Tangerine's PoV

A few weeks ago we could see in Barcelona a group of people anouncing free hugs. A lot of persons went there, got their pat on the back and went home. Some of them told this to their friends with an enthusiastic tone, other just hid it with an embarrassed look. But, in the end, does this really help? I mean, do you really feel better after hugging a complete stranger?

I always look at the people in the metro and I see their sad faces, their worries written with wrinkles and I always wanted to do something for them, like make them smile at least one. I wanted to found an ONG to help “metro folks” smile, or something. First I though of putting a poster at the metro entry with “Free shoulder to cry on”, but then I thought that maybe no one would come, because they would not trust. Maybe I wouldn’t trust either. So I gave up waiting for brilliant idea, not that risky.

I thought of things that use to piss off the passengers, like the delays of RENFE here in Spain. It seems they never come on time and people are getting really tired of this. I thought of a poster with “Free complaints about the delays of the trains… If they won’t listen to us, at least we’ll laugh together”. It seemed risky to me as I don’t know the laws in this country so I’ll have to wait a bit. Maybe this would have made them smile, at least once.

So, what can be done to make them smile without forcing them to pay the ticket with smiles? I’m sure that they all have issues they are worried about, we all have, but it’s quite sad to travel by train or metro. Let’s not forget that in specific moments, if not every day we’re converting into “metro folks” and we’re all sorry about the other “metro folks”. So, solution? Smile more, so the ticket will cost less

Today I wanted to know what happens in Romania as I have disconnected quite a lot lately. As I have seen a post in Alina’s blog about Libertatea I wanted to read it to see what they say, if they are still on the line writing absurd news that have nothing to do with what’s actually new and important.

So I found out that Mutu has a child! What a news! I guess this is most striking for the Romanian people as ultimately we only received news about the new drugs that he used. Well done, man!

We can also find out from this newspaper that one girl, Simona (not me) kissed Borat and has a paper in the movie with the same name. Quite ok until now, if only the romanians would stop talking about the charisma of the Romanian women. They say that after the kiss that they had to record for the movie there were more kisses. Ok, this is due to the charisma of the girl, not to the fact that she is Romanian. I defend Romania wherever I go, but let’s get serious.

Nadia Comaneci also has a child, Dylan. In Libertatea one of the first news talk about this littel boy’s grandfather. They say that his grandfather payed his university already (the kid is only 6 months old). It seems a quite nice present to me. Anyone wants to pay my studies, please? Quite a pity I don’t have a rich grandfather, or a poor one…

They also talk about the death of the oldest person in the world, about some “condom testers” that Durex is searching for, about the 25-fingers baby, about the speech of the British vicepresident, John Prescott, whose teeth fell down from his mouth while he was speaking.

Quite interesting news but are they really important? I never used to read Libertatea, and I will definitely not recommend it to anyone. I dislike they flowerish manner of presenting the news, and their selection method: they only put news that can impress, lots of emotional articles that have the same objective: make people buy the newspaper, so that they have a great audience, this would lead to more advertising, therefore they would have more money. All fine, but, wasn’t the objective of the newspapers to inform the population? Correct me if I’m wrong.

I will try to read more of the online newspapers to find my favourite and will comment them all here. For the moment, Libertatea is rejected.

Here is a little graph that shows how is your website designed. It’s not useful but quite entertaining visual feedback.

What do the colors mean?

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
Seen on creativetechs.com