So beautiful!

There is something about utilitarian clothes with a girly attitude that I find so whimsical. ZERO a dry and blunt approach to uniform style from a girly attitude. Simple with heart, and sensibility, not the empty luxe of the minimalism from the 90's.
Maria Cornejo/ZERO is one of my favorite designers. The image has a link to previous collections and the ZERO website. Here is the SPRING COLLECTION
Here is the link of my favorite ZERO collection up to date

lola and chia duermen

Trajan

weird, informative, and kind of funny.

Simple yet complex

interesting work

the current system of freedom and slavery

In the cover story, leading feminist writer Joan Smith provides a telling investigation into the extent of sex trafficking into the UK. She argues that, while lad culture may have decreed that prostitution is respectable, many men might wittingly or otherwise be committing rape for having sex with women compelled into prostitution.

Minneapolis the most fun city in the USA, EVER!

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

"the goal was to find a city that is an "outrageously fun experience with something for everyone." Minneapolis won because it's the home of Mary Tyler Moore, four professional sports teams, and the best mall in America. Minneapolis has more theaters than Boston, more parks than Denver, more golfers per capita than any other city in America, and with 10,000 lakes in the state, Minnesota, has more coastline than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined. It even has 15 dog parks. Woof! Cranium CEO Richard Tait said, "It's almost a no-brainer" to crown Minneapolis the Most Fun City."

The good samaritan

Website dedicated to showcase design work for social causes.

War, money, and religion

I read this morning some news about Iran and Iraq confronting each other close to some geographic point that has always been cause for disputes. It seems that Iraq has fallen into the state of limbo that creates conditions for Iran to take over those regions. I guess the latest nuclear developments in Iran is a reason for many to fear: specifically any efforts in making Iraq wholesome. I foresee this situation as the next war...I'm so sorry that the Arabic region is maintained through the cohesion of a system of belief so strong and absurd as (any) religion and the power of the arms. It seems to me that those countries are still governed like many regions in my home country: Colombia. The power of oil (in Colombia's case: cocaine) plus the power of violence gives "legitimacy" to some sort of crooked "democracy". At least in Colombia women have way more freedoms than women in the Arabic/Persian region. Religion plays a huge role in making people be submissive to abusive power,without any challenge. South America is very religious but not to the point of choosing a self imposed exclusion from the rest of the world,human freedoms, or the capitalist establishment. Still religion makes people behave abandoning life to a superior being...Not taking reponsability of their lives or other's lives. That is a crucial element of poverty and underdevelopment in many countries. That and the institutionalizing of exclusion of people from a competitive level of education locally and internationally.

Anyhow...Whether the news are a fact or not the reference to the past makes a strong precedent for future "incidents".War in the Persian land is getting closer.

Slow down

I have problems understanding that I need 8 Hours of sleep, when those same 8 hours can be used for something creative. I guess it is a non cool trait that all that are productive share in capitalist times. There are plenty of urban getways that will be happy to see some money spent in "free times".
Too much perhaps.

The Swiss, yummy!

Awesome tourism campaign for Switzerland.

burning Paris every once in a while

I have been pretty much amazed by how one of the first world countries; France, deals with immigrants. France is not dealing with what I think is the cause of the the isolation of some by mainstream culture..."Minorities" in France are not "French", because to be French is to cease to be many things in favor of "Frenchness" (what it is only those very proud french would know). To understand one self as "French" one should abandon whatever is not French...And of course that might be anything that might be "unacceptable" by "French" standards. Let's say that the most recognizable trait of "unfrechness" is to be poor... "Mais oui!" might say some...not understanding that integration consists in being flexible about the way oneself, (french), or one's culture (French) might change when there are immigrants...Difficult topic in deed, moreover when French have resisted even integration to "equal" Europeans, in the European Union, by the fear of loosing the frenchness.
I ask my self: Is it possible to be "minority" and French at the same time? "Mais oui!" might say some... But the reality says otherwise. During the early construction of the city states in Europe's late middle ages, in Paris was illegal for many to wear clothes that belonged to the few that had the power: wigs and moles! Mon dieu! Yes! At early stages of "frenchness" development those that decided who belonged and how did not, did it based on how far from muddy environments was the individual...not much has changed...and frenchness is still defined by "the location on the mole on the face"!. Social Mobility is regarded as a European right: for some europeans...and almost inexistant for those who are not. A good book about this topic.
Social Mobility for minorities (non french individuals) is not part of the idea of "frenchness". It might have it's exceptions, of course...but France is failing to offer that possibility to many.. I'm afraid that is the case in many day to day situations against what logic might say. (E.G.:age is one of the most common elements in labor selection: age discrimination is perfectly OK for employees in France,contributing to classism within european citizens). And let's keep in mind that a resume has to offer the very specific schools that only some attend being born in european territory: not very open for integration of minorities. Affirmative action anybody? I love some of the "french" traits...but to marry that perspective of "rightness" to the point of killing rationality, and succumbing to neglect real inequalities?

