, and despite some times I've deeply regretted to have gone to Japan, Japan has also changed my life in such a perplexing way that still I can't hardly foresee the ending. But this is another tale. On Saturday, I'm going to see queeny-weeny Lizzy! Britannia still rules!

Plena de Seny, Lleigs Desigs de Mi Tall

2010-01-26T01:13:00.000-08:00

[...]
Jo són aquell qui en lo temps de tempesta,
quan les més gents festegen prop los focs
e pusc haver ab ells los propris jocs,
vaig sobre neu, descalç, ab nua testa,
servint senyor qui jamés fon vassall
ne el venc esment de fer mai homenatge,
en tot lleig fet hagué lo cor salvatge:
solament diu que bon guardó no em fall.

I am that one that in stormy weather,
while the rest of people has fun near the hearths,
and instead of having with them their own games,
walks on snow, barefoot, and naked head,
serving a lord who never was a vassal,
nor ever had the idea of making homage,
in any ugly deed his heart was wild:
he only says 'good luck never abandons me'.

Ausiàs March (Gandia, Valencia 1397 – 1459 ) wrote such powerful words to apologize, as usual, to one of his lovers. He was a knight and a poet. His final words to Plena de Seny (Full of Sense), his lover pseudonym: 'I cut any ugly desired from me, no herb decays by my shore'. Nice words for a tombstone.

Wasn't today a holiday?

2010-01-23T07:32:00.000-08:00

Things I've gotta do today:
1) Shower...shaving...I need to look decent today.
2) Breakfast. Usual stuff, pa amb tomaquet.
3) Washing clothes. Is this stain mine?
4) Sweeping floor. That's funny!
5) Cooking lunch. Nothing in the fridge, just broccoli.
6) Washing more clothes. まだかな
7) Washing dishes. Hate this with all my heart!
8) Checking emails. Endless.
9) Sending email to Liege. Gotta go to Liege next month, but...Belgium...February...
10) Making a hotel reservation for London. Next weekend, first time in London!
11) Making a hotel reservation for Barcelona. Aya is coming in February...
12) Going to the supermarket. Will they still have some clementines at good price?
13) Hanging clothes to dry. I hate this!
14) Going to visit my friend's new born baby at the hospital. Premature, too premature
15) Chatting with friends on the Internet, Miyu and Aya
16) Cooking some dinner: パスタにしおかな？
17) Watching some series. American Dad kicks ass!
18) Reading. A neverending book about Japanese Bubble's Economy
19) Optional: Calling home to ask if still exists
20) Likely: Some adult stuff if the apology works out and the moon smiles at me

PS: I accomplished all of the 20 points, but it took me two days! But I haven't finished the book yet.

The Borgia or the Cuckoo Clock?

2010-01-22T06:56:00.000-08:00

Orson, Orson, Orson, so cynical, so genial...

You know, the Machiavellian Borja family was from Gandia, Valencia; and compared with Valencia, Sicily is just a school playground. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckooo!

The Incompleteness of the Butterfly Effect

2010-01-22T01:08:00.000-08:00

Wooow, I got yesterday that joke from my dear friend Rob.

It is really funny: Nano, Emacs, Vim, Ed, Cat are text editors in Linux some programmers use for coding, each one with less editing tools than the other, just a bunch of weird commands and key combinations, and no GUI (graphical user interface). But the guy using butterflies, making fun of the misunderstanding most people make about chaos and the butterfly effect, that is funny, specially by the fact that Emacs, the keystone of the most expert programmers, already seems to have an abstruse command to do it.

However, the funnier thing to me is the level of convoluted computer and mathematical nerdiness one has to exhume to find it hilarious, that is, my friends. They also like football: Nobody is perfect. Common people wrongly think geeks are not funny, but the truth is that what is not funny is most common people. Proof: the monkeys in any Reality TV.

This one is even greater: The only idea of imagining Kurt Gödel, the Austrian mathematician that starved to death because he was so obsessed about being poisoned that stopped eating, talking about a list of his sexual paraphilias paraphrasing his Incompleteness Theorem with Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead, which had tried and failed to establish the foundations of mathematical logic, is simply off the scale!

