Montpellier, je t'aime

... and thanks to you guys, it was also so much fun.

Badass of the Week

First we had the all-time adorable Eric Northman saying "Good night, tiny humans!",

but then came Shane Botwin and hit the Mexican bitch with a croquet mallet because he couldn't find a golf club and we had a winner of the Badass of the Week prize!

Cold method

From Amsterdam Fashion Week via niwdenapolis:

Life Is a Bitch

Martin Zach won Mr. Czechia 2009 on Friday. Less than 24 hours later, he had an accident during some stupid ski-jumping competition, injured his cervical vertebrae that left him quadriplegic.

The Inhabited Island

Growing up in a socialist Eastern Bloc country, we didn't have Star Wars but Strugatsky brothers. I still consider their humanist books as the best works of science-fiction genre. I recently found that the Russians adapted one of their most interesting books, the Inhabited Island, into two movies. While the ending is kind of cheesy and doesn't match well the original ambiance of the book, I was pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of the adaptation. While I was not imagining Maxim Kammerer as a blond surfer boy,

the Gaal siblings, Gai and Rada, were chosen perfectly:

Пётр Фёдоров, who played Gai, my favourite character in the book, was so incredibly charming!

PR S0602

The sixth season of Project Runway has started! It has moved from the mostly-gay-oriented Bravo network to the more Mom-at-home Lifetime channel and it shows. In the first (almost forgettable) episode, a conceptual designer was eliminated, something that would not happen while on Bravo. They were keeping these freaks around because they were so damn entertaining. Not on Lifetime. You are different = Auf wiedersehen! It has happened this week to the only Asian designer in the bunch. He came with this Eastern-philosophy-like bullshit about the chicken and eggs and dressed a pregnant woman like she was bearing an egg wrapped in Jesus-like rough linen. Oh, what a delusional idea, which, however, might have worked before but not now!
This season, the group of designers is extremely strong. Much stronger than I have seen in the last five (!) season and almost as strong as in the first Canadian PR. The winning look is here:

It's impeccable! Very well done Shirin!

True Blood Lovers

Something for you. Still waiting for the Eric's doll (to do some bad things). Maybe they will make a Godric's one, too. That would be heaven!

Typefaces

Smilla/Lisbeth

I just finished the second book from the Millenium series. While the first book seemed slightly out of focus (yet still worth reading), the second is a true gem, both stylistically and plot-wise. Lisbeth Salander, the major character in the Millenium books, reminded me a lot of Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen from Peter Høeg's "Smilla's Sense of Snow". Both heroines are outcasts, extremely intelligent (Smilla is a world-known glaciologist while Lisbeth is a computer guru), Scandinavians, both come from dysfunctional families... and equally hate men who hate women.


Can't wait for the third (but unfortunately also the last) book to be out (October 2009).

M(in)isterios 8:57

Walking to the train station today, I witnessed a breathtaking scene in front of the entrance door. One man, in his thirties and very tall, was wearing a light gray suit, a white shirt and a tie. He was crying. His companion was in his twenties, wearing camouflage shorts and a T-shirt. He put a hand on the arm of the crying one and then entered the Metro station, carrying a big suitcase. They didn't exchange a word.

The Penguin Gifts

The battery mystery

During the 10 days of vacation, a battery in my BlackBook died. It only went through 60 charging cycles! Well, it was constantly inside my notebook and connected to the AC, but Apple claims that charged battery is kept without further charging. I would take it out, but Apple also said that removing the battery would cause a drop in the processing power. It's quite confusing then what the user should do to avoid similar issues. In my old and loved 12" PowerBook, the battery was slowly dying - from initial 3.5 hours of power to just couple of minutes before it finally died, but that was a gradual process. In the BlackBook case, the battery died instantly, without any warnings. Anyways, I paid the Apple tax yesterday.