Rioting by some rebellious minorities, is of course fuel for the antimmigration policies. Silly silly immigrants (sans papiers) if they think that using violence anything will change in their favor.

Now,the burden is in France's government as director of "justice" and "frenchness". Are those good values that make part of the french identity going to spoils for keeping the "Frenchmen" away from the reality that the many non French experience in France? Why is it that Minorities in the US or other European cities don't go on a rampage for lack of opportunities? May be because there are options to achieve social mobility through effort or maybe not...

My point is: cultural identity has to do with the level of integration of one self and others to a common idea. Cultural identity is a construct of a group in relation to other. Men to Women, child to adult, Frech to non French...In that sense when an identity is in conflict with other identity might be for the lack of possibilities of integration, and lack of balance. Any effort to extinguish the conflict by hiding symptoms rather than attack the cause is futile.
The following is a series of reports on the state of affairs with Minorities in France form the BBC:

"In 2002 Abdel and Mohamed Djaiziri bought a small supermarket chain in one of bleakest of these estates, Les Pyramides - named after one of Paris' glitziest areas.

The Tunisian brothers then did a fateful thing. They turned the supermarket, affiliated to the Franprix chain, into a halal shop.

It was purely a business a decision, they insist: In a predominantly Muslim area, there was no point stocking pork or alcohol that would stay on the shelf.

"When a shopkeeper has a range of 15,000 products available to him, he will choose those that will sell," Abdel Djaiziri said in a recent interview."

But the mayor felt the move contributed to creating a ghetto by making life difficult for non-Muslims, and tried to get the store closed on health grounds."

art, peace at the top

I guess if one has made millions, it only makes sense that the next thing to do is to find peace by giving others a little tea...

"In New York, a Frenchman has taken tea to another level: he practices the tea ceremony in a wooden hut and Japanese garden he designed and built on the rooftop of his Manhattan townhouse. What's more, Pierre Sernet takes his act on the road, using an open-air, cube-shaped teahouse he designed. Sernet is a banker-turned-performance artist, and he performs the ancient Japanese tea ceremony in exotic locations and spreads a message of acceptance and peace in the process.

He calls his act, "Guerilla Tea." He has brewed and served tea in places ranging from the Thar Desert in India to the Great Wall in China to Niteroi, Brazil. He sets up his portable teahouse and invites local strangers to share a cup of tea and a tranquil moment."

Cartography as a tool of domination

Whenever I stumble upon this map, I can not stop thinking in the madness in human nature and how political power shapes ideas across many cultures.
"The Mercator projection creates increasing distortions of size as you move away from the equator. As you get closer to the poles the distortion becomes severe. Cartographers refer to the inability to compare size on a Mercator projection as "the Greenland Problem." Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, yet Africa's land mass is actually fourteen times larger (see figure below right). Because the Mercator distorts size so much at the poles it is common to crop Antarctica off the map. This practice results in the Northern Hemisphere appearing much larger than it really is. Typically, the cropping technique results in a map showing the equator about 60% of the way down the map, diminishing the size and importance of the developing countries"

What's stronger: Jaws or brains?