PS: Katharine Gates apparently wrote a book, Deviant Desires, about incredible strange sex practices, though a Bill Gate's daughter's name is also Katharine. Any second hidden meaning? Sure.

An, An, An, Tottemo Daisuki Doraemon!!

2010-01-21T00:40:00.000-08:00

Nakamura Shunsuke is not the only periquito (parakeet, RCD Español's fan) that can speak Japanese. These videos are hilarious! In the first one, Piyotan says it likes chocolate a lot, among other funny things.

In that one, Beri-chan tries to sing Doraemon's song as in a karaoke, but keeps mixing the Ponyo-ponyo's song in between. Why is that? Birds like Miyazaki's saccharine movie too? I knew some chicks liked it, but inko...that's too much for a movie about jellyfish!

of Trencadissos and Trencadisses

2010-01-20T01:13:00.000-08:00

Every morning, on my way up the Pg. de Gràcia going to work, I pass by some of the streetlights Gaudí designed, which are located on a narrow sidewalk between a secondary lane and the main roadway. Apart from the twisted iron work with crosses and leaves, common motifs among Gaudí's work, these lampposts have a basement shaped as an undulating stony bench with a particular coat of broken tiles, which tourists keep detaching as if they were a souvenir.

This irregular mosaic is usually called trencadís, from the Catalan word "trencar", to break. Despite it is normally attributed to Gaudí, it was in fact Jujol, his collaborator, who came up with the idea of using broken tiles to cover the capricious and irregular surfaces they used in their buildings. Jujol, unlike Gaudí, used to build very cheaply, recycling materials and trying to adapt the budgets to his client's resources.

Both Gaudí and Jujol were from el Camp de Tarragona, though Jujol moved to Gràcia when he was young. None of them ever cut their mutual relationship, nor the ties with their terroir. As it is well known, "gent del Camp, gent del llamp!" (countryside people, lightning people), which meaning is a mixture of being brilliant and presenting an uncontrolled strong character. In Catalan language, the word genius has both meanings, and a lightning (llamp) is flashy metaphor of this peculiar temperament.

Unlike Gaudí, who accidentally died earlier, Jujol lived through the Spanish Civil War and had to managed with the new fascist authorities to keep working somehow. He certainly did it in a very uncommon way, that of designer of fascist victory monuments, Virgin Mary's pedestals, and commemorative fountains, like the one in the middle of la Plaça d'Espanya. I was totally surprised when I discovered that fact of his life, but knowing how tough those years were, I can't blame him. Amazing was also getting to know that one of the connoisseurs of Jujol's work is John Malkovich, that stumbled upon him while strolling in Barcelona, a thing that apparently he usually does due to his nearby residence in the south of France.

I've seen many copies of Park Güell's trencadissos around the world, and it makes me feel a bit sillily proud observing how such a minute idea can have spread so widely while sharing the same origin with its author. How can a trencadissa (a wreck, a crash, a failure) be so productive? Ironic, isn't it?

And Yet, Another Piece of Junk

2010-01-20T00:46:00.000-08:00

Japan is a land of irrelevant fads and useless inventions, so much ado about nothing. Here, the last one, potechi no te, chip potatoes' hand. It is a pincer to grab crisps without getting your fingers smeared with oil. Is there any bigger one for politicians? You know the old saying, "qui oli remena, els dits se n'unta".

"Et suco a tu!" o La Venedora de Mandarines

2010-01-19T00:58:00.000-08:00

L'altra dia baixava d'enviar unes cartes a l'oficina de correus que hi ha al C/ Gran de Gràcia, i vaig trencar per una carreró que han acabat d'arreglar i que va de cap al Mercat de la Llibertat. Aquest és un mercat situat en un preciós edifici modernista que tot just fa poques setmanes ha tornat a obrir, després d'una llarga temporada de reformes. L'havien situat a la Pl. Gal.la Placídia, molt a prop d'on treballo. El resultat és magnífic, i les parades que hi a dins refulgeixen amb els productes de millor qualitat del barri.

