Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Nina Simone- "I Put a Spell on You"



My ex-wife, and still on of my best friends, Yvonne , introduced me to the Nina Simone's exquisite music. Many years ago..
Her poetry, and unique way of rendering it in her songs is true masterpiece.
When she sings "I Put a Spell on You", it's to this humble scribber, the greatest amongst her many works of art.

Minha ex-expôsa Yvonne, ainda uma de minhas melhores amigas me introduziu à música de Nina Simone muitos anos atrás.
A poesia dela, e única maneira de interpreta-la, em músicas é verdadeira obra de arte.
Quando canta "I Put a Spell on You", para mim, êste modesto blogueiro, é a sua obra-prima entre seus muitos trabalhos de arte.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Profound Words of Wisdon.



Amazing story.

An unemployed man is desperate to support his family of a wife and three kids.
He applies for a janitor's job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test.
The human resources manager tells him:
You will be hired at minimum wage of $5.35 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day.
Taken aback, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a computer nor an e-mail address.
To this the manager replies:
You must understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day.

Stunned, the man leaves not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmers' market and sees a stand selling 25 lb. crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family. During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day. By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly. Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck. At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him. By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.
Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage. The tomato company's payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed over one million dollars.

Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance.
Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically.
When the man replies that he doesn't have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned:
What, you don't have e-mail? No computer? No Internet? Just think where you would be today if you'd had all of that five years ago!:
Ha! snorts the man. If I'd had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors at Microsoft and making $5.35 an hour.

Which brings us to the moral of the story:
Since you got this story by e-mail, you're probably closer to being a janitor than a millionaire. Sadly, I received it also

Friday, September 26, 2008

Sergio Alexandre no Artists.de


















Já falei aqui do meu camarada Sergio Alexandre, arquiteto, cantor/compositor, pintor dos bons e os cambau.
No site dele http://www.sergioalexandre.com/ voce pode encontrar suas músicas disponíveis para download e suas incríveis pinturas.
Sergio tambem esta expondo no excelente site de pinturas http://en.artists.de/esquilo.html .
Altamente recomendável. vale a pena visitar.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Vale a pena ver Cathy



Cathy Vogan, australiana produtora de alguns dos mais incríveis video-clips que eu já vi.
Vale a pena também visitar o site dela. http://cathyvogan.chez-alice.fr/

Leonard Cohen - Democracy



Democracy - lyrics

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on ...

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

One of the most fascinating and enigmatic -- if not the most successful -- singer/songwriters of the late '60s, Leonard Cohen has retained an audience across four decades of music-making interrupted by various digressions into personal and creative exploration, all of which have only added to the mystique surrounding him. Second only to Bob Dylan (and perhaps Paul Simon), he commands the attention of critics and younger musicians more firmly than any other musical figure from the 1960s who is still working at the outset of the 21st century, which is all the more remarkable an achievement for someone who didn't even aspire to a musical career until he was in his thirties.

Um dos mais fascinantes e enigmáticos, se não o bem mais sucedido cantor/compositor do final dos anos 60, Leonard Cohen retem uma audiência que se extende por quatro décadas de composições, interrompidas por algumas incursões em descoberta pessoal buscando criatividade, que só fez adicionar ao misticismo que já o cercava. Segundo sómente de Bob Dylan (e talvez Paul Simon), êle tem a atenção de críticos e jovens músicos muito mais do que qualquer outro músico dos anos 60, que ainda esteja em atividade neste início do século 21, o que torna-se impressionante conquista para alguem que nem mesmo aspirava por uma carreira musical, quando já tinha mais de trinta anos de idade.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

I just find strange that the Democrats aren't talking about this picture at all.

Q:Is that a real photo of Sarah Palin holding a rifle and wearing a bikini?

A:It's a fake - Palin's head on the body of a woman who posed for it in 2004 as a joke. We have the full story of how this image was created and spread like a virus, fooling many.
A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but that doesn't make it true. Soon after Sen. John McCain named Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, a faked photo began to circulate showing a grinning Palin wearing a red, white and blue bikini and holding a rifle with a telescopic sight. It was quickly exposed as phony by blogger John Hawkins of Right Wing News, who said he examined the photo in a graphic program and determined that Palin's head was "pasted on" the body of another woman. Hawkins later located the original shot of the actual bikini-wearing gun-toter. But there's even more to the story – and FactCheck.org has the details.

Faked photo, head of Sarah Palin superimposed on body of "Elizabeth" taken in 2004
Faked photo using Sarah Palin's head on body of a 22-year-old woman

Copyright 2004 by Addison Godel: Original photo of "Elizabeth" with air rifle and American flag bikini
Original photo of "Elizabeth" by Addison Godel, copyright 2004. Reprinted with permission.

