Death. I can't make a joke out of that.

"If the light of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.... I am become death, the shatterer of worlds."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, after the detonation of the first atomic bomb

Here I am, back in front of the computer, writting about death. Now really, what was Ernesto thinking? I can't writte about death. No teenager nor the majority of humans can.It's like love, no matter how hard artists, philosophers and scientists try, we'll never really understand it in it's totality beyond it's physiological aspects. But anyway, let's move on.
We learned in philosophy class that, according to a lot of philosophers, you become an adult when you realize that you are going to die, and that the intelligence of a man is measured by how well he has accepted that he is going to die. Then, according to a lot of philosophers, I'm a complete idiot. I've never accepted death. To me, the termination of existence is an unfair, dreadful and even presposterous thing, and it scares me to death (Geddit?).
To avoid being permanently scared, I have always hided in the belief that technological progress wil make me inmortal (If hydras and jellyfishes can, why can't I?). And to avoid thinking to much about the real possibilities of that happening, I try to keep myself occupied ALL THE TIME, with more than one thing at the same time if possible. So thank you, Ernie, when the demons of the defunct future haunt me tonight rendering me as helpless as that little boy that cried to his parents that he didn't want to die ten years ago, I shall remember you. Or, more precisely, I shall remember your mother.

I'm like Hitchcock (fat)

http://www.zimmertwins.com/node/937671

I had a lot of limitations to do the clip (after all, you've only got a boy, a girl and a cat), but I think I came out with a pretty "intersting" clip. I hoped that the video would make accurate criticism of politics in general, american one in particular. But it enede up being some kind of absurd humour. I had to censor black out of "do you know how many black people will you have to execute to get back bible belt vote" and change sex for gender in "I'll go through a sex change operation" to avoid the closing of Lizardi's account (What are they, the MPAA?). Well, enjoy!

C2H5OH or "The tale of two livers"

I'm not the best person to talk about alcohol, for my experience with it has never been a personal one, and I am strongly biased against it, but I have to, and I will. The reason for alcohol's popularity is that it's easy to produce in any part of the world, but the reason for it's prevalence and status (Can anybody imagine a university degree in "tabacology" or "cocainology" in wich teachers explain and study the drugs only to explain wich one "tastes better" and describe them as "a valuable part of our culture to be promoted"?) are that it creates "only" moderate adicction, it produces no significant long-term damage below a Threshold, and it's consumers (except the very frequent ones) are not subjected to (almost any) discrimination or criticism. It's effects are akin to other depressant drugs, diminishing the brain's capabilities. In short, it makes you think less. I'm not going to enter into the discussion of whether people has the right to do whatever they want with their boddies, including making themselves more stupid, but I think it is obvious that we teenagers don't. I have to accept, no matter how hard it is to me, that moderate use of alcohol by responsible adults has no harmful effects (My head is gonna explode!). But even if that doesn't mean that all adults are responsible, as the state of Massachusetts proved yesterday (They were all drunk, ¿Right?), I accept "dry law" is not the solution. My plan to engage alcoholism is to long for this blog, and involves things that make the public opinion rather "jumpy", like chemicals in the watter supply or compulsory breathalyzers, so I will just ignore it. I think a good way to combat juvenile alcoholism is to make alcoholic beverages more expensive by taxing them (Limbaugh is right: Leftist think taxing is the solution to everything), specially if they are spirits, and giving the authority to policemen to confiscate any alcohol in the hands of people under 18. Also, those medieval fines on drunkenness should be reenacted, and the money could be used to fund AA-like associations, the rest being pocketed by the state. After all, we are still in a recession.

P.D. Really, how drunk do you have to be to break a filibuster-proof democrat congress that can (However mildly) bring change? Don't you have enough with Joe "Even I don't know how I managed to go with Gore back in 2000" Lieberman? Is either a drug or Pat Robertson is contagious.

Fashion

What's in and what's out? Well, that's relative, but That's next to saying nothing, as everything is. But to drill down that vacuous explanation, I might indicate that there are plenteous in & outs for different geographical, social and historic contexts (Witch burning was "in" in the pre-democratical american colonies, whilst democracy is "out" among the ruling class of corporatist China and Quantum Physics is "in" among MIT students). But asuming Ernesto wants me to write about in & out in my social, geographical(This is a good way to bat away saying Spain/Euskadi, huh?) and historic context, I might have a chance to do a meticulous yet relatively small post (That's just naïve, accounting for how pedantic and pernickety I am, but you can chalk it up to my juvenility*)

There are things that are preposterously in, as Belen Esteban(Anybody else wishes witch burning was in again?) or that infectious and most profusely used adjective "mitico". Others are in without popular consent, like being "made redundant", but most of things in are moderately so for a reason, however absurd this might be(Except those who are because of marketing, be it temporarily (The lattest genocided people, soon to be forgotten) or continuously(Clothing with corporate logos wich is astronomically more expensive than it's ad-free counterparts)). These would be Ipods, distilled beverages heretically mixed with sugared beverages, Vomitive TV shows, (Why doesn't anybody watch "How I met your mother" or "The big bang theory"?) music I try to ignore or vulgar, mindless, asyntactic, vocabularyless (Made those two up, but you can guess what they mean) talk wich is transforming our languages in "Permanent bushisms"(Bravo fellas, bravo).

