ihpguy

Thanks for the photos. Brings back some great memories from 2011. Did you make it to the piscinas naturais? Imbassai? The dune ride to Diogo? The fort? Passing glance of Ivete Sangalo? I'd love to read your impressions. The fort at Praia do Forte, the Castelo de Garcia d'Avila is the first real one built in the western hemisphere by the Portuguese to protect their colony. It has been well-excavated in places and partially restored. Some wealthy and super chic come from Salvador rent it out for weddings/private parties. If you had stayed at one of the many pousadas in the village, you would definitely had found "company" The people in town need a modicum of English to interact with the tourists coming from Europe. Driving south from the airport into Salvador is a bit easier than Rio or Sao Paulo, until you get into the older parts of town. Then..not too fun. But heading north from the airport into the prefeitura known as the Mata de Sao Joao is quite easy. Long stretches of open road.

Check the times for low tide to swim at the piscinas. And don't forget the old fort south of town. And look out for Yvete. She has a home right near the sea turtles project. Maybe half a kilometer in distance. Perhaps the dune buggies to Diogo? And super super ice creams.

He started out similar to Bradley. Just replace Victor with Merv and...

Hairy. Peludao. It drives me crazy here in the saunas that almost all of the guys shave down.

Besides Pickles, Don Knotts and a school bus, not good.

Involvement of anabolics to counteract HIV/AIDS? Anyone have any info on this? I seem to remember reading something concerning this a couple of years ago.

Of course having a Carioca sauna boy calling a Bahiano sauna boy espertinho or malandro is the pot definitely calling the kettle black!

Normal word would be malandro or malandragem SLY

Unfortuantely, a bit too far to travel overland to Praia de Pipa in Rio Grande do Norte or the dunes of Maranhao.

Maria Mata Moura has a very nice ambiance in the Pellourinho, nice place to go after the Planetario, but I think a bit expensive for the amount of food served. But then after Sampa, anything would seem like a bargain. Especially in Salvador, with moquecas, vatapa and acaraje, good eating can be found for very reasonable prices, just need to look.

Thanks for the hint. I'll try the msn.com for a bit. The new Yahoo is new but not good. I've been going to NYTimes and Google for news. BBC as well. ESPN for sports.

The bus strike is over for now. The drivers got their raise. It will be interesting to see who is next to strike. The professors are currently on strike at the State University of Rio de Janeiro(UERJ) across the canal from the Maracana stadium. Last week the 5000 workers on that site had a one day wildcat strike demanding more money. Someone I know from Banco do Brasil has told me that he has heard rumblings that the bankers are going to be striking once again. And the salario minimo for domestic workers has now gone up to just over 800Reais/month. Much more than the 678Reais monthly for retail employees, cleaners, etc. So there will probably be another where's mine soon by them as well. Guess it is a good thing that the Bangu Boys and the Baixada Boys don't join forces and strike for higher pay. But then how do they do that? Withhold their dripping hard male members from eager clients waiting hot orrifices?

Messing day in Rio de Janeiro. We had a bus strike. That includes the buses run by MetroRio. Yech. With the Metro closed past Siqueira Campos and few buses, Atlantica and Vieira Souto closed in Copa and Ipa, not fun. It took forver to get back from Farme and on Sunday, there are few vans running. Taxis of course were hard to find. Late in the afternoon, there was a 24 hour cooling-off period. Not sure what happens tomorrow. The buses where driven by newbie drivers who didn't know the routes and most routes were not in operation. Our driver just kept going in circles, literally, trying to find the tunnel from Copa to Botafogo that runs past Copa D'Or on Figueiredo de Magalhaes and then past Largo do Machado to Gloria and environs north. Nice tour of Copa, Definitely not needed. I wanted to get to 117 and grab some cock and balls. I felt like one of the ghosts on the bus in that Robert Downey Jr flick - Hearts and Souls. The ride that never ended.

After a super day at the beach in Ipanema, my visiting friend needed more anal affection. Unfortunetaly for his wallet, the doorknob in my kitchen just did not quite do it for him. So...off we went to Clube 117. We walked in with me in the lead. Needed to wait as a client in a towel was discussing the charges on his account. It all made little or no sense. Normally, a client is dressed and on his way out the door after settling up. Not still naked as the day he was born except for a white cotton towel, flip-flops and possibly excised foreskin? Oh well. the woman at the counter was trying to explain in bad broken English to a man with a very nasal tone to his English who kept saying, non, non, non. Kind of like a gay, naked Maurice Chevalier Or was Mo a femme? Anyway, I stepped in and started to translate her Portuguese and explain the charges on his bill. Then who shows up? The boy who was waiting upstairs for the Frenchman who litterally never came. Yep. When he found out that the entry was now 45Reais, 25 more for the suite and 3Reais for every package of joyjell and scumbag, standard is for Monik to have them hand out 4, hey she is one smart and very wealthy ex-ho, he said "Zees Eez Noht Joost" :"Zees Eez Noht Joost. And the boy in Portguese is wondering if he is going to earn some money on a slow Sunday night? And the woman at the counter is wondering if she should now delete the charges on the client's account and I just want my locker key so I can grab some cute Mineiro sauasage and beans.

