still amazed that he got away with it

I was just checking the dates again. Morsi was declared the winner in Egypt on June 24, and don’t forget how tense it was, and how possible it seemed that Shafik would simply be declared the winner against all evidence. (But had that happened, I think we would have seen explosive violence, and the Army must have known it.)

On August 12, Morsi cashiered the entire top leadership of SCAF. That’s just 49 days, or 7 weeks.

How on earth did he get away with it? There were no overt signs that SCAF had become this weak. There must be an untold story here, and I suppose it must have something to do with the deft exploitation of rifts between older and younger Army officers. I’m not sure how else it could have happened. I would say “someday the story will come out,” but in Egypt there are generally several parallel stories about everything, and you can never quite figure out which one is the right one. Perhaps we will never know in this case what happened.

3-D panorama shot of Mars

You’ll love this.

HERE.

during the actual lecture

I was hoping for a straight-on shot with the “Museu Oscar Niemeyer” podium clearly visible, but they didn’t send one of those yet.

Instead of having simultaneous translation for this lecture, they projected a Portuguese version of my text on screen in real time. It seemed to work pretty well for those who may have struggled with the English.

photo from Curitiba, August 10

Here I am flanked by (from the viewer’s left) Gustavo Utrabo, Hugo Loss, Pedro Duschenes, and Juliano Monteiro.

Hugo is an anthropologist, the others are all architects.