do que ter aquella velha

duylinh y yo llegamos hace seis horas na terra dos regios. pipo me dizou que queria praticar o seu portugues mas agora melhor que falemos espanhol, me dizou, siguendo no portugues... when the bus driver passed a few words with me and put his fingers on his face to stretch out his eyes "asi la chinita, asi la mexicana," pointing to a woman with an adequate butt, she said she preferred the guatemalan people, but came to be más de acuerdo after a few indios, sol y dos equis with pipo bernardo y el polaco. berna and i had a few sips of the buchanan's 18 years and immediately noticed the difference from the 12 years that paul phil and i drank yesterday in progresso. in line with maha's prediction, mexicans love buchanan's more than anything. i saw the romanian couple i keep running into since 18 months ago. on thursday night we'll head out to jalisco with chilanga and alemán

garbage cities grandmas' bedsores

i am down in the valley and starting to sweat. my brother graduated and i got to eat dinner at the olive garden.

até 3 may: san benito, TX
31may-2june: monterrey, MEX
3jun-5jun: guadalajara, MEX
6jun-7jun: monterrey, MEX
8jun-13jun: austin, TX
14jun-17jun: philadelphia, PA
18jun-15sep: mbalmayo, Cameroun...

in austin i hope to tie up various loose ends and have one last burger at burger tex. i don't care anymore.

restaurant review

if you do not often spend your time in the antioquian province of colombia, and live in austin, i recommend to you. go to doña emilia's on cesar chavez & san jacinto and have the bandeja paisa. wash it down with a guiness or two. the trick to drinking guiness, i learned from the notorious maha, is to finish it in about five gulps, well spread out of course. this picture i took in antioquia is fairly representative. any non-colombian food, the restaurant doesn't know how to make it. somehow the restaurant is a gathering place for young gay men and older professional women. perhaps this explains the tacky pseudo-ethnic atmosphere and wait service.

today's etymology lesson

"Other devices were also utilized to circumvent the Church's usury laws, the simplest perhaps being the adoption of a variety of euphemisms for the word "interest": prode (yield), guadaguo (gain), and merito (reward) . . . but still there were times when money had to be obtained quickly and with minimum social and political constraints. To satisfy this need, Jews, not being bound by the Church law, were allowed to be money lenders . . . Jews were limited by discriminatory laws to certain professions and money lending provided an opportunity for lucrative gains . . .The Jewish community of Venice was limited to one section of the city . . . and its money lenders became famous. It is with these money lenders and their benches, banco, or tables, travolo, of business, that the origins of modern banking began. When a money lender was found to be cheating he was publicly disgraced and put out of busienss by having his bench broken, banco ruptus; today we would say he went bankrupt.

Frank J. Swetz, Capitalism & Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century

veiullez agréer

i can't think. i can't move. i can't write. más sé que no soy incapaz...
we rode down to del rio. there would be a border patrol checkpoint:
-leaving del rio towards big bend
-leaving big bend
-leaving del rio towards san antonio

we would be detained:
-taking a nap on some picnic tables in big bend
-for running a yellow light
-both times we entered the US from ciudad acuńa

camping we cooked some food and ate it. one time we made several shish kebabs with stew meat and a thick curry gravy with stew meat and had all of this with the bottle of black label we got on the way up. we had ham and butter sandwiches most of the way down. duylinh said "this is so french." one man wanted to interest in his gift shop in ciudad acuńa and he spoke english so well. i asked him if he had lived in the united states, and he said he had for about 25 years in chicago as a child, graduated high school with honors, then got deported. we went around some taco shops asking for fajita tacos or tacos del trompo and finally ended up at some place with a pedro ---- poster, the actor with the tequila drunken crying serenading the mujer llorona in his military uniform. natha described his movies to me last summer as: "machismo, borrachismo, tanto cantando, mujeres sumisas." we came up with exactly enough money to cross the bridge and pay the tax on our alcohol bottles. one article in the big bend gazette is the new regulation starting at the end of 2007 that anyone who wishes to enter the US from mexico or Canada shall have to show a passport. my hometown is already a sort of a militarised zone with the border patrol (migras) constantly swarming up the highways. all along the river in texas border patrol outnumbers actual police officers. for people living along the border, going into mexico is a regular part of life, but most do not have a passport. they can be costly for poor families, moreso with new "security fee." i think all newly issued passports will have biometric features in the near future. we went to a local bar in terlingua texas where there was open mic. frank and daniel got drunk and told stories on the mike about the broken angel statue, the walk to lockhart. the night we allowed beef fat to drip onto the soil we went to bed scared that a bear or a mountain lion would catch the smell and rustle us up. we were awoken by frank screeming one night as a baby rabbit hopped around near his tent. two fully-grown jackrabbits got killed by our car and promptly eaten by turkey vultures. i think the turkey vulture population is boosted by the roadkill. they love to eat snakes and dead rabbits. driving back we felt as dirty as the beggars and as unshaven as the coyotes con el coyote no hay aduana...