Thanks for posting this. She was great. I can still remember the stories when she was voted off of Idol. The strange reasoning. But one question for those more technically-inclined. And not to even hint a bit at this or not in relation to this song. But how does one have a clue if a voice is auto-tuned like on many of the GLEE performances? Can someone explain?

It really is easy to do and live economically, if.. and a big if you are willing to make adjustments. Very true!

Will we see a Hamill Camel? I have no clue what is a Zendaya. But I'm cheering for her as we have the same breed of dog. And she is dancing with my pal Val.

Sorry, but I think that having a guy dressed in an SS uniform on the Oscars? And not even in a year when Christoph Waltz was nominated for Inglorious Bastards, not really necessary. Ya think?

Except....well, err...except...ummm Seinfeld = Funny MacFarlane = Not Funny

TY, Segways? Sorry but I must have missed those during the telecast. What with the NAZI in SS uniform and the awful Lincoln joke for starters, I must have been in the john grabbing the jar of Tums when he rolled in on the Segway. In my memory, the only show more tragic had to have been the Rob Lowe-Snow White - Shelly Long, Allen Carr extravaganza. In my opinion, the Franco/Hathaway train wreck seemed to have the hosts demonstrating some modicum of effort. MacFarlane on Oscar Sunday, not at all.

Seth MacFarlane hosted a slow-motion catastrophe of an Oscars broadcast Sunday night. His terrible performance immediately sparked two internet conversations: one about what a terrible Oscars host Seth MacFarlane was, and a second about who had, if anyone, been an even more terrible Oscars host. Many people were insulted by MacFarlane's sexist hostility. And I was, too. But I was also insulted by MacFarlane's obvious laziness and lack of professionalism. MacFarlane's shtick is built on contempt, which is why he's so witlessly insulting. But it was his obvious lack of effort, his confidence that his bush-league material was good enough for the likes of us, that betrayed his total contempt for the audience. Many of MacFarlane's apologists bring up the awful James Franco/Anne Hathaway show of two years ago. But that's a different question. Franco and Hathaway failed because they are not comedians (which is no more an insult than it is to point out that they are not acrobats). They simply do not have the skill set that hosting such a program requires; they could not have succeeded no matter how hard they tried. MacFarlane does have the requisite skills. It's clear that he has sufficiently effective comic delivery and he has a long track record as a head comedy writer. He knew his job. He just didn't bother to do it. That is insulting. Don't get me wrong: hosting the Oscars is a nightmare gig. The host has to perform roughly 30 to 45 minutes of original and completely untested standup material, in front of both a national television audience and nearly every power broker in Hollywood. Most stand-up comedy that you see on TV has been tested and tweaked in dozens, or often hundreds, of live club performances. Any comedy bit that hasn't already been performed in front of a live crowd is at best a hit-or-miss proposition and at worst a bomb that can blow up in your face. (The few minutes of standup by the hosts on late-night shows are untested material of this kind, which is why those jokes are so uneven.) Doing half an hour or more of completely untested material in front of Steven Spielberg is terrifying. Add to that the problem that you have two very different audiences to please, neither of them easy, and each with very different tastes: the room full of Hollywood luminaries in front of you and the vast TV audience somewhere beyond. To succeed, you need to bond with both audiences. Playing exclusively to one instead of the other is automatic death. And worse yet, the last ten or fifteen years have set up an expectation that the Oscar-night host will fail, which can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Potential hosts know this: Queen Latifah was asked before the show if she would consider hosting, and replied that the organizers would have to both "back up the Brinks truck" and get her the world's best publicist to repair her image after the show.) So all in all, an ugly seven-headed monster of an assignment. But if you're going to accept that terrible gig, there's no excuse for giving less than your best effort. Sometime after 11 Eastern, MacFarlane was waving off his own bits with excuses like "It's late." But that's a lie. The material was not weak because MacFarlane was tired (at something like 8:15 local time). That could only be true if MacFarlane were making up the material as he went. The material was weak because MacFarlane, given months to prepare, had prepared a script full of weak and threadbare material. "It's late," is really MacFarlane saying, "I did not bother to put together enough quality material for an entire show. So you're just going to have to take whatever I give you from here on out." This particular expression of contempt for the audience went unnoticed among MacFarlane's more blatant expressions of disregard for women, gays, Jews, ethnic minorities and people with mild Spanish accents. But all of MacFarlane's contemptuous misbehavior is rooted in that basic act of contempt for the audience, his refusal to put in the effort required to create enough A-level material. The boorish "I saw your boobs" song actually might have been funny if it had taken only ten seconds. A lightning-quick snippet of MacFarlane singing "I saw your boobs," would be a perfectly good joke, and harmless because it would come at MacFarlane's expense. (The context for the I-saw-your-boobs song was a "warning from the future" that MacFarlane was going to be disastrously offensive. If the audience then saw and heard him singing the words "I saw your boobs," just once, they would get the point: MacFarlane is an ignorant churl. It didn't get funnier the second time.) Instead, MacFarlane stretched that single, weak joke into a couple of minutes of material, requiring him to actually be a boor and then double and triple down. He didn't need the routine to be so long; it was pre-taped, so he could show as much or as little as he liked. But MacFarlane was trying to fill time, getting three minutes from a premise that only had one joke. He did the same thing with his next bit, stretching out a sock-puppet re-enactment of Flight to excruciating lengths. MacFarlane consistently tried to milk single jokes into longer sequences, because otherwise he would have had to come up with more jokes. What he did write was lazy. The offensive lines weren't just politically incorrect. They were comically incorrect. Several of them were badly constructed. All of them were based on cliches. (A female CIA operative didn't get over 9/11 because "women never give up on anything?" Really? That's all you've got?) Saying that MacFarlane was too "edgy" is absurd. MacFarlane is not an edgy comic. That was not Pryor, Carlin, or Lenny Bruce up there. There are comedians who can get away with material far more transgressive, and subjects far more taboo, than anything MacFarlane dreamed about. MacFarlane wouldn't have the stomach to do any five minutes of Bill Hicks's act, or Sarah Silverman's. Even Robin Williams, who all-too-desperately wants the audience's love, is far more of a painful truth-teller than MacFarlane. But all of those comedians get around the audience's inhibitions by breaking down cliches. Listening to them is liberatory, not because the material is difficult but because the execution is original. MacFarlane, who is lazy, prefers to build his act on as many cliches as possible. Of course, that's easier. It just doesn't work. If someone tells you MacFarlane's detractors are being uptight, remember that MacFarlane got major blowback from a joke about John Wilkes Booth. That is not cutting-edge material. People have been telling jokes about the Lincoln assassination for many decades. ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln ....") But MacFarlane actually managed to offend people with that moldy chestnut of a premise, because the joke he told was constructed so poorly. The punch line wasn't set up strongly enough to feel natural, so MacFarlane sounded like he was straining to drag in Lincoln's murder. It's the strain that made the joke off-putting. That's a spectacular failure of technique. He could have gotten away with a Booth joke, easily, if he had taken the effort to write a better joke. But then, that would have required work. And MacFarlane had clearly decided that none of us were worth that much effort.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/c0be736778/oscar-s-best-hand-job-award

