ratkiller identity revealed

Here she is, folks. Approximately 4 and a half feet of merciless rat-killing power. She may not look scary (actually, she kind of does), but with a broom she's just plain dangerous.

Her name is Dalvina, and she grew up on a farm, basically. She has no idea what the Internet is, so me telling her that I posted her picture there for all to ridicule, point and laugh at will be met with the same blank stare I got when I asked for the keys to her son-in-law's car. Which is the part of the reason I'm posting her picture here for public ridicule.

It's a victimless crime.

OK, 1 victim.

mattress-eating rat update

I know there's been a lot of chatter going over the wires regarding the details of the rat that ate Tiago's mattress, and I'm going to do the best that I can to clear things up and provide a little more detail.

OK, the chatter part may be a little exaggerated but there are some new developments.

The rat did not eat the entire mattress, as I'm sure some of you were wondering. He in fact only burrowed into it to escape being squashed by whoever the hell was chasing him around Tiago's room.

So here's the timeline:

1) rat is discovered in 6-year old kid's (already pretty freaking small) bedroom, in a pretty freaking small apartment. he shares the bedroom with his brother who's 10. or 11. i can't ever keep track.
2) everybody runs screaming
3) someone gathers their wits and starts chasing the rat around the bedroom
4) the rat runs into a hole that s/he may or may not have already chewed into the mattress
5) nobody sees this, and everyone assumes the rat went home
6) the babysitter folds up the mattress and sticks it (presumably the same day) on top of a bookcase (or armoire, whatever the hell you call those things you put clothes in that are 6' tall or more) in the room
7) the rat is still in the mattress and can't get out because it's folded. presumably s/he breathes through some tiny hole that may or may note be chewed, and lives on a diet of, you guessed it, mattress, and his/her own urine.
8) someone decides to hang the mattress outside, who knows why - maybe because of the rat urine smell, or the fact that it seems lighter (or heavier) than before. anyway, it's either hanging outside or propped against a stone wall.
9) a neighbor, a middle-aged Portuguese guy who has no job and whom I've never seen wear a shirt, sees, while walking his rediculous fancypants poodle around the condo, that something is moving inside the mattress and deduces that it's a rat.
10) he tells Tiago's mom
11) Tiago's mom tells everyone else
12) everybody runs screaming
13) to everyone's surprise, Dalvina, the mother in law of Tiago's aunt (4'8" tall, talks in an extremely high voice, with a thick bahian accent, and has a face like a prune), gets her shit together enough to kill the rat. the details are shady on how exactly this was done, although i'm going to stick to my theory of bludgeoning, given motive and available rat-killing means. i'll update this page as details on this story come in.
14) the mattress is retired and Tiago's dad, Ivanildo, buys a new one.
15) that's the kind of shit that has to happen for someone to get a new mattress around here.

duque de caixas slum visit

i'm still in Rio, at least until tonight or tomorrow.

two days ago i went to visit a slum that my organization supports with one of our schools. the slum is literally on a pile of trash, and the people who live there make a "living" by going through the trash for stuff to eat and sell. if it sounds insane, it is. the shacks they live in are surrounded by trash, and the kids can't go to school because they have to work combing through the trash. the government does nothing about it because the people who live in the slum are seen as a necessary part of the recycling/environmental process/policy, which is to say it's easier to just ignore them. i have pictures which i'll post when i get back to salvador. you may not believe that i was actually there - it might be easier to think that i just PhotoShopped some images together. the police don't go there because the drug cartels control the area. we had to get what is essentially indirect permission from the drug lords to tour and take pictures, and we were accompanied at all times by members of the union of catadores (trash-pickers - yeah, they're unionized), because otherwise we would have been schaperoned out, or just as likely, shot.

UPDATE: I posted the photos of the Lixão, as it's called (means "big trash" in Portuguese) here. For the most part you don't see any of the people who live there up close. I was accompanied by Ivanildo (black shirt) and Rita from the organization, in addition to two residents of the Lixão (green shirt, blue shirt) who were (or still are) catadores at one point, and who are active members of the union now. There was also another resident, a woman, who was a school teacher there who met us as we were walking through the favela and told about some of her (insane) experiences of living there.

There are more details on the living conditions in the Lixão here.

You can see the smokestacks of the Petrobras Brazilian oil refinery from the Lixão, which only adds to the hellish image of the whole place, since they spout fire and are surrounded by a huge cloud of smoke from both the burning trash and the refinery. It is also an incredibly ironic image since Petrobras is the biggest contributor to gross national product in the country.

