Drug war in Rio de Janeiro

Boston.com’s Big Picture has a gripping series of photographs of the battle currently taking place in Rio de Janeiro, between the drug gangs who rule the favelas, and the police and military who are trying to clean up the city in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

Among all the photos of men with guns and residents sheltering behind doors, this one stopped me.

The caption reads:

Coordination of Special Resources (CORE) policemen escort arrested alleged drug dealers and carry a marijuana plant seized during the raid in the Morro do Alemão shantytown on November 28, 2010 in Rio de Janeiro. (JEFFERSON BERNARDES/AFP/Getty Images)

Let’s take a closer look at that marijuana plant.

As an apartment dweller limited to container gardening on verandas, I have to say that this looks like a garden plant to me. Yes, it’s a little marijuana plant, but it’s in a glazed vase. It’s decorative! It has even been planted with a ground cover, a common technique among gardeners to make a potted plant look fuller and more interesting, as opposed to a vase with one plant and some dirt.

In another photo from this series, we see security forces with the real stuff: marijuana that has been harvested, dried, pressed into bricks and wrapped for shipment. But this little plant is not part of a cash crop. I can’t imagine there are too many farmers — or marijuana growers — who carefully nurture individual specimens of their cash crop in glazed vases.

My guess is that this particular plant was for someone’s personal use. But not anymore — now it’s evidence. I hope the owner at least gets that nice vase back.

You can see the rest of this compelling photo series here. The two others that really caught me were the kids taking gleeful advantage of a drug lord’s absence by cavorting in his pool, and the older man walking down a street, apparently oblivious to the armed man behind him who is crouched and ready to shoot.

Wallpaper Monday

The US state of Montana is nicknamed “Big Sky Country,” because the combination of its mountains and prairies make the sky seem larger and more majestic there than anywhere else. (Or so the natives tell you…residents of other western states might disagree.)

There’s not much of that sky visible in this National Geographic wallpaper. Photographer Sean Heavey captured a supercell thunderstorm unleashing its power on the prairie below, and looking like something out of an alien landscape. This is a mood of the Big Sky Country that nobody in their right mind would want to mess with.

Not being quite in my right mind, I would love to experience this. Just so long as I’m not in a tent at the time. I wonder if that storm is slinging hailstones?

(Click the image to wallpaperize.)

A snapshot from space

At first glance, this image doesn’t seem very special. Just another satellite photo, this time of an area of Houston called Reliant Park, which houses both Reliant Stadium and the Reliant Astrodome.

Except it’s not just another satellite photo. It wasn’t taken automatically, via telescopic camera from an orbiting observational satellite. It was taken by an astronaut, using a handheld camera and snapping the shot from the International Space Station.

This subset of a handheld digital camera image has a spatial resolution of 2 to 3 meters per pixel (or picture element), making it one of the highest spatial resolution images ever obtained from the International Space Station (ISS). Such high resolution was made possible by using lens “doublers” to increase the optical magnification of camera lenses. Active ISS motion compensation is also important; the astronaut must pan the camera by hand at just the right rate, keeping the object at the same point in the viewfinder. The technique involves bracing yourself against the space station bulkhead to prevent movement related to weightlessness.

If you follow the link above, you’ll see fine print at the bottom of the article detailing how the image was produced. The astronaut used a Nikon D3X, a camera that any of us can buy if we’ve got $7,500 to drop, plus a zoom lens and doublers that create an effective focal length of 1,000 mm.

Let’s just think about this for a moment. An astronaut was up there using a handheld camera, bracing her or himself against a bulkhead, panning the camera and snapping off a shot with such magnification and detail that you can see cars in the parking lots. How amazing is that?

Sometimes, even while I’m happily appreciating the advances and conveniences that ongoing technological development brings us (iPad, anyone?), I get stopped in my tracks by the realization of how far we’ve come. This photo was one of those moments. It doesn’t look like much, but it is.

Happy Thanksgiving

I think one of the oddest things about being an expatriate is the fact that nobody here knows or recognizes the holidays I grew up with. We have Easter and Christmas in common, but that’s about it. And of all the holidays that are not celebrated here, Thanksgiving feels the strangest. At home people are traveling, families are collecting, kitchens are full of food smells, and the whole nation is pretty much shut down for the four-day weekend. (Except for those poor souls who work in retail.)

But here it’s just another day. Another work and school day, actually, so having a little one-home Thanksgiving celebration isn’t really an option. I took my wife to work, taught my Pilates class, picked up my stepson from school, and now I’m heading out to pick up my wife again. Our little family will be together for the first time today at about 9 p.m. — hardly the time to start a big Thanksgiving dinner. Instead we’ll order a grilled chicken and chips as our nod to the holiday, which will make my stepson extremely happy. (Chicken and chips are his second favorite food, the first being burritos. He may be the only child at his school who has Mexican food on a regular basis.)

So to all my US readers, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving. And to everyone else, happy Thursday. One more day ’til the weekend!

