Cold, dark winter

I'm quickly running out of interesting things to do here at home. But I just can't go outside. Not unless I have to. It's raining, it's windy, and it feels very, very cold. I'm just back from a common cold and I don't want to catch another one, common or worse. And sometimes the feeling is painfully cold. I'm a skinny guy — I don't have a thick layer of subcutaneous fat to insulate myself. And I don't have a bar of strong drinks at home, at my disposal. Why can't I be a fat drunk, happily oblivious to the polar wave?

I've moved Vista Rosario, as I announced, and I've been working a lot on it. I've had a lot of time. I've been checking pictures from last year, and discovered a few gems among them, such as several historical buildings whose pictures I took, at the time, because "they looked so cool" (I guess). Most of the pictures are "burned" on one side, or too dark because I didn't care about the lack of sunlight, or simply not well composed, but some are just fine. Add some Gimp-powered tampering, and voilà.

(By the way, do check out Vista Rosario, link to it, mark it as a favorite Technorati blog, StumbleUpon it, etc. It helps. If I don't promote myself, who will? Exactly.)

I've also been reading Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a very fine book, except you need to take it in small doses or your brains will be splattered on the walls. It's about self-reference in fields such as mathematics and logic, though also in other places, such as Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues. A fugue is a piece of music composed of a basic theme repeated over itself in different scales, speeds, and even directions, and Bach was a master at them. I don't dislike math or logic, and I'm just an amateur at music, but it's actually far more entertaining for me to read about Bach's incredible skills than about Gödel's Theorem.

I did not go to see the Simpsons movie, and I think I won't. I'm a huge fan of The Simpsons; I grew up with them and I can pull out Homer's quotes about all sorts of situations in a second... in the Latin American Spanish version, of course. I didn't like how they changed the voices because the Mexican dubbers were asking for a salary raise, but I could live with it. But I couldn't stand by the series when Matt Groening left and it degraded into badly executed fake intellectual comedy. Homer was a nice fool, now he's just stupid, incoherent, and nasty; the kids simply have no character anymore, and the newer episodes usually don't manage to make me laugh — something the old series achieved every ten seconds during whole episodes.

So keeping the good things for the movie while we, the loyal TV followers, are left with the trash, is not OK with me. From what I've heard, the movie is just an overproduced long episode. I'm not going to pay for that. (Maybe when I'm old and President of the Supreme Court, I will allow myself to watch it.)

In short, I think no movies and no strong drinks will make Pablo go crazy. I should go back to my old pictures...