hanging out in Brazil

It’s a foregone conclusion that Brazilian women wear bras and that lingerie stores in Brazil sell bras. It’s an obvious assumption that you can come to Brazil and purchase a bra. You shouldn’t even have to speak Portuguese to purchase a bra, you simply enter the store find a bra you like, find your size and… Well that’s where it gets complicated. In order to actually find a bra your size you must, without exception or deviation, be a cup size B. Only B cup sized bras are sold in Brazil. You probably think I exaggerate. But I don’t mean that most bras sold in Brazil are B cups, I actually mean that ONLY B cups are available for sale in Brazil, exclusively! If you are a 44C you have to buy a 46B or 48B and make do. In fact, if you are Brazilian, not knowing any better, you will naturally think that 48B is your bra size. If you are a 46D you are doomed to live your entire life stuffed into a B cup. If you are a DD your only option is a B cup! I kid you not!

Of course I had questions for the poor, blameless, unwitting sales ladies. In the first store she told me that she had, in the past, seen a few bras that had the letter C instead of the normal B, but she didn’t have any of those in the store. She had a hidden talent for expression and managed to verbally italicize the word ‘those’. In the next store the sales lady didn’t know bras came with any other letter than B, she didn’t know B was the cup size, she simply thought it was a letter they put on bra tags. Mind you, the word for bra in Portuguese does not start with the letter ‘b’.

There was a quick piece on a variety show about Brazilian women wearing the wrong bras. What do you think the show was about? Did you guess wrong bra sizes? You guessed wrong. Apparently Brazilian women wear the wrong bras not because they all wear B cups, but because when they dress they choose strapped bras when they should have gone strapless, or regular when they should have gone push up, colors, textures etc. Nothing about cup sizes! Cup sizes are simply nonexistent in Brazil, no one has ever heard of the concept.

I miss California at a whole different level now.

This blog was brought to you by the letters A, C, and D, and by the number zero.

Everyone's gone batty

Living in downtown Porto Alegre is not for the faint hearted. I refer to you to the “human sausage” post for more evidence, and if that is not enough by all means read on. One evening sitting in the living room I heard a high pitched squeak sound from the service area. After much searching I discovered it was coming from outside. Just outside the window, flying between the buildings were hundreds of small insect eating bats. They were making the high pitched noise. I stood at the window and watched them for some time, they were very beautiful. Apparently some high ranking official also thought they were beautiful sometime in the past because there is a law against killing them. At first it sounds like a great law, it keeps the insect population under control and preserves nature. And I love nature. More precisely: I love nature outside my house, nature inside my house, not so much.

Here is how the Great Bat Alarm of 2010 went down:
Me: there are bats in the air conditioner in your room.
Mom: there are no bats.
Me: there are bats in the air conditioner.
Mom: there are no bats! Stop that.
Me: there are bats in the air conditioner.
Mom: that’s nice dear, off you go.
Saskia: Sniff Sniff. Bark Bark Bark!! Can I please, pleeeaaase have the bats in the air conditioner? Please? Just one?
Mom: What do you mean there are bats in the air conditioner? That’s awful, why didn’t you say something? We have to do something about that!
Me: *sigh*

There really is no point in killing a bat that has nested in your air-conditioning unit, if you kill the current resident, someone else will soon move in. And there is really not much point in killing bats that move into the box that houses the mechanism for your roll-up shades, another solution had to be found. The bats moved in, partied all night and apparently were all male because they drank lots of beer and peed indiscriminately all over the place. Or so it seemed based on the smell emanating from the roll-up shade mechanism.

The air conditioning manufacturer had an off the shelf solution for bats inside the units. They came out, cleaned the units, installed an external housing around each unit and presto. Bats-be-gone. By the way, the housing was installed by dangling a man by his ankles out the window. Harnesses? We don’t need no stinking harnesses!

(This is the second time he dangled, he was further out of the window the first time around, but I didn’t have a camera.)

