I received yesterday an Amazon email saying that since I had bought Sudaka then I should take a look at this newly released album from the Baden Powell Trio: The Frankfurt Opera Concert. The album was recored live at The Frankfurt Opera House back in 1975. As usual it had nothing to do with the Sudaka album, with the obvious exception that both (Baden Powell and Ramiro Musotto) are Brazilians.

Having said that, maybe Amazon does have a different way of associating products because indeed I loved the album. It literally blew me away. At this point I’ve heard the album at least 5 times. It’s been playing in my iTunes ever since I bought it. Almost every track is worth listening to. It reminded me at the feeling I got when I heard Rodrigo and Gabriela’s first album: unexpected, engaging and overall fantastic.

The opening “Valsa Da Euridice” is the perfect opening. Transitioning with “Asa Branca” and the melancholic “Samba Triste”. “Pescador” is absolutely beautiful. The acoustic bass in “Berceuse” is brilliant. The solo guitar in the first four minutes of “Variacao Sobre Canto de Ossanha” are just unbelievable.

This is an studio version of: “Canto de Ossanha” in youtube… enjoy!

Thinking about it, at least I can understand why lactose intolerant people would eat it. Now, what in the world is going through the people that makes it a choice. I know likes and dislikes are subjective and sure, somebody must like it for there to be a product, but this is beyond any comprehension. This is an actual aberration. If there is any Vegan reader that can explain to me why they would turn down actual ice cream for soy based ice cream, I hope the answer is like: we don’t eat ice cream for that reason, that would make me respect them at least. But trying to justify that they actually eat it because they like it would be beyond any comprehension.

Since we are in the subject, I’ll give you another piece of information on modified ice cream. The writer of this blog has actually been on and off the south beach diet. As you may know this diet precludes eating ice cream both because of the sugar and because of the fat. So, my love for ice cream is so deep that I am forced to buy the sugar free versions of the ice cream. Agreed that at least this ice cream is eatable. The availability of splenda and the like have make it possible to create a version of ice cream that though doesn’t get to the actual full fat/sugar ice cream is ok. But don’t be fooled ice cream was meant to be tasty not healthy, and it should remain as such.

For those of us that have access to San Francisco and those that come to visit I must suggest Mitchell’s ice creams. Incredible ice creams - no sugar free or soy available… … Go and expect to be in line for about 30 minutes even in the middle of the winter.

I have been silent for a while because I’ve been working with rantlust’s creator anup in getting a rantlust sibling blog: medialust.net. We have been working on and off for about six months on it and I think we finally reached a point where we can expose it to a larger community and audience.

medialust.net (unfortunately .com was already taken) is a space to rant about media. We have started with music, movies, video games and comics. There are few active bloggers this far, you’ll see that most of the entries are either anup or myself, so yes we are looking for active bloggers. As you know by now, if there are no writers it is very hard to maintain the site.

The idea of this space is to not only talk about media but also share media with the rest of the people. If we are blogging about music, we want to be able to share the music we are talking about. If we are talking about comics, we want to be able to see a piece of it, enough that might get the curiosity of the reader.

Certain features are still missing, but we’ll add them as they become necessary. There are a lot of cool stuff out there to share media, but not everything works well in the blog environment. We’ve chosen a hosting facility with lots of storage so we don’t forsee we’ll be running out of space any time soon.

Hope you’ll join us in expanding the lust family.

If you are interested in blogging let me know at josercaldera@medialust.net, or medialust@googlegroups.com

Bear with me in this line of thought and (un)reasoning. While talking about bad drivers, we sort of link it to the Darwinian mechanisms of survival of the fittest. So bad driving is really a natural mechanism for getting rid of certain number of people, which is, we suppose, one of nature’s problems: how to keep these annoying humans for growing larger and more powerful than nature. So we tied that to the fact that nature was very clever and was savy enough to embed human kind with some “stupidity” property, which comes small or large depending on the subject, and the geographical location (don’t ask me why but I suspect it is very true). Then nature decided that is not good enough because stupidity by itself won’t get rid of many people. So nature kept trying and decided to embed the “power” property in these human subjects (or objects for the OOP geeks). And then nature came with the master plan and based on probabilities, IT thought that eventually you could have one subject with enough desire for power that would take advantage of the stupid people. Chi chin! big win for nature, mathematically speaking, and we all know nature is about zeros and ones, this would guarantee the possibility of yielding enough stupidity together to raise to power somebody stupid enough, managed by people that desire power, that would cause the destruction of a lot of people.

