Somebody who thinks like me.

Thanks to Alexandre for this cartoon from last Saturday´s paper. It sums up to a freaking tee my attitude toward Brazilian soccer mania.

Mind you, I have nothing at all against soccer or people who like it. In fact, I am beginning to like it myself. Today I was home alone and watched the entire game between Argentina and Greece. My problem is with the people who would rather cheer for the Brazilian national team (and light firecrackers and blow horns in the street etc, etc, etc.) than look around them at the incredible economic inequity that confronts them everywhere.

One of the saddest things I´ve seen here was last Sunday night after Brazil´s victory over Ivory Coast when I was waiting for a bus to go meet a friend for coffee. There was a street person, who had somehow managed to find a green and yellow shirt, and a horn, begging for money to eat. I am convinced that Marx was wrong. Religion isn´t the opiate of the masses; soccer is. Well, religion is too, but I´ve got soccer on my mind.

If yáll see the same picture that I see as I am typing this, you will not be able to read the captions...but since I will need to translate anyway....

Panel 1 (with all of the Brazilian flags, which are omnipresent here during the world cup, by the way) = Victory

Panel 2 (with people sleeping in the street) = a trophy

Panel 3 = Nobody´s life is resolved or improved (this is the shakiest translation...Help, Alexandre!)

Panel 4 = But everybody cheers (or celebrates)

Panel 5 = The rat says "We´re going to win."

The whole thing is so depressing.

Give Me Some Good-old American Euphemisms

About a month ago, Heitor and I acquired an adorable little siamese kitten named Malu. The name, which we like and decided to keep, was bestowed by the previous owner, an elderly woman in our neighborhood who didn´t have the energy required by a kitten and who also feared she couldn´t keep Malu from falling off her apartment´s balcony. For those few of you old enough to remember the allusion, we considered renaming her Ballou (Cat Ballou), but decided she could be Cat Malu just as well.

After an earlier plan to get two kittens fell through, I went to our neighborhood pet store to ask if they might know of anyone with a cat to adopt. By coincidence, the owner said he knew of a woman who had a siamesse kitten she couldn´t keep. If I would wait a few minutes, he would call her and see if she could bring the kitten to the store.

The woman, Dona Fanny, was, understandably, very relucant to just hand her baby off to an american who might decide tomorrow to pack up and return to the US. I told her that I understood perfectly her concerns and said we could wait until she had an opportunity to meet Heitor and, if she wished, visit our place and see what we had to offer, in terms of living space. It wasn´t necessary, I said, that Malu go home with me that day. Still, after a good deal of conversation and some intervention on my behalf by the pet store owner and the veterinarian who has an office above the pet shop, Malu did go home with me. Dona Fanny, accepted my invitation to come and see Malu in our apartment the next day and she was so pleased that she returned later that same day to bring me a cat bed.

I don´t know anything about her provenance before she came to the Dona Fanny, but the veterinarian told me Malu was born in January. So, it is time to have her spayed. The date is set for 1 July.

There is one word that sends chills up my spine, and I suspect those of most other American males. To avoid using that word, Americans have their male pets neutered and female pets spayed. Unfortunately, if there is a euphemism in Brasil I haven´t found it. Pets here, both male and female, are castrated. So Malu is to be "castrado" and I feel like a jerk even though I know it is the right thing to do.

Moderation of Comments

I apologize to those (two) of you who have commented here regularly that your comments weren´t published automatically, but had to come to me for "moderation." And also to anyone who was put off from commenting by the notice that your comment would not be published until it had been moderated. (Until now, I had always thought of "moderation" as the opposite of "extremism;" not as something that a moderator does.)

It occurred to me how obnoxious moderation of comments is when I went today to a blog called the Revolutionary Muslim or something like that and left a comment...which I guarantee you will never see. There were zero comments when I wrote mine, and I don´t think they´ll like mine well enough to share it with all of their readers.

I presume people who comment here have been seeing the same message I saw there. You will see it no longer, as I have changed the settings. Comments now will be published automatically

Revolutionary Muslim, by the way, is the organization that has called for death to the creators of South Park for disrespecting Allah, and about which Jon Stewart had a terrific response/rant. Jon Stewart´s position, which he summed up as "Go Fuck Yourselves," seems as appropriate as anything else one might say.

A Spot of Olde England in São Paulo

I have started to acquire some English language students, and hope to get one or two more. So far all of my students live in my apartment building, which certainly makes it convenient. One of my more improbable students, Elio, is a Brazilian who earns his living by teaching English. He is about 40 years old and lived in London for 4 or 5 years in his middle 20s. I would say that his English is fine, but he pays me to help him with his vocabulary and his pronunciation. Sometimes he reads to me. Sometimes we just talk. Fortunately, because I don´t want to feel guilty taking his money just for listening, we have never met yet without my having helped him have an epiphany of one sort or another with regard to the language.

