Some months back, Brazil entered the Deal-A-Day business, made popular by US Internet company GroupOn. The premise is to reach out to local businesses in your city or any city and place-hold discounts for their products or services for the general public (as long as they are customers of GroupOn), then if a certain number of people say they will make a purchase based on the discount, the discount is secured and the GroupOn public gets the great offer.
Brazil’s version is called Peixe Urbano and both its owners are Brazilians (although you wouldn’t know it by watching the video here). So far, they claim success for their Brazilianized version which they say plays well off of the spontinaety of Brazilian culture. TechCrunch talked about Peixe Urbano back in late March which you can read about here. To give you an idea of how they are doing, the current deal on the sandwich they are offering now had 115 people signed up to buy it yesterday (with a min. of 100 purchases to secure the deal) and today, there are 2,370 people signed up to buy it.
“Three generations of the Teixeira family live in three tiny rooms in Eldorado, one of the poorest favelas (slums) of Greater São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas. The matriarch of the family, Maria, has six children; her eldest daughter, Marina, has a toddler and a baby. Like many other households in the favela, the family has been plagued by domestic violence. But a few years ago, helped in part by Bolsa Família (family grant)—which pays mothers a small sum so long as their children stay in education and get medical check-ups—Maria took her children out of child labour and sent them to school.
The programme allows the children to miss about 15% of classes. But if a child gets caught missing more than that, payment is suspended for the whole family. The Teixeiras’ grant has been suspended and restarted several times as boy after boy skipped classes. And now the eldest, João, aged 16, is out earning a bit of money by cleaning cars or distributing leaflets, taking his younger brothers with him. Marina’s pregnancies have added to the pressure. She gets no money for her children because she lives with her mother and the family has reached Bolsa Família’s upper limit. After rallying for a while, the Teixeira family is sliding backwards, struggling more than it did a couple of years ago.
Their experience does not mean Bolsa Família has been a failure. On the contrary. By common consent the conditional cash-transfer programme (CCT) has been a stunning success and is wildly popular. It was expanded in 2003, the year Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became Brazil’s president, and several times since; 12.4m households are now enrolled. Candidates for the presidency (the election is on October 3rd) are competing to say who will expand it more. The opposition’s José Serra says he will increase coverage to 15m households. The ruling party’s Dilma Rousseff, who was Lula’s chief of staff, says she is the programme’s true guardian. It is, in the words of a former World Bank president, a “model of effective social policy” and has been exported round the world. New York’s Opportunity NYC is partly based on it.” – Economist (for more go here)
Thanks to Expat Brazil, I found some interesting stories on the latter end of Brazil’s rubber boom, including a piece from Democracy Now (which usually has interesting stories) doing an interview with the author of a new-ish book on Fordlândia, Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city in the Amazon.
The pingo-de-ouro (drop-of-gold) frog, a.k.a. the Brazilian Gold Frog, is part of the family of the smallest amphibians in the world, which appears only in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, from Bahia to Paraná and measures close to 20 millimeters as adults. The one photographed above was found yesterday among some leaf litter in the mountains of Teresópolis (in Rio).
They can be found in their largest numbers on sunny mornings after heavy summer rainfall, when the males tend to make their vocalizations. They are slow walkers and only jump when absolutely needed.
These little frogs don’t grow as tadpoles in the water. Their reproduction occurs out of the water as they are born already in the adult form, from eggs deposited beneath the foliage of the forest. Threatened to extinction, it earned its name due to its orange color and its small size and it’s one of the smallest known land animals that have a spinal column. Keep in mind that its color signals danger as it secretes a toxin on its skin and a mere 1 milligram dose can kill an adult human being.
While this phrase might seem inappropriate (considering cú means a-hole), it really isn’t when you consider the way it is used. The colloquial idiomatic Brazilian-Portuguese phrase actually means ‘to want something but to pretend you don’t’ and in this sense, the person offering will insist until it seems like you are the one doing the favor. Basically, the person feigns disinterest or indifference probably because they like playing little games with people in order to attract attention or perhaps they think the more that the person offering insists, the more they care. Among interested parties (one who wants to date the other), it can be considered ‘playing hard to get’ (fazer de difícil).
Ex. Aquela menina me deu bola, mas na hora que eu a convidei pra sair, fez cu doce. Ex. That girl was into me, but when I invited her out, she pretended like she wasn’t interested.
Other ways to say the same thing in Portuguese would be fazer doce, fazer charme or fazer frescura. Btw, if you want to read a joke that uses the phrase, see the second explanation on Informal Dictionary.
Over at PBS, there’s a documentary focusing on Brazil’s take on the affirmative action issue which they started to enforce a few years back. It’s done quite well since they follow students of different socioeconomic backgrounds and races, which reflect on each other in what seems to be a neverending cycle. Affirmative action has been used in the US for the last 40 years and it still stirs up controversy.
Due to an unjust division in the minds of those in power, minority races (although perhaps not the case in Brazil where some reports say 54% are black) are given less opportunities in the realms of education and business therefore the government has to enter the picture and force laws onto institutions, in order to make a more just society. It’s all quite mind-boggling because those in government are the same (kinds of) people who protect the status quo and hobnob with the business elite yet they are the ones putting their signature on affirmative action laws. The question then becomes, how can a society that is so mixed, decide who is black and who isn’t?