Jo anava despistat, com sempre, pensant ves a saber en què. Vaig sentir una sequetat a la boca, segurament provocada per haver begut masses cafès ja de bon matí, i quan havia tirat amunt, passant vora al mercat, se m'havien obert les ganes rabioses de menjar-me unes bones mandarines. Comença ja no ser-ne temporada, però jo en sóc un addicte irrecuperable i sóc incapaç de passar una setmana sense menjar-me'n un parell de quilets, tot i que el preu comença a picar!

Havia fet una comprovació en vol de les qualitats i preus de les mandarines que les parades que hi ha a l'entorn del mercat oferien. Un mercat és com un castell a l'entorn del qual creix una petita ciutat de botiguetes, parades de carrer o simplement gent oferint les seves mercaderies d'origen dubtós sobre un llençol al terra.

Sempre m'ha cridat l'atenció l'origen de molts dels cognoms que destaquen als retols de les botigues que hi ha properes a aquest mercat. Són molt familiars per a mi i, fins ara, creia que es reduïen solament a certes arees del Camp de Tarragona. Segurament, els fundadors d'aquestes botigues vingueren a Gràcia a finals del S.XIX o a principis del S.XX en una de les més primerenques onades migratories que la revolució industrial va portar a la ciutat de Barcelona.

Cap parada m'havia convençut massa per deixar-me temptar a comprar un quilo de mandarines. Sóc una mica torra-collons en quant a comprar en una parada, i no sabria ben bé a què es deu, però si no em llama, que deia mon padrí, doncs, no em llama. Total, que vaig passar de llarg de totes elles mentre anava amunt a correus. Però al baixar, amb les mans buides a les butxaques, vaig passar just pel costat d'una botigueta minúscula i que semblava recuperada d'un viatge al passat remot del barri.

Era just una porta oberta al carrer, amb la fruita en caixes col.locades arran de paret. A la botiga no s'hi entrava, s'hi passava pel costat, i si voleies alguna cosa, la mestressa et pesava el fato en una bascula que penjava del llindar de la porta. La penombra omplia l'espai que quedava rera la dona, que feia de magatzem per a tota la fruita i verdures que es venien allà. Vaig parar com si fes una derrapada i m'hagués passat de llarg, reculant fins a quedar a l'alçada de la venedora, que es fregava les mans de fred.

Era una dona gran, petitona i no massa grassa, tot i que per la quantitat de roba que duia, semblava un gran cabdell de llana, embolcallat amb una bata de quadrets roses i un davantal. Tenia la mirada punxeguda de venedora de mercat, amb anys i anys de vida cristal.litzada a les seves pupil.les. Em va agradar el seu aire sincer i feréstec, i vaig pensar que no em faria passar garces per perdius a l'hora de triar les mandarines que volia.

"Un quilo de mandarines, si's plau!", li vaig dir, i la venedora va plegar de la caixa les mandarines que millor li van semblar, posant-les després a la balança per a pesar-les. Em va fer gràcia que no mirés mai el pes i, com un mag que acaba de fer un truc i mira al públic per dir "ta-xan!", em va mirar directament als ulls amb un somriure arter i digué "un quilo!". Com en cap moment havia mirat el marcador de la bascula, vaig fer cara de sorprès i vaig comprovar el pes. I dit i fet, era un quilo just. La dona estava orgullosa de la seva precisió i em va dir "noi, sóc la millor venedora del mercat!", i a fe de món que l'era.

Vaig tornar a la feina amb un quilo de mandarines a les mans, i me les vaig menjar tot seguit, sense parar, sense poder dir que no, sense que pogués trobar la manera d'evitar que aquelles mandarines desapareguessin una rera l'altra, mentre jo els hi xuclava el suc de les entranyes, fent-les petar dins de la boca com petites bombes de líquid dolç. "Et suco, a tu, i a tu també et suco!", pensava. I a cada mandarina, em venia a la ment la rialla atrevida de la venedora. "Noi, sóc la millor!". I sí, sí que l'era!

What Is All About? Being a Garrulo?

2010-01-16T15:46:00.001-08:00

Seriously, I'm kind of amazed that a certain person is still reading this blog. I know I'm \begin{sarcasm} utterly interesting and attractive \end{sarcasm}, but after all what has happened, I find it preposterous. Why you read it? What for? What's your hidden interest? Are you still looking for some fun at my expenses? Laughs? Your existence is so bored and mediocre? I know it, but the circus is over, girl, and the clown, fired.