Of course I am not referring to anybody in particular, or any sbject in particular.

Ahh! the wonders of commuting.

If you are in the mood for something different and in spanish, take a look at their bushido album. They have one more I believe, which I haven’t gotten yet. I am still digesting this one.

If you are a fan of film noir type, I am pretty sure you are going to like it. The story is fascinating, the writing is superb and the art is very compelling. I have shared the books with some of my friends, that are versed in the comic world, and they love it as much as we do.

The story starts with this guy (Agent Graves) that gives a suitcase to a (not-so) random character containing 100 Bullets, a gun, and a bunch of documentation of a person that is behind this character disgraces. The bullets, the gun, and the actions are untrackable by the police or any other law enforcement agency. It seems simple, but that is just the introduction to a really convoluted series of nicely tied subplots to the overarching big story that whenever you think you’ve gotten it down, the next page will make sure you are wrong, and start guessing again.

You can find more info about the series here

Happy read!

If you by any chance are a reader of Wired magazine, you might have read this month’s set of articles about gaming, latest trends, and where is it going. Or as it has been in the news lately over and over, I am sure you’ve heard about the many cases, especially in Korea, where people die in real life over marathon games and such. NPR issued as story not so long ago about how much money the virtual worlds are generating in real life. A search in EBay can give you an idea how much a weapon in World of Warcraft can cost you in actual US$. One of the articles in Wired tells the story about this person that paid $100K for a virtual space in a virtual moon in a virtual world. Stupid?, well, this person *made* in revenue about $250K the first year, and it is expecting to gain about $2.5 million next year.
And I wish this was the weirdest of the stories, it gets more bizarre. Issues are starting to rise about child pornography, as in these games you could impersonate a child and have virtual sex with an adult. Some of these games have extremely realistic rendering of actual child characters. It goes on and on.

I can’t help but to wonder where this is leading us to. Regardless of all the effort we are making as mankind to screw up this world, there is still enough to make life exciting and interesting and worthwhile to have actual feelings towards your fellow human beings. I can’t imagine myself telling Sebastian, go out and make friends and get drunk at the SIMS.

While having this discussion with a friend of mine we enter the discussion of child pornography and video sex games. This is not a trivial discussion. There is an actual case in court around this. The argument the court used to rule on the issue was that no children were harmed and therefore it couldn’t be considered a child pornography. Regardless of how bizarre and creepy the thought of this is, we took the example a step forward. What if you were to create a sex child robot, would this be considered child pornography or pedofilia?, what if it were an animal, would that be considered bestiality?. I couldn’t find a way to separate my moralistic views to come with an objective analysis.

The gaming industry, and more specifically, the MMORPG industry are expecting to grow 100% next year and more moving forward. If we keep going this direction our greatgrandsons will have to swallow the blue pill.

The story is about a very proud poet that is looking for the right woman. A woman that makes him believe that is worth loving, and by consequence that is worth living. As he comes to describe at the very beginning of the movie he is looking for a woman that can fly, and he wouldn’t accept anything else. Though one would think it is not quite a very innovative theme, the movie works because the script works, the characters albeit in its own sometime surreal and extreme representation are believable, and we learn to care about them, with their virtues and their defects. The metaphores are rather cliche but then again it is akin to the story, which I believe it is on purpose. His dialogues are mostly in verse, citing really good poems from latin americans poets like Benedetti. I am afraid it’d work better for latin americans as there are many references to our social and political chaos and it is a nice juxtaposition to his own search for love.

Unfortunately the DVD can’t be any worse. The quality of the copy is worse than the old betamax copies in the initial rental days. There are no extras either. Subtitles in english are non optional, which is really annoying for spanish speakers.

All in all it is still a movie that worth watching, and I am happy that it didn’t turn out to be one of those terrible “watch again experiences”.