The roll up shade manufacturer said: “Bats? Yes, that’s a common problem downtown. Learn to live with it, have a nice day, call us if you need anything else. On second thought, don’t call us, we don’t really care.”

I devised, what I think is an ingenious solution to the problem. Mom found a guy who was willing to build it and install it for an enormous amount of money and some prevarication that apparently passes for normal in Brazil. The nifty gadget keeps the bats out and allows the shade to roll up and down.
The man installed the gadget and cleaned out the roll-up shade boxes, this is what he found: (insert imaginary psycho music here)That was in the library. Here's what he found in the living room!

YIKES!!!

Everyone has heard of samba and Carnaval, but a little examined aspect of Brazilian culture is the annoying complacency that is endemic to the country. Most apartments downtown Porto Alegre have this type of roll-up shades. My gadget is of my own invention, there is nothing in the market that will keep bats out of the roll-up boxes…. people here have bats in their houses, have been told to live with them and seem to be happy to do so!!! It’s an extreme expression of the cultural complaisance found here. If something is not working, first you look for a way around it, if you can’t find a way around it, learn to live with it! i.e. dangling a man out of a window with no safety precautions is something you live with. God forbid anyone should suggest that a thing be changed or fixed so that it works properly. For decades the Brazilian motto was: “if you are up to your neck in shit, don’t make waves!” and the country resembled Elbonia.

The thing is: in the 90’s most of the shit was drained out of the country, it is now only waist deep and we have to make waves in order to drain the rest out! START COMPLAINING PEOPLE.

Visual Texture

Click images to enlarge

I love the public market in Porto Alegre. I always have. I love the textures you find inside. The visual texture in this place is mesmerizing. The infinite multitude of merchandise on display, the uneven illumination from the stands filtered through sausages, salted cod, fruits, people, and a century of dinge is congealed by the overhead daylight into a visual texture that exists nowhere else. It’s unique to this space.

The details of the wares being sold, the blend of people from all walks of life, the display lights, the architecture, history and filth, the stories in the faces of people who have worked there forever, the various degrees of cleanliness, it all comes together into a singlular personality that is held together by light. The light in the Porto Alegre Public Market is unique and it fascinates me!
The market has all the elements I hate about public places: crowds, smells, noise, dirt and questionable maintenance, I would rather pee my pants than use a bathroom there. However, all of that comes together under a specific quality of light, a blend of visual textures that mix to create a persona, a personality that would be diminished if any of its faults were removed. It always welcomes me when I walk in, it says to me “hi, remember me? I’ve missed you. You’re not in a hurry are you? Take a look at this…” and I’m hooked, I could spend all day looking at what it wants to show me.

cool gathers no dust

The other day, for no good reason, I wanted to use the word “swell”, I thought it would be a swell thing to do. So I took out a dust rag and started to dust “swell” off, which was no easy feat. I had to get the rag between the two l’s and give it a few buffs before the accumulated grime budged. The groves in the w were also problematic, but after a while, with the aid of some lemon pledge, “swell” looked brand new and ready for use. It felt almost like a historic moment, I knew “swell” hadn’t been used since the 50’s. Its last official appearance had, in fact, been in an "I Love Lucy" episode, I thought the event might even make it into the local 6 o’clock news. Except that I couldn’t do it. I had the newly polished “swell” on the tip of my tongue, I was ready to make history with the utterance and then I tasted “swell”. I would have expected “swell” to taste like lemon pledge after using half a canister on it, but no. It tasted stale and it felt a little like cobwebs in my mouth and at the decisive moment “swell” never came out, instead “cool” made its regular appearance. I think the reason “cool” is still around and “swell” died off is simply that the double o’s in “cool” gather less dust than the w and double l’s in “swell”. Language is a living thing and it’s continuously evolving. But here is a little known fact: the evolution of language is a derivative of our willingness to dust.

Now you know!

