My Factory of Extravagant Marvels

It's been almost seven year since I left São Paulo, and driving here, which used to be second nature, is now done with some measure of stress. I´ve been happy though with my sense of orientation, which didn't suffer from the years away. I am still able to find my way in the city in the most remote places, even under rain and at night. Or so I thought... My friend Kleber was kind enough to give Carla and I a ride last night - since I didn't have access to the car and Carla's foot is hurt, keeping her from driving. On the way back from Carla's place, Kleber took Bandeirantes Ave. towards the airport thinking that we were going home. He was lucky I was there to show him the right way -- he did a u-turn and soon enough we were headed to Vila dos Remédios. Except that 15 minutes later, we saw the airport. We then realized that we were headed the right way in the first place and I had indicated the wrong path. Sleepy, in the rain, and worst of all, 7 years of biking in Mo

First, for regular readers of Natália's blog, this is a guest post from Jon. I don't have a blog of my own, and this info needs to get out there, so I'm borrowing Natália's. I'm in New York City right now, and I needed some internet access without having to pay the exorbitant international roaming charges on my iPhone, so I did what any good geek would do: whip out the ol' aircrack-ng suite and crack some poor unsuspecting soul's wifi. There were (of course) numerous networks within range that only had WEP encryption, and I got down to business cracking the nearest one. It had a name that looked like it was randomly generated, so I figured it was some ISP's default configuration and would be nice and easy to crack. (Let me stop here for a second and remind everyone that you should never, ever, ever use WEP encryption. It can be cracked in less than 5 minutes. WPA or WPA2 with a strong password is the way to go.) Sure enough, the cracking went very s

Dear Rain: How are you in this grey but rainless day? Taking a bit of a break, are you? I heard a lot about you in the news - you worked hard. In the afternoon, you only manage 4 km of traffic jam, but I think the chaos you caused in the morning was enough to make you happy for the whole week. Oh, but knowing you of course you are going to keep on making the best effort to stop the city, right? Cars that turned into boats and trucks that turned into ships must be your biggest pride. It's not everywhere that we can see amphibious vehicles going around -- such innovation. You must love it. I also heard that you did some pretty crazy work in a favela in Santana do Parnaíba, transforming the houses in slip-slides... Four children died, though, did you know that? Oh, I see, collateral damage for your adventures? Don't you care for the parents' pain? I know you were here before us and nothing was wrong until we made the place water proof, but people need to go places in their car

Last night, Mário Bortolotto, dramaturge and playwright active in the theatre movement of Roosevelt Square in São Paulo, was shot during a robbery in the Espaço Parlapatões . I am deeply sad for what happened. I had never had the chance to meet Bortolotto or the Parlapatões (in fact I was eager to participate of a contest to win a spot in a comedy workshop that would happen next week at the theatre) and now he is fighting for his life in the hospital and Espaço Parlapatões is closed. I found out about the sad news this afternoon, when I tried to get tickets for the play "O papa e a bruxa". When I typed Parlapatões on Google, there came the bad surprise: the play had been cancelled due to the event and, instead, there will be a manifestation in support of peace. Those of you who know me are aware that one of the reasons I moved to Montreal is that I felt safer there. I love to be able to go out for a night at the theatre and come back home in one piece - even when I am alone.

Everybody around here (I am in São Paulo right now) is very unhappy about Robin Williams' little joke on how Rio got the Olympic Games instead of Chicago. Check out the joke here: I mean, of course it was a stupid joke, but to go so far as to report it in several news programs as the headline and try to sue the artist for making a joke, that's a little bit too much. Especially for a people like us who LOVE to make jokes about everybody in the whole world. Last year, when the Olympic games were happening in China, Jon and I were in Brazil to attend my sister's wedding. One day, when we were having some "quality" time watching TV (that's a good joke), we saw, for Jon's stupefaction (I'm already used to the absurdities in Brazilian TV), a little doll representing a Chinese person. The doll was named Ni Hao and was an olympic hit around here - especially among children. I mean, what are we teaching our kids? That it is OK to make fun of how other people lo