23/ LANGUAGE'S GAMES

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding,  subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:
1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future. 
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid. 
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high 
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer. 
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action. 
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. 
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

22 / Little portrait with sound track

In a stormy day like this, the one I was walked two metres over the street, sliding as a perfect dancer among the liquid images on the wet ground.  I could touch their souls and I wonder if they reached mine. I heard our voices and I heard our laughter from somewhere high above.

We had been conquering some plot in building works. That was the last time for the dirty perfection of the cheerful troop. Hand in hand, we were climbing a sand stack, jumping planks, trampling mud, singing a mocking song. As night was hiding the shadows, the war at last was over. Someone made a flag with his sweater tied to a steak. But there was no victory, nor defeat, instead, it was about time to go back home.

Autumn had come and I can still remember the fallen leaves which, battered by the rain, looked like the rests of a wild party. The paving became a mirror to the lampposts’ yellow light. The moon’s nose appeared from time to time among the clouds. I gazed at all those things, suddenly so important and mysterious, from a new watchtower in my brain. And I knew for certain that someday I would remember, I would miss, that one I was. 

21 / SIR ALGERNON PARSLEY

Sir Algernon Parsley, well known in learned circles for his valiant contributions to postmodern semiotic epistemology, after having worked on his acclaimed but controversial essay Towards the profound roots of ancient Celtic hermeneutic, was charged by  EUPHORIA (European Union’s Popular and Historical Operation for Reeducation of Identity Agency) to undertake  anthropological research in order to uncover the core of semantic intercultural symbols where, possibly, the European idiosyncrasy may be found. Parsley worked on this ambitious project assiduously, devoutly, compulsively. A good example of this execution (in more than one sense) is the English adaptation of the famous Rafael de León’s Ojos verdes.

On the bawdyhouse’s doorjamb she leant,

Gazing at the opening of the night of May
Men passed by and she smiled at them
Till I stopped my horse at her doorway

“Honey, give me a light and I'll give you this flower” 

"Come and take it, so my lips will give you fire"

I dismounted to glance closer at her face 
and those eyes, to me, were bright stars of May

 Those green eyes, green as basil is green
 Green as green wheat, green as lemon is
Those Green eyes, green with dagger's light 
They are deeply stuck in my very heart
To me, there are no more suns, no moon nor stars,
It’s only those eyes that make me feel alive

Those green eyes, green as basil is green

We saw the morning breaking from the room
The Vela Tower announced the dawn
You left my arms in the clear daybreak
And in my mouth, your cinnamon and mint taste

“Honey, I want to give you money for a new dress”
“You’ve done your bit for me, I need no more”
So, I went away fast as the wind, riding my horse

And, never after, have I lived such a beautiful night

Wonderful version in this magic copla-flamenco- jazzy way by Miguel Poveda.

20 / DIVINE DINAH

Do you like jazz? Do you like jazz singers? Do you like those wonderful voices, true sources of inspiration and magic? I love then all, from Bessie Smith to Diana Krall. However, my favorite one is, without a doubt, Dinah Washington. Don’t ask me why.

Dinah Washington, born Ruth Lee Jones (August 29, 1924 – December 14, 1963), was an American blues, R&Band jazz singer. She has been cited as "the most popular black female recording artist of the '50s", and called "The Queen of the Blues". She is a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

19 / ENOUGH (fine-tuning our writing 2)

It was very early in the morning and Martin was alone. Still in bed, hands under his head, he felt inevitably awake. “Thoughts roam around unsuspected places when sleep flyes away” he murmured when he realized he was missing the bells. The bells of the alarm clock, the bells in the school, the bells of the church, all those damned bells he had hated through his whole life, resounded now in his mind like echoes of joyful. That was an unexpected feeling since he certainly went into retirement as a prisoner reaches his release. Fed up of schedules, timetables, bosses, at last, fed up of people in general and particularly one by one, retirement appeared to his mind as a new brilliant world  full of vague promises of liberty, revived passions, and tranquility of the soul. But that morning had broken odd and his living apart paradise seemed, under the first pale sun lights, a huge amount of empty time.  There was a worm growing inside Martin. There was a worm scratching deep, in the soft thing. “Enough!” he exclaimed, “enough!”

The man jumped out of the bed, dressed up and made some tea, like a captain commanding his soldiers, with discipline and martial accuracy. Then, being the universe controlled again, took a book and started to read by the bedroom window. Morning seemed perfectly calm and quiet except for the birds singing outside, in the garden, mainly in the great old elm, which Martin’s great grandfather had planted according to the family record. That old tree had had a life longer than all of them. On the one hand, that great tree, on the other hand, those little lives, with their little business, insignificant troubles, pusillanimous joeys and sadness, little deaths and births.  All of them are the same as those birds which stirred up the leaves. “A huge amount of useless efforts” thought the worm. And Martin: “enough, enough!”

He closed his eyes and, suddenly, there was such a deep silence that Martin was affected. He looked again through the window and discovered a boy under the tree. He surprised he didn’t noticed him before, since the vision was totally out of the context. The boy was there, deeply concentrated, reading a book, as it was his habitual place of reading, a corner of his own garden. After a while looking at the boy but still not very sure about the reality of his vision, Martin decided to creep downstairs and, carefully, he opened the glass door onto de garden. He paced to the tree. “It seems a good book, doesn’t it?” For the first time, the boy looked away from the pages and, smiling in a shy but charming way, said: “It is the book of my life”.

Astonish, Martin looked at the boy for a long time while the boy got back to his book. He didn’t understand anything. Martin thought (or was the worm?) that that boy could be himself, or his father, or his grandfather many years before. “So, this is thing, the old wheel of eternal return start a new, the long series of little lives under the tree never end” And he thought (or the worm) that all the business under the tree are nothing but a huge amount of empty time. “ENOUGH!” shouted Martin. And the boy, suddenly, disappeared.

18 / QUADROPHENIA AND THE BROKEN DREAMS

Sometimes dreams make their travel like a Stone thrown in the beach. Firstly, they gain height in a fast, brilliant flight. Then, from the top of some vague goal, inevitably, they fall down even faster than they rose before. That fatal way is traced not only by personal dreams but by time’s dreams.  The counterculture spread out Europe and America in the 1950’-1960’ in the form of the beat generation and the hippy movement. It was a big stone’s travel, full of a huge amount of new ideas, new aesthetic conceptions, critical thinking, political activism and, of course, dreams. The dream of a new identity for human being beyond borders and flags, the dream of a new better world of freedom and equality, the dream of living in peace…

The dreams turned into fashions, devoured by the establishment. The stone fell down and sank in the sea, where every broken dream ends. 

I know for sure that Pete Townshend didn’t want to do a historic metaphor with his Quadrophenia, but in fact, it is. Quadrophenia is one of the so called rock Operas. In a strong and symphonic conception of rock, this work was recorded by The Who in 1973.   Later, in 1979, became the sound track of a film, directed by Franc Roddan and with Sting as Ace Face.  You can watch Quadrophenia on TV tonight (La 2). 

17 / Oliver Twist

I have to confess that one of my favorite pleasures is – and it has ever been from my early years- to listen to someone who read aloud a book, specially,  while I am in bed or reclined in a sofa. In this case, the one who read is a cold machine but, you know, in this rushed times, persuading some human reader to do this for you became quite hard. So, I (and you) can resign myself with the following thing:

And now the corny and sickly sweet but delighlful Oliver that everybody knows