Robinho’s blog

I just wanted to say happy birthday to my sister, Katie and to my mom.  Kate's birthday was today, and if my calculations are correct (and I suspect they are) then she is now a respectable 32 years old.  My mom's birthday was last Tuesday and she just hit a milestone, though I won't reveal which.  Happy birthdays to you both!

This is a picture of Kate with Natalia and her youngest, Bella

I'd just like to go on a rant for a moment regarding the top 100 book list from the "Big Read" project from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).  They are claiming that the average american has only read 6 of their top 100 books, this is sad, but what is more upsetting (at least to me) is the list itself.  I'm so incredibly sick of seeing the same tired books at the top of the all the "best of" lists, books like: Moby Dick or Great Expectations.  Seriously, when was the last time anyone you know has talked enthusiastically about reading anything by Nabakov?  And not that I want to get flamed here, but the Bible??  I know it's supposed to be the best selling book and all, but do people actually buy/receive it, then curl up on the couch to read about who begat who from cover to cover?  C'mon. 
The Big Read does redeem themselves to some extent by putting in the Chronicles of Narnia, Dune and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as more contemporary titles, but then they throw in the Da Vinci Code???!!!  WHY!  That's the absolute definition of formula writing. 
Luckily, if you go to their website and look under "Featured Books", they do have some very good ones listed, such as: fahrenheit 451, A Farewell to Arms and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 

* I'd just like to state that these are my opinions and you shouldn't get upset that I made fun of Dickens/Melville/Nabakov.  And, just a disclaimer, I love Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Grapes of Wrath and others that some might call "stuffy" or "heavy reading", but I would never assume that a majority (or anyone) has the same tastes that I do and that's why "top" lists are always ridiculed. 

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Bold: I have read.
2) Underline: Books I love.
3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (why is this book always on these lists?)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Note: I’m saying that having read several, doesn’t count)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown  (you have to be kidding me!)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (again with the Dickens)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I count 36 that I've read from this list.  What's the love affair with Charles Dickens???????

As promised, here are the pictures of the hugemungo Christmas tree that we had to put up:

Hard to tell from this but the tree standing against the wall is about 7 feet tall.

I don't have a lot to say about this day.  Scott and I went on the City Tour, the same one that we went on last time we were in the city.  We saw a lot of the same things we did that day: The capital building, the opera hall, the Pink House, the Boca neighborhood, the Bombonera, the Caminita area of Boca, etc...I really dislike these tours where you're in a bus and you drive by and the guide says something vaguely interesting or funny about it, then you move on.  There were three stops where we got out of the bus: the first was a "leather factory", which looked a lot like just a plain leather store, the second was the Bombonera stadium, home of Boca Jrs., and the last was the Caminita area of Boca, just a tourist trap that's painted in bright colors.  It's so touristy that when Scott and I found a cow statue on the sidewalk and took pictures, a woman came running out of the shop it was in front of and demanded three pesos ($1) for each picture.  I just walked away, I think Scott may have given her some money.  We took lots of pictures, but they weren't that great and I'm not going to include any in this post. 
After the tour was finally over (4 hours!), we met Ana Karin's parents in the hotel and went out to eat at....La Estancia.  Hey, did I mention that place is really good???  By the time we finished dinner, it was getting on to dusk, so we walked around for a while, visiting the capital building and some other cool places, but nothing that really stands out.  In fact, nothing was really great about this day, aside from the great meal at La Estancia. 
One thing did happen that really made me mad: Scott and I decided to go out and get some coffee or alcohol or something at a cafe on the corner.  We had a nice time but decided it was too early to go back to the hotel so we thought we'd walk a bit.  About a block after we started, I felt what I thought was rain on my shirt, but it turned out to be much worse.  Just before this, I had noticed a guy following us who seemed to be going the same speed as us, in fact when I stopped to tie my shoe, he also stopped to look in a window.  hmmmm...pretty suspicious.  Anyway, when I felt something hit my shoulder I heard the guy behind us say something, but I didn't pay any attention, but he was persistent so I finally turned around and I realized he was saying that something had been thrown on us.  Sure enough, someone had squirted mustard from an apartment above as we walked underneath.  Conveniently, this guy happened to have paper towel with him and he started to assist Scott and me as we tried to clean off.  He seemed very nice until I realized he had one hand half in my front pocket where my money was.  I couldn't be absolutely sure that he was trying to pick my pocket, but then I wasn't taking any chances so I slapped his hand away and Scott and I hightailed it back to the hotel to clean up. 

Anyhow, this was the excitement for the day, rather dull really.  It's getting late here, so I'll write about our last day in Bs. As. tomorrow.

