Pergelator

Criminal Code: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Cemitério do Morumbi Sao Paulo Brazil

Criminal Code | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Eurocopter AS-350 AStar (PR-TNG)

The AStar is a popular helicopter, over 10,000 have been produced since 1975. They can carry five people and fly about 150 MPH. New they cost pert near two million, used ones can be picked up for about half that. All in, they cost about a thousand dollars an hour to operate. You must really want to get somewhere to pay that kind of money.

Santo | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Gruesome story of a drug dealing cult operating in Brazil and Spain. It's a bit confusing because it jumps back and forth in time, though enough sequences are repeated that it eventually starts to fit together. But then we throw hallucinogens in the mix and now nobody really knows what's going on. The jumbled time sequences work to illustrate how confused our players are. Six episodes, 45 minutes each.

Good Morning, Veronica Season 1 Trailer | Rotten Tomatoes TV
Rotten Tomatoes TV
There are some very despicable people running around loose in the world and it's Veronica's self appointed mission to put a stop to their cruel, criminal activities in Sao Paulo Brazil. I think we started watching it once before and I think I put a stopper on it because we had just finished another series about about a sadistic killer and I wasn't up for another one.

Brazilian Currency - AFP/Getty Images

NPR / OPB Planet Money has a story about How Fake Money Saved Brazil. 20 years ago Brazil was suffering from a high rate of inflation, maybe even hyper-inflation. A minister called in some eggheads and they put up a plan to replace the current currency with imaginary currency, and then they magically turned the imaginary currency into real currency. It sounds slightly ridiculous, and I think it leaves out some important bits, but evidently it worked, which is frankly amazing.

Via Astral Codex Tex

City of God (2002) Official Trailer - Crime Drama HD
Movieclips Classic Trailers
City of God is evidently some kind of government housing project for the homeless. Not much in the way of opportunity, but plenty of crime. The story follows several of the boys and men from this neighborhood. They are all pretty rotten, some more than others. The worst of them takes over the drug business for the whole neighborhood. He does this by killing all of the other drug dealers. But now that he is in charge, crimes of robbery and rape are stopped, which makes the residents happy. Sounds kind of like the Mexican drug cartels taking over the functions of government in the territories they hold.

Parts of Brazil with no people living within one square kilometre (80% of Brazil's total area)

The Mechanism | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Netflix
We started watching this Brazilian crime show this evening. I don't know if we'll stay with it. It's kind of frustrating. We have cops trying to nail a money launderer, but he's well connected to the elite and they're all corrupt, kind of like here, so you know nothing is going to happen. They may as well be beating their heads against the wall.

Flying East from Brazil on the way to the Philippines? That's doing it the hard way. I would have expected them to take the wings off of the airplane, but it in a big box and load it on a ship. I mean that's how we did it with fighter aircraft in WW2. But times have changed and there could be any number of reasons to undertake a long flight like this, the primary one being that we don't have a world war going on right now.

Cessna Grand Caravan EX

FlightAware reports that the Rawanda military is getting a couple of Cessna Grand Caravans. Not quite sure who is paying for them but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the CIA since they are going to be equipped "with secure High Frequency and Ultra High Frequency radio systems, Night Vision Imaging System, . . .".

Then we have a photo of another Cessna Grand Caravan:

Cessna C-98A Grand Caravan

The Grand Caravan looks unbalanced - too much fuselage in back of the main wing. The engine must be very heavy in order to balance the weight of the cargo. The fuselage itself doesn't count for much, it's built like a beer can.

Is this the same aircraft? No, this one is from Teresina, Brazil. Teresina? Where the heck is that? I've never heard of it. Northeast Brazil:

Teresina Brazil

I read a book about the area but I don't remember Teresina being mentioned, but it maybe it didn't exist in the book's timeframe. Well, let's see what ye olde Wikipedia has to say:

Teresina is the hottest city in the country and the third city with the major incidence of lightning in the world.

Global map of lightning frequency--strikes/km2/yr.

I seem to remember that there are a couple of lakes in Venezuela that are subject to a great deal of lightning. Wikipedia confirms.

All this talk about lightning reminds me of an old tune:


Lou Christie - Lightnin Strikes Again - Live - The Midnight Special Godslove66

It took me several months to finish this. I had gotten sucked into the insatiable internet vortex and I only read when I was on the train. A pretty amazing book. There are three story lines interspersed with each other. They are essentially:
1. the history of Brazil
2. politics and corruption surrounding the recent (book was published in 2004) Presidential elections and the emergence of democracy,
3. the writer's personal experiences there.

I picked this book at the dollar store. Sometimes I find a real gem in the bargain bin.

From page 290:


"Res Publica". Now that is an interesting term. I have often wondered why all the governments in the America's South of the U.S. were so corrupt. Of course we have our share of corruption, but for some reason the U.S. is richer (so we can afford it?). Or maybe our corruption is not as bad as these other countries, or maybe we are the biggest dog on the block, and no one from the outside is messing with our politics. I like to think the U.S. has the best system of government, but as someone once said, our system is the absolute worst, except for all the others.

And then there was that one remark about pineapples that I quoted earlier.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.