A woman gets eaten by sharks. That is a sad story for humans in deed, specially for the deceased's "church group". Now, how is that after the shark attack, trying to find the "guilty" sharks, killing them and trying to find pieces of the woman is going to change the fact that sharks are carnivorous animals? The shark community will be happy to take a few out of the water, more food for the other sharks! That solution is just senseless! How is that taking the life of some sharks is going to help humans to become more respectful towards animal territory or animal instinct. Call me a "shark huger" but I think the efforts of finding predators after they do what they do to very inopportune humans wondering, swimming , hunting in their territory is just futile, and completely out of the scope of the real solution: don't swim where there are sharks!
Or get a strong cage!

The dragon and the little cricket

Microsoft "unplugged" a website from the world wide web, only because the government of China asked to censor a Chinese user....Interesting news, where Chinese laws (censorship) and Mutinational interest get mixed. Microsoft being an American (supposedly free) enterprise has to obey Chinese censorship logic because of the fear of losing the Chinese market...A favor from Microsoft to the not very open Chinese government. Crazy!
"Michael Anti, also known as Zhao Jing, a researcher for The New York Times, wrote the Beijing-based blog, which featured coverage of subjects such as a string of cat murders in Shanghai that attracted the attention of the outside press. The blog was deleted New Year’s Eve."
"Former CNN correspondent Rebecca MacKinnon revealed in a posting on her own blog on Tuesday that Microsoft had removed the blog. She pointed out that Mr. Anti had recently covered a walkout called by journalists at the Beijing Daily News after several editors there were fired for writing about recent accounts of police shootings of protestors."

Rivers of silver and bood

When I was 16 years old I read a book tittled : "Las venas abiertas de America Latina" by Eduardo Galeano ... After more than a decade, it remains as one of the most forcefull books, reavealing dynamics of power and economics in multinational times. This book is very usefull for anybody that would like to understand the shift towards social governments in South America, the adoration of el CHE, or the latest president of Bolivia, as examples of solutions to post-colonialism (not for that being a factual solution).
The intro to the book. Spanish. English (very rough automatic internet translation)

ohhh so pretty!

I love this collection by Claudia Rosa Lukas.(AW56)
The underwear is fugly! And some of the fashion photos are freaky...
But again AW56 is beautifull!!!!!! Little red riding hood chic.

One of the best

One of the most impresive professionals in motion design:

Who's honor?

Dead by honor

A furious comment after reading that link's content: It seems that honor is a matter of MEN owning women! when is this crazy construct from stupidity going to end...? Why do we women have to put up with such imbecility? If men were murdered by women in the degree that honour murders happen, millions of women would be killed to protect men.
But in this male world, these murderers will stay alive after killing women "by honour". Civility only goes as far as it crashes with male interest....

from wikipedia:

Previously, honour figured largely as a guiding principle of society, functioning as part of a code of honour for a gentleman and often coming to expression in the practice of duelling. One's honour, that of one's wife, of one's (blood-)family or of one's beloved formed an all-important issue: the archetypal "man of honour" remained ever alert for any insult, actual or suspected: for either would impugn his honour.

The concept of honour appears to have declined in importance in the modern secular West. Popular stereotypes would have it surviving more definitively in alleged "hot-blooded" Mediterranean cultures (Italian, Arab, Iberian...) or in more "gentlemanly" societies (like the "Old South" of Dixie). Feudal or other agrarian societies, focused upon land use and land ownership, may tend to honour "honour" more than do deracinated industrial societies. Traces of the importance attached to honour linger in the military (officers may conduct a court of honour) and in organisations with military echoes, such as Scouting.

"Honour" in the case of females is frequently related, historically, to sexuality: preservation of "honour" equated primarily to maintenance of virginity, or at least to preservation of exclusive monogamy. One can speculate that feminism has changed some linguistic usage in this respect.

