Carnival

Uncle Sam doesn't respect the Carnival. And the Carnival has its rights. It is hard to explain one's culture, but trying to say the unspeakable is the meat and bread of a writer's work. The importance those few days have for the rest of the year. They are more important a transition even than New Year's eve in making one feel a new time has just come. They are prepared for for months. Not a whole year, because the first six months of it after the Carnival days are reserved for resting. And so, half the year resting, the other half preparing for the four most important days of it. Of course not even Carnival is unanimous.

From time to time I am struck by the fact that, as a species, human beings can be so remarkably homogeneous. All the more remarkably as there is this common-sense intuition that we can even be divided into groups. Before, they called those groups races, but they changed that into ethnic groups as this use of the word race would be blatantly at odds with its use elsewhere, like, when it is used to refer to varieties of mostly inter-breedable animals that nonetheless differ by being the one 10 times heavier than the other, or the one not having fur at all while the other has a thick coat of it. Even with the name change, I would dismiss the biological substratum of that idea as a political strategy in the guise of a scientific statement.

When one start to think of the less external features of human beings, like the capabilities of processing well this or that nutrient or seeing that color or not, human beings are extremely similar, the variation being mostly restricted to minor personal variation carried on in the genes and generally not surfacing on all generations (I am thinking of stuff like colorblindness or the people living in that little city in the middle of nowhere in Europe whose organisms process fats better, and so are only minimally prone to heart diseases).

Not long ago, by the time cell phones were only slightly more portable than a freezer, and notebooks were unambiguously made in paper, science fiction writers and crazy visionaries in general thought, among many other things, of the weird shapes future human housing would take. As it turns out, we are the people that should be living in those strangely shaped constructions. Are we?