One of the people at the organization pointed this out to me in one of the pictures I took, and he said "Look, it's hell (pointing to the trash in the foreground) and heaven (pointing to the Petrobras smokestacks in the background)."

I disagreed - "No," I said, "It's hell (lixão), and the devil (smokestacks)."

A round of freedom fries for the Italians!

Don't get me wrong ... I don't have a problem with French people. That is, at least, no more of a problem than with the rest of humanity, with whom I actually have a big problem. I didn't like that they beat Brazil, but I did like that they went on to LOSE (ha ha) in the World Cup final to Italy today.

I'm in Rio de Janeiro right now. People had been telling me since before I got to Brazil (before November) that I had to see Rio, there's all this blah blah blah to do and whatever. And I was always like, Listen, man, I know Brazil, all right? So don't go telling me what's cool and what's not.

Turns out I was wrong. I don't know shit about Brazil, or at least I didn't until I got here on Saturday morning (at 5:30am, I should add). Rio, while like any city has its problems, including a pretty significant threat of violence, is an amazing place. It's far more modern than I expected - more like Buenos Aires than Sao Paulo. The architecture is incredible, and the place is just freaking huge. It's one of those place, like New York, where you could live for 10 years and not know 10% of what there is to do there. Especially if you sit in your apartment reading books all day and not answering the phone because some annoying douchebag thinks its a lot of fun to go to some club and oogle at chicks, none of which either of us have a chance with.

i got a fever and the only cure is ... more TRIANGLE

I'm sure by this time you're wondering the same thing I am, which is: How does one train to become a triangle player for a forró band? Is it a full-time job? Can anybody just jump up there and do it? Could I do it?

You're thinking of course "Sure, you idiot, it's the freaking triangle, for crying out loud." And I would answer, "Have you heard some of those triangle parts in the forró songs?" When I first heard a triangle used in a forró song I thought it was something mechanical like a synthesizer or some weird-looking exotic percussion instrument, but nope, it's everybody's favorite party instrument, the triangle.

To get some idea of what I'm talking about, check out this song. And then try to play the part on YOUR triangle.

heading to rio tomorrow ... at 3am

I'm sure that all of you (both of you) are sick of me saying that I'm going to Rio and never delivering on my promises. Or more likely you forgot I even mentioned it. Either way, it looks like it's going to happen, since we bought the tickets last night and are on our way tomorrow morning. That's right, at 3am, because we are some cheap freaking bastards and that's when the cheap flights are.

Of course, things are never easy, so when the travel agent put my credit card through last night it was rejected. So he called up somebody and they said "leave out the security code" (i.e., the 3-digit security code on the back of your card to prevent fraud), which he did, and it worked. NICE. You really got to hand it to security/credit card companies these days, making things secure by coming up with technology and then making circumventing it the only way to get anything done. Some slow claps for these folks.

It's cheapest to go to Rio via one airline (TAM) and come back on another (Gol). The credit card worked for TAM but not Gol. And before you start telling me why it didn't work, Captain Obvious, you can just save it. We already tried our secret little trick of leaving off the security code for Gol, too, but they were too smart for us.

So we're leaving tonight but who knows when we're coming back. ETA for return is Wednesday morning, depending on flight availability and/or price. I could stay for a couple of weeks and no one, least of all me, would notice. Unemployment and lack of responsibility and/or commitment, as I'm sure many of you know, has its perks.

The following may cause some of you to puke or at least want to, and to those folks I offer no apology. It's your fault for wasting your time cruising the web and not being astute enough to know how to avoid mediocre sites like this. Here's the following: anytime the word "Rio" comes up, the song of the same name by Duran Duran (look it up) comes into my head and won't leave for a minimum of two hours. The funny thing is that I don't think any of the lyrics (I'm NOT wasting my time looking them up, at least not until I finish writing this) even refer to the city in Brazil. The Rio Grande river, yes, and some woman with the name Rio. Who the hell names their daughter Rio anyway? You'd think the same wit the Duran Duran guys used to pick a hairstyle would have transferred to lyric writing, but apparently not.

Have you ever noticed, too, that a song can be playing in your head for hours and you didn't even notice it? And then something happens, like you involuntarily start singing it or the cloud of whatever else you were thinking about passes. And you're like, "Wow, I've had that song in my head for a really long time and I didn't even notice it. I got to try to concentrate on some other more inane song, like anything by Abba, to get it out of my head." It's a viscious cycle, because the songs only keep getting worse.

