Dane Cook

By now you must have heard that there's a certain Dane Cook that exists in the US and that he is making waves of tsunami proportions in the stand-up comedy scene. So much so that TIME magazine picked him for its annual TOP 100 World's Most Influential People issue. It was Ashley who introduced me to his website a year ago and since then I must admit that I've been a fan. Man, this guy is true energy, if he were a drug, he would certainly be classified as illegal, because he'd be likely to cause a heart attack. He is good-looking (according to Ashley, and I agree) unlike the typical, funny-face comedian, and most of important of all, he's got talent.

Here's what TIME has to say about him: He longs to own a pet monkey, take part in a heist, watch a pedestrian get hit by a car. When a couple in the supermarket line gets into a "nothing fight," Cook abandons his cart to go listen. Creeped out by that weird guy in the office? Cook's advice: make friends. Then when he starts shooting up the office, he'll skip you, offering instead a friendly, "Thanks for the candy." Sweet.

If you're dead bored at home or trying to kill time in your office cubicle, remember that coffee is not the only thing on this planet capable of keeping you from dozing off. Check him out at www.danecook.com. Once you get inside the main page, you will start hearing Dane's booming voice from clips of his past performances and it won't stop until you leave the site. Have a good laugh!

Almost a miracle

Like my new haircut?

As soon as the plane touched down in Malaga, I promised to myself: "I will get a fucking haircut." As it was, my hair was already too long that all throughout the trip I had to apply scandalous amounts of gel just to keep it from blocking my eyes. My fear was that I would bump into someone on the road or just fall into the river or something. So on the day I arrived from Bilbao, one of my first errands was to scout for a decent-looking parlor downtown. My heart wanted something radically different from my usual hairstyle (see pic on the left), but at the same time I didn't like to ruin my usual "respectable" look (hmmm...). Hair, after all, takes a while to grow. To make the story short, it turned out that I would settle for the "cresta" (see pic below), a punk-like cut whose name in Spanish evokes images of standing chicken feather. In front and at both sides, it seems like a semi-military cut but as soon as you look at the back of the head you will find a hidden suprise of thick and long hair. In the pictures below it may not seem too obvious, but I think I look quite scary in this haircut. Hahaha. So this is it, my summer look. What do you think?

Scholarship talk

If you're chosen as a scholar by the Spanish government, they initially give you a scholarship contract for your first year in school and then, depending on your program, you will need to renew this contract every year until your graduation. The maximum number of years you are allowed to renew the contract for a masters course is two, and for a doctorate, three.

The thing is, the Spanish government has this bad habit of not granting the contract for the succeeding years of your program. This means that they will stop financing your studies at some point. To further put this in layman's terms - this means that one day in your otherwise quiet life in the boondocks of some third world country, the Spanish will invite you to come and study in their country. So, accepting the invitation, you pack your third-world belongings and book the next flight to Spain thinking yourself the fortunate ambassador of your country. One of the chosen "few." However, after some twelve months of slaving over graduate-level coursework, you find a letter at your doorstep saying: "Sorry, we have decided we will not finance your studies anymore." And that's it. You now pack your first-world souvenirs and take them with you back to the boondocks, together with some course credits that are probably good for nothing. No masters degree, no PhD. Goodbye and to hell with you.

The thing is, there's not even a good justification for the non-renewal of your scholarship. Judging by the kind of inconsequential documents required of all applicants, I think they have to be god in order to carry out a fair selection process. In other words, if they have some 1,000 applications at hand and they need to reject 300 in order to suit a given budget, how do they choose the unlucky 300 on the basis of inconsequential information (e.g. applicant's personal details, coursework description, academic institution, etc.)? Their only choice, it seems, is to do a lottery. Throw all the application papers up in the air and renew the contract of all those which manage to land inside the box; those who fall out of it will then receive rejection letters.

Fortunately, when I applied for renewal last year, I was one of those whose papers landed inside the box. So my contract is guaranteed until graduation. But this year, I heard from a mailing list that the infamous rejection letters have been sent out and so far the known casualties number about 50. Most likely, these people will have to leave Spain without a graduate degree; that, after leaving their jobs and families back home just to come all the way here. I don't understand why the Spanish government has to take in more scholars than they can possibly finance to graduation. Isn't it absurd? To me, it doesn't make any sense, but to them it somehow does.