Friday night sleuthing

Dissertation research - call it "fieldwork" - is a lot like detective work. That is, I feel like a one-man detective agency, save that a) no one has died, or has asked me to investigate a case, b) other people might not find the cases interesting, c) my life is in little danger, and no television producers are calling or d) I don't smoke, and I don't currently have an office. In all other respects, it's like playing Dick Tracy.

I certainly didn't expect the following sequence:

I need to talk to Mr. Smith. He worked at the agency back in the late 1990s. Mr. Smith, by all accounts, lives in Rio de Janeiro. But he is now retired, and the last two times he appeared on the Google, he was 1) first in line for tickets to a Roberto Carlos (the Neil Diamond of Brazil) concert last year, and 2) asking a members-only car aficionado site how to fix his power windows, in 2005. Yet I really need to talk to Mr. Smith.

So tonight, Friday night, I joined the members-only car aficionado site, so that I could send a private message to Mr. Smith about the possibility of meeting to talk. Maybe we could meet at the beach on a Wednesday morning; that seems to be what retired people do here. We'll see if he responds. Hopefully his email address hasn't changed.

At least I have live music while I work; there's another concert on the balcony of the Modern Art Museum across the street. The last concert lasted until midnight last night, with no regard for noise ordinances. It was quite loud. Thankfully, they covered some songs I like, such as Minha Menina by the Mutants.

Finally, a photo taken from today's evening run in Flamengo, the famous crying coconut:



The caption encourages people to, at the end of a beach day, put their garbage in the trash can. Each hour, half a ton of garbage is abandoned on the beach. And you don't want to be responsible for making sad garbage, now do you?