El robo con violencia

I just got back from my vacation. It was very exhausting, but in a good way. On Friday night, Jesus called me to go out for a couple of drinks. On the way home, I took my standard street, normally a very quiet one. I saw that somebody was walking behind me, but in Madrid that simply happens, so I didn't pay attention to it. Shortly after, that guy called me and asked for a cigarette. I replied I didn't have any and at that very moment, two of his friends who were hiding attacked me, the third broke my glasses and they stole some cash and my mobile phone. The next day, I went to the comisaría, which was full of tourists reporting pocket-picking in the Metro, but when the police heard that mine included violence en vía pública urbana, they started to take it more seriously. On Monday, by coincidence, the free newspaper was reporting this modus operandi, but also with knives included, so at the end, I was actually quite lucky.

Send Away the Tiger

Last Tuesday I updated my Blackbook to MacOS 10.5 after realizing that many useful applications were Leopard-only. Worried about losing some valuable data, I first cloned my old Tiger-based system disk and after the approximately one-hour-long installation, my computer booted into the 10.5.6. Not surprisingly, all my settings were kept, including my network settings, wallpapers etc., similarly to my last upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4. However, the installer deleted my printers, which I found kind of odd, but well, there is always a price. Unfortunately, the more important loss were all my e-mails! The Mail app launched but did not show any mails in my 3 accounts and could not download anything from the servers and had to be force quit. I started to search the Apple discussion forums and it turned out to be a known bug! Fortunately, some geek posted a quite laborious but functional way how to fix it. C'mon Apple, WTF? If the Parallels virtualization kernel extensions could be tolerated, why you cannot make your own applications to be upgraded correctly?
Overall, I like the "new" system, the QuickLook function saves me a LOT of time going through pistures and documents at work.

March 15, 1939

The crisis

I lost somewhere the dock-to-USB cable that I use for my nano and because that model does not allow me to use the old dock-to-Firewire cable that I have, I made a trip to the fnac to get a new one. Unpacking the box, I realized that the crisis had really arrived:

My Own Private Lightshow

I was leaving the lab quite late today and therefore, I was almost alone in the train. It has never appeared to me, but to work as a pilot of these trains must be truly spectacular. As the train was lunging through the tunnel at a very high speed, the myriads of electric sparks illuminated the darkness. Such a breathtaking trip.

Cover arts

Hand In Glove

William, It Was Really Nothing

Danielle 1988

The fourth episode of LOST brought together two characters that I wouldn't expect to meet again. Jin, presumably dead, was found by a group of hot French scientists during a heavy storm that sunk their ship. The pregnant member of the crew later introduced herself as Danielle Rousseau! That means that Jin was also trapped in the time travelling journey, together with the rest of 815ers. They made three time jumps: first to 2004, when the hatch exploded and Claire gave birth, witnessed by Sawyer; then to an unidentified time in the future, when they were attacked by a group of mysterious people and when the time started to shift again, Sawyer yelled to the sky: "Thank you, Lord!"; and finally to 1988, ending in the storm that destroyed the French ship and Sawyer commented: "I'll take that back!". I love this season so far!

Hypocrites

Michael Phelps, one of the greatest athletes of all time, is 23 year old, smoked pot at some party and some idiot provided the tabloids with the photo. He was out of the training season. If he was holding a bottle of vodka, nothing would have happened. In this judgmental society though, Michael Phelps was suspended from the team for three months and has lost his Kellogg's endorsement because he was "no longer consistent" with the image of the company. Fucking hypocrites!
Seems that Seth Meyers agrees:

Time machine

Today after the swimming, I used for the first time some lotion that I bought on Saturday. In a blink of an eye, the smell sent me to the West Blaine Street, crossing the railway track on a bike and watching Mt. Baldy covered with snow. The smell of orange blossoms.

D&G Fall 2009

My favourite four looks:

Ms. Eloise Hawking

Another brilliant episode of Lost this week, almost touching the greatness of The Constant. Fortunately, we haven't seen the Oceanic 6 at all, as the plot was entirely focused on two of my most loved characters, Daniel Faraday and Desmond Hume. Faraday was sent in the last time jump to the 1950's and it seems he actually met his mother, an Other. What is the most amazing about this TV show is the consistency, running for five seasons, with characters written off, others given more screen time, there is not a single contradictory element and the viewer feels like assembling a gigantic puzzle! Well done, indeed.
PS. Desmond, oh Desmond... so stylish, the colour combination is lovely...

