Overrated

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a music fan and chart watcher. I’ve seen a fair share of bands come and go (Blue Zoo, Living in a Box, Johnny Hates Jazz), a few who lasted a bit longer before either disbanding or losing quality (Marillion) and a tiny fraction who have stayed the course even after their demise (The Beatles). I’ve seen a few who were underrated. Bands like Kiss, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, although trashed by the critics as being too high on image and too low on music, actually produced better songs than they are usually given credit for. I’ve seen bands who were not all that great and generally recognized as such (Motorhead). However, I’ve also had to stomach the media darlings, the bands that everyone loves to love no matter how repetitive or meaningless their songs are. I'm not saying for a minute that they don't have any merit, I myself have bought records by all of them. All I object to is their being given an iconic status that they don't deserve. Here’s my top five.

5. Simple Minds

When I was coming of age, all the trendies in Glasgow were Simple Minds fans. They used to do five or six shows in a row at a licensed hall and you had to be 18 to get in. Scottish people have a bad habit of loving anything remotely Scottish that makes the big time (remember Sheena Easton?),and the Minds fitted that bill. I never understood what all the fuss was about. All their songs sounded exactly the same, their lyrics were mostly nonsense and they all had an annoying thumping bass line. Until the mid eighties, they were the classic indie style act. They didn’t sell much, but everyone wanted to go to their concerts and buy their T-shirts. They finally made it big in 1985 with Don’t You Forget About Me reaching #1 worldwide. When I came to live in Brazil in 1988, the Simple Minds wave was not far behind. By 1990, all the teens I was teaching were into them. Finally, their fans either grew up or caught on to the fact that they were releasing the same song over and over again. In the mid nineties they brought out an album that went nowhere. I don’t know if they are still going, touring the nostalgia circuit. I don’t care either. Definitely the most overrated band Scotland ever produced. Truly awful. And yet the Billy Sloans of the country never tired of giving them a leg up.

4. The Rolling Stones

People look back at the sixties (whether they lived through that period or not) and imagine or pretend they remember The Beatles and the Stones battling for number one or waiting to see who would sell out their tours fastest. Truth be told, there was no contest. The Stones had a few hits, notably Satisfaction, and a lot of sold-out shows. But the Fab Four sold far, far more records and it was really no contest. The reputation of the London boys only grew along with their longevity. Jagger and Richards were no match for Lennon and McCartney. The Stones could take a lineup change, The Beatles couldn’t, the Fab Four being THOSE fab four. But the Scousers split up; the Stones never did. Every year or two they would release a new album with a couple of good singles and a lot of fillers. The older they got, the more the media loved them. Good songs? A few. Brilliant? No way. Overrated? Sad to say so, but yes.

3. U2

I saw U2 for the first time in 1982 and since then there has been no stopping them. There was a summer festival that was broadcast on Channel 4’s The Tube either around Christmas, 1982, headlined by The Police and with U2 second on the bill. Bono gave interviews, prattled on about everything from ‘glossy wallpaper music’ in the charts to religion in Ireland. The press fell in love with them. At that time, they only had released two albums (Boy and October), both of which were full of the nonsense arty lyrics that were the norm in the early eighties. In June ’83, Live at Red Rocks was shown on the five-hour special of The Tube and propelled their new album, War, to the top of the charts. But it wasn’t until 1986, when they released the Joshua Tree, that the band became an international phenomenon. This album was good, at least side one was. Ever since, they have released a plethora of mediocre albums that, assuredly, have sold well but have never reached the heights of the mid eighties. Bono became the voice of everything from Amnesty International to protect mom and pop stores. They tour a lot and sell albums by the truckload, and yet I doubt that these albums will be remembered much in later years. A band that started out good, reached a high and lived on for political reasons. Overrated like hell.

2. The Sex Pistols

Simple Minds, the Stones and U2 at least put out what we could call music, and more than one offering of it. The Pistols never did. They had one album and a series of outtakes, sporadic singles and re-releases in a hundred packages, but Never Mind The Bollocks was their only real album. The band barely lasted two years before falling apart. Sid Vicious became the vocalist and a few money generating singles were released. The Sex Pistols were never meant to last long and the members themselves never seemed to take the project very seriously. And yet, as the years passed, they became something of an icon, which they didn’t deserve to be. Yes, in terms of image and shock TV there can be no doubt that they made an impact, but to hold them up on a pedestal as musical icons is a joke. But that is what’s happening. Whenever an ‘influential’ list of albums is published, their lone release is inevitably there. A couple of good punk songs, a lot of fillers and basically forgettable, NMTB is given far, far more credit than it ever deserved, and so is the band.

1. The Clash

This is the band that everybody loves to love. I have their Greatest Hits album and would hesitate to give that title to the CD, as the actual number of hits was very, very low. In the late seventies, they made a name for themselves on the British punk scene with good singles like Tommy Gun and English Civil War, rounding of the decade with London Calling. In 1982, they finally made it big around the world with Combat Rock and the two singles Rock the Casbah and Should I Stay or Should I Go. That was basically their only big hit. Their last release in 1985 was considered a joke even by their biggest fans. So why is it that The Clash are everywhere. Documentaries about them appear regularly; when Seth and Summer split up in The O.C. and she sent his stuff back to him, a London Calling LP was prominently displayed at the top of the pile. When the cast of Friends visited England for Ross’s wedding, London Calling was used on the soundtrack. When Rolling Stone issued their Top 100 Albums of the 80s, London Calling was #1, even though it was released in 1979! Their media popularity, in proportion with the quality of their music, is unbelievable. I bought the four singles mentioned above and enjoyed listening to them. I don’t dispute that the band had some talent and put out some good songs, but the amount of fillers supersedes the good stuff a hundred fold. The most overrated band of the lot.

The Secret Garden

Last night Grêmio made it to the semi final of the Libertadores, while Palmeiras didn’t. Corinthians beat Inter 2-0, the second goal being Ronaldo’s. on 1 July, they have a huge advantage. Inter just didn’t have a lucky night. They attacked and attacked and attacked, but the Corinthians goalie, Felipe, was just on top form and nothing got past him, even balls that were fired at point blank range. Tonight, São Paulo and Cruzeiro dispute the last place in the semi finals of the Libertadores. Cruzeiro won 2-1 in BH last month. Let’s see. The winner meets Grêmio and will arguably be my team’s first challenging game in the competition.