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Cultures of honour and cultures of law

It has been suggested that Changes in Honour be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

One can contrast cultures of honour with cultures of law. From the viewpoint of anthropology, cultures of honour typically appear among nomadic peoples and herdsmen who carry their most valuable property with them and risk having it stolen, without having recourse to law enforcement or government. In this situation, inspiring fear forms a better strategy than promoting friendship; and cultivating a reputation for swift and disproportionate revengeMontesquieu to Steven Pinker have remarked upon the mindset needed for a culture of honour. increases the safety of one's person and property. Thinkers ranging from

Cultures of honour therefore appear amongst Bedouins, Scottish and English herdsmen of the Border country, and many similar peoples, who have little allegiance to a national government; among cowboys, frontiersmen, and ranchers of the American West, where official law-enforcement often remained out of reach, as is famously celebrated in Westerns; among the plantation culture of the American South, and among aristocrats, who enjoy hereditaryprivileges that put them beyond the reach of codes of law. Cultures of honour also flourish in criminal underworlds and gangs, whose members carry large amounts of cash and contraband and cannot complain to the law if it is stolen.

Once a culture of honour exists, it is difficult for its members to make the transition to a culture of law; this requires that people become willing to back down and refuse to immediately retaliate, and from the viewpoint of the culture of honour, this tends to appear to be an unwise act reflecting weakness.

Conceptions of honour vary widely between cultures; in some cultures, honour killings of (usually female) members of one's own family are considered justified if they have "defiled the family's honour" by marrying against one's wishes, or even by being the victims of rape. These honour killings are generally seen in the West as a way of men using the culture of honour to control female sexuality.

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Related concepts

In contemporary international relations, the concept of "credibility" resembles that of honour, as when the credibility of a state or of an alliance appears to be at stake, and honour-bound politicians call for drastic measures.

Compare the concepts of integrity, face (social custom) in stereotyped Oriental cultures, or of mana in Polynesian society.

For a similar concept with many connotations opposite to honour, see shame.

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Quotations

• "To the King, one must give his possessions and his life; but honour is a possession of soul, and the soul is only God's". Pedro Crespo in Pedro Calderón de la Barca's The Mayor of Zalamea, 1st day.

• "... Honour ... remains awake in us like a last lamp in a temple that has been laid to waste." — Alfred de Vigny, Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835).

• "... during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc." — Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.

• "We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." — C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

• "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die..." — William Goldman, The Princess Bride

• "To die with honour, when one can no longer live with honour." — Giacomo Puccini, Madama Butterfly

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Amazing!

astonishing! This guy is an excellent animator/designer. I'm in shock by the beauty in his work.

Seeeeeeeeeeeed

Great magazine content,
great design: pure science.

TV for contemporary people

This is the web channel from the WALKER art center. The Walker is one of the best museums of contemporary art in the world. These are the broadcasts from previous lectures on art, culture and design issues held at the WAC. Priceless!

Crazy man with millions, go figure!

New Blog

Some friends and I had to create a blog as an assignment... what a better excuse to create a collective of girls! wee. The mothership has landed!

black birds

Today I felt like I need to voice my admiration to winter birds: Crows (CORVUS in latin, CUERVOS in spanish) are one of the animals that have gained my respect in my time living in the northern US. I admire their tenacity in coexisting with the more vicious species: humans. They are smart enough to limit their encounters with humans during summer time...Then to recover the urban territory in winter time. They seem to me "winter" birds because they are one of the few beings that make life happen in the cold -in a noisy way-. They remind me that not all is dormant in winter and that while humans rule earth in sunny conditions they are stronger in winter conditions. Here are some observations by scientist on the intelligence of the persistent and articulate black birds:

"While tool use among birds is not unheard of, Hunt's New Caledonian crows, close kin to American crows, were observed employing two distinctly different kinds of tools to forage for invertebrates such as insects, centipedes, and larvae. Such specialization in tool manufacture has not heretofore been observed in nonhuman animals, according to Hunt. The observations occurred between November 1992 and March 1995 in New Caledonia, a group of islands 900 miles northeast of Australia. Hunt observed both manufacture and use of a hooked tool made by plucking and stripping a barbed twig. He also observed the use, but not manufacture, of what he described as a "stepped cut tool" with serrated edges. He did, however, observe and photograph leaves from which crows had started to cut such stepped tools."

