terça-feira, 16 de agosto de 2011

Love

Actual children's answers to the question “what is love?” This is absolutely precious.

“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.” - Billy, age 4

“Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.” - Karl, age 5

“Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.” - Chrissy, age 6

“Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired.” - Terri, age 4

“Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.” - Danny, age 7

“Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.” - Bobby, age 7

“If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,” - Nikka, age 6

“Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday.” - Noelle, age 7

“Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.” - Elaine, age 5

“Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Brad Pitt.” - Chris, age 7

“Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.” - Mary Ann, age 4

“I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones.” - Lauren, age 4

“When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.” - Rebecca, age 8

“When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.” - Karen, age 7

“You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.” - Jessica, age 8


Claudia

sábado, 6 de agosto de 2011

Pottermore



I'M IN!!!!


Congratulations!
You’ve successfully validated your early access Pottermore account. You will be one of the lucky few to shape the experience before the site opens to all in October.
You may have to wait a few weeks for your Welcome email to arrive as we can’t let everyone into the Beta site at the same time.
We look forward to seeing you.


OH YEAH!
Fandom mode on!
Sorry folks!

Claudia

segunda-feira, 25 de julho de 2011

Amy Winehouse

London, 14 September 1983 — London, 23 July 2011

I liked Russel Brands tribute for Amy. I'll post it here:

"When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone.
Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.
I’ve known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma. Carl Barrat told me that “Winehouse” (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; “Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric” I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.
I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his “speedboat” there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.
From time to time I’d bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was “a character” but that world was riddled with half cut, doped up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn’t especially register.
Then she became massively famous and I was pleased to see her acknowledged but mostly baffled because I’d not experienced her work and this not being the 1950’s I wondered how a “jazz singer” had achieved such cultural prominence. I wasn’t curious enough to do anything so extreme as listen to her music or go to one of her gigs, I was becoming famous myself at the time and that was an all consuming experience. It was only by chance that I attended a Paul Weller gig at the Roundhouse that I ever saw her live.
I arrived late and as I made my way to the audience through the plastic smiles and plastic cups I heard the rolling, wondrous resonance of a female vocal. Entering the space I saw Amy on stage with Weller and his band; and then the awe. The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened. Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse! That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I’d only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound. So now I knew. She wasn’t just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a fucking genius.
Shallow fool that I am I now regarded her in a different light, the light that blazed down from heaven when she sang. That lit her up now and a new phase in our friendship began. She came on a few of my TV and radio shows, I still saw her about but now attended to her with a little more interest. Publicly though, Amy increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that youtube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. I was 27 years old when through the friendship and help of Chip Somers of the treatment centre, Focus12 I found recovery, through Focus I was introduced to support fellowships for alcoholics and drug addicts which are very easy to find and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking and without which I would not be alive.
Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call."

Claudia

sexta-feira, 8 de julho de 2011

Feeling #84

Sabem aquela sensação de que não está tudo bem, apesar de estar tudo calmo? Essa.
A quietude é mau sinal neste momento e eu não estou a gostar.


Claudia

I am in need of a life changing, heart wrenching, adventure filled book.






Sugestions?

Claudia

True enough Ms Rowling

No story lives unless someone wants to listen... The stories we love best do live in us forever. So wether you come back by page or by the big sreen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.


J. K. Rowling


(Fandom moment over now. I promise.)

Claudia

HP Premier at Trafalgar Square.

sábado, 25 de junho de 2011

Yeah!

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but hushed Senate chamber. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in the Senate in supporting the measure after an intense and emotional campaign aimed at the handful of lawmakers wrestling with a decision that divided their friends, their constituents and sometimes their own homes.
(...)
“I apologize for those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”
Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Assembly. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.
Passage of same-sex marriage here followed a daunting run of defeats in other states where voters barred same-sex marriage by legislative action, constitutional amendment or referendum. Just five states currently permit same-sex marriage: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.
At around 10:30 p.m., moments after the vote was announced, Mr. Cuomo strode onto the Senate floor to wave at cheering supporters who had crowded into the galleries to watch. Trailed by two of his daughters, the governor greeted lawmakers, and paused to single out those Republicans who had defied the majority of their party to support the marriage bill.
(...)

