Just returned from watching the band Califone play a live soundtrack to their Sundance-selected film All My Friends are Funeral Singers at Lincoln Hall. The film lives in the world of the supernatural, with superstitions lingering on the screen (e.g. It’s bad luck to say ‘pig’ on a fishing boat) followed by clips relevant to the particular lores. Most of the clips take place in the home of Zel, a fortune teller. Zel lives with a group of ghosts who help the business by lending their other worldly powers to call winning horses for a comical gambler (desperate and sleazy in turns), heal headaches, and channel the voices of dead loved ones. The ghosts, perpetually dressed in white, play soulful, urgent, surreal music in rooms throughout the quaintly decorated home — music that was, in this instance, played live by the band and filled the large acoustic room.

The film and music are both experimental, but keep from being overly meandering. While the film introduces many open-ended questions and artistic sequences, the character definitions are clear and there is a linear and accessible story arc, as Zel and the ghosts realize that the ghosts, who Zel embraces as family, are trapped inside the house by a legacy spell that thwarts the ghosts’ newfound desire to move on. The band members (Joe Adamik, Jim Becker, Ben Massarella, Tim Rutili) multi-tasked between multiple instruments (note the contraption of bells inside the briefcase above) and vocals. Califone has a previous track record of performing cinematic music, having contributed live improvised soundtracks to silent films.

Afterward, the band played songs from their new album, eponymous after the film. Due to the configuration of the equipment — facing the movie screen — the band was forced to play the whole set with their backs to the audience! (The band extended a joke and their apologies.)

Califone plays again on March 10th at the same venue, this time as a concert instead of as a live soundtrack.

“The effects of global warming have touched every continent. Drought and deserts are spreading, while from the other floods and hurricanes unseen before the previous decades have now become frequent.” (Haveeru Online)

This statement is surprisingly lacking in rancor. Although something may be is lost in the transition from tape to text, this does not really all that inflammatory a statement. No conspiracy theories? No mocking our decadence? Perhaps, some of the tone was lost in the transcription. Regardless of the quality of Usama’s rhetoric, his mention of climate change raises an interesting question: could anthropogenic climate change incite terrorism against the industrial west?

Likely not. For instance, should Pakistan’s water supply reduce to a few precarious trickles due to thinning glaciers, bombing Manchester, Düsseldorf, or Los Angeles for their backlog of carbon dioxide emissions would not do much to solve that. Instead, Pakistani terrorists (or armies, for that matter) would turn their attention to dams up the Indus River, in Kashmir—a measure that quenches thirsts for both water and revenge. In a worst-case scenario, climate change-induced violence would not be primarily be turned outwards at India but would erupt between provinces within Pakistan—already tension exists between Sindh and the Punjab over the latter’s sizable diversions from the Indus River.

The security threat from climate change comes from the exacerbation of current environmental tensions, not any sort of east vs. west—or north vs. south—struggle. In a recent video put online by the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate highlights climate change will increase the need for American military expenditures; clashes of civilization go unmentioned.

They also go almost unmentioned in Usama’s recent video. Instead, he criticizes the major global corporations for their role not only in CO₂ emissions as well as the economic downtown. While this may seem a moderation of views, we need to remember that these statements are part of the same rhetorical universe as Ayman al-Zawahiri’s 2008 statement“How brutal and greedy the Western Crusader world is, with America at its top.”

Al-Qa‘ida’s rhetoric conforms to what Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit termed occidentalism, the reduction of Western civilization as a means of dehumanization. Typical tropes depict the Western society as passionlessly and mechanistically organized, yet at the same time embroiled in sin. Buruma and Margalit trace its intellectual roots to German Romantics resisting the French incursion under Napoleon, who was still seen as the of French revolutionary rationalism. To counter the perceived dryness of this outlook and rouse the nation for war, they espoused a philosophy of moralistic heroism in defense of the nation.

