Posts from — November 2009

Green Porno has been out for a while on the Sundance Channelbut for some reason I haven’t heard about it before. I just discovered it today on a discussion board and well, it’s probably the weirdest thing that I’ve ever watched but I find it genius and very educational. It’s just brilliant. You won’t be disappointed if you’re a minimum curious about the sexual life of animals around us. It’s an informative video series created by the famous Italian actress Isabella Rossellini, describing mating rituals in the animal realm. She has put together these really awesome shorts movie and their education factor is as high as the gross-out factor.

Green Porno began as an experiment,” says Rossellini. Fellow film icon Robert Redford challenged her to create a series of online shorts for the Sundance Channel. The constraints: “It had to work on a small screen, it had to be brief, and it had to be cheap,” she says, because she was given a tiny budget. “It also had to be about the natural environment in some way.” Her solution: Green Porno, a series of cartoonlike vignettes about the sex life of animals. “I want to give people a sense of wonder about the natural world,” she says, “to make them fall in love with it and want to protect it.” The first season’s episodes were all about backyard invertebrates. For the second season, she teamed up with conservation biologist Claudio Campagna and focused on marine creatures. And in the third one, she talks about animals that we eat such as shrimps, porks and chickens.

If you image Google “new moon”, you get the New Moon movie before the astronomic version of it.

So, there’s this amazing place in Seattle called Remedy Teas that I discovered last quarter. I wonder how I missed it, I actually live 4 blocks away from it. This is hands down the best Tea shop I have ever been. Remedy Teas offer a huge selection of 150 organic teas from all kind and from all over the world. White, Green, Black, Oolong, Herbal… some of them are mixed for specific purposes (hangover tea, relief for colds, deep sleep, extra caffeine, etc), it’s just amazing to enter the room and see their entire collection on the walls. It is so overwhelming at first. I love the location too, on 15th Avenue, way more chill than other parts of Capitol Hill such as Broadway and Pike – that’s probably the reason why it took me 4 months to find that place. They have big windows and a nice little patio. It’s all very cozy and the atmosphere is perfect to relax with a book or a laptop. They also have provide free Wifi and they’re open til 11PM. It’s very modern inside and they always play some chill and ambient music, never too loud. I just love this place. I always bring one or two bag of leaves home. Here’s what I got. I love them all.

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Yesterday I was just reading some news websites, and saw that a lot of people – mostly conservative Americans but not only – were attacking Obama because he bowed whilst meeting the Emperor of Japan. A conservative voice on CCN: “It’s ugly. I don’t want to see it…We don’t defer to emperors. We don’t defer to kings or emperors. The president of the United States — this coupled with so many apologies from the United States — is just another thing.” Apparently the U.S. president is King of the WORLD. How ridiculous. It’s just an example of cultural arrogance. In Western culture bowing means you acknowledge the superiority of the one you bow to, so that’s what it means, no matter what. The whole idea that certain words and gestures mean different things in different cultures, and that it is honorable to honor or try to honor the cultures of others is absolutely lost. What was he supposed to do, stroll in there like an arrogant cowboy and go: “AMERICA FUCK YEAH!!!”?

“Here’s to the crazy’s ones. The misfits. The Rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the squre holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
— Jack Kerouac

I talked to my mom today on MSN like we always do every few days. I love her. She’s going to send me some food from France. She does it once in a while. I give her a list of what I miss the most and she sends it. She always tells me that I could ask her anything I want, she would drive hours to find it, just because she misses me and that it would be the only way for her to feel useful when we are so far from each other. Also she always add something that I didn’t ask for. More food, some old pictures of us or those little things that I forgot in France when I moved. It reminds me when I was a kid and when she would bring little gifts home after work. I love surprises and she knows it. I think I got it from her, I love doing special things for special people in my heart. For me, having someone surprise me makes me feel that they truly care because they actually spent an extra effort for me. Most of the time, it doesn’t require a lot of money or time and it can make people very happy. I wonder why people don’t do it that often.

I’m feeling ridiculous. I’m getting bothered with so many thoughts again it’s really becoming a burden. I’m sorry, I can’t make out something great right now. I wish this would be over but the months grow long and it’s never ending. I can’t help but always reflect on it because it’s there, it affects me and it won’t go away. So here I don’t feel good once again, trying to make something out of air and prolonging the hours to start off where I began. The only thing I learned is that it will repeat again. It’s like I missed the favorite part of the song so I played it over, and I missed it again. I never want to take these earphones off.

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.”
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche