INGLESIA

EPIPHANY

2009-01-04T15:15:00.000-08:00

I'm just back from my Christmas holiday in Spain. It's been a couple of intense weeks and all that intensity brought a revelation with it. At first, a cloudy feeling started to haunt me, but it was still something vague, I couldn't quite grasp it. However, one day, when browsing a book of poems by Jaime Gil de Biedma, the vagueness condensed abruptly into something very clear and painful. The poem before my eyes was at last explaining it all:

NO VOLVERÉ A SER JOVEN

Que la vida iba en serio
uno lo empieza a comprender más tarde
-como todos los jóvenes, yo vine
a llevarme la vida por delante.

Dejar huella quería
y marcharme entre aplausos
-envejecer, morir, eran tan sólo
las dimensiones del teatro.

Pero ha pasado el tiempo
y la verdad desagradable asoma:
envejecer, morir,
es el único argumento de la obra.

And this is my* reckless try at traslating it:

WON'T BE YOUNG ANYMORE

Life was in earnest -
one realises later on.
Like all young people, I had come
to take life by storm.

Leaving my mark I wanted
and leave to a standing ovation
– to die, to age were just
the dimensions of the stage.

But time has gone by
and the nasty truth shows now:
to die, to age are just
all the plot in the play.

*my translation owes a big deal to the one made by Elena on her blog I'm not Michelle Pfeiffer. Thanks Elena ;).

El amor como en las pelis / Like Love in the Movies

2008-08-06T08:13:00.000-07:00

After a long silence... I'm back.

But don't rush into a explosion of joy just yet. No, unfortunately, it won't be like in the good old days, it's not that you are going to be able, once again, to delight in reading my every-other-day posts. I know - I'm so sorry.

I'm back just on emergency posting. I thought it was my duty to let you know about the literary event of the year: the online launching of Samita Garri's latest novel El amor como en las pelis (Like Love in the Movies).

Samita Garri's has decided to release El amor como en las pelis through the new online publishing platform Google Knol. Google Knol is totally free, so anyone can read the novel without paying a penny.

Google Knol is the last development in web 2.0. It's something that reminds a lot of Wikipedia (readers can modify entries and submit their modifications) but with an important difference: there are entry owners. This owners are also the moderators of their entries; they can accept or reject any modification sent by a reader. In short, Knol is a moderated Wikipedia.

Samita has decided to publish using this innovative platform so that readers are able to modify the story themselves. That's why El amor como en las pelis is making history in the publishing industry by becoming the first online-evolving novel ever published by a major literary author.

Enjoy the masterpiece!

Samita Garri in the only photograph
available to the public

see you... good bye?

2007-07-25T03:39:00.001-07:00

The good news: I'm going on holidays, I'm leaving London for the Moroccan seaside!

The bad news: I'm not gonna post for the whole length of my vacation. I need a total rest, to leave behind anything which reminds me of London and the English language. Now it's time for French, Arabic and for beautiful Moroccans. So for the whole month of August you will have to live without my every-other-day-post. Don't cry yet, the worst is still to come. Keep reading because what follows is devastating...

The devastating bad news: I might never come back; I mean, I’m coming back to London in September of course (unless I find a beautiful Moroccan-male who wants to marry me, certainly a possibility which is always worth considering). Where I may not come back ever again is to our beloved blog, Inglesia. Yes, my dear readers, because:

>>I'm tired<<

I’m tired of a lot of effort and very little compensation. In order to understand me, all you have to do is to go back to the beginning. Inglesia was conceived as a tool to achive journalistic stardom. However, after more than four months of great dedication and effort, neither El País, nor Le Monde, nor The Guardian has contacted me so far to hand a succulent deal. All I've gotten out of this business is an average of 3 visitors a day, who, to make things worse, didn't even leave a paltry comment after reading the posts (you've guessed it, yes, I'm actually blaming you at this point).

But, to tell you the truth, writing the blog in itself wasn't that tiring. Most of the time, writing posts was entertaining and challenging. It has also made me improve my written English, and I've broadened my knowledge about hot topics like plastic surgery or sadomasochistic porn. What I couldn’t stand was having to promote it on the internet. I soon discovered that reaching a good position on Google required an effort which I wasn’t willing to make, and an amount of time which wasn't at my disposal.

