Dichotomy

I saw a Jesus fish decal on the bumper of a car this morning. It caught my eye because that was the second Jesus fish I have seen in five years of living here.

In the US, these decals are ubiquitous. They’re found in rear windows and on back bumpers of cars all over, along with bumper stickers proclaiming Christian religious statements. It’s not uncommon to see religious billboards on roads and highways. Many Americans feel the need to advertise their religiosity. Meanwhile, at the government level, Article VI of the US Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Yet a couple of intelligent debaters could spend hours on the question of which candidate is less likely to be elected President: a Muslim, or an atheist.

In Portugal, you can’t walk 500 meters without falling over a church. Their bells ring out the hours every day, and the masses every weekend. The calendar is packed full of saints’ holidays, which are observed nationwide, and the main south entrance to Lisboa features a huge statue of Jesus. Religion is impossible to avoid in Portuguese daily life.

But nobody ever puts a Jesus fish on their car. There are no religious bumper stickers or billboards. The Portuguese do not advertise their personal beliefs because they don’t think it’s anyone else’s business. And religion makes no appearance in public office — there are no prayers opening legislative sessions, as there are in the US. Candidates for high office do not proclaim their religious observance, and speeches aren’t ended with “God bless Portugal.”

It’s such an interesting dichotomy. In the US, a supposedly secular nation, religion is very public. And in Portugal, perceived as a Catholic nation, religion is very private.

SOPA means…

After the global hullabaloo caused by the so-called “Stop Online Piracy Act,” which didn’t do much to stop online piracy but did a whole lot to protect the interests of certain large corporations with expensive teams of lawyers and lobbyists, this email came into my inbox from a friend in Stockholm:

SOPA means garbage in Swedish. I think that’s appropriate.

So do I.

Laranja ouro

Today I learned a Portuguese proverb:

Laranja de manhã é ouro, à tarde prata, e à noite mata.

Which translates to: “Orange in the morning is gold; in the afternoon, silver; and at night it kills.”

The Portuguese love their orange juice in the mornings. Most cafés have an industrial juicer right next to the espresso machine, and a giant bin of oranges somewhere nearby. It’s not so common to have it in the afternoon, and nobody orders it at night. Apparently, someone figured out long ago that the acidity of the juice does no favors to the digestion process while sleeping, and can lead to acid reflux or heartburn.

Interestingly enough, I never crave fresh orange juice at night. I do in the mornings, and sometimes in the afternoon. Is this my body’s intuition speaking, or my cultural training?

At any rate, I am now happily sucking down a fresh glass of orange juice and committing this proverb to memory. The best part is that it solves a long-standing problem I’ve had with remembering the difference between prata and prato. One means silver, the other means a plate or dish, and I am forever confusing the two. Now I can just remember that prata rhymes with mata.

Wallpaper Monday

The Algarve has been a little too sunny lately, and I’m starting to crave a good rainstorm and the resulting temporary streams and waterfalls. As a substitute, here’s a lush scene from Mpumalanga, South Africa: Mac-Mac Falls, dropping the Mac-Mac River 65 meters (213 feet) in a big hurry.

(Click the image to cascadize.)

iBooks Author and the freakout

Tech bloggers and columnists are having a freakout over Apple’s newly introduced iBooks Author, a program that allows authors to format e-books using interactive images, music, videos, and spoken recordings. It was designed largely for the textbook industry, and offers potential that no existing e-book format comes close to at the moment.

It is also free.

So why the freakout? Because the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) stipulates that the format is proprietary, and that if a user wants to profit from that format, said user must profit through Apple’s e-book store and nowhere else.

Apple is not asserting ownership of content, it’s asserting ownership of a proprietary format. Writers will not write in iBooks Author. They will write in Scrivener, Pages, Word, whatever, and then import that text into iBooks Author in order to format it for publishing in Apple’s store. The text will always belong to the author. The presentation of that text, as produced with this program, will have a restriction: either sell it in Apple’s store, or give it away for free.

In essence, Apple is saying, “Here is a program that will enable you to create interactive layouts using media forms in ways that no other program currently allows. We are giving you that program for free. Anything you format with this free program, you can give away for free in turn. But if you want to profit off something you format with our free program, then we want a share of those profits.”

This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. It apparently does to a lot of other folks. A typical example of the pundit backlash can be found at ZDNet, where the headline “Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement” tells you right away what you’re in for.

The author starts out by quoting another pundit, who writes:

It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty.

This is a false equivalence. Word and Photoshop are not free programs. They are not being distributed worldwide, free of charge, for anyone to use who wants to.

