100 and 1 little candles

Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, this is my 100th posting. Quite a lot of water has gurgled underneath this bridge since that very first archived message, over a year ago, which was heralding the beginning of a new era. I am not going to dwell into nostalgia - it's against my policies, especially at 2:20 am after spending hours trying to make sense of the basics of HTML language. On the contrary, I chose to celebrate this birthday with an act of creation, or rather amoeba-like self-duplication, by setting up a second blog: GlobaLab's blog! [ignore the layout for the moment, clearly I need more than a crash-course in web-design...]

I know, I know, some of you are already rolling their eyes and putting their hands up in the air: another blog to keep track of?!?!? Oh bloody hell!!!

Rest reassured: the purpose of this second blog is to reconnect with those initial and feverish ideas, which led me to cross the ancient doors of the London School of Economics, in search of the mythological beast we call globalisation. The timing could not be more perfect, since my term begins on Friday, and my cords - the quintessential student item of clothing - are aching to get out of the cupboard. Over the next year, I will read, sweat, drool, argue, enquire, memorize, snooze, debate, cycle, search, ponder, write, gesticulate, question, jump and occasionally ooze until, with a primal scream, a flickering light will appear. This blog will serve the purpose of collecting my academic and less academic thoughts, together with the thoughts of those I know and admire already, and of those I don't know yet but are heartbeats away from entering into my life. It'll aim to be serious (insofar as I can be serious for more than a few hours), argumentative, stimulating, challenging, unorthodox, young, open to as many ideas as there are people out there. But most of all, it'll be an on-line creative process, just as GlobaLab should be, at the end of which I hope our interconnected paths will start making more sense.

As for my good old blog, which I have grown to depend on almost like weekly psychotherapy, it will remain my first port of call for all things personal: friends, family, random rants, counter-rants, music discoveries, movie reviews, Tuscan totty-adventures and London musings. All boring stuff concerning in particular silly countries will be banned from this site, and relegated to the more austere rooms of its younger sibling. And I apologies to those of you who like to cross-fertilise genres, but sadly the net sets its own rules, and I can only bow to the beautiful complexity of its emergence. So, please carry on reading, commenting, partaking: because, as an American author once said, "... no writing is a waste of time,—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work".

Especially with such readers as yourselves...