But I’m not going to get into any more details. After all, perhaps this is just a “see you soon” instead of a “good bye”. In Fact, what might happen in the end is, to a degree, in your hands. If your messages of grief and despair are numerous enough I don’t think I will be able to find it in my heart to refuse.

And finally, to make this farewell feel less bitter, we'll finish on a musical note. A beautiful song with Arabic themes which I came across yesterday on Youtube.

I’d especially like to dedicate it to my dear average-3-visitors-a-day, I love you guys!

the quote of the day

2007-07-23T04:58:00.000-07:00

"The sleep of reason produces monsters"
Francisco de Goya (1799)

This is not actually a quote but the title of a Goya's illustration. However in this case I think that the title is worth much more than the picture.

This quote/title summarizes the spirit of the Enlightenment: reason is a treasure owned by us humans and, when we don't let it rule our thinking, problems start. Some people during the Enlightenment started to liberate themselves from the irrational set of beliefs which had governed their lives till then.

This people decided to analyze the generally accepted truths from a critical perspective. Was it rational to believe all those stories about Jesus Christ? And what about the idea that kings ruled because that same Jesus and his divine father decided it should be so? Wow! the Enlightenment was really exciting.

Meanwhile, more than two centuries later, in the middle of a revival of religious fundamentalism (Evangelicalism, Islamism), when some groups in America are putting pressure on the authorities to teach Intelligent Design instead of Evolution Theory at schools, and when the uncritical belief in new age stuff enjoys perfect health, Goya's remark is still young.

Thanks Goya!

privacy threat

2007-07-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve recently spent a couple of very nice days walking through London with a friend. During these walks, we talked about many interesting issues. One of them was the precariousness of privacy in the Internet age. All started because this friend told me that he was going to close his Facebook profile. He was afraid that at his place of work someone might find out something about his private life which could damage his reputation.

In case you haven’t heard yet about it, Facebook is a web service which allows the user to do networking as well as keeping in touch with friends. People create a personal profile on it which can contain a lot of personal information such as hobbies, work info, studies background, political opinions and photos. This personal profile is linked to the profiles of the person's acquaintances. The problematic aspect comes into the picture here, since these acquaintances are of all kinds: from childhood friends to work colleagues. Therefore people who you just have a formal relationship with may learn details about your personal life. That's why my friend said he no longer wants to risk somebody who works with him finding out something inappropriate about him.

And he might be right. The more we get involved in internet activities and communities, the more exposed our personal life becomes. Think about a person with a Myspace and Facebook profile, with his personal photos stocked on Flickr, who stores his browsing links on Delicious, and who regularly writes on a blog. If someone would take a bit of effort to track this person on the Web, he could easily end up composing a very accurate picture of what this person is like without having ever met him.

It is true that you can use false names, and that you can set the configuration options of these web services to permit a higher degree of privacy. But even so, from the moment you start publishing information on the internet you can't be 100% sure that nothing is going to get leaked. The risk that some of your data escapes your control is real.

So unless you have been really careful when interacting on the Web, the prospect appears scary: one day the employer of your dreams, while considering hiring you, will decide to google your name as a final check, only to discover those compromising pictures of you that a friend posted to your Myspace profile. Or maybe, having a look at your Facebook groups, he could learn that you belong to that minority communist party. Or what is even worse: he could find out that you are one of those pervert homosexuals!

I’m afraid this scenario is not that far-fetched. As for myself, I’ve always enjoyed looking up my acquaintances’ names on Google and I can state that recently it is becoming more and more common to find at least two or three entries for any person you search for. So, yes, in the short term, I have to agree with my friend: it is probably a good idea not to put too much personal information on the internet if you are to get involved with conservative work environments where people care about such things.

However I think that this struggle for preserving privacy is doomed to fail in the long run. Trying to erase all your traces on the internet is becoming more and more difficult, up to the point that, in a foreseeable future, it will be virtually impossible. The Web 2.0. services that I’ve just mentioned (Flickr, Youtube, Myspace, Delicious, Wikipedia, Facebook, Blogs, etc.) are only the beginning. The future development of the internet is all about sharing information of every sort.

But everyone has secrets to hide. Who wants to be known by people he hasn’t even met? Being so exposed is quite problematic indeed, so what can we do to deal with this new threat?

