"Curanto"... a typical chilean meal

The "Curanto" is a typical meal of Chiloe, Chile.

It`s traditionally prepared outdoors, reciving the name "curanto in a hole"
by being prepared into a quite deep dug ground hole.

Even when the preparation takes a couple of hours, the kind of ritual that
takes place is a social event where non less than 5 people work together so
that everything goes well and, certainly, the wait worth.


This meal can also be prepared into a pressure cooker, but the taste isn`t the same. By this way itsn`t called "curanto", but "Pulmai".

Ingredients

• clams
• choros or cholgas
• navajuelas
• picorocos
• chicken
• smoked pork
• sausages
• beans, peas and potatoes (with the shell include);
• chapaleles and milcaos.

* There isn`t a limited amount for each ingredient.

Preparation

First, dig a hole about a meter and a half deep in the ground, and fill it
with large stones and wood sticks. After thist, make a campfire to heat the
stones. Then, remove the wood sticks almost burnt, and pour the bags with
shellfish and cover them with pangue leaves (nalcas). This can also be done
with fig leaves.

Put the seasoned meat over them and re-cover this with pangue or fig leaves.

Finally, put above the vegetables, chapaleles and milcaos and cover it all
with potato or wet flour bags. This will simulate a pressure cooker.

After an hour, an hour and a half, the ingredients will be already cooked
(steamed), and the food can be withdrawn by layers, removing the pangue or
fig leaves, serving the dishes ready to be consumed.

Ginger Snaps review

Ginger Snaps tells the story about two young sisters Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), both obsessed with suicide and death. Socially disoriented these girls will be immersed into a feminine lycanthropic story and a strong fraternal love when in a full moon night a werewolf attacks one of them putting her under an inevitable metamorphosis.

Bloody, attractive, gore, with a shady tone and a very good performance by its protagonists, this Canadian film, even when it`s focus on a teenage world, shows its characters through a maturer vision where physical and self-existence troubles are mixed in a cohesive way.

Ginger Snaps, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed (the sequel), and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beggining (the prequel), have become into cult movies for those disappointed spectators of what we can call nowadays “horror movies” by its realistic performances and centring its importance on the story and not on the genre conventionalisms. Even there is some people who classified this trilogy into B type cinema.

This is a horror movie which argument and intense emotions, and of course an overwhelming actuation, become it totally recommendable for those adepts to this kind of cinema.

Credits

Director: John Fawcett
Country: Canada/USA
Year: 2000
Cast: Emily Perkins (Brigitte), Katharine Isabelle (Ginger), Kris Lemche (Sam), Mimi Rogers
(Pamela), Jesse Moss (Jason), Danielle Hampton (Trina), Peter Keleghan (Mr. Wayne), John Bourgeois (Henry), Christopher Redman (Ben), Jimmy MacInnis (Tim)

Script: Karen Walton
Production: Steve Hoban y Karen Lee Hall
Music: Michael Shields
Photograph: Thom Best

Thanksgiving Day

American Thanksgiving Day it`s a celebration to remind the day when the pilgrims arrived America and were helped by indians to survive their first year.

Thanksgiving story began in 1609.
The pilgrims were a group of persons, members of the English Separatist Church, who had to escape from religious persecution of their country.
At the beginning they traveled from Plymouth, England to Netherlands where they lived and prospered, but after a couple of years the pilgrims became disenchanted with the life style of dutch people, so they decided to leave from there.

Seeking for a better life, they sailed to the New World, America, aboard a ship called "The Mayflower". The long trip was cold and hard, many of the passengers became sick and some others died.
On December 11, 1620 the pilgrims set ground at Plymouth Rock.
Their first year was devastating, specially during their first winter (of the 110 pilgrims and crew who left England, less than 50 survived), but thanks to native indians help they survived to it.
Certainly the pilgrims wouldn`t have made it without indians help, this is why the remaining colonist decided to celebrate with a feast that it was more like a traditional english harvest festival. It lasted 3 days.

On 1789 George Washington proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving. On 1863 President Lincon proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving, and on 1941 it was finally proclaimed by Congress as a legal holiday, as the fourth thursday in November.

Nowadays for this holiday families usually get together and have a big dinner with many food like butternut squash and apple soup, roast turkey, green bean salad, cranberry relish, and pumpkin pie.

There`re many movies where Thanksgiving Day is illustrated.

Most famous are :

- Alice`s Restaurant (1969)
- Home for the Holidays (1995)
- A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973)
- Pieces of April (2003)
- The Ice Storm (1997)

More information at

http://wilstar.com/holidays/thankstr.htm

http://www.holidays.net/thanksgiving/pilgrims.htm

http://www.andrewnixon.com/movies/tday.htm

How Chimps Avoid Temptation

Through some experiments, researchers have been able to demonstrate that chimpanzees are capable to distract their minds by playing with games, thus to avoid being tempted by some temptations, in exchange for themselves according to the time they passed avoiding them.
As we (humans) do certain actions in exchange for others (for example we save some money destinated to food and we spend it later on a cinema ticket, or we study all week so we can go out on weekend), researchers have demonstrated that this kind of congintive and conductual knowledge of self distraction was also present on primates.

"The experiment"

At first they put 4 chimpanzees under a stimulus, as well as it is a candy dispenser where they could eat as many candies as this container had. After this, chimpanzees had to wait for until the dispenser started to fill itself again, so as long as the wait was, bigger was the reward.
Then, the researchers introduced into the ambient some toys in the way that chimpanzees could wait the filling deposit time by playing. In this way they could distract themselves. This distraction technique was proved by showing to the primates how the deposit was getting fill but without getting the candies yet.
Results showed that chimpanzees spent more time playing with toys when they didn`t have any restriction related to get the candies from the dispenser than when they did have it.

By this way they demonstrated that playing with toys was a puntual strategy to control the impulse or temptation to eat the candies.

This study was researched in Georgia State University in Atlanta.

For more information visit the web site:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/822/2

... about "talking about.."

Well, there were some things i didn`t write on the first entry.
Answering to the questions about the web page, well actually one of the members of the staff has a title on computation, something like that (it`s quite bit longer the title name but i can`t remember it now) but he knows a lot about this `cause it`s on what he works.
i can say that the 80% or 90% of the staff members knows something about computers.
i represent the 10%-20% of the exception hehe.
And well, the page has already a year online, but we had first another one about two years ago but there we weren`t paying any server like we`re doing now (our page wasn`t .com but .tk). This acquire us certain independence.
And, as an Errata, yes, about the paragraph "but the fact that i already now the mentors of the page makes it special for me", i made a mistake, i ate the k letter, i should wrote "know" instead of "now".

Talking about www.Ocio-World.com

One of the internet pages that i visit mostly is http://www.ocio-world.com
It`s a page that i created with some friends without any luxury end.
I visit it at least once a day, to keep myself informed about any change, or just by maintenance.
I like our page because it`s a kind of personal project, either as a hobby.
Maybe there`re many other pages with the same trend, but the fact that i already now the mentors of the page makes it special for me.
Here you can find lots of different things. To download for example we have discs of music, movies, plays, programs, books.
We`ve invested many hours on this project. In fact, as an example, the page`s design was made by one of us.
We think that we`re growing slowly but surely.

Feel yourself sincerely invitated to visit us

Regards

Ocio-World Staff

(Geraldine Prieto R.)