Obama’s media darling status rolls on. Yesterday a lot of attention was paid to him swatting a fly during a press conference. The North Koreans are still making big noises about their nuclear program, reportedly threatening to fire a nuclear missile towards Hawaii in July. This should have a lot of nerves on edge but I’m a bit cynical that it’s more a ploy for attention and international aid than anything else. North Korea is not a serious threat to the West. I lived through it all with the Cold War and it all has a feel of been there, done that about it.

My workload has been lighter this week. Last week I had to work on Corpus Christi, but this week there have only been sporadic texts and my usual two classes to deal with. This means that I’ve been able to make progress in a lot of things. Yesterday I watched The Secret Garden (1993). I thought it would be something like Tom’s Midnight Garden but it wasn’t. The little girl, Kate Maberly, was highly praised at the time for her acting skills, but for me the star was Maggie Smith. She’s a great actress. I first saw her in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and she was great. Later I saw her in My House in Umbria, a great movie, one for which she managed to drag Ronnie Barker out of retirement. A wonderful actress. The cinematography was great too, really capturing the mood of the cold Yorkshire Moors. The story is set in 1910, I think, and the film captures that turn of the century mood. I enjoyed it. I say I imagine 1910 because that was when it was first published, in serialized form, with the book coming out in 1911. Surprisingly, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story was not as popular then as it is now. The book is available in the public domain and I might get round to reading it one of these days…

The other day I was reading up on Brian Cant, the children’s entertainer that I ‘grew up on’ as they say in America. He and Johnny Ball and a host of other BBC presenters were the voices of my childhood. I was happy to see that he is still alive and well.

I’m still treating my urinary tract infection. The last pill is tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. I hadn’t been sick for quite some time before this. I hope to stay in form for my trip to Scotland. We’ll be leaving in twenty-three days.

Today is the anniversary of Churchill’s “their finest hour” speech in 1940. I was reading up on Churchill the other day and an interesting fact or two came to light. First, he spent an incredible amount of the day in bed, conducting the war in his pyjamas. Second, they say that a secretary or other functionary would prefer to work with Hitler than with the greatest Briton. Hitler remembered birthdays, gave gifts, was not too fussy about grammar and in general was supposedly a lot easier to work with. Churchill was so rude to his staff that in 1940 his wife had to bring this to his attention! Funny.

Another wartime anniversary, on this day in 1945, Lord Haw Haw was charged with treason in London, being hanged a year later. Lord Haw Haw was actually a number of different English-language broadcasters from Germany, but the name was personified in the person of William Joyce, a British fascist. His distinctive “Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling” became familiar to British radio listeners. There was also Axis Sally, real name Mildred Gillars, from Maine, who broadcast pro-nazi propaganda to ANZAC forces. She tried to turn soldiers against the war with taunts that their wives and girlfriends back home were being unfaithful to them. She fared better than Joyce. Sentenced to thirty years imprisonment, she was paroled in 1961 and died of natural causes, aged 87, in 1988.

I’ve also been studying Operation Dieppe, but it makes my blood boil and I can’t bring myself to write much about it. Mountbatten had a lot to answer for. He was once something of a hero to me. I watched his TV series in 1987. But further studies when I was an adult showed me that he was a demagogue, a ruthless crook and a conman.

Today is also Paul McCartney’s sixty-seventh birthday; Alison Moyet is 48. I can’t believe she’s only about five years older than me. When I first saw her back in 1982 I thought she was a ripe old age of at least 25!

Interesting fact: Eden is Hebrew for ‘delight’.

This week I’ve been in the mood for fifties style music and have been listening to The Temptations (Earth Angel) and Los Lobos (Oh Donna, Come on let’s Go).

I’m still working away at Stargate and last night got half way through Season 4. There was an interesting story about a time loop that O’Neill and Teal’c get caught in, Window of Opportunity. I enjoyed that, along with Season 2’s 1969, a time travel story. Yesterday I jumped forward a bit to one called Watergate, which I imagined would be a time travel story to, but wasn’t. I was hoping they’d meet Nixon or something, but it was a totally different theme altogether, with the gate leading to a planet made of water. Agh! Marina Sirtis was in it, which was good and she had a pretty good Russian accent, but I must say I was disappointed when the story didn’t turn out to be about the seventies.

Today the weather is cool but sunny. Two nights ago we had an awful storm during the night and I thought the house would split in two! I don’t mind the cold, but rain in a tropical country is a harsh enemy.

The Omphalos Hypothesis

In this painting, Adam and Eve have bellybuttons, but why? They were not born from a woman. The Omphalos Hypothesis explains why our distant ancestors had a bellybutton.

I’ve found some time to study along the way too. I’d like to write down all my discoveries but I’ve forgotten so many of them. First of all, IBM stands for International Business Machines. I’d never thought about that. I also started surfing the web the other day and came across the name of Bertrand Russell. Now that’s a name I’ve seen around for years, but had never taken the time to find out who he actually was. I started reading about him and before I knew it I was dealing with a quote of his about the Omphalos Hypothesis. The name caught my attention and I read on. The hypothesis is based on a book written in 1857 by Philip Henry Gosse, an Englishman, and published two years before Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In the nineteenth century, people were waking up to the fact that scientific evidence showed that the world was far older than the six thousand or so years calculated by Archbishop James Ussher, who in the seventeenth century, after exhaustive studies, worked out that the world was created on the night prior to 23 October, 4004 B.C. This dating was generally accepted by most Christians; however, by the nineteenth century, with the discovery of fossils that were clearly hundreds of thousands of years old, scientists were attempting to reconcile the age of the universe with the Old Testament. One such theory was the Omphalos Hypothesis. Omphalos is the Greek word for navel or bellybutton, and is based on the idea that God must have created the world as already old. It also states that Adam and Eve had bellybuttons because God created them with one, even though they were never born of a woman and had no need for an umbilical cord. Trees in the Garden of Eden should also have had no growth rings, but God would put them there anyway and the world was created as already old before the arrival of Adam. The galaxies that are millions of light years away were created that way. This may seem a bit nutty to us today, and it also came across that way to people of the time. Gosse had built a successful career as a writer and this book sort of ruined his reputation. Reaction ranged from giggles to blasphemy. Charles Kingsley, who wrote The Water Babies, refused to review the book saying that giving it credence was to say that God was a “Sometimes Deceiver”.

