Owner: Stories & Straight Thoughts URL:http://www.stories-straight.blogspot.com Join Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:26:51 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: The Short Stories, Articles and Essays that appear on this blog are not translated works form Spanish. They were written in English by Carlos Benito Camacho Site statistics:Click here
The Old Reflex 2007-06-28 19:15:00 By Carlos B. CamachoIt was coming back again; that recurrent anxiety that gnawed inside him like a worm until he felt completely empty; a taut vacuum which desperately craved for something he could not account for. Wrapped up in the summer muggy air, he paced up and down in his cramped, mansarded apartment. He rolled his eyes from side to side as he had the impression that the walls had just begun to close in on him inch by inch. He sweated profusely and his undershirt clung to his skin. Clenching his hand, he walked over to the window and looked ten stories down at the traffic which crawled along like multicolored motorized bugs. Then his stare wandered off to the horizon where there was a green patch of trees from which the Parisian steel tower stuck up into the sky.Jean Paul Couteau was a wrinkled, silver-haired French who had something weird with his eyes, and whose facial features were marred by a nose that had once been twisted to one side by a blow. He was lean and of medium hei Read more:Reflex
Maté 2007-06-27 10:45:00 By Carlos Benito CamachoMaté, ilex paraguayensis, is a South American shrub whose leaves and shoots are dried and ground. The stuff is then steeped in hot water in a small round vessel. Drunk through a thin metal pipe, usually among friends, this infusion is popular and creates the circumstances for socializing, and gossiping. The Jesuits were the first maté growers, and once they had realized it was a potential source of income and an excellent replacement for the alcoholic beverages, they taught the indians to cultivate it. Perhaps it was then that “yerba” maté became known as “the splendid weed”, but also as “the evil weed”, as it was considered by other religious orders as “a hidden source of perdition for the souls of humans”.According to custom, the one who brews has the first maté. So, as a guest Sean Mc Allister got the second one. In the dim light of dusk, he watched the hot water pour from the kettle spout into the gourd. Then Marina handed him the maté,
Awareness 2007-07-03 17:06:00 Awareness
By Carlos Benito Camacho 1-Did you know that Charles Manson, criminal and founder of a cult, once said during one of his trials that if at daybreak someone starts stating a fallacy repeatedly, persevering in asserting it over and over again during the day, without giving in one inch, when the sun has set, such lie will have become a truth? The dogmatic truth; the psychological truth; and the sheep will live and die by such truth. The nine hundred and eighty people who committed suicide in Guyana in 1978 by order of their religious leader, Jim Jones, is a big example. At the beginning of the sixties, the Chinese thought that they were catching up with the western world in industrial and technological capacity as many of their peasants left their rice paddies and wheat fields to cast steel in their home back yards just because Maoh Tse Tung’s state propaganda apparatus unrelentingly told them so in his misconceived Great Leap Ahead government policy. But the chimera took its
A Letter To The General Manager 2007-06-30 13:25:00 A Letter
To The General
Manager By Carlos B. CamachoDear Sir,Skipping your subordinates may be regarded as a brash impropriety, but somehow I have a glimmer of hope you might spare me a scrap of your precious time; and yet at the same time I am aware there is always the risk of this letter being scrunched up into a ball and thrown away into the nearby litterbin in a sudden outburst of impatience.Perhaps if this is read in the evening, when your brain has bidden out its managerial orders for the day, to get things organized, projects undertaken, and problems worked out, when your executive muscle has sat down to slacken the day strain, there is a chance that this letter will be read thoroughly.You must be wondering what on earth this is all about.. Well, this is about information. As you know, information is knowledge of reality, whether it is obtained through reception of
In Their Youth 2007-07-29 19:03:00 A Chronicle By Carlos Benito Camacho"Peron, Evita, la patria socialista" (Peron, Evita, the fatherland is socialist), shouted a throng of political activists that appoached in long columns, carrying placards and banners with names and acronyms of political organizations such as Montoneros, E.R.P., and F.A.R. Long-haired guys beat drums and wielded staffs with big red flags on; unfurled, the faces of Che-Guevara and Carl Marx ominously billowed in the wind. "Peron, Evita, ni yankis ni marxistas, la patria peronista" (Peron, Evita, nor pro-American, nor Marxists, the fatherland is peronist), chanted another crowd of people who had arrived there several hours earlier and gathered on and around the big platform with the tower-like, wooden structure that had been built in the neighborhood of Ezeiza International Airport. Silence pervaded the leftist crowds as if in waves. Then four shot