The original photo was actually taken May 23, 2004, somewhere east of Athens, Ga., by Addison Godel, now a student of architecture at Ohio State University in Columbus. He says it was a gag shot. The friend who posed for it, whom he identifies only as "Elizabeth," was 22 years old at the time and intended it as a spoof of flag-waving, gun-toting persons with whom she disagreed politically. The weapon pictured is not even an actual firearm. "It was definitely not a real rifle," Godel told us in an exchange of e-mails. It looks to us like an air-powered pellet rifle, but Godel says he doesn't recall whether it was a pellet gun or a BB gun.
Going Viral

Godel says he uploaded the photo to his public flickr.com Web page in 2006, but that he's not the one who pasted on Palin's head. Responsibility for that has been claimed by another person, who describes herself as "a recently laid-off soul with way too much time on her hands." Posting under the name of "Innocuous Fun," she states: "I was the brazen Photoshopper that doctored the image. I created the image this past Saturday [Aug. 30] and posted it to my Facebook blog." Elsewhere, she posted a screen shot of that private Web page to back up her account. "To be honest, I didn't think ANYONE would see this photo except my friends." But somebody copied the fake photo and it began to spread like a virus: "faster than herpes in a celebrity rehab clinic."

We contacted "Innocuous Fun," who has given us permission to say that her real first name is Naomi, and that she is a 27-year-old, unemployed Web site editor who lives in New York City. We're withholding other personal information at her request. Naomi tells us she got the idea after hearing that McCain's surprise pick for vice president was a former beauty queen and lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. Recalling the "Elizabeth" shot which she had seen earlier, she searched the Internet quickly for a head shot of Palin that had somewhat similar lighting and created the composite image using the Adobe Photoshop program in about 15 minutes.

Although only 289 people have access to the image on her private Facebook page, Naomi was not all that surprised to see it used elsewhere. "I did say, 'If you want to pass this on, feel free.' " But she says she was amazed at how rapidly and widely it got around. "I had no idea it had spread as far as it did until brother called me at 3am to tell me my picture was on the Huffington Post," she says.

This image has been exposed as a fake numerous times elsewhere. Nevertheless, we continue to receive inquiries from persons wondering if the photo is real, and we have seen Internet postings passing it off as authentic.

As Naomi notes in one of her postings, "Alas, people believe what they want to believe, especially in an election year, and this little exercise in Photoshopping is no exception."

We say "Amen" to that.

-Brooks Jackson

Sources
Hawkins, John. "This Is The Sarah Palin Bikini Shot You Are Looking For And, No, It's Not Real." Right Wing News, 2 Sept. 2008.

Godel, Addison. "elizabeth - american flag bikini rifle." Posted on flickr Web site, accessed 8 Sept. 2008.

_______, Naomi "Sarah Palin in Bikini - Original Blog Screenshot." Posted on flickr Web site, accessed 8

Friday, September 5, 2008

Endless nights - Supertramp

Putting a cap on this night, Tonight, remembering those crazy nights on the 70's smoking a joint, walking countless hours, on the streets of my Santos, with long vanished friends.


The Logical Song
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.

There are times when all the worlds asleep,
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am.

Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical,
Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're
Acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable!

At night, when all the worlds asleep,
The questions run so deep
For such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am.


Don't leave me now.
Don't leave me now
Leave me out in the pouring rain
With my back against the wall
Don't leave me now
Don't leave me now
Leave me out with nowhere to go
And the shadows start to fall
Don't leave me now
Don't leave me now
Leave me out on this lonely road
As the wind begins to howl
Don't leave me now
Don't leave me now
All alone on this darkest night
Feeling old and cold and grey
Don't leave me now

Don't leave me now
Leave me holding an empty heart
As the curtain starts to fall
Don't leave me now
Don't leave me now
All alone in this crazy world
When I'm old and cold and grey and time is gone...


Breakfast in America
Take a look at my girlfriend
Shes the only one I got
Not much of a girlfriend
Never seem to get a lot

Take a jumbo across the water
Like to see America
See the girls in California
I'm hoping its going to come true
But there's not a lot I can do

Could we have kippers for breakfast
Mummy dear, mummy dear
They got to have em in Texas
Cos everyones a millionaire

I'm a winner, I'm a sinner
Do you want my autograph
I'm a loser, what a joker
I'm playing my jokes upon you
While there's nothing better to do

Don't you look at my girlfriend
Shes the only one I got
Not much of a girlfriend
Never seem to get a lot

Take a jumbo cross the water
Like to see America
See the girls in California
I'm hoping it's going to come true
But there's not a lot I can do

Well, greetings to our next VP.
























Because I don't know much about our next VP, I'm posting, let me say, this: impressive shot of her preparing to fight terrorism.