LIQUID LOVE: ON THE FRAILTY OF HUMAN BONDS

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The tone of Liquid Love isn’t elegiacal, or not often. Rather, Bauman’s book is a hymn to what he calls our liquid modern society. (…) The work of the liquid modern is likewise never done, but it takes much more imagination. Bauman finds his hero working everywhere – jabbering into mobile phones, addictively texting, leaping from one chat room to another, internet dating (whose key appeal, Bauman notes, is that you can always delete a dating without pain or peril). The liquid modern is forever at work, forever replacing quality of relationship with quantity.

What’s the significance of all this anxious work? For Bauman the medium is not the message - the new gadgets we use hardly determine who we are. Nor are the messages that people send each other significant in themselves; rather, the message is the circulation of messages. The sense of belonging or security that the liquid modern creates consists in being cocooned in a web of messages. That way, we hope, the vexing problem of freedom and security will disappear.

We text, argues Bauman, therefore we are. “We belong,” he writes, “to the even flow of words and unfinished sentences (abbreviated, to be sure, truncated to speed up the circulation). We belong to talking, not what talking about…So stop talking – and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.” (…) It is the fear of silence and the exclusion it implies makes us anxious that our ingeniously assembled security will fall apart. (…)

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This article largely reflects upon projected expectations regarding educational actions/activities carried out in schools, within the scope of STD/AIDS prevention. To discuss this theme, we revised historical aspects that marked the institution of Sexual Education as a school subject. We noticed a significant association between school and the objective of correcting human behavioral deviations, including sexual (mis)conduct. We also observed that the proposals for Health Education, formulated in the health field and targeting schools, establish principles, objectives and recommendations for the sexual education of adolescents and children that do not take school as a social environment as their theme. We concluded by pointing out that highly constructive contributions are likely to be developed at schools, mainly as a result of the ability to broach the apparently fixed categories that constitute the field of sexual experience as eminently historical constructions. We believe that, from this point of view, the possibility of rearranging social relations is strengthened. (I)________________ social relations can have an impact on (II) ________________ conditions (III)________________ enhance the vulnerability of individuals to sexually transmitted diseases.

Bella Swan has always been a little bit different. Never one to run with the crowd, Bella never cared about fitting in with the trendy, plastic girls at her Phoenix, Arizona high school. When her mother remarried and Bella chooses to live with her father in the rainy little town of Forks, Washington, she didn't expect much of anything to change. But things do change when she meets the mysterious and dazzlingly beautiful Edward Cullen. For Edward is nothing like any boy she's ever met. He's nothing like anyone she's ever met, period. He's intelligent and witty, and he seems to see straight into her soul. In no time at all, they are swept up in a passionate and decidedly unorthodox romance – unorthodox because Edward really isn't like the other boys. He can run faster than a mountain lion. He can stop a moving car with his bare hands. Oh, and he hasn't aged since 1918. Like all vampires, he's immortal […].

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Bled by emigration, abandoned Portuguese villages lose hope of surviving

The villages of Agracoes and Povoa de Agracoes in northern Portugal look little alike – one is a run-down cluster of dilapidated old stone houses, the other has a cosier feel, with a flowerbedecked wayside shrine and chapel.

But the one thing they have in common is the “slow agony” of abandonment, as some villagers say.

The steady drip-drip of emigration has brought down their numbers from more than 50 residents to fewer than a dozen each. These remaining villagers share the same glum acceptance that, after they have gone, their villages will die out too.

It is the same desolate picture in scores of other backwater settlements in Portugal’s interior, north to south.

There are no shops. A grocery truck comes once a week and elderly residents taxi pool to see a doctor miles away.

“This place will get overgrown with woods for wildfires to burn, that’s what will happen... My daughters won’t come to live here, so my land will disappear”, said Antonio Goncalves Fontes, at 62 one of the youngest residents of Agracoes, where mountain waters gurgle next to crumbling stone houses.

He and his wife Maria grow chestnuts, vegetables and have a small flock of sheep and five donkeys.

Mass emigration to wealthier countries like France and Switzerland, high unemployment and poorly-paid local jobs, combined with falling birth rates, have caused some parishes like Loivos, which encompasses Agracoes, to lose about three-quarters of the population in the past few decades.

The remote Trans-Mountain region of western Europe’s poorest country, near the Spanish border, is one of the worst affected. As the population has dwindled, schools and medical outposts have been shut down, causing a vicious circle of ever greater abandonment.

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Burger King Japan bottles its 'flame grilled' fragrance

Perhaps this fragrance can help one appear - and smell - smoking hot.

Burger King Japan said it will sell a special fragrance on April 1 which is a recreation of the scent of the flame-grilled patties used in their hamburgers.

The product, called Flame Grilled Fragrance, will be available for one day only. It will be sold in 30-milliliter bottles for¥5,000 (S$57.40) and will come with a Whopper sandwich. The fragrance was developed to promote Burger King products and to enable fans to enjoy the scent even when they are not at a Burger King outlet, the company said.

A company spokeswoman confirmed that although the release date is April Fool's Day, the announcement is no jokethe fragrance will definitely be sold at its stores in Japan. "It has that nice savory smell," she told Japan Real Time.