Sunday, July 31, 2011

We've got tonight

I did not get what I was expecting from watching Beginners, but the surprise has not been in vain. The years of the romantic comedy seems to be gone, at least at the moment. There is not much sweetness in the story of its characters -apart from sweet bitterness- in a time when it seems that the young, after jumping from one relationship on to the next one, is losing all faith in love and the happy living-together. The myth says that in the old times, you were stuck with whatever you had and, perhaps, people could incubate the -now- futile hope of "fixing" things up.

The young, on the contrary, in spite of having it all, albergates mould into their hearts, nihilism has crawled profoundly and made all their corners damped. The young keeps searching without any luck. The girl has lived in Paris, London, Berlin, New York and LA and, still, her apartment in New York is as cold as ice, and she feels like in her mind there will always be an empty room for her. The happy moments for the young are not 44 years of marriage, but isolated moments -moments of photography and facebook- where everyone plays the game of finding some truth and intimacy and relevancy and significance.

**

Precisely, today, I am not certain about the reason, I imagined the story of a man driving along a winding highway somewhere in the central United States on Saturday night, alone and soar to the bone, down to this bar on the edge of a forgotten and old road. There he enters; it feels warmer; he feels company without interfering too much -loneliness, you know, is like a jealous husband-, and after alcohol has shaken the drowsiness out of him and his eyes timidly ask for sparking, he finds his woman. And here you make up the story: it could be a forever kind of love or it can be a love made of instants. Up to you.

And in the dumbness of their nerves, in a careless night, shocked by the unexpected finding, the man and the woman dance in the middle, abandoned to each other... Perhaps, the abnegate and always magical band is playing Bob Seger.

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A trivial detail

I thought it was written by Eugenio d'Ors, but it probably wasn't. Among myriads of books placed in disarray in one of the shelves at home, years, years ago, before the remodeling of the study room, I used to look at a small book, with yellow covers, of which I don't remember the title. I said that I thought it was written by Eugenio d'Ors, but it probably wasn't: did not find its reference among his production now -although did not look thoroughly. 

Anyhow, the book was composed in little paragraphs of only a few sentences where someone, undefined, spoke in first person explaining to someone, an undefined interlocutor, the reasons that led him to kill someone else, a third undefined person. Most of the reasons -if not all- were trivial details which led to an unstoppable surge of rage and irationality and, thus, to the killing. For example: "I killed her because I did not like the way she slurped her soup".

Now, I don't mean, of course, that such details lead me to kill anyone nor anybody else; however, such eruptions of anger actually take place daily in all of us and got ourselves to our nerves at occasions.

In my case, every morning in the tube, I got upset at the common habit of commuters of trying to approach the exit doors when the train is arriving to the destination, but way long before it is stopped. So, if I am in the corridor between both rows of seats -which is fairly narrow-, I have to adjust myself to let somebody pass when the train is moving, which is annoying and, perhaps, I have to upset somebody who is seated. Could we not be civilized, wait patiently and, once the train is stopped, get off?

A trivial detail, it is true... But how many of these details can you count on a daily basis?

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Thursday, July 28, 2011

A Spaniard for Spain

Precisely today, July the 28th, Miguel Indurain, a mighty ciclyst is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of winning his first Tour de France. The man won five tours in a row, from 1991 to 1995, plus two Giros d'Italia in the same period. He never participated in La Vuelta de Espana but, paradoxically, never was a nation more proud of a Spaniard and more united as a nation as Spain when Indurain was winning practically everything we was into (apart, perhaps, the new phenomenon of the National Team of Football, but that is a different story, I think).

I was just a teenager at the time, but I feel that people was proud of this heroe for being that, a heroe, and a humble and nice person. Indurain was just the man who let others win individual races, who never spoke against anybody, who was kind and patient always. But still, a heroe: the man who will leave behind one by one all his rivals in going up the mountain with that characteristic rythm that made him endurable; the man who will fly against the clock, and even if getting a flat tire, he will run the distance in 2 or 3 minutes less than anybody else. Indurain made his success with Banesto and never held the pet of Credit Lyonnais, sponsor of the Tour.

I have watched tonight a few clips from those years and, in a flash, everything came to me so familiar: the color, the bikes, the image, the names, the winding roads, the heat over the green Alps... And the image of those summer afternoons clang to the TV, drinking ice coffee and watching mouth-opened the man on a bike. After all, I guess, and looking back reflectively, Indurain represented the heroe of all Spaniard: a fair and honest player who strives for winning against all odds, careless of everything else.

Indurain was that heroe: a heroe for all the Spaniards.

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Anders Breivik

Last Friday, around 1.30 pm GMT, Anders Breivik, 32, made a car-bomb explode in a Govermental area in central Oslo, near the building where the Norwegian PM, Jens Stoltenberg, had his office. Stoltenberg is the head of the Norwegian Laborist Party (Socialdemocrat). Then, Breivik swiftly and masterly, let's say, escaped the crime scene and moved on to the small Island of Utoya, about 45 minutes from Oslo. There, dressed up like a policeman, approached the summer camp of the youngsters of the Laborist Party and, one by one, killed by shotgun over 60. The overall toll of casualties is about 76, although the counting was higher immediately after the killings, as the police was counting injured people as well.

Not until today I did care about it, I honestly must say. And I do not need to know anything else about the story now after listening to the chronicle of this great professional, Paco Perez Abellan. If you don't understand Spanish, try to find a guy of similar profile like Paco in your own country: I am sure, he or she exists.

People get too complicated when things like that happens. At the beginning of It's a mad, mad, mad world Russell comes back to the car after the accident and says "things like that happens" and his mother-in-law gets crazy and retorts "why do you say things like that happens; the whole world is a mess because when things like that happens, people say things like that happens".

The truth is that Evil happens. And you cannot do anything about it, nor create any agency against Nazism or Islamofobia or Xenophobia or any sort of -phobia. Evil will exist ever, and education nor any kind of rational cure will ever do it any better, not necessarily. The key point is what societies do in order to prevent it. According to the story of Abellan, I share his opinion that Breivik is a "solitary wolf", crazy if you wish, but he is no nuts. He knew very well what he was doing; he had up to 20 bombs prepared from aspirin and fertilizers. The police knew and did not proceed further with the investigation.

Again, Breivik is very conscious of his acts and has fully responsibility upon them. The motivation, according to Abellan, is a notoriety urge. Breivik, indeed, fulfilled this his aim. The credit and repute of the idyllic Scandinavian society, where everybody is gentle and happy, is at stake and damaged; the Norwegian Government is to move to a different location and is facing the demand of this man to make his reasons and "philosophy of life" public: just as other serial killers, like Ted Kaczynski, Unabomber, who terrorized the Universities and air companies of The States since 1978 for almost 20 years, Breivik carried a diary, a 1,500-page diary, very detailed and elaborate, and has composed a Manifest. Extracts of the diary can be found here.

