Quote of the Day- from Portuguese Writer Jose Saramago

Unfortunately, the famed Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, pictured here, died last week at his home in The Canary Islands at the age of 87.

Like many great writers, including the late Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet who lived in Russia and the late American writer William Burroughs who spent many years in Tangiers, Morocco, Saramago was an exiled man. This was mainly due to his political views for Saramago (like Hikmet) was a communist even though the Portuguese writer's exile (from what we gather) was a personal choice.

Saramago's novel "Blindness" had been made into a 2008 film with Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, and the writer won the first Nobel Prize for Portugal in 1998.

We are featuring Saramgo as one of the 32 people from the 32 countries in the World Cup.

The Portuguese team made headlines on Monday with a 7-0 thumping of North Korea, which assuredly did not go over well at the Kim Jong Il residence in Pyongyang.

As many soccer fans know (and I consider myself a casual one though I did watch virtually every game of the 1978 World Cup which host Argentina won when I was a child while we were living in Turkey), Portugal has a bonafide superstar in Cristiano Ronaldo, whom David Fellerath of "The Independent Weekly" in Raleigh, NC, called 'a glowering metrosexual.' Ronaldo is also starring in a series of tennis shoe ads with Homer Simpson?!


Here is today's quote from Saramago. It is, as one would fully expect, a political one in nature:

"People used to say about me: 'He's good but he's a Communist. Now they say: 'He's a Communist, but he's good."