(I know that many linguists out there will want to use this theory for their doctorate dissertations, all I ask is that you don’t give me credit)

The world without chocolate Booga Booga

A tweet by Brent Spiner recently used the term "Booga Booga" and it made me smile.  At the same time it made me consider what would thrill me in the sense that the expression implies, with a childish fright of a monster under the bed. I’ve come to terms with the destruction of our environment and the inevitable and imminent collapse of humanity, that no longer gives me pause; and if the destruction of humanity no longer thrills me in the Booga Booga sense, I imagined that little would.  I pondered the issue for a while and eventually I found something: Witch’s Broom. No, not the kind of witch’s broom flown by a cartoon version of Elizabeth Montgomery in the opening credits of Bewitched.  But rather the fungal disease that is threatening to wipe chocolate off the face of the earth. 

a healthy cocoa fruit

The cocoa tree was originally domesticated in Central America.  The Mayans were fond of a cocoa derived drink some 1500 years ago, the conquistadors brought chocolate to Europe and we have all been addicted ever since.  Fungal infections such as witch’s boom have completely decimated cocoa production in its native land.  The fungal spores can be spread by wind and through direct contact and can quickly eradicate cocoa production in vast areas.  In a recent visit to Ilheus in the north of Brazil I had the opportunity to visit a cocoa farm that had been destroyed by witch’s broom, there was nothing left.  Throughout the nineteenth century Ilheus and surroundings produced  and exported a third of the world’s raw material for chocolate. In doing business with Europe and the world, the city was incredibly wealthy and sophisticated, as described in the novels of a local resident Jorge Amado, whose works have been translated into most languages these days. Today Ilheus produces no cocoa and its past grandeur has given way to dilapidation and poverty, all due to – you guessed it – witch’s broom.

a cocoa fruit with witch's broom

 Once a region is affected by witch’s broom there is no cure, there is no pesticide or spray that will do away with the fungus. Scientists are frantically working on genetically altered cocoa trees that are able to withstand the infestation.  The greatest fear is that such funguses will cross the Atlantic Ocean and destroy the crops in West Africa.  Around 70% of the world’s chocolate comes from West Africa and the trees there have no immunity to witch’s broom.  The world’s supply of chocolate is one careless farmer or one uninformed tourist away from being completely destroyed.   I bet you didn’t know that.  Booga Booga!

Khufu: Irony at its best, biggest and smallest

When we think of the great figures in history, from Caesar to Napoleon we conjure up their likenesses from images of statues or paintings. Napoleon and his odd looking hat masterfully painted on canvas, Caesar and his laurel wreath perpetually carved in marble are familiar to us, we think of their deeds and names and in our mind’s eye we see their faces. However the image of the man responsible for the largest and most iconic building in the history of humanity is relatively unknown to us.  We speak of Khufu and his great pyramid and the scholarly among us might imagine the cartouche of his name, but few conceive of his face.  Every school child has heard of the pyramids of Egypt, and knows that the great pyramid is the last standing the seven wonders of the ancient world.  Few know that it was built by the second pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, Khufu; and even fewer people, when speaking of the pyramid, are able to conjure up a likeness of Khufu. That is simply because no representation of Khufu has survived the millennia, except for a miniscule three inch ivory statue.


