Practice Your Spanish

Well, Wafers: I got duped. Canal 22, the cultural TV channel in Mexico City, asked me to do a taped interview with them, which I did a few weeks ago. They told me they would tape about 30 minutes, then do a slight bit of editing, and issue the interview in two parts, of about 10 or 15 minutes each. Well, the "slight bit of editing" consisted in removing almost all of the interview. What aired was two parts of 3 minutes each. Their apparent goal was not political analysis, but entertainment. As a result, all I managed to convey were slogans and platitudes; what else can you do in 6 minutes? I may be being hard on myself, but I think I come across as a cliche (progress vs. tradition, etc.). Not good. I guess the American contagion of hustling has managed to infect the Mexican media, tragically enough. My first and last interview for Canal 22, in any case.

Anyway, I'm posting this not for content--there isn't much--but for those of you want to practice your Spanish (though mine ain't perfect, as hispanohablantes will rightly point out). Gozalo!

http://youtu.be/WIvkWxcSFdI

http://youtu.be/ZPKFlSWS3tM

-mb

238

Well, Waferinos-

We've got a good discussion going on the Ukraine, so we might want to continue with that; although a subthread on the merits of chopped liver would not be totally amiss, methinks. I don't have a lot to add right now, being up to my eyeballs in trying to get out the Japan book and the Spanish edition of SSIG. Also doing my taxes. When I saw how little I earned last year, I wept. Not sure how I manage to keep going; it sure ain't from book sales. "Little Known Author Dies in Mexico from Poverty, While Trollfoons Applaud"--a future newspaper headline somewhere, I suppose. On the bright side, we now have 157 registered Wafers, so our victory is assured.

Life goes on, amigos. Try to avoid talking to Americans, in the meanwhile; it's just too depressing.

mb

Interview with James Howard Kunstler

OK, Waferinos; let's take a break from Charlie Hebdo for a while, and check out JHK's latest podcast:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_263.mp3

(Another) Interview with Ken Rose

http://whatnowsolutions.org/?powerpress_pinw=1216-podcast

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Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

Well, here we are, at the end of another year. I have nothing profound to say at this point; I'm going to leave that up to you. We spent 2014 watching the U.S. slide further into chaos and self-destruction; it's a good bet we'll see more of the same during the next twelve months. As a group, we Wafers could retard the process, if the American public would only listen to us; but as we all know, there's not much chance of that. Onward and Downward! That's all we can say.

Happy New Year!

mb

So Much for That

Dear Wafers,

So Much for That is the title of a remarkable novel by Lionel Shriver, which you might want to put on your Xmas Reading list. It has two important points to make:

1. The U.S. is a violent, depressing country filled with people who are not very bright; who are, at the most basic level, selfish and cruel; and who stopped being human a long time ago.
2. Hitting the road is the only intelligent response to this state of affairs, and if there is any way you can escape, it's essential that you do so. (Shriver herself moved to England.)

The book is bursting with brilliant passages. Here are two of my favorites:

"There's something especially terrible about being told over and over that you have the most wonderful life on earth and it doesn't get any better and it's still shit. This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but...it's a sell...I must have forty different 'passwords' for banking and telephone and credit card and Internet accounts, and forty different account numbers, and you add them up and that's our lives. And it's all ugly, physically ugly. The strip malls...the Kmarts and Wal-Marts and Home Depots...all plastic and chrome with blaring, clashing colors, and everyone in a hurry, to do what?"
"[He] was born into a country whose culture had produced the telephone, the flying machine, the assembly line, the Interstate highway, the air-conditioner, and the fiber-optic cable. His people were brilliant with the inanimate--with ions and prions, with titanium and uranium, with plastic that would survive a thousand years. With sentient matter--the kind that can't help but notice when a confidant suddenly drops off the map the moment the friendship becomes inconvenient, disagreeable, demanding, and incidentally also useful for something at last--his countrymen were inept...these people had never been taught how to behave in relation to a whole side of life--the far side--that had been staring them in the face since they had a face...these shabby specimens of the species..."

"After us," wrote Yeats a hundred years ago, "the Savage God." Looks like He has finally arrived.

mb