Rivers of Fate - Official Trailer [English] | Netflix
MVSRS
Very good. The first and maybe the second episodes are nerve wracking. You know something bad is going to happen to our girl. I can't tell you just what techniques the show's makers used to induce this feeling, but it was very effective.
Our girl, Janalice, is a very attractive 16 year old girl whose teenage lust leads her to trust a boy that she shouldn't. She becomes a social pariah, so her parents send her to live with her Aunt in Belem and things go wrong. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
We also have a gang of teenage river pirates. They steal cargo from boats traveling on the river. The merchants file an insurance claim and then buy their goods back from pirate's fence for half price and everybody's happy. Well, except for the passengers who got robbed and the insurance company.
4 episodes 45 minutes each.
Ilha de Marajó Breves at lower left, Belem at lower right
Ilha de Marajó is in the state of Para on the northeast coast of Brazil. It is in between the Amazon River, the Guajará Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. At Belem the bay is ten miles wide.
A mother seeking revenge against a river gang that murdered her family. She is a former soldier. She & her husband ran a bar that floats in the middle of the river.
Luca
Dan
Guilherme
Mariangel's gay son.
Lucas
Galvino
Preá
River gang leader who becomes obsessed with Janalice
Gangs of Galicia: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Our girl, Ana, the female lawyer, has been in Madrid for the last three or four years, raising her daughter, the daughter that was fathered by Daniel, the son of the Padin patriarch that runs the Galicia drug smuggling empire. Ana and Daniel are our Romeo and Juliet. He's been in jail for the last three or four years and has just been let out on account of they haven't gotten around to holding his trial. The trial may still happen, but for now at least, he's out.
Ana left Galicia on bad terms with some people, Now in order to make amends, she offers to go to work for a Columbian drug smuggler, setting up a lab to process their drug, which doesn't make a lot of sense, unless maybe they were just doing packaging, but it sure looked more complicated than that with screens being dipped into tubs full of liquid. I mean, I can understand setting up a packaging operation. The drugs (heroin or cocaine) come in lots of hundreds of kilogram size blocks that each need to be cut into at least a couple of thousand pieces for retail delivery. But a lab for producing heroin or cocaine doesn't make much sense. The raw material would be much bulkier which is going to make shipment more difficult. Then again, maybe they were making a totally artificial drug like meth or fentanyl. But in that case I think you would need like full-on hazmat suits and respirators. Or maybe losing a few factory workers isn't a problem. Or maybe I wasn't watching that closely.
Anyway, the Columbian is conspiring with Paco (Luis Zahera - famous to me for his role as Ezequiel in the Netflix series Wrong Side of the Tracks) to take down the Padins. To do this they setup an elaborate trap. When a shipment of drugs comes in, it gets manhandled from the go-fast boat to a waiting van. This happens in a matter of minutes and then the van and the boat disappear into the night. On this night though, the Columbian gets tipped off and sends a squad of fake policemen to raid the scene and snag the van as it was driving away. Now Paco and the Columbian start selling off portions of their haul. Naturally the Padins find out about it, and go raid the warehouse where the Columbians stashed the drugs. The Columbian has been waiting for this - he has lookouts watching the warehouse. When they spot the Padin crew approaching, they call the cops who swoop down and arrest Nilo, Daniel's best bud.
Now things start to unravel all around. I think all of the shooting was confined to the 9th episode, and there was a bunch. Naturally all the principal players survive so we can have another season. Maybe.
Why is the Colombian from Brazil? Maybe because Colombia doesn't have any seaports on the Atlantic Ocean. Umm, no. Colombia's busiest seaports are on their Atlantic coast. Maybe because Brazil is a thousand miles closer, or maybe northern Brazil drug enforcement is not as formidable as what you find in urban Colombia.
Criminal Code: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
We've got a police task force that's been set up to take down violent criminal gangs. The gangs are organized, well financed, and their heists are carefully planned. They send in a crew armed like soldiers, so their heists are like pitched battles with the police and / or the military. Their targets are valuable, they aren't wasting time on penny ante jobs. They are foiled one time when the block of cash that is their target is guillotined and doused in red paint. All this happens in southern Brazil and Ciudad del Este across the border in Paraguay.
Originally written in November of 2023. I suppose I was going to say more but I never did, but now we're watching Season 2, so it's past time to post this, even if I don't have anything more to say about it.
The AStar is a popular helicopter, over 10,000 have been produced since 1975. They can carry five people and fly about 150 MPH. New they cost pert near two million, used ones can be picked up for about half that. All in, they cost about a thousand dollars an hour to operate. You must really want to get somewhere to pay that kind of money.
The airport code attached to this picture is SSPF. Mouse over the code and we get a popup that says Fly Village (Altos/PL). There is a Fly Village in northeast Brazil. However, SSPF is the code for an airport closer to Sao Paulo, way farther south.
Fly Village is located in the Brazil state Piaui. Looking at Piaui I find this cool photo of ancient rock art. The rock art might be 20,000 years old. They figured that out using optically stimulated luminescence. Wait, what? Optically stimulated luminescence? Never heard of it.