One of the solutions could be to fight. That is, to try to protect one’s movements on the internet in every possible way. On the one hand, by using data protection technologies, and on the other asking the people who govern our societies for legal support. That's why there will probably be attempts to legislate in order to protect the right of privacy (In a very similar way to that which is happening today with the fruitless attempts to protect copyright. Since the appearance of the P2P platforms such as Napster or Emule, the legal initiatives to stop the sharing of music and video have proliferated, always with the same unsuccessful results: the free exchange of copyrighted data rises steadily).

But all that will be like trying to prevent the tide from coming in. Just think about all those mobile phones with photo cameras (whose latest generation allows you to take really high resolution pics); the mobiles with high resolution video cameras are expected to appear soon as well. And it is pretty sure that all these amateur photographers and filmmakers will be very keen to broadcast their recordings online. To make things worse, there are even people who are starting to record all their conversations on Messenger and Skype. And in the meantime, Gmail and the new mail services promise that you will be able to store the totality of your emails during your whole life. In brief, our digital print is getting huge, it will soon become uncontrollable.

The other possibility is the solution formulated by David Brin in his book “The Transparent Society”. He asks us to think about the problem with a radically new optic. Instead of the hopeless efforts to protect privacy, he proposes that society forbids privacy itself. Or in other words, that society legalizes the possibility for everyone to watch each other.

The problem of having your private life exposed appears when there is an asymmetry, says Brin. That is, when your potential watcher doesn't have his life exposed as you do. This asymmetry gives peoples an advantage or disadvantage when interacting with others. But from the moment when everyone can get to know everything about anyone else, the equilibrium is reestablished. If my boss knows that I am one of those pervert homosexuals, but I know that he pays Brazilian transsexual prostitutes to penetrate him... then everything is cool, man!

What’s more, as a matter of logic, the more powerful an individual is, the more observed his movements will be. And this would have a positive effect on democracy. For example: would the war in Iraq ever happened if all the phone conversations between those Bush, Cheney, Blair and Murdoch had been public from the very first moment that they were taking place?

highly romantic

2007-07-17T04:15:00.001-07:00

I hope that this video will help you to understand that love between a human and a machine can be as beautiful and pure as any other form of love.

I would like to thank my favourite Italian for first showing me this video and for starting to open my mind to this different form of love.

the pic of the day

2007-07-16T05:16:00.001-07:00

The Grand Hotel of Taipei (1973, Taiwan)

the pic of the day

2007-07-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

A balanced composition by Gengoroh Tagame, the master of
sadomasochistic illustration.

information society well explained

2007-07-11T09:35:00.001-07:00

Today I want to recommend you a book which changed dramatically my comprehension of our society and its future. It’s the three-volume work by Manuel Castells called “The Information Age”.

I had just finished high school when I discover this book. My intellectual background was quite poor; I hadn’t read any serious academic book at the time. Nevertheless my curiosity about the topic was huge. The Internet had appeared a couple of years before and I wanted to know how it was shaping our society. The length and austerity of this trilogy seemed a bit discouraging at the beginning but I was going to discover soon that it was worth the effort. Until then my only approach to the matter had been the books of these futurist gurus like Negroponte and Toffler. At the beginning I found them rather inspiring, they make me dream about wonderful worlds to come in which technology would allow us to do, well, everything we wanted. After a while I realized that the statements this authors made about the evolution of society were closer to science fiction than to any serious research. Pure technophile speculative day-dreaming.

On the contrary the book I was about to read didn’t make any reckless predictions. Its approach was to find the insight about the future that the systematic analysis of what is new in our society can provide.

I was in Ireland, shut away in my room recovering from a flu, when I started the first of the three books which compounds the trilogy: “The Rise of the Network Society”. And from that moment on I harrypottered it, and the other two parts which followed: “The Power of Identity” and “End of Millenium”. I just couldn’t stop reading them.

It was an intellectual treasure for a virgin mind like mine. This book offered a powerful general structure about how our society works. It’s like a reference framework which since then has remained with me and where I often go back to hang in the new knowledge I acquire.

Book shops are full of good books about particular dimensions of our changing society. Take one of them about economic globalization. Another one about the changing geopolitical game (China, India, and all that stuff). Another about the new technological paradigms of Internet and the interconnected society. And still take another about the socio-political aspects of our time (rising of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, crisis of democracy, feminism, ecologism, gay issues, the media…). Then mix them all and the result that you obtain is this book. What’s more, Castells doesn’t deal with these issues separately but manages to connect all of them in a common theoretical framework.