Breivik is Bruce Willis' Jackal.

Evil is part of the Human Journey; only Utopias, like the Socialist crap, believe in its eradication by rational means. Again: what are societies doing to prevent it as much as possible?

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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

The Moody diagram: notes

In my studies, I have learned today what I was meant to learn many years ago. I can't stop getting surprised by the fact of having a certain level of knowledge at hand for years and, even after dedicate myself to the topic for a while, not having the stamina or curiosity to dig into it. I looked today into the basics of a few topics of the fluid dynamics and, again, I don't understand how I have being without grasping a tenth of it for so many years.

Anyhow, I am studying deeply friction in pipes, you know. Today, I have read the original paper of Lewis Moody in Transactions of ASME,1944. It is such an interesting historical piece! I honestly had lots of fun and read it like watching an action movie.

The derivation and generalization of the Hagen-Poiseuille relation between pressure drop in small pipes (blood conducts) and the forth power of the flow rate (which is the linear part for laminar flow in the Moody diagram) is from 1860. Before that date, the problem was approached from an engineering point of view and empiricism was exerted within the practical purposes of hydraulic calculations (by, mainly, I guess, the French school) and the aim was, solely, to compute the head loss in, mainly, water circuits. It could not be more: Reynolds' famous experiment in the University of Manchester which set the studies of the transition between the laminar and turbulent regimes is from 1883.

From that year on and, foremost, after the summer of 1904 (when Prandtl presented in Heidelberg his theory of the Boundary Layer), the problem is approached in a more scientific rationale, albeit keeping engineering applications in mind. The struggle with the transition and turbulent areas in the diagram by Prandtl and some of his students, apart from others, is extremely interesting (Blasius, von Karman, Nikuradse, Colebrook, etc.).

As a matter of fact, Moody's paper in 1944 is quite illustrative (take a look at the year as well). The paper has a discussion at the end, and different authors bring up collateral topics of extreme interest. The case Rouse-Moody about the originality and best form of the diagram is so, so entertaining. I think it tells a lot about the personalities of both or, at least, one can guess, as well as being of great historical interest.

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Monday, July 25, 2011

Fuck the past that is hunting

This morning, in the tube, a nice-looking girl was reading a soft-paper novel on something about "haunted by the past". In the evening, as I left the office, K. came along with me and ended up around a pint of beer. The guy is from Hungary. The story of how he managed to be admitted at UCL is an encouraging example, an invigorating and genuine one. K. came to the UK to start from scratch, to escape the endemic pessimism of his country, that's what he told me, and I think it is worthy to write it here: "I want to forget my past and start again".

"The life expectancy of Hungarian men is now 62. 200 hundred kilometers away, into the Austrian border, it is up to 78", he continues: "For twenty years, since the formal break-down of Communism (the very same politicians before and after the transition remained in power), I have been listening to the chant that all sacrifices we do are for the future, for our kids; but it is a lie, a politician crap, the future might never come. What about now! All we have to pay now is for the benefits of our future generations, all the taxes Hungarians pay (around 50 %) are for the future... Oh, what about living now?"

K. lives somewhere around the tube station of Manor House, in the Finsbury Park area, located by a Hungarian agency that keeps 11 people in a house with one bathroom...

The guy wants to be happy and is glee... That's a lesson. Period. That's what I learned today.

Good luck to you!

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In three square feet

In three square feet, a whirlpool of the abyss I saw tonight. Just glanced at it, from the distance, and I said to myself, holly makaroy! I went for a-runnin' to Highgate Woods at dusk. Me, without glasses, kind of funny thing. This time, I believe, in the green fields of Alabama and Tennessee, below the huge and eternal trees that spread down to the state of Florida, the thin air is hosting a convention of delicate and peaceful glow-worms, flashing now and vanishing at once; on the contrary, the wet woods of England are dark as a forgotten pit, and if something luminous was to be found, that would be a burning sphere of reddish rage, crossed from top to bottom in a vertical radius by the black oval of a savage beast: the pupils of a wild animal, standing there, tenacious, until the aim is fulfilled.

In three square feet, I insist, two girls laugh licentiously, holding softly drinks in their hands and keeping them in a careless sway; a weird shilouette, sitting sideways in a bench and having her face covered by a cap, repeats twice looking astray, cigarette in hand: "it doesn't surprise me, it doesn't surprise me". I recognized her: Eleonore, remember? The banned prostitute. A short, dull-looking man, carrying two plastic, orange bags from Sainsbury, walks at my pace, looks at the woman, looks at me and, half-smiling, says: "A-running, it's hard".

In three square feet... If doom and perdition can be found, redemption is many-times fold as much worthy to be sown.

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At this hour of the night

At this hour of the night I am under some sort of weird activation. I don't feel like going to bed; I would rather prefer to travel along a secret, mysterious tunnel into the underworld, just to come tomorrow in the morning to my usual undertakings.

With pleasure I have received this notice from V., a truly passionate artist. Indeed, it is refreshing to come across with someone who takes his job seriously, loves it and is so constant with it. Indeed, it is so many years that he has been counter-balancing obligations with devotion, with no other motivation than the satisfaction of a very natural thrust of self-vocation and genuine passion. The man seems not to be hiding any evil inclinations or any self-destructive beast lurking behind the skin to jerk forward and bite as soon as the safe curtain of the day is drawn off; he does not seem to comply either with any rituals or fashionable vindications of society. Ausin Sainz looks like a man living his life and doing what he wants; he probably is ambitious, but not pretentious nor megalomaniac. He faces work up front, does not duck it out; just an ordinary man bringing his sizzling and artistic interests forward, day by day.

I will try to exert my criticism on your work, as you wish. Go ahead, continue!

**

I am listening to some recordings by Janis Joplin... Yea, yep, I got the curiosity from the so-called 27 Club reminders, spread after the death of Amy... I am just such an ignoramus. Also, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Eric Clapton. I spent part of the evening in Candem Town. There was an exhibition of framed photographs of Jim Morrison in this bar -gosh, what's its name??-, all for sale (at very reasonable prices from 500 to 1000 quid). I guess I could make some comments of all this, but I won't. I don't know a shit about it, and what I could say might be irrelevant.