“[With] your newly created Adam's navel, you make God tell a lie. It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here ... I cannot ... believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."

One of the offshoots of Omphalos is false history. If God made the world already old, in other words, with a history that never existed per se, then when did the world actually begin? Could it not be said that it began five minutes ago? Five minutes ago, God created the world and filled it with false memories. Everything we remember, including Gosse himself, are just memories provided by God to give us a background, a reference point of some sort to go by, including our own childhoods and memories of yesterday, or even just waking up this morning. Bertrand Russell puts this forward in The Analysis of Mind:

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

This is where I first came into touch with the Omphalos notion. Russell was taking the logic of the idea to extremes, but also seems to have been at least giving it serious consideration from a philosophical viewpoint. However, other writers have been less generous. Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges trashed the theory in 1940 by writing a book about people who followed a similar philosophy religiously. In the 1990s, people online began referring to the theory as Last Thursdayism, arguing that the world was actually created last Thursday. Heretical offshoots, such as Last Wednesdayism, were also mentioned!

I feel a strain on my brain whenever I read about these things. But I feel its important to study and try to get a perspective on philosophy when I have the time to do so, even though a lot of the ideas, to the layman, don’t seem to come within shouting distance of common sense. But there you go…

16 June, 2009

The weather has been freezing in Curitiba for the past few weeks. It can get warm during the day, but in the evening and during the night we’re chattering and shivering. We haven’t had such a cold winter in quite a while. In 2007, the boiling hot weather went all the way to July, with virtually no winter at all.

The Brazilian League has seen six rounds already, with our local teams doing dismally. Coritiba finally got out of the rut on Sunday with a 5-0 victory over Flamengo. Atlético did it on Saturday night by beating Sport 1-0 in Recife. Coxa made it to the semi final of the Brazilian Cup but got knocked out two weeks ago by Inter. Tomorrow, Inter and Corinthians are in the final. Grêmio are in the quarter finals of the Libertadores. I won’t even mention Celtic and their dreary results this year.

I’ve been working steadily and last week did a great translation about cheese. It was very interesting and now I’m looking at all the fine cheeses in the supermarket! I feel like buying them but, as the translation mentions, they are very expensive.

Last night I finally watched the original Stargate movie. James Spader was in the role of Daniel Jackson and Kurt Russell was Col. Jack O’Neill, and smoked like a chimney! It was all right but nothing brilliant. I prefer the series. I’m now on Season 3, with two episodes to go. I’ve got a long list of DVDs to watch, including new ‘cans’ of documentaries about WWII. But Stargate is getting most of my attention for now. I’m getting to like Capt. (now Major) Carter better than the others. I like the combination of scientist and military officer. But I also like it that she doesn’t have to ‘kick ass’. She is the kind of person I’d like to have as a sister, I think. She’s kind and considerate and not aggressively sexual. The sexy one for me is Dr. Fraiser. However, sexuality is not a big deal on this show. It’s quite philosophical in a way. I also finally, after about a million years, bought the original Freaky Friday. This was a film I always wanted to see as a child because it was regularly featured on a BBC quiz show for children called Screen Test. I watched the remake with Bruna a couple of years back, but it was a bit boring. I think I saw some of the original back in the nineties, but not all of it. Going to the cinema when I was a boy was a rare occurrence, since it was incredibly expensive. The first movie I ever saw was Benji, followed by 101 Dalmatians. In 1978 when we went to Saltcoats, we saw a number of movies, but then I think I went years and years without going to the cinema again. I always wanted to see Freaky Friday and Candleshoe. We all used to think Jodie Foster was cool, preferring a cheeseburger and cherry cola to tea and biscuits. In those days, I’d never seen a cheeseburger and had no idea what cherry cola was!

The news hasn’t been of much interest lately. The Iranian elections caused a bit of a stir, with accusations of fraud. Netanyahu has accepted the idea of a ‘disarmed’ Palestinian state, and President Obama seems to be going out of his way to screw up the United States. I think he’s a nice enough guy in his own way but his priorities are all wrong and he’s being far too lenient on terrorism. There was a big report a few weeks ago about his ‘cool’ factor, with stories of teens in some school saying things like “Yo barackin’ ma main man!”. Liberal journalists are loving it, but I think I would prefer a president who was competent rather than ‘cool’. Presidents aren’t elected to record rap music and be the ‘in thing’; they’re elected to do a good job and he’s not pulling it off. He promised no more bailouts of banks but had hardly warmed his seat in the Oval Office before he was announcing hundreds of billions for them. Banks are too powerful for you, right bro’? His first indication for the Supreme Court is a woman called Sonia Sotomayor. She’s been taking a pounding from the Right, with Gordon Libby accusing her of speaking ‘illegal alien’. But if a Supreme Court nomination and Susan Boyle are the biggest stories around, then there’s not much happening.

Ah yes, Susan Boyle. She’s the new singing sensation. I haven’t heard her voice yet, though everyone tells me it’s brilliant. She is a 48-year-old unemployed Scottish woman who became the next big thing on a talent show called Britain’s Got Talent. She came in second place. The fact that she’s pushing fifty, is fat and not attractive and has a heavy Scottish accent have made her the anti-hero of the pop world. People keep coming to me and asking about her just because she’s Scottish! That drives me nuts. But I hope she does well in her career. Despite not clinching the top spot on the talent show, she has been a big feature on the tour and reportedly has a record deal in the works. I really hope she makes the big time. If she can do it, so can us!

Diary Time: On Saturday I took Bruna to McDonald’s for the first time in months! She’s shifted her priorities now and she’s in love with a packer at the local supermarket. Inaiá and I have been out a lot, but this week we’re staying home because we’re taking medicine for a urinary tract infection. We started the medication on Sunday. On Saturday we went out on the town and met up with Helena and Irene at the Chinese woman’s bar downtown. We all sat talking but a drunk guy started ranting too much, so we got out of there and went to the beer house next door and had chips and bacon and listened to some music. Then we went home and that was it. I’m still going to the sauna a lot and loving it and to Tibério’s too (although not this week of course). The house from which the bar is run, along with all the other little shops there, is up for sale, so this could be the end of our little bar. A pity. I hope that they don’t manage to sell it for a long time..

