For outdoors lovers (or should I say freaks?)

It can not be more real than the reality show: Survivorman. The guy is thrown in a desolated corner of the planet, alone, without fresh water, without food, without camera crew, and plays survival for seven days. In the tropical jungle of Costa Rica or in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, Les Stroud is there with a couple of video cameras to tape himself his long-suffering days .

He makes a shelter with what finds, he produces fire with sticks and he eats, if he eats, plants and bugs that only someone with enough knowledge about the flora and the fauna of our planet would consume. There are episodes when he finds nothing to eat and endures days without food. As he did in the Arctic surrounded by nothing but snow.

What is even more entertaining than the situation itself is that Les Stroud is not the most comfortable guy on the spotlight. He is often awkward and an expert on not-so-funny jokes, but gosh, the guy is in the desert, alone, without water, without food, without anything and having to film everything. By the way he is always complaining about having to be recording his survival. "If it was only surviving it would be fine, the filming part that sucks", he would say.

I am not a big reality show aficionado, but I worship nature, thus I became a fan of the Canadian Les Stroud.

Big Bob, a Brazilian politician

Big Bob was, well, big. He could have been a sumo fighter, but he chose the politics.

He was also very charismatic. During his speeches he used to explain, on his way, what was the representative democracy.

He would say that a congressman should not have his own ideas. What does it mean? "A politician should be like a human body with several other little bodies inside of it." He would touch his belly and draw one or two laughs only. The people did not understand yet. “For example, my circulatory system are the taxi drivers taking other cells everywhere. My heart is our friends from the industries that produce power for the community. My brain represents the schools. He would also compare his respiratory system that cleaned the body to the roadsweepers. It could sound inappropriate associating them to the intestines.

In the end of his speech Big Bob received euphoric applauses.

In the steak house, Big Bob wouldn’t waste time on the salad bar. He was a fan of fat stakes and pork ribs. He had great difficulty to walk from his office to the elevator and from there to his car.

He was not intelligent either. His biggest intellectual triumph was guessing right who would be the next American Idol.

It couldn’t have been different, Big Bob died early. Nobody knew exactly what happened. His organs began failing one by one. From the time doctors told him about his problems to his death was only a couple of weeks.

The entire community cried. Nobody doubted that he was the greatest example of the Brazilian democracy.

(Non)senses

Some time ago I watched a reportage clarifying about the danger of being seriously burned by malfunctioning heated car seats. There was an old man saying: "I began feeling the smell of burned meat [pause]. I looked down and my bottom was burning."

That feller might have a good sense of smell, but certainly his sense of touch has been gone long ago.

It is something like: "When I arrived at home and I stripped off my shirt I noticed that it had a hole on it. It was only then that I noticed a knife impaled on my chest"

Recipe for an Art Film

Begin the movie by the end.

Have someone narrating it.

Use any language except English.

Include a handicapped character.

Make the film in black and white, use color only on small details.

Choose classical music or jazz to conduct the story.

Project the scenes on slow motion.

Put enough explicit violence.

Finally, wrap up your work with a name of a fruit.

Guess what I'm thinking about

On this month’s Scientific American magazine there was an advertisement for a machine that can read the cerebral activity. The device from a Japanese company called Hamamatsu looks like those helmets with pipes and lights worn by any stereotyped scientist on TV or movies. The text explains that there are already similar readers of cerebral activity in the market. However theirs uses light, instead of radiation or magnetic fields, being safer (if they say so, we have to believe). The ad still goes into technical details but the most interesting part is the utility of such mechanism: to find out if a head is actively working on a task or in a state of rest. Maybe that will be the true Big Brother, not a camera filming citizens all the time, but something that will have to be worn in the work place to check if you are really elaborating on a spreadsheet, or simply looking at the screen with the weekend in mind.