An iconic poster

I check a blog called Iconic Photos now and again, which features historically significant images and explanatory notes. Sometimes I’m clueless about the images, but today’s photo smacked me right between the eyes:

There could hardly be an image more instantly recognized in Portugal than this one, a poster commemorating the 1974 Carnation Revolution. A small, grubby and barefoot child places a carnation in the barrel of a rifle held by three hands, which represent a soldier, an agricultural worker, and an industrial worker.

The Carnation Revolution got its name because one of the meeting places of the revolutionaries happened to be the Lisbon flower market, which at the time was overflowing with carnations, as it was the season for them. Red carnations ended up tucked into rifle barrels and threaded through uniform buckles, an instant and effective means of showing the general population that the revolting soldiers meant no harm to the people. In truth the revolution was as bloodless as it is possible for such a thing to be, and set into motion a wave of change that swept through Spain, Greece, South America and Africa.

The things we Americans don’t learn in our history classes…

If you’d like to read more about this pivotal moment in recent global history, Iconic Photos has a very short write-up on it, along with another fabulous image of soldiers and their carnations. The blog Olá Vilnius has a longer explanation, including the political context in which it took place. Fascinating stuff.

If you choose not to follow those links, you should at least know one more cool fact about the Carnation Revolution. There were two signals that set it all in motion: one alerted the soldiers that the coup had begun, the other was the signal to hit the streets and take over pre-planned strategic locations such as radio and TV stations. The first signal was Portugal’s entry in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The second was the airing of a folk song.

Successful revolutions always have songs to celebrate and commemorate them after the fact, but has any other revolution begun with music?

A marital moment

My wife J and I were in a local restaurant, stuffing our faces with fresh bread while waiting for our order. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

…

J: Did you know this restaurant buys their bread from our favorite bakery?

Me: No, I didn’t. But it must be a different type than we buy. It tastes different.

J: No, it’s the same thing.

Me: It can’t be. It tastes different. Better, actually.

[interlude of chewing and testing flavors]

J: It does taste different. But I’m telling you this is the same bread.

Me: Then it must be the butter.

J: Huh. [picks up wrapped pat of butter] Well, this is the good butter from the Açores.

Me: I know, that’s the brand I buy for my baking.

J: It is? Then why don’t you buy it for our bread, too?

Me: Because you like that soft, spreadable butter.

J: No, I don’t. I get that because you like it.

Me: What?! I don’t like it! I like real butter!

J: Then why do you keep buying it?

Me: Because you like it!

J: No, I don’t.

…

There was no satisfactory conclusion to this particular dialogue, though I maintain that since I never even heard of that spreadable butter until I moved here, and since I bought it only to replace what J already had in the refrigerator, I am not the one who established the tradition of having that crappy spreadable stuff. However, as of this week the tradition has changed. We are now using the good, hard butter on our bread, and it tastes so much better.

Now we just need to figure out what to do with that barely used container of spreadable butter in the fridge.

Wallpaper Monday

Bet you won’t guess where this is:

Would you be surprised if I said Taiwan?

This is a “candle rock” formation at Yehliu Geopark, located on a little spit of land at the top edge of the island, just north of Taipei. The whole area is full of extraordinary geological formations — you can see more examples here.

I must confess that Taiwan never made it onto my Places To See list, but this would be worth a visit.

(Click the image to wallpaperize.)

“Voting is a pleasure”

Disapproving Spanish eyebrows are being raised as a result of this “get out the vote” ad by the Socialist Youth of Catalonia. The ad shows a young woman making her vote count as she participates in next week’s Catalonian Parliamentary elections.

All I can say is, this gives new meaning to the classic American advice of “vote early and often.” I would vote just as often as I could.

You know you’re in Portugal when…

…the balding old man who pulls his battered Renault in front of you, without so much as a glance your way to check for oncoming traffic, and who makes you stand on the brakes to avoid a collision…

…has a rosary hanging from his rearview mirror.

Scientists are rock stars, too

Okay, I admit to making “squeeee!” noises when I saw this. It’s part of a fabulous fund- and awareness-raising campaign which pairs rock stars with science stars:

That’s Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart on the left and right, flanking Nobel laureates Phillip Sharp and Elizabeth Blackburn. Since Heart’s music was practically the soundtrack of my teen years, I had a little fan-geek attack at the idea of them lending their faces and names to the cause of science.

The campaign is called Rock Stars of Science — since, of course, scientists are rock stars too. As the campaign notes, “Being a Rock Star is about the same amps, thunder and art it’s always been. But these days, that title applies to anyone whose genius moves the crowd — whether they’re onstage or in the lab.”

There is a lot of genius in this world, regularly displayed by people who operate in general obscurity while learning, inventing, creating, and advancing both our understanding and knowledge. These stars rarely get any credit outside their own field, and unless their research is of interest to governments or corporations, they rarely get much in the way of funding, either. I will happily support any campaign which attempts to shine a little light on these “rock docs,” as RSOS calls them.

(However, my enthusiasm is tempered somewhat by the fact that I only recognize one other musical star — Debbie Harry — out of the additional six who are featured on these posters. This is just one more bit of unnecessary evidence that I am musically over the hill.)