I don't have a lot to say about this day.  Scott and I went on the City Tour, the same one that we went on last time we were in the city.  We saw a lot of the same things we did that day: The capital building, the opera hall, the Pink House, the Boca neighborhood, the Bombonera, the Caminita area of Boca, etc...I really dislike these tours where you're in a bus and you drive by and the guide says something vaguely interesting or funny about it, then you move on.  There were three stops where we got out of the bus: the first was a "leather factory", which looked a lot like just a plain leather store, the second was the Bombonera stadium, home of Boca Jrs., and the last was the Caminita area of Boca, just a tourist trap that's painted in bright colors.  It's so touristy that when Scott and I found a cow statue on the sidewalk and took pictures, a woman came running out of the shop it was in front of and demanded three pesos ($1) for each picture.  I just walked away, I think Scott may have given her some money.  We took lots of pictures, but they weren't that great and I'm not going to include any in this post. 
After the tour was finally over (4 hours!), we met Ana Karin's parents in the hotel and went out to eat at....La Estancia.  Hey, did I mention that place is really good???  By the time we finished dinner, it was getting on to dusk, so we walked around for a while, visiting the capital building and some other cool places, but nothing that really stands out.  In fact, nothing was really great about this day, aside from the great meal at La Estancia. 
One thing did happen that really made me mad: Scott and I decided to go out and get some coffee or alcohol or something at a cafe on the corner.  We had a nice time but decided it was too early to go back to the hotel so we thought we'd walk a bit.  About a block after we started, I felt what I thought was rain on my shirt, but it turned out to be much worse.  Just before this, I had noticed a guy following us who seemed to be going the same speed as us, in fact when I stopped to tie my shoe, he also stopped to look in a window.  hmmmm...pretty suspicious.  Anyway, when I felt something hit my shoulder I heard the guy behind us say something, but I didn't pay any attention, but he was persistent so I finally turned around and I realized he was saying that something had been thrown on us.  Sure enough, someone had squirted mustard from an apartment above as we walked underneath.  Conveniently, this guy happened to have paper towel with him and he started to assist Scott and me as we tried to clean off.  He seemed very nice until I realized he had one hand half in my front pocket where my money was.  I couldn't be absolutely sure that he was trying to pick my pocket, but then I wasn't taking any chances so I slapped his hand away and Scott and I hightailed it back to the hotel to clean up. 

Anyhow, this was the excitement for the day, rather dull really.  It's getting late here, so I'll write about our last day in Bs. As. tomorrow.

I don't have a lot to say about this day.  Scott and I went on the City Tour, the same one that we went on last time we were in the city.  We saw a lot of the same things we did that day: The capital building, the opera hall, the Pink House, the Boca neighborhood, the Bombonera, the Caminita area of Boca, etc...I really dislike these tours where you're in a bus and you drive by and the guide says something vaguely interesting or funny about it, then you move on.  There were three stops where we got out of the bus: the first was a "leather factory", which looked a lot like just a plain leather store, the second was the Bombonera stadium, home of Boca Jrs., and the last was the Caminita area of Boca, just a tourist trap that's painted in bright colors.  It's so touristy that when Scott and I found a cow statue on the sidewalk and took pictures, a woman came running out of the shop it was in front of and demanded three pesos ($1) for each picture.  I just walked away, I think Scott may have given her some money.  We took lots of pictures, but they weren't that great and I'm not going to include any in this post. 
After the tour was finally over (4 hours!), we met Ana Karin's parents in the hotel and went out to eat at....La Estancia.  Hey, did I mention that place is really good???  By the time we finished dinner, it was getting on to dusk, so we walked around for a while, visiting the capital building and some other cool places, but nothing that really stands out.  In fact, nothing was really great about this day, aside from the great meal at La Estancia. 
One thing did happen that really made me mad: Scott and I decided to go out and get some coffee or alcohol or something at a cafe on the corner.  We had a nice time but decided it was too early to go back to the hotel so we thought we'd walk a bit.  About a block after we started, I felt what I thought was rain on my shirt, but it turned out to be much worse.  Just before this, I had noticed a guy following us who seemed to be going the same speed as us, in fact when I stopped to tie my shoe, he also stopped to look in a window.  hmmmm...pretty suspicious.  Anyway, when I felt something hit my shoulder I heard the guy behind us say something, but I didn't pay any attention, but he was persistent so I finally turned around and I realized he was saying that something had been thrown on us.  Sure enough, someone had squirted mustard from an apartment above as we walked underneath.  Conveniently, this guy happened to have paper towel with him and he started to assist Scott and me as we tried to clean off.  He seemed very nice until I realized he had one hand half in my front pocket where my money was.  I couldn't be absolutely sure that he was trying to pick my pocket, but then I wasn't taking any chances so I slapped his hand away and Scott and I hightailed it back to the hotel to clean up. 

Anyhow, this was the excitement for the day, rather dull really.  It's getting late here, so I'll write about our last day in Bs. As. tomorrow.