Cândido Godói

Pretty mysterious.

The Camp is not gone

It hasn't been built yet. The fifth season of one of the best TV series is back. The first two episodes of LOST were broadcasted on Wednesday and they were amazing, mainly the first one. When Ben moved the island in the last episode of the fourth season, I kept wondering what has happened to the people on it and well, now we know. They are continuously tortured by time jumps similar to a music from a broken record, as my favourite character Daniel Faraday said. During one of these jumps, Daniel talks to his constant, Desmond Hume, who is still in charge of the Hatch!

Daniel tells him to go to Oxford to see his mother. In the LOST universe, she may as well be Ms. Hawking, who was seen in the second part talking to Ben and giving him 70 hours to fix the mess.

Yes, You Should

Yeah, things sure will be different...

Entropa

by David Černý. More here, including the clarification pdf.

UPDATE: It all turned out to be a big joke. Nevertheless, I still like the Polish design a lot, Catholic priests raising a gay flag? Priceless.

Snail

I don't like shopping for food on Saturday mornings. The store is always full of people, which is kind of annoying. Yesterday, I wanted to get my fruits and vegetables for the weekend there but, probably due to the heavy snow, I found the shelves almost empty. Today, waiting in the long queue in the cosmetics aisle, I have spotted a box with a nice picture of a garden snail, saying: crema facial con extractos de caracol. I found it ridiculously disgusting and funny at the same time.

Snow in Cantoblanco

Incredible! Photos courtesy of Marta de 317.

The FORWARD directive

Romper el cristal para acceder al martillo rompecristales. Who are the brains behind this gem?

El golpe más fantástico

DH S05E11

The pulse and a facial hair. Hilarious.

Bird nest

Stephen Sackur discussed with other four BBC correspondents what was ahead for us in the coming year. He predicts a big theme for 2009: the era of hubris is over, a new age of humility and realism is upon us. As an example, he uses the 900-meter tall skyscraper in Dubai, hoping that nobody will care about this monster anymore and the abandoned tower will serve as a nest for the desert birds.
Me too.
An extreme, neo-luddite view on the same thing:
In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club.

Janáček

Sinfonietta (V. Andante con moto)

Genial

I need milk only for my coffee. Only on the weekends. That means pouring about half a liter down the drain as that's the amount that is usually left. Fortunately, there are some sweet minds and functional brains at the Asturiana dairy. This 4x500 mL package made my day.

Dr. Aue is not my friend

but he is one of the most fascinating characters I have ever encountered. When Jonathan Littell published his "Les Bienveillantes/The Kindly Ones" in 2006, the book became a literary sensation, promptly awarded the Goncourt prize. The novel follows the raise of Dr. Max Aue to a respected SS-officer, travelling with him through the Ukrainian marshes, actively participating in the early steps of the infamous Endlösung, reaching the Caucasus where involved in the "scientific" dispute whether the Bergjuden are indeed Jews or "just" Persians and where, because of his homosexuality, became an enemy of a local SS-leading officer and was sent to Stalingrad as a punishment. There, for the first time, witnessing the fall and deterioration of the Nazi dreams, being wounded and sent back to Berlin, where he meets Albert Speer and starts to be involved in his plan of running the concentration camps "more economically". For that, he visits Auschwitz, the underground Dora factory and other camps, he is in Budapest where the monstrous 1944 transports just started and finally, he spends the last weeks of the WWII in Berlin. What is the most striking about this book is that Max Aue is an educated man, very passionate about books, art and music, and yet, we follow him through these horrors of the XX. century as those were just reasons for a slight nausea that accompanies him through the novel, which is an over 900-pages thick trip to the darkest times of the mankind. For this strange contrast between this almost adorable, young, hansome and intelligent man and his indifferent actions, some reviews even accused Littell of writting a pornography of violence. I wish I were more familiar with the structure of the classic Greek tragedies, because the last two (almost cryptic) chapters were difficult for me to understand and I feel I will have to go back soon to re-read them.

