That’s false, false, and it infuriates me!

Several years ago, in order to generate links to my old website and thus getting a strong presence in Google, I wrote a series of articles related to Internet technologies and web design, two matters about which I lacked lack completely in knowledge. Animated by identical purpose, I also wrote a few opinion columns (“free software promotes the economic progress and the knowledge development in disparaged societies” was always my proclaim). In one of those columns, I thought up about Sparkle, the vector language developed by Microsoft to engine Vista, his next operative system. (Note: the things have changed from then, and Sparkle alludes now to one of the programs which integer the creative command Microsoft Expression, but this is other story). One user of ???, the web portal where I published the column in question, sent a little favorable email to the site’s director. In it he accused me of plagiarizer; but I’m afraid that at the time I didn’t know the author whose work I had stolen supposedly. Maybe, guided by a playful Martian with eyes of silicate, both the American author and me had written the same text in different idioms. Or, more likely, both the renowned American and the unknown Spanish had been rudimentary and little original enough to carry out the same work, using the same resources and mentioning the same predictable ideas. It can be even that thousands of people from the whole world had written the same discourse with scant and discouraging variations.

I’ve remembered that anecdote while combing through Internet* in search of information about Everybody Loves Zefrank (* is Google still a virtual creature; will I find it someday in the upper shelf of my fridge, next to the pâté of duck mousse with port wine and the pack of twelve Coca-Cola?). I discovered a section related to San Francisco in Zf’s del.icio.us, and, consulting the linked blog entries, I saw one about a supposed plagiarism committed by the San Francisco Chronicle (I’ve not passed from the title, I’m sorry). Anyhow, the festive Zefrank is one of these adorable little geniuses of the Net who, from their apartments in New York City and accompanied by their cats, become the bosses of the party and say what can be done and what not within the WWW. Given that in general terms they observes anarchist tendencies, it’s more what they suggest than what they forbid (note: remind that isn’t completely true, because the tables used to compose the layout of a webpage, and not just as tabulation guides, are a mortal sin, and they must be eradicated by both pacific and war methods. Second note: mention to all those web designers... itch!, conceited information technology experts who play the roles of CSS/ accessibility/ server-user interaction gurus by writing articles in which the syntax is a scant good).

Zefrank shows that candor so attractive and lightly hippy which converts some guys in ideal candidates for our best friends’ boyfriends, in the case we’ve best friends and we harbor some good desires for them, and also in the case all of them are coincidentally heterosexuals, what happens in seldom occasions. Note: get new friends. Note: change my sexual preferences.

Zefrank has a fantastic website in which he assures that you are his favorite visitor. And by a second of time in the transitional Net in direction to Web 2.0 one feels euphoric and an explosion of adrenaline constructed with ones and zeros knocks down buildings and obstacles and the happiness and the Nirvana suddenly set up an imminent interactive reality written in php with MySql databases and easy and shining is the road which from Hell leads to Light...

I’m sorry, I lost the North. I was saying the New Yorker gained the fame teaching to dance properly, and everyone loves Zefrank. Me too; but, what about ye, me dear lady?

This entry is an horrible translation of my post written in Spanish, Eso es falso, falso, ¡y me indigna!

The process of lie, TV shows

That guy was convinced of being the reincarnation of a military officer from the Roman Empire, and he adjusted quite well to that ‘light tank profile’ typical of the short males, of heavy skeleton and solid musculature, who wear tight-fitting jeans and black t-shirts and drink whisky till the hour of the knocks-and-jumps festival at Friday night. The man had assisted to a TV show with the object of being analyzed by two experts of the reincarnation market; this is... a plump hypnotizer endowed with a certain fame in the esoteric Spanish circles, and a sober psychologist of professional appearance and good manners. Had the chap inherited the spirit from an old Roman general? I ask myself if that guy’s thorny certainness wouldn’t be a way of reinforcing his own self-esteem, and if not exist within our reach -poor devils-, methods more wordly and less compromising of fomenting the self-confidence. And I imagine now the cloned-Roman-general deadly offended by the children of his own street, boys who, while give punches between themselves and laugh insolently, extend their arms in Hitlerian pose and shout with high-pitched voices: “Hail, Cesar!”.

Ok, between other proofs destined to elucidate if the TV show’s guest was or not a glorious bi-millenarian reincarnated, the hypnotizer invited him, once suggested, to speak in the imperial language. Needless to say that the supposed strategist limited to stutter a few suspicious pseudo-Latin words, unintelligible and fractionated, uncharacteristic of a hardened officer from so distant age. Needless to say either that, when the ‘experts’ explained to the guy that he wasn’t a real reincarnate, or that in any case he hadn’t offered reliable proofs which supported his conviction, the guy kept his beliefs and left the show with his eccentric ideas, if not reinforced, at least unbroken.

The case is that, a few days after the spectacle, one of my university classmates alluded to the TV show and underlined, excited like a praetorian soldier in the full charge, that both the psychologist and the hypnotizer had proved it was a real case of reincarnation, and that the false Latin spoken by the bloke accredited it beyond question. That is, my classmate had misinterpreted from the first word to the last, and his vane little brain had daydreamed, with a critic spirit characteristic of a phone hot-line tarotist, until convince himself, just like the controversial reincarnate, of what he wanted to believe was, in fact, true. I then thought that the human lies and fantasies flourish with extraordinary simplicity and lack of grace, and that explains many of the things which happen around us.

This entry is an horrible translation of my post written in Spanish, El proceso de la mentira, TV shows, CS Lewis.