Playlist:
Music: Shannon (Let the Music Play); ELO (Time; Rock ’n’ Roll is King; early stuff; Barbra Streisand (Guilty Pleasures); Randy Crawford (Secret Combination)

Stargate

Once again, I’ve become lapse with my diary, and haven’t written since mid March. I’ve had tons of work on my plate, although there were a few gaps that I could have used for writing but didn’t. Quite a lot has changed.

First of all, Bruna and I are off to Scotland in just over a month! We’ll be leaving here on 11 July and returning on 3 August. It will be my mum’s 80th birthday and she wants everyone there with her. So, we’ll be off! I’m looking forward to going back, it’s been one and a half years since my last visit.

Second of all, we’ve got a wee dog! We got him from an animal shelter and he’s about three months old. He’s been with us for a week now and we’re in love with him. I was out playing with him in the path this morning and he’s grown quite a bit since last week. His presence seems even to have made Inaiá and Bruna put up with each other.

Tons of translations coming in from Rio, BH, you name it. There was a terrible mix up with Anpad over my payments but it’s all been sorted out now. I did a very interesting text about Spanish flu, finished off the book for then FGV, and another two papers for them. A few new clients too and still teaching Edna.

Another thing I’ve started doing is watching Stargate SG-1. I first came across this a few years back, 2004 I believe. It was on on Sunday afternoons on one of the cable channels, but as it was at the same time as the football, I didn’t really get into it. But I love sci-fi and decided I’d try to watch more. However, unlike some programs, this one was on only once a week. In Scotland I thought I might get the DVD, but Season 1 alone was a whopping fifty pounds, which was far too much to pay. However, two weeks ago we were at the shopping center and I came across Seasons 1 and 2 in a special box set for only R$99,00, so I snapped it up. It got off to a slow start but I’m hooked on it now and have almost finished Season 2. It is definitely, as Don S. Davis says, a character driven show. The sets are so cheap that they make me cringe and the shoestring budget is evident all around. My favorite character is Dr. Jackson, probably because he’s the most similar to myself. Captain O’Neill is the least impressive and realistic in my view. He’s too brash and comes across like a second rate James Bond, with pithy jokes and silly comebacks. His lack of diplomacy is monumental and it seems hard to believe that a guy like that would be used on missions in real life. He’s also too disrespectful of the scientists, and they are too often humiliated by his cheap humor. However, as played by Richard Dean Anderson, there is some salvation for him. Amanda Tapping is Captain Carter. I like her. She can “kick ass” but doesn’t do it too often and doesn’t seem to be out to prove that she can as tough as a man. Teal’c is a bit of an enigma to me. Maybe I missed something but I don’t get how he can control his goa’uld. I suppose that will be explained sooner or later. Anyway, it’s a good series because… well I have to tie that in with the next subject.

In the early 1970s, I would hurry home from o’clock mass to watch a cool sci-fi series on ITV called UFO. I thought it was great and futuristic. And a few weeks ago I bought the DVD megaset. I plunged into it for about a week and have to say I enjoyed it up to a point. But I found, like many things from childhood, that it wasn’t as good as I remembered. The main problem was lack of development. As all the episodes were made to be ‘stand alone’ episodes, that meant that they couldn’t have any continuance. So the series is like a snapshot of future history. The aliens are coming and we don’t know why. If you look at it from that perspective, then it’s okay, but if they had tried to make another series, people would have got sick of it (it wasn’t exactly a big hit to begin with). The weakest point for me is Commander Straker. He’s trying to be tough but just comes across as rude and brash. He demands perfection from others, but goes too far. He himself commits several blunders that cannot be questioned. First of all, he kills his own son for the sake of a mission. That was a real turn off. Second, when he actually gets an alien on his hands and has a chance to question him, he has the guy injected with poisonous drugs that kill him. This is the problem of the ‘stand alone’ episode. In real life, the alien would be imprisoned and under a mixture of threats and promises, would be induced to provide information. The only person who stands up to Straker is Colonel Freeman, at least in the first couple of episodes. But he soon degenerates into a groveling yes man and didn’t even make it to the end of the series. In the pilot he was a real ladies man and gave the impression that he would be fun to watch, but his womanizing was removed from future scripts and he became bland, boring and banned from the series. Poor guy. The characters smoke like chimneys on screen, which makes the show look dated, along with the upper crust English accents. Everyone speaks like Princess Diana, or like Julie Christie in Darling. The most annoying was in an episode called The Long Sleep (which lived up to its name). In this episode, a girl is in a coma for ten years after being abducted by aliens and comes out of the coma in 1981. Commander Straker, who knocked her down and was responsible for the coma, goes to visit her and tell her that ten years have passed. He’s also out for information. But the girl’s accent is so bloody annoying that you can’t concentrate on the plot and all she says is “I’m thorry, I caaan’t remembah”. Her lisping upper class accent sucks. I was glad when she bit the dust at the end of this unbearable episode. I think it was the last in the series, although not the last to be filmed. The producers pride themselves on the fact that racial differences have been wiped out on Earth (circa 1975) but obviously they think that class differences ought to prevail. However, I do have to consider other reasons for this. Everyone thinks that Americans love classy English accents, so this may have been a ploy to capture the American market. Who knows? Anyway, my feelings about the show are mixed. The episodes have all been digitally remastered and look great. The UFOs, Moonbase Alpha and Sky One are very impressive. I like the futuristic uniforms on the moon, including the purple wigs (early colour TV was bombarded with impressive hues). But the stories at times are too weak and have no chance to develop. Which brings me back to Stargate. The seasons have arcs and progress is made, and that makes it watchable. Stargate SG-1 was the longest running sci-fi series of all time, lasting ten seasons. There are spin offs: Stargate Atlantis, which lasted five seasons, Stargate Infinity, a failed cartoon, and a new one coming in October, Stargate Universe. Going back to UFO, an interesting fact is that Michael Billington, who plays Paul Foster, auditioned for James Bond more times than any other actor! He was considered for Live and Let Die, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy. His only actual appearance in a Bond film was a Sergei Barsov in The Spy Who Loved Me. It must have been frustrating for him to come so close to that special role so many times and never land it.

