Today was a day that really, REALLY dragged on. Now that immersion classes are in a hiatus, I finally have time to do the — extremely dull — important job of compiling student’s feedback, write evaluations and also prepare the feedback on all the teachers. So, in order to get things done without any distractions, I left my laptop at home and worked with the school’s computer. What a piece of junk. But OK, I managed to prepare the first four evaluations, on the students that had classes in Santa Cruz. As for the other, I don’t know, 15 to 20 students that still need to receive some feedback, well, I need the help from the teachers, who have been anything but helpful when it comes to respecting deadlines. Anyway, I’ll give them one more day to hand the papers in, otherwise I’ll get the papers, go to the other branches and will sit in front of them and literally watch them fill in all the tables.
So, I was watching AC360 and there was this Nic Robertson’s report on a Catholic boy from Long Island that turned into a jihadist. When Anderson was announcing the report, he said something like: … one young man journey … and before he had the chance to finish the sentence “…from altar boy to jihadist”, instantly the phrase “…from Milan to Minsk, Rochelle Rochelle…” sprang to mind! hahahahaha! Well, if anybody out there is as much of a Seinfeld fan as I am, you will understand!
While in the terror subject, there was this tweet from CNN breaking news of a new evacuation in Times Square. Very short account and strangely enough, no other news organisation reported the incident, which makes me wonder if that’s true or not. So what’s happening now is that if any moron forgets some package on the street it all turns to chaos. This is something that obviously wouldn’t happen in Brazil. An unattended package wouldn’t last five minutes, you know, UNATTENDED, because somebody would definitely take care of it — you know, grab it before you could even say “IT’S MIN…E…” Sometime ago, when I didn’t have cable and was still watching Brazilian programmes, there was this report on “how honest Brazilians are”. It was actually a research carried out in a number of state capitals — my city included — in which some objects would be left unattended. The idea was to see how long they would remain in the same place. They left a bike in Rio, Sao Paulo, Brasilia and, obviously, Porto Alegre, among other places. They actually left the bicycle in MY neighbourhood, some 10 minutes from my flat, and the bike was “taken care of” in less than 10 minutes, the country’s number 1! So much for a great neighbourhood to live in, uh? What’s really amazing, though, is that property prices in the area have spiked in the last few years, mainly because it’s near the city centre , but it also borders some of the best-known trafficking points in town. So, once again, the main picture of inequality that exists in this country.
And Lula is helping bailout Greece…
One more TEDTalk translation available in Portuguese. This time, I reviewed the talk of executive director of the Lions Aravind Institute of Community Ophthalmology, Thulasiraj Ravilla, who explains how eye surgeries are being done in patients with curable diseases in India at a low cost, helping thousands of people see again. Translated by Sueli Zardo.
-- Never too many beers -- 