Quotation of the month

'What I did not know -I was a young man- is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.'

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Then things a teenager should know.

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about ten things teenagers will not learn in school. He spoke about how feel-good, politically corrrect teachings created a generation whit no concept of reality and how this set them up for failure in the real world.

1. Life is not fair - get used to it.
2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
3. You will not make $60.000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
6. If you mess up, it's not your parents' faul, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
7. Before you were born, your parents weren't boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents's generation, try delousin the closet in your own room.
8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have aoboslished failing grades ant they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything real life.
9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on you won time.
10. Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop an go to jobs.

Post script: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

What do you think about these ten things?

Princesees

Princesses from fareway lands. Catalonia and Hungary in the Middle Agges, is an exhibition that open on 12th May at Barcelona's History Museum of Catalonia.
Four travelling princesses who married and became queens in other countries, four extraordinary (and sometimes very sad) personal stories; four moments during the Middle Ages in which the destinities of Hungary and the Catalan-Aragononese crown became joined through conjugal diplomacy.
The exhibition focuses on Constance, as well as Violante of Hungary who married James I of Aragon in the 13th century, Beatrice of Araon who was wed to Matthias Corvin in the late 15th century, and on Mary of Hapsburg who was married to Louis of Hungary in the 16th century.
Although in many cases the marriages were not a great succes (Beatrice of Aragon was despised for being a strange), the case of Violante is special: it seems as thought there was real love between her and James I.

Clamp down on internet piracy

Obama and Zapatero recently enjoyed a warm meeting where they found plenty of common, but the two leaders have already found a point of friction: the internet. Obama’s White house is more critical with Spanish policies against piracy on Internet.
The USTR (United States Trade Representative) produces every year a report to encourage countries to respect laws that cover intellectual property rights –in particular with regard to internet downloads. Countries in the special 301 Report must enter into negotiations with the United States to leave the list and will face trade sanctions if they do nothing to fight piracy and illegal downloading. Countries are classified in this report in different categories, according to the level of piracy present here. Spain doesn’t appear in the “priority watch list”, but for the second year appears in the Watch List. Countries like Italy and Norway are also include in this list but is Spain the country that received more rebukes.
Futhermore, last year Spain appears on a blacklist edit by the US congress as one of the countries where internet piracy was most frequent.
301 Report appeals the Spanish government to ban commonly used peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs such as eMule or Ares.

Finally, this report has some severe words for Spanish judges and prosecutors for having systematically absolved the owners of WebPages that shows link for downloads, given that there has only been one case that ended in prosecution.

Do you agree with the content of this report? Are the law so permissive with regard to piracy on Internet in Spain?

SOMALIA PIRATES

A Spanish tanker picked up seven suspected pirates off the coast of Somalia after they fell into the sea while trying to hijack another vessel. This new has appeared today in the newspaper. We can read news as this one every day, but who are Somalia's pirates? To know those modern-day pirates a bit better I propose you watch this video.

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj5f6ApIjUE

Chema Madoz: Visual metaphors

Last year I visited the exhibition entitled "Chema Madoz" 2000-2005. Madoz is a point of reference in Spain's contemporany art scene because of his unique way of interpreting art trough photography and his searching of visual poetry.

This artist manipulates the objects with studied delicacy. He modifies the objects looking for a balance between the essence of things and their latent significance.

Madoz is a incredible and fascinating collector of ideas that he photographes in black and white. This artist, with his poetic vision provides us with a window to better understand the world around us. As Confucious says: "Everyting has its beauty, but not everyone can see it".

Madoz uses the objecs and his graphic representation as if they were words froma very clear vocabulary. Madoz worked with Joan Brossa on a book (Fotopoemario), and Madoz's work has also been compared to the visual poems of this catalan poet.

The black-and-white format lends a melancholy distante to his work. The scale of greys turns things into shadows. The work with shadows allows the artist to obtain a plastic elegance in his photographs. Chema Madoz works on the delicate border existing between the real and the imaginary. In his works he proposes to us a split between whats exits and what is possible. As usually happen in the plastic arts, what is intellectual in Madoz's work is precisely what is abstract. Madoz has produced images with such a clear surrealist content, that remember the work of Magritte.

Uncanny, but real story

Real life is more impressive than fiction. How many times have you have listen to the sentence “reality exceeds fiction”?
It is difficult for me to imagine an uncanny story, but it is not necessary to imagine one, you can simply swim into daily news to find uncanny, terrible or touching stories.

Chris Biblis was sixteen when doctors diagnosed him leukemia and told him that he needed radiotherapy, and this treatment would leave him sterile and doctors advise him that if he ever wanted to become a father he would need to freeze his sperm before the treatment, so he decided to do it.

Now, he is 38 years old and he and his wife are celebrating the birth of a healthy baby daughter Stella, who was conceived after scientist injected a defrosted sperm into an egg of his wife, Melodie, and implanted it in the uterus.

Five remaining eggs have been fertilized and are now frozen for possible usy by the couple in the future, if they want to have more children. This is a touching story with a promising end because Chris lives 22 years after doctors communicated him his leukemia. He has overcome his illness as well as this year he has celebrated the birth of Stella, his daughter.