This is not a tourist guide either, so you'd better go here if you're planning your next safari of self discovering and lust. Neither am I your friend, never been, so you should spend your time in a more fruitful way with somebody else at your Facebook or Worldfriends. A bird told me you're always having so much fun there, and we both know what kind of fun you like.

I know you were keeping me in the fridge for a better timing to get something from me, eh? What was that? What were you expecting? Help to move to Spain? Was it that, after all? Too bad, too late now. If you still have any reason to move to Spain, which I doubt, go and coax somebody else into helping you; you won't find using people too difficult.

But I presume that imagining a blog remotely related with you exceedingly feeds your pathologically oversized ego and selfishness, and makes you feel undeservedly important and desired, but don't make any misjudgment here, you're not: you have always been a futile divertimento. In any case, please, get stuffed, along with all your lies and bullshit.

Excuse me for using too many difficult words, way beyond the usual level of the freak parade of your friends, so garrulo they could be in Gran Hermano for life. I just can't help ROTFLMAO at them, particularly the effeminate eyebrow-shaved drunk douche bag you fucked with, another not-a-friend, in your Newspeak. Who is the next one, Paquirrin? Hopefully, I was turned down from the list on time. Now I know I can't beat any of them...I finished my elementary school and I can read!!!!

Meditating among Little Buddhas

2010-01-16T12:52:00.000-08:00

Japan should be happy to house among its wonders some of the most delirious places on Earth. While living there, I had the opportunity of visiting some of them, and I still have a few left for my likely future trips to Japan. Nevertheless, so far, the one that ranks to me among the most deranged places is Taiyou Kouen (太陽公園) in Himeji, Hyougo prefecture. How to explain what it is?

To say it straight, it is a place with reproductions of the most important monuments in the World, something like Catalunya en miniatura, but in a more global perspective. What makes it so special? Thera are two aspects that make it a completely crazy place. First, its scale. Unlike the Catalan counterpart, Taiyou Kouen has built in stone massive reproductions of the monuments featured.

Among the most distinctive world wonders in there, the Arch de Trioumphe in Paris, the Chinese Wall and Tiananmen Square, and Bavarian Neuschwanstein Castle, and some other minor ones, like a Xian warriors parade, a small Egyptian Pyramid, with a Sphyinx included, and also some Moai from Easter Island.

However, to me, what makes it unique is the second detail: a whole retirement complex is lodged within the limits of the attraction park. That's simply great! Why going around the world in a tiring and expensive trip to visit the highlights of civilization if you can actually live in a peaceful and remote residence in Hyogo mountains, among rice paddies, and walk every morning along the most important monuments ever built? That's the craziest idea ever!

Another reason to go to Himeji, apart from its castle, which must be visited barefooted, and the cherry trees in its gardens. In the picture, I'm seriously meditating about the unbearable lightness of my being sitting on the lap of one among a myriad of buditas, little Buddhas, planted on a hill, like mushrooms in Autumn.

It's Beyond my Control or How to Philosophize with a Hammer

2010-01-15T14:45:00.000-08:00

Women are strange creatures. If you kiss them, you are not a gentleman. If you don't, you are not a man. If you praise them, she thinks you are lying. If you don't, you are good for nothing. If you give them everything, they don't value it at all. If you don't, you are a selfish ogre. What, then? Giving them just what they deserve, being it for good or for bad. Not a single inch more, not a single inch less.

My friend is really mad at a girl. She is basically a liar and such a self-centered and contemptible person, who likes fucking around and using people near her, that I can hardly think of any objective reason to try stop him from taking any kind of retaliation on her. There is a hidden pleasure in doing so, I guess, and smashing her down as he is persuaded to do by all means.

Even if I wanted, which is not the case, I can't do anything, it's beyond my control, his favorite quote. That's the price of bullshitting with dangeros liaisons. Unhopefully, neither he is as chivalrous as Valmont, nor she is as virtuous as Madame de Tourvel. So, I will sit and see what happens, for fun.