I had a long shot of varied characters today and, again, the feeling is always the same. They all are creatures of time and fashion, myriads of stars strolling the skies orderly. But when the night comes, London sleeps. Oh, yes, London does sleep. And there is no escape from time and truth when you are asleep... A lonely activity we repeat so often, unless you belong to the heart of a woman.

The heart of a woman, oh, the heart of a woman.
A precious, invaluable gift.

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Sunday, July 24, 2011

Amy RIP

The death of Amy Winehouse (27) shall be the example for youngster that excess is not free. The news comes precisely on Saturday, one day in the week when damn-famous and damn-rich artists often show up in magazines telling their terrible story with drugs and playing the know-it-all about life. Today it was the turn of Slash, from Guns and Roses in The Guardian.

Well, Amy is dead. Drug addiction is some serious shit. It is not an easy thing to move away from it and boast about later on, don't get the wrong picture. Nor the dissolute environment, fallaciously free, of Candem Town, nor the indulgent tattooes of her arms made Amy stronger nor happier. Evil makes no exceptions: learn this by heart. Time is always advancing and nobody can lure its menace away.

She is in a better place now. RIP.

**

I wish I could tell you about this film, but I fall asleep the whole time... .

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Saturday, July 23, 2011

Hardy

I have not read yet anything by Vidiadhae Surayprasad Naipaul (V. S. Naipaul), but after his utterances in the Royal Geographical Society last May, I am not sure if I will. I feel curious, that's the truth, but what can you believe from a man who says that his work has never been appreciated in the UK, but holds the title of Sir at the same time? He has been awarded at least 6 important British Literary prizes since 1958, and his recognition spread after his winning the Nobel Prize in 2001... What exactly is he talking about?

Perhaps, his intellectual power has already reached the barren threshold above which nothing will blossom again. That happened to many others before.

The point at which I am in complete disagreement with him is in his saying that Thomas Hardy was and "unbearable writer" who did not know how to compose a paragraph. Oh, men! What a stupid comment! What does he mean with it? I am only now starting to read The Return of the Native, and Hardy's writting is indeed not straightforward, but vivid and poetic. As the great poet he was:

"To sorrow
I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me and so kind.
I would deceive her,
And so leave her
But ah! she is so constant and so kind".

Or the beloved woman in Beeny Cliff I have already quoted months ago. In The Return of Native he starts by presenting the Egdon Heath, a place "on which time makes but little impression". Who has not seen the image of a dusk growing above a wild land, being the soil half-an-hour darker than the sky, and with distinct, distant rims of earth and firmament clearly separated?

And listen to this: "It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature -neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seems to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities".

The negative sequence of three adjectives and that of two-positive ones placed in order and symmetry in the first two lines are nice. The action is simply presented in two realms (locus and personae) in the last two sentences and forecasted in saying "tragical possibilities". The powerful image of loneliness is presented in two directions: outwards (solitude looks out) and inwards (it had a lonely face).

Hardy: I suspect he is a festival for the text analyzer, a truly wizard of eternal and immovable human images. I like it!

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Thursday, July 21, 2011

Fort Lauderdale

In my supine ignorance, never heard of Gerd Muller before until today: a great goalscorer and a very successful footballer. His appearance and his play style was, I heard, not very appealing -like those of Raul Gonzalez, I presume-, but his figures are excellent -like Raul's-.

I just read that Muller, now working for the Bayern Munich, got disorientated and lost in Trento for hours. His wife had to fly to the Italian city to pick him up and return home with him. His story after the football era does not look happy -at least, from what I read. Muller tried to open a restaurant at some point after his career were over in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The reason of such location can be found, I guess, in that he played for The Strikers of Fort Lauderdale between 1979 and 1981. There he ended his being a professional footballer. After the failure of the business, he got depressed and slid down the hole of alcoholism.

I guess that a movie could be shot on the story of a footballer when his age reaches the 35.

**

The piece of news caught my attention because I actually spent once one weekend in Fort Lauderdale. I guess one is surprised at the popularity of the place, given the extraordinary extension of the United States; unfortunalety, I can't say that "I have been to everywhere, man", as Johny Cash says.

I flought from Huntsville, AL to Charlotte, NC and from there to Fort Lauderdale, FL for a job interview in Deerfield Beach. I remembered it like a very European-like (Spanish-like) resort about 50 miles away from Miami.

The trip was an adventure. First, because I arrived to the airport at midnight of Thursday and the person who was supposed to pick me up had been fallen asleep at home. I had to wait for half an hour at least. Then, he took me to a pub in the beach and made me drink a couple of beers until close to 2 am. I was dead hungry and tired and the interview was scheduled at 9 am Friday morning. Later on, I spent the weekend in the house he occupied along with some other people... . Only that nobody knew of my staying.

My flight on Sunday got some troubles and I ended up in a hotel in Dallas, TX awaiting till the morning to flight back to Huntsville. I had to phone my boss to let him know that I was not going to make it to work next day. At 10 pm that Sunday night a group of at least 10 people going to Huntsville were having a burger in the hotel bar. Curiously enough we were more or less familiar to each other. I bumped into K., a peculiar German guy, with who I finally rented a car to drive from Nashville to Huntsville on Monday. The end of the story is that I did not get the job, but a nasty letter from my current employer at the time with a warning for having my annual leave sheet almost at zero hours in March.

Fort Lauderdale and Deerfield for me: a beach, a misty and crowded highway, a secret store packed with magic vinyls, the hope of seeing sharks, a road trip among mansions, a tall, huge condominium, a guy of 50 in the house, sick-look, skinny and tattooed, playing video games with a plastic guitar in a titanic plasma TV, an untidy and suffocating room and a Leonard Cohen's song, sand in the feet all the time, the ghost of a high salary, a drinking gathering in the trunk of a Mercedes, and picture of myself in a green, plaid shirt of short sleeves with sun all over my face.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The heart of a woman

I was in this lecture at the British Library last week by Tim Lenton. Don't look for me in the picture; it is my fate: I've been everywhere but I left no witnesses. I actually wrote a review straight away but lost everything when I clicked on "publish post". It was a dense and deep shit and did not have any nerve to write again a single word. Today I can say a few things instead.

Geo engineering is, regarding its terminology, a fallacy. I mean, engineering involves something practical, a design or something, but one set of the solutions proposed to avoid global warming is not practical at all, unless you believe that fertilizing the ocean or blocking the sun rays at a planetary scale is something reasonable. Of course, you can attain something like that at a local range (and indeed much was said about deforestation), but then, why not to spend time, money and effort in neutralizing the constellations of corrupted politicians and groups of interest that operate out of the law? Pollution has less to do with Science than with Law.