A renowned English archeologist by the name of Flinders Petrie is credited with finding the only existing likeness of Khufu.  Imagine, if you will, Petrie sitting in his tent at an excavation at the temple of Abydos 700 kilometers from the great pyramid.  It has been a long day and he is perfunctorily examining an insignificant statue.  The statue is only noteworthy for being carved in ivory rather than stone.  The year is 1903 and in the poor lighting of his tent he discerns the name Khufu on the lower right edge of the statue.  He is holding the only existing likeness of one of the greatest figures in history, but there is a small problem, a very small problem, in fact a problem less than one inch long. The head of the statue is missing.  All excavations are halted and for the next three weeks no one does anything unrelated to finding the missing head of Khufu.  After much frantic and desperate sieving of sand and rubble, Khufu’s head is found, his image is revealed for the first time to the modern world.
Khufu’s statue is currently housed in a little visited corner of the Egyptian Museum.  There is no fanfare; a small spotlight shines over the miniature Khufu in a display cabinet sitting against a wall.   Khufu, in his day, was the most powerful man in the world and yet we know very little about the man, from his appearance to how he built his pyramid, uncertainly is our only foundation.    We will never know whether early one morning, one of his advisers turned to him and said “I’m sorry sir, but what you propose is impossible”, or whether Khufu himself turned to his architect and said “You want to build what?” But we do know that he invested his life and resources in an eternal afterlife, that he may have been unfamiliar with the mathematical concept of zero and that he was certainly unfamiliar with the practical concept of the impossible.


Nowadays we contemplate Khufu’s pyramid and we are flabbergasted by the work, the man-hours pulling and quarrying stones to build such a structure, but we seldom stop to consider the logistics required just to get enough people and resources in one location to even consider the project. Following the upheaval of earlier dynasties, Khufu’s reign was a peaceful and prosperous time for Egypt. The time was ripe for a large scale social organization and standardization of resources required for the implementation of a project of such pharaonic  proportions.  We now estimate that perhaps 20,000 people worked at one time on Khufu’s pyramid.  This large number of people had to be housed, fed, trained, organized, given tools and the basic necessities of life.  It is likely that the organization for the project comprised a number of full time workers who dedicated their entire lives to supervising and planning the building of the pyramid and a number of farmers who only worked on the site while the Nile was in flood.  The workers where efficiently organized into larger groups called phyles (tribe in Greek) and then into smaller subgroups of 10 to 20 workers.  They lived in the village of the Workers, as it has come to be called, and there is evidence that workers ate extremely well judging by the types of animal bones found on the site, and they received the best medical care judging from the healed fractures of workers buried on the site.  The village had to provide the resources and manpower to produce ceramics as well as construction tools (mortar, metal and stone tools), administration functions such as accounting and work/housing assignment, grain storage and religious, medical and mortuary facilities, housing, legislation, transportation and clothing for all the workers and their families.  The scope is daunting, for each necessity met, materials and professionals had to be made available.  A sewer system was built and maintained, potters worked around the clock to provide molds for baking bread, which implies that clay had to be provided by someone, flour, water and yeast for the bread had to come from somewhere, cloth had to be woven and delivered to tailors, cattle and sheep had to be shipped over the river to be slaughtered and cooked, magistrates had to resolve legal suits, priests and tomb builders ministered to the dead and so forth. Each of the activities had to be timely or the entire system would collapse.

Nothing about Khufu was small; everything about him was larger than life.  He achieved immortality and the impossible with his pyramid.  With the only remaining likeness of him, an ivory miniature, Khufu achieved the greatest irony in history: the man responsible for the most colossal monument in the history of humanity is in fact only depicted by the smallest royal Egyptian sculpture ever found.  His pyramid is 481 feet tall while his only existing likeness is a mere 3 inches. What, then is the greatest lesson our current leaders could learn from Khufu? Simply that if you want to achieve immortality and eternal fame, don’t erect statues of yourself in public spaces, build yourself a pyramid.

Today the Village of the Workers is the domain of Egyptologist Mark Lehner who has been working at the site for some years now. Most of what we know we owe to him. Recently the filling of a canal that ran the length of the city has caused water to rise in the site, quickly deteriorating everything.










Lehner and his team backfilled the site with clean sand to protect it from erosion and are now working closer to the Wall of the Crow, which surrounded the ancient town.  Some of the town now lies under a modern cemetery and a soccer field belonging to the city.








The entrance to the Village can be seen on the left side of the Wall of the Crow.

Below are some of the tombs for the pyramid workers. Dr. Hawass, who is not shy about taking credit for all the work that takes place in Giza, is always quick to point out that if the pyramids had been built by slaves, their tombs would never have been located so near the pyramid.  Pyramid workers were free people of significant social rank.

the day the telephone almost never was

The fated historic moment is before us, a voice is heard saying:
“Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you."
There is a pause and everything becomes silent. Alexander Graham Bell becomes a little disoriented and his surrounding a little hazy. A nasal voice comes over the wire:
“Hello? Mr. Bell?”
“Yes, I’m Alexander Graham Bell, who is this? What is going on?
The woman’s voice responds “Ah, Mr. Bell, yes, this is Marcy with your new ice delivery company, we have opened a new branch in your neighborhood.”
Bell, now a little dizzy “What, where am I?”
Marcy continues in a monotone voice “Mr. Bell I’m calling to know whether you are happy with your current ice delivery service. Is this a good time for you, I could call back some other time, what time is good for you?”
Bell shuffles his feet to adjust his balance, he looks that the invention before him. “This is not possible, it’s impossible”
Marcy’s monotone voice continues as if reading from a book “impossible… yes. Well, here at IcePick we try to make everything possible for you. Would you be interested in trying our ice for a week for half price? We have the coldest ice in the market.”
Bell, momentarily surrenders to the surreal and responds “No, no ice, I don’t understand what’s happening…”
Marcy continues: “We all need ice Mr. Bell, don’t turn down this great offer before you’ve heard what we are giving you. If you buy a one year service today I can give you a 30% discount and if you act now you get a free ice pick for picking IcePick. The free ice pick is yours to keep even if you decide to cancel your ice deliveries. You get to keep it forever, a free gift for trying our services…” Marcy’s voice trails off babbling something about a price guarantee.

Graham Bell’s eyes regain focus and he sees Mr. Watson storming into the room congratulating him and grabbing their coats to set off immediately to the patent office. Alexander Graham Bell sits down, rests his head on his hands and slowly answers: “We first have to stop by the church, I have a terrible feeling I should pray for my immortal soul before I patent this invention…”

god is actually a dog

What if god is actually a dog? Think about it.  Every religion has the unmitigated egocentricity to claim god created man in his own image.  I’m proposing a different theory, god is a dog.  He created dogs in his own image and humans were created just so dogs would have people.

God looked down one day and thought the world was perfect, dogs were perfect, but some dogs were better than others. The best dogs were more faithful to god than bad dogs.  God decided that good dogs should be rewarded, they should be pampered and loved, so god created humans to serve those dogs.  The better the dog, the better a human he got. Stray and abused dogs are undeserving in the eyes of god and therefore don't get a home and a human.

And following Fox News logic, and in honor of Genn Beck's dog given intelligence,  I shall prove my theory by offering this irrefutable evidence (imagine this on a blackboard):

G-O-D backwards is D-O-G! Coincidence?  I think not!

The space between Julianne Moore’s thighs

I was pondering titles for this blog and that one made me laugh, so shamelessly and unabashedly, there it is.

Bulgari came out with some billboards featuring a scantily clad Julienne Moore surrounded by icons of the exotic and luxurious. I’m not Bulgari’s target audience and so in daily life I am as aware of their existence as they are of mine, and I am as concerned for their advertising as they are for my breakfast choices. Zilch! However, an article caught my eye, not because of Bulgari but rather because it commented on the reluctance of Venice’s mayor to post a Bulgai billboard on the Doge’s Palace. Since no billboard belongs anywhere near the Doge's Palace I clicked on the article and found an image of Julianne Moore reclined on a divan, naked, petting two lion cubs. Nudity doesn’t offend me. The current trend to airbrush women into distorted unrecognizable mutants does.

In this image, Julianne Moore’s thighs don’t meet! In order for her knees to meet at the angle portrayed in this picture, her pelvis would have to be a meter wide! What’s more, lion cubs don’t smile! The image prompted me to look at the other images in the series.

