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.

Beijing, 10m Platform Men

Bigots.

Twitteresque

• new apartment, great location, alone
• still without internet (listen orange, it's already three weeks!)
• otitis externa (on amoxicillin/clavulanate) => no swimming pool for a week, but surprisingly accompanied by vivid dreams
  

Golden boy

RENFE commercials

I wrote couple of weeks ago about the Civia trains that were servicing Cantoblanco campus. One can find flat screen TVs there, which normally show the name of the next stop, connection to other train or metro lines, time etc. Sometimes, though, the passengers can enjoy "train commercials". Today, the info system was completely down, so the only thing what we could see were these little movies about the greatness of the Spanish train system. The funniest one goes like this: A beautiful woman, living somewhere in sun-drenched La Mancha, smiling while waiting at some little art-deco station for a train. A businessman, soaked in sweat, running through streets of some anonymous metropolis to pick up his car. The colours also contribute to the subliminal message: while the woman is on the train, we can see the yellow and red La Mancha countryside, full of olive trees, the ideal Spain. The man is stuck in traffic, sweating even more and he finally leaves the car on the freeway, running away. The woman leaves the train with a big smile and walks through sunny streets and enters a house. Shortly after, some old man walks out of the same building and removes the rent announcement that was attached to the door so the sweaty businessman finds the apartment already rented. Take the train, people, and the life will be wonderful! You will never sweat! All your dreams will come true! Hilarious.

Control

Balkan butchers and prime ministers

Radovan Karadžić was captured in Serbia and will be prosecuted in Den Haag for war crimes. Fair enough. Hashim Thaçi who committed similar crimes became a prime minister of "independent" Kosovo.
Carla Del Ponte, who stepped down in January as chief prosecutor at the Hague tribunal for crimes committed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, reports horrible details about Serb prisoners that had their internal organs removed and sold by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war in her new book. Senior figures in the Kosovo Liberation Army were aware of the scheme, in which hundreds of young Serbs were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs were removed. Miss Del Ponte provides grim details of the alleged organ harvesting, and of how some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed. "The victims, deprived of a kidney, were then locked up again, inside the barracks, until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. In this way, the other prisoners were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source, pleaded, terrified, to be killed immediately," Miss Del Ponte writes. More details here and here, some interesting information can be found in the dicussions, for instance about a camp Bondsteel, the AMBO pipeline, Halliburton etc. From all of the above, I can't get rid of a feeling that we (as Europeans) were fooled again by both the Kosovans and the US. I am not a fanatic supporter of either side but if we want justice then it must be justice for all.
P.S. Ramush Haradinaj, a former guerrilla leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army and former prime minister of Kosovo, charged of war crimes was acquitted on April 3rd, 2008, because of lack of convincing evidence.

Font conference

Silly, but funny, too.

Alexandre Revisited

Can't wait to see him on a platform or a springboard in Beijing! The baby fat is all gone and he looks way hotter than before. Bravo Québec, well done!

Cobertura: 95% del territorio internacional

A Windows PC of my friend crashed last week and he lost some of his own precious movies. When I saw him yesterday, he was surprisingly stoic. Then it struck me. A Windows user always expects the worst, so when it happens it's not a shocking event. It's like a continuous vaccination. A Mac user, on the other hand, would be devastated. A conclusion? Nobody wants to be devastated and therefore, the Windows OS share is a stable 95%.

Revelation

Enrique takes his kids there. People often talk about that place. I have finally made it today. Love it. Matadero Madrid.

Cobalt blue is the new pink. Just sayin'.

The Usual Way

Tomorrow, the commuter train system in Madrid will experience a Big Bang. The second North-South tunnel will be opened and the line numbers and directions will change. I won't be able to catch a direct train to Cantoblanco anymore. It sucks big time. But what is the worst and the most shocking is that there was no information about it on the RENFE website until today. There was also no announcement in my station of Recoletos, which will be affected the most. Spain is truly different.
UPDATE after the first trip: The Recoletos station became a ghost town. Low frequency of trains, few confused people waiting for their usual trains. One woman was desperately calling her office to ask what was going on. On the other hand, Nuevos Ministerios is una locura de puta madre, filled with dust from the construction and thousands of disoriented people. While Qué! newspaper reports that 250,000 madrileños can sleep 10 minutes more, the reality was far from that. After the Nuevos Ministerios experience, I believe that number of people who transfer between trains must have increased. Advantages? The line to Cantoblanco is now serviced by the hypermodern Civia trains.
UPDATE 2 after the trip back: The Civia trains are the worst. They are much smaller than the "old" ones so they can't fit the thousands of people travelling from Alcobendas or Colmenar and I had to stand the whole ride.
Bad, bad RENFE.

Kylie Minogue - Cosmic

Glamour. Sadness. 100% Kylie.

