32 posts tagged with Portugal by chavenet.
Displaying 1 through 32 of 32.
O povo é quem mais ordena
The new, sweet oranges quickly displaced the bitter variety
The word for orange and its cognates in several Indoeuropean languages arrived in Europe via Persian (نارنگ nārang then, and نارنج nārenj nowadays). At the same time, in Persian oranges are called پرتقال (porteqāl) which literally means... Portugal! Why is that? from Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
Meet Elysia azorica, the Azores sap-sucking sea slug
Plunging into the crystalline blue waters off a Portuguese island, scuba divers searched the seafloor. A see-through, orange creature lurking below caught their attention. It turned out to be a new species ... The Azores sap-sucking sea slug is about a quarter-inch in size, researchers said. It has “bladelike teeth” and a “bright and translucent orange” body. Its digestive system is visible from the outside and looks like “a dark green pigment.” from See-through creature with ‘bladelike teeth’ found lurking in sea. It’s a new species [more inside]
Habemus Pasta
Pope Francis is going to be in Lisbon next week for the World Youth Days. To welcome him, artist Bordalo II strolled into the gargantuan and controversial stage still under construction for the main mass, and unrolled €500 banknote replicas for an installation he called "The Walk of Shame" for "the tour of the Italian multinational."
The original plan quickly unraveled
“An Inexcusable Act That Dishonours Our History”
On 16 December 1972, a village in northern Mozambique virtually disappeared from the map. Wiriyamu saw its inhabitants killed one by one at the hands of the Portuguese military, who invaded the territory during the colonial war. [more inside]
One Fish, Two Fish, Sun Fish, Moon Fish
Lusitano's Moment Has Come
"The Western classical music canon is notoriously white and male – so you might assume that a black Renaissance composer would be a figure of significant interest, much-performed and studied. In fact, the story of the first known published black composer – Vicente Lusitano – is only now being heard, alongside a revival of interest in his long-neglected choral music." from The great 16th-Century black composer erased from history [BBC] [more inside]
“Art is the only place you can do what you like. That’s freedom.”
These Are The Drones You're Looking For
Disney+ set up a spectacular drone show in the skies over Lisbon to hype the launch of the new Obi Wan Kenobi series. One of the producers, Fabrice N'Kom from Dronisos, explains.
Sentir Tudo de Todas as Maneiras
Inventing an avant-garde movement and its principal protagonists, then attempting to institutionalize the movement with literary criticism written by yet more imagined personae: it seems, at first, insane. Indeed, Pessoa feared for his sanity as a youth, having watched his paternal grandmother lose her grip on reality. But as a student of fin-de-siècle theories that posited a correlation between artistic genius and mental degeneracy, Pessoa decided his mind was one thus afflicted. Regardless of its cause, Pessoa’s mad strategy succeeded. from Conceptual Personae - The many imagined lives of Fernando Pessoa [more inside]
"We Are Much More Than a Team"
Até Sempre, Otelo
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, hero of Portugal’s return to democracy, has died. [FT obit: archive version]
This Titillation of Power, This Illusion of Freedom
Like the rational reorganization of bureaucracies in the second half of the nineteenth century, computers began as an implementation of the power to abstract away means and uniformly apply a mindless, rule-based order on unruly reality ... and this power has only grown greater, thanks to both an unprecedented capacity for data gathering and analysis and the increased propagation of digital tools in every facet of human life. Mobile applications, whatever their purpose, are little bureaucrats with a checklist or a punch card in our pockets. Whether they are centralized or distributed, deployed by the government or peddled by a small startup, the applications have the same effect: an increasing perfection of the totalitarian vision of nineteenth-century administration. from Paul Valéry and the Mechanisms of Modern Tyranny [Hedgehog Review] [more inside]
516 Arouca
#patrimoniografico
The “Red Ibérica en Defensa del Patrimonio Gráfico” is a Spanish/Portuguese collective that collects images of commercial signs as well as physical examples. Their site has a treasure trove of links to related Instagram accounts. [more inside]
We Celebrate All Cultures
Fashion outlet Tory Burch tries to pass off traditional fisherman's sweater from Portugal as Mexican poncho, gets busted. Also maybe scamming Portuguese cabbage-shaped plates. [more inside]
Gnats From the Far-Off “Western Ocean”
As China comes into greater conflict with the West, and the United States in particular, now is a good time to consider the long arc of this relationship. In the West, Chinese history is commonly framed as having begun with the first Opium War, giving the impression that European powers always had the upper hand. But from the first direct contact between East and West—the arrival of the Portuguese in south China in the early 16th century—the Chinese were dominant. When China Met the West by Michael Schuman, from his forthcoming book Superpower Interrupted
“I Did This For All Football Fans.”