In this shot Julienne Moore had managed to show the camera the back of her left shoulder and the front of her hair draped right shoulder. Either Mrs. Moore counts contortionist among her many talents and charms, or she broke her collar bone and dislocated both shoulders for the shoot. What dedication!
How exactly does distorting women help to sell luxury products? I may not be the target audience for these ads. But I defy anyone looking at an image of a woman with two dislocated shoulders, a broken collar bone and missing the lower three vertebrae of her spine to think “wow, I need a new $3,000 purse”.

It makes you wonder if people who pay $7,000 for a purse have such a distorted image of the world that they actually prefer to see distorted people in advertising...

P.S what the hell is going on with her right hand? The bird is sitting on her right thumb and an unnatural growth on the palm of her hand.  It looks like she suffers from mild elephantiasis on her right hand, strange that we never noticed that in her movies.... good grief!

Paulo Coelho and the platitude from hell

“You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it”

Paulo Coelho (@paulocoelho) just tweeted that horrific platitude this morning. I had to unfollow him the last time he tweeted something like that. I forgave and mostly forgot and started following him again. Now he comes up with that gem. I understand the allusion and may I just say that "you smell not by taking a dump, but by failing to wipe it!"

It's not that the platitude is offensive, but rather that my expectations were high.
Coelho is a wonderful author, surely such platitudes are beneath him. Or maybe not.

Being a goddess is not easy

My min pin Titus used to think I could make the sun shine. Truly he did. On a cloudy day he would stand where the sun usually shone in the house and beg me to turn it on. It makes sense, I made heat when he was cold, I made cold when he was hot, I provided water and food, I made pain go away, I scratched impossible to reach places, I soothed in times of stress, I produced dog biscuits on demand, I came home with a roasted chicken in a bag, I produced a blanket on winter nights, I could open the front door, why then should I not turn on the sun? He always seemed a little disappointed when I failed to give him sun on cloudy days, and I always felt like a lesser deity for that failure. Being a goddess has its drawbacks. People never ascribe limitations to their gods and apparently neither do dogs. The difference is that I’m more powerful and infinitely more benevolent than any man-made god. Has god ever scratched behind your ear? – I thought not.

Porto Alegre - what was that street name again?

Having lived all of my life in California, I now know my way around Porto Alegre instinctively. A sort of survival instinct I must have developed as a child in order to return home if ever I was lost.   Save for perhaps a half dozen, I don’t know the names of any streets.  This morning I had a doctor’s appointment at a building at the corner of Mostardeiro and Miguel Tostes, I took public transportation there.   From my house it’s almost a straight line to my destination and these are streets familiar to me, I used to walk them as a child.

The problem is that I remember them as a child.  “Miguel Tostes” is meaningless to me.  I know that street as "the one with the Nacional supermarket where my grandmother used to shop".  Or if you prefer as “that street where they kept the historic old house in front and erected a large modern building behind it”.  My doctor’s office, by the way, is in that very building.

Since I couldn’t remember the name of the street I asked my mother, and she informed me that Miguel Tostes was actually a relative of mine.  He was a doctor and was married to my great grandmother’s sister. Well, I was impressed and surprised by the story. It's all fine and dandy, but the sad part is that tomorrow I won’t remember the name of the damned street!!! I should have learned these names when I was a kid!

Human sausage in 1863 Porto Alegre (no, really! true story)

Porto Alegre has a tradition of anecdotes and storytelling, I think it stems from the cowboy heritage of sitting around a campfire in the evenings of cattle drives with little more to do than eat and tell stories. Since moving here last week I have felt an urge to tell the tale of one of its most gruesome and fantastic stories. The tale is not new it has been told countless times in newspapers and books, nor is it recent, it took place in 1863. If stripped of all details the story is as old as time: murder for profit. But this story has a twist: cannibalism.

In 1863 Porto Alegre was a small town, most of its streets were unpaved, the poor street lighting was provided by fish oil lanterns that generated soot and smelled bad. The streets a couple of blocks downhill from the noble part of town were dark, unpaved, lacking in plumbing and covered in filth. The crimes took place on one such street, Arvoredo Street.