Supodselly crows and ravens articulate sounds (the noisy interventions in groups) not to convey concepts but to express emotions...So a gathering of noisy crows is a poetry jam! Awesome birds...

Two things that I found funny when researching good liks for this entry: some individuals are obsessed in finding "white" crows...(white whatever, to give sense to their white ideals)...weird individuals. Some other individuals (most of humans i'm afraid) think of brave and selfsuficient animals as pest. Like animals have no right to survive finding food in our mess...researching about animals we find more thruth about humans, I think.

A creative carrot head

So, Valentino happens to be orange! I find obsession to tanning pretty funny when is taken into orange leathery extremes....even Meryl Streep seems to have a dash of the orange surface on her cheek...is he melting?
I happen to have olive skin, so when I see a tanned person that goes into the fake realm of neon food colors it makes me laugh...Thanks for the good times Don Valentino! It is like me trying to look credible if I had some fake blonde...I would look like one of these
Picture taken during October 2005 in NYC.

"Meryl Streep, in Valentino, with the designer, who received the Fashion Superstar award."

wallpaper in motion

Motion from the Netherlands. AMAZING work!

FEUDAL times

Feudal Lord Luciano Benetton, the owner of Benneton has donated "his" land to the MAPUCHES (aboriginal community from the south of Argentina and Chile). This act is not a Marketing strategy to make fairness part of the Benneton allure, NO!. This is only the natural course of things in postcolonial times. Don Benneton had bought "public" land from one fascist Argentinean authority that sold the aborigines land to the rich Italian. Crazy story but truth...The story of Latin America and Feudal Lords from foreign lands buying properties ignoring whole communities (in spite of those people)...It seems that this "return" of lands is making sense of all the craziness that has made the AMERICAN continent.Talking about a PR campaign gone BAD.

jihad by the infidels?

It is really funny to hear that a feminist wants to defend women rights within the boundries of islamic religion...is like trying to make gravity happen in cero gravity environments...

"Organisers of the first international congress on Islamic feminism are calling for a "gender jihad... Organisers say they want more collaboration with western feminists but say non-Muslim feminists need to challenge their anti-Islamic stereotypes."

I guess they are trying to create a bridge between the "islamic world" and the "western world", but in reality any effort for promote femenist views within religion in western or eastern cultures is plainly futile...Most (I think all) religions opress in one way or the other, female nature. Female nature is, within all big religions, something to control and avoid, something evil, subhuman, twisted, non correct. Where as male nature is something to prise and mostly to follow. I think religion (any religion) is a face on human social development that should be left as a bunch of fear on punishment (from the hand of a male god) mixed with faith on what it can not be explained, and of course all sort of social constructs to opress who rebels against the monopoly of faith based power. It is a power based on opression, ignorance, superstition, mediocrecy, with a veil of superficial mercy on others (mercy on who, I would ask).
In all cultures "infidels" are most of the time women....no wonder why...

scandinavian e-motion

A Norwegian guy once told me many jokes about how silly Swedish people were...and then a Swedish girl told jokes about how silly Norwegians were...This is a website that a scandinavian looking dear fellow likes...I like it to! No silly jokes here.

mapping stuff

Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans."

Matt Woolman
Digital Information Graphics

Goal

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

Tom Ford loves the machine

He has capitalized on the human tendency of not so secretly adoring sex. He put Gucci on the hot sphere of mass consumption...luxe for all...

"When sex goes out of business, so do we."

A bon mot of brilliance delivered back when by Estée Lauder, one her son Leonard Lauder takes considerable delight in repeating.

Assuming the beauty doyenne was correct, these should be heady times for the house she founded. This month will see the first fruits of Lauder's curious marriage with Tom Ford, the man for whom sex and style are virtually synonymous. "We've always tried to position ourselves where we're selling something that's really sexy," says Leonard Lauder, the company chairman. "That's the cornerstone of Estée Lauder."

W: These pictures look futuristic-creepy—not a celebration of beauty.