What I love is the fact that he learned British English. There have been several instances where we are just talking, and he says something that is 100% British. The most recent was his reference to something in his refrigertor which had "gone off." And there was the polite question at our first meeting if I "fancied" something to drink. I wish I had been writing them down, because we have hardly ever talked, in person or on the phone, without my noting with delight some particular word or expression which was totally British. As I said, I love the way the Brits talk.

We all know a lot of instances where the Brits have a different word for something than we do...(elevator/lift, flashlight/torch, hood (car)/bonnet)...but the examples I can think of are all nouns. Once we were chatting and I had to call an end to it because it was time for me to fix dinner. Elio said that his partner was also fixing dinner and that it was a good thing because he, Elio, was feeling a bit peckish. I didn´t say anything, but I was quite sure he was misusing that word. To me, feeling a bit peckish meant one was in a bad mood, or a moderately bad temper. After dinner, I looked it up and found out we were both right. In England, "peckish" means hungry. In the US, it means crotchety. So far this is the only example I´ve encountered of an adjective with totally different meanings in England and the US.

Finally, since I´m on the subject of England, in Anthony Trollope´s "Can You Forgive Her?" he describes something as being "as cold as charity." Isn´t that awesome?

And I have to mention Henry James´response to Trollope´s title, even though he was supposedly a great admirer of Trollope, "yes, and forget her too for that matter."

More about being an English teacher next time.

Noise Pollution

I was reminded again this morning that Brazilians don´t seem to understand the concept of noise pollution. Before I was even out of bed this morning, although it is true that I was sleeping late, I was being assaulted with the sound of someone selling watermelons on the street outside our window. It is common for farmers to drive their beat-up old trucks to town with a load of melons, pineapples, strawberries, or whatever with a loudspeaker mounted on the top of the cab and an annoying tape on a continual loop.

Of course one sympathizes with the desire of the small farmers to sell their produce and of the residents of the city to buy directly from the farmers instead of the markets. But the process wouldn´t have to be so invasive. Farmers Markets similar to those in the US already exist throughout the city.

If it isn´t the farmers who are disturbing my peace, it is some small neighborhood store or restaurant which has a man with a microphone and a speaker standing on the sidewalk haranguing the passersby, although I don´t know that I´ve had that experience since we moved to our new apartment, in a neighborhood a little less commercial.

Perhaps these tactics are used because they work, although it is just as possible they are old patterns that have persisted since forever, and nobody has ever studied their effectiveness. If everyone were to adopt my way of thinking, namely that I wouldn´t eat in your damn restaurant if you were giving the food away, or buy that pineapple from you if it were the last one on earth, maybe the practice would continue because that is just the way things have always been done.

A Bit of Unseemly Bragging?

One would assume the size of his Johnson doesn´t make the Ruffles potato chips in this store any better than in the gazillion other little placess like this in São Paulo.

It is silly, I know, but I love these kind of linguistic blind spots. Indulge me.

Tchau.

A Sweet Little Story

To counterbalance all of my negative comments about Brasil, past and future, here is a nice little affirmation of common decency that went above-and-beyond .

Today on my way home from the gym I stopped at a little meat market that is closer to our old neighborhood than to where we live now. I´ve only been there a couple of times in the past and I´m not sure why I went there today, since there is a similar market a block from our new apartment. But, for whatever reason, I did, and I had the butcher cut me six nice, thick slices of pork loin. For those of you in the US who are curious about living costs here, the price came to about $7.65, at the current exchange rate.

I handed my debit card to the old lady at the cash register only to have her tell me that they don´t accept debit cards. Actually (this is for you, Alexandre) she told me a lot of stuff that I didn´t understand, but I clearly understood that my debit card was no good. This does happen now and then, but usually I am with Heitor and, between the two of us, we come up with the necessary money. Today I had practically no cash. But it was no big deal because I knew that my bank had a branch only a couple of blocks away and I said that I would go there, get some cash and return. The lady tried to get me to take the sack of meat. I said, "no, I´ll get the cash and return." She insisted. She said, "I trust you." Since I don´t live in that neighborhood, and didn´t know when I would be back, I was equally insistent that she keep the package and that I would return with the cash. The butcher who had cut the meat was watching this conversation with the textbook definition of a bemused look, by the way.

Oops, I left out one detail. The price was R$13.44. When the lady told me they didn´t take Visa debit cards, I naturally checked to see how much cash I had, which turned out to be only R$9.00. The woman questioned the butcher, "R$9???" with a look in her eyes as if to say, "is that close enough?" He was blocked from my vision, so I didn´t see his reaction, but I kept saying that, no, I would get the money and return.

So I did get the money and returned in less than ten minutes and the transaction was finished. I told the woman that I would remember that she had trusted me. That only started a new rapid-fire dialog on her part, of which (for you again, Alexandre) I understood very little.