Frank proceeded to communicate to the nice old lady that the reason for not accepting her check was that the previous check she’d written three days ago hadn’t cleared yet. Safeway policy is not to accept checks until the previous one had cleared. Not only the policy is ridiculous, “Frank’s” attitude, the “assistant Manager”, while delivering the message was as if the whole world is stupid for not knowing this doesn’t-make-much-sense policy.

The nice lady had to look everywhere to put together the $13.35 to pay for a medicine and milk. She turn back to me and asked whether I knew about this policy as conceding that it was her fault for not knowing it. I responded that I didn’t know about it and for what it was worth I thought that Safeway’s policy was wrong. I hope at least I made her doubt that she was wrong for not knowing this policy. I don’t think I was compelling enough to make Frank doubt though.

Go corporate America!

It was pouring rain in San Francisco. So, on my way out of the daycare I wrapped Sebastian in my jacket and proceeded to my car. Opened the car and unwrapped him out from my rain jacket and strapped him to the car seat, he was pretty dry, and I was already wet. In the middle of the rain and this maneuver I sort of heard a strange noise that sounded as the locks setting. As I was stepping out of the back seat, I thought that I’d leave my jacket in the back seat, as I’d have to wrap Sebastian again when getting home. I slammed the back seat door and just like that, I had lock myself out of the car, Sebastian inside, cell phone inside, jacket with car keys inside, and 42 degrees under the pouring rain outside.

After failed attempts of opening one of the rear windows of my car, which is supposedly damaged, and at times had decided to lowered itself, of course not this time. I proceeded then to try to get a wire hanger thorugh the edge of the window to see if by any luck I could trigger the locks, needless to say I couldn’t get the hanger through the edge of the window. Then feeling pretty stupid myself soaking wet under the rain I tried to break the window, of course with not enough strength, as I was concerned the shattered glass could harm Sebastian. I was running out of ideas and was afraid of Sebastian being closed with no air inside the car. At this point I am talking about 25 min under the rain, and by the way Sebastian spent all this time looking at me through the window smiling and sort of curious of what superdad was doing outside the car getting wet.

Finally, to make long story short, firefighters came in, somebody had called 911. In matter of seconds they broke into the car and got the keys out. After thanking the firefighters and the personnel at day care facility, I had to rush home because the stew was in the oven, and Vanessa wouldn’t be for another half hour home.

At least got in time for the stew, which Sebastian, of course, didn’t even try.

Tune in for the next episode of superdad…

Anyways, the people that know me, also knows my relationship with Las Vegas. Last weekend I made my annual gambling trip with my two brothers to Vegas. There was big doubt in their minds about me staying up pass 10, in fact there were not doubts but bets (which seemed pretty appropriate) about how late I’d stay awake. Much to their surprise, and God knows, mine as well, I went back to my pre-kid behaviour and drank and stayed awake all night, to the point that they went to bed before I did.

I guess it is somewhere embedded in my DNA, between the cytosine and guanine, there is some code that says:

“You shall remain awake if the following conditions are met:
a) There is gambling
b) You are drinking “for free”
c) You are losing money (therefore the previous quotes)
d) There are lots of people around you that are also losing money and they don’t seem to enjoy it
e) The ceiling is painted with fake blue sky
f) There are lots of smoke
g) your ass is going numb given the many hours you’ve been in the same seat
h) The guy sitting by you is somewhere from the midwest - option A
i) The guy sitting by you is drunker than you are - option B
j) The guy sitting by you doesn’t talk at all ‘cuz it’d ruin his luck - option C
k) The guy meets all of the above”

I wonder, if just like heroes, our nature flourishes when put in the right time and the right set of circumstances.

As he’s grown older his passion has become stronger, after books and stories, balls are his big thing. He recently discovered a yoga ball we bought during Vanessa’s first pregnancy. For those of you that don’t know, these balls are big, made out of rough thick rubber, and they are pretty heavy in general. I guees there are different sizes, we have a big one, so big and heavy that he can’t really play with it unless you are there to mostly play with it and he is there to watch. What surprises me is his stubbornness to play with this ball in particular. Watching him feel frustrated becase he can’t really play is heartbreaking, but watching him try in many ways to do it is so rewarding that it is all worth it. One thing I can tell about him, he doesn’t seem the type of giving up, which of course it makes me very proud.