Diary Time: Been getting on great with Bruna and we go out a lot. I take her to the club and she tells me all her secrets, especially about a boy who works at the supermarket that she’s got a crush on. I was never able to open up with my parents like that. Bruna also made her First Communion a few weeks ago. A nice Sunday afternoon and all went well. She looked cute in her dress. Inaiá and I have been out and about as usual, trying to lose weight, with lots of long walks. Seems to be working. On Saturday we went out with a woman called Patricia, who was nice. The little bar that we usually go to downtown has been closed for a while. The owner seems to be having trouble with her husband, who had run up gambling debts and went to China, taking the children with him. Now she’s gone after him. We miss that little bar. But during the week we’ve been going to Tibério’s practically every day.

Playlist:

Books: Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Omphalos
Music: ELO (Time, The Definitive Collection); Randy Crawford (Secret Combination); Roxette (Tourism)DVD: Stargate SG-1; UFO; Wargames; Valkyrie

Rogues' Reunion

Almost two weeks since my last post here. Time slipping away… Good fortune continues to smile upon me with so much work coming in from so many sources. Last week I landed a big contract with the FGV in Rio and they’ve already sent me some work. I’ve been getting lots from Anpad too and the companies I work for in Rio and BH. There have even been clients from Curitiba. But I’m living a totally different lifestyle now and am looking after my health more. Every morning we go out walking in the park. I put a good three or four kilometers behind me every day before I start work. For a while, work was everything and I actually took my clients seriously with their talk about the text having to be ready today or the world would end for them. But now I’m getting lots of walking done, I stop to have my meals at the right time and hardly ever do any work after six o’clock. After all those years working in schools at night and on Saturdays, with never a word of thanks, I learned that you’re only valued if you value yourself. I make sure I have lots of time for Bruna. I take her to the club and fetch her from her fistball training sessions three times a week, I go out with her on Saturday mornings and on Sundays too when we can. We have such a close bond and that was something I was losing while I was at that horrible school. It’s funny. Those people are still there with their petty bickering and silly little power games. I’m glad to be away from it all. No more cheeky teenagers, head games, threats of dismissal, falsified complaints from the managers (the oldest trick of them all) and no more adhering to inconvenient timetables. I make my own timetable now. If I don’t feel like working today, I’ll do more tomorrow. The only teaching I’m doing is Edna and when she stops I don’t think I’ll want to get involved in it again. I used to have a vision of me at sixty-five retiring, with generations of students coming to say farewell. But that was a different time in a different world. Things are different now and I have different values.

I’m also keeping up my reading and studying. I study so much and learn so much every day. And I’m still working away at The Three Investigators. Last week I read Wandering Caveman. It was, well, unusual to say the least and a typical example of the decline of the series. I also read my first book by Marc Brandel. This was the fortieth in the series, entitled The Mystery of the Rogues’ Reunion. The Rogues are the cast of The Wee Rogues, the show that Jupiter was in when he was a child, in which he played Baby Fatso. We learn a lot about Jupiter here. First of all, his parents died in a car crash when he was four. His Aunt and Uncle took him in and it was actually Aunt Mathilda who got him out of the TV series. We also learn his address, 45 Sunrise Road. It was quite a good story. It seems that Brandel, with his three books, helped breathe a little bit of new life into the dying series. However, the weak point is that the bad guys go unpunished. People are kidnapped and beaten up but just let it all go at the end, which makes the mystery a bit pointless to begin with. But it wasn’t bad.

Celtic beat Rangers 2-0 on Sunday to win the Cup. I can’t remember which cup and I’m too lazy to look it up, but it was probably the equivalent of the old League Cup with a sponsor’s name in front of it. The Champions League was exciting last week, with four English teams in the quarter finals. Coritiba’s performances have been dismal. Grêmio are picking up speed now and have become the leaders of their group in the Libertadores.

Inaiá’s family have been putting themselves through hell this week. Her brother is trying to show everyone who’s boss and attempting to get his mother to sign a proxy for him! She’s supposed to be about to come into some big dough. They were all fighting last week but things have calmed down a little now. On Sunday evening we went there and I had my sister-in-law all to myself, just like the old days. We sat listening to music in the kitchen and downing a few beers. I’d made a new CD for her full of surprises like her favourite Erasure song and an old Elvis classic called My Boy. Then we had hot dogs and came home. A nice evening. At lunchtime I took Bruna to McDonald’s and then Inaiá and I went to a steak house on Avenida Paraná. It used to be called Cuia de Chimarrão but is now called Costelão Gaúcho. Very expensive, but the food was excellent.

The other day I listened to a record I haven’t heard for years and years: Never take me alive by Spear of Destiny. Quite good after 22 years, really stood the test of time. I’ve been listening to a few 80s songs this week, including Mister Mister’s Broken Wings and Africa and Rossana by Toto.

Bailout fatigue is hitting people. We’re all sick to death of banks and insurance companies getting billions and then paying out tens of millions in bonuses to the same executives who messed things up. It’s funny that they have to give all the money to banks. Why not give some to the people who owe the banks money so that they can pay off their mortgages? Why not give ten grand to each person to get the economy moving? Banks are a strange institution. They make billions in profits one year and then a few months later they’re bust because a few people couldn’t meet their mortgage payments. Anyone who trusted in Barack Obama’s package to beat the recession has got to be disappointed. He criticized bailouts all the way, but as soon as he got to the White House he continued them, saying that this is the last time. Just like Lula here in Brazil who was supposed to be the president of change. The first thing he did, in typical Brazilian style, was up income tax, with the shopworn promise that it would help make things better in the distant future. People have been listening to this crap for decades, from the military governments, to the right wingers and now the left. In the case of the AIG bailout scandal, Obama says he’ll ask the overpaid CEOs and executives to return the money. This is done for the cameras, of course. He’ll never see that cash again.

Talking of financial scandals, there was finally a glimmer of justice last week as Bernard Madoff was jailed, awaiting sentencing in June after pleading guilty to eleven charges of fraud, money laundering, perjury, etc. The judge denied his request to remain free awaiting sentencing. So he is in jail and could face up to 150 years of hard time. Of course, as he is seventy and reportedly ill, he won’t serve much of his sentence. He finally took the fall so that his wife and children can enjoy his ill gotten wealth. They may be forced to return this or that, but Bernie has claimed that he did all his crimes by himself and that the family knows little to nothing about it all. This means that the odd two or three million hidden here or there around the globe can be tapped by the Madoff family. Now a few mill is a far cry from the sixty billion the old man ripped off, but it’s a lot more than most of us will ever see.