People should know, in a different perspective, that the so-called Geo engineering means indeed an alteration of the climate change in a very direct and intended manner. I find this very scary. It always surprised me why, if we are concern with greenhouse gases (I doubt you can find anyone who can tell you what these gases are, apart from the infamous CO2), we are overlooking vapor of water. As far as I know, CO2 and H2O (v) emit radiation in the infrared: both has the same effect as "global warmers".

Alternative energies produce H20 (v) but, take a look at this: 3/4 parts of the planet are water. If the solar activity is experiencing some changes now (higher than average), is it not possible that a temperate increment is a cause and the increment of H2O (v) and CO2 in the troposphere an effect? I don't know, am a crazy for thinking something like this?

Tim Lenton, anyhow, stated clearly during the final questions that he does not believe we are in a run-away scenario (according to his modeling). And in addition, that the challenge comes in a local scale. I agree with both assertions. As a matter of fact, I would not expect that someone like him, being attached from his times as a PhD student at the University of East Anglia with James Lovelock in the Gaia Theory, and having spent so much time to model the Earth as a self-regulated system, could defend something different. It is surprising though that he is involved in this fairy (horror) tale of pseudo Geo engineering.

The main question, anyhow, who will pay for this new technologies and how much is, in my opinion, the key point. I don't think that charge it on to the tax payers on the grounds of being a moral issue will buy it.

**

I sneak a peek in the tube at The Evening Standard. Apparently, some people demonstrated at the Tate Modern against the involvement of BP as a sponsor of exhibitions of Art in the Tate and in the British Museum. I find it rather amusing. Don't you really think that the Tate and the British are damn happy to receive the money of BP to run their business?

Perhaps, I could expand this idea some time later... Or perhaps not.

**

However, my point today is (I received it in a flash today, just minutes ago, as I walked): For certain men, there is a moment in life when the only safe place for them is the heart of a woman.

If you are one of them and have not reach it by then, you are doomed. The heart of a woman, at certain stage, is the only place on Earth to stay warm and alive. A chilly Artic spread everywhere else, a hellish jungle, the ferocious abyss.

Oh, the heart of a woman who loves you... .

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Monday, July 18, 2011

Show me

I have listened to this song a few times in the last days. And I keep thinking about it, just thinking on my own. Everybody knows Noa. Mira Awad was, at least for me, unknown, and I must say that it is difficult not to get attracted to this pretty woman of sweet gestures, thin lips and eternal eyes, despite her later support for the Israeli communists. I think she sings really well and I heard she can actually act.

However, there is something about two Israeli women singing to unite the impossible. Both has been educated faithful to their cultural roots, Jewish or Christian traditions, and both had education in leading-democratic countries. The only apparent difference in the song is that one sings in Hebrew and the other does it in Arabic.

The day the stage of Eurovision will shake -and, indeed, the very solid basal platform of the Earth and the seas- we all shall find a third woman and a fourth man from Gaza singing next to them in Hebrew. Oh, come on! Show me just one man from any Arabic country singing in Hebrew... If the Israeli can live with Arabs and sing in their language, why the opposite situation is almost a piece of science-fiction?

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Sunday, July 17, 2011

When you become the victim of yourself

I heard that Francisco Cabral was indeed killed as a result (but not because) of the main target of the assasins: his music promoter. This promoter, Henry Farina, someone from Nicaragua, must not be clean wheet: among his business, there is a chain of strip clubs. A friend from Colombia told me: Cabral would apparently being offered a ride to the airport by Farina, and minutes later, their car was ambushed. Farina himself was driving the car and is, as far as I know, in the hospital in critical condition.

And I thought, terribly ironic! The man made messenger of Peace for Unesco in 1996, died from shot injures in an ambush; the man who fought as a communist, died in the car of a rich and probably corrupted business man; the man who wanted to give his life for a better cause, might have been killed unintentionally.

Sounds awful... But it is so.

**

Hugo Chavez Frias is going to die soon, I suspect. My Venezuelan friend, M., genuinely against his liberticide regime, told me that the cancer has undergone metastesis already, that the fight was over a year now. The now man in charge, the vicepresident Elias Jaua, of course, denies it, but it is easy to dismiss his statement.

I read that Chavez has finally decided to go to Cuba for chimio, turning down offers like that from Brazil. If you are to personalize such invitation, you should look at Dilma Roussef, former Energy Minister. I guess, she needs to protect the strategic position of Brazil in terms of gas and oil, and Venezuela looks a very important player in the game. I don't know, just a guessing.

Now, I think Chavez knows that his condition is serious and, most important, I think he would not go to Cuba for a cure. The excellencies of that country's medicine is what Castro's supporters want to believe (or capitalism's haters), but it is difficult to accept the fact that you can get a better treatment for cancer in Cuba than in the United States or in any other country in Europe. I mean, otherwise, everyone would go there, but, in fact, nobody does.

And so, Chavez, who is still very young, is sadly becoming the victim of his stupid game... And I bet you a pint: he knows.

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The Mousetrap

My dear friend E. would like to know that one of the singers in the Milk Bar (Sophisto) in A Clockwork Orange is Gaye Brown, and that one can be just yards away from her now as she is playing Mrs Boyle in Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, St. Martin's Theatre, London. Her character is the only murdered seen on stage in the play. I would like better And Then There Were None, the only novel I have read by Agatha (in English). Nice: one by one, all characters are disappearing, a story full of murder and corpses.

Christie must've been a very unusual woman. I bought And Then There Were None in the summer of 2009 during my first visit to London, and the novel drew my attention because of its simplicity. There is no big, soundly sentences or descriptions in her novel (and I guess, I would expect, in all her novels). Her writing is direct and simple. I must say that I found nothing remarkable in her style, nor anything valuable or original. What really surprised me is Christie's capacity to picture the psychology of her characters so deeply and full of contrast with a sole writing technique based on -apparently- heavy brushstrokes. That and, of course, her ability to create thrillers.

I reached the very same conclusion today with The Mousetrap. It is amazing how she plays around with the feelings and minds of her characters, making them puppets, but profound, rich, real puppets. And she does so readily that it looks like all comes naturally from the story.

And that's why I say that Christie must've been an unusual woman. I found The Mousetrap a very British story. But behind the conventions, the good manners, the stylish costum (trains, tickets, the Evening Standard, the weather, etc.), the ceremonials and all the titles, there you see on stage the lives of very unconventional characters: underneath their skins, a river full of shameless and burning emotions is running wild. In the play, she makes fools out of their characters against conventions (have them in and out the house through a window or play piano with one finger), makes the pretend-to-be sergeant lose his nerves because someone steals his skies, shakes to ruins the trust of the young married couple with a gust of doubt and suspicion, makes the poor Christopher Wren (a crazy, apparently foolish artist who finds attractive a man in uniform) cry his heart out.