I would write about what's out, but my bile is overflowing my circulatory system and I have to go to the hospital. Mind you, madman's bile is pretty corrosive, so try not to think about all this.


*There you have, Ernie, plenty of debonair(There I go again!) Phrasal verbs and "awesome" adjectives.

Description

I'm going to describe Mr.X, there's no prize for recognising him:

When I first saw Mr.X, I noticed inmediately that he couldn't stand still. He was a teenager, he had a slightly lower than average height, a short black hair with a thin ponytail, brown eyes, some acne, round factions and he was quite overweight. Shortly after "first contact", it seemed quite obvious to me that he was quite an unstable person, and that he lacked personal skills as much as he redunded in nervous ticks and manias. Within little time I discovered that he was a seemingly bottomless pitch of information, wich was equally divided in usefull, useless, important and rubbish. "It's because I lack any control over my brain" he would say rather worried "It usually follows my advice, and I will have for example easily learned the name and spin of every elementary particle, but sometimes it does not, and I end up not knowing the way basque verbs decline but knowing the entire script of a family guy episode by heart". I realised that during long periods of time, his humour would change from "maniachal-frenetic-optimistic" to "surrendered-passive" to "depressed-worried-emotional" (even if he did not show this emotion in public). This states could stay unchanged for a long time, or change fastly for such outlandish reasons as "LHC is back online" or "the complexity of the sky is almost fully apparent today", and sometimes even without cause. Altough people was nice to him, he had very little social life. He could not detect when people was interested or not in what he was saying, so he would usually ramble on and on without pause. Quite lazy in everything he was not good at, he lacked the ability to like people because he didn't like himself because of all the failures that resulted from his lazyness. Lacking self-steem, he would react very defensively to critics refusing to change, only worsening his defects. Ironically, even his deep distaste for organized religion had not prevented him from being like a saint, that is, being a voluntary and useless martyr and a virgin. I left Mr.X with a growing sense of distress within me.

The 4 ways sound affects us: Report

Julian Treasure speaks about how sound affects us. He intends to transform the way we interact with sound, and explains that there are four ways in wich sound affects us. The first one is physiological; The sound of a circular saw working increases the levels of the hormone cortisol, and the sound of the sea is very soothing . The second one is psychological; Albinoni's adagio will surely make you sad, but a bird's tweet will relax you due to ancient instincts. The third one is cognitive; Productivity is reduced TWO THIRDS in a noisy workplace (This is also true in high scholls ¿eh?). The fourth and last one is behavioural; people with rythmic music doesn't drive in a stedy speeed, and "soundscape" is vital for sucessful retailing. Mr. Treasure has developed a system wich allows him to know the effects of a sound and vice-versa. He then speaks about music, wich is very powerful because it's very recognisable and it's very strongly associated to other memories and feelings. He finishes by saying that music has been inapropiately used especially in marketing and gives advice to people working in marketing.

It's english a mania ?

Some months ago, I was pretty shocked when I saw PM Zapatero saying "fair play" instead of "juego limpio". It was completely innecessary, but he repeated it two or three times more during the next week whilst the interest in the topic he was speaking about faded. My shock came mainly not from the fact that he was using an english expresion, but from the fact that he doesn't know english (another spanish tradition that hampers our progress) and he emphasized the expresion a lot. Was it an idea of one of it's advisors? or worse, was it his?
But back to my point, what I was seeing was another step in the race of english for becaming as ubiquitous as the monotheistic gods or corrupt politicians. As a result of two centuries of anglo-american hegemony in economy, trade, science, war, popular and not-so-popular culture now english is king, despite having "only" as many native speakers as spanish and less than half than mandarin. It's the cornerstone of any attempt at superior education, tourism and all kind of international enterprises. It has even became a Synonym for modern and cool, and is therefore used on every slogan, catchphrase or product. Nobody is unaware of it's importance, and so it has become a mandatory school subject in almost every country, every adult person with aspirations is trying to learn it, and virtualy everybody knows at least a hundred words in english.
Some people have claimed that it might be destroying the different cultures of the world, but I don't agrre with that, as it seems obvious to me that even if a person works, learns, and even watches TV in english, he might introduce some of it in his everiday life, but his everiday conversations, humour, debate and cultural production will still happen is his mother-tongue. I would also like to remember that every language metamorphoses each layer of new words be them foreign or indigenous, making it evolve without destroying it. People might still know easily that spageti or futbol are italian and english rooted words, but they have generaly no idea that gripe, auskalo, Irina, algebra or mendia came from German, Spanish, Latin , Arabic and Celtic.
And that's how you ramble on and on without answering a question.