Jerry Falwell

As you all know Rev. Jerry Falwell died recently. Here are some of the teachings he left us:

On Martin Luther King Jr.: "I must personally say that I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations."

On public education: "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again, and Christians will be running them."

On feminists: "I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. ... These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem."

On global warming: "I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We'll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn't returned. I don't believe a moment of it. The whole thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."

On the separation of church and state: "There is no separation of church and state."


Rest in Peace!

Email for me

It is 2:45 PM:

I am very scared. I’ve just received an email sent by my own yahoo account:

"Dear Augusto,

I am you in the future. I’m not from a distant future; I’m from only some minutes later. It is exactly 3 o’ clock now. You will receive this email exactly at 2:45 PM. I know it because that was the time I received this same email. I am writing to you to warn you: You are going to die at 3:01 PM unless you write an email to the Augusto from 2:45 PM with the following instructions:”

It finished like this. There was nothing else written. Why did the Augusto from 3:00 PM not finish the email? Is it because I died before finishing the email?

I reply to the email asking about the instructions and receive a response without a clarifying answer.

It is 2:50 PM:

What do I do now? What are the instructions? Should I write the email and send it exactly at 3:00 PM even without the instructions?

It is 2:55 PM:

I copied and pasted the email onto a new email and I am going to sent it to the Augusto from 2:45PM. However I still do not have the instructions. I’m going to send it as it is.

It is 3:00PM:

I’ve just sent the email and I promptly receive a reply sent from the Augusto from 2:45:

"What are the damn instructions?"

It is 3:00PM + 30 seconds:

I still have time to reply to it before I die:

“How the hell am I supposed to know?!?”

The last standing traditional institution

I asked some of my best friends on what they think about marriage. The people I asked were: a gay man, a gay woman, a cocaine addict, a nerd, a pot-head, an illegal alien, a hippie, a cheater and an atheist. Sure some of them had more than one of these characteristics, but it doesn’t really matter.

What really matters was that the result was: 100% of them take marriage very seriously to my absolute surprise. They find that marriage should be based on the purest love and that one must try to be happy forever in a marriage.

You can call me conservative but I thought that this concept of marriage only existed amongst radical Christians and ugly and fat people.

Then something occurred to me. Is that the origin of the unhappiness of many couples? One can think like this: I am married and this person here beside me really bothers me. I do not know if I love this person anymore. Actually I am not even sure it was love that brought us here. Perhaps it was only passion or maybe I’ve just been horny for an extensive period of time. However now I cannot leave this relationship because I built a psychological prison around me. After all I’ve always believed that marriage should be forever.

How can someone be happy like this?

Obviously some of the people who answered the poll are single. Therefore they cannot be completely happy yet. It will only be possible when they find the person who they will marry, even though they may then paradoxically find bitterness in their marriages till the day they die.

PS. I also interviewed some happy people, both married and single people, but they did not believe in the institution of marriage therefore they had not entered this research.

X-sports

I have a skydive jump scheduled for May and a 30k trail race schedule for June. I think it is funny that telling about the jump gets all kinds of responses as: really?, oh my gosh!, what da fuck!. And the same doesn’t happen when I tell people I’ll be running a 30k trail race run.

Jumping out of a plane burns, let’s say, about 2 calories. It doesn’t make you tired, it doesn’t hurt. Now go and try to run for 4 hours in the woods.

Let’s talk about the few words languages have.

Let’s begin with a classical example: The word “chair”. You know what a chair is. In a file in your mind there is a generic example of this thing. But this file/image is not a photograph. It carries subjectivity, flexibility. A wooden chair leads to the same mental file as an acrylic chair.

The same line of thoughts applies to the stool, to the bench, to the seat, to the armchair, to the sofa.

However there is an object, a chair with some kind of support for the arms, cushioned, perhaps with some inclination, that one does not know for certain if one should use the word chair or the word armchair. There are among all those elements, seat, sofa, bench, etc, hybrid objects that are not entirely one nor entirely another.

Now, imagine a straight line that goes from the perfect chair (that does not leave any doubts that it is a chair, that has nothing on it that can lead us to think it is any other kind of seat, if, of course such thing exists) to the perfect sofa (under the same hypotheses). Think about all the words in the world, from any language to define an object where people sit. I bet all my money that there are more variations in the forms of the objects than words to call them.