I don't know, but in the same way I suspect Mr. Shaw had an ace in his sleeve when writing Pymalion, a hidden purpose somewhere, the script of The Mousetrap makes me suspect likewise of Agatha Christie. She was up to something more. The ending is surprising, sounds artificial, but, alas! You realize she was playing games, perhaps. After all the psychological thriller, she resolves the crisis of the marriage naturally but childishly, and ends up the whole thing with a conventional scene of burned-out pudding. And everybody laughs... After all the unsettling (and I see that the story can be very unsettling), Christie says "that's all folks, have a good night!", by a simple (though not-out-of-the-blue) scene of British tradition and composure... What a woman she must've been.

I am not sure whether or not the play is aging nicely. It lacks of something, not sure what, rhythm, sometimes, perhaps energy... . People get cold at times, you feel, and laughs are not entirely enjoyable.

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Saturday, July 16, 2011

A shower of simplicity

It might be true that the cat gets naughty at night, but it also seems to be a customary animal, as we are. We have to lock him in the kitchen during the night and, thus, we have to wait on him to arrive from outside; now, once it is inside, it puts itself to sleep.

I fall asleep tonight while waiting, and a mighty shower of rain woke me up: the cat is now asleep and I got my double dose of pleasure: things are complete and the sound of drops is like dope to the veins to me.

At this hour of the night, the town must be beautiful, like a naked queen in her bed behind a thin curtain of waterfall. All by herself in the dark, she is lying down and lonesome, but watchful, awaiting. And I wish I were the lover she is waiting on for, and come to meet her and walk in her exclusive streets.

Triple source of pleasure... To realize that such simple thoughts and bare feelings can make me feel good. Dear Lord: keep me this way.

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Thursday, July 14, 2011

Scenario ONE, scenario TWO

- "It doesn't work" -cried the Rat.
- "What do you mean, 'it doesn't work?'".
- "I mean, it doesn't work: the scenarios are not exclusive. For many months or even years, in the land of Shapuk, we thought that scenario ONE would vanish as soon as scenario TWO appear; but now that scenario TWO has occurred, scenario ONE is still to happen or tempting to happen".
- "No, no my friend", said the Flower. "Scenario TWO only appears to have happened, but it is a mere mirage, is not real at all. If scenario TWO were real, scenario ONE could not be happening".
- "Oh, My, oh, My" -squeaked the Rat: "That's what you want to believe".

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Where does it end?

I came to understand that my life as it is, is a mess, a utterly mess. Patches and pieces of unconnected experiences or inexperiences. I need a change, the big change that I need from so much ago. But, how? My flaws are reflected here. How? Time is running fast and everything is getting more and more difficult.

It might be that I am a type of self-exposed individual, too much exposed, I mean, with little sense for self-preservation. Like the bacteria that can live in cold environments, I feel like I am one of them, fit to be cold for ever, unable to grasp the basic elements of human dynamics.

' "That" will make you free', you might say, but I doubt it. Freedom means slavery sometimes, giving-in, awaiting, self-denying. Freedom is against any type of cowardice. Freedom is suffering. But one must be in the right place to take it and taste it to the fullest; to hold the pressure and all the damaging shear. Otherwise, in the wrong side, in the wrong place, life will tear you apart... Eventually.

Where does it end? When?

How long can I take this before I fall apart? Oh, Lord! Make me free, real free... Even if this is something you did not have figured out for me, in the first place.... Otherwise, I am doomed!

**

Sometimes, I get afraid. I can read the lives -fearful lives- of people around me... Now, I can see these guy in front of me in a crowded bar -o, temple of loneliness for the lonesome!-, drinking alone, making crazy gestures unconsciously or careless, talking alone, all by himself. He is young, he probably was a good boy from a good family, held numberless friends time ago. And there he is now, looking like a nut.

Where will it end?
Where did it start?

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Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Pygmalion

In the 10th book of Ovidio's Methamorphosis, I heard that a Cypriot sculptor fells in love with an ivory woman he himself has carved. Before, he is on the side of Venus, but has decided not to be interested in women; after finishing his work, he is in deep love with the sculpture, and asks the Great Goddess in the Temple to grant him the sickening wish of having her of bone and flesh. Back home, he kisses the lips of the stone and feel warm; he touches the breasts of rock and feel soft and welcome.

The name of the young sculptor (one might imagine) is Pygmalion, and got this wish granted from Venus.

Rupert Everett and Kara Tointon have the main roles in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, being showed now in the Garrick Theatre. However, the story of Shaw, as seen on the London stage last Saturday, resembles very poorly to the original myth: the transformation seems not to be radical, as Eliza keeps speaking with a very thick accent (the voice of the actress is warm, by the way, great), and I cannot imagine Mr. Henry Higgins asking Venus to fell in love with her.

In fact, it seems that the story runs away from the pureness of the myth, from its innocence. The relationship between the characters at the end has become poisonous, is sick to death. The final scene before the wedding is well-constructed. The two characters, each in one corner, sit and talk poison to each other. It is a powerful design on the stage but, however, one had the impression that somehow, somewhere, through a third corner, energy was leaking.

Yes, I think the nasty reality in Shaw's play overcomes the crystalline and childish myth. Indeed, the play uncovers at the end the true message, that the important transformation is not done, nor even commenced. Mr. Higgins remains unchanged, he is the same cold-hearted, the barren iced-scientist, a vault empty of human kindness.

Much has been said about phonetics. In his preface to the play in 1912, Shaw himself writes: "The English have no respect for their language and will not teach their children to speak it (...). German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen". And despite his flare for correct speaking and phonetics, and his being well-involved in down-to-earth initiatives to make English "accessible to all", I dare say that he deluded all with Pygmalion.

The main, fundamental transformation to achieve is that out of human kindness. In one of the dialogues towards the end, Eliza asks Col. Pickering: "please, call me Eliza. You have done much to me... All details like standing before me, taking your hat off, or the first day I came here when you called me Miss Doolittle. Of course, you were not aware of such details: they all came naturally to you, from your generosity". Beautiful, isn't it?

Looks like that, right? It's delusion: the main transformation is under cover, all the phonetics stuff, a mere decoy. The important change is to be naturally generous men and women. And so, I think, this story can play an important role in transforming society (oh, the longed transformation of society): let's begin by being civil creatures. Let's start by recovering the value of genuine "please", "thank you" and "sorry"... Go ahead, you can start tomorrow in the tube and in the bus. In this sense, Pygmalion is fiercely active.