Patrick Duffy, a.k.a. Bobby Ewing, is 60 today. Lesley Ann Down is 55. I recall friends of mine at school ogling over her, but I never really thought there was anything brilliant about her. I doubt those guys remember her today…

Playlist:

DVD: Mary Tyler Moore Season 3
Books: Foundation; Foundation and Empire; Rogues Reunion; Wandering Caveman; Monster MountainMusic: Spear of Destiny; Mister Mister; Fiddler’s Dram

The Secret of the Haunted Mirror

Edna cancelled her class again this afternoon, so I took the chance to read Haunted Mirror. I usually don’t like these books with fictitious countries, in this case Ruffino “a small island country off the coast of South America”, and I didn’t like it here! This was Mary Carey’s fourth foray into the world of T3I. Her first was Flaming Footprints, which was not very good and also had an imaginary country. Then she wrote Singing Serpent, which was brilliant. One of the things that made it brilliant was the characterization. In Allie Jamison, she had found the perfect offset for Jupiter Jones. And her minor characters were great too. Take Allie’s Aunt Pat. She was a middle-aged woman, and a bit of a bird brain. Middle-aged women would become a staple in her stories later on. The strong, independent Mrs. Macomber in Death Trap Mine and Madeline Bainbridge in Magic Circle spring to mind. In Haunted Mirror, there is Mrs. Darnley, the mirror collector who wears expensive clothes and is a strong-willed, financially secure widow and grandmother. But she just doesn’t click as well with the reader as Mrs. Macomber does in Death Trap Mine. Her grandchildren, Jeff and Jean, are rather bland. The men from Ruffino are weird and it’s hard to make out whether Señor Santora is a good or bad guy. And the plot device of the microfilm sounds like a badly written Agatha Christie story when she made her blundering way into the world of spies. The plot lacks any excitement at all. At the end of the day, it’s hard to find an answer to so what and who cares! Do we really give a toss whether some fictitious government has some old microfilm taped to the back of a mirror? Could anyone care less about two guys debating the typically corrupt South American politics of a country that doesn’t even exist? And the whole thing about the ghost seems pointless. The answer is uncovered just too easily. Why steal the mirror when you could just break in, peel off the sticker and walk away? Yikes!

But there are other problems. Ms. Carey has problems with some of the main characters, especially Bob. Yes, he was creator Robert Arthur’s same ego. Bob Andrews = Bob Arthur. But later writers have problems finding anything for him to do. And in this book, all Bob seems to do is apologize for goofing up. He and Pete are sent to the hotel to shadow Santora. Jupe makes it clear that both boys should go in order to watch both entrances to the hotel. However, while Pete is in the hotel, Bob stays in the car with Worthington. He says sorry later, but why did he go in the first place? Pete is given quite a lot to do in this one, which is unusual for Ms. Carey because she tends to concentrate almost entirely on Jupiter. I think she would have been happy just to write the One Investigator series. Jupe does some fine detective work, tracking down an ice cream van at a railway crossing. But the plot in general is weak and the characters don’t make much of an impression on the reader. All in all, four out of ten, and only because I’m feeling generous today.

I used to read this book while eating a packet of prawn cocktail crisps, a Twix and washing them down with a bottle of Irn Bru and preferably on a Saturday night in Halley Square. Just for the record.

Back to The Three Investigators

Now to the most interesting news this week (in my life, that is – the news in general is pretty dull just now). I’ve been catching up with Jupe, Pete and Bob again. I read The Mystery of the Singing Serpent two days ago and Death Trap Mine yesterday. Definitely M. V. Carey’s best works. She always knew how to create great characters. At the time, when I was a boy, I didn’t know who actually wrote the books. A lot of us thought that it was Alfred Hitchcock himself. But now I know that he didn’t even write his own introductions. In fact, all the ‘Hitchcock’ books only had his name on them. All the little comments, introductions, etc, that were supposedly written by him were all done by other people. He just allowed his name to be used (in return for a huge wad of cash) for commercial purposes. Quite a disappointment, that. Anyway, I now know that the first nine books were written by Robert Arthur. And so was the eleventh. The series was revolutionary for writers. In those days, the authors were given flat fee to write a book and that was it. whether it sold a million or none made no difference. Robert Arthur negotiated royalties for himself and the other writers who eventually took over. The first book, Terror Castle was published in 1964. By 1968, nine books had been published, all written by Arthur. But he was in failing health and appointed William Arden to write the tenth (and best) of the series, Moaning Cave. Arthur himself was working on Talking Skull when he died. William Arden then became the writer of Laughing Shadow and Crooked Cat. Random House was unhappy with the latter and hired a new writer for the fourteenth book. This was the worst of the whole lot, Coughing Dragon. The writer was ‘Nick West’, a pseudonym of Kin Platt, who had written some episodes of Top Cat and a wide variety of other stuff, including children’s mysteries. But he didn’t adapt well to T3I. The fifteenth was Flaming Footprints, the first M. V. Carey book. The sixteenth was the second effort by ‘Nick West’, Nervous Lion. It was clear by this time that something had to be done to save the sagging series. Carey produced the brilliant Singing Serpent, and Arden was recalled for Shrinking House. From then on, it would be these two writers sharing the series for many years. Both would produce great books (Arden wrote Dead man’s Riddle; Carey wrote Death Trap Mine and Magic Circle) but there would be disappointments too. The ‘good’ books are generally seen to have ended with Deadly Double. In 1983, a new writer came in, Marc Brandel. He wrote only three books. The series was discontinued in 1987 after the publication of Carey’s The Mystery of the Cranky Collector. Two other series followed: Find Your Fate and Crimebusters, with the boys a bit older and driving. Other authors in addition to Carey and Arden wrote these books, but they were not big hits and not given much publicity by the publishers. For most of us, T3I are the teenage boys of the sixties and seventies. Here are lists of the authors, first of all. Note that M. V. Carey was the most prolific of them all:

Robert Arthur:

1 The Secret of Terror Castle - 1964

2 The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot - 1964

3 The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy - 1965

4 The Mystery of the Green Ghost - 1965

5 The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure - 1966

6 The Secret of Skeleton Island - 1966

7 The Mystery of the Fiery Eye - 1967

8 The Mystery of the Silver Spider - 1967

9 The Mystery of the Screaming Clock - 1968

11 The Mystery of the Talking Skull - 1969

William Arden:

