Feliz cumpleaños

Feliz cumpleaños Torre Eiffel. (El resto de las fotos aquí.)

Adiós marzo. Bienvenido abril.

Links del día

FB en el mundo, chequen la imagen de esta liga.

La ventaja de los ricos en aplicaciones a universidades.

La caricatura boba.

La caricatura de abogados.

La caricatura política.

Chones japoneses.

Por último, este video que me gustó

Cita del día

"Indeed, these days America is looking like the Bernie Madoff of economies: for many years it was held in respect, even awe, but it turns out to have been a fraud all along." Paul Krugman

El resto del artículo aquí.

la lista de la cubeta

En un blog encontré esta lista. Me gustó.

Things you have done during your lifetime:

(x) Gone on a blind date

( ) Skipped school

( ) Watched someone die

(x) Been to Africa

(x) Been to Europe

( ) Been to Middle East

(x) Been to South America

(x) Been to North America

( ) Been to Asia

(x) Been on a plane

(x) Been on a helicopter

(x) Been lost

(x) Swam in the ocean

(x) Cried yourself to sleep

( ) Played cops and robbers

(x) Recently colored with crayons

(x) Sang Karaoke

(x) Paid for a meal with coins only

(x) Done something you told yourself you wouldn’t.

(x) Made prank phone calls

( ) Caught a snowflake on your tongue

( ) Danced in the rain-naked

(x) Written a letter to Santa Claus

( ) Been kissed under the mistletoe

(x) Watched the sunrise with someone

(x) Blown bubbles

(x) Gone ice-skating

(x) Gone to the movies

( ) Shot a gun

( ) Gone on a safari

(x) Been deep sea fishing (the boys are better smelling on land… come now sheesh)

(x) Driven across a country

( ) Been in a hot air balloon

( ) Been sky diving

( ) Been hang gliding

(x) Lived in more than one country

(x) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets

(x) Seen a falling star and made a wish

( ) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser

(x) Been on a cruise

(x) Traveled by train

( ) Traveled by motorcycle

(x) Been horse back riding

(x) Been to Disneyland

( ) Been in a rain forest

(x) Seen whales in the ocean

(x) Been to Niagara or Iguassu Falls

( ) Ridden on an elephant

( ) Swam with dolphins

( ) Been to the Olympics

( ) Walked on the Great Wall of China

(x) Been water-skiing

(x) Been snow-skiing

(x) Been to Westminster Abbey

(x) Been to the Louvre

(x) Been to the Mediterranean

( ) Been to a Major League Baseball game

( ) Been to a National Football game

Evidencia de que me faltan muchas cosas por hacer. Aunque no quiero hacerlas todas.

crecer

Ayer me sentía fatal. Tuve varios ataques de tos que me hiceron llorar y casi-vomitar, ya entiendo a los asmáticos. No pude ir al cumpleaños de M (perdóname) y me encamé doce horas.

Desperté sintiéndome un poco menos mal pero decidí que necesitaba inyecciones de vitaminas, urgentes. Las fui a comprar y la doctora en casa, me inyectó. Sigo tomando el jarabe radioactivo, el que su venta " requiere receta médica" (sí claro) y muchos líquidos. Comí lo que mi abuela nos trajo por estar convalecientes y vi una pelicula. Mientras tanto, sigo estornudando, tosiendo y moqueando, pero al menos ya no tengo fiebre.

Por la tarde mientras acomodaba algunas cosas que estaban sobre la mesa, recogí unos estados de cuenta y al guardarlos decidí limpiar ese cajón. Encontré una tarjeta de navidad de Memo, un niño de puebla que cuando iba en 4to de primaria conocí en un torneo de Volleyball, con su foto en tamaño pasaporte y blanco y negro adentro. Encontré un sobre lleno de fotos catalogadas como "diversas horribles", que efectivamente lo eran. Fotos de primaria, preparatoria y algunas más recientes. Encontré un barniz de uñas fuisha que me hizo feliz el día que lo compré en Paris y que sólo usé ese día. Me pinté la uña de mi dedo índice izquierdo para ver su color y otra vez me gustó. Seguí buscando entre papeles y la pintura se corrió.