A corporate, industrialized society licentiously changing atmospheric chemistry at the expense of global welfare seems a ready-made occidentalist message, and indeed climate change-based rhetoric was often at the fore of the Copenhagen conference last December. As Sudan’s Lumumba Stanislas Dia-Ping said, the conference’s proposed remedies were “a solution based on values, the very same values in our opinion that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces [and] asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries.” (Guardian). Dia-Ping also has an answer for those who say that it’s hypocritical for the Sudanese ambassador to argue in such a manner:

Dia-Ping struggles, in contrast to those faceless right-wing newspapers! Although I’m hardly familiar enough with Sudanese political history to comment on Dia-Ping’s personal history, I am familiar enough with its economics. Sudan, Venezuela, and Bolivia consistently positioned themselves as the voice for “the millions of common masses.” However, in light of the UK Climate Secretary Ed Miliband’s comments after the Copenhagen conference, these nations, along with China, did the most to undermine the proceedings. How has it gone unmentioned that these countries’ economies rely on exporting fossil fuels? And that China—Miliband’s main target of critique—buys sixty percent of Sudan’s oil output?

As much as Dia-Ping and company like to excoriate the developed world for the carbon dioxide it’s amassed in our atmosphere, such occidentalist rhetoric merely masks the profit motives that ultimately lie behind countries like Sudan’s opposition to current actions on climate change.

What’s Naomi Klein doing in the video above, though? How do climate-based critiques of the West impact the West? Next week’s installment will find out.

When Guinea gained its independence from France in 1958 Ahmed Sékou Touré became the its first president. He rejected French colonial influence. In a stroke of anti-colonialism he decided to implement a deliberate reversal of French rule and law. Everything, including basic sanitation was reversed. Touré sent the country into an unending spiral of poverty. When his despotic rule was finally overthrown in 1984, it seemed to be too late to undo the effects of his ruinous policies, which seemed to throw Guinea back into a lawless, feudal era.

This country is a classical example of the paradox of plenty. It has a plethora of natural resources including gold, bauxite, gems and petroleum. While only 29.5% of its population is literate. This statistic is heavily slanted in favor of the country’s men. About 42% of the literate are men, while the percentage of literate women barely breaks the double digits. Almost half of the country’s population lives below the international poverty line. Every resource is exported from this country. The sand from Conakry beaches are dug up and exported. Everything is also imported, evidenced by the unbelievable cost of food. The current exchange rate is 455 Guinea francs to the dollar.

Guinea has very little infrastructure including waste disposal. Most impoverished residents defecate in the ocean, and trash-strewn streets are an inescapable part of life.
Potential foreign partners remain wary of investing in the country due to its widespread corruption. Yet there are investors, particularly the International Chinese Fund who are working to develop much needed industry in this country.

Guinea was once known as a beautiful country. Vestiges of its colonial beauty can still be seen in Conakry, underneath layers of trash. Outside of the city, well into the countryside Guinea exhibits every shade of green. Its wild, natural beauty is apparent in its lush forests and waterfalls. It seems impossible that such unremitting poverty and beauty can exist in the same country.

True to the seemingly impossible legend that it was once a beautiful country, Guinea is home to a population of mixed women: the Puelle. The heritage of these women often comprises three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe. Stories abound of how they made foreign men give up their families in Europe and chase after them. They drove these men mad. In local lore, there is the story of a maddened German man, who wanders the streets of Conakry. Mixed children flit through the rubbish-strewn streets.

My friend and her family lived in Guinea for several years. They left shortly after the coup, which occurred in December 2009. My friend describes Conakry, the nation’s capital as, “A —hole”. Trash fills the street. When it rains— and the rain is torrential, as it wont to be in the tropics— several feet of water and trash mix and flood the streets. The nearby beach cannot escape the ubiquitous trash.

The meager progress and development being made in this country was halted by the violent coup of December 2009. The veiled autocracy, disguised as a democracy, passed into a phase of military junta. The coup and its ramifications for this fragile country will be discussed in the second installment of this article.

Marie Brown contributed reporting

Trip date will be cemented based on a democratic process. Possible open dates are Feb. 1, Feb. 5, Feb. 8, and Feb. 11. Please e-mail editor@diskordchicago.com to vote on a date and receive e-mail updates.

Call me a cynic, but market forces say that when the going rate for student information is high, people with access to it are probably selling it. And think about it: You’re tech savvy. You have admin access privileges to the e-mail of everyone you see at the gym. It’s been a long day. You want to have a little fun, harmless snooping at someone else’s expense — find out what kinds of listhosts they’re subscribed to, what websites they’ve visited recently, and whether she hasn’t responded to your e-mail because she hasn’t checked it today or if she’s simply ignoring you …. if you had the power, wouldn’t you?