Gaza

Mark Steel comments for the Independent. Nuff said.

Resolutions, f@$k them

I went to the lab today, to water my plants and to check the ones of my co-workers. Quite a light day, in fact. Before lunch, I went to swim as always and when I got there, I found the pool full of people. Wondering what's up I realized that it must have been the usual "New Year's resolutions" that I am witnessing repeatedly every first week of September and the first week of January. I won't see any of those guys there in two weeks, isn't this world really a funny place?
Anyway, today I have also accidentally found what they call "A dress code rules for the 4-H California Summer Camps". I thought they must have developed a time machine in the US and brought this piece of joke back from the XV. century. According to these rules, one can't wear a Speedo to the swimming pool! The only option are the clown pants. Crazy, crazy world. The Crisis not included.

Christmas lights

Puerta del Sol
Paseo de RecoletosCalle de AlcaláAtochaCalle de Preciados

Third Reich

Yesterday, I watched a German movie called "Der Untergang", or "The Downfall" in English, about the last days of the Tausendjähriges Reich in the Führerbunker. Hitler's madness, cold evil of Magda Goebbels, rational reasonings of the army generals, all blended into a quite good movie. There are only three "good" persons there, the young secretary, obviously, because it's her story; Ernst-Günther Schenck, the heroic SS doctor taking care of the wounded ones, but whose real story is way darker; and finally Albert Speer, the talented first architect of the Reich and later a successful Minister of Armaments and War Production:

Speer pays a risky visit to Hitler on April 22, when the Chancellery is already under a heavy bombardment from the advancing Red Army, and informs Hitler that he hasn't followed his Nero decree to destroy all German infrastructure in areas soon to be abandoned due to the Allies advancing. Leaving the bunker, he turns around to see what is left of his masterpiece, greatly damaged Chancellery:

Unfortunately, there is nothing left of that building now, it was demolished by the Red Army and the stones used for a War memorial, so we can just guess how the statues of Die Wehrmacht and Die Partei by Arno Bekker must have impressed the visitors:

In a strange turn of coincidence, Albert Speer was a featured Wikipedia article yesterday. In addition, BBC is reporting a new life awaits Prora, a planned Nazi holiday supercity, whose almost 5km-long stretch of buildings and swimming pools should have accommodated around 20,000 New Germans.

Folie à deux

The new FOB album is finally out! Seems that the Patrick's voice qualities are proportional to his body mass, LOL. He hasn't sounded better. My favourites:
- What a Catch, Donnie (of course, I've blogged about that song before)
- (Coffee's For Closers)
- Tiffany Blews
- w.a.m.s.
- America's Suitehearts

The three words

Two tortured souls... and the two best characters on TV. On January the 5th, here I come!

Soul

Yesterday I tried to break my cold-related imprisonment and we went for a coffee. Talking about some stuff, my friend told me that he had to eat again his mother's paella today even though he doesn't like it but they have it for lunch every Sunday. I look at him slightly surprised and told him that if that happened to me I would just make a quick steak for myself and eat it with the rest of the family, considering it not a big issue. He was then even more surprised by my reaction and he said: but that's my mother's food! I realized what I love about this place and its people: under the thick armour that is so hard to penetrate, there is a golden heart and the purest intentions. A funny thing happened in that café: we entered and the camareros asked us if we wanted one double espresso and one with milk, something what we ordered there last time, but it was like 2 months ago! I guess a hairless guiri accompanied by a hairy Jesus Christ is an unforgettable experience, LOL.

Day and Age

The new album by the Killers is no disappointment. It rotates on my iPod and the more I listen to it, the more I like it. The Hot Fuss glamour ambience is nicely mixed with the roughness of Sam's Town. Good job, guys! My favourites:

• Joy Ride
• This Is Your Life
• Goodnight, Travel Well
• The World We Live In
  

Ya no quiero tu querer

José El Francés and Niña Pastori

Egoístas

Saturday night and me sitting in the house, drinking Frenadol and eating mandarines. All thanks to some selfish people who go to work to spray their rhinoviruses and picornaviruses all around the lab.