A ne'er-do-well by the name of Jose Ramos lives in a small rented house on Arvoredo Street with a woman by the name of Catarina Palse. He is the son of a military deserter and as a child was fascinated by his father’s war stories, especially those involving the decapitation of enemies on the battlefield (a common practice in the War of the Farrapos). As a young man he stabs his drunken father to death in defense of his battered mother. He runs away to another city and is employed as a military police officer, until he is caught in the act of decapitating a prisoner in his cell. He is discharged and becomes a police informer in Porto Alegre. Catarina Palse is of German descent, born in Hungary. At the age of 12 she suffers atrocities at the hands of the invading Russian army and her family is murdered. At 15 she marries Peter Palse and they move to Brazil to escape abject poverty. Her husband hangs himself during the trip and she arrives in Porto Alegre alone. There these two damaged creatures come together and are joined the third accomplice, a butcher named Carlos Claussner.

Ramos has a penchant for living outside his means and music, he also finds a great deal of joy and satisfaction in killing people. He combines his passions and starts killing people for the money they carry. It was common at the time for people to carry most of their monetary worth in their pockets, especially when traveling for business. At first he is cautions, he cannot give in entirely to his passion for fear of being caught and hung. But Claussner, who owns a butcher shop, comes up with a brilliant plan for disposing of the bodies. He would make sausage out of Ramos’s victims and there would be no evidence left of the crime.

Given a method for impunity, Ramos goes on the hunt. One of his favorite hunting grounds is the area around the city’s public market, he looks for business travelers or wealthy women from out of town. He spends time charming his victim who is then invited to dinner at his house on Arvoredo St. The victim is served a sumptuous meal and plenty to drink. After dinner Ramos excuses himself momentarily and returns with a hatchet and a dagger. His modus operandi is to split the skull with the hatchet and decapitate with the dagger. Catarina cleans the blood stains, Claussner and an accomplice named Henrique cut the body into pieces and transport it in two wooden trunks to the butcher shop. The bodies were either transported on a hired cart or by two hired slaves.

“The butcher debones the meat and grinds it on a small machine. Seasons the meat with salt, pepper and other spices. Takes the dried whole intestine, ties one end with a string. In the open end he inserts a tube through which he inserts the minced meat. When the intestine is filled he ties the other end with a string. ” “The bones are incinerated in the butcher shop yard and the ashes discarded in the Guaiba river.” [from “O Maior Crime da Terra by Decio Freitas]

The sausages were mixed with bovine meat on a cart and sold around town. The butcher was instructed to offer the sausage at a reduced price at the homes of the president of the province, the chief of police, the bishop and other prominent citizens including wealthy merchants, the remainder was sold at the butcher’s shop. There was a high demand since not many places made sausages in town.

The night before the sausage is sold Claussner and Ramos have Catarina fry some for dinner. The rest is sold the following day. In all cases they sampled the sausage before it was sold. The butcher’s customers called it “special sausage” because they thought it was more flavorful than other sausages, and complained when none was available for sale. Sometimes Claussner would take orders for future batches.

After each murder Ramos follows an obsessive ritual. He recites a biblical psalm, eats heartily but alone, he shaves and takes a long bath. He then dresses meticulously in the finery his activities have afforded him and puts on an exaggerated amount of cologne to offset the stench of the streets. He was later called the “Perfumed Monster”. He orders a carriage and goes to the Sao Pedro theater a few blocks way. After the murders he always felt artistic and following this ritual would declare himself cleansed. The Sao Pedro theater is in the noblest part of town and there he hobnobs with the highest society. His manner of dress and address makes him welcome in that circle in spite of his low origins.