Disclaimer: No, I’m not getting paid by the publishing house of Manuel Castells. Neither am I his nephew or boyfriend.

more "the pic of the day"

2007-07-09T16:09:00.000-07:00

I know, I'm posting too many "the pic of the day" lately. I have been quite busy and I didn't find the time to write a long post. But anyway, I shouldn't apologize, this section is called "the pic of the day", what means that I have the right to post up to seven "the pic of the day" a week. And you must know that from now on I will stand up for my rights.

So, once things are cleared and you know how things are gonna work from now on, here we go with today's "the pic of the day".

It's a symbolist painting by Odilon Redon. Symbolism is a movement which appears in the late 19th century as a reaction against realism to whom Redon was one of the main practitioners. I particularly appreciate those flowers absurdly surrounding the pensive girl. The dynamical explosion of colour contrasting with the stillness of the girl has an immediate appeal. I feel that the artist has succeeded to capture in the same canvas a girl living an austere existence and her escapist inner world.

Portrait of Violette Heymann (1910)

the pic of the day

2007-07-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

The lavish, art-deco and huge city hall of Buffalo, a medium-sized city situated in the State of New York in America. Click on the image to view a bigger version.

Buffalo City Hall (1931. New York, USA)

pic of the day

2007-07-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

Cabin at Lake George (Georgia O'Keeffe)

Another nice painting.
It's quite simple and depicts the most innocent of subjects. Nonetheless it has something intriguing. The loneliness of the scene is thick instead of being placid. And those clouds... And the window, which seems as if it could have clarify something if it wasn't so black.

the flying spaghetti monster

2007-07-04T06:23:00.000-07:00

In the United States the movement supporting Intelligent Design
is growing. It intends to make schools to teach this new form of Creationism in their biology classes. Creationism and Darwinism would be taught together. Children wouldn't receive any more one single vision of the evolution of species.

The central argument of Intelligent Design is that the biological evolution of species is too complicated to be a random process and that therefore its become the evidence of the existence of an Intelligent creator (aka God) which drives the process.

In the middle of this battle between pro-creationists and darwinists a new group appeared. Its followers require the government to teach at the school also a third evolution theory: the "Pastafarian theory of Evolution".

This theory states that the whole Universe and the evolution process were created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The FSM is an all-powerful creature which happens to be composed of two flying meatballs surrounded by several noodly appendages.

The number of followers of the religion called The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is growing steadily, and so the support for this alternative theory of the Darwinian Evolution. Let's wait and see if it becomes a serious alternative to Darwinism or if the FSM theory is just other of these fashionable movements which disappear in the following season.

the picture of the day

2007-07-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't managed to find out the author of this illustration. This is my personal homage to tobacco, smoking and to the freedom to choose. Since last Sunday, smoking in public places is forbidden in the United Kingdom.

freshly fired

2007-06-30T15:12:00.000-07:00

I've just been fired from the restaurant. When I told Marcus, the boss, that I'm going to Morocco on holidays during August he got very upset. He thinks that after just 3 months working there I couldn't ask for a whole month off. He said that I'm all the time asking for days off, and now also this... As the British say, it was "the straw that broke the camel's back".

The thing is that I agree with him for once. In fact, I loved the people at work, and in particular I really loved my dear manager Metin. But Marcus was right saying that I was becoming too demanding. What happened is that working there was becoming more and more boring for me. And having to do two jobs at the same time was too much, I had nearly no spare time. So I wanted to leave Café Emm and at the same time I didn't know how because they had been so kind with me. Somehow I feel relieved after all.

But I also feel quite sad; I'm going to miss Metin so much! He was the great thing about working at Café Emm. He was so funny, always making jokes to create the nice atmosphere, so helpful from the beginning when he hired me... There was some sort of platonic love going on between us.

gay boyfriend

2007-06-28T17:08:00.001-07:00

an ode to faghag-faggot love

world's tallest building-to-be

2007-06-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

This is one of the latest photographs taken at the construction site of Burj Dubai.

It will be the tallest freestanding structure ever built once finished.

Click on the pic to enlarge

A few days ago it already became the second tallest structure when it surpassed the 470 metres height.

Currently the tallest building is the hideous Taipei 101. One of the ugliest towers I've ever seen.