The French Connection

2010-01-14T02:19:00.000-08:00

I went to primary school in some dark ages where most people didn't even have telephone at home, tv was black&white, and we studied French as the only foreign language. French...who the hell speaks French nowadays? Apart from France, there still exists the concept of "la Francophonie", a kind of French Commonwealth based on the language that remains as a vestige of another lost empire. It includes pretty exotic countries, mostly in Africa, but also Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as Canada and its French-speaking territories, Quebec.

However, there is a new area of influence for French, i.e., the EU. Among the dozens of languages spoken in Europe, only three are the official languages of the EU institutions: English, German and French. Personally, I can handle English, a bit less confident with my rusted French, and totally lost with my forgotten German. That's why I thought it would be funny to go back to French classes, back to my adolescence!

Gladys is my French teacher, a very friendly and lively girl from the Jura department in the Franche-Comté region of France. The only thing I know about the place is that the word Jurassic comes from Jura, which is a mountain range itself. Anyway, she studied in Toulouse since she wanted to become a teacher of French for foreigners. However, there, she started to learn Spanish and, eventually, moved to Barcelona, to finish her studies. Or was it maybe because of her boyfriend is a Mexican guy living here?

Her Spanish is nearly perfect, grammatically and lexically, despite some detectable traces of French accent, far less strong though than in usual French people. Her new challenge now is to become a UN translator. She said it is pretty difficult since the level is very high and there is a lot of competition, but she wants to try her hand. In case she successes, she would be living either in New York or Geneva, with a pretty nice pay and lots of opportunities to travel.

Currently she is training with legal stuff of the European commission from our company, a real log that makes sheep sleep. My case is more mundane, I just want to brush up my French pronunciation, which is still terrible and keeps getting entangled with English all the time; I guess both languages are located in the same area in my brain. Hope they don't fight!

More Snow in Poblet!

2010-01-14T01:33:00.000-08:00

My Nokia has a very poor camera, and the video I took ad libitum last Saturday is an unworthy crap that doesn't let people, if any, appreciate any detail. That's why I've uploaded that one. Pictures are yet pretty bad, but at least, they're a little clearer. Sorry about the song, I know it is a cliche, but, wtf, it's Dean Martin! (Buble? Who?)

Qui Perd els Origens, Perd la Identitat...

2010-01-12T15:35:00.000-08:00

P. is an interesting and intelligent Colombian architect who works mounting exhibitions by CosmoCaixa around Spain. Her hobby is traveling to Japan, and she was there at the end of the year to visit her friends in Tokyo.

This afternoon, while I was in my weekly French class at work, I got an email from Ch. summoning me to meet her and P. at a restaurant near Pl. Universitat. She is learning Spanish and regularly meets Spanish speaking friends to practice while having a drink or a meal. The choice today was surprising to me. The restaurant is called La Llavor dels Origens (The seeds of the Origins); Catalan cuisine. I've discovered there are four in Barcelona; one in Gracia, two in El Born, and that one in Enric Granados.

When I arrived, they were already eating zucchini with codfish and beans with mushrooms, accompanied by pa torrat amb tomaquet i all. I've finished what they had left and order a little more bread and another beer. They were chatting about P.'s recent visit to Japan, and the story of the obachan, owner of the restaurant where she was having breakfast everyday, near Higashi Ueno (東上野).

She showed us some pictures of the old woman, around 90 y.o. She was very energetic and interested in P.; where she was coming from, about her family, and things like this. P. can only speak very basic Japanese, but they communicated using a notebook where the old woman was writing in hiragana the words, while P. was translating them using her iPhone.

At the end, the old woman gave some presents to P.: a set of chopsticks and a huge and perfect apple. But this apple was not poisoned like that in Snow White. The obachan wanted to give a present P. could keep forever. Since she thought P. couldn't bring the apple home, or at least, keep it forever, she said the present for her was not the apple itself, but actually the odor of the apple, which P. could keep forever in her memories. P. found the present very poetic, and so did I.

The accidentally chosen place was also like an apple to me. However, mine is a poisoned one, and the smell, just the stench of decayed memories.

Valencia, la Tierra de las Flores, de la Luz y del Amor...

