Listen to the song "Boundaries" at this location:

http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/846

This will increase our chances to be enter on South By Southwest.

oh man, this one goes to my list of things I can't believe humans can actually do:

 

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a 22-year old woman have reported she has been stolen inside a bus. Not only the thieves have stolen her purse and cell phone, but they also stole her hair! Apparently she had a pristine-looking long hair, and the thieves cut it to sell it to places that buy it and offer to put it on their customer's who aren't happy with their natural hair.

 

I've had to read the news twice to make sure my eyes weren't playing a trick on me. People stealing somebody else's hair... how deeper can human beings go? Well, to answer my own question, I can already see insurance companies trying to make some money out of it by offering people "hair insurance"... argh... this World is so beyond wrong...

 

Uh-oh... Markus tagged me: http://www.markusegger.com/blog/Travel.aspx?messageid=c407da9f-1f6c-4ac3-b3ee-f4d3ccf7dd18

It seems like this tagging thingy is becoming pretty popular. It is kinda cool, and I’m wandering who’s actually started it (I remember something like that through emails a while ago, but with blogs this takes a further step into the whole concept)…  J

Ok, so here we go…

1. The Hair…

Contrary to what some people think, nope, it is NOT a requirement to be long-haired in order to apply for a job at EPS, and it is not a “let’s suck up to the boss” thing either. J  I’ve had really long hair from age 13 or so to age 19, when I’ve finally cut it short on the wedding day. The funny thing is that nobody knew I was going to cut it (well, my wife knew it, otherwise I figured it’d be too much emotion for her in just a single day), so some people were almost leaving the church because they though there were on the wrong wedding when they saw the short-haired groom…  anyways, about 4 or 5 years ago I decided to let it grow again, first because I prefer it that way, second because it actually has a purpose when I’m playing guitar and headbanging:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFXOPZGs4Gw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-qAS3f1MZE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV_ddsfWn_A

(I’m the guy playing the red guitar)

2. Tattoos

Lots of people who somehow know me don’t actually know that I have my back all tattooed. Usually when I take off my shirt I hear something like “holy crap!!” (or anything along those lines). I love tattoos. I got my first one (a wizard on my right arm) when I was 14 (nope, it’s not legal in Brazil to get a tattoo at that age, but I knew what I was doing, so just went for it), and then worked on my back piece between ages 15 and 17. I still have some details to finish on my back piece, and I’m planning to do that the next time a visit Brazil (this is my tattoo artist: http://paginas.terra.com.br/arte/tattoomadness/index2.html).

Despite the long hair and the big tattoos, I’m not into the other “radical” things people do, such as piercing and all that other freaky stuff. I have some cousins in the family who are into all that stuff, and the other day I was talking to one of them (who actually became a tattoo artist) and told him: “Man, you’re a freak!! What the hell are you doing with all these piercing, tattoos and stuff??”. He quickly replied: “Dude, you started it all!” (Because I was the first in the family to get some big tattoos at the time).  J

3. Religious

Another thing that surprises people about me is when they learn about me being kind of religious. The main line of thinking is: “c’mon, the dude has this long hair, big tattoos, plays guitar in a heavy metal band, listen to a lot of heavy music where the players are atheists, swears a lot – mostly when playing games… he just can’t be a religious person.”. Well, that’s a matter of perspective. Even though, as most Brazilians, I’ve been baptized as a catholic, I knew Catholicism wasn’t for me. So I’m definitely not the type of guy who’ll go to church every Sunday morning, and I don’t believe in the concept that “a God-fearing man is a good man” (is a good citizen the one who’s afraid of his president?).

But, I do have my beliefs that make me feel good and have made others feel good too, and for me that’s what really matters. If you want to know a little about the religion that better fits me, check it out: http://www.izunome.org/ (if anything, read the page about Johrei).

4 - How I learned English

Lost of people I talk to, every since I’ve moved to the U.S., compliments my command on the English language, and also show surprise when I tell them I really didn’t take any formal English classes. They usually enjoy hearing how I’ve learned it.

Basically, I grow up listening to heavy metal music (as far I can remember, I was already listening to it by the age of 6 or so… I only have one brother, who is 11 years older than me, so I’d listen to whatever he was into, and that was metal). Since that style of music is almost always sung in English, I become really familiar with lots of words and how they sound. The interesting thing here is that many people would despise other people who were into this kind of music, whereas they were listening to crap pop music sung in bad Portuguese by singers who can barely articulate the language; that means they didn’t learn good Portuguese, and let alone learning a second language. Guess who’s laughing now?  J

So music helped me with the way English sounds, and some vocabulary. Most of the rest of my vocabulary comes from reading, and good part of this reading was comic books (yeah, Batman, X-Men, that kind of thing). That was another thing that people would mock on me: “look, he reads stuff about heroes… how silly…”, while they were reading the tabloids or crap like that. What they did not know is that those “silly” comic books not necessarily had kids-oriented stories; quite the contrary, many of them had some pretty complicated stories for a kid (such as Frank Miller’s or Alan Moore’s ones – V for Vendetta? Watchmen?). Those books helped me learning a lot. Again, guess who’s laughing now?  ;)

5 - Playing Argentinean Folklore music? And singing it too??

Who would have thunk? J

Yup, besides playing electric guitar in a heavy metal band, I also play some acoustic guitar on the side. I’ve always liked to play some acoustic stuff, both some classical pieces as well as some other tunes that I like.

Recently (over the last couple of months), I’ve been getting together with my friend Lucas, who’s originally from Argentina, and between one beer and another we started to pick up the guitars and jam. He usually does the rhythm (with some flamenco flavor), and I try to improvise some solos. That’s fun, because the music is not planned at all (as opposed to my metal stuff, which is carefully arranged). You can check out a little of this jamming here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuaS2Fmr_Ew

Then Lucas start playing some tunes from Argentinean Folklore, and I’ve always appreciated regional music from other countries, so I ended up learning to play some of the songs, and more recently, I’ve been learning even how to sing it! For me it’s specially challenging, first because I’m no singer, second because Spanish is not my primary language (despite the similarities with Portuguese, it’s not that easy to pick the pronunciation of some words right, besides the accent…).

I think this whole deal is pretty cool for many reasons:

• The strings on my acoustic guitar are much harder than the ones on my electric guitar, so playing acoustic stuff helps me making the muscles on my fingers stronger (playing the electric after the acoustic is a breeze…);
• I’ve never been that good at improvisation, so these jams help me developing my technique;
• I obviously use a pick when playing heavy metal, and therefore my skill for strumming aren’t great; learning the strumming for flamenco and the Argentinean Folklore helps on that front as well;
• As I said before, I’m no singer, but I do like singing, so trying to sing these tunes is fun and helps me trying to develop some control over my voice;
• I’ve always had trouble learning Spanish, mostly because I’ve never had a need to (and quite honestly, I didn’t like it much). Just like it happened with English, now music is helping me learn Spanish as well.

 We’re actually doing some home recordings of this material. Eventually I’ll put it online for your entertainment. ;).

 Dang

 Over 1322 word later, I’ve managed to go through 5 things I guess not everybody knew about me.  J

 Oops... I almost forgot to tag some people:

Kevin McNeish: http://msmvps.com/blogs/kevinmcneish/Default.aspx
Fabio Vazquez: http://www.phidelis.com.br/blogs/fabiovazquez/
Alex Feldstein: http://alexfeldstein.blogspot.com/
Martin Salias: http://msalias.blogdrive.com/
Miguel Castro: http://www.geekswithblogs.com/mcastro