For more more pics of the construction progress go to this website.

comparison of Burj Dubai and some
of the tallest buildings already built

And to finish here you are a imaginary picture which compares the Burj Dubai tower with the skyscrapers of New York (including the disappeared Twin towers).

tom cruise kills oprah

2007-06-24T10:34:00.001-07:00

the picture of the day

2007-06-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

USA blasfemy scandal

2007-06-22T15:12:00.001-07:00

The people from blasphemychallenge.com has provoke the outrage in the States thanks to this hilarious video-campaign.

We all have heard sometime that, in Christianity, every sin is forgivable if the sinner repents of it before he dies. Well, it doesn't seem to be 100% true. After reading the Bible carefully, the creators of this video have found a passage in it which states that one unforgivable sin exists: to deny the Holy Spirit. Having made this discovery, they decided to invite their fellow Americans to do exactly so, posting their denials of the existence of the Holy Spirit on the internet.

Probably in our secularized Europe blaspheming doesn't look that funny anymore, but in the States things are quite different. In the second video you can see how this game has generated furious reactions among certain people.

small, boring, delicious moments

2007-06-19T18:20:00.001-07:00

The small, boring, delicious moments beside you and some coffee are over…

I’m sorry for not keeping your company properly in the end. I acted like a coward? I preferred you to die when I found you there in that hospital? I wish I could embrace you from here. Today, closing my eyes, I can see vividly how it feels to embrace you. You have the warm touch, sweetfresh smell, of a baby.

americana

2007-06-14T17:50:00.000-07:00

Subject-matter: Americana!

We tend to associate the still-life genre with painting. However it is also a photographic genre.

Today I want to show you one particular example which, although borders on the kitsch, I find great.

I like it because if you are naive enough, looking at it can transport you to that idyllic first-half-of-the-20th-century America. That same America depicted in the Norman Rockwell illustrations.

my street

2007-06-11T15:50:00.001-07:00

there you go, another picture of my street (on the sides there are always building works going on)Click on the image to enlarge a bit.

Microsoft's CEO

2007-06-10T07:57:00.001-07:00

The man in the video is Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer of Microsoft. The managerial style at the company seems somewhat aggressive.

more from the exhibiton

2007-06-06T14:31:00.001-07:00

Here you can see another of the works shown in the Damien Hirst exhibition which I'm invigilating at the moment. At the back there is a fellow invigilator.

is the london2012 logo a mess?

2007-06-04T16:17:00.000-07:00

The logo for the Olympic games which will be held in London in 2012 was launched yesterday morning.

Immediately many people have started criticizing this graffiti-like logo very hardly: illegible, looking like something out of the 80's, myspace crap, embarrasing, silly... It's difficult to find any positive reaction on the media.

Apparently the design team has got its inspiration precisely from the 80's revival. This revival is currently quite widespread in trendy Londoner circles. The problem, outline the critics, is that this 80's revival is reaching its end now so for 2012 it will look fairly dated.

My first impression was of dislike too, but after watching the past Olympic logos I don't find it as bad as I did at first. At least it's original, it doesn't have a Big Ben or something so predictable on it, and it is highly recognizable. More over, the creators have proposed it to evolve over the time, and its designs seems quite evolving-friendly indeed.

In fact I thing that after some slight polishing of it shape it could be more appealing. Yes, now it looks too like a skate-board sticker. It should look a bit more universal without sacrificing its boldness.

most expensive artwork in my gallery!

2007-06-01T17:51:00.000-07:00

The most expensive work of art ever done by a living artist is being showed in the gallery where I work since today!
It belongs to the new exhibition "Beyond Belief". A solo exhibition by British artist Damien Hirst.

One of the artworks is called "For the Love of God". It costs 99 million dollars, the highest price ever fixed for a living artist's artwork. It consists on a skull covered with diamonds. Just the materials used in it cost 20 million dollars. Next day I'll put some pictures of the other exhibits.

what is the singularity?

2007-05-25T09:43:00.000-07:00

There is much controversy about whether it will ever happen. But the importance of the singularity, in the case in which it will actually occur, will be so huge for our world that it deserves our attention.

The singularity is something that can finish for good with the problem of oil, with global warming, terrorism, with poverty in the third world, etc. in just a matter of years.
And the singularity could also be the beginning of the end of all human life in earth. This could also happen in a matter of years.

Nevertheless nobody is speaking about it in the media. The governmental meetings don't discuss the issue, the newspapers don't analyze its pros and cons, Hollywood doesn't make catastrophe or futuristic films about it!

