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17 Oct 2009 17:55

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World: In Rio de Janeiro, gangs shoot down police helicopters. (Holy crap!)

  • Dang it, Associated Press. This is simply too crazy to not post. We’re going to feel guilty about breaking the boycott for this article, but this is some Ikari Warriors action going on in Rio de Janeiro. So, Chicago’s looking a lot better now in 2016, eh, International Olympic Committee? (Oh wait, we forgot how crazy this was.) source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

12 Sep 2009 16:11

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Music: Saturday Mixtape: Os Mutantes, or why Brazilian music freaking rocks



Welcome back, insanely progressive Brazilian musical icons. We wanted to commemorate Os Mutantes' first album in 33 years, Haih Or Amortecedor, by looking back a little at music of their homeland. Warning: Four of these five songs are in Portuguese, but rule anyway.
  • 1. The females in the Tropicalia movement, including Os Mutantes’ Rita Lee (later a famous solo artist in her own right) and Gal Costa, had this wonderful way of blending their voices into the productions around them perfectly. On Costa’s “Lost in the Paradise,” there’s just as much quiet storm-style R&B as traditional Brazilian elements.
    2. “Telcar” is Os Mutantes’ first single from the new album. What’s surprising about it is that even though it clearly has modern, non-experimental production values (and only features one member of the original band), it still feels of another era in the best way possible.
    3. Caetano Veloso is one of Brazillian music’s greatest songwriters with a reach starting with Tropicalia and far into Brazilian popular music. He’s written hundreds of Brazilian standards, including “Soy Loco Por Tí, América.”
    4. The English lyrics to “Chuckberry Fields Forever,” a Gilberto Gil song performed by late-70s Brazilian supergroup Doces Barbaros, tell of how rock had a permanent impact on traditional Brazilian music. The music acts as evidence.
    5. Despite the fact that that this is a Giberto Gil/Caetano Veloso ditty, “Bat Macumba” is likely more known to American audiences for the Os Mutantes version, which played centerpiece to the band’s 1999 David Byrne compilation and is one of the band’s best-known songs. It loses little in Gil’s version. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

11 Aug 2009 20:20

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World: A Brazilian TV show host lives life like a “Murder, She Wrote” episode

  • Manaus can no longer live with this wave of crime. Nowadays everyone is killing.
  • Brazilian politician and TV host Wallace Souza • On his TV show “Canal Livre.” His show had this uncanny tendency to be first on the scene of a crime, so much so that authorities are investigating him and the show for actually committing the crimes that they reported. The crimes conveniently had a tendency of proving his point and boosting his ratings. Sure, Souza’s possibly a bad guy, but the real bad guy is Jessica Fletcher. Every time she showed up in some random small town, somebody died! He basically just recycled the script. The real crime here is plagarism, kids. • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

07 Aug 2009 12:08

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Offbeat: Protip from Brazil: Pee in the shower. It saves money.

  • There’s a great PSA for this. We’re going to link it, though. Brazil wants people to save water. What do the suggest? Peeing in the shower! Of course! Why didn’t we think of this before? The animated video, funny but just crossing over that line into wrong, suggests that members of the entire family do it. It also shows all sorts of other people doing it – basketball players, Ghandi, Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen Hawking – and if the idea of having dozens of people urinating all over our Web site didn’t disturb us, we’d embed it here. Instead, you need to click the link. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

20 Jun 2009 23:53

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World: Families of killed Air France passengers will get money for their loss

  • $24,500 per passenger killed on the flight source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

15 Jun 2009 01:54

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World: The Air France crash recovery continues slowly but surely

  • 49 bodies have been recovered in the ocean so far source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

07 Jun 2009 20:55

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World: More bodies found from Air France crash site. Sigh.

  • 17 people have been recovered so far, mostly from today source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 3 Comments • Permalink
 

06 Jun 2009 09:50

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World: It sounds like a lot of things went wrong with the Air France flight

  • 24 error messages, including a loss of autopilot, were reported source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

04 Jun 2009 21:39

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World: Speaking too soon: The debris wasn’t from the Air France flight

  • Time to start back at square one. Brazilian officials, obviously under a lot of pressure to have something to show from the Air France incident, have nothing to show after it was confirmed that the debris was actually trash, and the oil slick they found was actually from a ship – not a jet. Granted, the plane’s still missing, and something really bad happened, but could you guys at least checked a little more closely before making an announcement? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Jun 2009 21:46

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World: A sad ending to the Air France missing plane saga

  • The last bit of hope that we had no longer exists … Before a lot of us were hoping that the plane could have landed on an island or something like that, but no more.
  • Aldair Gomes • Whose son was on the Air France plane that went missing earlier this week. The Brazilian army found the wreckage earlier today, and later confirmed what was likely but feared: The plane crashed into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in bad weather, and everyone on board – 228 people – probably died. It’s the worst tragedy in Air France’s 75-year history. • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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