A Casa Caiu

This blog is pretty much defunct, but I have a good story to tell and I think I can tell it quickly.  Those are pretty much the parameters these days.  I have lots of stories but not the time nor the focus to get them out.  I think maybe this blog has run its course, maybe, like a book, I should give it an ending.  Or like a novela, the famous Brazilian prime-time soap operas.  Unlike an American TV show, which keeps going until the ratings drop enough, novelas run their course and wind themselves up in less than a year.  Evani's current favorite just ended tonight, not even a half hour ago.

But not yet.  I'm not ready to give up the ghost.  I've got twelve followers and by gum, I won't let you down!!

Anyhow, the story.

Yesterday a building in a neighborhood near where my wife grew up a building blew up.  Literally.  A three story, steel and concrete building exploded.  Here's a picture:

As you might imagine, this is big news even in a place as crazy as Bahia.  One guy died and several others, including two young girls, were injured.

What happened?  is you eminently logical question, and I will tell you.  Apparently they were making espadas there, these completely insane homemade fireworks that are basically gunpowder packed into a bamboo tube, lit like an enormous sparkler.  They make their appearance at São João, the big party that rolls around at the end of June.  Here's an example, this video was shot in the neighborhood where the house blew up:

I'm not a big fan of São João, I've whined about it on this blog in the past, it's a freakin' month of my life listening to homemade fireworks go off and I have come to loathe it.  I heard some fireworks last night and cringed - it's starting again.

However, this business of the espadas (better known as 'guerra de espada' or 'war of the swords') is just madness and stupidity as far as I'm concerned.  I'm sorry, but no civilized place should let people run around in public with homemade rocket bombs of considerable calibre in residential neighborhoods where they could, you know, burn or blind people, which happens all the time.  You only need to watch 30 seconds of the video above to see what I'm talking about, but if you watch a bit more you'll see the cop cars on the scene, doing fuck all about it.

But hey, I'm a 40-something fuddy duddy and I don't get it.  The people who are into this are really into it, it's an insane adrenaline rush apparently.  And plus, what's the worst that could happen?

Well, you could blow up and die and take a whole building down with you, and you could cause the deaths of innocent people which thank goodness didn't happen yesterday.  They're trying to figure out if the neighboring buildings will also have to be torn down as they suffered structural damage in the explosion.

So that's a pretty good story, right?  Well, it gets better.  One of the guys who lives, I mean lived, in the house?  I know him.  He's a graffiteiro.  And a cop to boot.  There's actually a picture of him on this blog, but I'm not going to tell you where.  I found out about this whole thing because Facebook lit up with people wanting to help him out because his house blew up.  The two girls who were injured were his nieces.  As for me, I'm going to wait and see.  I don't know what his involvement was, but as you may have noticed from my tone I don't think highly of building homemade explosives in residential neighborhoods with kids in the house.  This guy is one of the nicest people I've ever met and I'm sure he wouldn't intentionally harm anyone, especially his own family.  Oh wait - he's a police officer now.  Maybe he would hurt someone.

I'm an American, more specifically a UnitedStatesian, citizen of one of the most reviled and warlike nations on the planet.  We blow people up, things get blown up, we shoot people, etc.  Who hates the Brazilians?  Nobody, except maybe some Argentinians, and that's mostly over soccer feuds.  Who is Brazil going to war with?  Nobody.  Who's blowing up bombs in Brazil?  Why, that would be the Brazilians.  Whole lot of shooting going on in Brazil, whole lot of dying going on here, and it's all internal, all self-inflicted you could say.

There's a joke about God as he's making the Earth, he makes this amazing paradise that has no earthquakes, no volcanoes or hurricanes, and that's Brazil.  One of the angels asks him if that's really fair and God says: Don't worry, wait until you see the people I put there.  That's pretty mean, and also pretty funny.  But seriously Brazil?  At least take 'Order and Progress' off of your flag.

From My Window

I heard someone crying in the street, so I went to have a look.

I see a man holding a revolver, pointed at the ground.  I think he lives on the street, but I don't really recognize him.  He walks into a building across the street, reemerges with the gun in his waistband.  He walks away.

The crying woman faints.  She is lowered into a chair by a group of women, who try to revive her.  There is some confusion, one of our neighbors herds her child into the house, but stays on the street herself.  Suddenly she cries out, and I see that one of the teenage mothers on the street is carrying a rock.  She's also carrying her baby.

The rock apparently is intended as a weapon, because a scuffle ensues, with four or five women pushing and pulling on the woman, the rock, and each other.  I am worried that the baby is going to be dropped, but he is plucked out of the arms of his mother by another teenager.  He starts howling.

Confusion reigns for a bit.  The teenage mother is chased back down the street away from her presumed target, who may or may not have been the crying woman.  I have no idea.

This last bit I'm not even sure I saw properly. It looked like the same girl who took the baby from her mother, still carrying the baby, picked up a beer bottle and smashed it on the ground, so she was carrying the broken bottle neck.  She disappeared from view, walking down the hill, with the baby and the broken bottle.

Nothing much happened after that.

Oh, those silly spammers

Nothing like a brainless post when I have better things to do...
So I just got this lovely comment on my skylights post:

 I'm glad that you did something about your roof. The metal's corroded and deteriorated. I'm sure anytime soon, water will start dripping from your roof when the rainy season comes. I think it's a good decision that you choose a skylight for your new roof. It'll let ambient light in, that will save you money. Plus, it won't corrode as fast as a normal metal roof.

This is the third one like this - it looks like a comment, but it's really spam. Actually, it's not exactly spam, it's a clever attempt to boost a site's SEO - that is, Search Engine Optimization. It links back, not to a housewife in Cleveland, or Ceará for that matter, but rather to a website for some roofing business. 

And I've gotten three - from three different roofing companies.  They're on a roll.

WTF, people - didn't you read the post??  My roof has no corroded metal because until I installed these skylights, there was no metal in it.  Unless you count the nails.

Anyhow, these are the only comments I get these days, so maybe I should publish them anyways.