But I have a feeling that this is going to change quite soon.
Without much difficulty this could possibly become "the topic".

"Singularity" is how technology experts call the moment in which the first "strong artificial intelligence" will be created. This moment is of great importance to us humans, due to the fact that history will accelerate from that point on.

Accelerate? Yes because the main vector of historical evolution is technological change. Technology has been produced through history thanks to human intelligence. But human intelligence is about to create a new very special kind of technology: artificial/technological intelligence. This technological intelligence will in turn go on producing more technology, but much faster than us. To summarize: once the singularity happens, technology will produce technology without human help and very quick.

The new period will be either good or bad for us. This will depend on the extent in which we will be able to control the artificial intelligence. But, what is sure is that it will be a totally different historical period as well as a very fast one.

So, when will the singularity happen?
The estimations range between 2014 and 2040 which is: quite tomorrow!

A beautiful Artificial Intelligence Research Centre belonging to MIT

a londoner

2007-05-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

A beautiful Londoner. He reminds me of my brother Lucas. His look is quite interesting, isn't it? I found him in london-street-fashion. Unfortunately the site is not as good as what the street fashion in this city deserves, but nevertheless you'll can get an idea of what there is over here.
x besos x

everybody is like fucking at home!

2007-05-05T13:39:00.000-07:00

I'm going to describe a standard weekend at home so that you can have an idea of the environment which surrounds me here in London:

Friday afternoon
I leave home to go to work at the restaurant.
My flatmates are preparing to leave to party (bastards!).

Saturday morning
I leave home to go to work at the gallery.
At the very moment I'm having my cereals my flatmates and their friends arrive from some club to continue their party-weekend at home.

Saturday evening
I go back home after an standing-up day at the gallery.
The party is still going on. The difference is that the ones who remain awake are sort of having sex with each other. The floor of the flat is all drugs and people lying stoned.
I think I can take refuge in my bedroom when two guys ask me for it to... have sex, of course!
I move to Rafa's bedroom with my computer and start writing in the blog while Sodom and Gomorrah takes place in the rest of the house.

I feel like a celibate journalist reporting from the middle of a sexual war.

new job

2007-04-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

Now I have two jobs, the one in the cafe and a new one in an art gallery. The gallery is called White Cube. I'm taking care of the artworks in there and giving information to the visitors. The place is quite interesting and is one of the most important art galleries in the world. In fact I'm discovering that London together with New York is currently the art capital of the world.
I'm happy.

...

2007-04-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamid!!!!!!!!!!!

picture of the day

2007-04-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

In this picture the mount Fuji seems so lonely and quiet.

Mount Fuji in Clear Weather from the series 36 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai (Japan, 1827).

quote of the day

2007-04-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

"There is no such thing as society"

Margaret Thatcher (1987)

urban tribes in london

2007-04-10T21:21:00.001-07:00

Below you will find three of the more common urban tribes that I find in my new home. Chavs, emos and indie boys. If you don't know them you can read their descriptions in urbandictionary.com. It's a funny website where the people write the urban definitions (in the style of wikipedia).

That's an emo. Sometimes they are very similar to the Gothics. When I go to work, not matter how early or late, I see lots of them queueing to get into concerts. I wonder if these kids (they are usually teenagers) don't have anything to do in life but to go to concerts at 2 in the afternoon. Obviously I'm still getting to know London.
They are three chavs (or scallys or pikeies, well in fact there are hundreds of names to call them). And you know them, no matter what country you are from, because they are amazingly similar in every country. In Spain we call them "johnies", "bacalas" or "calorros". In France "racaille", "banlieusards" or "zonards".
And to end, the tribe which populates my area in London. This guy in the picture is an indie boy. The neighborhood close to mine, Shoreditch, is like the epicentre of all them. Altogether with the "new rave kids". But it's worth a single post to explain what are they like.

my neighborhood

2007-04-04T19:21:00.000-07:00

Imagine a long, long road, though not very wide. A road that is full of grocery’s, hairdresser's, and florist's through all its length, and which extends for 5 kilometers before getting closer to the city centre. There is where I live. Sincerely, aside from a big city, my area could seem anything. In fact is like living in a small town which is embedded in something greater than itself.

In the morning, when I go to one of those grocery's to get some bread and milk, I can see, far away, a skyscraper called the "gherkin". He stands tiny in the horizon of my road, and it reminds me that, after all, I'm living in one of the four alpha global cities. Then, I ask myself: is it really necessary to have one florist's every 20 meters?