Chamberí Mon Amour

I had to stay late in the lab today and I didn't feel like going to Carrefour to get some food, so I just visited a little bakery close to my house. I had to wait in a queue but when I get to the counter, the girl gave me a "pan integral" already in a paper bag. She knew exactly what I wanted and I don't shop there very often! Amazing.

Life 1981

A man who made the World a better place.

Thanks, Google.

Afternoon at the MNCARS

The MNCARS has two really exciting expositions going on. One is a retrospective of a brilliant New York artist Nancy Spero. Starting with dark images of love, through her anger at the Vietnam war, the abuse and torture of women, the viewers can finally see her feminist masterpieces, Let the priests tremble and the Ballad of Marie Sanders. The second gem at the MNCARS is the A.C. The GATEPAC magazine exposition, presenting a Spanish avantgarde during the times of the Second Republic, including architecture, cinema, photography and urbanism.

F@#k the neocolonialists

Sick. Sick. Sick. South Korea buys land in Madagascar. Saudis buy land in Pakistan. China is shopping for land in Laos. Libya buys land in Ukraine. Kuwait and Qatar in Cambodia.

My MetLife

Sounds

Broken hard drives. Scary like hell.

The last agony

Gene - Is it over? (2001). Three more years to go.

Why does he smile at the end?

Mr. Cuteside

The new album is coming soon! Can't wait.

Be My Light, Be My Guide

Gene. 1994 - 2004. An underrated band. Called a copy of the Smiths. Still love them.

Obamatrix

Obamanadas de gran obamagnitud, writes Julio Somoano in Metro today. The big election turnout is clearly the reason why Barack Obama will be the 44th president of the US. In Europe, a big turnout usually means a socialist government. In the US, it will mean an Afroamerican with "white" education and "white" diction, ruling the (still) most powerful country on Earth. It also meant that Proposition 8, banning the same sex marriage in California, had passed. I keep reading that one of the reasons might be the Afroamerican view on the gay "lifestyle". Apparently, around 70% of black people supported the same-sex marriage ban contrasted with 45% of Caucasians and 48% of Latinos. It seems that the oppressed became the oppressors. I cannot stop thinking of charismatic Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay politician who was assassinated in 2002 and claimed that the uncontrolled immigration of culturally different people might affect his freedoms in the Netherlands, when the minority becomes a majority and subsequently changes the liberal laws through the general elections. Let's see where does the Obama's politics move but the first quite shocking signal came by appointing "Rahmbo" Emanuel as his chief of staff.
UPDATE 8/11: Oh, no. Another disappointment.
UPDATE 9/11: Ok, maybe not. (Funny, BBC has deleted the previous article)

Joel 2004

I was there when this was recorded! Later I met Joel in person and what a wonderful guy he is. Congrats!

minimummy

Walking home today, I have seen a mother and a child close to the Iglesia metro station. 'Oh, what a stylish white outfit the baby is wearing!' Coming closer to them, I've realized that the kid was wearing a mummy Halloween costume. The fashion sense is a bitch.

Angel

There is a great looking poster for Max Payne, which is apparently a very bad movie. I love the way Mark Wahlberg stands in front of the Brooklyn bridge, the arch looking like wings.

Dog

I am reading José Saramago's Blindness now and today I have encountered a part worth mentioning: the protagonists are discussing the time when they went blind and one of them was just in a gallery. He doesn't remember the artists and he describes what he saw and the audience is suggesting who might have painted that one. There was a picture of a cornfield with crows and cypress trees. Sounds like a Dutch painter, they said. There was a picture of a naked woman inside a conch floating on the sea. Obviously Italian, they said. And then there was a drowning dog. In that case it must have been a Spanish painter, they concluded.

Incredibly

beautiful and witty.

Lewis Hine

Breathtaking.
Power house mechanic working on steam pump (1920)

They did it again

and I love it:

Fall Out Boy: What a Catch, Donnie

James Franco

Something I knew for quite some time.

