Tiago's brain dump

Sociology is a subject that has always fascinated me, and, had I not been bitten by the Legend of Zelda bug as a child, I would certainly be in that line of work today. I often read about the topic, however, which, other than leading to bizarre conversations with friends deep into the night over a bottle of wine, has the side effect of triggering epiphanies for me in the most unexpected of places. For instance, a couple of months ago, my wife and I went for lunch to a small ramen shop near where we live, being sat next to a young married couple and their 5- or 6-years-old son, whom, we'd overheard, they had brought along for his first "official" taste of the dish. As we ate, we couldn't help paying attention to a particular advice they gave him about how to properly enjoy his food: "You must always make noise while slurping ramen," they said, "because the louder you are, the tastier it will be, and the happier the cook will become". My wif...

I got married recently to a wonderful woman from Ibaraki called Satomi. Mozart buffs that we both are, there was no place we would rather marry than  Salzburg , his birthplace, and, since we would already be in Europe, we decided to travel around the continent for our honeymoon. Leaving Salzburg, our first stop was Vienna, a marvelous city in which, amidst all the beautiful, historical buildings, lavishing palaces and breathtaking cathedrals, a  small cinema  caught my attention, for prominently displayed by its entrance was a poster advertising a noir-looking movie called  The Third Man , featuring none other than  Orson "Citizen Kane" Welles  himself! Intrigued, I jokingly asked the ticket clerk (in my poor man's German) why such an old movie would be top-billed alongside this year's releases, to which he replied that that movie had been playing there even before he was born (!). "A great look into post-WWII Vienna", he said enthusiastically....

The history of the  Weimar Republic  is as short as it is fascinating. Established in 1918-19 by reformist civilian politicians who aimed at introducing modern democracy to a Germany used to nothing but the authoritarian  Hohenzollern monarchy , its formative years were far from the democratic-republicanist utopia its creators had aspired. With its economy crippled by the maintenance of the blockades imposed during World War I, famine was generalized; the humiliating terms of the  Treaty of Versailles  infuriated right-wing extremists, who brewed hate and antisemitism; political instability caused by power struggles among several party coalitions made it nearly impossible to run the young republic efficiently; lastly, the German people, once suppressed by absolute state power, commanded to follow and obey, felt severely at a loss about their newly given rights, retreating  instead into themselves, yearning for a strong leader to show them ...

Last December, while aimlessly browsing the Internet, I happened to stumble upon an article published by Ebert in 1991 - that is, five years before starting his Great Movies collection - in which he listed his personal ten best movies of all time, comprised of films that had "moved [him] deeply in one way or another". Despite being the first time I had ever laid eyes on that article, based on what I knew about Ebert I was pretty sure of what to expect. I knew Michael Curtiz 's  Casablanca  (1942) would be in there - as it was the movie with which he had started his Great Movies compilation -, together with  Orson Welles 's  Citizen Kane  (1941) - generally regarded as " the " best movie of all time (at least by then ). I was sure that a movie by  Yasujiro Ozu  (one of Ebert's  favorite   directors   ever ), as well as one by  Martin Scorsese  (about whom Ebert even wrote a book ), had been selected as well, and I had ...