Another post in the Series of Rock en Español.
Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas was an Argentine duet that mix hip-hop, funk, rock and traditional Latin American rythms. They published 8 albums and enjoyed moderate success throughout the region, before separating in 2001. Some of their songs below:
Coolo (Leche, 1999)
Abarajame (Chaco, 1995)
Jennifer del Estero (Leche, 1999)
Liked the trees and the couple in the background. I’m not sure they liked being photographed that much 😉 .
In the second game of the play-off series, Chivas absolutely demolished Veracruz by 4-0. I’m a happy man. We’re meeting Cruz Azul in the quarter finals. Review and pictures of the game at mediotiempo.com. I’ll post a video as soon as somebody uploads it to YouTube.
Update: The video is here. I was amazed by the quality of the goals and goalkeeping. The game against Cruz Azul is tonight (wednesday 22nd). Let’s see how it goes.
I read during the weekend the Economist Mexico Survey. If you follow the situation in the country the conclusions they reached won’t surprise you very much.
I have to say, that it didn’t make me happy, but could’ve been worse. If only the politicians read this…
Most of the posts I wrote during the weekend were thought/dreamt in the period between 1-3 a.m. last friday. It was so bad that I had an idea, wrote it down, then another one, wrote it down, then another one and so on until, finally, I got too tired to go on. Does it happen to you?
As inspiration, I’ll leave you with an ad-hoc video. Sleeping Awake by P.O.D. (from the Matrix Reloaded Soundtrack)
The business books I have read, will read or have used that more or less have defined my current business thinking (of course it will change and I’m still missing quite a bit of topics, give me time):
Finland is a very homogeneous country, but there are foreigners there as well (this poster was one of them for quite a while, and is open to becoming one again). Mostly they are people from Russian, Estonian, Somali, Vietnamese, Chinese, Swedish or American extraction. They tend to stick to certain specific cities and areas of the country, and there are certain stereotypes to each. MTV3, one of the local TV channels (not related to MTV, Music Television) started airing a drama/comic series about an area of Helsinki with many immigrants, and how the different inhabitants adapt to each other.
Even though I only share with the foreigner characters in the series the fact that I was also a foreigner living in Hesa, I have to admit that reading about one of them who according to the plot is an African man that tries to become more Finnish than the Finns, taking a local surname from his wife, hanging pictures of Mannerheim in his house and making his son try to win the tango king contest to become the first black tango king, well, brought a smile to my face and a little bit of moisture to my eyes. =) And I haven’t even seen the series yet. Is it any good?
I still remember that I learned to read when I was 4. After that all mayhem broke loose and you could not make me part from a book, regardles. I was so interested in everything, and literally devoured any written material that came to my hands. It took me some time to learn that curiosity was not only about the contents of books, but about what would happen if you kicked a ball a certain way, did something to a frog, or how would people be. During the years I have met some people that are not (or seem not to) be curious about pretty much anything. I really don’t understand them, because to be curious is part of what being human is all about (but one we share with other organisms… after all, “curiosity killed the cat”, which is a horrible saying). We’re all very curious when we’re children, but not so much anymore as adults. Why?
One point brought home from another of the speakers at the CWF is the fact that people of our grandparents’ generation (65+ years old) have already gone through very big changes in the world, something that I don’t think we recognise often enough. If your grandparents are old enough, they saw the introduction of radio, TV, trans-atlantic travel, the Second World War, decolonisation, the European Union, the nuclear bomb, the massification of the automobile… without even talking about microwave ovens, immigrants from different parts of the world, computers and the internet… If you take into account that the rate of change is much faster now than when they were your or my age, you can only come to the conclusion that the world will be even more drastically different when we reach their age.
If there’s people over 70 wathching pictures in Flickr and doing their banking over the internet, that’s the kind of person I want to be when I’m their age, and I understand why not everybody can be like that (there’s also cultural issues of, say, uncertainty avoidance involved which they are not responsible for, among many other factors). If at that age they still take the world at face value and enjoy what they do, that’s the person I want to be. So if you agree with me spare a thought for your parents and grandparents and give them your love and respect. Probably a hug would be nice too.
One of the speakers at the CWF made some very interesting points that I had already thought about but not really articulated in the fluid, structured way he did, but of course I need to start from the beginning.
The singularity I’m talking about is something that to some people might sound like a concept out of science fiction: the fact that in the next few years, the processing power of a computer will be reaching that of a human brain, and we will be able to augment our grey matter with cybernetic prostethics. As such, we will have more “processing muscle” than ever before, but our ability to imagine, that what takes us apart from machines, is what adds value. At the same time, we’re more connected than ever, but that doesn’t make us less chauvinistic, and maybe even more, because we’re able to see up close those things that we didn’t lay our sight on before, like poverty, war and strange people and customs. A point that was very important is that we don’t know where it’s taking us, how it is changing us and even whether we will survive these opposing forces bringing us together and at the same time further away from each other. I sure hope we do.
