Do you remember this numbers from Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine?
Number of gun deaths:
Although there are claims that this data might be slightlybiased, one would expect that after the accusations and facts given on this picture, americans would steer away from the problem, right? Sadly, no.
Talvez não seja assim em todo o país, mas a zona onde vivo é bastante pródiga em publicidade não endereçada – do mini ao hiper, da loja de roupa para criança às lojas de artigos de bricolage, recebo todos os dias um pouco de tudo. Há sempre aquelas que se destacam pelas letras garrafais a dar-me os parabéns ganhou! responda já e ainda poderá ganhar este mundo e o outro como bónus! ou faça já uma fantástica excursão ao caminho de santiago de compostela a preços especiais!. Claro que também recebo correspondência dos seguidores alexandrino como o professor karamba ou o mestre cambai e é neste tipo de panfletos que reparei num pormenor que resolvi destacar.
Estes são são epenas dois exemplares que tinha à mão – já caíram na minha caixa de correio vários muito parecidos a este par. Tenho inquirido sobre o assunto e já foram formuladas várias teorias sobre estas semelhanças. Ficam aqui as melhores:
Serão bem vindas quaiquer outras teorias com que queiram contribuir com vista a esclarecer este grande imbróglio.
Quem é que não esboçou um sorriso quando ouviu falar pela primeira vez da operação apito dourado? Há que admitir que há originalidade na escolha dos nomes das operações da PSP pois este é apenas um entre muitos. Senão vejamos, já houve a operação mãos limpas (também no futebol), operação sirene oculta, operação trabalho limpo (e as outras, como são?), operação fechar os olhos (a minha preferida) e agora mais recentemente a operação chip-out.
E não é só cá no burgo que se fazem destas preciosidades, também há algumas importadas com piada como a operação ajax, operação justiça infinita e a operação tips (em busca da gorjeta perdida?).
Por tudo isto, queria sugerir aqui a criação de uma nova licenciatura, a LEÃO – Lic. em Eng. de Alcunhas de Operações. Desta forma dar-se-ia o reconhecido valor aos carolas que passam o tempo a inventar estas coisas para nos entreter.
If I was a book, I surely wouldn’t like to spend all my life in a bookshelf, dusting and waiting to get outdated. But nowadays, that seems to be the common case, if not onto a stack of them or into a card-box at some dark corner. Sure, it’s better than being burned, but isn’t much better either. And if I was a book, I would want to be read, of course, plenty of times, not just by a single person but by several, learning what were the parts of me that would make them sigh, cry or simply smile. I would have special attention to which sentences would make them pause or read over and over again, like if they were trying to understand and memorize something extremely important. Getting dust on a bookshelf looks a even darker destiny, when one things that a book can for instance, enjoy the wonders of falling on a reader chest that just felt asleep while reading it – being a dream appetizer can only be something great. Oh, and I would like to travel, to travel as much as possible from reader to reader, sharing the underlined sentences and notes some other reader did, like if it was a bonus story. The book story. And this is pretty much what the bookcrossing movement is all about, from a book point of view :-).
My keenness for books has increased since I’ve become a bookcrosser, not so long ago. Although a relatively small country, Portugal is one of the top 10 countries where the movement is more active and thus, meetings take place on a regular basis. Last month, I’ve had the chance to participate on my first bookcrossing meeting, here at Braga. It had place at Café Vianna and had the participation of a few Spanish bookcrossers who got dazzled by the amount of churchs Braga has. The event was relevant enough to get covered by one of the city newspapers – something that was a surprise to everyone. Books were exchanged, talked about and above all, everybody had a good time. There are some photos of the meeting here.
Speaking about bookcrossing meetings and photos, I’ve noticed that there wasn’t any group at flickr for bookcrossing pictures so I’ve created one so that people can post their pictures of books, bookcrossing meet-ups and such.
Lil’P was sometimes asked if he was a royalty member because of his long name. His five long names were always subject of smiles when filling in forms and people always asked which was the weird country where one could have such a long name. Asking if people really wanted his full name also raised eyebrows so there was no escape from it. But there were a lot more cultural differences, some more peculiar than others.
Something that got lil’P confuse right at start, was the cheek kissing. While he was used to give two, one in each face – something he believe to be a standard anywhere – Dutch gave three. At first, it didn’t seem to be a big problem, actually it was a good extra, but that cultural aspect was about to become more tricky than he initially thought.
Assuming that only Dutch had differences on the cheek kissing, was his first mistake. Although Italians gave two as lil’P, they start with the left cheek – something lil’P found to be awfully confusing and counterintuitive. Almost as confusing as the ones who only gave one kiss leaving lil’P floating on the atmosphere; probably the same feeling Dutch must have when waiting for a non-existing third kiss.
So, what to do? Well, if it was Netherlands, then everybody should give three, just like Dutch, that seemed like a good solution. There, problem solved! Or maybe not – then he found out that some German don’t kiss at all and may see it in a offensive way. Things got even worse when he realized that some French guys even tried to kiss other males on the cheek which made a lot of people uncomfortable. Actually, even within the same country people could act in different ways regarding cheek kissing, so lil’P ended up, like most people, trying to do his best on those initial seconds when knowing someone new, trying to evaluate their movements the best way he could and act accordingly. If things went wrong, it was a good quick-start subject of conversation anyway.