10 The Mystery of the Moaning Cave - 1968

12 The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow - 1969

13 The Secret of the Crooked Cat - 1970

18 The Mystery of the Shrinking House - 1972

19 The Secret of Phantom Lake - 1973

22 The Mystery of the Dead Man's Riddle - 1974

25 The Mystery of the Dancing Devil - 1976

26 The Mystery of the Headless Horse - 1977

28 The Mystery of the Deadly Double - 1978

30 The Secret of Shark Reef - 1979

33 The Mystery of the Purple Pirate - 1982

38 The Mystery of the Smashing Glass - 1984

42 The Mystery of Wreckers' Rock - 1986

M. V. Carey

15 The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints - 1971

17 The Mystery of the Singing Serpent - 1972

20 The Mystery of Monster Mountain - 1973

21 The Secret of the Haunted Mirror - 1974

23 The Mystery of the Invisible Dog - 1975

24 The Mystery of Death Trap Mine - 1976

27 The Mystery of the Magic Circle - 1978

29 The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow - 1979

31 The Mystery of the Scar-Faced Beggar - 1981

32 The Mystery of the Blazing Cliffs - 1981

34 The Mystery of the Wandering Cave Man - 1982

36 The Mystery of the Missing Mermaid - 1983

39 The Mystery of the Trail of Terror - 1984

41 The Mystery of the Creep-Show Crooks - 1985

43 The Mystery of the Cranky Collector - 1987

Nick West:

14 The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon – 1970
16 The Mystery of the Nervous Lion – 1971

Marc Brandel:

35 The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale - 1983

37 The Mystery of the Two-Toed Pigeon - 1984

40 The Mystery of the Rogues' Reunion - 1985

Mary Virginia Carey was working on the forty-fourth, The Mystery of the Ghost Train, when the series was cancelled in 1987. They say her partial manuscript still exists.

One impressive aspect of the original books the artwork. In the UK, our hardbacks had the American cover illustrations but the internals were redrawn by an artist called Roger Hall. The reasons for this are unclear. But the best artist was Harry Kane. He did the covers for numbers three to sixteen and the internals for all sixteen of the first stories. Other artists were involved, but most of us see the boys through the eyes of Harry Kane. Here is a list of the artists and their contributions to the series:

Harry Kane: Cover artist for Random House hardbound trade edition titles #3 - #16. He also provided the internal illustrations for #'s 1 - 16 and created the famous blue graveyard endpapers. In the late 1970's he re-created his original cover art for Scholastic's edition of "Moaning Cave."

Ed Vebell: Cover artist for Random House trade edition titles #1, 2, 17 (he also drew the internal illustrations for this one), 18, and 19. Cover artist for the Windward paperback editions of "Terror Castle" and "Stuttering Parrot".

Jack Hearne: Cover artist for Random House trade edition titles #20 - #27. He provided the internal illustrations for titles #18 - #27.

Herb Mott: Provided the cover art and internal illustrations for Random House trade edition #28, the last book in the series to utilize internal illustrations.

Robert Adragna: Beginning with 29, The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow, 1979, Robert Adragna became the exclusive cover artist for the original series until its end in 1987. Internal illustrations were no longer provided and a hardcover edition was no longer sold in the retail market. Also in 1979 - 1981, Random House continued to release the remaining Three Investigators titles in paperback, and Robert Adragna drew the art for these new covers. Later printings of 10 of the 12 Marchesi paperbacks also received Adragna covers in 1981 - 1983, giving the series a uniform look for the 1980's.

Great to be reading the stories again!

5 March, 2009

Today would be my dad’s eighty-first birthday. Happy birthday, Mr. Stewart. This week I’ve been reading some of the posts on the Writer Beware blog. It’s amazing just how many cons are out there for writers who are so desperate to get their work out there and will go to any lengths, i.e. pay any amount, do achieve their goal. It’s a useful website. However, I couldn’t help having a laugh this week when one of the victim’s of the site decided to strike back. This has been going on for a while now and it’s hilarious. With awful grammar, misspellings and malapropisms, people who are supposedly experts on the world of publishing have started lampooning Writer Beware. One of the targets is the founder of the site, A. C. Crispin (who wrote a Star Trek book, btw). Whenever she signs a post, she writes A. C. Crispin, Chair, Writer’s Beware. This has provided an easy target and the mysterious posters have been calling her pompous and stuck up because of her insistence on using this title. One even wrote: yes, I too am a chair, my husband is a table and our children are stools. Not bad, eh? I suppose it does sound a bit pompous to be brimming with self-importance like that. Anyway, it was quite funny.

The weather here has been scalding hot with no signs of letting up. I draw attention by going out wearing a jacket with the collar turned up. But I have to protect my neck. I can live with the heat easily enough, it’s the sun’s rays that get to me. Yesterday, Inaiá and I went to Unibrasil to get the cheque for the huge translation I did last month for Roseli. After weeks of endless work, things have lightened up a bit this week and I can take it easy. I have work, but not that big heavy load that I’d been snowed under with. In recent weeks I’ve done so many translations that I can’t keep track of them. But I do know that they’ve all been delivered now, so I’m free. Edna brought a tough text for correction on Tuesday and didn’t do a class. That’s all right, I suppose. I’m still managing LinkedIn for Efigênia, the owner of Upside. They want me to go to Belo Horizonte soon for a visit. At least, they said they did. When it comes to buying plane tickets, etc., they may back down. At this time of year it’s too hot to go anyway. I did three interviews for Teamwork two days ago, which is always good. And last night…

Yes, last night was interesting. We went down to Cantinho da Familia for the famous tongue and mashed potatoes and peas. Delicious. Then we came home and watched the Corinthians game. They were playing a team from Goiás and won 2-0. Nothing unusual about that. But the big news was (and I mean big) that Ronaldo played his first game in ages. He signed for Corinthians a couple of months ago and has been battling to lose weight. Last night he played for about 25 minutes, although he didn’t score any goals. Coritiba, Atlético and Internacional all went through to the second round of the Brazilian Cup. Palmeiras surprised everyone by losing at home in the Libertadores, leaving them pointless at the bottom of the table while Sport Recife are on top, winning again last night. The football season started off really dull, but it’s picking up a bit now.