Es cajón me llevó a otros y a cajas olvidadas llenas de cuadernos y diarios. Encontré un anillo que hace más de un año no veía que seguramente guardé ahí en la mudanza y que ahora traigo puesto, tire calendarios, rompí hojas, acomodé garantías y recibos perdidos. También encontré un cassette que en su etiqueta dice "En blanco, para grabar" con mi letra adolescente; conociéndome, ese cassette está todo menos "en blanco" así que lo guardé para escucharlo cuando encuentre una grabadora. Empecé a leer lo que pensaba y sentía entonces. Me aburrí rápidamente, señal de que he cambiado y que lo que entonces me preocupaba ya no está ahí.

Ahora tengo una caja de cosas que tirar. No tiene caso guardarlo más.

Después de mi limpieza estoy convencida que todos los pubertos son insoportables. Me da gusto ser yo, yo ahora.

marzo

Este mes ha sido difícil. Fue el mes del choque, de la tos de tuberculosa y de algunas malas noticias. L me dijo que esta época de año había demostrado ser así en otros años. 

Verdaderamente quiero que llegue el miércoles y sea abril para poderme ir de vacaciones.

Cuatro de diez, porque siempre puede ser peor.

Cita del día

Hillary Clinton en México

“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” she said, using unusually blunt language. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.”

Viene de este artículo.

Links del día

Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

Hartford wives.

Brains or beauty?

Sobre mi ex jefa.

La caricatura.

Cita del día

"Bankers should have noted that very small changes in their underlying assumptions could result in very large changes in the correlation number. They also should have noticed that the results they were seeing were much less volatile than they should have been—which implied that the risk was being moved elsewhere. Where had the risk gone?

They didn't know, or didn't ask. One reason was that the outputs came from "black box" computer models and were hard to subject to a commonsense smell test. Another was that the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula's weaknesses, weren't the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number. That was the problem."

Viene de este artículo.

El choque

Sobre el domingo.

Todo tiene una fecha de caducidad. 

No siempre la conocemos y a veces llega antes de tiempo.

Los 10 links del día

1. How do I tell my boyfriend we'd have ugly babies?
2. Los 10 titulares que inidicarán el fin de la crisis
3. Slumping billionaires: financial crisis slashes ranks of world's super rich
4. “El Chapo” aparece... en lista de millonarios
5. After the Pompidou, can Rogers transform the secret, shabby, divided side of Paris?
6. Great Shots of Tpugh Times
7. Pope pained over "hate, hostility" against him
8. Six degrees of separation? We can only manage five
9. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/915974ac-09dd-11de-add8-0000779fd2ac.html
10. El pilón.

Que tengan un lindo día.

MC Hammer

Me desperté en la mañana con esto en la cabeza:

"Tu ru ru ru, U can't touch this..." una y otra vez

Señala que estoy perdiendo la cabeza.

[prometo regresar a escribir... pronto]

Lectores mentirosos

He encontrado que es bastante fácil distinguir al que presume ser un gran lector con sólo dos o tres preguntas.

1. Exactamente, ¿qué es lo que te gusta leer?

Respuestas equivocadas:
-Novelas
-Ficción
-Dan Brown


Despúes de esta primera pregunta varío entre las siguientes dos:

2a. ¿Qué autores te agradan?

Respuestas equivocadas:
-Dan Brown
-Paulo Cohelo
-Carlos Fuentes
-y otros… (ya saben a quiénes me refiero)

2b. ¿Qué libros te han gustado, últimamente? (Añado el últimamente porque la pregunta me parece ridículamente absoluta.)

Respuestas equivocadas:
-Los clásicos (al final de esta entrada entenderán porqué)
-Aura (el que sólo lo leyó por la controversia)
-Cualquier cosa de Dan Brown y sus similares
-Libros de Gabriel García Márquez
-Cualquier cosa de Becquer, Nervo y similares


Nota aclaratoria: Hasta las respuestas equivocadas se pueden apelar. Vale totalmente la pena, y el tiempo, escuchar el “pero...” y el "porque..."

