[OT] BRAZIL: HEAVEN OR HELL?

[Andre Garzia]

Bob,

thanks for the essay, it's hard to come by texts that doesn't picture  
brazilians being carnival lovers, football dream players, cheaters in  
general, heavy coffee drinkers.

You go deep to think a problem that everyone knows and we all pretend  
it's not in there. And you live in dream lands (floripa!), situation  
in Rio is beyond warfare, Statistics show that in one single year in  
Rio and São Paulo more people are killed than in vietnam or something  
crazy like that.

I plan to move south too, where a person can still go out at night  
and trust he will come home later.

On the other side, there's nothing more creative than brazilians,  
solving problems by thinking outside of the box is the standard  
brazilian practice. In a country where careful planning and  
scientific thinking is shunned in favor of intuition and "let's try  
this way! where's your spirit of adventure!"-felling. Once I saw a  
guy in a jeep with a problem in the engine where not enough gas was  
being pumped into the thing when the car was on a cliff, the guy took  
the water of the windshield clearing thingy and inserted gasoline in  
that thing, cut the tube to the windshield and moved the tube to some  
other part of the engine, so when he was on the cliff and there was  
not enough gas, he could just "clean the windshield like a  
madman!!!!" and pump more casoline into the engine. He arrived safe  
home, he is viewed as a very smart guy and that is the standard  
brazilian way of solving things (hack around them).

he documented the procedure and put it online, it works for toyota  
jeeps from 1981, he own cumpliments of the jeep club for his  
"scientific achievement in favor of all jeep owners that were once  
stopped at a high cliff and the betterment of mankind" or something  
like that.

(my cs teacher used a stethoscope in old harddrives and machines to  
diagnose problems, but thats another history of brazilian ways)

andre


On May 15, 2007, at 3:25 PM, Bob Warren wrote:

> For those who have not read it, I would like to recommend once  
> again my article at:-
> http://www.bobsite.org/brazil/
> - particularly the early section headed "*Alternative Perception"  
> and the examples of simple dialogues where people very easily drive  
> one another nuts through debate.
>
> The point about the title is that Brazil is both heaven AND hell,  
> just like Runtime Revolution: two contradictory perceptions of the  
> same reality are present, and denial of either one of them leads to  
> madness.
>
> Personally, I am very happy to see alternative perceptions on this  
> UR-List, and I am not at all upset when people demonstrate their  
> emotions - positive or negative. For me, the recent debate about  
> bugs was enormously enriching.
>
> Bob
>
>
>
> *
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