The Stories Told in This City

Cigarrettes and q-tips

I guess I should explain the pictures first. I’d like to apologize for the blurry pack of cigarettes, but the lighting was just impossible. What you see here is a the back of a Brazilian box of cigarettes with a warning from the health ministry that “this necrosis was caused by use of tobacco.” I’m not a fan of smoking, but I’ve never heard of leg cells dying off because of tobacco. My point is that I leaned something. There is—as should be expected—an entire series of these warnings, and I’ve heard rumors of one featuring a picture of a woman crying on the edge of a bed with a man lying behind her, the warning reads “tobacco causes impotence.” I’m on a mission to find that one.

The blue four-fingered fat bald mustachioed character is the image that Johnson & Johnson Brazil decided to use to cell q-tips. It worked for me!

Because I didn’t have much to write about yesterday, I flirted with the idea of posting a link to eyepatchheaven.com, a site featuring eye patches made of “FUN” materials with patterns such as “crazy eyes,” “robomatic,” and “all screwed up.” If I ever need an eye patch, I hope I have the sense of humor to get it with the crazy eyes pattern. I’d be in eye patch heaven! But don’t expect more references to other websites on here. If I come across anything worth gawking at, I’ll post it to my online bookmarks site that you can find here at del.icio.us/tripoli. del.icio.us is an interesting little phenomenon: a simple way to keep your bookmarks handy wherever you go and a great way to mine for information that google might not turn up because it’s organized by thousands of people instead of search engine algorithms.

Blah blah blah. A Gentle Bossanova is not about the internet, it’s about the outside world! And people! And for the time being, it’s about Rio de Janeiro!

So here’s a story I heard last night while I was out in Barra: the most horrifying Orlando-esque sprawling strip mall-littered pseudo-suburban area I’ve ever seen in Brazil. I will avoid Barra from now on, but that’s besides the point. There’s a story. I’m going to have to start writing things down faster because the stories I hear—despite their greatness—keep slipping away. Anyway, I don’t even know if I should relay this story because it’s so base, but it’s about the band Crazy Town and I can’t help but laugh inside whenever I think of these guys. Anyway, a story was told of a girl who went to a Crazy Town concert here in Rio, threw a letter onto the stage for the lead singer and ended up hooking up with him later that evening. The next day she got a call from him while she was in (high) school and she went back to his hotel room after classes. He mentioned that her mother had been there earlier.

Confusion.

Her mother? Had been where? There in his hotel room. I guess this girl’s mother also hooked up with Crazy Town soon after the girl had. Apparently, the mother had “dated Van Halen for like three years” so this was nothing new to her. I don’t know why I got such a kick out of this story, but I think it’s because:

1. I didn’t think I’d ever hear about Crazy Town again.
2. Crazy Town
3. I found out that there’s one degree of separation between me and a woman who dated Van Halen for, like, 3 years.

Anyway, I’m really hoping to get Crazy Town’s autograph sometime soon.