2010-01-12T04:03:00.001-08:00

Last year, after I left Japan, I was living and working in Valencia. I must say it has been one of the best periods in my life. Work was a piece of cake and people was great and alive. I have lots of friends there, and we had memorable binges! We used to go out, first only for a drink on Thursday after work, but it became a custom and started dragging more and more people with us, and later, it turned into a legend.

One time, we didn't sleep and went back to work almost directly after a fast shower at home with the biggest handover of the last times. My brain was literally damaged and I was unable even to read from the screen of my computer. We did very crazy things that night, but having to go to work on the next morning, makes things terribly complicated. The group of tireless ones were Aaaaaandres (excess of 'a' are necessary for emphasis purposes), Clemens, Pascu and me.

Pascu got slept on the toilet when he got home and his girlfriend had to wake him up before falling down on the floor. Cle was the only one walking back home. For the rest, and against any common sense, we drove back home. I remember magically getting home and them, suddenly, falling like a log on my bed. But that's Valencia, big empty avenues at night, with no police control, unlike Catalonia.

Nevertheless, it could had even been a better night if they wouldn't have dragged me away from a college girl. She was ok for me, no brain, big boobs, and fast tongue, but they said she was ugly and we had better things to do, like going to eat something. Who cares, just another little crazy disco bitch thinking she is a queen on zest after her exams, and she already had done her job.

Anyway, my friend Javi has just sent me a link to his band's performance last weekend in Valencia. They play Queen's songs and, despite these videos suck, they do pretty well, very professional. He's the most formal guy on earth, living with his girlfriend, a blond Valencian beauty, in her just renewed apartment. They will marry on July. I'm trying to help him with his PhD, but too many things steal his time, and Rock'n'Roll is the one!

I will go this March to see the Fallas, since last year I missed them, and I guess it is gonna be crazy as ever. Visca Valencia!

Varykino 2.0

2010-01-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

It's been heavily snowing in the interior of Tarragona province these last few days, and I've decided to go to see the snow this afternoon. I've gone, as usual, to Poblet, at the footsteps of Prades mountains, the coldest place in the province. I heard on the radio the way to Prades was blocked by snow, which is normal, as also are most of the roads on the other side of the mountain, in the Priorat, which is kind of exceptional.

Poblet is a Cistercian monastery with a great deal of history behind, but for me, it is a place where I've spent very enjoyable summer days walking around its mountains, which used to be full of chestnut trees before a plague decimated their population. I also worked many Autums while a student harvesting grape in a huge estate in Montblanc, a nearby village. I usually bring there my friends, as I did last time in August with my friends from Valencia that visited me in Barcelona.

However, today the place seemed more the ice-palace at Varykino, the hamlet in Dr. Zhivago where Yuri reunites Lara, than Poblet. Lara finally leaves with Komarovsky, and Yuri, for her best interest or maybe knowing her choice, let her go. Komarovsky had turned Lara into his mistress, Lara had turned Pasha into Strelnikov, the shooter, and the war had turned Yuri and Lara into lovers, but also separated them, forever. Varykino is just their ending icy sanctuary that will melt down and be forgotten in spring. Poblet was also an icy sancturay this afternoon.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum..

2010-01-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

It happened again! A new funny turn of fate: two Japanese friends sent me the same postcard! Why is that? Did they tell these things each other by telepathy? Doutonbori (道頓堀) in the snow.

Anyway, I thank Tomi and Emi for remebering me these days. What else could I ask to a friend, apart from knowing my name?

Christmas Present

2010-01-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

A little Narcissism, my new glasses...

Hope not to be doomed to get stuck by my own reflection in a pool of water.

Zara's Changing Rooms or a Microcosmos of Microbourgeois

2010-01-07T14:36:00.000-08:00

Life has some funny turns sometimes. This Christmas holidays happened an interesting one to me. We were doing some shopping at one of these huge malls, Gran Via II, the heaven of the microbourgeoisie, the last social rank before the plain lumpen that lives in the ugly and shabby district that surrounds the mall, which I guess I belong to.

They flock to places like that one to kill time there during holidays, specially in those cloudy and dull winter days, and make the last purchases. And, in the same way that there are plenty of well-known fastfood chains, there are also the same McClothing retailers that exist everywhere, like Zara, and all the pack that belongs to the same group (Massimo Dutti, Pull and Bear, Oysho, Uterqüe, Stradivarius and Bershka).

