Rock the Police

Spring, 2011. Erin filmed his brother Matt and his cousin Billy while they made a guitar duel. But it was a somewhat unorthodox duel, as they were reenacting a slow motion medieval sword fight with the guitars as weapons, planning to speed it up in post production. Matt's character was the defendant, protecting his "castle", a two storey house with a large balcony and a long lateral rampart. He was wearing a "suit of armor" composed of a wool jacket and a hat.

One of the most dramatic scenes portraied Matt chasing Billy along the rampart with a sideways climatic duel where one tried to shove the other off to the first floor! An epic scene to watch, but ridiculous to make. The problem was that somebody saw Matt, a guy with a black hat, exiting the house by the second floor window carrying a guitar.

While Matt defended Billy's blows driving him backwards towards the street, a police car discretely stopped on the other side of the road and one policeman started looking at the scene, where two fat guys struck each other with guitars while another fatty filmed them. Billy paused the production and respectfully asked the police officer if there were any problem. "What are you doing there?" Asked him authoritatively. "We're a rock band, we're making a video". With a combination of amusement and frustration, making the funniest face expression possible, he said "Your video got me a call!"

Four more cars arrived,  a swarm of twenty policemen with machine guns and rifles filled the street moving all around, some laughing, some serious, some angry. As it is their procedure, the first policeman got Billy's ID to look for some previous record, but there was nothing to be found as the squeaky clean nerd had never done anything remotely wrong in his entire life.

"You were recording a rock video? You tape stuff on the cemetery, right?"

That somebody called the police because three fat idiots tried to film a funny clip.

Without any police record, the cops just went away, leaving behind an interrupted film, a scared neighborhood and a story to tell.

The final video was completed a week later and it's available on YouTube today. Viewer discretion is advised.

https://youtu.be/dxB1eCSNRyU

The Oyster Incident

Salty water touched the shore as people enjoyed the summer on Tumble Beach, in Brazil. Two brothers played in the water to cool their bodies down, as the sun was particularly hot this day. Wilhelm and Christof jumped and dove through the strong waves always paying attention to not end up too far into the ocean. And so they did, controlling the distance responsibly, not letting the water go past their chest. But as it often is, they forgot to account a simple factor - lateral displacement. Tumble Beach is well known for their underwater holes that act as traps to unaware tourists. More and more to the right, the distracted brothers found themselves deep enough in the water to not be able to step on the beach floor without submerging their heads! And the waves were strong enough to overcome their efforts to swim to safety! Even worse, there wasn't any beach left in that direction, as large rocks filled the shoreline! Wilhelm, whose large body was not prepared to prolonged physical efforts, wasn't able to maintain himself over water for too long, so Christof, who was a lot smaller, pulled him up a few times, as desperation tried to take over. Observing their unusual struggle, a couple of surfers offered help and dragged them both closer to the shore, where they could walk. Phew! Finally this was over and... Whoosh! Tidal waves started to throw them on the rocks! They grabbed and held on, but alas! the rocks were covered in oysters! Sharp inch-long oysters that pierced their skin while the waves threw them around again and again! Now, Christof, stuck in a hole, started to get scared! Wilhelm, climbing over the rock, slicing his flesh on the oysters, tried to save his brother, but it was no use as the waves threw them around as if the sea wanted to claim them back as her own! What would be of the brothers? Here comes the surfers for the rescue again! and Wilhelm let Christof go first, as a lighter body got thrown around more easily by the waves! With their feet on dry sand again, the brothers counted their blessings and ran off to treat their wounds, as their legs were covered by slices and blood, a little reminder of the respect the ocean demanded.

Faceplant

A beautiful and warm evening composes the background of the scene as a 7 year-old boy gets home with his mother by bus. As the bus stops and opens its doors, a fire starts to burn in the boy's heart and he jumps off of it, landing perfectly on the sidewalk. The two meter jump feels like a world record on the sparkle from the eyes of a curious little man. This was the first physics experiment of an amateur scientist.