TF: We are futuristic; we're on the cusp of being able to manipulate humans genetically to grow into whatever we think looks good. The moment we can start manipulating genes, how long are our legs going to get? Beauty used to be all about cream and lotions, and now it's not. It's about Botox. It's about fillers. It's about mini facelifts. We've reached a level of manipulation. And then of course I'm portrayed as the one doing the manipulating…the polishing, buffing, shaping, which is what I do. It's just what we do. What the fashion industry does.

Sad day for Mayan people.

I like this war!

the cold days are here to stay for months...

hot or cold design

A couple of designers from portugal came with this design for bedding sheets:
"Couple(name of design) can be a game or a monitoring system.
The ruler is printed so as to be readable from inside the bed.
The numbering rises outwards and from warm to cold colours.
Each person knows how much he or she can pull and how far apart the couple rests."

Final test : past!

My interview/exam went pretty well. 20 minutes before the scheduled exam, I realized that my green card was somewhere out of my reach. I freaked out for 20 minutes....Then I decided that I had to go without that document and hope they will allow me to take the exam. I drove late to the apointment, like a mad foreign woman. Then I circled the same block for 10 minutes without realizing that I was looking for an imaginary different address than the immigration building. Here there was in front of me and I always thought that it was a new address (next building or something). I arrived , sat, and after 1 minute the officer called my name...The Officer asked many questions that I partially answered and then when not having the exact answer, ..Anyhow, that is what they require to give you the precious right to vote. I'll be sworn as citizen in a short while. WEE!

Men in tights! fuck yeah!

I love tights! I have had tights across many different periods throughout my life...Breeches, tights, super slim pants, and I just adore them. You have to have some nice toned legs to wear tights properly.... otherwise you would look like a crazy taco. Anyway it seems that my favorite feminine/masculine style is coming so super strong into fashion, that many spring collections for males were inspired by Nurayev. Rock on my pretty male ballerina!
"Nureyev's signature peaked fishermen's caps and wool beanies were the crowning glories on a schizoid personal look that embodied his Rimbaud-Rambo ying-yang sides. He was just as inclined to dress like a stevedore who might have calluses on his calluses as he was to step out resembling a doyenne in Oriental robes and shawls. Fittingly, for a brawling balletomane who grew up in 1950's Russia having to wear his sisters' hand-me-downs, Nureyev became the mediagenic personification of jet-set-era androgyny, an agent for sexual and cultural change whom the dance critic Arlene Croce once dubbed "Gorbachev's advance man." ">> NYTIMES.

North or South, I'm definitely American!

I have the test for becoming a citizen tomorrow morning...It seems really easy. I hope to pass it only using my general knowledge on American history. Regarding rights: I personally find the right to bear arms, the most ridiculous right EVER! Only make sense if you are a paranoid person and believe in the rule of the natural law (Hobbes).In the study guide there are some useless questions regarding past wars... Like we need to remember who shouted some rant against some other country on the top of a hill...I think the most important thing to take into consideration is to take pride in the multitude of cultures mixing in this continent: the whole melting pot...I'm totally melted! ...melting on this planet!
I'll post my exam experience afterwards.

Editorial: images + content

For my 'editorial design' class I have to build a book.
Each student can decide what would be the topic of the book.
I choose fashion by location. I'm planning to include some serious essays about cultural identity through fashion, as I go to very distinct locations and take a series of minimum 30 people per location. I'm posting the images in my website while in college.

NEEEEERD!

I must confess:Although I'm ridicusly hot, my alter ego is a nerd.

telebolitos

This guys are awesome! Not that they are my super friends or anything: they ROCK! I recomend two songs from this new band: Valderrama y Cae. Good music.
Here is the front cover of the final compositions I made for their new CD.

Ryan McGuiness

My greatest inspiration. This designer/artist has been able to create a style that has permeated all visual aesthetics in what is cool and sophisticated... Astonishing excellence!

crazy little things

Apple announced the Ipod NANO. cute and not expensive....too bad that I just got my second Ipod "biggo".

"After summarizing the existing iPod product line, Jobs explained that the iPod mini is what all of Apple's competitors are aiming for. Apple is "going to do something pretty bold," he said. Apple is "replacing it with something new."