My sister-in-law is getting married. It’s a weird situation. Matheus’s boyfriend brought his brother to Curitiba and introduced him to Josi. But it seems that he thought it wouldn’t last and isn’t happy about his brother marrying her. So they’re going to do it in secret. I’m careful to keep my mouth shut about these things because Inaiá changes with the wind. One minute she’s all for her brother and then they’re on the outs. It’s tricky, so I maintain my neutrality. That works. These big brawls of theirs all tend to blow over quickly…

Yesterday I read Death Trap Mine, the day before I read Singing Serpent. Great stories.

Happy Birthday, Bruna!

Today is Bruna’s twelfth birthday. Happy birthday, little princess! Not so little anymore of course. She’s nearly as tall as me. She started the sixth grade last week then went off to the beach for the carnival. Came back on Wednesday and back to school the next day. Today we’re going out to lunch together.

Well, this week seems to be victims’ week. A month ago, more or less, a Brazilian woman called Paula Oliveira who lives in Switzerland claimed that she was attacked by neo-nazis who used razor blades to cut nazi party symbols on her torso and legs. She also said that she was pregnant and aborted her twins in a toilet at the train station where she was attacked. A shocking story. The Brazilian media got hold of it and went into overdrive, screaming for justice. The government also seized the opportunity to lash out at how nasty, brutal foreigners could do something so horrible to one of their own. I suppose that’s fair enough. I would like to think the British government would do the same for me (it wouldn’t of course!). However, forensic experts from the outset were suspicious of Paula’s story. She claimed to be in a violent struggle as the thugs lashed into her, and yet the symbols and acronyms were cut into her legs with perfect symmetry. Hmmm. Medical tests showed that she had never been pregnant either. Then she reportedly confessed that she had made up the whole thing and inflicted the wounds on herself, although that report was leaked by a Swiss journalist and not yet confirmed officially. Now why would anyone do this? The idea seems to have been that as a lawyer she knew Swiss law pretty well and saw that she would be able to claim two hundred thousand euros in damages from the Swiss government. The Brazilian media, which went so wild over the original story, is now keeping quiet. This week I found only one article from an experienced journalist saying that everyone had jumped the gun. The sensationalism was too much to resist. Maybe the writers were a little indignant too. Who knows? But the guy also said that in our rush to beat everyone to the story, the idea is run with it and check your facts later. Whether it’s true or not is something we’ll worry about when the time comes.

The other victim this week is Jewry. I read an interesting article this morning warning that the current woes of the financial world are once again being placed on the Jews. The writer, Brad Greenberg, himself a Jew, was concerned that the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme will provide anti-Semites with an excuse to fire up hatred against his race. His rambling discussion including names ranging from Zacchaeus to Shylock mentions that in a recent poll, only six Jews were to blame for the current slump, and that other names included George Bush and The American Consumer (yawn). He claims, and I suppose you can’t wrong him here, that you can’t blame that Jews because of Bernie Madoff any more than you can blame the Christian churches for Ken Lay and the Enron debacle. OK, so I keep agreeing with Mr. Greenberg, so why am I a bit pissed at him. Well, his article was fine till the end when he finished with the following words: ‘Indeed Jews may be the easy historical target, but scapegoating misses the moral of our own failures. The real responsibility lies with all of us’. Now that really gets my goat up, it really does. What have I got to do with the financial markets? When did I or anyone else I know take part in a ponzi scheme? I can understand Mr. Greenberg wishing to shirk the blame from the shoulders of his people, but just dumping the responsibility in the lap of everyone else is not the answer. Grrr!

I finally saw a good football game the other night. Palmeiras beat São Caetano 4-3 in a truly great game. Everything else I’ve seen this year has been gump!

Snowed under with work this week, literally. Tons of stuff from Upside, RAC, a new company I’m working for, Caccuri, Amaro and Professora Malu. My network of clients is growing weekly and I’m happy. And on Thursday something unusual happened: Edna

This week, despite my heavy workload I’ve been reading a lot. I revisited the old Three Investigators once again by reading Dead Man’s Riddle, definitely one of the best of the entire series. Last week I read Headless Horse but didn’t like it so much. Next up will be Singing Serpent and Death Trap Mine. And I’m still working through the Foundation series by reading Prelude to Foundation. I have mixed feelings about this one. When I first read it back in 1999, I thought it was cool how the Robot and Foundation universes were tied together. But having Daneel run everything with his humanoid robots is something that I’m a bit bored with today. It undermines everything Hari Seldon achieved because in reality it was all Daneel pulling strings. And the obsession with Earth is a bore. Nobody believes in Earth and nobody has heard of it beyond Perolat and one or two other scholars. And yet, every time the subject comes up (surprisingly often for something that nobody has heard of or believes in) there is the inevitable conversation:

“Earth? I’ve heard of it, vaguely, but I’m sure no such planet ever existed.”
“And yet, they say it was the original planet of humanity.”
“I’m sure that’s just a legend.”

It’s wearing thin. But there is an attraction to Asimov’s writing that is irresistible. But you can get too much of a good thing. A powerful tool for a writer is to put the reader on a pedestal, letting him feel powerful with knowledge that the characters don’t have. That is the case of Mycogen (the part of Trantor founded by Aurorans). They talk a lot about their (now lost) mother planet and speculate about the veracity of things that we know about from some of the other books. But it does wear a bit thin. It was all right in Foundation and Earth when Pelorat speculated about two lovers long ago, one a Spacer and the other a Settler. We know he’s talking about Gladia and DG. But this sort of thing an only be used up to a certain point without becoming tiresome. It’s nice to see a young Hari Seldon and find out more about him, but it weakens the character a bit to know that Daneel is the one behind it all. With Daneel’s mind being ‘godlike’ he could have worked out psychohistory himself, without any need for a mere human.

I’ve been having lots of great saunas this week. And Inaiá and I have been walking every day. I’ve lost a couple of kilos already. Really needed that. We’re going out for our usual Saturday afternoon adventures soon, topped off by a beer and a sauna and maybe a trip to Cantinho da Familia in the evening. I’ve dreamt about Débora almost every night this week. What’s happening to her is similar to my story The River, at least in the aspect of physical appearance (if you believe in that sort of thing).