Best Song For S&M Sex

Oops... no, best song for reading Castells...

Closer - Nine Inch Nails

You let me violate you, you let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you, you let me complicate you
Help me I broke apart my insides, help me I've got no
Soul to tell
Help me the only thing that works for me, help me get
Away from myself
I want to f**k you like an animal
I want to feel you from the inside
I want to f**k you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to god
You can have my isolation, you can have the hate that
It brings
You can have my absence of faith, you can have my
Everything
Help me tear down my reason, help me its your sex i
Can smell
Help me you make me perfect, help me become somebody
Else
I want to f**k you like an animal
I want to feel you from the inside
I want to f**k you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to god
Through every forest, above the trees
Within my stomach, scraped off my knees
I drink the honey inside your hive
You are the reason I stay alive

(com'on, it's a joooooke!! topic suggested by Edgar and Adolfo... I will make it a regular here :))

Top Ten???

When most DJs are asked to give their top 5 songs, or when a famous actress is asked for her top 10 movies of all times they often cannot answer and come up with a clever answer that show their preferences, but not really. Du-uh! Of course... our mind does not work like that, linearly; it works in contexts, it all depends... of the network of related songs we are living at the moment... (why do I post here instead of where I supposed to make smart posts about networks? - in my PhD super-ultra-cool-and-somewhat-arrogant seminar taught by Dutton and Castells; but what PhD seminars are not? what PhD students are not? :))

So... those are some of the songs playing in my mp3 player at the moment (haven't got an iPOD YET). I was going to make a super network of networks of relationships with them, following the fantastic idea of Musicovery. But... since I could not install a Photoshop (or any editing/drawing software for that matter) in my work computer, you will have to use your imagination!

Born Slippy - Underworld
Talisman - Air
Poison - Astrix
The Way You Look Tonight - Billie Holliday
Michael - Franz Ferdinand
Man Eater - Nelly Furtado
Venus as a Boy - Bjork
What You Waiting For - Gwen Stefani
Climson and Clover - Velvet Underground
Girls and Boys - Blur
You Gonna Want Me - Tiga
I Don't Feel Like Dancing - Scissor Sisters
Let Forever Be - Chemical Brothers
Superafim - Cansei de Ser Sexy
Flawless - George Michael
The Seeker - The Who
Release Me - Infected Mushroom
Madonna -Fever
Simphony n.7 - Beethoven
Pure Morning - Placebo
Hyper-Ballad - Bjork
Triptico - Gotan Project
The Test - Chemical Brothers
Blue Monday - New Order

Lizzy the Lezzy Part II

You won't believe this! Dani has downloaded the Lizzy the Lezzy ringtone for her new mobile so... today we woke up listening to Lizzy singing! OH-MY-GOD! What do I do now?

NOT a Serious Person... "I'm Lizzy the Lezzy..."

I've waited days and days to publish this, but I simply could not resist... Bloody hell, this was supposed to be ¨kind of a serious blog". But it isn't because simply... I am NOT a serious person... Can't lie... this song (and its variations), sang by Lizzy the Lezzy - an adorable creation of Ruth Selwyn - has been stuck in my head for the last week and I cannot stop (silently) singing it. What now? How do I get rid of it? I can't concentrate on anything else anymore! It's hilarious!!!! This is one is the first episode, in English, but my favorite is definitely the one in Spanish (the one in French is also fantastic!).

Lizzy the Lezzy



Check the other episodes here

Dani asked me the other day "when have we become such lesbians???"...

Haven't, but it is so interesting to identify certain attitudes of ours as a "lesbian" thing. Aff... complex stuff... those stupid labels...

:)

Català

sisplau (si us plau)
...
si os plaze
s'il vous plaît
...
if you please
...

se te dá prazer???
hahaha!!!

the more romance languages I learn, the funnier the world gets!