The Bolt of Lightning 2007-09-25 10:37:00 By Carlos Benito CamachoRobert O’Connor was a lean, read-haired man who then lay under a black, plastic sheet on a gurney in the morgue of a state-run, general hospital in the city of Cordoba. There was a blue bump protruding through his crew-cropped hair, a bruise in his side, thorns embedded in the forearms and shoulders, and an ugly burn on the side of the head. Those were the fresh vestiges of violence impinged upon O’Connor’s body. Maria Teresa Camacho's photoFive days before he still walked about in the city of Buenos Aires. Surprised and delighted by the Parisian-like, mansarded buildings, he strolled along Avenida de Mayo street when he came across a long column of leftist picketers carrying banners and placards with the pictures of Chez-Guevara and the president of Venezuela. As he tried to make his way through the rabble of demonstrators, one of the picketers that wore a checked bandana wrapped around his face jabbed him in the ribs with a stick and, as he doubled up i
The Populist 2007-09-17 12:19:00 by Carlos Benito CamachoIt is said that a populist loves the poor so much that he multiplies them. Whether he comes from the right or the left political spectrum, he has existed throughout our Latin American history whenever an economic crisis and political instability make room for him to spring up. From Peron to Chavez, first he crops up on the political horizon as a small, shadowy figure that pundits do not pay much attention to. Then, claiming to be the people’s voice, he works his way up, vitriolically tilting at the upper classes and political enemies with a paranoid attitude, seizing every opportunity which arises along the way.In 1930, Juan Domingo Peron was a young captain in the Argentinean army which overthrew the constitutional government of Hipolito Yrigoyen. By 1938, he found himself as a military attaché in Italy under Mussolini regime. Just as Juan Bautista Alberdi, the father of the Argentinean constitution, under which Argentina got finally organized as a nation i
A Concealed Story 2007-09-10 14:52:00 by Carlos B. CamachoIt was very late at night. The city noise had died down, and the traffic had thinned out to one car every ten minutes on 24th of September Street. The wind-blown, autumn drizzle came down slantingly, shining like fine silver needles in the street light. With a sad-eyed expression on his gaunt face, he was standing there alone near the curb, waiting impatiently for a taxi as he shifted from side to side. The wind tousled his damp, brown hair and he kept raking it back off his forehead with his hand to keep his view clear as he glanced around. Small raindrops ran slowly down his sharp nose, gathering into pearly beads that hung fleetingly at the tip, reflecting his urban surroundings upside down in miniature; the buildings, the colored neon signs, the wet street, and now a dark-blue van that had just drawn up in front of him. His brown eyes opened wide as two burly men in blue, double-breasted suits got out and pulled a dark, wooden coffin on a collapsible-legged st
Systems 2007-10-01 11:46:00 By Carlos B. CamachoWe have all heard or read the word “system”, but can everyone define “system”? I looked it up in several dictionaries the other day and I came across a simple and clear definition in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English which defines “system” as “a group of related parts which work together forming a whole”. Adding something else to this good definition to make it wider, we can say that a system is a group of related parts which work together forming a whole that performs (a) useful(s) function(s) to fulfill an objective for other systems.For example, we speak of the “cooling system” of a machine. Its useful function is to keep engine temperature at acceptable levels. The purpose of absorbing heat is to prevent the engine from burning out. Function, heat absorption; objective, prevention.Our immune system, which is made up of different kinds of white blood cells, has the function of destroying alien agents or cells, thus fulfilling the Read more:Systems
Democracy 2007-10-08 09:55:00 By Carlos B. Camacho Abraham Lincoln’s concept of democracy as “the government of the people, by the people, and for the people” does not apply to Argentina, since as soon as someone from the political spectrum center-right is elected representative, mayor, or to any other public office, the greasing machinery of corruption is set in motion to prevent him from being sworn in for the job for which he has been elected, or if he does get to take the oath, he will have already switched allegiance. Such is the case with Dr. Borocoto, a physician, locally renowned for his appearance on television giving health advice.When he ran for representative to the national congress two years ago, he was on the “PRO” ticket. The “PRO” (Republican Proposal) is a new center-right party founded and led by a businessman called Mauricio Macri. Dr. Borocoto sudden change of allegiance astonished everyone when the incumbent President himself anounced to the media that Dr. Borocoto was going to l
