I love airplanes

I said I wrote many letters from the time I left home when I was seventeen and went to the barracks.

Yes, I went to the Brazilian Air Force.

I loved airplanes.

I still love airplanes.

I can not say exactly what happened to my life that led me away from them as a profession, since I left the Air Force in 1995. I do not know what led me to reconnect them, but I can not but admit that I love airplanes.

I also loved the wars. I did not understand, I could not understand, I was really too young, too naive, too raw to understand intellectually the wars as they really are, so loved militarism in general. I loved everything about studying World War II, about the Vietnam War and especially the Falklands War.

It's a long story.

I was twelve years old when the Falklands War broke out. It was this war that I had contacted all about militarism. Hence wanting to be military was a leap. I ended up being one of them, but something went wrong along the way and the dream faded quickly.

Today, I do not believe in war. I study them with great curiosity, but I do not see them as a deed of glory, but made of pain and suffering, and do not wish to be wars carried out or extended, or planned, nor romanticized. Wars are all bad, without exception.

 

But airplanes are a separate story. Whether civilian or military aircraft, are magnificent machines.

Interestingly, I have no desire to fly. Or like simulation games.

I do not know, but there is something interesting in my interest in stories of war and aviation technology. Indeed, at one time I loved astronautics, space race, rockets and satellites, spaceships and probes. I dreamed of being an astronaut, like all boys have dreamed one day.

But that dream has passed. As life goes on!

Now, I'm a bureaucrat, a government official, a accommodated, a cynical and skeptical. I am a sort of mulch stripped of illusions.

But the letters show that I has been different.

And the piles of magazines prove that loved aviation aircraft more intensively.

If only I had become a mechanical engineer, but no.

I ended up became a business administrator. A businessman who insists on bureaucracy, without faith, or heat, or hopes.

Why follow our life so strange directions? 

About the things I wrote

I said in my first post in this blog I write a lot, every day.

It is not true.

I wish I could write all day, but I can not. I have much to do, although this 'to much' does not mean it's necessarily more important than writing. Much of what I do is trivial, but still, the banalities are important part of life.

Still, writing is not the most important thing I do in life, definitely.

Anyway, we should not now discuss why I do not write every day. It just convenient to make a summary of what I wrote. So, after this overview, I have a real idea of how much I write and how much I wrote.

In retrospect, it seems little. Looking from another angle, it seems like a lot.

I started writing when I was literate, at preschool. But nothing remains of that era. I have a few books in high school, and I confess that I did not even look at them in search of some writing or text that was my original authorship. Maybe there are some. It would be interesting to read them to see the young man I was, or what I thought a long time ago.

What's sure is that from July 1987 I started to write enough letters to my family, because this time I left home and went to the barracks, and then even use the phone was something forbidding. So, I used a lot of paper and pen to communicate with my family and some dear friends.

Well, I have kept dozens of these letters since that time.

I keep them as precious, and I want to scan them and save them in digital format for posterity. I think this a very cool thing to read about what we thought about old joys and old problems, now all resolved and forgotten. As life goes on!

I started writing hard in the barracks, in writing courses. The methods adopted were the most stringent possible, and interestingly, did awaken in me the creativity and dreams.

I then proceeded to write short stories, small annoyances, which served as entertainment for my brother as I finished my course in military training and went to work at an air base.

There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of absurd short stories.

In the end, I put it all together and created a book whose more appropriate name to be given was "Neurons in Fury!."

Never had the courage to show it to anyone, but my brother liked nonsense and showed few stories to my friends of youth.

Finally, I ended up passing the text from paper to computer and now Neurons in Fury! is available for the whole world, for free, in two very popular sites: Scribd and Bookess.

I have not stopped writing. But I wrote after deserves a post aside.

I think I have written a book of concatenated short stories as Neurons in Fury! even when I was 22 years old was a beautiful done.

Of course after that I gave a polishing in text, fix some things, and when I jointed stories together I had to use some amendments that did not exist in the original texts, but even so, the bottom line was built even when I was 21, 22 years .

But first we must remember the letters.

