Tapensen! (H1N1)

The weather (or e-Small talk)

For centuries, the weather has been the primary subject of banal conversation between individuals that meet on the street and have no desire to share any deep or personal thoughts. More recently, with the dawn of the taxi, the weather has become the theme of choice for passengers that want to avoid the awkward silence that occurs when riding alone in the back seat of someone else's car.

Today, as the internet becomes the medium of choice for communication within the human species, it is only normal to expect that the weather will soon take over as the main source of inspiration for armies of bloggers trying desperately to publish their voice to an anonymous crowd of readers. So today, dear blogfans, I feel it is my duty to engage in some small talk and tell you about the weather:

OMG this weather is crazy. I can't believe it was snowing on April 1st and yesterday it was 15 degrees (Celsius)! Just last week, I was walking around with a winter coat and a scarf and today I'm considering wearing flip flops and a t-shirt. Jeeez! Gotta love Vancouver.

(Yes, unfortunately, it is rather difficult to talk about the weather using formal language, for fear of sounding like a television weather man. i.e. "a low pressure system entering the province from the north will disperse the cold air and bring springlike temperatures and clear skies on Sunday.")

La dieta FARC

Atención nutriólogos y profesionales de la salud, Ingrid Betancourt presenta la Dieta FARC:













(si no fuera tan mocha, ya hubiera sacado un calendario)

Top 5 Inauguration Requests

After watching tons of live feeds and live coverage and live blogging and live almost anything you can think of about the Presidential Inauguration, I can only say a big "clap, clap, clap!" to the US for finally letting a non-cowboy inhabit the White House. It was way overdue.

Now, my atheist inner self is begging for me to ask what the hell was all that show with the reverends? The whole day felt like the anointment of a Feudal Lord with all those blessings and the Bible oath and all that jazz. Weird. (gave me the chills, really)

And last but not least, here is my list of Top 5 requests to Obama. They need to be addressed ASAP:

5. Kindly invite those Wall Street punks to Camp Guantanamo.
4. Trade in the 6 ton Cadillac limo for an electric car (I suppose you could get a magnetic bullet shield).
3. Promise not to say "God Bless America" ever again.
2. Tell Hillary to forever shut up with her "this one time, in the Oval Office" stories.
1. Give a TiVo subscription to Ted Kennedy so he can at least watch a replay of the Inauguration Parade.

Yes we did!

(or the Presidential Orange Mocha Frappuccino.)



(I got this from a feminist blog...but I lost the link!)

The most sophisticated piece of technology you will ever pee on

As a result, as a result, as a result.

As a result of being in the library for six hours, I found this utterly amusing:

Religulous, or the need to doubt

Beware. This post will offend you if you place faith above reason in your scale of values.

I watched the film Religulous this past weekend and found it phenomenal. Bill Maher's take on organized religion mixes elements of "laugh your face off" comedy with bits of intelligent skepticism a la Richard Dawkins. As I expected, the film was less about the impact of religious beliefs and more about the ignorant society that keeps them alive. It was hilarious, inspiring, and at times offensive in all the right ways.

Bill Maher is unforgiving in his documentary, where he puts Scientologists and Jews, Cantheists and Catholics on the same plane. And that's precisely what makes the mockumentary worthwile: the realization that all of these organized religions can be as absurd as the other. The fact that the Bible is the #1 all time bestseller doesn't make religions based on it less illogical! For Bill Maher, Scientologists are as crazy for believing in the alien spaceship as Catholics for believing in a virgin woman giving birth to the human version of a God.



Surprisingly, the most intelligent parts of the film were provided by the Vatican's chief astronomer and a retired Vatican priest. These men, although strictly religious, made it clear that it is not the educated religious elites that take religious scriptures as dogma ad absurdum, but rather opportunistic religious leaders that use the fear inciting power of religion to spread harmful lies. (i.e. the for profit religious corporations like the Evangelists)

But the message is by no means that of intolerance towards religious people. Maher is not against religion per se. Instead, he is against the negative effects that religious thought has on the human thought process...because the mechanism of "faith" goes against the process of questioning, of unrestrained curiosity. He criticizes these organizations because they discourage scientific doubt in favor of imposed dogma. And a mind that doesn't doubt, might as well be dead.

Needless to say, I left the theatre with a big smile on my face.

Huh?

Giraffes do it standing up.

So does everyone else.

But still. They're taller.


(now, for some real laughs)

Le Camembert est mort!

I've lived with a foul smell in my apartment since last Thursday. I took a minute or two every morning and every night to try to find the source, with no success. I knew it was coming from the kitchen, but kitchens are such good keepers and producers of smells that I assumed it was a "phase" my dear kitchen was going through. I let it be.

But this smell was not one to dissipate into the fresh air coming from the window. It intensified as the days went by...until it became unbearable. Today, at 1300 hours, I decided to take some action.

I poked my nose out into the air to follow its trail...which led me to the cutlery drawers. "Weird", I thought, "there's no food in these drawers that could rot." I slowly opened them one by one, expecting a dead rat or a similar horror in any of them. Nothing of the sort appeared.

Instead, as I opened the last drawer (the one where I keep plastic containers, ziplocs, etc), I found a deliciously putrid Camembert stored neatly in a small tupperware! Ahhh...the beauty of having a pothead roommate!

Shit guys! They figured me out.

Browsing through this jewel, I came across a line that might launch the third wave of my identity crisis (the first and second waves will be explained upon request):

Fact #7 - White people earn credibility by being into film from strange countries - “oh you liked Batman? Yeah, I didn’t see it, I’m really into Serbian film now. They had a great retrospective at the Vancouver Festival.”

Shit guys! I'm white!

p.s. For an alternative view of "shit guys!" visit The End of the World.

Aliens are free from original sin

Ahhh... the beauty of surfing the internet on an otherwise uneventful rainy evening in Vancouver. I found this delicious piece of news that has given me hope: I can now sleep without fear, knowing that I will not encounter hordes of aliens in heaven when I die. (I'm thinking that the title to the previous post could be better applied to this one...)

Do you need a tray?

Friday evening again. The connotations of those three words are enormous. In Mexico City it would first mean a fight to the death with traffic... then, if you emerged victorious (no headache or bulging vein on the forehead), the night could turn into anything. In a city with 23 million people and so many choices, you're always missing out on something...that's what makes it exciting.

Friday evening in Vancouver. This would normally imply either rain or live music, or an intermittent combination of both. Maybe a bowl of fabulous noodles and then a stop at Half Alive. But tonight it's snowing! Yes...at the end of April...snowing like crazy in Vancouver (you could say that the unpredictability of the weather is what makes this city so exciting). So I'm just in the mood for my couch, a book, and some takeout chow mein. And a little bit of comedy:




And some genius did this Lego version.