In: New York Times



 The Empire State Building’s pre-scheduled rainbow light display honoring NYC Pride Week becomes that much more meaningful in light of the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage.

Há coisas que me deixam feliz.

Claudia

quinta-feira, 23 de junho de 2011

J.K. Rowling Announces Pottermore

segunda-feira, 6 de junho de 2011

Há coisas que me corroem o cerebro

e sim, eu sei que é, provavelmente, a bebida e isso, mas há coisas que realmente me fazem confusão.
Há bocado lembrei-me de uma conversa, daquelas em que o álcool está envolvido. Estava eu e uns amigos a falar sobre as melhores invenções da história na nossa opinião. Depois de se discutirem assuntos como a roda, a televisão, a Internet, a música e tantas outras descobertas, o meu input na conversa atingiu o seu auge máximo quando digo: chicletes. É verdade. Pastilha elástica.
É que, quer dizer: internet- muito bem, boa coisa, mas era um bocado óbvia (necessidade de comunicação a longa distancia e evolução da distribuição da informação - compreensivel, certo? Luz: importante, mas também ela uma necessidade.
Mas agora... Chiclet's? Quem é que se lembra de uma coisa dessas? Veio de onde? Da fome? Um tipo lembra-se: ahhh e tal, deixa-me só experimentar este pau a ver se dá para eu me manter aqui ocupado. Não. Se bem que, depois de uma grande pesquisa (aka Wikipedia) a Claudia descobriu que foi uma tribo indigena que decidiu comer resina. É, depois digam que as ervas mágicas não dão resultado.
Anyway, aqui está o artigo:

A origem do hábito de mascar chiclete é controversa. Alguns autores afirmam que o hábito de mascar gomas surgiu entre os índios da Guatemala, que mascavam uma resina extraída de uma árvore denominada chicle com a finalidade de estimular a salivação. Outros, que o hábito surgiu entre os Maias, no México, que mascavam uma goma obtida de um látex que escorria de cortes de uma árvore conhecida como Sapota zapotilla, hábito que os Astecas posteriormente assimilaram. Também na Grécia antiga era comum mastigar a resina de uma árvore chamada mastiche para lavar os dentes e eliminar o mau hálito.
Nos anos 60 do século XIX, Antonio López de Santa Anna (presidente e general mexicano exilado nos EUA) levou para a América do norte uma resina cremosa (látex) a que chamavam chicle. Apresentou-a a Thomas Adams Jr, um fotógrafo e inventor nova-iorquino, que tentou, sem sucesso, vulcanizá-la, utilizando-a depois para o fabrico de pastilhas elásticas que se tornaram um sucesso. Mais tarde, melhorou-lhes o sabor, acrescentando um pouco de licor, o que agradou aos seus clientes.


Industrialmente, a produção do chiclete iniciou-se em 1872 quando o americano Thomas Adams Jr iniciou a venda de pedaços de cera parafinada com alcacuz.
O nome "chiclete" deriva-se de Chiclets, um produto da ADAMS.
As duas grandes guerras mundiais, principalmente a segunda, contribuíram para o aumento da popularidade da pastilha elástica, não só nos EUA mas também um pouco por todo o mundo. Era tida como terapia relaxante para o stress diário de que as pessoas eram vítimas. E também para evitar o congelamento do maxilar durante as emboscadas nocturnas.
Com o aumento do seu consumo, os fabricantes tiveram de procurar novos produtos que substituíssem as resinas naturais. Surgiram novos tipos (sem açúcar, com novas cores, novos sabores, novos formatos, etc.) e novas marcas de pastilhas.

E ficam também a saber que a venda de pastilhas elásticas é proibida em Singapura. Pois é.

Claudia
 

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