Pinto prefers to talk about what he has uncovered, and to describe the evolution of European soccer from a varied and distinctive game to a corrupt playground for the international élite, in which only the richest, least scrupulous clubs can thrive. Pinto sees the future currently awaiting European soccer as bland and predictable. “It will be like plastic,” he said. How Football Leaks Is Exposing Corruption in European Soccer [SLNYer]
Fascination With the Void
Huge forest fires in Portugal
At least 57 people have been killed by huge forest fires in central Portugal, with many dying in their cars as they tried to flee the flames, the government said on Sunday. Portugal’s prime minister, António Costa, described the blazes – which have injured dozens more people – as “the greatest tragedy we have seen in recent years in terms of forest fires”, and warned the death toll could rise. [more inside]
WanaCrypt0r 2.0
A massive ransomware campaign appears to have infected a number of organisations around the world. Computers in thousands of locations have apparently been locked by a program that demands $300 (£230) in Bitcoin. There have been reports of infections in as many as 74 countries, including the UK, US, China, Russia, Spain, Italy and Taiwan. (BBC) [more inside]
Ronaldo or Bust
Besides his soccer prowess, Cristiano Ronaldo is known for being exceptionally handsome, and at least somewhat vain. So what must he have been thinking on Wednesday when he turned up at Madeira International Airport (now renamed Aeroporto Cristiano Ronaldo) for the unveiling of a bust that, well, was not exactly an uncanny likeness? Ronaldo Bust Looks Nothing Like Ronaldo, and the Internet Notices [more inside]
A Francesinha
When picturing a francesinha, imagine a croque monsieur — the delicious baked or grilled French ham and cheese sandwich — that got extremely angry, hulked out into a muscle-bound edible behemoth and was then doused by the attendant cook with a zesty beer-and-tomato sauce to prevent any further, monsterlike growth. [more inside]
Mário Soares: Socialist, Republican, Layman (1924-2017)
Mário Soares,the spirited Socialist leader who deftly steered Portugal from authoritarian rule to democracy, fended off a Communist push for power, led his country into the EU and helped its people recover a sense of confidence lost under almost half a century of miserly dictatorship, has died in Lisbon aged 92. Mr. Soares started an underground Socialist movement after becoming disillusioned with the leadership of the Communist Party, then the only organized opposition in the country. He began a tour of Europe in 1967 to drum up support from other Socialists, but he was jailed on his return and, in March 1968, banished without trial to the remote equatorial island of São Tomé. Mário Soares Dies at 92; Guided Portugal’s Shift to Democracy (NYT) [more inside]
Give Sarcasm a Chance
Wasted Rita is a Portuguese artist, based in Lisbon, born with a natural tendency to provoke, using sarcasm as a weapon and the power of full-time thinking to write about the most common things of all possible things: life and human beings, the inbetweeners, and the all arounders. . [more inside]
Lisbon Burning
Twenty-five years ago, in the pre-dawn of August 25, 1988, a fire started in downtown Lisbon's Carmo
Street and quickly spread to Garrett
Street and others, destroying a total of 18 buildings of the
Chiado. Two people were killed, and 73 were injured (60 of them
firemen). Between 200 and 300 people lost their homes. Several of the
historical shops were lost. In terms of the extent of the city
affected and number of destroyed buildings, the Chiado
fire is considered the worst disaster to strike the city since
the 1755
Lisbon Earthquake. A rebuilding project directed by Portuguese
architect Siza
Vieira has, to a great extent, returned the area to its former
glory. The exterior look of the buildings were restored, while the
interiors have been completely renovated. [more inside]
È morto a Lisbona Antonio Tabucchi
Surf's Way Up
Toma!
In 1875, the Portuguese cartoonist and caricaturist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro invented an “everyman” to express the opinion of “Zé Povinho” – “ José of the People”, or “John Doe". His most famous “opinion” is the “manguito”, a universally-recognizable symbolic affront to the status quo, with the slogan “Toma!”, or “take that!” In the wake of the downgrade of Portugal’s sovereign debt to “junk” by Moody’s, the Portuguese were outraged. They reportedly jammed up the Moody's site. Zé Povinho responded with his usual aplomb. The figurines are made by hand and the anti-Moodys one went on sale this week. [Last link in Portuguese; some NSFW language and rude gestures in some of the links]
To The Finland Station
Portugal, in the throes of an IMF / EU bailout that Finland could block, sends a video letter to convince Finland to support the rescue effort. Finland responds. Bonus: crisis the focus of Portugal's Eurovision entry this year.
O Ano da Morte do José Saramago
Portuguese writer and 1998's Nobel Prize for Literature recipient José Saramago has died, age 87. [News link in Portuguese] He died in Lanzarote, Spain, where he had lived since a bust-up in the early 1990s with Portugal's government over his controversial book, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Saramago wrote nearly 30 books, and was cited for the Nobel as a writer "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." No holiday for death, after all.
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