Sambodia Today: Tips,Trips and Ammunition Clips

I am closely following the story reported above, from the regional Tribuna media group of Santos. A local alderman was murdered in the seaside town of Guarujá. Political motivations are suspected.

I have a little running “adopt a corpse” feature on my Portuguese-language blog, based on the principle of “treat thy neighbor’s corpse as though it were your own.”

TV Globo SP budgeted 45 seconds of coverage to the assassination. Tribuna, 15 minutes.

Valor reports:

Cuts in the Brazilian Treasury Ministry’s budget for the National Development Bank — BNDES — will begin with and to interest-rate subsidies on the bank’s loans to the private sector for equipment and machinery purchases. The cuts will take effect in the second quarter.

Relatório Reservado, the investment banking tip sheet, claims  that

Two of Brazil’s largest cell phone manufacturers are about to butt heads. Samsung is arming itself to the teeth for a court battle over the tax-free empire conquered by Nokia in the  Manaus Free Trade Zone more than a decade ago.

Samsung and Nokia appear to have a sort of «coopetive» relationship in Brazil, as they say at Harvard Business.

The Android-powered Galaxy S goes head to head against the iPhone here, but you also see some discreet  joint sponsorship of youth marketing campaigns as well, coordinated through the Assocation for Youth Movements. GE Brasil is a co-sponsor of YouthActionNet projects in São Paulo.

Nokia, Semp Toshiba and Evadin were manufacturing about 580,000 handsets a month in Manaus, in Amazonas state, in January 2009 — down 61% year on year, they say, thanks to the financial crisis.

Samsung may be best known for its locally made TV sets. I have one. The wife has a Gradiente TV, which is also the make of our cheap cell phones.

Samsung’s extensive Wikipedia article in Portuguese is plagiarized directly from the company profile — which is a bummer because this is a general history and not a breakout of the company’s profile in-country here.

The Koreans are a growing presence, sending cultural missions and such like — much as the Dutch punctuated their trade propositions recently with sponsorship of the carnival celebration in Recife, once briefly under Dutch rule.

The governments of Brazil and the U.S. are negotiating a broadening of their deal for U.S. access to the rocket-launching base at Alcântara, in Maranhão. The package includes technology transfer over ten years.

Technology transfer makes the Brazilians happy, and has been a sticking point in its procurement of new jet fighters for the FAB — narrowed down to the French Rafale, the Swedish Griffen, and the good old F-16.

Pasquinades | “The XVIth Century Yiddish Blog”

An interesting article from the Spanish-language EFE news agency on “the blog as literary genre” — a topic I sometimes pretend to have an opinion about.

• El pasquín, el “blog” del siglo XVI que los ultraortodoxos usan en el XXI | Ana Cárdenes, EFE, 8/4/10 (Centro de Estudios de Medios, Argentina).

I translate.

Hundreds of posters cover the walls of the ultraorthodox Jewish neighborhood of  Mea Shearim, a world in which the banishment of radio, TV and blogs on religious grounds has made the pasquínade a principal mode of communication.

I always like to point to medieval scholiae — interlinear and marginal commentary — and the study of reader-annotated books in Victorian England as similar examples.

These pasquinades, written in Hebrew and Yiddish, often anonymous and full of satire, are an essential means of disseminating information among members of the isolated ultraorthodox community, whose rigorous interprettion of Jewish law prevents the use of other media.

The ban on looking at photographs of women or listening to their singing — along with the general believe that ‘everything new is prohibited by the Torah’ — inspires many haredim (literally, ‘the fearful’ of God) to turn their backs on secular media, depending on the posters for information.

Garcia-Márquez, En Mala Hora, is a fine literary exploration of this same mechanism.

‘It’s like blogging to them, what one pasquinade says may be rebutted in another, and many are signed with pen names. They cannot use the Internet, and if they want to publish something and be sure everyone reads it, they use the pasquinade,’  explains Menachem Friedman, an academic expert on the subject at Bar Ilan University.

Actually, since the genre predates the Internet by centuries and centuries, it might be more useful to view blogs as just an outgrowth of the pasquinade in an electronic format.

If you think of the blog as merely a piece of digital paper, it is not as surprising that people will use it to create texts in just about any genre that you can think of. A blogged tragedy is a tragedy is a tragedy so long as it has anagnorisis and stuff

Born in XVIth century Italy as a response to Catholic authorities,. its use among the ultraorthodox  was popularized by Mea Shearim, in downtown Jerusalem, in the  XIXth in the former Palestine.  The community rejected the first stirrings of Zionism out of a belief that the state of Israel should not be created before the coming of the Messiah.

What is geolocation tagging but a 21st century version of the old hobo codes?