reference's blog

Isn’t it wonderful to wake up in the morning to a fresh, warm and delicious cup of coffee? The only coffee I like is the kind I make at home. Sorry coffee stores! I haven’t found one with better coffee than my own. I guess this leaves me out of this new coffee culture in the US, where you spend half your day at a coffee shop: you meet there with your friends or colleagues, do research on your laptop, read your favorite book, meet for a book club, play on your phone or talk to somebody on your phone, and, in the middle of all that, drink coffee.

After talking about sea lions and jury duty, it’s time to talk a little about some ballet and one of its main exponents: Rudolf Nureyev.

Nureyev is famous not only because of his amazing skills as a performer but also because the way he impacted the masculine roles in classical dance. Because of his abilities, he had more choreography than any other male dancer would have but he also believed that ballet could not exist or progress without choreography. He not only dedicated tremendous effort to perfect his technique as a dancer but he also put a lot of emphasis on what his roles needed to communicate to the public. By having a more important role in the performance, he revolutionized masculine roles in classical dance; male dancers previously were basically considered as supporting elements of the principal female dancer.
 

Willie Morris was not born in Austin. He only lived here a handful of years. Those years mattered though. As an undergraduate, Morris edited The Daily Texan, shaking up a stagnant campus with fiery editorials that often found him at loggerheads with the board of regents.

There is something about the end of the year that renders us suckers for “best of” lists. Whether it is the best albums or the worst movies, the last week of December bombards us with these lists. It is compounded this year with the closure of the decade as well. Any “best of” list is wrought with subjectivity. (Un)fortunately, that won’t keep me from providing a “best of” of sorts. I like novels. So, I present my own highly subjective list of the best last lines in novels.

Oh, yes, this is the time of the year when everybody talks about The Nutcracker, the wonderful ballet with music by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky that fascinates children and adults.

Four hundred years ago, Galileo designed his most wonderful creation: a telescope. At that time, there were already other telescopes invented by other scientists in Europe. The problem with those was that they could only magnify objects 4 times. Galileo’s telescope, on the other hand, was able to magnify things 20 times. This tool allowed Galileo to prove, to his misfortune and to our fortune, that the Copernican Theory that says that the planets rotate around the sun was correct.

Way before all the new sophisticated computer games like Dungeons and Dragons Online or Age of Empires III, there was Tetris. This simple but addictive game has been considered one of the “greatest games of all times” by Electronic Game Monthly, and has been in the list of the 50 most popular games for the last two decades.