CHAMCARRALERIOS

Today, the train computer system has gone totally berserk. Usually, it shows the next station and then changes to show the final destination, but today we have seen a very amusing mixture of random parts of the names glued together in a very surrealist manner. CHAMISTERIOS (Chamartin + Nuevos Ministerios). ALCOBARTIN (Alcobendas-SS Reyes + Chamartin). CANTOBARRAL (Cantoblanco + Fuencarral). Unfortunately, I couldn't see more because Cantoblanco was my destination.

Senses

Autumn fog in Cantoblanco. The olfactory system at its peak. Sewage processing unit. Kenzo. Decaying leaves. Gasoline. Acqua di Giò. Fried churros. Cigarette. Cat urine. Teatro mundi.

Sangre de mayo

Leaving the train station on Friday, I saw this poster for a new Spanish movie:
Hmmm, it looks quite impressive, I've thought, a history of the Peninsular wars, maybe, good looking actors, too... So when Carlos told me to pick a movie on Sunday, I suggested this one. Oh, what a mistake! A ridiculous pastiche of romantic scenes and court intrigues, mixed with a theater and poetry history and spiced a little bit with the war scenes in the last 15 minutes. When I saw the hand of Goya sketching his masterpiece five minutes before the end and the aerial views of KIO towers, Castellana and Bernabéu during the closing credits, assuring us that Madrid would survive everything, I was sure I was watching some parody. It's a truly bad movie.

Wet Wet Wet - Angel eyes

Klinikum Aachen

The Spanish Ministerio de vivienda organized an interesting exposition about two German architectures from the end of the WWII to the unification. One can see the divergences but also the convergencies of the capitalist and the socialist German states illustrated by numerous projects ranging from theaters, universities and sport facilities to the shopping centers. I discovered one breathtaking bulding from the FRG, a university hospital in Aachen. Apparently, it's the largest single hospital building in Europe. It can be also easily mistaken for an oil refinery:

Obreros

Once a friend of mine in Cali questioned my friend selection. She said I should only befriend people with PhDs. The painter asks me why do I hang out with an obrero. Today on a train I've seen a group of businessmen dressed in Armani, showing off with their iPhones and other gadgets and I thought to myself: look, these people are the ones responsible for the crisis we are experiencing now. I've got the answer.

Bravo, Google

Somehow I like you even more.

Hot, Hot

True Blood is becoming THE must-see show. Nicholas González, one of the hottest men on Earth, appeared in the last episode as a cameo:

Puglia, Ti Amo

Last week I spent in Lecce, Southern Italy, with my "endomembrane" colleagues. The conference was quite time consuming, but every evening we found some time to enjoy the city. I was impressed how stylish the place actually is, even though it has only around 100,000 inhabitants. There are some baroque monuments on almost every corner, the people are polite, very well dressed and very, very good looking, too.

M30

Last week Madrid experienced some quite heavy storms and as this city is never ready for any rain, the M30 tunnel system was again flooded. The M30 tunnels were used as an example how wonderfully can Partido popular govern Madrid province and the whole system was wisely opened just before the local election. Obviously, any problems turn quickly into a political issue. Today, the newspapers report that after some investigation, another public project works were found responsible for the flood by making holes into the existing M30 structures. It's not clear to me whether it was the same reason for the flood we witnessed the last year (I personally doubt it), but whatever. More importantly, the designer of the M30, Manuel Melis, said yesterday: "Estoy deprimido por lo que les están haciendo a mis túneles". He's downhearted for what they were doing to his tunnels. Priceless.

Nancy No More

The fourth and so far, the darkest season of Weeds just ended. The DEA agent was found skinless on the US-Mexican border fence, Doug called the INS to have his girlfriend deported, Celia was kidnapped while in Mexico, Shane has started do deal pot at school... There were no guns aimed at Nancy's head (Season 2 finale) or her house burning to the ground (Season 3 finale) but when she was in the car heading south and calling the gift shop to order a delivery for Silas, it was one of the saddest scenes I've ever seen on TV. Finally, when the alcalde confronted her with the photograph, I though there was no way she could survive that but well, who knows after the second photo presented. Now it'll be long nine months to figure it out.