Imagine 2007-10-03 18:28:00 By Carlos B. CamachoMay, 1960, Fidel Castro met with Nikita Krushev, and two years later, the Soviet Union began installing the launching pads and assembling the nuke-warheaded missiles in Cuba, which would lead to the October crises. Presently, Mr. Chavez meets with the Iranian president on the eve of the death of Fidel Castro. Can you imagine Iranian silos with intermidiate range missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba and Nicaragua sponsored by Mr. Chavez? Can you imagine terrorists training camps with Alqaeda cadres in Ecuador and Bolivia? (Argentina has got the largest Jewish population in Latin American).For the Muslim, killing and dying means going to heaven, even if the earth is converted into a charred ball of distruction. Can our Western Culture, in which there still are Christian traces of "turning the other cheek and forgiving" patterns of feeling and thinking, cope with the new threat? Or will there be a new Renaissence of the old Greek and Roman values, which helped them t Read more:Imagine
Siliconed Cristina in a Plastic Democracy 2007-10-31 10:52:00 By Carlos B. Camacho According to law, voting is compulsory and secret in Argentina. Schools and universities are the places where people attend to cast their ballots. Every citizen older than eighteen can find himself or herself on an electoral list which tells him where to vote, usually in a public school near his residing address. It also tells him the table number; the table upon which the ballot box sits, and it stands in a corridor outside in front of the classroom arranged as a voting room. There is a table authority who gives an envelope to a voting citizen, who in turn hand his national document of identity to him who checks that he is on the list and then he stamps and signs it as a legal proof that that citizen has voted. Standing in line, the people go into the voting room one by one with the stamped and signed envelope. Closing the door behind him, he fin Read more:Cristina
, Plastic
Dreams 2007-10-27 09:07:00 By Carlos Benito CamachoIt was when I had come back from Europe. I had never meant to go there. I wanted to go to America instead, to Vermon. An English teacher I had met working as a tour guide had invited me to stay at her place during my sojourn in the United States the following year. I had never been to America before and I wanted Carlos Benito Camacho's phototo get to know the country about which I had read so much and seen on t.v. or on the oblong screen of a movie theater so many times ever since I had been a little kid. I yearned to set foot upon Clint Eastwood’s distant land where evil was perpetually blown into oblivion, to get beyond the screen into a three dimensional real world and meet Americans under the American flag. I longed to experience the freedom of a free society, away from the shanty town landscapes. But after I had bought the ticket to New York, Middle-East monotheism showed once again its appalling, dark fundamental side in a big dose of pulverizing terro Read more:Dreams
The Fictional Entity 2007-11-09 15:09:00 By Carlos Benito CamachoIt was when dark clouds blotted out the sun. It was when a chilling wind blew relentlessly, raising dust and dead leaves. It was when the world in which he gotten stranded, with everything that belonged in it, moving and static, seemed to have gotten snagged in a leaden nook of time. It was eons before, when he had become eternally old; when his shriveling heart pumped pointlessly the curdling blood of a fading existence. It was when the impending change was coming, slantingly fast, out of nowhere, like the swing of scythe, cutting deeply, gouging out fragments of time-warped reality He stirred, coughing. “I want to be!” he screamed hoarsely at the wind, with a poignant sense of inconsistency. Scanning about his surroundings with a distant eye, he realized he was alone; not a single creature which used to moved about in every forms. The deso Read more:Entity
Nation, State, and Culture 2007-11-15 20:46:00 By Carlos B. CamachoA Nation is a group of people who usually speak the same language, share a common history, and follow the same tradition and customs. In our contemporary world, this group of people is legally organized around a state, which enforces the laws it creates to regulate the individual behavior, not to oppress the human being, but to guard his freedom and rights from those fellow citizens and foreigners that infringe the established rules.The state is not a person or persons, but merely a juridical structure of laws which generally revolves around a main and primeval one, a constitution, although under an autocratic regime the tyrant incarnates the state, dictating at whim the edicts his insane mind sees fit. In a democratic system the state is usually divided into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial, each one independent from the other to avoid abuse of power.Culture is what marks off a nation. It is the pivot around which a whole society turns. It is no Read more:State