I met with Bob Bartlett, the University of Chicago’s Director of Network Based Resources at Network Services & Information Technology (NSIT), to find out. Bartlett built the U. of C.’s mail system, and according to him, potential snooping by NSIT is the least of our problems, and only the tip of the iceberg. Sun MicroSystems CEO Scott McNealy is reported to have said  “Privacy is dead.” Bartlett believes this is sad, but almost true. There are a handful of people at NSIT (about 4 or 5) who, by their job description, have to be able to access the mail system to do their jobs, and are able to look at our e-mails and information.

“What’s the market value of the information?” I asked.

“Market value is probably pretty good,” Bartlett replied.

“If someone were to sell this information, could we track down the culprit?”

“No. I guarantee you that nowhere could you find out what happened.”

There is a permissions system in place at NSIT, where technicians must have permission from lawyers before accessing certain information. There is auditing in multiple places, with the exception of when the system is in “imminent danger,” in which case certain people have the right to go in to fix the problem.

“But how will the lawyers know if you are looking at information unauthorized?” I asked. “They’re not techs.”

“It’s really a personnel issue,” Bartlett replied.

In NSIT’s defense, Barlett asserts that “the people who are in charge of mail systems tend to be privacy advocates.” This includes the security technicians as well as the lawyers. For the truly privacy-conscious, what should be disconcerting is that there are about a dozen places that e-mail is routed through (regardless of where you are sending e-mail to and from) before reaching its final destination, meaning there are about a dozen points at which a group of people in a room somewhere have access to the network just the same as NSIT. Mail can very easily be sniffed as it goes through.

“So if I stole 8 billion dollars from the government, and I wanted to tell somebody about it but I didn’t want my e-mail to be read by anyone else, is there any way to do it?” I asked.

“The only way to do it is to use strong encryption on your message body,” he replied.

Bartlett says that encrypting e-mail is “always a good idea.” (The idea being that if you only encrypt sensitive information … it’s pretty obvious that you’re encrypting the important stuff.) The encryption breaks down if the person who responds to your e-mail doesn’t have encryption enabled, and the body of your e-mail is sitting in the response.

The challenge with e-mail encryption is social, not technical. For the system to work, the people who send encrypted messages to each other must all exchange something called a GPG key. It is, of course, unsafe to send this key via e-mail, but transmitting a copy via a USB key would work.

The most critical security issue, however, and one that happens all of the time, is theft. The easiest way to hack into a system is at the source. The way to safeguard against this, again, is by encrypting your hard drive.

Bartlett asserts that, anyway, the NSIT staff are busy and have more important things to do than read private e-mails. Among the technical challenges that NSIT faces, 67%-85% of the mail which comes into the University is regarded as spam. This is comparable across universities. A typical day for NSITers is spent battling hackers who have set up botnets to have zombie computers send us the latest on Cialis. On Tuesday, the University received 55,000 mail messages in 20 minutes. It is not the students’ fault for signing up with too many websites. Spam is an arms race between spammers trying to make messages stealthier and counter measures. When the mail system is slow, it likely has nothing to do with the number of people on campus simultaneously clicking “Inbox” and “Send”.

“Why does the University even give us e-mail accounts?” I asked, referencing the multitude of free e-mail accounts that are available.

“Until recently, it was desirable to try to give students accounts,” Bob replied.

Now, a good half of U of C students use Gmail but this was not the case when the mail system was built.

Bottom line? Yes, some people at NSIT can read our e-mails. And see what websites we’ve been to and whether we’ve Googled ourselves lately. If you’re interested in keeping your e-mail private from someone with the power to read your e-mails at NSIT specifically, it can’t hurt to use another e-mail provider. On the other hand, if it’s important to keep the e-mail private from everyone but the intended recipient, encrypting the exchange is the only way.

The year’s technology: hands-on and hassle free.

This past week the streets of America have been abuzz with technological news regarding items that until recently, we never knew we needed, but now, will never be able to live without. One such item has been the Apple iPad—the iPhone with the really big screen and a personal message that says, “Hey, you, average consumer. Give us more of your money for redundant-but -flashy gizmos. Love, Apple”. But that is not the technological wonder I am recommending you today. No, this device of which I speak is far more humane and comforting than the feel of cold steel and plexiglass in your palm.