Genius

The new iTunes version introduced an interesting Pandora-like feature: when playing a song, you can let the Apple database suggest you other songs that can complement nicely the one that you like. Today, I put my all-time-favourite, There Is a Light that Never Goes Out by the Smiths and this came out:

• Life on Mars by David Bowie
• To the End (La Comédie) by Blur
• The Killing Moon by Echo & the Bunnymen
• Starálfur by Sigur Rós
• Motorcycle Emptiness by Manic Street Preachers
• Suzie by Boy Kill Boy
• Moving by Supergrass
• Gold by Spandau Ballet
• etc.

Simply amazing! These are all songs that I love to death. Bravo Steve, well done.

True Blood

HBO started to broadcast their new original TV series called True Blood. Takes place in Bon Temps, Louisiana and depicts a world where vampires are not drinking human blood but Japanese synthetic substitute and thus can live among us. Sounds pretty lame at first, but based on the screened episode premises the show is likely to be extremely stylish, cool and worth checking out.

LHC Take 2

There is a great site showing the Large Hadron Collider-related "end-of-the-world" status.

Sweet 21

Blind Melon - Toes Across the Floor (1995). BTW, the toe at 2:08 is incredibly hot.

LHC

Today, the free newspapers published a truly shocking article about the end of the world that is undeniably coming due to some obscure experiments performed at the CERN. Well guys, you have to wait a little bit longer. What happened today that has caused such an outrage? The first proton beams started to circulate in the Large Hadron Collider, one of the most expensive and groundbreaking European projects. But no real experiments will be performed until the end of October, when the "journalists" should turn on their computers because that will be the time to write about the end of the world and when the protons beams will finally collide to produce some particles which existence has to be proved to support a Grand Unified Theory. The GUT is trying to unify electromagnetism, the weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces through the theoretical Higgs boson, which is the main objective of the collision experiments.

H&K

Over the weekend, I watched both movies with Harold and Kumar and I have to say that I won't trust the critics so much. While the first movie was critically praised, the second one was just so-so for them. For me, it's the opposite, while the first one was just OK, the second one was a pure joy to watch. Making fun of so many stereotypes is truly refreshing. I'm happy to know that Harold was actually an emo boy back in college (using an eyeliner, LOL):

Waking the Dead

Today I have finally made it to an exhibition of the Renaissance portrait in El Prado. The unification theme was a great humanist message that the portrait was here to keep the dead alive, illustrated by the changes of the focus from the religious themes archetypal for the Gothic artists to, at first, the noble and rich families and later even to the workers and peasants in the Mannerists' works. My personal discovery was this great portrait of a tailor by Giovanni Battista Moroni:

East Coast vs. West Coast

The eternal rivalry moves to another battlefield: this week premiered both the second season of Gossip Girl and the reborn 90210 TV show. Now imagine the Upper East Side style with gloves, sweaters and raincoats from Bergdorf, and then the So-Cal swim trunks and wife beaters. Then imagine the almost Bergmanesque dialogues between Blair and Chuck at the Hamptons (GG) and the trashy tease with the pigs on some football field (90210). Continue with the Manhattan girls and guys actually looking seventeen years old and the sundried "sweet-sixteeners" from the West Beverly Hills who might actually be born in early 70's. The disparity couldn't be more obvious and I have a clear winner.

Autumn

Though far away from the coast, today we have a quite humid air in Madrid. Checking the weather forecast, we may even get some rain tomorrow. As the sun rays need more and more time each morning to chop the clouds and the trains becoming more and more crowded, it likely means the only thing: the autumn has arrived in its full glory.

A card game

Extremely interesting.

The Palin's Powers

She is a creationist, a book burner, a homophobe, a proud NRA member, a militant pro-life activist etc., but she's delivered what the audience wanted to hear. Scary, indeed. There are not just these thousands at the Republican National Convention but other millions of the US citizens who love these simple solutions for difficult issues. I am not a big fan of Obama and I always thought that Hillary would be a better candidate, but watching the faces and reactions in the audience, there is no other but the Obama way.
Her daughter licking her palm to groom the little one's hair reminded me of Paul Wolfowitz licking the comb:


It must be a republican thing.