Author: Tom

Some final thoughts on the “Reset” stuff — mine and de Tocqueville’s There is a short animation that came out recently about the “Great Reset” aka Covid operation and how it could evolve into some kind of permanent totalitarian dystopia. The film has some moments, but I think that, in the end, they get it…

Taking life as it comes day by day Cats and dogs love routine. They must eat at every day roughly at the same hour, take a walk or play at roughly the same hours, sleep at the same hour, etc. They find it strange if people or places around them change too much. Cats in…

I’ve written about movies, books, politics but I haven’t written as much about Barcelona as I would have liked. But I’ve been here several times already and I’m not really doing tourism, plus I’m not exactly in Barcelona, but in a suburb coastal town thirty minutes away. People in this suburban town don’t tend to…

Maybe both – an analysis of two versions of “Dune” I re-watched the other day “Dune” — not the recent version, but the 1984 version by David Lynch. Then I watched only the first 20 or 30 minutes of the new “Dune” (2021) and could not go on. I had disliked the previous movies that…

The decade when everything changed I am a child of the 1980s and 1990s, so the sixties were already a distant memory when I was growing up. Perhaps a stronger memory than it is now, as it was closer in time, but still only a memory. A few things, such as certain rock bands, or…

A time of discoveries, from Tintin to MAD Magazine The recent death of Al Jaffee at 102 years of age (who retired at 100, after a record-breaking 73-year long career) brought back to my mind the time I read old and new numbers of Mad magazine at the Library of the ICBNA, or Brazilian-North American…

A reflection, a Latin Mass, and a dream A reflection Today is Easter. I am here in Barcelona, or rather in a smaller place in the coast near Barcelona. It is sunny and warm enough, around 20 degrees Celsius. In fact, too sunny. It seems it hasn’t rained in Catalonia for several weeks or perhaps…

A tale of contrasting stereotypes There are at least two Europes: Northern Europe, and Southern Europe. (Maybe three, counting Eastern Europe, which is also a different universe altogether, but not one that I am very familiar with.) So, here, I will talk only about the North and the South. I’m fascinated by the Northern European…

And now for something completely different I don’t like so much to write about politics. It feels a bit dirty, and it gets old very fast. In the long run, it is not so important as it seems at first. In general, I prefer to discuss deeper cultural, historical and social issues, or really, just…

Finland joins the new Cold War The good news is that prime minister Sanna Marin was voted out. The bad news is that it doesn’t matter, because, after decades of neutrality even during the Cold War, Finland has joined NATO.  I don’t even know who’s the new Finnish prime minister, but I’m glad that Sanna…