Meet Roxxxy, the lady robot powered for your own hands-on experience. Marketers have labeled her the most advanced talking sex robot yet. According to her home at TrueCompanion.com, she comes complete with soft silicone “skin”, voice recognition and speech-synthesis software, and even 5 distinct personalities in varying friskiness to match the consumer’s, er, preferences. She even has sensors in her womanly organs that are to gather a vocal response when touched. Barring any major malfunctions, and as long as her battery doesn’t run out, she is yours for about $7,000. While her creators have assumed that Roxxxy is only meant for a niche clientele (or at least one hopes) preorders have been flooding in, in the thousands, since her debut at the Las Vegas Adult Entertainment Expo last month.

This story is disturbing on so many levels, but where to begin? For me, personally, it’s not the idea that there are thousands of lonely (and gullible) men who are actually eager to spend $7,000 on a sex robot than say, on a high end prostitute, who is, at the very least, a real-live person. (I’m not trying to make an argument for prostitution; I’m only trying to argue the alternatives to such an investment). Rather, it’s the idea that today’s technology, as embodied by Roxxxy, can be manipulated and marketed to replace what is arguably the most human and intimate of functions—human procreation. Now, in 2010, there is no real need for single, lonely men who “have trouble meeting girls” to do anything to establish a real personal connection with a member of the opposite sex if they consider the idea just too horrifying or haven’t left their house for the past two months since they’ve started to build the next supercomputer by hand.

Similarly, the iPhone application Brushes offers “mobile painting”, and such “paintings” have actually appeared on the cover of the New Yorker several times. Why bother, Brushes argues, with years of training and tuition and messy paints when all you need is a gizmo on an iPhone? Once again, with the right amount of greenbacks and with not a whole lot of self-esteem, technology is trying to make things that are supposed to be difficult, very easy. Creating and sustaining relationships that might involve sex can be one of the most exhaustive things one can ever do, and yet, today, a high-tech blow-up doll has managed to do just that. Roxxxy may never turn into a real live human being, but hey, at least we humans are willing to settle for what we pay for, without having to put in too much effort. A Brushes painting may have not taken the training or contemplation that a normal painting would require, but if the New Yorker can put it on its cover, then clearly then it must be art enough, no? In other words, we’re finding all kinds of ways for the instrumentality of technology to replace tasks that would usually require input from our emotions, our moral judgment and human esthetic, and I’m starting to wonder if one day we’d like to get rid of these purely human capacities altogether. Just as long as we get the job done, we’re starting to care less and less how it’s done.

Well, as with my take on sex with robots, I think I’ll just have to say no.

The progressive case for nuclear power is fairly simple—it’s better than coal. Coal doesn’t just up the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air, but also rains down a more conventionally lethal cocktail of ash, uranium, thorium, arsenic, mercury and more. A 2004 EPA report estimated that coal-burning power plants kill 24,000 a year. Although nuclear waste disposal is by no means perfect, at least the industry acknowledges it is a problem to be secured. Furthermore, even when things do fail, they fail much less spectacularly: the worst American nuclear incident, at Three-Mile Island in 1979, led to no statistically significant (pdf) increase in cancer rates. As environmentalist Bill McKibben cleverly summarized it:

“We know that nuclear power represents some risk; even [nuclear energy proponent Rip] Anderson says so. But we also know by now that a new conventional coal plant offers a flat-out guarantee of environmental destruction—even if nothing goes wrong.”

What about renewables, though? Although renewables are becoming more and more capable of providing a greater share of our energy mix, it is still hard for them to provide baseload power—the constant minimum amount of electricity needed for the grid. Although some environmentalists claim that a good network of renewables can provide such power, the most advanced “supergrid” being planned—connecting the countries bordering the North Sea—will connect with such intermittent sources as wind and solar with the constantly-running Norwegian hydroelectric dams. Even as renewables provide a greater and greater share of our electricity, we’ll still need a greenhouse emission-free and reliable baseload, and (lacking Norway’s geography) that means nuclear.