Living with a bunch of foreigners was one of the best parts of it all. Soon the kitchen became a international meeting point where people spent a big part of their time hanging around, knowing each other better. After everybody got over the fact of be living in a place with a name that most foreign couldn’t pronounce correctly – Oranjerivierdreef, people started assimilating the gastronomic differences – finding a common taste was a challenging task in the first days, but soon they started trying other things and having some good (and sometimes very bad) surprises. Lil’P kitchen skills weren’t that good but apparently his Portuguese typical way of cooking rice with fried onion seemed to surprise everybody which wasn’t very hard to do since most people confessed not to know how to cook edible rice without a rice cooker anyway.
Shopping was also sometimes tricky but there was always a German around to help avoiding later surprises like the classics meat&sugar or reinventing the sour-milk concept. Everybody seem to got addicted to the Dutch vla pretty quick as the kitchen fridge soon became a display of all the varieties: vanilla and chocolate seemed to be the most popular flavours, but caramel, stracciatella and tiramisu also had some fans.
But the kitchen wasn’t just a place to cook and hang around – it was also where everybody could show their artistic skills. The building was very old and nobody really care what happened to the walls, as long it didn’t offend anyone, so the kitchen walls soon turned into a canvas. Some more artistic than others, everybody had the chance to express themselves on the walls, in particular, everybody had fun adding items to the things we love and things we loathe about life lists.
(to be continued)
It has been quiet around here, and besides the lacking of will to write, it’s been one year since my first post on a personal blog – a good time to rethink about the blog itself.
It all started posting on a shared blog with a friend and at the time, it’s main propose was to update friends with my whereabouts as an exchange student in The Netherlands. It always had a temporary character and eventually it got replaced by a personal blog in the livejournal.com and later on, migrated to this version integrated on my homepage. Along the way, my ideals about blogging have changed considerably and that reflected on both the content and the format of what I wrote. There were a couple of times when the blog was nearly to be putted aside but it has survived so far – and in my case, I need those moments to justify all the others.
For all those who might don’t know yet, my lil’P stories are an attempt to document how my erasmus experience was, back in 2003/04. It’s meant to have what wasn’t written on the first blog using a different approach, this time giving more emphasis on how important it really was to me – something I didn’t do properly on the first attempt. It just felt like a documentary, I guess.
Anyway, blogging will keep going around here, for the moment. And to take some juice out of this personal rant on my blogging experience, here are some of the most curious search strings people used on search engines and ended up (somehow) on this page.
by no particular order:
mini bikes
string photos
micro string fotos
gothic crucifixe pics
red light district in utrecht
orgasmatron
algarve stadium structural design details
braga hot girl
gothic wear
kamasutra
reasons to live in portugal
street bikers
just a bit of silliness really
luís figo wife foto
smokers lungs fotos
what is meaning of 24 over 7
some in portuguese:
sorriso amarelo
mamarracho dos poetas
que trata de wife swap
como tricotar
tatuagens new school
fotos de atraso mental
moelas em fotos
consequências das cãibras
o meu…penso que é mesmo cansaço!
coisas bizarras
combater insonias
fotos de guitarras brancas de bandas
músicas transmontanas
dores depois de extrair siso
requisitos para ser cantora
ovos em conserva
carta para amigo secreto brincadeira
mousse de chocolate simplificada
kamasutra simbolos -venda -oral -anal -compra -blog -blogger -procura-se
braga cortinas
for more, check here
The next person to accuse me of lacking in ambition will have to put up with me.
Doesn’t mater religion, beliefs or race. It can happen to anyone. And despite everybody knowing this for a fact, everybody still falls on the very same mistake: we all prefer not to think about it, and just assume that they will always be there, side-by-side, till the old age. Until it happens.
So one day, we feel inside a space that is completely empty, a big hole that makes all the difference on the daily life. I’m still not certain about how I’ll cope with all this – people says that time cures everything, but I find it hard to believe. I miss my tooth a lot.
Portugal is a place where people are used to eat well. Very well. Not only the meal time is a moment to sit around a table, with time and a nice warm meal, Portugal has one of the best gastronomy’s in the world.
Despite all that, young people are known for not having very healthy food habits, in particular the students who live by themselves during school time. Usually this is even worse between male students that live together and find out that the amount of recipes they manage to do successfully is quite low. Even counting with the microwaves ones.
Some become avid fast-food consumers, others re-invent the concept of breakfast cereals, but only a few really try to cook on a regular basis. From this last group, I’ve seen a lot in the past 5 years, but I’m not going to rant about that now.
I happen to live with an excellent cook. Not only he enjoys eating well – like me and any portuguese -, but he also enjoys cooking and does it in a way capable of blushing quite a bunch of so called professional cooks. Each meal is not only a pleasure to both eyes and mouth, but cooking is also a constant place for improvisation being the surprise one of the ingredients he masters best.
I know I’ll miss this one day.
Yesterday, was one of those days when it’s easy to catch me with a distante look and a stupid smile drawn on the face: it was exactly one year since I returned from my 6 month exchange period in The Netherlands. From time to time, watching someone riding a bike, seeing a windmill, or a simple mention to it reminds me of how much I miss it and how much I want to return there. It’s on days like this that I restart making plans to return, while wondering why I’m still here and why I didn’t return already.
On any other day, I just want to return there.
PS: sometimes I thank myself for not owning a credit card.