De Reuters:
Aside from a list of ten titles which respondents were asked to tick or leave blank, many admitted wrongly claiming they had read other "classics" including Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Herman Melville. Asked why they had lied about reading a book, the main reason was to impress the person they were speaking to. The study, carried out on the World Book Day website in January and February, surveyed 1,342 members of the public.

Those who lied have claimed to have read:


1. 1984 - George Orwell (42 percent)
2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (31)
3. Ulysses - James Joyce (25) [y van a decir que también Finnegan's Wake?]
4. The Bible (24)
5. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (16)
6. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking (15)
7. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (14)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (9)
9. Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (6)
10. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (6)

En qué estaba pensando?

Este video extrañamente describe lo que me suele suceder.

Más como este aquí.

Cuidado con lo que empacas

LONDON (Reuters) - A Mexican national who told airport immigration he was visiting Britain to see a friend was swiftly deported after a search unearthed a good-luck card in his luggage wishing him well for his "new life in the UK."
UK Border Agency officers at Manchester Airport routinely stopped the 40-year-old chef after he arrived on a flight from Los Angeles last Friday.
The man told them he was on a short trip to see a friend who was opening a restaurant in the area.
"However, a search of the passenger's baggage revealed a huge collection of Mexican food recipes and a good-luck card from his church wishing him well for his 'new life in the UK,'" the agency said in a statement.
The man later admitted he had intended to work at the restaurant illegally and had planned to bring his family over from America if he liked it.
He was deported the next day.
"We will not tolerate people coming here to work illegally," the agency said. "People wanting to visit the UK must play by the rules. Those who do not are sent back."

Slumdog Millionaire (parte de la reseña del NYTimes)

"It’s hard to hold onto any reservations in the face of Mr. Boyle’s resolutely upbeat pitch and seductive visual style. Beautifully shot with great sensitivity to color by the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantel, in both film and digital video, “Slumdog Millionaire” makes for a better viewing experience than it does for a reflective one. It’s an undeniably attractive package, a seamless mixture of thrills and tears, armchair tourism (the Taj Mahal makes a guest appearance during a sprightly interlude) and crackerjack professionalism. Both the reliably great Irrfan Khan (“A Mighty Heart”), as a sadistic detective, and the Bollywood star Anil Kapoor, as the preening game-show host, run circles around the young Mr. Patel, an agreeable enough if vague centerpiece to all this coordinated, insistently happy chaos.

In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale). In the past Mr. Boyle has managed to wring giggles out of murder (“Shallow Grave”) and addiction (“Trainspotting”), and invest even the apocalypse with a certain joie de vivre (the excellent zombie flick “28 Days Later”). He’s a blithely glib entertainer who can dazzle you with technique and, on occasion, blindside you with emotion, as he does in his underrated children’s movie, “Millions.” He plucked my heartstrings in “Slumdog Millionaire” with well-practiced dexterity, coaxing laughter and sobs out of each sweet, sour and false note. "

Risas simples...

... y por lo tanto, elegantes.

[Gracias M. por la página]

La primera, cortesía de M, recordando a uno de los P.

Dos sobre religión:

Y una sobre geeks (a los que adoro y de los que soy fan).

El pilón:

Barbie dolphin

Me encontré esta foto en the guardian. El artículo lo pueden leer aquí.

Me choca que nunca sabes cuando es un scam de photoshop o es realildad.

[Aunque mi mamá se las cree todas.]

febrero

Febrero fue emocionante.

El conteo:

-1 exposición de fotografía;

-1 encuentro cercano con la ley;

-1 solicitud enviada;

-1 colitis nerviosa (o no sé que diablos fue lo que me atacó);

-2 cartas de recomendación;

-2 fiestas de cumpleaños (C, M);

-2 citas con mi asesor de tesis;

-4 despedidas (P, M, F, D); y

-1 galán nuevo

Un buen 8 de 10.