Ah! The letters!

My MP3

A few years ago I posted here that liked to listen to Frank Zappa. Then I posted that I do not hear more rock.

Let the facts: I still hear music?

Yes, I still hear music, and quite. I live traveling and while enjoying for long hours my music on my MP-3.

So if someone came and asked me what I've been listening, I would say:

- Well, in my MP-3 you can find Pavarotti, the soundtrack of the movie Batman Begins by Hans Zimmer, the soundtrack of the movie Letters from Iwo Jimma, the soundtrack of the movie Star Wars Episode IV, by John Williams, more a collection of thirteen songs by John Williams composed for motion pictures and still Laura Pausini and Andrea Bocelli.

But it has also Renée Flaming and Brin Terfell with Under the Stars, and a compilation called Classicals 2009, with several famous musicians and performers such as Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo, Sarah Brightman, among others, playing a lot of known works. I love Chi Mai, by Morriconi.

It also has Emma Shapplin with Carmino Meo, very good to hear.

Finally, there is Backstreet Boys with his Backstreet Boys and Millenium.

Yeah, I heard Mussorgsky, Richard Strauss and Carmina Buranna of Orf.

Rock?

Well, there's Bon Jovi.

Viva Bon Jovi!

Consumers

Once day I thought writing a blog about consumption. Not that the idea was original.

No.

There in the United States, at least I've heard about it, there are magazines that specialize in testing products for popular consumption and then put expert opinion or simple consumer praising, criticizing, or simply giving opinions about what they consumed.

My idea was to post my impressions on the site about what I would consume, but, as always, the idea went no further.

I created the blog on UOL, posted two small, minimal text and lost a darn time fiddling with templates and other trifles, and he remained in the air from April to September 2008. He remained with only two posts and received only five external visits.

A failure.

One more failure.

But, to not say that there's nothing left of it, I post here, as a kind of obituary, the two small text files that existed for this brief period. They are:

 

Consumers, a blog for consumers

You like to consume?

This is your blog.

And:

Consuming since the uterus

We are born consumers and can not deny this fact. There are many people twisting the nose for consumerism, but still consuming things that are to be consumed in this world. There is simply no way for non-consumption. Even a hermit uses the gifts of nature.

We consume from the womb. We do not stop consuming even after death.

What are the things we consume?

What criteria do we use to consume what we consume?

Perhaps these questions are quite personal, but the exchange of experience is nonetheless an interesting thing.

So, go ahead.

But we ended up not going ahead.

Farewell then, Consumers, the blog that was to be for all consumers, but that turned out to be nothing at all.

Zago: Online!

After 14 years in limbo, finally I managed to get my little and loved book "Zago," complete online.

It was a hard work, and lacked commitment on my part, but now it's done.

I wrote it in 1996 directly in Word, but we have so many problems in life that finally I was only with the paper version, which no one reads and no wonder.

Now, slowly, I hope the people aware of it, and are taking notice of "Neurons in Fury!" and "Six Simple Poems."

I'd like to write more, but it is impossible.

Writing is impossible ...

Yes, my friends, writing is a human act almost impossible.

Oh, if you know Zago, use Google: find my name ... Zago is in Scribd and Bookess.

Long live Zago!

Liking Paulo Coelho

I just saw an interview with Paulo Coelho,  in Rede TV!, with Kennedy Alencar.

Well, maybe I even do not like something in his books, but I like him, definitely.

Actually, I'm being unfair.

I read only one book of his, "The Alchemist", and thinking well, is not a bad story. In fact, by the time I read it, around 1996, I did not like especially his literary style, which was not as rich as a Victor Hugo or a Proust. I did not know that he actually does not care for literary styles. At the time I thought that I could easily write by myself the same book in a much more elegant way. But to think something is one task, but to do this something is another task, very different.