Jobs calls the iPod nano "an entirely new ground-up design, that also has 1000 songs in your pocket." The white device features a color display and can support photos, uses a grey click wheel to navigate, and is 80 percent smaller in volume than the original iPod -- thinner than a number two pencil, said Jobs. The iPod nano weighs 1.5 ounces or 42 grams.

Compared to the iPod mini, the iPod nano is half the thickness and 62 percent smaller by volume. It uses a 30-pin dock connector, so the iPod nano plugs in to existing iPod accessories, and can also connect using USB 2.0. It features a 14-hour rechargeable battery. It achieves its small size by eschewing a hard disk drive in favor of flash memory."
"Jobs told the crowd that Apple has sold more than half a billion songs through its iTunes Music Store to date. "We are selling songs at a rate of 1.8 million songs per day," he explained. "iTunes has an 82 percent market share here in the US."

Jobs reiterated an Apple press release offered earlier today that it has 80 percent of the legitimate online music download market in the UK, and said that iTunes is doing "extremely well around the world." There are iTunes Music Stores in 20 countries, he said, representing 85 percent of the global music market."

"Pastafarians" unite

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is a parody religion created to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to allow intelligent design to be taught in science classes alongside evolution.

The "religion" has since become an Internet phenomenon that has garnered many followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (sometimes referring to themselves as "Pastafarians", a pun on Rastafarians) who claim to have been touched by "His Noodly Appendage" and preach the word of their "noodly master" as the one true religion. Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is primarily the invention of Bobby Henderson, a graduate of Oregon State University with a degree in physics.

Natural state of violence

Thomas Hobbes (leviathan) resonates in mi head while listening to the news of the collapse of "civility" in New Orleans. I believe is time for this U.S. system to develop a conscientious staged process for granting "the order of civilization", avoiding the "natural law" rule. It seems that they (current higher political power) takes for granted civilization as a condition intrinsic to geographical area, and the use of military power...They fail to see basic structures on different societies that maintain and legitimate order. It is a extremely complicated topic in deed. Hobbes gives at least one of the corner stones for understanding human behavior, chaos, and power legitimacy.
This fundamentals in political theory are grounded in the believe of a God (XVI century). Something that currently I find harmful for society in general and women specifically. But again everything needs to be read taking into consideration the valuable and ignoring the futile.

Blonde redhead

Blonde redhead is one of my favorite music groups. It is not pop music, so it has many sharp edges. I'm very interested in the structure and melody of their music, plus the lyrics are al bit psychotic and intimate: lovely. Music for a few.
They have like 3 different websites.
Here are some videos and music samples.
"None of the band are American. Amadeo and Simone came from Milan as teenagers to live in Montreal, while Kazu relocated from her home town of Kyoto in the early 90s to study in New York, where the band initially formed and where all three still live. These tangled paths are reflected in the intuitive twists and turns of Blonde Redhead's music, which has increasingly shed its influences to follow a strange, bewitching and cosmopolitan logic of its own."

Tijuana Bible

Again: culture, religion, and geography connected to a sexual "reality"
In terms of design: awesome little booklet, with a forbidden and humorous allure.

Entertainment

While living in Berlin in my very early twenties, I discovered that sex was a pastime for many people trying to stop boredom: some type of national hobby. These days I think it is a pastime not exclusive to a culture or an age...Even though some want to believe it is exclusive to a gender.

An essay by Peter Saville on pornography that link commercial art and sex.
...And yes, he is naive enough to think that pornography is a "male" motivated past time...like women are floating in ether and males are the ones living on "reality"....Whose reality? It seems that men escaped from the religious/cultural constructions the kept separated sex from entertainment, but women are supposed to stick to those constructions like some type of "natural" tendency. I would say that men might find themselves more addicted to the past time than women to restate their very "cultural freedom". Interesting essay anyhow.

"Most of our popular culture these days is based on familiarity. It's good business. Challenging is not good business."
This quote is what I consider A basic in the semiotics of globalization!

"I can say categorically that porn depraves and corrupts. Absolutely. Frequent exposure to pornography changes your sensibility about personal behavior."

More essays.