The government of Brazil wants you to pee in the shower.

Confederations Cup liveblogging: I'll be watching the finals of the Confederations Cup in a bit and posting excited exclamations whenever the U.S. scores against the hated and villainous Brazilians. (Early projection: 10-0 U.S.) Game starts at 2:25 EST.

2:13 Summary of ESPN pre-show: "U.S., you need to play good."

Spoiler alert and assorted observations behind the [+/-].

0:00 And we're off.

1:00 Congrats to the U.S. for keeping Brazil scoreless through the first minute of the game.

9:38 DEMPSEY SCORES! Dempsey again, God bless 'em. U.S. 1-0.

10:00 Announcers say that this is the first time Brazil has trailed in the entire tournament. I suspect their spirits may have been broken.

12:00 Nice save from Howard. U.S. putting the pressure on—they barely stopped Davies on a breakaway.

21:00 More informed match-tracking from the New York Times.

24:00 Another nice save from Howard. Things are getting physical.

26:00 U.S. defense generally looking good under pressure.

26:52 Donovan scores! Up 2-0!

34:10 Another miraculous save from Howard. He's doing great today.

45:00 + 1 Brazil having terrible luck with their shots so far today. U.S. very lucky. Game goes into the half with the US up by two.

45:45 Brazil scores 45 seconds into the second half. That's a bad sign.

58:00 U.S hurting, though still up by one. Lucky save just now.

60:00 EVEN MORE LUCKY SAVE FROM HOWARD. God. That really looked like it was in. (On replay it looks like it was kind of definitely in.)

63:30 Two good shots from the U.S., but no dice. U.S. fans on Twitter seem a little embarrassed about The Save. I make no apologies.

70:30 Howard again. Hero of the match.

73:31 Time to break Fabiano's leg. 2-2. Ugh.

84:00 Brazil gets its third goal off a header. Looking very bad. It's clear now that God is punishing Tim Howard for The Save.

89:30 U.S. just can't find the equalizer.

90:00 Three minutes stoppage time.

90:00 + 3 Amazing first half balanced by a terrible second half. At least we made Brazil work for it. See you in 2010.

Tivo alert: As yesterday I'm settling down to watch the heroic South Africans upset the hated Brazilians and I may or may not have some comments to make about what I see. I'll put everything behind this [+/-], but try to stay away from my RSS feed if you're taping the game.

Game is starting now. Updates are live as the game progresses. [+/-]

12 min: Brazil just got off their first shot, saved by the goalie, Itumeleng Khune. But Brazil is getting around South Africa's defense fairly easily—after the shot you could see Khune gesticulating angrily at his defenders.

29 min: South Africa picking things up—heartbreaking save by the Brazilian goalie on a penalty kick a minute or so ago.

36 min: Brazil actually a little bit on the defensive here.

42 min: Geez, that one was close. Kaka just got unlucky.

43 min: And South Africa matches with a shot of their own that was thisclose. Amazed to see South Africa keeping Brazil scoreless at the half.

45 min: Spoke to soon? Tsepo Masilela hit with a yellow card, Brazil gets a free kick right at the start of stoppage time.... Blocked!

60 min: Still scoreless. What a game from South Africa.

74 min: Still scoreless!

87 min: Shit! Brazilian goal off a penalty kick with three minutes to go.

Heartbreaker. Tough luck for the US for Sunday.

Okay, a few more.

* Carteret Islands evacuated due to the islands' sinking against rising sea level.

* Advantage Canavan: Joe Trippi says there's no truth to the rumors that Edwards staffers had a secret plan to bring down the candidate.

* 90% of Brazil's Atlantic Rainforest has been destroyed.

* My Pitches for Political-Satire Skits Playing on President Obama’s Foibles Keep Getting Shot Down. At McSweeney's.

* Photographs by blind photographers.

* Life as a New Yorker writer, twittered. Read this version for chronological clarity.