In this picture you can see the "gherkin", though already bigger than from my house.

peak oil. when global warming will make you laugh!

2007-04-03T21:39:00.000-07:00

In less than 20 years the daily production of oil won’t be able to increase any more. And what is worse, from that moment on, it will decrease steadily.

This moment is called by geologists "peak oil" and, although it is very difficult to date exactly, it is totally sure that it will arrive in some years.

I've found an interesting website which explains the question in an easy way. It's called "Woolf at the door". It tells that the real problem with oil will start much before of its end: the day in which the demand will be higher than the production. Then an economic earthquake which will change everything will start.

We are so much into the consumer society that we cannot really imagine it might finish one day. Each year the computers are faster and store more for the same price. Buying clothes in the chains like H&M, Zara or GAP allows everybody to become some sort of Paris Hilton, changing our wardrobe at the speed of light. And we really find that is cool to fly to Barcelona or Berlin for the same price than the bus to the airport.

The limits of the oil extraction means that we should say goodbye to all that when the peak arrives. Maybe you don't care, cause you are really fed up with the whole capitalistic thing, but the "peak oil" seems to be also the moment in which a Third World War will be likely to start. The solution? It looks difficult anyway, thought lots of fantastic brains and resources devoted to the question could help. Nevertheless, perhaps it is a better idea to continue worrying all the time about the global warming and the Islamic terrorism which, everybody knows, are the two main menaces that our society faces.

...

2007-04-03T02:50:00.000-07:00

i've already done a part of the journey and i arrive wounded; don't play with me now. not now please. i feel i may break.

i need you. what you have inside. what there is behind those layers of clothes and the sticks in your hands.

don't hit me with your sticks. i've got pain over my complexes and wounds. i'm an injured queer.
heal me a little bit, don't hit me; heal me somehow, heal me a little...

organic fever

2007-03-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

From the very first moment after my arrival I realized that the word "organic" were going to be omnipresent during my British stay.

The adjective "organic" applied to "food" produces the English expression to say "ecologic food" (which is how we call it in Spain). The difference is that in Spain it's just a new fashion whereas in Britain it's a ftotally consolidated trend.

At the shop, in the fast-foods, in the ads... , "organic" is just the golden word. There's even a supermarket chain specialised in organic food which has become the shopping temple of the educated middle class and the upper-middle class. Buy/eat organic is a maxim repeated by the media and followed by the consumer community.

We, at home, are also somehow devoted to this postmodern faith. Our favorite chocolate is a new organic brand, called "Green and blacks" and the other day Jaime, one of my flatmates!, was shocked after discovering in the shop they are even selling organic cat-food!

But has this organic fever a rational foundation?

Yesterday my doubts about this matter started to rise. In "BBC Focus", a science magazine, I read that the scientific community is skeptical about this kind of products. There are not empirical evidence about the benefits of eating organic food instead of conventionally cultivated one. Moreover, there is cases in which the organic agriculture might be worse for health. The researchers have discovered, for instance, that the bacteria of the salmonella is three times more present in organic chicken than in those grown in conventional farms.

Neverless I must recognise also that there are good points on the organic way of eat. The products commercialized under the label organic very often happen to be actually healthiest. But that's because of the ingredients chosen and not because this ingredients are organic. Olive oil is healthiest than palma oil no matter it is organic or not. The mistake is to mixed up the importance of the healthy diet with the necessity of eating organically cultivated stuff.

The second positive side of organic food is that it tends to be better tasting. Country free range eggs, seasonal vegetables, etc. are tastier than the equivalent products coming from the intensive agriculture. Here the objection is that I can enjoy it because I belong to a privileged minority of the rich Western World. But what would happen if the whole 6 billion people who populate our planet would enter into the organic way of eating? The answer: we would need the surface of 3 or 4 extra planets earth to cultivate the food that the world eats today with the organic agricultural techniques.
Organic is an unsustainable luxe.

got a job!

2007-03-26T22:33:00.000-07:00

I've already found a job. I'm working as a barman in a restaurant-café called "Café Emm".

Its funny, for the first time in my life, I've got a nice and friendly manager. He's decided to make a professional barman out of me. He tries to help me all the time. Instead of telling me you must be faster Matías or, you are doing everything wrong Matías, as I was used to with all my former managers, he says take it easy Matías you cannot learn everything in one day or, dont be nervous please, relax yourself, unbelievable. The café is in Soho which we can say is the most lively district for going out in London, as well as the gay village of the city.

