Thomas

 Sound Waves by Eric Mills

Last week a woman called me at my celphone doing some research about music. She asked me all the basic questions about it you might think about “what’s your favourite band?”, “What kind of music do you like?” etcetera. But at the end of the “interview”, she asked me two interesting questions that I would like you all to answer:

1 - “How would you define music, in one sentence?”

2 - “Which one of these sentences describes how you “feel” the music:

a) Music changes the moment.

b) The moment changes the music.

c) Both

d) Music is a compilation of noises.

e) Everething is music.”

I know they all sound a little strange, but it all depends on how you interpret them, so I would like you to try and explain why you chose that particular sentence.

For a little more information about this subject, you might find something at http://whatismusic.info/, a website based on a scientific research about “what’s music?”

That’s all for now, just wanted to share this with y’all…

Nilmar is a player from Corinthians, my favourite team (check out a post from last year).

 (This is a photo of the Corinthians’s cheerers, taken by Aldoalexandre)

The reason I’m writing about him is simple (or not, it depends on how you look at it): he is injuried, and he’s thinking about leaving the team, BUT HE CAN’T! He’s by far the best center-forward that plays here in Brazil, and so he cannot stop playing for Corinthians!

He sais his salary hasn’t been paid, an that he won’t play for Corinthians ever again, at least not with the same passion… He has an average of almost a goal per game, and Corinthians was the champion of the Brazilian League mostly because of him and Carlos Alberto Tevez, that plays for Westham, in England, now…

Just wanted to share my fear that he might really leave the team… “Corinthianos”, please comment on this….

You can check for updated information about Nilmar on the Corinthians Website

Now this is my idol. You probably all know him, except for those who really,  REALLY aren’t interested in the music business.

Saul Hudson, AKA Slash, was born on the 23rd of July 1965 in Hampstead, England. He was raised in Stoke-on-Trent until he was 11, when he moved to Los Angeles with his mother, where he attended to the Beverly Hills High School along with Lenny Kravitz.

When he was 15 years old, his grandmother gave him his first guitar; a few years later he dropped out of school. He joined many bands, but none of them had much succes until 1984, when he met Axl Rose, and a few months later, he was a part of Guns n’Roses.

The band struggled for 3 years playing in bars and opening shows for other bands, but in 1987, they recorded their first album “Appetite for Destruction”, that contained songs like “Welcome to the Jungle”, “Sweet child o’mine” and “Paradise City”, the band’s most famous songs. The band just kept getting bigger and bigger, hitting nº1 on Billboard charts in 1988, and the succes went on and on untill 1996, when all the G’n'R’s members said that they could no longuer work with Axl, so the band split up.

Slash worked with some artists like Michael Jackson and Lenny Kravitz after the band split up, but in 2002 he and the other ex-G’n'R’s (except Axl) decided to find another lead singer and form another band. Scott Weiland was the “chosen one”, and then Velvet Revolver started playing in 2003.

Velvet opened the show for Aerosmith last thursday here in São Paulo, and I miraculously got a ticket at the last minute. I finally got to see him play with my own eyes! It was just so weird to know that someone you worship so much is right in front of you! Unfortunatelly I was reeeeealy far away from the stage… But it was worth it! The only problem is that Aerosmith seemed really dull after I had just heard some Velvet…

 Weird photo by Samuel Kobayashi  at flickr.com, but the best I found with CC.

But anyway, I just figured that since I’ve been talking about places and teams that I like, I should also talk about Slash… And I can only hope that some day I will play as well as he does!

I have already talked about the
Barcelona team, but not about the city.Located in eastern
Spain,
Barcelona is my favorite city in the world. I spent only a day there, I went by train when I was in Paris, so I didn’t really get to know every aspect of the city, but it certainly stunned me enough so I still remember it as a perfect place. I’d rather go there again then visit many cities I don’t know. It has a “young environment”, I mean, mostly of the citizens are between 18 and 25 years old, so its a city that probably “never sleeps”. I’d really love to get to know the nightlife of the city…When I went there I visited the aquarium, a traditional spanish restaurant, the docks, and many other touristic points, like the Sagrada Familia (or Sacred Family Church), but I spent mostly of my time at the docks, simply because it is a quite “central” place of the city, everything is nearby.

Spanish people are very friendly (this probably seems a quite narcissistic thing to say since, as I’ve already told you, I’m half-Spanish, but it is still true ), and that is probably why that is my favorite place. You’d think “why
Barcelona, if all Spanish are friendly?”; well, I only visited
Barcelona, Valencia and
Madrid.
Madrid is the capital, so people are always stressed, what makes them less friendly;
Valencia is like
Florida in
Spain: I think the average age there is 75 years old, so people are a lot grumpier… And in
Barcelona, people are always relaxed, near the sea, everybody is young… Perfect place…

 (Photo uploaded on June 21, 2005 by juicystyle )

Everyone should go there at least once in their life, you certainly won’t regret it… You can take a”tour” at the city’s website.

During this year of 2006, we have worked on many things and used many different tools, like different blogs (WordPress and ECML), along with many other different things. I’ll try to sum up each and every function of each one of them.            The blogs (WordPress and ECML) are meant to be the window from where every person from the world can see us. Our first blog, on ECML, was a blog where only members from the ECML community were were able to get into. It was a project between many schools, with the goal of making students talk to each other in English, to develop a better language level. Or second blog, on WordPress, works as a normal blog: anyone can read it, comment on the posts, etc, and anyone can have a WordPress account.            Other tools we used were aggregators (suprglu and bloglines). Suprglu aggregates things we have written on flickr, on our blogs, the comments we have on our blogs, the posts we left on 43 things and 43 places, every thing, and puts it all together as one new blog. On the other hand, bloglines wraps together the blogs from our friends, and exposes all the new posts the have made on a single page, so it’s easier for us to see them.            We have also created accounts on 43 thing and 43 places, sites where we talk about our wishes and travel experiences. In these sites we made contact with other people and learned how to speak an informal language.            Flickr is a site where we post photos we take and people comment on them, and we can comment on other people’s photos as well.The last thing we used was Community Walk, a site where we can add markers to a map, in a way that we can tell stories through the world. 

            Overall, I think the most useful thing we did was create the blog, because that is the only place where I really made contact with new people (through comments). I think what we should do to get more vocabulary and learn an even more “normal” english is to start entering chat rooms where people speak english.