Friday, September 28, 2007

Un país hot... hot... hot...

Estoy maravillado con el espectacular repunte de la campaña presidencial argentina. La tercera candidata, Luciana Salazar, definitivamente le puso candombe a la política y ofrece solucionar temas como educación, seguridad y salud, vestida a la usanza. Realmente ella está con los temas "profundos" y "reales" de la gente.
De todos modos, con la delantera que tiene, no creo que le quepa la banda presidencial albiceleste. No imagino una presidencia más estúpida que esa. Sería bizarro. Anyway

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Confusión

Reconozco que en ocasiones me pongo excesivamente autoreferente, pero las circunstancias lo ameritan.
Llamadas telefónicas confusas, que no se por qué disqué, hacen que me cuestione lo que busco, proyecto y organizo para mis días. Por un lado, me gustaría actuar como si fuera un real Brian Kinney sudamericano, y por otro, un real esnob de decimocuarta categoría. No entiendo bien qué me pasa. Quizás es un tantito de bipolaridad mal entendida, o la hormona jamás rotulada del shampoo.
En resumen, a veces quiero desbandarme, pero no me resulta. Quisiera partir al fin del mundo, solo, como todo un hombre adulto; y en cosa de segundos empiezo a anhelar volver al útero de mi mamá. Entiéndame mi dios agnóstico. No sé en qué chucha-de-remoto-escondite perdí la brújula que algún día mis papás me dieron. Estoy divagando sin sentido. Lo quiero todo y al mismo tiempo tengo nada. Nada tengo. Todo tengo. A lo más tengo una nutrida cantidad de poleras y cachureos, pero no tengo tranquilidad. Me siento confundido, jodido, extenuado. Como dije en algunos posteos anteriores: I'm so fucked up. And now, I'm again fucked up. I used to know how to keep that feeling in me.
Gabriel Silva me diría que necesito sesiones de psicólogo. La Claudia me diría que me marche a bailar y a sandunguear, mientras que la María Paz me recomendaría ir de compras y sanar mi mal. No sé, las he hecho todas y sigo igual. Posiblemente es al estado al que me debo habituar como mi normalidad. ¿No es acaso también un estado el no tener uno? Sí, me estoy convenciendo de que sí.
Intuyo que nadie leerá esta perorata, pero vaya que rico es usar el blog como catarsis. Al menos, por ahora, no comento mis jornadas de vómito, de cortes en las muñecas con sacapuntas u gilletes, o el estupendo tonteo de pierce-yourself. Dije por ahora. Uno nunca sabe. Aunque lo dudo, porque le temo al dolor mas no a la curiosidad. Me gusta ser curioso. Mi alma periodística lo pide. Y aunque escribir esto me bloquea chances, da igual. Ya todo da igual.
Me puse short. Hace calor y lo necesitaba. Me sentía un poco aprisionado en la textura del jeans, así que para la tarde opté por el cómodo short color beige que tanto quiero. No me durará más allá de las 6 PM, pero al menos es entretenido sentir aire en mis piernas peludas. Sí, es gracioso.
Ya. No escribo más tonteras y me voy a transcribir entrevistas varias. Las de Leo Prieto y Roberto Arancibia me esperan. Welcome to my life.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Mundo blog

Hoy entrevisté a Roberto Arancibia, de ACHIB, quien me dio algunas impresiones muy buenas respecto a la cultura blog. Muy entretenida la conversación, por cuanto su franqueza ante ciertos temas aporta una mirada diferente a lo que muchos denominarían bien social.

Ante la pregunta: ¿cuál crees que es el fin de postear y bloggear?¿popularidad, ego, o ácción social?, La respuesta de Roberto fue categórica: ego. Me gustó que alguien fuera así de sencillo y franco.

Mis saludos a todos.
Fernando.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

World’s Languages Dying Off Rapidly

World’s Languages Dying Off Rapidly
Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.
Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.
New research, reported today, has identified the five regions of the world where languages are disappearing most rapidly. The “hot spots” of imminent language extinctions are: Northern Australia, Central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, Eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and Southwest United States. All of the areas are occupied by aboriginal people speaking diverse languages, but in decreasing numbers.
The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, an organization for the documentation, revitalization and maintenance of languages at risk. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic magazine and at www.languagehotspots.org.
At a teleconference with reporters today, K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said that more than half of the languages have no written form and are “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” When they disappear, they leave behind no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.
Dr. Harrison; Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic Society have traveled in recent years to many parts of the world, the beginning of what they expect to be a long-term series of projects to identify and record endangered languages.
The researchers interview and make recordings of the few remaining speakers of a threatened spoken language, and collected basic word lists.
The projects, some of which extend over three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of audio recordings, development of grammars and preparation of children’s readers in the subject language. The research has especially concentrated on preserving language families that are on their way out.
In Australia, where nearly all of the 231 spoken aboriginal tongues are endangered, the researchers came upon such tiny language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, in the Northern Territory, and the three Yawuru speakers, in Western Australia. In July, Dr. Anderson said, they met the sole living speaker of Amurdag, a language in the Northern Territory that had already been declared extinct.
“This is probably one language that cannot be brought back, but at least we made a record of it,” Dr. Anderson said, noting that the Amurdag speaker strained to recall words he had last heard from his late father.
Many of the 113 languages spoken in the Andes Mountains and Amazon basin are poorly known and are rapidly giving way to Spanish or Portuguese, or in a few cases, to a more dominant indigenous language. In this region, for example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have their own secret tongue, used mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal plants, some of which were previously unknown to science.
“How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being spoken by very few, is a mystery,” Dr. Harrison said news release.
The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages of the Northwest Pacific plateau of North America, a region including British Columbia, Oregon and Washington. Only one person remains who speaks Siletz Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.
In Eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced speakers of minority languages to use national and regional languages, such as Russian or Sakha.
Forty Native American languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of them originally used by indigenous tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations there, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.
Another measure of the threatened decline of many relatively obscure languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that speakers and writers of the 83 languages with “global” influence now account for 80 percent of the world population. Most of the thousands of other languages now face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish or plants.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Aquí no hay quien viva

Hace varios días que no actualizo esto. Y eso que me encanta hacerlo. No obstante, se me olvidaba. He estado absorto en la gran serie española, Aquí no hay quien viva. Me entretengo en demasía con las aventuras de ese grupo de vecinos sin lógica, quienes entienden que de cada disputa se puede obtener algo poderoso y unido.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Cristina lanzó su portal web



La primera dama argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, lanzó su portal en vías de lograr la presidencia.

De excelencia.