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“No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

(John Donne)

It is that time of year again! Semlor, serving Sweden’s Fat Tuesdays for generations, 500 calories at a time.

Add a Lego lover with an Escher’s art fan, sprinkle liberally (very liberally) with time, and you get Escher’s Relativity, but in Lego.

Click on the images to zoom in.

Why not make your own Coca-Cola (or Pepsi)? Or at least a fizzy drink that tastes much like like the aforementioned? The recipe is open source, freely available and modifiable, as long as you release the modifications to the public, and a Canadian company even marketed it in the past under the brand OpenCola.

You can download both the formula and brewing instructions here.

“Menininha do meu coração
Eu só quero você
A três palmos do chão
Menininha, não cresça mais não
Fique pequenininha na minha canção
Senhorinha levada
Batendo palminha
Fingindo assustada
Do bicho-papão

Menininha, que graça é você
Uma coisinha assim
Começando a viver
Fique assim, meu amor
Sem crescer
Porque o mundo é ruim, é ruim
E você vai sofrer de repente
Uma desilusão
Porque a vida é somente
Teu bicho-papão

Fique assim, fique assim
Sempre assim
E se lembre de mim
Pelas coisas que eu dei
E também não se esqueça de mim
Quando você souber enfim
De tudo o que eu amei”

(Composição: Vinicius de Moraes / Toquinho)

“I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful ‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”

(Sylvia Plath)

And now for something completely different: cat smileys. Because cutesy (in acceptable dosage) is gratifying.

If you follow international politics you most likely know who Carl Bildt is. You may even have read his blog before, Bildt Comments. Now that he was chosen to be the foreign minister on the recently elected government of Sweden, he started a new blog, and this time in Swedish – Alla dessa dagar.

Carl Bildt is what we would call a technophile. And he contrasts abruptly with his three predecessors, none of which even had a computer in their office. According to this report, someone in the public office managed to get hold of a computer, but Carl Bildt had to install it himself.

It begs belief that in this day and age, and in a such a developed country, three foreign ministers in a row never felt the need to a have a computer in their offices. Had you been living here for a few years and keeping abreast of the machinations of politics, you wouldn’t be so surprised, though. Out here quite a few people in position of power seemed to be living under a rock. Auspiciously, things are looking up now. We will even be able to visit the Swedish embassy in Second Life, according to reports. If you care for those sort of things, that is.

Swedish government, welcome to modernity. It’s about time.

“I just killed off a bottle of wine
and
found bukowski at the bottom
poetry makes love to you
like an expensive hooker
it is the truest love you can find.
Love is wild in bed.
Just wait, you will figure it out.
Poetry and love.
Love poetry.
They both kill you just as quickly
if you don’t figure them out.
I’m dying fast.
I just killed a bottle of wine
and
found bukowski at the bottom.”

(Carl A.I.)

Today, while chatting with a friend, I was reminded of Three Ages of Woman, a Gustav Klimts’ oil on canvas that I had the pleasure to admire in person at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. A photo simply doesn’t do justice to the painstaking detail and unsparing beauty involved on this masterpiece of the Symbolism movement.