Friday, April 29, 2011

#getoffmylawn

O RLY?
Nobel Literature Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru considered that “young people” who abbreviate their words and violate grammar rules while chatting online or on Twitter and Facebook think “like monkeys”…

“If you write that way, you talk that way. If you talk that way, you think that way. And if you think that way, then you think like monkeys. And that worries me. It could be that people are happier this way. Perhaps monkeys are happier than human beings. I don’t know,” said the author (in an interview published in Uruguay’s “Búsqueda” magazine).
His comments were pounced upon by Peruvian conservative presidential hopeful Keiko Fujimori who tweeted that Twitter users are “geniuses.”

Though Vargas Llosa backed former military man Ollanta Humala in the runoff for the Peruvian presidency, he blasted Wikileaks for causing “an electoral catastrophe” that led to Humala’s first round victory. (He previously compared choosing between Fujimori and Humala to “choosing between cancer and AIDS.”)

Both presidential candidates have been feverishly seeking the support of moderate voters who shunned them due to their political baggage. Fujimori has tried to distance herself from the corruption and human rights abuses under the decade-long presidency of her father, while Humala has sought to portray himself as a moderate rather than a firebrand revolutionary.

With roughly five weeks until the definitive round of elections, a poll released today showed that both candidates are in a statistical dead heat.

Image- AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko via ABC News (“Peru's Nobel Literature Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa delivers a speech during a conference at the annual book fair in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, April 21, 2011.
Online Sources- Reuters, The Latin Americanist, Two Weeks Notice, Mercopress, EPA, El Universal

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