Orgullo 2008

El punto de referencia

Santiago de Compostela, 4th of July

Spring 2009

Two of my favourite looks:
Dsquared
Etro

AGV

The 4th generation of high-speed trains is being currently tested.

Good Morning Justin

Beam me up, Scotty!

Firefox 3 is finally out. On a Mac, it's blazingly fast. It correctly imported all my old bookmarks and passwords. Love it.

Botany

The lavenders are flowering now. Magical. By the way, the fourth season of Weeds started. Magical, too. Guillermo Díaz is a regular now. Magical times three.

Dolphins

Weird. When I was at high school, I read a novel by Strugatsky brothers named The Waves Extinguish the Wind. In the book, the whales and dolphins were committing suicides because they were sensing big events coming.

Ugly Betty

I wrote about me avoiding the stuff that causes a media buzz before, but I decided to give the Ugly Betty show a chance. Man, what an entertaining piece of junk (and I mean in a good way)! It's so light, so fresh, so witty that I cannot stop watching it. I have to save some episodes for tomorrow, I have to save...

My favourite character is undoubtedly Justin Suarez:
Marc St. James: Nice vest!
Justin Suarez: Ralph Lauren, we got it half price because there is a small hole but you can't even see it.
Marc St. James: So, the kids at school, do they like it?
Justin Suarez: No. They don't really get me.
Marc St. James: A word of advice, be who you are, wear what you want, just learn how to run real fast.

Green heresies

The Wired magazine nails it (once again).

Craziness

Spanish truck drivers are on strike, blocking freeways and causing total chaos. Today I had to go to buy some food and I found the Eroski store totally empty. There was no meat, no bread, no apples... I saw people carrying twelve tetra briks of milk, fifteen boxes of cereals and dozens of bottles of water. That's how my grandma must have felt before the WWII erupted.

Before the Devil...

...Knows You're Dead finally arrived to Spain. Great movie, superb acting, highly recommended. If accompanied by three delicious montaditos, una jarrita de Cruzcampo and later a cup of coffee in Antik, a great Sunday afternoon is made.

Sueño olímpico

The newspapers are ecstatic about Madrid being one of the four cities picked by the Olympic committee. The rhetoric though is truly laughable. The Qué! newspaper says: Madrid left behind Chicago and Rio de Janeiro, beaten only by Tokio. It's a typical way how they usually write: Spain was better than XY but unfortunately lost to WZ. In a truly self-confident country the sentence will be very simple: In the olympic competition, Madrid lost to Tokio. But Qué! continues with five reasons why Madrid should be hosting the Olympics, one of them: La gastronomía es una de nuestras armas. El cocido madrileño, mejor que el sushi. No comments as it's too ridiculous to even try. Just look at it and decide by yourself:

Despendolado

That's how they labelled me in my lab today. No se atiene a las normas sociales con el fin de divertirse. LOL.

Pentathlon

¡Qué guapo! David Svoboda, a modern pentathlonist, won a silver medal at the World Cup in Budapest yesterday. Congrats.

The Mist

Yesterday I saw the new adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist. It's surprisingly good. Advertised as una peli de miedo, it's actually quite psychological and smart stuff.

Pathetic

Is this a joke? It sure looks like one. BTW, Alejandro Sanz is a Spanish citizen so why is he supporting a US presidential candidate? Also, why the US public doesn't support Hillary is beyond me. For me as a European she would be the only choice.

Lost Season Finale

Desmond David Hume and Penelope Widmore finally united. I have to admit that the S04E05 episode named "The Constant" where Des calls Penny from the freighter to her London house made my eyes wet and it well might be the best TV ever made.

Hermano Sol

Love this movie. Graham Faulkner as Francis of Assisi could make an atheist convert. A stunning performance but unfortunately also the only one from this amazingly talented guy. There will never be better Francesco, ever.

Stationmaster

Only in Japan.

The New Indy

Today I've seen the new Indiana Jones movie. Overall, I wasn't very impressed, but at one point I thought it almost got the old charm back. When Indy and the Soviets fought over an alien coffin, Indy drove his jeep through the mountain of wooden boxes in some Nevada military warehouse. One of them cracked open and we could see the Ark of the Covenant for a second or two! Obviously, it was the same warehouse that we saw at the end of the first movie. Sweet.

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf

Google found this German poster of one of my favourite movies for me. Appreciated!

4X KT8

Propellers

Titanic propellers. Amazing. Breathtaking.

Expo 58

Czechoslovak Pavilion

Gropius

To remember the 125th anniversary of Walter Gropius' birthday, the Google logo has changed for today:

I think it's quite cool, especially the "Monument to the March Dead" hint. Bravo!

Nutrition

Don't eat any food that's incapable of rotting.

Misfits

Stakka Bo - Mute

Fall 2008

Kinda looking forward!
Rag & Bone
DSquared