Despite nuclear power’s green potential, though, the way Obama framed his energy policy was worrying. It included almost every potential energy option under the sun—or rather, under the ground. By specifically pushing for “clean coal technologies,” Obama threatens to undermine the great unsung grassroots accomplishment of the noughts: the United States’s de facto moratorium on new coal power plants. Obama’s plan, as outlined in the State of the Union, consisted mostly of carrots: more incentives, more subsidies, more power stations. Nuclear can’t simply add onto coal as the baseload electricity source—it must replace it, and that means introducing a stick. And the most effective stick would be some sort of carbon pricing.

Obama only backhandedly this, pushing for congress to “[pass] a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.” This seems like good politics on the short run, defusing concerns that energy prices will rise in a bad economy. However, by making cleaner energy investments—be they in nuclear power, renewable electricity, or energy efficiency—dependent on the whims of congressional budget committees, such a “positive” approach makes change in the long run more difficult.

Increased subsidies are no substitute for a price on carbon which would level the playing field in favor of more efficient and less-greenhouse gas intensive methods of electricity production and consumption. And more importantly, it would make it easier for actors independent of the government—individuals and businesses—to make green investments. And it would make the sort of subsidies that make fossil fuel backers and fiscal conservatives chafe at nuclear and renewable subsidies less necessary.

One would think this sort of libertarian paternalism would appeal to the self-described conservatives in Congress. On Friday Obama confronted House Republicans over their health care proposals—a similar confrontation over the logic of energy funding needs to happen. The nuclear option may be greener than commonly assumed, but extra funding won’t make America more sustainable unless it happens in a sounder policy context. To address that, we may need to confront the legislative nuclear options.

Even though I was born in Boston, I spent my early years in the town of North Andover, in northeastern Massachusett’s Essex County. Full of greenery, winding roads, old cottages and a Congregationalist church, it is also home to not a few ostentatious houses and parking spaces. A quasi-rural part of Greater Boston, North Andover is classic New England exurbia. Pickup trucks were a regular part of the landscape. Although my family might have struck outsiders as classic Bay Staters during the Dukakis years—Greek-American liberals with a Volvo (and Dad’s a professor to boot)—pickup trucks were a regular part of my landscape. Thinking back to North Andover today, I’m not at all surprised that 64% of its voters supported Scott Brown. My big question isn’t why they voted for Brown, but why North Andover doesn’t follow the rest of America’s exurbs and vote red more often.

If the Brown election was exceptional, it was only because Martha Coakley fashioned a uniquely unlikeable self-image. As Cheneyesque Brown’s views on torture may be, Coakley’s rudeness was much more alienating to the Massachusetts electorate. Brown’s better-fashioned image made it easy to overlook the venality of his platform, and American voters have often favored persona over policy. Brown’s anti-tax message was interpreted by Bay Staters as representing “fiscal responsibility”—what better way to reduce the deficit than by not spending the money to reduce it and blocking efforts to reduce the cost of Medicare? This inability to do subtraction is a well-entrenched aspect of American political economy. People in Massachusetts, it turns out, are Real Americans^TM after all.

Thus we have the panic amongst the Democrats about losing “Middle America.” As noted above, North Andover certainly looks Middle American enough. Did I forget to mention that North Andover’s almost 95% white? As Reagan sppechwriter Peggy Noonan opined observed of Brown, “He’s a regular guy, looks like an American.”

Now we’ve hit something. Although this doesn’t explain why North Andover usually votes blue, demography might be part of the reason for the Republican turn in less urbanized areas in Massachusetts—and for the exurbs’ conservatism nationwide. The New Republic’s Thomas B. Edsall quotes Robert Powell, a sociologist (appropriately enough) at Harvard: “New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’” This is a familiar story to any urban geographer and historian—Chicago is the classic example. Edsall argues that white “hunkering down” is responsible for the emergence of the Tea Party movement as a national force. “The demographic transformation of the country and the birth of multicultural America have made this group extremely status anxious—an anxiety that the recession obviously heightens.” Even if we don’t accept Edsall’s argument that the anti-health care backlash is rooted in the fear of a transfer of wealth and benefits from white to non-white communities, the geographical implications of the Massachusetts vote are obvious: Massachusetts already pays for its own health care—why should it pay for other states’?