For those of you who are wondering about these asides, Alexandre is my português teacher, who will only allow this much English here. And he is a vegetarian, so he probably doesn´t even approve of my visits to the meat markets. :-)

Tchau.

Not exactly news from São Paulo

It has been so long since I´ve written anything here that I am out of practice. The reason is that Heitor and I moved into a new apartment on 23 December. I will write about our misadventures later. For now I still feel too close to all of the chaos to want to talk about it. I will just say that, as of yesterday, the dining room table, which had been laying in a pile on the floor for almost a month is finally assembled. I don´t like talking on the telephone in Português, but when I got home from my class and found that the guy had been here (unscheduled, typically), and left his number I got on the phone and got him back. But, as I say, more of that later.

Now I want to tell you a little story from, I believe, the summer of 2005, when I was still living in Redlands, CA. I´ve told this to many of you and shared these pictures, but I was thinking of it today and realized again what an extraordinary event this was.

My back yard in Redlands was relatively narrow, but quite deep. I am not good at estimating distances, but I would guess that it was about 50 yards deep. At about 35 yards, there was a chain link fence enclosing a smaller area that was probably about 15 yards deep.

I arrived home from work one evening and went into the back yard to see the dogs. Soon I noticed that there was something hanging in, or on, the chain link fence 35 yards away. I walked back and was stunned to find a young hawk hanging perfectly still upside down on the back side of the fence, hanging on with his claws.

At first, I didn´t know what to do, but eventually I went back to the house and put on a leather jacket and found some leather gloves. Probably, if it hadn´t been so obviously a young bird, I wouldn´t have dared to do this. I went back to the hawk and, from the opposite side of the fence, gingerly unhooked his claws from the fence and he immediately dropped onto a large rock at the foot of the fence. It happened so fast that I have no idea how he righted himself fast enough to land on his talons. But having landed there on the rock, he didn´t move a muscle. Actually I can see from the pictures above that his head is not in the same position, but he was clearly in some kind of distress. I went back to the house and got my camera and took the two pictures which are attached here.

I think the fact that he stayed on the rock instead of flying away was my first clue that there was more of a problem than his just being tangled up in the fence. And in the process of freeing him, it was clear that he hadn´t really been tangled up inthe fence; he was just hanging onto it for dear life.

All this while the dogs are frantically trying to get at this creature. It was probably ten hours since I had left for work in the morning, and who knows how long he had been hanging in that position, while two big dogs on the other side of the fence were trying desperately to get at him the whole time. You can see the fence in one of the pictures. It is almost like there was nothing between the hawk and the dogs. It is no wonder that he was in a state of shock.

The only explanation of events that I have come up with is that he was still young, obviously, and that he had landed on the fence to wait and watch, or maybe even rest. The dogs then frightened him, maybe even nudged him, and he fell off the fence to the side away from the dogs and managed to grab on with his claws, but then was more or less trapped, constantly harassed by the dogs from the other side of the fence, and he could do nothing but hang on because he had no idea the dogs couldn´t really get to him.

Almost as soon as the hawk was on the rock, with the dogs just on the other side of the fence going crazy, I decided this wasn´t an ideal arrangement. The hawk let me lift him up off the rock and move him onto a tree stump another 15 yards further away from the dogs. Then, not knowing how long he was going to remain comatose I thought maybe it would be better to set him on the ground, and he allowed me to move him again. I put the dogs in another enclosure close to the house so that they couldn´t get anywhere near the thing.

I assumed it was too late to search and find a raptor rescure program in the area that would still be able to come out and pick this guy up so late in the day, and then I realized he may not have had anything to eat or drink for several hours. I went back to the house and filled a little dish with water and, for lack of a better idea of hawk food, I cracked open an egg and put it in a dish. When I returned with the two dishes, I don´t think he had moved a muscle. I would have liked to stay and watch him, but I also guessed that from his point of view I was as big a part of the problem as the dogs, so I left him alone and went back to the house.

I was able to stay away for maybe 30 minutes or so. When I returned he had moved to the top of the fence that separated my yard from neighbor´s. He let me approach to within six feet or so of him, and then he flew off, apparently fully recovered. The whole process had probably only lasted about 45 minutes....for me. As I say, who knows how many hours it lasted for him.

The epilog. Several months later I went back to that last 15-yard section of the yard to fill the bird feeder. Some movement in the low branches of one of the trees caught my attention, and I looked up and saw a hawk with the remains of a little bird in his talons and a few feathers flying around. I would guess he was only 12-15 feet away from me, but he never moved as I filled the bird feeder, and he was still there when I walked away. I felt bad that this hawk was using my bird feeder as bait to catch his own food, but I liked to think he was "my" hawk and that he was so serene in that tree because of some vague memories.

Ok...next time news from Brasil.

Beijos.