plasticmadness

-No, I didn’t make it to the Bob Dylan concert – but he’s played here before and I’m sure I’ll get the chance again.

-A few days back we watched “The Thaw”, a sci-fi B movie starring Val Kilmer. A climate scientist tries to warn the world about the perils of global warming by reintroducing dormant, deadly parasite back in the world. I have seen many bad movies in my life, but I have never ever seen a former great cinema star decline so vertiginously like Kilmer did. He seems to star exclusively in very bad B films (worse than average). How does one go from playing Jim Morrison and Batman in the movies to TV only, 90 minute bottom-of-the-gutter badly scripted films? Decadence sans elegance!

-Here’s the first 30 minutes of “Rabid” (1977) by David Cronenberg: a young woman suffers a terrible moto accident.  A person watching with binoculars from the top of a plastic surgery clinic nearby witnesses the accident, and, instead of calling 911, she shouts out loud to the plastic surgeons inside, who promptly get in the clinic’s green ambulance and rush to the accident site in order to help the woman. Arriving there, they determine that the woman has massive internal bleeding, but her blood pressure is “stable”, and they are able to perform a series of plastic procedures that ultimately heal the woman, even though “her body remains in shock” after the procedure, as we are told by Dr. Keloid, the clinic’s owner (yes, he is a plastic surgeon and he’s called “Keloid”). In order to better access the woman’s health, Dr Keloid has the patient “removed to town in order to get an ECG.” And so it goes… Honestly, how did someone approve that to be ever written at all? Stay away from this one, unless it’s for the giggles, and don’t let yourself get fooled by it’s 6.2 rating on IMDB. This movie is a steady 3.0.

- “The Midnight Meat Train” (2008) with Bradley Cooper was a very good surprise. The right measure of extreme gore and spookiness, good actors that don’t take themselves too seriously and know they’re doing a terror film.

No Comments | In: Cinema, Culture & Entertainment, Music, Olivia, Personal | | #

On March 11th my husband and I went to see Mark Farner’s (from Grand Funk Railroad)  concert at Bar Opinião venue, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I’s always great to see great musicians in small venues. You get to see and listen to everything so much better. General enjoyment level rises 200%. Mark masters his guitar and sings with the same energy as the old times: age has not deteriorated his voice and talent. It was an awesome concert.

Now I’m on the hunt for a Bob Dylan ticket. If I get that, there’s only Paul Simon left on my bucket list.

This is a video recorded from Mark’s concert:

Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner in POA, Brazil

Comments Off | In: Culture & Entertainment, Music, Olivia, Personal | tags: bar opinião, concerts, Culture & Entertainment, gfr, grand funk railroad, mark farner, Music, music concerts, opinião. | #

Easter is a surrelistic holiday anyway: for some it means the return of dead guy who claimed to the be the son of something that we have no prove to exist. For others, it means celebrating the life of bunnies that lay chocolate eggs. I pick the last one. At least chocolate and bunnies exist.
*off to watch old Peanuts easter special*

Comments Off | In: Atheism and Religion, Olivia | tags: atheism, easter, holidays, religion. | #

The mental asylum of San Servolo,Venice (1860–1978): plots, classifications, subjects. Epistemology and history.

I had to share this. Even though psychiatry is not part of my medical talents, I must confess I find all things mental very fascinating.

Comments Off | In: Health, Olivia, Science, Shared Links | tags: history, links, madness, medicine, mental, psychatry, psychology. | #

It’s been a long time since my last post. I’m now married, moved to a new place, have a dog beyond the two cats, and I’m slowly cooking in “Forno” Alegre with temperature around 40 Celcius. I’m completely broke fromt he whole moving and stuff, I’m bored, and so it goes. I’m still reading the same book from last post since it’s so slow and its mentions about god all the time really get on my nerve, but I’m determined to finish it. We are currently without AC because the guys who install it are taking 4 days off because of carnaval, as everyone else Brazil. I dare anyone to find a person who hates carnival as much as me. Oh well, maybe this vlogger:

(thanks to my friend Mico)

Comments Off | In: Olivia, Personal | tags: olivia, personal, videos. | #

I started to read two books simultaneously: JR by William Gaddis and “A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe. I must confess reading JR will require time and special tecnique, because it’s nearly unreadable (I didn’t say bad, please don’t misunderstand me). I completely ignored the 25 pages intro of JR and all the advices for using a reader’s guide to read it. Hell, I was told to use a reader’s guide to read Pynchon and after I’ve read 3/4 of all Pynchon wrote I thought that “author’s guide” thing to be a real over the top exaggeration. Finding Pynchon readable, I thought “oh well, let Gaddis come.” – I was wrong. I’m still fiddling with this one.
I started with Defoe’s book which is a great account of the plague years in the middle ages. A bliss of shocking reality into the stream of zombie novels I have been reading. So far from zombieness the middle ages were not.

