ztraffer

Shopping for lightsabers? Enjoy.

I've always seen the ability to laugh at one's self as sign of sanity and good nature, so this article from ArabNews.com really made me laugh... LOCAL PRESS: Thefts impossible on Saudia flights By MUHAMMAD SULEIMAN AL-AHIDIB | OKAZ Published: Jul 26, 2010 23:22 Updated: Jul 26, 2010 23:22 NEWS agencies, newspapers and satellite channels have all carried the story of an Air France flight attendant who had been stealing from passengers while they slept, especially on long haul flights such as those between Paris and Tokyo. The reports noted that Japanese passengers usually carry with them large amounts of cash as well as valuable mobile phones, and that the air hostess was caught after it was discovered that most of the thefts happened on flights she was on. This woman would not have been able to steal if she were working for Saudi Arabian Airlines. First, she could easily find a job with Saudia because our people do not thoroughly scrutinize résumés. However, I do not say she w...

Every four years, the world gets together for the biggest party in the planet: the World Cup. What used to be a European and South American club, is now truly global, with North America, Asia, and now Africa having hosted the event. The last World Cup final was watched by 725 million people -and that number grows with every event. Here in Uruguay, every match is televised, and you can pretty much tune-in to a World Cup-related show 24/7. When Uruguay plays, an eerie calm befalls and it suddenly feels like a ghost town -at work, in school, at home or at restaurants, every last soul is in front of a TV. World Cup fever is here.

Montevideo is a city full of trees. They line most streets in abundance. Yet the species chosen don't produce the full spectrum of red and gold leaves come fall, as do most trees in North America; just a few shades of dull brown and yellow. I miss the symphony of color.

The health insurance industry is very powerful and so is their lobby. They have almost limitless resources, and have used them to apply enormous pressure to congress and to conduct a missinformation campaign of legendary proportions in order to maintain the status quo. They don't want to give up the golden egg goose -everything else is inconsequential. This is of course, predictable. Why give up the such an enviable situation? The truly remarkable fact is that the current administration managed to break the status quo. Altruism over self-interest. Truth over deception. History will rememeber this day as a good day for the US.

Some snapshots from the Guns 'n Roses concert I attended last Thursday... No bad, but it started 90 minutes late, at 10:30 PM, and it ended around 4 AM... GNR started playing around 1:30 AM, and people were starting to fall asleep... there were rumors that Axl Rose got there really late, so we had to put up with Sebastian Bach a bit too long. In spite of it all, it was an awesome concert.

In case you haven't heard enough about this film, it's a visually stunning, very well executed epic about a technologically primitive but environmentally advanced people living in harmony with their home, Pandora, a moon orbiting a gas giant in a distant star system. Their only sin was to stand between belicose, technically savy, and environmentally primitive humans, and the object of their greed: a valuable substance with the comically foreshadowing name of "unobtanium". The story has been told before: western/transnational powers steamrolling the innocent natives for King or quarterly reports. Watching this film, I found myself wishing I could live a simple and full life in this beautiful quasi-magical land among these free-spiritited people and their tropical paradise, in perfect synergy with their surroundings, free of materialistic concerns, lacking nothing. Then I realized they lacked a very important something: the keys to the Universe. It is true that the nati...

I often find myself doumfounded by how often policies that are in the best interest of the majority -that are aimed at fixing major problems- are met with strong antagonism by large sectors of the the public. Helth care reform in the US is an obvious example. I have a hard time living with the fact that significant percentages of the population can be so easily manipulated, regardless of how much money special interests throw at maintaining the status quo. I'm not sure what upsets me the most: that politicians will play to the tune of special interests against the people they are supposed to serve, or that people will actually fall for it. The article below goes a long way to explain why this happens, so I decided to copy the whole thing into my posting. Enjoy. The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare ...

No winter for me... :-)

Pour.  Sip.  Look cool Mate is a traditional caffeinated tea-like drink from southern South America. Unlike tea or coffee, the filtration process happens while drinking, not before: a special metal straw has a closed end whith tiny holes in it that allows in the infusion but keeps out the herb. A special "cup" or gourd is filled with "Yerba Mate" once, and then hot water, usually from a thermos, is poured into the gourd. Lastly, the straw goes into the gourd and the infusion sipped via the metal straw. You can read all about it here . The habit of drinking Yerba Mate is so common in Uruguay that you can often see young and old drinking it on the streets.

Its been six months since the fraudulent elections in Iran, and despite all the arrests, imprisonments, torture, and killings of protesters, the opposition is still very strong, as the recent demonstrations follwing lead opposition cleric Hossein Ali Montazeri's funeral show. It seems clear this goverment won't complete its full term, the question is how long will it last, and what will happen afterwards. I pray for a fully democratic government in Iran that will help stabilize the middle east and prove that full-fledged democracies are viable in muslim countries.

A few weeks ago I arrived home in Montevideo anticipating a peaceful vacation in this small corner of the world. Little did I know...

More snapshots from Mexico City

Walking down the Avenue of the Dead in this precolumbian city, you can almost feel the weight of time adding to the thousands of tons of masonry -over twenty centuries since its first buildings were erected. I was particularly aware of this fact because only a day before, I had been marveling at five hundred year old cathedrals in the historic distric of Mexico City and all the history since the Spaniards arrived in Mexico. Knowing that the builders of this city faded away without ever coming into contact with the people of the Old World feels like watching the remains of an alternate current of history. What if the the Europeans had never crossed the Atlantic and the Mayans had thrived and expanded? Perhaps I'd be posting pictures of ancient Roman ruins and wondering the same thing.

The Zocalo You can feel the flow of history in this town, from the 500 year old cathedrals, to the glass towers from the age of corporate globalization just a few blocks apart, to the great cities abandoned long before Columbus was born. It is also a city of sights and smells: ubiquitous food vendors fill sidewalks with the smell of cooking, the ever-present always-on flashing red and blue police-car lights, the pedestrian-only commercial streets. And in spite of all the hustle and bustle one would expect from the second-largest city in the world, it is surprisingly orderly, and it feels quite safe -at least it feels that way so far -maybe I haven't come across a "fun" neighborhood yet...

I found this old family picture, and I thought about how the past seems like a foreign country: most things are easily recognizable, but just different enough to make them seem a bit strange, unfamiliar. The infant on my great-grandmother's lap is my Dad.

Chevy Chase, Maryland

Of course they had to be French...

After reading this article , my original intention was to reflect on the irrational fear of change that afflicts so many of our species. A useful survival trait perhaps, in an era of tribal warfare, but no more. At a certain level, I feel that Europeans are avoiding their responsibility to take on their share of leadership in the world. I was reminded of the ancient myth of a Europa in distress, and started searching for an appropriate image to go with my yet to be written post. Aside from finding the great bronze piece above, I became more interested in the details of this mythical woman who lent her name to a continent, and so I -ahem- binged her. Thus I found myself browsing this lost presentation. Intrigued by its, shall we say, uniqueness, I looked into it and found it was put together by a school kid. It was then that it hit me -I always talk about how everybody has something to teach and today I was taught ancient mythology by a 6th grader. This was a completely wasted half-hou...