There are some famous mishaps naming products, mostly for imported products. Not knowing the local culture is a dangerous thing. Of course there are some complete disasters such as Hufu, the human flesh tasting tofu that seems to have gone nowhere. I wonder why...

 

The famous Ford Pinto, quickly renamed Corcel in Brazil, after they realized that "pinto" is how everyone -even grandmas- refer to the male genitalia. There is the great Dirty Dicks Crab House that defies explanation. And my favorite fake bad product name is the NPR's CarTalk fake HMO: CFI Care.

 

And the new pearl on my list is Kagome juices. It sounds *exactly* like "cago-me" in Portuguese and pretty close to something like that in Spanish. It means "I sh*t myself" if you're wondering.

Travelling by air is an amazing thing, we can cross a whole continent in hours for a fairly affordable price. My parents would take days or spend a fortune (or both) and my grandparents would take months. By any measure we had amazing progress on transportation and communication.

 

Funny that none of that matters when I'm going through crowded airports, abusive security, late flights, missed connections and a total of 36 hours to travel from Porto Alegre to Seattle. It doesn't help at all when I sit for 4 hours looking at a parked plane that is late because of "crew issues", knowing very well that I'll miss my connection because of it.

 

At least my luggage arrived with me.

I´m in Brazil for the past couple of weeks. Someone close passed away and I´ve been ignoring this blog for a while. Things are settling down at this point and I´ll be back home next week.

 

Brazil still a big mess, but the longest period of worldwide prosperity and some good economical policies changed the country for the best. Infrastructure is having a hard time to keep up with growth, what is a much better problem to have than stagnation. Piracy still rampant so coming back to develop software is not an option. I wish I could be closer to my family as none of us is getting any younger, but as someone that lives out of intellectual property the rule of law is not optional.

 

I had the chance to visit a local doctor for a checkup and rememberred why I dislike the American health system so much. It was not how personal and nice he was, or how much he demonstrated to care. It was the bill. I paid out of pocket (not using health insurance) for both doctor and laboratory tests. Cost for my annual checkup? BRL $355 (US $180), with BRL $220 (US $108) going to the doctor. Last year my health insurance in the US paid around US$800 for exactly the same tests *after* negotiating (i.e. reducing) whatever value the doctor/labs asked for.

 

My results were ready 6 hours after the samples were taken and I was treated like a king. The machine and kits used were imported from the US. Next week the doctor that took care of me will be in Boston for an American Diabetes Association sponsored event. He told me he travels abroad at least twice a year for such events. He prescribed some pills I´ll have to pay out of pocket too, but they are dirty cheap.

 

In the US folks that do not want to regulate pharmaceutical, oil and other big companies are called Republicans. If in a democratic state parties represent their people, the US is lacking the SP (Suckers´ Party) that would represent everyone giving big companies a free pass. Believing that big open companies ran by Wall Street and anonymous shareholders have some sense of moral is to defy logic and evidence. But, what the heck, some folks want to teach creationism as fact.