Oh, Lord, in this night with the scent of change and the smell of unsettleness, I say, like the Prophet Ezequiel: Take away my heart of stone and give me one made of flesh.

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Sunday, July 10, 2011

The Tree of Life

You might heard it is a master piece but The Tree of Life is a difficult movie to see. It is probably something like Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries in the 50s, a really difficult film to which praise because everybody does so. I am not sure what The Tree of Life is about, because I did not understand much. It is a slow movie, the longest 2 hours in many years. Sometimes, you hear the crack of the wooden floor in the house of the O'Brians and so do you hear the crack of the wooden chairs of the audience, as they try to find a comfortable spot to give the film another opportunity.

Why is it a master piece?

Indeed Terrence Malick and Douglas Trumbull are not kids. They are almost 70. That's what keeps me surprised and searching for a meaning. Visually, I guess the movie is great, but I don't know anything about that. I caught a few things, that's true. To me it is a film of deep Christian message, if the modern movie groupies condone my insolence for saying so. It tackles the problem of suffering. And it solves it in a beautiful manner, Christian way, like not many have done. Everything passes away, nothing will remain, life is a journey we must travel on and on, it is said in the movie, repeatedly. But, indeed, pain seems to stay. The story of the past and the future is unfair and painful, from the time of the dinosaurs down to two generations of Americans. (Did you noticed? What does it mean the scene of the dinosaurs?). Pain is an unchangeable reality. So, against the question so often pronounced by men to God: "where are you, motherfucker? What do you have to say to this mess?", the author settles, from the beginning of the movie, a beautiful passage from the Book of Job; now, God is speaking: "Where wast thou when I layd the foundations of the Earth?" (Job 38, 4).

Rev. Rowan Williams talked about that in The Guardian this weekend: that God can be without Men, that Creation is totally a free gift.

The character of Brad Pitt is great. Oh, what an evolution from his times as a Southerner in Thelma & Louis! The work of the boys, great. But the movie is difficult, a festival of images without a script. The aesthetics of the modern world, with those huge buildings where Sean Penn works, are great, though. And Penn makes them worth a million more. I wish to have had more than that.

"Help each other, love everyone", says the Mother at some point. But, indeed, even though Love is the answer, the only source of happiness, this conviction is shaked to ruins by the only visible argument in the movie: the lost of a children by their parents. If this is not Love, what else can it be?

As I said, Malick and Trumbull are getting older, death is not a far-away possibility after they enjoyed the mambo-jumbo, the breathless ride of the trip of life... The Tree of Life, probably an excursion for men of success and money, a caprice of image and visual aggression.

I don't know.

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Self-absorption

Juicy all the stories in The Guardian magazine this weekend, including the interview of David Hare to Rev. Rowan Williams. I don't share his views against Capitalism not the necessities to search and propose a new social order, and I am doubtful about the learnings he just extracted from his very recent trip to Kenya, but his words to avoid self-absorption I find inspiring. His photograph in the report is terrible, though _looks like a man without his woman, indeed.

Rev. Williams is considered a priest-poet; as he says, there are things that can be better said by poetry. Agree. It is better and easier. Trust the image, that's all, and people will understand the non-understandable. They say he belongs to a group of Welsh priest-poets, with Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ronald Stuart Thomas in the 20th century, a group founded by George Herbet (1593 - 1633). Herbert is important to Williams, he says, "Herbert is not sweet", and Williams likes this non-sweetness.

I took a glance to some poems of Herbet -really good, much better than the others-, and curiously enough, I have found the word "sweet" in all I chose by chance. It seems to carry the idea of the Prophet Jeremiah in The Lamentations. For example:

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

 G. Herbert: "Bitter-sweet".

I like it.

**

I got my eyes all watery in the coffee shop this morning reading the testimony of Sophie about how she lost her husband in a tragic accident in Egypt during their honeymoon. A sad and devastating story, very well told.

In addition, The Guardian extracts the story written by Ben Mezrich about the young boy from Utah that tried to steal the lunar vault with all the moon rocks from the Johnson Space Center to sell it and start a new life with his new girlfriend, Rebecca, whom he met one day while cliff-climbing. The story kept me captivated! The boy wants to become an astronaut without an engineering degree and manage to get himself inside the space training program. He becomes close to the old researcher who was first to study the pieces of rock brought to Earth with the Apollo missions and have the chance to contemplate the vault. At the same time the boy, who is married at the age of 23 to a model in Utah, falls for Rebecca, who joins him in his crazy idea of stealing and selling the a lunar rock to someone he could find. They think they have found a buyer, a collector from Belgium, and arrange a meeting to exchange a piece of rock for $100,000 (worth much more many-folds than this), in a Sheraton hotel in Orlando, Florida. The collector and a companion of his happens to be FBI, police or whatever and they got caught. The boy gets seven years and a half of prison, and gains the divorce of his wife.

It is a powerful and rich story, full of human insight.

**

Facundo Cabral got killed in Guatemala today, apparently by hired assassins. I have looked at some of his songs and very pleasantly I found this. This song, he sometime sang with Alberto Cortez, my father used to sing to me when I was a child.

**

Indeed, life is pulsating life in every corner. Oh, Lord, give me eyes to see and ears to listen. Give me a heart to live. And keep me safe from the virus of self-absorption!

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Saturday, July 9, 2011

Away in the river

There is already day light at 4 am. Last morning, a heavy downpour of water woke me up. Rain tapping on the window or muttering in the dark outside is one thing I love to be awoken by. A mighty, sleepy kiss is a second one.

The Thames flows majestic and cold tonight. I walked from King's Cross to Saint Paul; then crossed Millenium Bridge -loved the view at night to the North, facing the Cathedral right ahead, the Mary's Axe Building to the East, and Tower Bridge further-, and continued the South Bank up to Jubilee Bridge and Westmister Bridge -loved the former bridge and the view of the latter from underneath the first-. Gusts of air brought silky and faded waves of party music from more than two or three boats. The river path was dark and quite, apart from herds of teenagers, jumping from somewhere, sometimes.

If you are in love, that's the place where you shall be on nights like this. Across the river, on the North bank, the city shakes noisily, vibrates with the rituals of social uniformity. I guess, a couple of years ago you could see the smoke of the party town gravitating amidst. But this other side of the river is forgotten; the Thames is black and wild, and if you pause, you shall hear all its mysteries loosen underneath its watery surface. What a thick and threatening surface!