(Gmail in Catalan from now on, so I can get used to the language the Phd students around me speak most of the time.. "safata d'entrada")

Rhythm

We saw Babel a couple of days ago... totally disappointing! I am getting tired of those movies that show the world as only full of tragedies and disasters - well, it is, but com'on! What do we learn from watching an American woman being stitched up without anaesthesia in a village in the middle of nowhere in Africa AGAIN? I have seen this movie before... “If you want to be understood, listen” seemed to be a good theme for a movie, but the parts of the film were not glued well together to give that “whole” feeling that carried a message.

I guess what made me feel even worse was realising I have the same disappointment towards the theme of my PhD thesis... "I have seen this movie before"... “What is the message?”…And that is what I feel when I read most PhD thesis... why on earth someone is studying this? What is the purpose? I know most of the time theses just focus on that little tiny detail that other theses did not cover... but... I don't want to have this feeling about MY thesis. Four years feeling like that?

I have just started to develop the theme into first, a literature review paper (this will definitely be useful if I am able to pull off a new perspective for this review, a new look at things), and later, my thesis project. The theme? Broadly, eGovernment indicators. Too broad? Well, yes. When I get to the point where I can state my thesis theme in only one sentence I will be happy. Can't now. But I can try to explain more or less where I want to get...

My disappointment at the existent eGovernment performance indicators and benchmarking reports, such as Accenture's, the UN's, and all others that rank countries websites or focus mainly on the delivery of "services" to "customers" started back in São Paulo, when I was working with eGovernment cost-analysis indicators. So many questions relating to policy relevance kept coming to my mind...

How can one measure innovations?
How can we actually track new (better) ways of interaction between the government and the society?
If we measure the number and sophistication of services online and more means better, what if one service becomes completely obsolete and seizes to exist or it merges with another one as we move to online interactions - is that portal ranked lower?
Why eGovernment studies and surveys are often detached from eDemocracy themes? Isn't democracy a form of government? Is the government only a service provider? What is the definition of service? What is government after all? (I am in a period of defining things in my life...:))

Hmm… I guess I am basically concerned with the transformations in relationships (government, businesses, citizens) that are related to eGovernment and how we can track them (now I am thinking how not to fall in a deterministic view of technology, society and transformations... but I will leave this to a whole new post). I hate the feeling of being completely lost and confused and not knowing where to go!

Oh well. For now, I will leave you with a clip of the only good scene of Babel: the one at a Japanese dance club. It made me think... do I need music or a feeling of rhythm in my life?

Here We Go!

Several blogs created, none started. But I am very confident I will stick to this one.

I've always been so jealous of those illuminated people who could actually write insightful things about a theme or even just blablabla about anything with refined irony a couple of times a week and make people laugh! And think! And philosophise! Pff.... I was never able to do that - too lazy to just entertain people with my thoughts. This is actually a problem I guess I've always had... laziness… or perhaps I was just not comfortable with being lost and showing that so explicitly in a blog. Never able to make choices, never staying in one place for more than 2 years, never focusing on one object of study, never starting AND following a career. But now, almost a year after Dani bought me a fridge magnet “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” I have started to believe I-AM-OK AND I can take advantage of my messy way of being (who needs self-help books? You just need a fridge magnet!).

I just need to write about my messy head. But I need to focus. Focus, focus. That’s what I have been telling my self since I started researching for my PhD thesis (on eGovernment evaluation).

It was soooooo obvious from the beginning! The Soundtrack of my life! I can't do anything without music, without tapping my feet to that lalalalalala, tchurururururu... It inspires basically everything I do. As my life from now on will pretty much be my doctorate (and the totally related conversations with Dani as the one we had last night about Second Life…) I will write about the sounds of my PhD. Maybe I can get something insightful out of it and who knows, I might actually become one of those illuminated people… but for now, the idea is just egoistic self-therapy. And I am OK with that.

So...

[hey girls, hey boys, super star DJ’s…]

HERE WE GO!

(not sure exactly what this song/video clip means to me right now… perhaps the process of finding the skeleton of my thesis…lol… oh, well, this is just my first post ;-))