Two of the most boring things on Earth are flying and waiting for a girl in a changing room at Zara. For the first one, I've always thought there should use some Mariachis or acrobats from le Cirque du Soleil to make long flights more entertaining. For the latter, a bar with enough alcoholic drinks would do the trick. In the specific case of that Zara, there was, at least, a sofa to sit down while waiting for the lady. I could see some weird scenes among the fauna swarming such environment, myself included.

There was this Muslim girl trying on clothes over her actual clothes, courtains drawn back, while her husband was overseeing her. A couple of Dutch girls were exchanging clothes between neighbouring booths while showing her buttocks and thongs to the casual audience. I could even see, without asking, some jobbed boobs from a vulgar Vanesa who was trying on some party gown two sizes too small.

And what about me? I was waiting again, as usual, for the same reason all guys there were waiting. I've been in such situation so many times, I could even write a book. It would be entitled "Waiting at Zara's all around the World; from Osaka to Barcelona", better than Callejeros!

And the turn? After waiting for almost an hour, plus the time previously spent going around the whole mall looking for a specific ウアンピエス; after having tried on all possible variations of the same dress, in color and size; after having in fact bought it, on our way out, we stumbled upon a dress I already knew from another occasion.

I recognized it immediately. It had been with a different girl, back in September, in a different Zara, in a stormy afternoon, while looking for an allegedly "white" one piece dress. We couldn't find it that day, but today it was there. The comical situation was that she instinctively took it, and also the other ones similar to that which were arranged by chance together, and swiftly headed again towards the changing room to try them on.

At that moment, I was totally astonished. How can it be that two different girls, despite coming from nearby places, were picking the same clothes under the same conditions? Was it me that I'm frequenting the same kind of girls, with the same mind set and tastes? Was it them that coming from the same place share the same predictible behavior? I don't know, but maybe the likelihood that there is no free will exists after all.

Hopefully, I convinced her to forget about the new dress and stick to the first election arguing that this one was far warmer and more suited for winter than the other one. I didn't want to see her going around with such dress looking like that despicable girl. Too bad a joke, even for my oversized inclination for tasteless jokes. However, I can't help myself laughing at the coincidence, if this is what it is!

When You Dance with the Devil, You Wait for the Song to Stop...'Know What I Mean?

2010-01-07T06:38:00.000-08:00

Enough postcards...a little rock'n'roll!

I've seen that movie 10.000 times, and yet, I can't stop laughing at their stupidity...Snatch and Rocknrolla are also great, despite being similar stories.

El Delta de l'Ebre

2010-01-06T22:29:00.000-08:00

The delta of the river Ebre is a fantastic place which reminds me of Japan and the time I've spent there, surrounded by paddies. Well, I mean Japan in a most pure and remote period, one without pachinko parlors and love hotels. Maybe similar to the spirit that can be felt when walking along the great extension of nothing inside the old palace of Heijo in Nara, the only place in Kansai where the sky can be seen without any cable interfering the view!

I know I tend to take pictures of the sky, but the sky there is wonderful. So powerful and penetrating, that always captures my eyes, and I can't avoid trying to hold it in a picture. Just cheap postcards, I know, but still, strong views of living reality. Sky, water, mud, and rice, the four elements of the Delta. Which is the fifth element? Beauty, but there is no beauty in things without a pair of eyes looking at them. Beauty is in the eyes.

Arashiyama or Rowing Up the Stream

2010-01-05T09:57:00.000-08:00

These pictures correspond to one of the nicest days I spent in Japan, at Arashiyama (嵐山) in Kyoto.

When looking back in time, only those moments that were lived with a smile are worth to be remembered. And yeah, I laughed a lot! specially when buying and eating うでん in the middle of the river, in a kind of floating 居酒屋, a funny 船!

My Last Days in Japan, The Movie

2010-01-05T01:29:00.000-08:00

Mare Nostrum, December 2009

2010-01-04T17:37:00.000-08:00

Barcelona and Sitges, rambling around under a great weather...

...another map, by Mediterranean sea.