Comments Off | In: Books & Literature, Culture & Entertainment, Olivia | tags: book reviews, books, daniel defoe, defoe, ebooks, gaddis, literature, reviews, william gaddis. | #

…2012 is near. It’s that cliche cheesy time of the year when people re-think their lives and make new promises as if their lives were about to start all over again and the past never hapened. Ten years ago I thought my life would be very different than it is right now. I don’t know how exactly, better, worse, just different. I just do.

Anyway… to the news: Cary is moving in the next few days and I couldn’t be more anxious – in a good/bittersweet sort of way – and happy (and feels the same, I’m sure). I always considered myself a convicted bachelorette by choice, independent, a lone wolf, whatever you prefer to call it. I decided had decided that my life would be going to work and loving my work, then going back home and amusing myself as I wished. Then I found the love of this this wonderful man. Or he found me, or we found each other, I don’t know exactly how it all started. But it started with Twitter. And from that we moved to getting married in the next couple months. I love you, Cary. Thank you for everything. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I love your family as if they were mine and I wish I could spend more time together with all of them.

“Family” news: I have adopted two new kittens, Mister Mistofelis and Nikita. You can seee their lovely faces on my Flickr account. Also, Cary is bringing Ysabel the dog, so we’ll be a big family and we’ll be moving to a new appartment soon.

More news: soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me? I failed the residency exam I appplied to. Very very upset about that. I had all the year of 2012 planned out carefully based on this residency. Now I’m kind of lost and back to general-practice-who-doesn’t-know-exactly-what-else-to-do state of career. And the time to decide what to do is tight. Well, for the sake of whatever, I’m still a general and private practice medical doctor. And so it goes…

2 Comments | In: Olivia, Personal | tags: olivia, personal, personal news, personal notes, personal updates, rants and vents. | #

After the recent painful and disappointing waste of time on the worst and most boring zombie novel ever written, I needed something light, to humor me. “The Death Clock”is a 33pg short story much like episodes of a many short lived spooky TV series from “Chiller TV” and “Space” channels: “Fear Itself”, “The Outer Limits”, “Night Visions”, “Alfed Hitchcock Presents”, “The Twilight Zone”.

I seriously advise the author to try and sell this to a media other then the book. I’d love to see it on TV.

Congrats, J. Rock, you did an awesome job.

Comments Off | In: Books & Literature, Culture & Entertainment, Olivia | tags: book reviews, books, goodreads, horror, J.Rock, literature, short stories, terror, thriller. | #

OK, so Colson Whitehead is technically good at writing a book. Hs english is perfect, he uses fancy thesaurus words. BUT: Nothing happens in this book. This is a no-story. It’s 200 plus pages of endless empty useless stream of consciousness, with right-out-of-the-thesaurus nouns exaggeratedly embelished with half a dozen adjectives. The book consists of endless reminiscing episodes that could as well have been read randomly or backwards: it wouldn’t make any difference to the story. It’s like looking at a photo album: it doesn’t matter which photo you see first, it’s all still just fragments of the same event. “Zone One” is not horror, not spooky, it does not caused me any feeling but that of dropping the book to never see it again. Stay away from this one. I don’t understand how this book was even published. I only gave it one star because i couldn’t rate it 0 stars.

Link to “Zone One” on “Goodreads”: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11501957-zone-one

Comments Off | In: Books & Literature, Culture & Entertainment, Olivia | tags: books, ebooks, fiction, horror, literature, zombies. | #

Acho o cúmulo essa discussão sobre o destino dos royalties do petróleo. A Petrobrás é mista, mas ainda é majoritariamente uma estatal. Uma estatal *do Brasil*. Não é estatal “do estado do Rio de Janeiro”, nem “de Santos”, nem da Conchinchina nem de Cacimbinhas. Na época da redemocratização e abertura econômica uns viviam “acusando” outros de serem neoliberais que venderiam o país às corporações estrangeiras, demonizando as privatizações, essas criaturas malévolas de chifre e tridente que dominariam nosso país com seu capitalismo selvagem. Os anos se passaram, as privatizações ocorreram, os “outros” sairam do poder e os “uns” entraram e também fizeram privatizações, e no fins uns e outros se mostraram não tão diferentes assim. Tanto que eles parecem ter esquecido o que é uma estatal: tratam a divisão dos royalties do petróleo como uma empresa privada que decide qual CEO vai ganhar o maior bônus no final do ano. Mais capitalismo selvagem, impossível. Parabéns. Os royalties do petróleo pertencem igualmente a cada brasileiro, e não só aos estados produtores.

Comments Off | In: Brazil, International, Olivia, Politics | tags: brazil, economics, energy, oil, oil basin, petrobras, pré-sal. | #