Even when people “hunker down” in a city, though, urban density makes juxtapositions inevitable. Obviously there’s tension (which sometimes erupts), but proximity also has a way of breaking down barriers between groups. In a city, a conversation between a Greek-American, a Uyghur-American, and a Cambodian-American is completely possible (as a matter of fact, it happened in Cambridge last summer). Cosmopolitanism is more likely in the polis.

When we deal with statewide and nationwide politics, however, different patterns emerge. It’s hard to breach ethnic barriers when communities are separated by the interstates and where random encounters are limited to the mall and supermarket. As the de facto segregation of the northern urban areas demonstrates, this has been an issue for over a half-century. The internet doesn’t make things any better—as Cass Sunstein argues in Republic.com 2.0, hunkering down is worse on the internet than anywhere else.

Older, white voters were among Brown’s strongest supporters (pdf). The country is changing into something unfamiliar, and they are discomforted by it. This is not necessarily active racism, , but rather a vague sense that things should continue to be as they are. Of course Massachusetts has a strong history of active racism: the last person who held “the people’s seat” was pelted with tomatoes by his constituents over school busing, in very urban Boston no less. Such racial conflicts led to the spatial segregation we have today. So it takes more than an urban zip code to be a cosmopolitan—it requires stepping out of one’s perceptual shell in order to view to world in a broader way.

Brown’s victory does nothing to change the broad demographic trends that are reshaping the country. Whites will no longer be an ethnic majority, and almost a fifth of our citizens will be foreign-born. It is our generation’s task to redefine Middle America as the meeting place between peoples, not the provenance of one race and history. Not only does our nation have great potential for cosmopolitanism, it has great need for it. If Americans decide to hunker down, whatever challenges facing the nation as a whole will go unrecognized, and whatever satisfaction that comes from crouching with our own kind will be false comfort at best.

One such place is Guell Park, built by none other than Gaudí. Climbing to heights of this magical park, even on a cold day, you are serenaded by jazz musicians and the Andalusian specialty: Flamenco. With each new winding height of this park- Barcelona unfolds before you. You can barely see skyscrapers atop and even higher mountain in the distance, frequently visited by the city’s cable car. As you descend the hill, going further into the park you can hear Steel Pans in the distance. The scene is both romantic and idiosyncratic as a nearby cat avidly licks itself on a bench. The park exhibits the playful flair that immortalized Gaudí- ceilings appear to mushroom over you, and nearby houses look edible, as if it belonged in the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel.

The old Gothic Quarter in the heart of downtown offers a maze of narrow streets, each a world upon to themselves. Food is plentiful and delicious, particularly from a market the lines the city’s most famous avenue: La Rambla. Spain’s reputation for its pork is validated in this city, particularly when it is served on a baguette. Paella’s reputation is also validated here as well, just as long as you bypass the unfrozen dishes served to unsuspecting tourists on La Rambla; head to seaside cafes instead for the real thing.

An unexpected calmness overcame me for the three days that I spent in this city, despite the nightly rituals of drunken teenagers cursing each other in Catalan whilst sitting on the floors of subway cars. Even despite the men standing on La Rambla shrouded in darkness, offering alcohol, drugs and sex. It was a calm which I could just barely glean in Rome and never in New York City. Indeed my friend and I wondered why we both felt so comfortable in a city and country we had never set foot in, besides the fact that it was the first time in months we could actually communicate with people in a language that we knew. By the last day we finally figured it out: it was the New York of Europe.

Barcelona is a vibrant city crawling all throughout the year with tourists. But like New York and unlike Rome, it is able to completely absorb the crush of tourists that throng the city. Barcelona is trendy, with chic modern restaurants and hip clothing shops lining the old gothic neighborhoods. It’s marked by a diversity that I had not encountered for months in Europe. It is also very artsy. In one handbag store, a young man sat cutting leather pieces for new bags. The finished products were funky, incredible and one of a kind. Stores and [the numerous] art galleries regularly throw open their doors for city events, to preserve the Catalan language and heritage, and to host programs to help Barcelona dwellers break addictions.

Late at night, perhaps midnight, after several glasses of Sangria and hopping from one tapas bar to another, there’s nothing funnier than having your drunken waiter (made to look sober by his even drunker colleague) deliver your Tapas and tell you, “you look like you could be from Brazil.”