Books, happiness, learning Spanish, and bad haircuts

Forgive the long post and paucity of images…wordpress is gone all wonky for me lately, first not letting me access any wordpress blog, then just some, and then finally all but not letting me upload any images. I am temporarily back in control. (Weekends off for the wordpress folks?)

1. Bathe her and bring her to me.

One of many helpful phrases thanks to GrowaBrain..

¿Dondé está el baño?
Where is the bathroom?

Tu hija es muy bonita.
Your daughter is very beautiful.

¿Cuanto cuesta esa cosa?
How much does that thing cost?

Tú eres un pendejo chingado.
You are not a very nice person.

Tengo una caja roja de las lapices.
I have a red pencil box.

Me gusta tu cabeza y tu estamago.
I like your head and your stomach.

¿Cinco doláres? ¿Por esa cosa?
Five dollars? For that thing?

No comas esa. No sabes donde esa ha pasado.
Don’t eat that. You don’t know where it has been.

Lavase, y conduce a mi.
Bathe her, and bring her to me

2. Javier Bardem

You see I do need images but I have been rather upset at the ludicrous emphasis on Bardem’s coif in No Country for Old Men. For one thing, it is not the worst and not even close; see the links below, and for another; he has had worse in other films (see below). And finally just the lack of imagination in so many to focus on the do, and really, shouldn’t there be some haircuts/hairdos that are not perfect. Isn’t film supposed to reflect reality, and there is a lot of bad hair out there.

Best and Worst from Hollywood.

Herald Sun Gallery (Australia), still fixes on Javier.

Nerve.com, here is Javier’s worse haircut.

3. Happiness and Melancholy

I am still thinking about Louis Bayard’s review of Eric Wilson’s Against Happiness and though not sure I agree find the review thought provoking.

Maybe it’s all paying off, though. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly 85 percent of us believe ourselves to be happy or very happy. All power, then, to Eric G. Wilson for writing a book with the refreshing title Against Happiness. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, is seriously bummed by the cultural landscape. “Everywhere I see advertisements offering even more happiness, happiness on land or by sea, in a car or under the stars. . . . It seems truly, perhaps more than ever before, an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.” This “overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness,” he writes, produces only blandness, conformity, “a dystopia of flaccid grins” fueled by Lexapro and Paxil.

Melancholia, by contrast, is “the profane ground out of which springs the sacred.” To prove his point, Wilson takes us on a private survey course, retreading the lonely paths of Beethoven and Coleridge and Rothko and even Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. In each case, he finds the same equation of melancholy and creation. “Our sadness,” suggests Wilson, “is not aberrant or unseemly or weakness but instead a call to interior depths, to cauldrons out of which will bubble new solutions, crimson and sweet and unforgettable.”

From Washington Post via 3Quarks

4. Useful device

From hedonics.com, purveyers of odd things promoted as useful: for the cigar on the golf course -reminds me of those 99 Useless Japanese Inventions.