I looked. Optically Stimulated Luminescence is some real Star Trek shit. It sounds like complete bullshit, but evidently it works. Not only are they using to date cave paintings they use it with dosimeters. It sounds insane.
Gruesome story of a drug dealing cult operating in Brazil and Spain. It's a bit confusing because it jumps back and forth in time, though enough sequences are repeated that it eventually starts to fit together. But then we throw hallucinogens in the mix and now nobody really knows what's going on. The jumbled time sequences work to illustrate how confused our players are. Six episodes, 45 minutes each.
Good Morning, Veronica Season 1 Trailer | Rotten Tomatoes TV
Rotten Tomatoes TV
There are some very despicable people running around loose in the world and it's Veronica's self appointed mission to put a stop to their cruel, criminal activities in Sao Paulo Brazil. I think we started watching it once before and I think I put a stopper on it because we had just finished another series about about a sadistic killer and I wasn't up for another one.
It was kind of curious watching the first episode. Nothing in the first half of the show clued in me in that we had seen it before, but as soon as the villain appeared on the screen I began to realize we had seen this episode before.
But it's been awhile since I have seen a show with a sadistic killer, and I know Veronica is going to prevail, so I think we'll probably be able to finish the series.
NPR / OPB Planet Money has a story about How Fake Money Saved Brazil. 20 years ago Brazil was suffering from a high rate of inflation, maybe even hyper-inflation. A minister called in some eggheads and they put up a plan to replace the current currency with imaginary currency, and then they magically turned the imaginary currency into real currency. It sounds slightly ridiculous, and I think it leaves out some important bits, but evidently it worked, which is frankly amazing.
City of God (2002) Official Trailer - Crime Drama HD
Movieclips Classic Trailers
City of God is evidently some kind of government housing project for the homeless. Not much in the way of opportunity, but plenty of crime. The story follows several of the boys and men from this neighborhood. They are all pretty rotten, some more than others. The worst of them takes over the drug business for the whole neighborhood. He does this by killing all of the other drug dealers. But now that he is in charge, crimes of robbery and rape are stopped, which makes the residents happy. Sounds kind of like the Mexican drug cartels taking over the functions of government in the territories they hold.
I keep hoping for a character I care about, but only character who isn't a complete scumbag is the narrator and he does nothing. Well, he eventually becomes a photographer.
Blu-Ray DVD. In Brazilian slum-speak with English subtitles.
The Mechanism | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Netflix
We started watching this Brazilian crime show this evening. I don't know if we'll stay with it. It's kind of frustrating. We have cops trying to nail a money launderer, but he's well connected to the elite and they're all corrupt, kind of like here, so you know nothing is going to happen. They may as well be beating their heads against the wall.
Netflix in some kind of furrin' gibberish, presumably Portuguese with subtitles in English. 16 episodes, 45 minutes each.
I picked up a few clues as to the route they are taking and then made some guesses as to where else they might stop after they leave the UAE and plotted the results on the above map. The range of the aircraft (1700 miles) is the first constraint, and then there are political alliances. Some countries can be real persnickety about letting warbirds fly over them, much less touch down.
The first stop after leaving mainland Brazil is Fernando de Noronha, a place I did not even know existed. You can't even see it on Google Maps unless you are zoomed in on it, and why would you zoom in on a featureless bit of ocean?
FlightAware reports that the Rawanda military is getting a couple of Cessna Grand Caravans. Not quite sure who is paying for them but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the CIA since they are going to be equipped "with secure High Frequency and Ultra High Frequency radio systems, Night Vision Imaging System, . . .".
Then we have a photo of another Cessna Grand Caravan:
The Grand Caravan looks unbalanced - too much fuselage in back of the main wing. The engine must be very heavy in order to balance the weight of the cargo. The fuselage itself doesn't count for much, it's built like a beer can.
Is this the same aircraft? No, this one is from Teresina, Brazil. Teresina? Where the heck is that? I've never heard of it. Northeast Brazil:
I read a book about the area but I don't remember Teresina being mentioned, but it maybe it didn't exist in the book's timeframe. Well, let's see what ye olde Wikipediahas to say:
Teresina is the hottest city in the country and the third city with the major incidence of lightning in the world.
It took me several months to finish this. I had gotten sucked into the insatiable internet vortex and I only read when I was on the train. A pretty amazing book. There are three story lines interspersed with each other. They are essentially:
1. the history of Brazil
2. politics and corruption surrounding the recent (book was published in 2004) Presidential elections and the emergence of democracy,
3. the writer's personal experiences there.
I picked this book at the dollar store. Sometimes I find a real gem in the bargain bin.
From page 290:
"Res Publica". Now that is an interesting term. I have often wondered why all the governments in the America's South of the U.S. were so corrupt. Of course we have our share of corruption, but for some reason the U.S. is richer (so we can afford it?). Or maybe our corruption is not as bad as these other countries, or maybe we are the biggest dog on the block, and no one from the outside is messing with our politics. I like to think the U.S. has the best system of government, but as someone once said, our system is the absolute worst, except for all the others.
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