The ZDNet author goes on to claim that if an author writes “a work of staggering literary genius,” formats it in iBooks Author, and has it rejected by Apple, that author is then “out of luck” because this work can’t be sold elsewhere. No, that author can then lay out that same work of staggering literary genius in .mobi, .epub, .pdf and any other format they want, using any number of other formatting programs, and sell it wherever they want. (Note: the author updated his post to walk this back a bit, while complaining about the difficulty of maintaining multiple layouts for multiple formats. You mean like e-book authors do right now when they output their text in multiple formats for Kindles, iPads and Nooks?)

The only way this EULA would be as “mind-bogglingly greedy and evil” as this pundit claims is if it were the only formatting program available in the entire e-publishing industry and all authors were forced to use it.

What is it about Apple that sends so many tech writers over the edge, frothing at the mouth and spouting easily disproven untruths? I’ve never quite understood it.

Saturday picture show

Here’s a little something to brighten up your monitor…an HD time lapse in Yosemite National Park. The glimpses of fall colors are marvelous.

(via Bad Astronomy)

A new canada-cy

In the “so insane you couldn’t make this shit up” reality show that is the Republican primaries, this week alone has seen Perry abandon ship (shortly after saying he was a fighter who would never give up because America needed him), Santorum retroactively win the Iowa caucuses (and complain about not getting a concession speech from Romney), Romney declare that “maybe” he’d release his tax returns in April (wink wink nod nod), and Gingrich launch a full-court attack on a debate moderator for daring to bring up his second ex-wife’s recent interview, in which she noted that when Gingrich asked her for an “open marriage,” he’d already been screwing around with his soon-to-be third wife for quite some time.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to the remaining field of Republican candidates: Canada.

It’s that time

It’s officially spring in the Algarve: the almond trees burst into bloom last weekend. And I do mean burst. This paragraph from the romantic myth of the Algarve almond trees actually rings true now:

The sultan did as she suggested, planting almond trees not only in his valley, but throughout the entire Al-Gharb. Months went by, but as the trees strengthened and grew, Gilda worsened. And then, one early spring morning, the sultan looked out his window and gasped in surprise.

My experience is slightly less romantic, as our windows do not look onto almond orchards. However, last weekend my wife and I were carrying our recyclables out to the collection site (which sits just across the street from our apartment buildings and right on the edge of an orchard), and we really did gasp in surprise. Two days before, that orchard had been bare. Then it rained. And literally overnight, the almond trees blossomed.

I love this time of year. Almond blossoms and fresh, sweet oranges all at the same time — it’s paradise.

Gas and lunch

I had lunch today in one of my favorite cafés, which is very Portuguese in its food, clientele, and prices: five euros paid for a plate full of curried chicken and vegetables, including a side of carrots in garlic, cilantro and olive oil (I love those carrots.)

After lunch, I pulled into a gas station and filled up our tank. As with everything else in Portugal, gas prices have been going up and up — between this fill and the last one, the price has jumped 13 cents per liter. (American readers: there are about 4 liters to a US gallon.) As the numbers in the pump’s counter rolled past five euros, I thought, “There’s one lunch.” And then I began counting. Two, three, four, five, six…

The pump stopped at 72.50 euros — or, fourteen and one half restaurant lunches.

That puts things in perspective!

So, just out of curiosity: how many lunches is a tank of gas elsewhere? Using your own local lunch prices, of course.

A moment of levity

Yesterday, my Pilates class hit a little bump when the stereo failed. Music is fairly critical in Pilates, and I wasn’t keen on doing another 50 minutes of matwork without it. Fortunately, I happened to have my iPad with me. So I pulled up a recently purchased album, which has just the right combination of slow and faster music, and set it to play at full volume. Resting the iPad against a window allowed the sound to reflect back outward, making it room-filling enough for everyone to hear. (The album was They Made History, by Bliss. Great background music for writing, too.)

What I didn’t realize was that my iPad was set to play the songs, not the albums. So after “Answered Letters” by Bliss, the next song that came up was “Azure,” by Ella Fitzgerald. I shrugged and figured Ella was a good accompaniment for some slow stretches.

But then came the next song: “Baby Got Back,” by Sir Mix-a-Lot. From the smooth vocals of Ella, we went to hip hop and a trenchant male voice announcing:

I like big BUTTS and I cannot lie!

You otha brothas can’t deny

That when a girl walks in wit’ an itty bitty waist and

A round thing in yo’ face, you get SPRUNG…

The entire class fell apart in laughter, with one student saying, “That’s what I’m in this class to get rid of!”

Well, laughter is good for the abs, too.