Some people are there, some couples, some groups, there are some lights in the buildings and late boites aside. But, right outside, the river marches solemnly like a obscure king, silent and austere. And if you feel cold and lonesome, the river will just suit you.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Prandtl, the advisor

In the last months I have sustained that, unfortunately, advisors and supervisors in Universities are not real researchers and that, in my experience, they hardly go into the lab once they get their position. I assume that papers are cosigned in occasions by people who scarcely know the details of the experimentation of the topics in the publication, if not the complexities of the theory. Advisors and supervisors play the role of managers and strive to keep in motion the machinery of their living.

As opposed, I normally mentioned the example of Ludwig Prandtl: a photograph of his in his laboratory of the University of Gottingen, bent over his water tunnel, watching diverse motions of the fluid. He is a man of smart, neat aspect, well into the middle-age (see, first page here). I could only with difficulty imagine nowadays advisors looking so thoroughly at something that basic in the lab, at that point of their lives and careers, and so I did point it out.

However, I read what Von Karman, a graduate student with Prandtl in the old ages, wrote about the water tunnel in his Aerodynamics (1954). Read this, and tell me what conclusions you extract. I can see through it that Pradtl looked rather like a distant man from his graduate student, who build and operate the water tunnel; the student was doing and apparently stupid and childish thing to further prove the break-through work of his master: drag a cylinder suddenly from rest within the fluid in steady motion at speed V; and that, from this apparently childish occupation, even a big mind like Prandtl's fail to recognize (insist: from the observation of Nature) a well-sustained phenomenon, known later as Von Karman vortex sheet, although a very unexpected one:

"(...) Prandtl had a doctoral candidate, Karl Hiemenz, to whom he gave the task of constructing a water channel in which he could observe the separation of the flow behind a cylinder. The object was to check experimentally the separation point calculated by means of the boundary-layer theory. For this purpose, it was first necessary to know the pressure distribution around the cylinder in a steady flow. Much to his surprise, Hiemenz found that the flow in his channel oscillated violently.

When he reported this to Prandtl, the latter told him: 'Obviously, your cylinder is not circular'.

However, even after very carefully machinery of the cylinder, the flow continued to oscillate. Then Hiemenz was told that possibly the channel was not symmetric, and he started to adjust it.

I was not concerned with this problem, but every morning when I came in the laboratory I asked him, 'Herr Hiemenz, is the flow steady now?'

He answered very sadly, 'It always oscillates' ".

(Von Karman, T., 1954: "Aerodynamics: selected topics in the light of their historical development". Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York).

I can see the episode described in the last paragraphs, so familiar, so universal.

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Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Crooked seeding?

In an event with pre-A high-school students in the ChE Department I attended today, a young speaker answered one of the questions at the end of his talk, right before lunch, of which I only grasped, approximately: "there is oil in the UK for 25 more years and in other parts of the world for 40 or 45; but the beauty of Chemical Engineering is that you can easily transfer your skills from one area to another: a fluid in a pipe is just a fluid in a pipe".

Well, I deeply disagree with both assertions. How do you feel?

The latter is not true in my experience. If you work 10 years in the oil industry, you will accumulate 10 years of experience and learnings which, obviously, someone new does not have. Indeed, it is common sense and a blessing that this must happen in this way. Otherwise, how can you compete when you are 45 with a youngster of 25, stronger and fresher, if knowledge and experience is not an issue?

And so, if you applied for jobs in the water industry, you might have 10 years of experience in oil but, you have no experience in water and, perhaps, your level is at odds with the starting salary in the new market.

I think that if you consider the employer's point of view, the second assertion is difficult to believe. It seems, anyhow, that nowadays a bunch of young British engineers decide to go "to the City", i.e. to the finance world in London. The salaries are obscene. These young students and their advisers might get the illusion that the fact is explained by the transference of good analytical and numerical skills. However, I think that the reasons behind are to be found elsewhere, most likely are due to any coyuntural situation or specifics to the employer.

Could it be?

The first assertion of oil resources doomed and depleted right in a few years is seductive and logical, but I don't believe it. I don't have major arguments, I know nothing about it: I just don't believe it. I am not sure, anyhow, because I don't understand how people involved with oil companies can maintain such a thing if it is clearly not true. Perhaps, the matter is subtle.

My point is: if the UK were about to become out of oil in 25 years, would it not be people making money out of it a little worried? Would they not do more investments in other sources?

The statement is, in addition, misleading: what do you mean by UK resources? Oil is extracted from fields around the globe. Are those geographically "closed" to the UK coast or on UK soil the ones called UK resources? Or has it to do with the nature of the company exploiting them? But then, I guess the nature of BP is quite different from that of companies operating -and belonging- to a dictatorship somewhere in the Middle East... Or Chavez's PDVSA.

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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Rain and levities

The rain is back in London, now is falling heavily and soundly. The temperature dropped in the late evening significantly... . The night when the Titanic hit fatally the iceberg, the outside temperature was of about 12 C at 5 pm and in the course of the next two hours, the temperature dropped down to 1 C. The water temperature was recorded every two hours at ten minutes to the hour: at 9.50 pm, the water temperature was of -2 C.

The Titanic went down on 1912 and the spot of the wreckage was located in 1985. In the O2 Arena here in London some real objects -not that many- are being showed. The last survivor from the Titanic died last year; she was a just-born baby at the time of the tragedy.

Why is the story of Titanic so fascinating? And so fascinating to me? The ship had three huge impellers, being the one in the middle (the bigger) propelled by a turbine and the other two by standard reciprocating pistons. To maintain the massive structure in motion at 40 km/h (closed to top speed) during 2 seconds, they need to burn a 35-kg chunk of coal.

Do you know that the provost of the White Line company conceived the Titanic and two enormous brothers, "Olympic" and "Britannic" during the course of a summer dinner? Titanic was indeed Irish.

**

As the rain falls, I am recalling a couple of days I spent in Midland, Texas in the course of an interview... Quite a desert, quite a peculiar hotel. The rooms were arranged around an inner patio, in three or four different levels, like a huge "corrala"... . A la recherche du temps perdu, the original title of Proust's work, perhaps encloses a much more intuitive idea than the entire collection of volumes. Could it be? No... I have not read it.

As the rain falls, bits of scattered memories come and go to the shore of my conscience, and "all time past seems to be better".

Ok,enough... . The laundry, the cat... And my sleep.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Bites and blue

H. has painted her room in blue and C. asked her not to paint the whole house in blue. But the whole house is almost blue already. Through the window, the dark shades of the tall trees are painted against the dark marine blue of a belated dusk.