Anybody with me on this one? Hello?

vermin revisited

Ivanildo's son Matheus has been sleeping at his aunt's place for the past couple of weeks or so. She lives in the same building complex, about a 30-second walk away, and to be honest, it's a much nicer place. They have a couch which doesn't look like a Goodwill reject, which is always nice. I can't say the same, unfortunately, for his parents' place. Why am I writing so much garbage on the minutiae of daily life here at the Janus building in the Condominio Sistema Solar, in Pernambúes? Because the reason Matheus is sleeping at his aunt's is that A FREAKING RAT ATE HIS BROTHER TIAGO'S GODDAMN MATTRESS.

I'll attempt to soften that blow by saying that the rat in question is no longer with us, thanks to a 100-year-old-looking prune-faced woman named Dalvina who lives in the complex. She's the mother of Ivanildo's brother-in-law, David (get all that? I'm lost too.) Apparently she told Ivanildo that "That Matheus (pointing to me, as opposed to Matheus the 9-year-old) doesn't understand anything I say." Ivanildo said that he quelled the urge to say, "Dalvina, we don't understand anything that you say," because she's from the interior of Bahia, aka the Sertão, and talks with a really thick accent using rustic words and in a very high voice.

I don't know how exactly she killed it, but my guess is that it was through bludgeoning or beating of some kind. I don't think there's shovel around, but there are brooms, so maybe she did it with that. I really wish I had a picture of her that I could post here (and the deficit of conscience required to post pictures of people and make fun of them without their knowledge) so you could get some idea of how hilarious (and scary) it must have been to see this short, slightly overweight old woman chasing a mutant, mattress-eating rat around with a broom or whatever.

When you take into consideration her life experience, my guess as a homemaker and/or similar domestic profession, you can see why she was the most qualified to take care of the rat problem. My guess is that she's killed more than a few of those sons of bitches in her time, and at this point she's probably just plain deadly when it comes to this type of thing, a "rat ninja", if you will.

And while we're on the topic of gross vermin, you should see how blasé people are about other things like cockroaches. All the women here wear havianas or sandals or something else that leaves their feet nearly bare. This, in addition to the proliferation of (again, mutant) cockroaches in the apartments and all of the sidewalks in the condominium or on the street, leaves them susceptible to the inevitable cockroach crawling over their bare feet when they're not paying attention. I, of course, when I see this happen to them, brace myself for what I'm certain will be a horror-movie caliber scream, but it never comes. They just brush it off, or do nothing, and don't even chase it down to kill it when it goes on its panicked little way. I, of course, am inclined to jump on a chair and scream like a little schoolgirl whenever I see one of these things, but luckily no one has witnessed anything like that yet. They do laugh, though, when I jump at the sight of a cockroach, or at least a big one. "Matt's afraid of cockroaches," they say, laughing and pointing. And in the same breath at least one of them will give the expected horror-movie scream when she sees a freaking half-inch-long caterpillar. Go figure.

that's it, i'm out (slams wad of cash on the table)

Well this weekend sucked. Not just because Brazil lost to, of all teams, freakin' FRANCE. Mostly because Brazil lost after I blew R$179 on an official Brazil world cup T-shirt. Chances are that the value of it dropped by around 50% 2 minutes after the game ended, and I only got to wear it for one match. The thought crossed my mind while I was buying it that, "I might just be jinxing the whole team by buying this right now." So not only did Brazil lose, but it's looking like it's probably my fault.

Additionally, I still haven't paid up on the (first ever, I should mention) World Cup pool that I entered with people from work back home. I think I'm going to ask if there's a prize for last place, since I've demonstrated a surprisingly consistent ability to pick which team will lose and designate them as the winner.

I went to a bar/luncheonette/restaurant with a bunch of coworkers on Saturday night, to watch the game, and even though Brazil lost it was a lot of fun. And crazy. The last time I heard so many people screaming at the TV was in college at 3am on a Tuesday, sitting in my apartment with a 1/2 roommate/case of beer ratio and watching Jenny Jones.

They took it surprisingly well, though (the Brazilians). There were only a few people crying and it was mostly women. One of my coworkers spotted a woman crying in the street and motioned for me to hand over my camera so he could capture it on film. The country's team may have lost, but at least we have a picture of some anonymous woman crying to point and laugh at. So it's not a total loss.