Commemoration 2007-11-22 15:41:00 By Carlos B. CamachoToday, Thanksgiving Day, is the 44th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty fifth President of the United States. Born in Massachusetts in 1917, he graduated from Harvard and entered the navy in 1940, serving during World War II with outstanding conduct.In 1946 he became a congressman, and in 1960, he defeated the Republican candidate Richard Nixon in a close presidential elections. During his presidency, the Cold War was at its climax as he underwent the Bay of Pigs fiasco, on April 17, 1961. But he led the American Nation successfully along the narrow ledge that divided peace and a nuclear Holocaust as he stood firmly, facing the October Crisis of 1962 with determination.On November 22, 1963, while riding alongside his wife in a motorcade in Dallas, he was shot to death. It was a tragedy that shook the American Nation and the world.
Education 2007-11-21 17:15:00 By Carlos B. CamachoWhen people or governments speak of education, they usually mean the formal supply of scientific, technical, and humanistic information which one receives at schools and universities. Contained within a state budget, this academic knowledge is transmitted from an instructor called teacher or professor to students or pupils.But, if one gets to the root of the word, “education” is a noun variant of the verb “educate” which derives from the Middle English verb educaten and this from Latin educatus, pp of educare, which means to rear (Merriam-Webster dictionary etymology). And to rear not only means to feed and look after a child, but to infuse him or her with the values containing behavioral codes that serve as a life strategy for the individual and a survival policy for the social group.Although there have been many people who, despite having received inordinate amount of data through formal education at college, they have committed horrendous crimes against h Read more:Education
Rudy Giuliani 2007-12-05 11:24:00 (From Dept. of Records, NYC Gov.) In 1944, Rudolph W. Giuliani
was born to a working class family in Brooklyn, New York. As the grandson of Italian immigrants, Mayor Giuliani learned a strong work ethic and a deep respect for America's ideal of equal opportunity. He attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School (Class of '61) in Brooklyn, Manhattan College (Class of '65) in the Bronx and New York University Law School in Manhattan, graduating magna cum laude in 1968.Upon graduation, Rudy Giuliani
clerked for Judge Lloyd MacMahon, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. In 1970, Giuliani joined the office of the U.S. Attorney. At age 29, he was named Chief of the Narcotics Unit and rose to serve as executive US Attorney. In 1975, Giuliani was recruited to Washington, D.C., where he was named Associate Deputy Attorney General and chief of staff to the Deputy Attorney General. From 1977 to 1981, Giuliani returned to New York to practice law at Patterson,
Money 2007-12-02 18:40:00 By Carlos B. CamachoEtymologically speaking, the word “money” comes from Latin moneta, in reference to Juno, Juno Moneta (“she who monitors”), a Roman goddess who protected finance in the early days of Rome. But, semantically, "money" is something used by a group of people as a medium for the exchange of goods and services. The lack of a product, or products, led man to barter the goods he was able to produce in large quantities for the surplus staples the neighboring tribe possessed.In the system of barter, man began using commodities such as livestock and crops as unit of exchange. But even then bartering was sometimes impractical, as cattle were not easy to drive, and a bushel of wheat cumbersome to haul around. So, about 1200 B.C., man started to use cowry shells as a medium of exchange in Asia. The earliest coins had to wait until 700 B.C. They were crude pieces of silver, which eventually evolved into round coins with the heads of kings and emperors stamped on them. The Read more:Money
Cristina Kirchner Faults U.S. on Inquiry 2007-12-15 09:57:00 By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO (From The New York Times)Published: December 14, 2007BUENOS AIRES — Argentina's new president, Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner
, lashed out at the United States on Thursday for meddling in Latin American affairs after American prosecutors in Miami alleged that a suitcase stuffed with $800,000 was intended to be a secret contribution to her campaign. Cristina Kirchner"There is some garbage in international politics that holds back development and seriousness in international relationships," Mrs. Kirchner said from the presidential palace here.On Wednesday, just two days after Mrs. Kirchner was sworn in as Argentina's first elected female president, American officials arrested three Venezuelans and one Uruguayan on charges of acting and conspiring to act as agents of a foreign government within the United States, without prior notification to the attorney general.According to the American criminal complaint, the four individuals, and a fifth who is still be Read more:Inquiry
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Hugo Chavez's Cash 2007-12-13 18:38:00 U.S. Links Smuggled Cash to Venezuela (From the New York Times)By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVOPublished: December 13, 2007BUENOS AIRES - A Miami man who brought $800,000 in a suitcase into Argentina was trying to deliver a campaign contribution from the Venezuelan government to the Argentine presidential candidate Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner
, American prosecutors said Wednesday.Assistant United States Attorney Thomas J. Mulvihill said in court Wednesday that conversations recorded by the F.B.I. indicate that Mrs. Kirchner, who won the election and was sworn in on Monday here as Argentina's president, was the intended recipient of the money, said Alicia Valle, special counsel to the U.S. Attorney in Miami.The United States attorney's office in Miami charged five men with acting and conspiring to act as agents of the Venezuelan government within the United States, without having notified the attorney general, in a scheme it said involved the highest levels of President Hugo Chávez's gov Read more:Fernandez
, Chavez
, Hugo Chavez
Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar 2007-12-11 19:23:00 By Carlos B. CamachoRodrigo
Diaz de Vivar was a knight and a hero in Spanish history and literature. Known as the "Campiador" (from Latin campi doctor, champion of the battles), he was of Visigothic descent. He was born in 1040 in northern Spain. As his father, Diego Lainez, was a courtier and a cavalryman who had fought in several battles, Rodrigo was educated in the Castilian royal court. When he was fifteen, he began to serve the prince Sancho.When King Ferdinand I died, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar was twenty years old and fought alongside the new king Sancho II against the Muslim strongholds of Zaragosa. Being a Christian knight himself, he also fought against other Christians, as during the siege of Graus when he killed an Aragonese chevalier in single combat in front of both armies, winning the title of el "Cid" by the Moor, and "Campiador" by the Christians.Later Sancho II was assassinated by the King's brother Alfonso and his sister Urraca. As Sancho died childless, Alf
The Human Brain 2007-12-22 07:14:00 By Carlos B. CamachoThe human brain is the biggest organ of the Central Nervous System and is divided into the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. The forebrain comprises the cerebral cortex which represents the acme of human evolution, as it is the center of superior intellectual functions, and the Homo sapiens is the only species that has reached such high degree of development. And this is the part that we commonly refer to as the human brain, especially when we mean human intelligence.Tightly wrapped up in a system of membranes called meninges, it takes up most of the cranial cavity as it is made up of 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) which are arranged in six layers of nerve cell bodies that form the cerebral cortex (the brain surface). Due to the color, the cerebral cortex is also known as the grey matter.The human brain is divided into two brain hemispheres; the left and the right, joined together by a thick band of white matter made up of the cerebral cortex neuronal axons, w Read more:Brain
English, The History of a Language 2007-12-19 08:17:00 By Carlos B. CamachoHomo sapiens is the only species endowed by evolution with the power of speech. Since the time he could utter intelligible sounds, man has been able to communicate to his fellow beings the plans he devised to accomplish the daily task of surviving in a hostile environment, coordinating everybody's efforts and activities to carry them off.Thus, as man roamed the earth, he hunted his quarry and killed his enemies in bands, with the weapons he had learned to make out of stone, bone, and wood, using a basic oral language, and perhaps, when the situation arose, sign speech. When he developed agriculture, Homo sapiens articulate communication system also allowed him to organize complex societies, as he became a sedentary creature who hoarded for the future in the earthenware he had learned to manufacture.As a speaking member of a social group, he could not only pass down to the next generation the ideas and innovations he contrived along the road of technological devel Read more:History
, English
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