* Raised by anthropologists: Profile of Ursula K. Le Guin.

* The fallacy of authorial intent: The director and writer of The Usual Suspects disagree on what happened in the film.

Craziest thing I've read today: Did Josef Mengele create a town full of Aryan twins in Brazil?

Something very close to what Marx meant by "the revolution" has been happening for years in Argentina, where workers "have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management."

The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers: "We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale - some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country's other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country's deeply unequal "recovery". Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: this is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.

Like a number of other emerging social movements around the world, the workers in the recovered companies are rewriting the script for how change is supposed to happen. Rather than following anyone's ten-point plan for revolution, the workers are darting ahead of the theory - at least, straight to the part where they get their jobs back. In Argentina, the theorists are chasing after the factory workers, trying to analyse what is already in noisy production.

These struggles have had a tremendous impact on the imaginations of activists around the world. At this point, there are many more starry-eyed grad papers on the phenomenon than there are recovered companies. But there is also a renewed interest in democratic workplaces from Durban to Melbourne to New Orleans.

That said, the movement in Argentina is as much a product of the globalisation of alternatives as it is one of its most con tagious stories. Argentinian workers borrowed the slogan "Occupy, Resist, Produce" from Latin America's largest social movement, Brazil's Movimiento Sin Terra, in which more than a million people have reclaimed unused land and put it back into community production. One worker told us that what the movement in Argentina is doing is "MST for the cities". In South Africa, we saw a protester's T-shirt with an even more succinct summary of this new impatience: "Stop Asking, Start Taking".

Via Boing Boing.

New culturemonkey post: Reification and dystopia in mass culture, or, a few quick thoughts on the greatness of Brazil.

McSweeney's: An Intrauniversity Intraoffice Flier Announcing That the Company Is Having a Jellybean-Counting Contest for Its Employees.

I know there are a few Brazil fans in the audience, so for their benefit here's the short essay we're using in our classroom discussion on the movie this Wednesday in Introduction to Film. Did anyone out there ever wind up seeing Tideland? I've been meaning to, but I've been so disappointed by Gilliam lately I haven't pulled the trigger.

It is also possible to see Brazil’s simultaneous past/future makeup in the images and music Gilliam selects (as opposed to just the words). While the above discussion basically deals with the philosophical tenets of postmodernism, the movie’s visual dimension is more concerned with style. As a style, "[postmodernism] emphasizes diversity, displays a penchant for pastiche, and advocates eclectic use of elements from the past." Although Brazil is meant to be futuristic in some sense, it incorporates several cultural artifacts, in particular elements from the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. The workers watch Casablanca (1942) and B westerns on their mini-TV/computer screens; the costumes are vintage Hollywood fashions from the ‘30s and ‘40s; the large eagle statue at the entrance of the Ministry of Information symbolically recalls the Nazi domination of the late ‘30s/early ‘40s, as do the scenes in which armor-clad police burst into apartments (Buttle’s and later Sam’s mother’s) like SS troops; the various posters in the film ("Don’t Suspect a Friend – Report Him!") copy the style of those World War II posters designed by the Englishman Abram Games; and finally, even the title song "Brazil" by Xavier Cugat comes from 1939.

To the idle viewer, all of this may seem like mere coincidences, but Gilliam strategically designs his film to recall the writing of Arnold Toynbee. According to Toynbee, the "second act" of the "first postmodern general war in AD 1914, brought into focus a series of problems with the rapidity of technological change…in so far as [it] threatened prevailing forms of life…" Put another way, "World War II, with its unprecedented savageness and destruction, with its revelation of the brutality at the core of a high-technological civilization, could appear as the culmination of demonic modernity, a modernity that has finally been overcome." Overcome, quite simply, by the advent of postmodernism. Thus, is it any wonder that Gilliam created Brazil to look like that moment in history that best exemplifies the evils of modernity and the beginning of those styles associated with postmodernism?