Both sides of the equation make a bit of sense but neither side is right, in my opinion (but perhaps that’s because I am after the ideal – a just society). There shouldn’t need to be a law that makes people do what they should be doing in the first place, but to believe that, you’d have to agree that the only race is the human one. The fact that there is a law makes plenty of room to take advantage of the system and get benefits where merit has yet to be shown. Then again, how can merit always be shown if certain parts of society don’t have equal rights and opportunities? Having to define yourself by your color or race means there’s a possibility for more segregation, not unification. Although for those whose minds can be changed, seeing someone of another race doing the same tasks as you and doing them just as well may lead to a shift in how they see the world.
Here’s a suggestion, how about a quota based on economic status and not race? Sure they are intertwined as I previously mentioned but crime is more an indication of poverty and a lack of education than of anything else. Anyways, here’s the documentary, called ‘Brazil in Black and White’, for you to decide.
Today I learned a new phrase which can be used in two ways. First, let me tell you the normal way to say ‘fairy tale’, which is conto de fadas (lit. tale of fairies) although the one I just learned is conto de carochinha (lit. tale of little lies), although either can be used to talk about something that is or seems like a lie. The example I heard was ‘racial democracy in Brazil is a mere conto de carochinha,’ at which point I had to look up carocha.
Carocha can mean ‘beetle’ (and thus one will find this name as an alternative to the Fusca by Volkswagon…which we call a ‘VW Bug’ in English), ‘dunce hat’, ‘witch’ and a ‘lie’.
I’ve been looking at how women are negatively portrayed in foreign media and almost immediately two countries come to mind as the most guilty parties, Italy and Brazil. Women in these countries are mere sexual objects and good only for decorating TV sets, well, that is the picture one would take away from spending time in either country and avidly watching their television shows. My ‘favorite’ example is that of the dancing girl which in Italy is called a velina, or ’tissue paper’ in Italian which recalls an object that one uses once to discard something unwanted, before that object turns into a piece of rubbish (I wonder what Freud might say have to say about this?). While the dictionaries I looked at have said definition, an Italian told me the term velina is a journalistic term referring to the paper the news is printed on.
According to the New York Times*, “Last November, Time reported that a poll of girls in Milan said that being a velina was their top choice of profession.” Is this not extremely sad? I don’t doubt that such findings would be very similar among young Brazilian women who dream of being a dancarina on any one of many variety shows that are so popular in Brazil (and in Italy, too, for that matter). For those who know something about the study of the psychology of women, you know that women are taught to follow certain mandates in modern societies, such as the mother mandate or the career mandate but I suggest a ‘new’ one, the beauty mandate. I touched upon this subject in my recent post called Models for Success*, but I fear the topic needs way more attention than it currently receives. Then I ask myself, how can the same media that requires the beauty mandate, be the critic of it? After all, it’s the very media that tells women that being powerful as a woman means wearing ‘sexy’ clothes and being able to sleep with however many men they please.
Now I wish I had some Brazilian documentaries to show but I really only have two from Italy* and one from the US* on the subject of how women are portrayed in the media. What I thought of immediately, however, was the lack of differences between what I saw being shown on Italian TV and what is shown on Brazilian TV, even down to the stacchetto, or 30-second dance done by the dancing girls to keep the audience interested. These women being televised aren’t the only issue here because the men, and women alike, who are being downloaded with certain ideas about how to be are also part of the problem because they tune in. On top of that, you have ‘reality’ TV which says everyone can get something for nothing (as long as they look a certain way) and everyone should be judged on their appearance and ability to win a controlled game. Forget working hard for something, that’s so passé, or did you not get the note?
There are two strange terms in Portuguese that are used in the media. One is torpedo which means ‘text message’ and the other is zapping which means ‘something that creates a lot of interest’ (although it is pretty much strictly used for entertainment news).
I’ve never seen ‘zapping’ used in a sentence, rather just as a header on news sites. I think it should be called penugem (fluff), or perhaps besteira (absurdity) fits best. ; ) Let’s see if I can make a sentence…
“Recebi um torpedo sobre um zapping que mencionou um outdoor que mostrou um smoking que posso comprar num shopping.”
And some people say anglicisms are not hurting the Portuguese language…but just for fun, I’ll do that in English while using German words in place of the anglicisms (although ‘smoking’ for ‘tuxedo’ seems to be more universal). Given the sentence below, I would assume the speaker and the listener were bilingual and code-switched with regularity.
“I got a Kurzmitteilung about a Promi-News that mentioned a Reklametafel that showed a Smoking which I can buy at the Einkaufszentrum.”
I always find it a bit funny when I converse with certain Brazilians online who don’t know me but think that because my Portuguese is good enough that I can only be Brazilian. Is it that improbable that someone, anyone can learn another language, including slang terms and cultural references? I understand that the lesser-known the language, the higher the chance that a non-native speaker would speak it, much less know how to speak it informally, but Portuguese is widely-spoken throughout the world.
