I'm starting a new series on day-to-day issues affecting Brazilians and foreigners living in Brazil, so I'd like to ask for your input! The first post will be about bureaucracy in Brazil, and the second about transportation in Rio de Janeiro. Feel free to share your experiences, opinions, and recommendations on both of these issues in the comments or by email.
And as a reminder, for daily updates on interesting Brazil news and info, follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
I was in DC over the weekend, attending a Brazil conference amongst other things, and I've been following Obama's visit as much as I can, but have a lot of catching up to do this week. If anyone has any suggested reading, articles, or videos, please feel free to post them in the comments or shoot me an email. My overall reaction is one of mixed feelings, in that some pretty key mishaps strained the supposed good will that the trip was supposed to foster. Anyway, I'll try to get a post up tomorrow or Tuesday, and I'll also include a post about the conference some time this week.
This week, I had the delightful experience of getting some insanely vicious malware onto my laptop, which I tried every possible way to get rid of using advice from IT people, and ended up having to pay to get it fixed. Thankfully, I'm up and running again, and I'm now really considering switching over to Mac.
In any event, this week is a huge week for Brazil-U.S. relations, as Hillary Clinton has landed in Brasilia and is set to meet with Lula tomorrow in her first official visit to Brazil. Recently, I wrote about Lula's foreign policy over on FPB and about Hillary's visit, amongst other things. The post resulted from an email exchange about politics with a Brazilian friend, the hubby of an American blogger friend, who explained to me how Lula is a lula, in the political sense, a metaphor that had never occurred to me quite like that. So thanks, Henrique! [Update: Henrique sent me an interesting op-ed about Hillary's visit - read it here]
Hillary's visit is packed with a lot of action items (she only has one day), but Iran seems to be at the top of the list. The US government wants Brazil to get on board with sanctions to try to contain Ahmadinejad, who many suspect is building a nuclear bomb. From the look of things, Lula is likely going to say, não, obrigado, because the Brazilian government does not want to be told what to do by the US, even though the Iran policy has yet to be finalized. Personally, I'm not sure sanctions will work on a mentally unstable dictator hellbent on destruction, but if anyone could pacify a lunatic, maybe Lula's the man for the job. I'm not a huge Lula fan, but I definitely recognize his diplomatic skills. He's due to make an official visit to Tehran, and maybe he can bring some cachaça to placate the Iranian leader, a la Ze Carioca. Or maybe he could appease him with humor?
Hillary and Lula have some serious trade issues to discuss, including a bitter WTO conflict and the purchase of airplanes for the Brazilian air force (the US wants Brazil to buy Boeing, but it looks like they are leaning toward France). They're also due to discuss aid in Haiti, since both countries are taking the lead in recovery efforts. Hillary is somewhat of a controversial figure in the US, but regardless of your political views, she, like Lula, is extremely capable in terms of diplomacy. The best we can hope from this visit is smoother sailing between the two countries, and maybe even a rumored visit by Obama to Brazil sometime soon.
I was always taught never to use quotes in speeches, papers, essays, and the like, but I've always loved them. I have Quote of the Day on my iGoogle and if I come across something I like in a book or a movie, I always add it to my quote collection. Here's part of it:
"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned." - Antonio Gramsci ["O desafio da modernidade é viver sem ilusões, sem se tornar desiludido."]
My syntax is highly complicated cuz I emigrated from the single greatest little place in the Caribbean Dominican Republic/I love it, Jesus, I'm jealous of it --In the Heights (musical)
"It's
OK, muchacha, he said. Santo Domingo will always be there. It was there
in the beginning and it will be there in the end." --Junot Diaz, in The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
"There is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference." -- Machado de Assis (I found this quote originally in English, and for the life of me I cannot find the original in Portuguese)
La indiferencia es bizca. -Carlos Eire, in Waiting for Snow in Havana [Indifference is cross eyed]
תיקון עולם - Repairing the world
Conoces bien, cada guerra, cada herida, cada ser Conoces bien cada guerra en la vida y el amor tambien. --Sergio Vargas, "La Quiero a Morir"
"Os ricos não podem continuar vivendo como se fossem uma ilha no meio de um mar de pobreza." --Ayrton Senna [The wealthy cannot continue to live as if they were on an island in a sea of poverty.]
Lo ha hecho pecho. --Cuban saying [What's done is done]
"O povo sabe o que quer mas o povo também quer o que não sabe." - Gilberto Gil [The people know what they want, but the people also want what they don't know.]
Deja que el mundo te cambie y cambiarás el mundo. -The Motorcycle Diaries [Let the world change you and you will change the world.]
There's no rehab for stupidity. -Chris Rock
"El que tiene un derecho no obtiene el de violar el ajeno para mantener el suyo." - Jose Marti [Someone with rights cannot violate the rights of others to maintain his own]
"Todos los días la gente se arregla el cabello, ¿por qué no el corazón?" - Ernesto Che Guevara [Every day we fix our hair, why not our hearts?]
"You've
got to have an exit strategy to stay principled. If not, you'll
compromise principal for materialism and comfort." - Omar Minaya
"Mas se você achar/Que eu tô derrotado/Saiba que ainda estão rolando os dados..." - Cazuza
"Morar em Nova York é bom, mas é uma merda. Morar no Rio é uma merda, mas é bom." -- Tom Jobim [Living in New York is good, but it sucks. Living in Rio sucks, but it's good.]
"Los
seres humanos no nacen para siempre el día en que sus madres los
alumbran, sino que la vida los obliga a parirse a sí mismos una y otra
vez." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Paradise was always over there,
a day's sail away. But it's a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and
wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but
somehow you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life
belonged. Home." --J. Maarten Troost
I've had this post on the back burner for awhile, and the time has come to put it up and make it a page, as well. I'd like to dispel some misunderstandings about commenting on this blog, and to provide some real-life examples to put things into perspective. For those of you with your own blogs, if you can't relate to this yet, you will likely be able to in the future.
FAQ: Comments
1. You're all about free speech, and yet you moderate your comments. That's unfair!
Contrary to what some believe, free speech does not apply to commenters. Most major blogs, newspapers, magazines, and websites moderate their comments in some form due to the hailstorm of crazy that is the Internet. For some real life examples, consider this:
At political rallies, only certain people are chosen to speak, and usually plan ahead of time what they will say. In magazines, they never publish every letter to the editor they receive; they only pick a few to use. In newspapers, op-ed pieces are carefully chosen from a huge pool. On the TV news, much more footage is taken than actually goes into a broadcast; it is meticulously pared down to only certain interviews or certain parts of interviews. On the radio, only certain callers are picked to speak on the air.
If I don't speak in Portuguese to Brazilians, I'm perfectly happy speaking in English just to hear their accents (it's disappointing when their English is perfect).
Alex Castro was discussing this accent issue on his Twitter yesterday, and posted this hilarious video from BBC'S Creature Comforts series. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be a lion, but rather some other wild cat that is actually found in Brazil, but it kind of doesn't matter because his monologue (and hand gestures) are priceless.
I am insanely busy this week, and I'm also working on posts for Portuguese Blog and FPA Brazil Blog, so I'm going to keep it short. Please enjoy: Tuti tu tu tu.
