Food and bird

Hello. First of all let me comment on two things that I've seen 1 min ago in Mtv. First one, one videoclip of Shakira. Well, not much to coment on that but it is worth mentioning, not so for its musical content but....Anyway, second thing is that in the previous program, a poor guy that went to a show to have dates with unknown girls has ended up having to go to some restaurants and clubs with the most ugly (and silly) of all the girls who went there, with the cameras following them all the time. I mention this because I was laughing alone thinking about his friends watching the bad-lucky guy on the screen and also laughing in a cruel way and he didn´t look very happy at all during his "free evening". Well. Now the post.

Another curious thing about basel (Guess its the same in all the country) is that you can find LOTS of things while walking in the street that can be useful for your appartment. Almost everyday I see stuff that people leave for the others. Ali has already picked a couple of brand new wine glasses and some kind of cool minisofa. All in perfect condition. Yesterday we went to have dinner to Cynthia´s place and they had a really nice leaving room table also from the street (brand new!). Well, by looking at the picture below doesn´t seem that you can find really good things but believe me, there are "chollos" every day in the street. I was thinking about walking a bit tomorrow and try to find a non-metallic table that absorbs less heat than the one I have now, which I think is made of some kind of superconductor material, because as I said yesterday my computer reaches melting temperatures on that table every day.

As I said, yesterday we had dinner in Cynthia´s place. Julia, Ali, Aaron, Myself, and the amazing cooker Cynthia. What a dinner! We all ate SO much!! Everything delicious. After that we were supposed to go to the bar of the week (BOW) but we were eating for a long time and at 12 , the only thing we found was a min mini-version of the BOW. Almost everybody was at home. Anyway I was so full that the supposed digestive effect of the Gin-Tonic didn´t work at all. Even this morning I was full, and at 10AM today we had our monthly Business Development breakfast. Mooooore food. How are you supposed to have a breakfast later than 10am with plenty of food in a country where you are supposed to have lunch at 12? Everywhere people say in Spain we have very strange eating hours but year after year experience confirms to me that Spanish mediterranean eating times are perfectly coherent ones.

Today I have finished introducing manually tons of data into a spreadsheet during one week, and then I was booking a flight and seraching some hostals for my planned weekend trip to the mountains when the distraction of the afternoon came to our window. A little bird, of course absolutely unaware of the danger it was incurring in, stopped between the electric blinds of our window. Really bad place to stop because they are controlled by a couple of buttons that I have on my side. One sec press of the button and the poor animal would have been assasinated by me. Its mother was bringing him food every 5 min. Ali left a note to the cleanning ladies to not press the killing mechanism.

But Ali, I have to tell you something. After I went to your place to pick the 7th DVD of the 24 series (yes, I am still absolutely addicted to that) I came back to the office. I realized that I have no food in the fridge, and some diabolic force made me think about a delicious (and illegal) dish you can eat in Andalucia, called "pajaritos fritos", so I decided that tonight I was going to eat "pajarito frito". Don´t know what is happening to me lately. I feel the devil inside!!

Good evil weekend to everybody!

Tuesday is national holiday here is Switzerland, we have 4 days off!! I will come back on wednesday, with pics from the mountains or the firworks here in Basel.

Music: Bob Marley - Three little birds (because of my dinner tonight ;)

Herzog & De Meuron and weapons

First of all I apologize for having the last post deleted. i have tried this afternoon to upload it again but it was going to take me a lot of time that I don´t have right now. Lo siento mucho por haber borrado la entrada de la boda del sábado (con lo que me gustaban las fotos y todo, en fin). Ha sido por problemas técnicos y ahora no tengo el tiempo de volver a reeditarla. Que rabia!!!

Today, I wanted to post about nice buildings here in Basel, but for two reasons this has been changed. The first one is that is incredibly hot here at nights. My room after 10PM looks like a Swiss sauna, much hotter than during sun hours (This I don’t get), and yesterday, during my 4th DVD of 24 series, in the most interesting part of the chapter, the automatic security measure of my computer against “melting” turned on and...puf!...Black screen, no blue light in the power button. From that moment on Mr.Toshiba stays functioning for some time and then the anti-melting measure comes back. This, added to the image loading problems, makes me to write instead of showing buildings. For this reason I will only post my two favorite buildings in Basel. The first one is inside Novartis campus. A glass building designed by Diener & Diener:



The other building is the one below. I know its not the most beautiful building you could expect here, but I can tell you its an important one (for me). I walk in front of that house everyday in my way to work, and see people working inside with their enormous screen computers, all windows opened, lots of scrap paper and cardboard, and full of books in the walls. But it was not until last week that I saw on the door the names of two architects. Yeah, inside this building they think buildings.

Herzog & De Meuron. Both are from Basel.

Ok. Now the second reason for this post. We can make the connection with the buildings talking about populations. Nowadays most people live in buildings, inside cities and inside states in complex societies. The book I am reading explains the transition over the past 13,00 years from small, non-centralized societies to more larger and complex ones. The author tells that the size of the population is the strongest single predictor of societal complexity. Then the following question arises. Was intensive food production that triggered population growth, leading to a complex society? Or are large populations and complex societies the cause for intensification of food production? (the book also talks about food production). Neither of them. The author calls the realtion between food production and complex societies an "autocatalitic" process, which means that both processes trigger each other at the same time, with neither of them being the single cause for the other one.
Why am I telling you this? Just because the population of bugs in my room is doing this process in a very accelerated way. I guess that there are different factors that are triggering the incredible growth of this specific population. Among them (no, don't think about dirt, my room is clean, very clean), we can consider the fact that I live one minute from the river, the high temperatures in my "swiss sauna room" at nights (which make me sweat and release some kind of feromones that bugs like I guess), the fact that my window is fully opened, and the endless food resource that my blood represents (especially for the mosquito part of the population). Well, in the history the trend has been the replacement of smaller, less complex units by larger, more complex ones, mainly because states usually enjoyed an advantage of weaponry and other technology. The centralized decision making was also an advantage over small societies. Altogether makes me think that it is time now in my room to repet history trends, and use the power of larger and technologically advanced societies. This power has been always exercised in the same way regardless of the fairness or unfairness of the cause or state they represent (the CNN girl in my tv is confirming this everyday lately with her permanent smile). Friends, it is the time to use big power against bugs. I don't have anything against insects, but in the next hours, if you are a bug in Marc's room, you are a dead bug. I'm sorry. Nuclear attack:

Music for today: Something well constructed, because of the buildings. Sigur Ros - Takk