• Most of the people are tourists, not a good sign when in SF there are so many good restaurants, and tourist spots are not known for the food, at least not in SF
• The rest are really young people. I guess the price is right for a burger which you can eat for at least three days
• Host, hostess, and servers don’t really care if you stay or you go, they don’t need you there as there are about 1000 people waiting anyways
• Music is terrible… unless you are a fan of easy listening stuff, the type they put in the dentist office
• Food is largely overrated and large in general… I mean the quesadilla I had (as an entree, even though it is an appetizer) had like 3lbs of cheese, that is my cheese intake of a week, if not a month… I guess it is a quesadilla after all, but any Mexican restaurant can prepare about 20 with that amount of cheese…

Anyways… I am just pissed off that it took forever, that Sebastian got so tired that we couldn’t eat well, and that by the time we got the table, we ordered two appetizers (that was the whole dinner) and when we got it, we couldn’t it because it was terrible… we spent 30 minutes at the table, and 1:30 waiting… go figure!

The cheesecake, which of course we ordered to go, was as usual, excellent…

This is my second experience with oriental medicine. I’ve to admit that the first one did by no means augment my respect for the practice. Coming from a family of medical doctors it’s always been kinda weird to accept the concepts of alternative medicine. Though it’s funny that we call it “alternative” when million of people have been using it for thousands of years. I wonder if in Asia they call the western practice “alternative”. Anyways this time around acupuncture has done great things for me. So while I am still a bit skeptical of techniques such as “surrounding the dragon” or that the root of my problem was that my yang was offset from my yin and that I was on the colder side therefore loosing my temperature balance, I can tell you that I am looking forward to see what the acupuncture can do for me on the allergy season.

enjoy…

–Financial Institutions to Create Database of Employees Who Pose Security Risks
(26 October 2005)
US financial institutions are working together to establish a database of employees who are known to pose scam risks. People included in the database will be those who compromised customer data or “knowingly caused financial losses.”

[Editor's note (Schultz): This initiative will pay rich dividends to the financial institutions, but the implications for privacy and individual rights are truly frightening. A person whose name is entered into this database will for all practical purposes be "blackballed" throughout the financial industry, per the intention of this initiative. But what if an individual was falsely accused and then was fired anyway? There appears to be no appeal or review process for such an individual.]

I wonder if this guy has an opinion on people falsely accused of terrorism… Black lists are bad because it is easy to get in and hard to get out (or impossible - especially if you are killed because of it), but they’ve proven to be very effective. Nonetheless, great subject to have an argument.

With the DVD release of the tv anime series I got hooked again into Ghosts in the Shell series and its characters. However, they lack the depth and thoughtfulness of the theatrical version. Being hooked into it and with the release of part deux Ghosts in the Shell: Innocence, I went and bought the “special” edition, just released, of the Ghosts in the Shell DVD. By the way there is nothing special about this DVD release, other than the price. As with other many DVDs I buy, it sat on the shelf, went to a couple of friends, and went back to the shelf until yesterday nite. I popped up a beer and decide I was going to watch it again. Prompted also because I got Innocence on the mail (thanks to netflix), and I wanted to have the first one fresh in my head before watching the second part.

Even with the many interruptions I had in the middle of the movie, like feeding Sebastian, putting him to sleep, me falling sleep (I am sure all of you parents feel sympathy for me on this subject), etc, I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. It’s really a good movie. It suffers a bit from “let’s-make-it-so-thoughtful-it-actually-may-not-make-sense-all-the-way-for-everybody”. I guess I was used to the plot and characters after watching the tv installment, and could digest easier the over-dense, long, and overly-technical dialogs.

Undoubtly Ghosts in the Shell is one of the great science fiction stories in the past 10 years and I am sure that regardless what you think about anime, you’ll end up liking this movie as well.

If you see it, please do notice the MANY things that The Matrix stole from it.

I’ll blog later about the second installment…