Beautiful women, dancing half or more naked under the moonlight, what more could a normal man wish for in his holiday? If he's alone, of course, and by that I mean "not with his wife," because you can never be alone in Brazil, especially during the Carnival. Loud music, a continuous feeling of surrealism and let's not forget the beautiful women, all of that would make the Latin America country a perfect location for unwinding after a long year.

As rolling cheese wheels down the hills is traditional for some countries, so is the carnival traditional for Brazil. Out of the two, the choice is clear to me, but I won't dwell on it. Google recognized the importance of the holiday and decided to honor it with a doodle, to remind every user accessing the Brazilian homepage that party time is here.

A wise move from the Mountain View-based company, as the South American Brazil is one of the countries with the highest recorded penetration of its Orkut social network, and that deserves some recognition. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, the navigational bar has Orkut up front, unlike the bar from where you're living. I myself haven't used Google's social network because others were more prominent when I decided to sign in to such a community, but they must be doing all right, and with OpenSocial rallying people, it will be an important pawn in the fight against Facebook.

The doodle celebrates the Carnival, which according to Wikipedia is "an annual festival in Brazil held 40 days before Easter and marks the beginning of Lent." It doesn't look very impressive, with only one "o" being clearly represented, but nobody's perfect and it does have a holiday feel to it, so I'll let that slide. Now, back to thinking about beautiful women…