Yes, I know, I told you all before leaving Granada that I was not going to accept a job which wasn't related with my studies. But hey.... London is not as easy as I thought. I'm afraid that I'm going to have to wait until my English improves a little to find a proper job.

(the picture above is the main dinning room in the café)

plastic surgery

2007-03-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

Until now, nobody has contacted me about my accommodation problem. But anyhow I have taken the decision to continue doing my normal life as if nothing was happening with these individuals. To begin with, I will keep writing my blog posts as I had decided before the whole thing started.

Today I want to recommend you a fancy website about plastic surgery. Have you ever thought about going through some retouches? I always believed that it would be great... with the technology we will have in the year 2050. But with the current means I personally find going to the operating theater a reckless action. Plastic surgery is still nowadays more an art than a science. Is an art which involves our flesh!

Go and have a look, the web site in question has tons of pictures of the "bad jobs" that celebrities do to their faces, and very cruel descriptions of them. Down here you can enjoy my favorite one.

Jocelyn Wildenstein doesn't look pretty

my new house in London

2007-03-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

Many of you are probably wondering about the place where I ended up when coming to London. It's understandable if you are a bit worried about me getting into trouble. After all, it wouldn't be the first time I get into complications whilst abroad. Some of you might even be afraid of the kind of people who so generously have taken me in at their home. Too much generosity may seem suspicious at times.

Well, unfortunately, all your fears are completely justified. As you, my friends, told me, people don’t give anything for nothing. It was certainly strange that people who knew me so little were so kind and helpful. Yes, my dears, I should have listen to you. Some strangers offering me to stay at their house all the time I needed, just like that, for nothing? Now I realize that I was so naif. Indeed, there are no good people in here.

Actually, there are lots of them. Some live here all the time, some others just intermittently. This warehouse being so big and full of rooms, it's a bit difficult to work out how many people really live in this space. But I'm particularly worried about the intentions of two of them. These two guys are the ones who sort of run the flat. Everyone seem to follow what they say. At the beginning they behaved in a polite and friendly way towards me. But as days go by, I started noticing some abnormal behavior in them. Now I have reasons to think that they are some kind of sexually perverted individuals. The other day I even noticed them spying on me from behind the plants. I did nothing; I pretended not to have noticed. But I cannot feel safe anymore. I'm afraid of what may happen to me if I don’t find another place to stay soon. That's why I wanted to ask you for help, my friends, if any of you know of some place where I can stay temporarily until I find something else, please let me know as soon as possible, thank you. ASAP

a trip of a robot

2007-03-20T07:32:00.001-07:00

So it seems like I’m writing my second post, I can barely believe it, I was fearing to do again a one-post-only-blog for the second time, and now I’m sure it is not going to happen. In the worst of cases, I will have done this time a two-post-only-blog which is some advance anyway.

Okay, so for this second post it’s time of one of those videos…
This robot scares me; it looks like an evil giant insect. But I also fancy it a lot. Despite it rustic aspect it’s a state-of-the-art piece of robotics. It belongs to a new generation of machines which can move around like a human or an animal no matter how rough the terrain is.

broken english

2007-03-18T16:10:00.000-07:00

I really feel like writing a blog and reaching the journalistic stardom. I’ve felt like it since many months ago, but one reason (or pretext) after another has put off the moment until... now?

In fact I had already taken the firm decision to start it up on last November and I actually started, but all what I finally did was a one-only-post-blog. After that some unexpected events happened in Spain and stopped me from continuing writing.

Anyway, this time, I intend to succeed and write regularly about many things, using this weird of an English that I have for the moment. So guy... Why in English if you are so fucking bad in that language? You’ll ask at this point. The answer is because I’ve come to London to learn it and since I live with two Spanish guys and I work translating French texts, if I would also write my blog in Spanish I could go to learn English to Seville and it wouldn’t make such a big difference.

Here I have to mention and thank my brand new flat mate. His name is Rafael, "Sweetie pie" for the friends, and is the one who have had the simple-but-great idea. Why don’t you just write your blog in English? He told me when I was complaining of wanting to write some blog and never doing it. It doesn’t matter that your English writing will be broken English, broken English is quite charming even. He said. And you know what? I answered: goood idea boy!