I applied this morning to give a bite-sized talk this coming autumn. The proposal for a 15-minute talk goes like this:

"When oil is extracted from a well at the bottom of the ocean and pumped along the pipe, amounts of water and gases are present from the bore well. It might not look important, but the manner in which all these components flow and behave in the pipe actually is of vital significance, in terms of efficiency and safety of the operation.

Under certain conditions, in horizontal pipes, oil travels on top of water, a flow pattern called "stratified". However, such configuration can become unstable (i.e. drop formation, unstable waves, etc.), and my research is concerned with this point: what makes a stratified flow unstable, why and how?

The difficult task to understand the nature of the flow inside the pipe has been attempted by many in the last decades, and many tools, models and solutions have been provided. Of course, there is still room for improvements, but the fact that many brilliant researches and some for many years have devoted themselves to the problem, worries me: how can I (who am new in the field, a sort of layman) contribute to the current state of knowledge?

In the last months, I have realized that the improvement of the models shall start from basic observations. Perhaps, in our time, one is tempted to think that progress is necessarily tied to advanced and complex techniques and that science and engineering are, more than ever, a closed realm for more and more initiated and exclusive specialists, away from the common mind, using state-of-the-art technology. However, I came to realize that the final laws of fluid mechanics, which are widely accepted and of used in stratified flows and everywhere else, were developed from the 18th century and that the big names and men did not have access to complex or special tools: they only had the power of their brains and relied intensely on basic observations of Nature.

Along with the use of current techniques, I am carrying simple experiments in the lab by bringing together oil and water in different manners and gathering all information that I can from observation. I think these experiments are visual and nice and very accessible to all, and make the nature of the problem clearer.

I wish to present my work in this manner, by showing my experiments in video clips and photographs and ideal scenarios and talk about them carrying the audience with me. I am convinced it will be a very entertaining short talk to them. The idea is not mine, of course: one cannot be the same after reading the Christmas lectures of Michael Faraday".

**

Amen.

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Sunday, July 3, 2011

Hello, Spain?

Not the English nor the French, not even the Americans have done so when the microphone fails and you have to speak to a large crowd in the central pitch of Wimbledon, specially if you lost the Great Final. Nadal did it this evening after losing the match against Djokovic... "Hello, hello, Spain?"

I loved it.

You can spot a Spaniard a thousand yards away anywhere in the world, and not because we disturb the public order, are hairy or obscure, or because we speak loud -not any more: the English and a great deal of Northern Europeans have now that recognition, mainly because they spend more time drunk, men and women alike-. The Spaniards' land is varied, and so is their customs, their food, their styles; the languages and dialects and accents are many, even the racial traits and, still, we are all alike. We and you can recognize a Spaniard anywhere, anytime.

And, however, an identity crisis strikes the country for years, being the situation aggravated in the last few. The problem is serious now. Why? The identity crisis comes from a clear disapproval of public displays of national affection (PDNA), rejection of national history (mainly the 20th century history, the Imperial past and the Church's history) and denial of national symbolism and patriotism. And why? Where is all this coming from? Why?

Therefore, when someone as Nadal takes pride in wrapping himself up in a National banner when he wins or come up with a "hello, Spain?", when he loses, it is a most refreshing display of something that, against all appearances, I hope is not entirely lost: the sense of an old and honorable nation.

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Simon Callow

I think that an army of picks and spades as much as hands and muscles will be needed to remove from the streets of Soho the piles of garbage and incivility that the festivity -proud and prides along- has been producing in the last hours, and still is, at a rate of a ton per minute. But I won't comment on this, neither about the Marxism fair in the main Court of the UCL this Saturday.

You have to be a complete ignoramus like myself to enjoy the pleasure of meeting Simon Callow for the first time tonight -I mean, learning about him: Simon Callow, Being Shakespeare, a representative of the set who sees William in a different light. And in the show, Callow does what he loves the most: Shakespeare. He has said that he would do Shakespeare until he drop dead.

Callow is a versatile artist -writing (16 books), TV (Chance in a Million) and movies (Four weddings and a funeral, Amdeus, Balad of the sad cafe). He is the boy who got struck by Macbeth  at the age of six in the lap of Mrs Birch and who read aloud Shakespeare and cried all stretched on the tiger-skin rug of the living room as a teenager; he is the young fellow who worked in the box office of the Old Vic theatre of London in the 60s where Lawrence Oliver reigned along with his National Theatre team: among the youngest, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Gambon (the headmaster Dumbledore in Harry Potter).

38 characters Simon Callow partially interprets in Being Shakespeare, a narrative of the 6 stages in the life of Shakespeare as seen by Jonathan Bate. Almost 2 hours of words and contrasts and elements of surprise, an excellent voice and diction, a massive piece of effort and work. Callow is 62 already... .

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Saturday, July 2, 2011

The equations of change

When related to motion, change is an English word that is becoming deep and mysterious to my ears. The point of Aristotle as the essence of Nature being the sense of change is profound and appealing; when the questions of how to and why [change] are posed, the problem gets fundamentally in the same spot it has been for ages. And, indeed, change is all around.

In Nature, the search for the equations of change is certain and, if such equations exist as a description or a model of reality, Nature conforms to them faithfully and fits tight.

In the case of individuals, in our case, however, the up-change (growth) and the down-change (decay) seems to have their own rules. How can one ensure he will grow and avoid his decay? And why? And what is the meaning of growing? In occasions, the streams of Life seems to carry the fate of a given individual beyond his will: Nature changes, Time goes by, but the Individual is stuck.

Sometimes, when you look back you find yourself being the same as years ago, doing the same, behaving the same. The mechanisms to turn your equations of change in motion look rusty and inoperative. When did you settle? Why is it too hard to move? How can you move?

A make-up tale comes now to my mind, as the tale of men and women with an assigned place in the Universe -it was called Vocation before, now is Passion- and all internal forces within them being loose for a while and gripping tight afterwards to guarantee their happiness.... However, there is no happy ending if the clamps closed before such spot is ensured or even glanced at, and men and women shall remain where they do not belong.

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Friday, July 1, 2011

Transformers 3D

This is the first Transformers movie that I have seen. Perhaps, too long, too stupid, too shallow, but had a good time with the graphics, popcorn and the 3D glasses. At the end, this is what movies are about today. It is the same story, and remains as much surprising as usual, no matter how many times is told: the road to progress and improvement is built by free-donors, snipers, isolated individuals. It is the distinction between individuals and the undefined mass. Faithful and determined individuals. Among them, generosity surges from necessity, not as an impending, Utopian obligation.

And the disturbing questions are:
What pushes individuals to behave like this?
What is the essence of our Nature as it depends itself on very unnatural individuals?

Tell me: do you really think that schools can teach children to be faithful individuals with golden hearts?

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