The truth is that, well or poorly written, with elegance or not, Paulo Coelho has conquered the world and it is worthy of all credit. Seeing him, I think the great work that he did to become the writer who is in a country that read books very little. But he did more than this: his books are read worldwide. I always say that if I had a basket to put only five or six Brazilians living and worthy of being admired for his achievements, I would include Paulo Coelho in the group. Who else? No matter now. Paulo Coelho has the right place among Brazilians who I like and admire. Of course, in the basket is not always necessary to get people that I necessarily have to like it, but it does not matter. I like Paulo Coelho.

 

But Paulo Coelho himself explains this change in my taste.

Actually, the thing has more to do with Raul Seixas, who with Paulo Coelho.

Everyone in Brazil who likes rock'n'roll and spent his adolescence in the 80s knows that Raul Seixas was a controversial guy. But I wonder if this whole legion of ex-teens knew at the time that Raul Seixas, a man already established in the '70s, was our dear Paulo Coelho as a partner of letters.

 

So I had a certain dislike for Raul Seixas and his fans, but what annoyed me were the letters of Paulo Coelho, wish in that time I did not know they were write by Paulo Coelho.

When Paulo Coelho has emerged as a writer of fiction novels with spiritual feature, I was in other places, learning to write my own stuff. I disdained his simple way of writing.

Now, I admire him, the man, although I admit I never read anything about him other than "The Alchemist".

But he, the man, has also changed. Talking about drugs in this same interview, he did it with a transparent honesty. And he surprised me to say that under current conditions, he was against the liberation of drugs such as cocaine. He deemed himself as having conservative opinions. Now, my dear Paulo Coelho, there's nothing wrong with being conservative. Not that thou are conservative: is that you are a ambulant metamorphosis.

If so, then I am also this ambulant metamorphosis. Maybe I will read his books, maybe not. We have common interests. Although we are of places and of different generations. I also love writing. I love books. I admire sincerity and believe in almost everything that I can not see, from Aleph to Christ. There are truths that do not require evidence. And it seemed to me at some point thou were speaking of something different in a different language, it was a slight mistake, excusable to young men, naturaly arrogant. We speak the same language and about the same signs, just it. Things tend to converge to a center where everything makes sense.

So I wish long life and success to this brave, who armed only with his enormous willpower and hard work, could prove to himself that he can make the rain fall on the desert.

And wasn't there someone before us that said that faith could move mountains?

I'd rather be ... I prefer ... I choose ... I decide ... like Paulo Coelho!

Now, faith!

The learning process

This was the tenth and last post in Defend Yourself!

In time: the counter never showed more than a few dozen visits, all mine, and no one has posted any comments.

April 24, 2008

The learning process

Living safely means learning certain habits and unlearn some others.

Is the learning process in safely possible or feasible?

Yes, the process is possible. We can learn rules and safety procedures as we learn a lot of other things. It may be a little slow for some people, or even difficult for others, but there is nothing in the process itself that makes it different from any other learning process.

Is the learning process in safety feasible?

It is feasible only to the extent that has been encoded. I mean, like any learning process, a rule or safety procedure should be studied and organized in order to attend the basic principles of learning.

But in this feature our modern culture fails painfully.

Think in computers and how difficult is to operate them for someone who never approached one of them. However, it seems commonplace for experienced users. The difference between a beginner and an experienced user is simply that the experienced user has gone through a learning process that made him able to understand the use of a computer.

The same is true with any kind of knowledge.

 

In terms of safety, perhaps the best prepared people to use safety procedures are the people who work with the hypothesis of violence. They are the military and civilian police, the military armed forces, private bodyguards, the federal police, security bank, the night watchmen, employees of companies wich transport high values​​ objects and money, firefighters, among others.

These professionals are trained to be able to adopt effective security procedures, and use weapons and security equipment, but initially, they are people who know nothing about it until you receive the proper training.

 

What training is that?

In fact, there is not only a single workout, but a set of them.

So what learn these professionals wich that in fact become professionals, not amateurs with uniforms, batons and guns?

What learn they that we, ordinary citizens, can also learn?

What can they teach us?

Who can teach us?

Is feasible a mass learning process that makes people so familiar with security actions that the process will really make a difference in quality of life for its users?

These are important questions that deserve an appropriate response.

Written by Rosenvaldo Simoes de Souza at 13h57