The quantity of words is infinitely less than the quantity of objects in the world.

But the most important statement is not that. We should also consider the ideas.

The quantity of objects is infinitely less than the quantity of ideas.

Practical example: In my head, at this second, I see an alien sitting down on a wxztrkjhwwptg. To define a wxztrkjhwwptg we would need all the words used in Earth’s sciences and some more words that would have to be invented like hgtrfpzxt and jsrrrrnv or tprnmwqprtqqs.

The practical application of all this silliness is rather simple. One should not get stressed when searching for success, happiness, love. These words are trying to be defined since the world is called world. People have tried to explain them using all the words from all the languages of all times. They even tried wxztrkjhwwptg.

The quiet Ronnie

Ronnie was white, thin, weak. And he had a giant nose and huge ears. His eyes were normal sized, but they looked like big eyes behind those glasses. He was born like this and would die like this.

Perhaps, that was why he as shy.

Being the only son Ronnie spoke little with his mother and father and nobody else.

At school he had a friend that worked at the cafeteria, a fat cook that spoke like hell. And he spoke a lot, nonstop, spoke all the time, he would sometimes forget to breathe, he was always talking, he would talk to himself whenever possible, he sleep-spoke, all the time, he would repeat himself, repeat himself, repeat himself, repeat himself.

Shut up!

However, Ronnie would never even say these two words. The cook’s never even noticed that Ronnie was shy. One was a talker, the other a listener. They were perfect.

Ronnie’s greatest fear was that people would touch him. Not bumps or eventual hugs, kisses and handshakes, but those that were paid to touch people: a hairdresser cutting his hair, a dentist looking for cavities, a doctor taking his pulse. For some reason touching was not enough for those kind of people, they had to be speaking all the time. His fat friend would never touch Ronnie. And he would not expect an answer either. But the touching-professionals always waited for an answer:

“It rained a lot yesterday, didn’t it?” Ronnie could feel himself his heart beats speeding up in his the neck, beside his quiet throat. He would go home sicker than when he got here. That frustration was probably going to grow a cancer on him.

When he turned 13 years old, however, Ronnie had his body flooded with hormones. And then he spoke. He had now a thin rare moustache franticly moving synchronized with his Adam’s apple.

He dialoged with the hairdresser moving the head all the time and would get a crooked haircut. At the dentist he drooled but did not silence.

Ronnie began to speak and fought with the fat cook. He conquered a pretty girlfriend only to send her to hell. He made a baby during a night of wild sex when he screamed endlessly. He talked seriously to his daughter’s boyfriend. He lied to his lover and to his wife. He said to his ex-partner: “We are ex best-friends from now on”.

Now he was 53 years old and from now on, bending over in front of his proctologist, Ronnie would never speak again. He would not answer about how hot it was yesterday. He would be touched by his doctor and would shut up forever.

Beauty and the Beast

Having lunch at a restaurant the other day, I couldn’t help noticing the couple on the table close by. She was young, thin, tall, had dark hair and Latin features. She was pretty, I mean very pretty. He had Latin features also, and nothing else similar to her. He was a shorty, swollen, chubby Mexican.

A third person arrives and sits down with them. He was certainly an American and probably a lawyer. I always thought that lawyers smelled differently. That one seemed to be on the border between the legal with the not-so-legal. Thus he smelled even worse.

Curious, I moved my seat a little closer to them and heard parts of their conversation.

The chubby Mexican would say: How much is that going to cost? … How much is that going to cost? .... It was the only thing he asked.

The lawyer talking to the girl: Have you ever been married? … Have you ever been convicted of felony? … What is your actual status?

The girl, in the entire time, said only a couple of phrases that I didn’t understand and apparently neither did they. She spoke English very poorly.

Based on what it looked like, the chubby Mexican was a naturalized citizen and was bringing the girl to live here on an arranged marriage. It seemed to be what they call a win-win deal. She would earn a lawful permanent resident status, and he would have that beautiful woman beside him.

The lawyer was the only one that was there for love. Love for the money.