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By pigwhisperer, June 11, 2010

Wired UK printed this spiffy diagram of an algorithm predicting who will win the World Cup. I hope it’s true!

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By pigwhisperer, March 18, 2010

A wonderful review of The Seamstress in The Independent, a UK newspaper. The book’s paperback version was released by Bloomsbury in February of 2010. Here’s the review’s full text:

“Although this is Frances de Pontes Peebles’ first novel, her prose flows with the assuredness of a natural storyteller’s. Each sentence of her epic narrative is stitched with meaning and insight, and the reader’s imagination is woven into the novel from the very first paragraph

We begin in 1935 in Recife, Brazil, where the married Emilia lives in the largest house in an area of newly built estates. She is living a life which at one time she could only dream of. But dreams, as she will learn, come at a price.

As orphaned children, Emilia and her deformed sister Luiza were brought up in a hillside village under the care of their Aunt Sofia. They worked as seamstresses, yearning to find a thread to take them away to a world elsewhere. Interwoven with their personal adventures is a slice of the fraught Brazilian history of the 1920s and 1930s: the economy is fast unravelling, and unrest and a clamouring for the rights of women are spreading as people attempt to fabricate feasible lives for themselves. The challenge facing Emilia and Luiza is how not to compromise their loyalties to themselves, and, most crucially, to each other.”

Here’s a link to the actual review. Many thanks to Bloomsbury for offering the book in the UK!

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By pigwhisperer, November 2, 2009

Today is Finados. It is a day to remember all those who came before us, to light a candle for them, and to commemorate their lives.

Ancestors

by Harvey Ellis

my ancestors surround me
like walls of a canyon
quiet
stone hard
their ideas drift over me
like breezes at sunset

we gather sticks
and make settlements
what we do is only partly
our own
and partly continuation
down through the chromosomes

my son
my baby sleeps behind me
stirring in the night
for the touch
that lets him continue

he is arranging
in his small form the furniture
and windows of his home

it will be a lot like mine
it will be a lot like theirs

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By pigwhisperer, September 3, 2009

We are smack-dab in the middle of coffee harvest. Coffee cherries are turning red on the trees, and we are scrambling to get our picking teams to every tree, so no cherries are wasted. What does a coffee cherry look like? Our trees flower in December. Then a small, green fruit develops. As the fruit ripens, it matures and turns red over the course of 8-9 months. The best time to pick the cherries is when they are red and juicy. Like any fruit, coffee is best when it’s ripe. If left on the tree after it ripens, a coffee cherry gets soft and wine-colored. Eventually, if it isn’t picked, the coffee fruit will turn black and shrivel. We try to pick our cherries red. Each evening, we use water-based machines to sort the cherries (because a few black and green beans inevitably make their way into pickers’ baskets) and pulp the fruits. We pulp the cherries (taking off their skins) because our coffee season occurs during our rainy season, which means a complicated drying process. Pulping the beans helps them dry faster. We also have covered drying patios, so rain doesn’t fall on the drying coffee and ruin it’s taste.

I’ll post more pictures of our entire coffee harvest process over the next few weeks. But since the coffee cherry is the heart of our operation, we’ll start with it’s life cycle.
Abraços,
Frances

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By pigwhisperer, August 13, 2009

We lost a very dear friend today. Fernando Boiadeiro was a rancher and a savvy businessman. Everyday he brought home ice cream to his wife, Tuta. He told long, detailed, sometimes bawdy stories. He gave each of his cows a name. His laugh was a cross between a loud growl and a cough. If he deemed you a friend, he never let you down. In his presence, his friends felt protected. Safe. Loved.

For those of us lucky enough to have been his friends and loved ones, today is a shock. It’s a sad day, and we will miss him.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.