"Estudia y no serás cuando crecido ni el esclavo servil de los tiranos, ni el juguete vulgar de las pasiones".

-Elías Calisto Pompa

Increíble que en un sitio de tanta belleza haya tanto estrés, dolor y sufrimiento. La vida nos brinda espejismos como éste...detrás de todo sólo se esconden perfidias, desengaños, mentiras y más mentiras.

Hooked on a Feeling
B.J. Thomas

I can't stop this feelin' deep inside of me
Girl, you just don't realize what you do to me
When ya hold me in your arms so tight
You let me know everything's all right
I-I-I, I'm hooked on a feelin'
High on believin' that you're in love with me
Lips are sweet as candy, the taste stays on my mind
Girl, you keep me thirsty for another cup of wine
I got it bad for you, girl but I don't need a cure
I'll just stay addicted and hope I can endure
All the good love when we're all alone
Keep it up, girl, yeah ya turn me on
I-I-I, I'm hooked on a feelin'
High on believin' that you're in love with me
All the good love when we're all alone
Keep it up, girl, yeah ya turn me on
I-I-I, I'm hooked on a feelin'
I'm high on believin' that you're in love with me

Paul Cornoyer, The Plaza After Rain, 1910, Oil on canvas.
The Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MO.

"Impressionism followed the lead of the Barbizon School and emphasized open-air compositions over studio work. If the painter had to work quickly and with spontaneity in order to capture the ever-changing light of a landscape scene, a street scene demanded even greater speed. This speed of production created an even sketchier and more abbreviated rendering of the subject. The resulting work was often a visual poem, such as seen in Cornoyer's The Plaza After Rain. Not only does this painting offer an impressionistic perspective of a misty spring day, it also captures the mood. The viewer is transported to time, location, and emotion.

The Plaza After Rain not only fulfills the typically impressionistic goal of conveying the effects of light and atmosphere of the scene, it also extends a sympathetic and human view of city dwellers as they negotiate the city's canyons. Whereas the viewer initially sees a painting with muted palette and soft hues, a closer inspection reveals shocks of vibrant color: the bright green of the young leaves that frame the top of the painting, the rosy light reflected off the buildings in the background, and the intense red of the child's scarf. Through the use of color, the eye is slowly drawn from the sky to the figures below. The painting gradually reveals an authentic human moment. We share in this moment; we feel the warm spring rain, we smell the fresh air, we are there. In another painter's hand, or through a less poetic eye, this scene might seem somber, even drab. Cornoyer offers the inherent joy and hopefulness of an early spring day in the city. Ultimately, Cornoyer gives the viewer the gift of visual poetry and the quiet beauty of a misty day."

-Brian P. Pace, The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Your Song
Ewan Mcgregor & Alessandro Safina
Moulin Rouge Soundtrack

My gift is my song
And this one's for you
And you can tell everybody
That this is your song
It may be quite simple
But now that it's done
Hope you don't mind
I hope you don't mind
That I put down in words
How wonderful life is now you're in the world

Sat on the roof
And I kicked off the moss
Well some of these verses well
They got me quite cross
But the sun's been kind
While I wrote this song
It's for people like you that
Keep it turned on

So excuse me forgetting
But these things I do
You see I've forgotten
If they're green or they're blue
Anyway the thing is what I really mean
Yours are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen

(Allesandro Safina: opera)

And you can tell everybody
This is your song
It may be quite simple
Now that it's done
I hope you don't mind
I hope you don't mind that I put down in words

How wonderful life is now you're in the world
I hope you don't mind
I hope you don't mind that I put down in words
How wonderful life is now you're in the world

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating, "If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they painted new lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought "CarNT," but then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive-but it would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "general protection fault" warning light.

8. The airbag system would ask, "Are you sure?" before deploying.

9. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, you car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.

10. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

11. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

12. You'd have to press the "start" button to turn the engine off.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Souvenir de Mortefontaine, 1864, Oil on canvas.
Louvre Museum, Paris.

"The park of Mortefontaine, north of Paris, was laid out “à l'anglaise” in the eighteenth century and offered inspiration to Corot for a great many related landscape paintings. One of these, Souvenir de Mortefontaine, which he sent to the Salon in 1864, was purchased by Napoleon III and is now in the Louvre."

"Comparison of the various paintings evoking the park of Mortefontaine and the sketches Corot made for them reveal much about how the artist created his landscapes. To Corot, landscape motifs were compositional building blocks in a carefully constructed design which he arranged almost abstractly, working to harmonize line and shape, tonalities and silhouettes, distance and foreground, solid mass and reflections. [The paintings of the Mortefontaine series] demonstrate the carefully designed substructure underlying these intensely poetic, often romantic, images of nature. Corot’s work, while rooted in the classicism of Claude and Poussin, led directly to Monet and developments in late nineteenth-century landscape painting."

-The Frick Collection, New York.

"The bad thing about dinner is that I don't have anything to look forward to until breakfast next morning."

-Cookie Monster

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

-Albert Einstein

dichotomy n, pl -mies [Gk dichotomia, fr. dichotomos] (1610)
1 : a division or the process of dividing into two esp. mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities
2 : the phase of the moon or an inferior planet in which half its disk appears illuminated
3 : a : BIFURCATION: esp : repeated bifurcation (as of a plant's stem)
b : a system of brancing in which the main axis forks repeatedly into two branches
c : branching of an ancestral line into two equal diverging branches
4 : something with seemingly contradictory qualities

Source: Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition.

Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skys from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade
Your heros for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada

1

Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos,
te pareces al mundo en tu actitud de entrega.
Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje te socava
y hace saltar el hijo del fondo de la tierra.

Fui solo como un túnel. De mí huían los pájaros
y en mí la noche entraba su invasión poderosa.
Para sobrevivirme te forjé como un arma,
como una flecha en mi arco, como una piedra en mi honda.

Pero cae la hora de la venganza, y te amo.
Cuerpo de piel, de musgo, de leche ávida y firme.
Ah los vasos del pecho! Ah los ojos de ausencia!
Ah las rosas del pubis! Ah tu voz lenta y triste!

Cuerpo de mujer mía, persistiré en tu gracia.
Mi sed, mi ansia sin límite, mi camino indeciso!
Oscuros cauces donde la sed eterna sigue,
y la fatiga sigue, y el dolor infinito.

-Pablo Neruda

"For the last 10 years we've been talking about "the post-cold-war world." We've described the world by what it isn't -- it's not the cold war -- because we don't know what it is. Well, what it is is a new international system called globalization. Globalization is not just a trend, not just a phenomenon, not just an economic fad. It is the international system that has replaced the cold-war system. And like the cold-war system, globalization has its own rules, logic, structures and characteristics."

-Thomas L. Friedman

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job.

The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?" The mathematician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."

Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."

Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you want it to equal?"

Spring, tulips, Davidson College, pollen, BBQs, stress, work, more work...

Ten Good Reasons to Study Economics


1. Economists are armed and dangerous; "Watch for their invisible hands."

2. Economists can supply on demand.

3. When you are in the employment queue, at least you know why you are there.

4. When you get drunk, you can tell your colleagues that you are just researching the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility.

5. You can talk about money without ever having made any.

6. Economists do it with models.

7. If you arrange the letters in Economics, you get "Comic Nose".

8. When you call a Chat Line and get Candy Keynes, you will always have something to talk about.

9. Economists do it risk-free, and in an Edgeworth Box cyclically.

10. You can say "trickle down effect" and keep a straight face - and your job!