In September 1863 Claussner tells Ramos he has had enough. His customers keep commenting on the odd tasting sausage, even while finding it delicious. Claussner is afraid of getting caught and declares he will no longer participate and that he is moving to Montevideo. Ramos is afraid that once Claussner is safely tucked away in Uruguay he might rat him out with an incriminating letter to the police. So in a dark evening he goes to the Claussner’s apartment over the butcher shop and splits his skull with a hatchet while he sleeps. He chops the body into pieces and uses two of the victim’s trunks to transport it to his house on Arvoredo St. where Clausssner is buried in the yard. Ramos ransacks the butcher shop for valuables and tells everyone that he won the lottery and that Claussner moved to Uruguay and left him the butcher shop. His story becomes inconsistent and the police start to suspect foul play.

With his partner gone, Ramos is no longer able to properly dispose of his victims and the next few are buried in the yard or the basement of the house. Eventually a victim is seen entering the house and never leaving and an investigation finds Claussner and a few other bodies on his property. He is tried for those murders but escapes the noose. He is never tried for the murders of 1863 or for selling special sausage to the public. After years of incarceration he managed a sort of prison work furlough where he worked in the city’s public hospital as a nursing aid. He was known for sitting vigil with the dying. Both he and Catarina lived to be old and free and the case of the sausages was covered up by missing and poor documentation. Probably because the local elite did not want to be reminded that they had been unwitting cannibals.

Arvoredo St today is called Fernando Machado St. All of the information in this post is taken from a book called “O Maior Crime da Terra” (The Greatest Crime on Earth) written by Decio Freitas, published by Editora Sulina in 1998, out of print. Decio Freitas’ research is thorough and his book is filled with fascinating details and cultural references of the time.

This story fascinates me for a couple of reasons. It took place some four blocks from where I live and every morning I walk my dog past the same church Ramos attended every morning, and past the Sao Pedro theater he attended after each murder. Ramos, in his embittered and vengeful state preferred to sell the sausages to the upper classes of the city’s society, a very small group to which my great grandmother’s parents belonged at the time. Because their portraits have hung on a wall all of my life, their names and faces have always been familiar to me, and I was fortune to know my great grandmother personally, I feel close to them and cringe at the thought that they might have been Ramos’ unwitting clients. My great grandmother was such a proper lady… I wonder what her reaction would have been. I choose to think she never knew anything about the story.

Andradas st. one of the wealthy parts of town

Arvoredo st. a few years after the crimes

The newly build jail house, where Ramos was first sent

Porto Alegre Public Market, one of his hunting grounds. 

Matriz sq. the noblest section of town with government buildings the cathedral

Sao Pedro theater in those days (also on Matriz sq.)

can we win if no one loses?

Can we win if no one else loses? In our commercial, free-market capitalist society we are brought up to win and our victories are always measured against someone else’s loss. We have been brain washed to win when playing games, taking tests, practicing sports and other such activities that keep numerical scores. Once we’ve learned how to keep score we apply the concept to other activities in our lives that have no visible score: dating, dressing, driving, religion, jobs are all activities in which we compare ourselves to others in order to determine our obvious superiority. Thinner, fatter, more expensive, better label, pricier store, newer car, trendy, latest fashion, our society is based on comparisons that determine a winner. But there are enormous victories to be had at nobody’s expense, victories that require no comparison to others. A beach side sunset is just as splendorous when admired from the hood of a 15 year old clunker as from the deck of a Malibu beach house. The ability to enjoy the sunset and take pleasure in the moment is the victory not the Malibu deck.

You are not better than anyone else, your religion is not better than all others and your child is not the culmination of human evolution! But if you are happy, your religion brings you peace and your child is the love of your life, then your victory is all encompassing and permanent. All the comparisons and scores in the world could not take it from you.

Treasure the victories in your life that have no losers or comparisons, they are true and real.

Does anyone know what this is? Peruvian pottery

I have often wondered what this item might be. I was told it’s Peruvian, but I would love more information about which culture and time period it might belong to. Does anyone out there know?


It may be a reproduction, but of what?