Five years later, the results of that research were all but lost when the now 11 year-old remembers his greatest achievement riding the bus with his mom again. The memory of the thrill comes back to him followed by an unstoppable desire to feel it one more time. On a busy boulevard, trying to save time, the bus driver opens the door a few seconds before arriving at the bus stop. The opportunity is given and the boy jumps from his mother's side towards the freedom of the outdoors! The parabolical trajectory perfectly connects when the jump is done. The young scientist forgot to account for one simple factor: momentum. An object in motion tends to remain in motion and the 20km/h human body connects his face with the asphalt, and continues it's forward trajectory surfing the road with his nose and forehead.

Another experiment with an interesting result: Do not jump off a moving bus.

Humility vs Arrogance

Imagine: You are in a fancy restaurant for a romantic date. The French waiter delicately handles you the menu so you can order the desired dish between these two options: cow fertilizer or cockroach salad. Which one would you choose? Which dish would you like the most? We do that kind of choices every day, not having a third not absurd option, save abstinence.  

In silence, I've witnessed absurd debates charged by improvised and unfounded arguments. What people (have the audacity to) call "music" nowadays is closer to growls and rumbles to actual music and, listening to the arguments of the "oppression of the brazilian funk by the modern country music" or how the brazilian funker is "unrightfully marginalized", being compared to tattooed people a few decades ago, make evident most people's complete alienation from the real world that treat their microscopic perception of reality as irrefutable truths, independent from what is shown by their own eyes and ears.

"Brazillian funk is culture", they say. "You're prejudiced!", they say, sometimes only with the eyes. Culture is a word which has lost its meaning. Think of a "cult" person (ie. full of culture) and compare him with the dude that, crowning himself a regent over the city's night life,  goes around the neighborhoods making car alarms go off and obliterating the peace of those whose only sin was to live on his path. Brazilian funk isn't a kind of culture yet to be recognised and accepted by a future society, it is a cultural and intelectual dismantling caused by two types of criminal (in association with each other): primarily the leader of drug trafficking organizations inside Brazil's favelas, almost gods in their own eyes, that invest on these pseudo-singers and use their shows as money laundry, also enjoying the apology to the use of their product and the violence to their enemies that the popularization of this fenomenon provides; and, secondarily, the corrupt government, a self proclaimed enlightened elite ready to decide humanity's future, with the goal of imbecilizing the population, turning them into complete idiots easily thrown towards any direction. The absurd investment made by the government to the so called "university country musicians" also contributes to this, for even though those aren't as much of a fecal secretion as the previously mentioned genre, they revel on idiotizing lowly vocabulary and immoral themes. The popularization of those two (un)musical genres throws the people in an ever deep abyss of futility, egotism, promiscuity and alienation from where they'll probably never escape.

We don't even have to consider the extremes to see that dismantling all over the world. Once I had an argument with a student that clearly examplifies the modern youngster's mindset. This one criticized, rejected and rudely insulted my teaching method when I used a song from an especific genre to show him some practical English, extolling his own (questionable) taste over Mozart, Beethoven or Vivaldi. My reaction, driven by love to my calling and my students, was to make evident his misteken point of view. Impartially, I gathered popular music in a single "heap" making clear that what is classical is always superior to what is popular and showed him how deeply the statements "I enjoy it" and "it is good" differ from one another. What makes us grow as humans is true art, what entertains us just that, something fun, a silly thing we use to rest our thoughts. The reaction? Becoming a former student in a matter of weeks, the arrogance of which I was the object unrightfully got attributed, by cognitive parallax, to me!

And that consistently goes on.

I love to learn, I study for pleasure. Be it the bible, physics or cosmology, I read, I learn and I feel fulfilled. On the other hand, I am fully conscious of how much I do not know (truth be told: I know nothing). But when I am capable of helping someone with the little knowledge I gathered, I'm labeled arrogant.

What can we conclude from that?

An alienated person with unfounded and improvised opinions, that happens to be the same as everybody else's,  is humble. Considers himself an unbeatable and absolutely humble intellectual that, when losing an argument, travels through time and changes history transforming himself into the victim of the arrogant haughty knows-it-all that "doesn't know how to play".

The one who recognises his own ignorance and searches for knowledge, leaving behind his prejudiced opinions do make room for the truth, is the arrogant. The monster that comes to humiliate the poor bastard that, even thouh he knows everything (for he was given all the information about all things on his birth), loses the debate to his monstrous arrogance.

I do my best to be a humble person, but thats probably arrogance from my part.