There is also a leiteria at the Cobal of Humaita. Just west of the end of Botafogo on the Rua Voluntarios de Patria. Not sure on the fresh milk but they have a crazy wild assortment of cheeses from the Serra north of Rio as well as in the interior of Minas Gerais. I have been told also there exists a leiteria in the Mercado Popular/Common Market of Madureira. But that is a bit of a hike to just see if the leiteria there has fresh milk. Also another popular market just to the north of the boat station at the Praca Arariboia in Niteroi. The fast ferry gets will get you there quick from Praca XV. But if you are staying in the Zona Sul, check out the Cobal first. I have been told by a good friend that they have a superior assortment of cheeses but not sure about the milk sit. If you walk a bit further north past the old Carrefour near the water that has closed, the Mercado Popular of Niteroi has incredible selection of pretty much all things edible, besides linguica brasileira(brasilian man sausage)

Honestly, that is the translation of the headline in today's O Globo Show Section. Well, almost,,,,I did leave out the word "Codfish" The review mentions that very high quality of the draft beer that they offer. And that is offered really cold in four different ways as the spout is at the end of 90 meters of serpentine cooling pipes. Only problem is that the Adonis, sounds like a great name for a gay porn theater, is located in Benfica. An interesting neighborhood that is the location of the CADEG, the older wholesale fruit and flower market, now populated in large numbers by Yuppies and Guppies on Saturday mornings. And Sao Januario, the location of the Vasco de Gama sports club with an enormous swimming pool, gymnasium and architecturally-interesting(kind of like a smaller LA Coliseum) football stadium http://rioshow.oglobo.globo.com/gastronomia/restaurantes/adonis-538.aspx#

Living kind of isolated does have its advantages. I had no clue that the CEDAE municipal water company wasn't functioning for more or less 60 hours. I went to the veggies market this morning and caught the headline on the front of O GLOBO. 9 million Cariocas were without water. Due to the incredible heat the electric company has been doing some rolling blackouts and one hit an unprepared water distribution plant in Guandu. Lucky for me(yes, Lucky. I sure was!)my cistern which contains about 4000 gallons of water was nearly full. Good for about a month. Things are going back to normal. The picture on the front page of the paper shows a CEDAE worker at one of there units near the old train station in Leopoldina(near Central and Sambodromo) sleeping/resting on the top of an empty water tanker truck. No water flowing through the pipes even to the water company. I am sure with 90, 95 and 100 degree temps the smells have to be just as bad as what the passengers on the Triuumph has to endure. http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/falta-dagua-atinge-toda-cidade-do-rio-municipios-da-baixada-7664631