i am doing things like consolidating deferring student loans, telling them my bicycle size, changing names on the cable bill, throwing away everything i own in a fit of exasperation. somehow those four backpacks the box full of dry pens, cd covers, pennies, chain links, plush dolls from past girlfriends, shirts with only a few bottons, printers, coffee tables, ice trays, a tarp, i hate it all. i made myself believe that all of the things i own are causing me to yawn so much. now that all the housegusts are gone i can get some work done and arrange a trip to monterrey. i always have this desire to run and jump and hit the wall. maybe i will stay frozen in the air. i will have a good vantage point. duylinh and i don't get much accomplished besides cooking, for she is the maniac who is frightfully anxious that the future will never come so she had better sit on the couch and wait for the future to come to her, like the man of yore who lies on his grass mat waiting for fortune to arrive, and i am the maniac who fears that the future is painfully imminent and that i must do everything possible to prepare for it, but oftentimes impossible things appear on my list of everything possible and the fear that the list is so pitifully incomplete glues me to the couch to take one long fresh breath

yeah i ain't cleanin' these streets

the notorious maha called me from the road on thursday night to say he would be arriving shortly. the condition is that he may not bring the AK on the road trip to big bend national park and the UETA duty free shop in del rio peleo pa'l nene peleo pa' la nena maha's car was kidnapped in the night by an august suitor bearing the crest of J&J towing. we went to the vinyl siding trailor with bulletproof glass in the burned out area behind the airport. the woman inside eating a mayonnaise and potato chip sandwich told us that we would be in trouble if not for her virtuousness. she would release the car at no charge even though it was illegally parked, as a favor to our property manager. the dishonesty list stands at: crackheads, junkies, winos, carnies, tow truck operators. now that maha has their phone number, he has a plan. hello, i'm stranded out at XX intersection. i find y'all's service exceptional, so i would like for you to tow my car for me. of course i am willing to pay extra since it is far away we have exhausted our gentleman jack and gin supplies, so it shall be expedient to make it to the border fast

.

it's not the way you ride

contessa and i once discussed all the possible ethical dilemmas that could be extracted from any field of work, c'est â dire we took some seemingly innocent examples amd found an ethical dilemma within each, and made the generalization in order to detach ourselves, allow ourselves a bit of desultory apathy. the moralist finds reliable comfort only in indifference to the truth.

a young girl contracted by a subcontractor came to my door to solitcit a donation for save the children, and i handed her a check for five dollars. she explained that it was not their policy to accept donations of less than ten dollars. she said that there was a processing fee for depositing the check and in order to keep overhead costs low, it was not poosible to accept my donation unless i changed it to ten dollars. i told her i had an ethical dilemma. that i would like for the five dollars to go to save the children, but i wanted to know who was actually contracting her at minimum wage to solicit these donations. in this way i failed to donate any money to children for an ethical dilemma that i couldn't really articulate. or is it that the ethical dilemma is an indulgence to allow myself more indifference?

gator belts and patty melts

the breakaway republic of Transdniester in Eastern Europe... I guess the name is too hard to pronounce

(The Times)


?The terms of the deal have changed. I will be in touch later to give you a bank account number. You must now transfer $5,000 to see the rockets and then we will proceed as agreed earlier. On May 9 we will move the rockets across the border.?

He added that a bank transfer to cover the cost of the forged documents for the cargo would have to be made from inside Transdniester using his satellite telephone. ?You have 24 hours to talk to your people about the new terms,? he said.

Following this meeting the reporter was followed on the streets of Chisinau by a man believed to be working for Dimitri. The man at one point sat two tables away from him at an outdoor cafe for more than an hour.

The Sunday Times withdrew that night because taking the investigation any further would have required making a substantial payment to an arms smuggler who had no compunction about dealing with terrorists.

However, Dimitri?s willingness to let the rockets be tested with a Geiger counter strongly indicated that he had access to them and believed they could be moved at short notice. The offer to sell the Alazans appears to confirm fears in the West that deadly weapons could be acquired by terrorists in Transdniester with relative ease.

precarious patience of an overnervous person

i find that the students work with me more if i show myself to be subject to the same collapses of attention as they are. one of the basketball players i gave him a problem to do about two slit interference, he starts sort of drawing lines on the paper to make a pattern then signs his name in several places with his jersey number while i glance at the various tenses available only to serious readers and writers of french: definite past, pluperfect subjunctive, anterior past...say are you ever having a dream and the alarm goes off, you get up, but you still concern yourself with the events of the dream? like i was responsible for some heavily ramified arrangement of people, unusual objects, and places that i could only operate competently without the burden of consciousness and that venomous bird of glowing red numerals shrieks at me in a way that demands one's complete attention like a wasp's sting. i disarm it and start to piece together that which i had been working on upon being interrupted, but first one quick calculation. 1130 - 1106 = 24 yeah i hate when that happens, he says and we check our clocks and agree that time moves slower in the morning. i explain how lenz's law works for a bar magnet and an ideal solenoid. moving the magnet towards the solenoid, it resists the approach, moving it away, it resists the departure. just like a woman, he says.

my neighbor came up to make me eat a piece of zucchini stuffed with chicken, pico de gallo, salsa verde and aguacate

if you'll smoke a dime say "i'll smoke a dime"

yesterday i woke up fast and fixed myself to cleaning up the house, doing the laundry, and writing a story or two for sarah. everything was completed to various degrees, but then became rudely interrupted when tran came over and showed me how to play the card game called VC. i then played VC for about ten hours, managing to keep track of my hand while cooking and eating curry and enchiladas, drinking rum and playing dominoes. from now on i am going to ban people from introducing addictive games to my house. we reached a moment of high drama when we attempted to simultaneously play a game of dominoes and VC. there were three players common to both games, then two additional who each played nothing but VC or nothing but dominoes. in this way they would encourage their game to keep going. we all ended up yelling at eachother, because people would play out of turn or things they said would apply to the wrong game, and in one case, someone won the card game and johnny immediately dismantled all the dominoes and shuffled them

realpolitik

one of the biggest markets for federal money is the place where i grew up, along the mexican border. the government gives money to competing federal, state and local agencies for regulating the drug, currency, and immigrant trafficking industries. this is a typical operation:

In late April, the U.S. Attorney?s office announced that it had cut a deal with Santillan in which it dropped murder charges against him in exchange for a 25-year sentence for pleading guilty to ?conducting a continuing criminal enterprise.?

That star witness against Santillan was an informant on the payroll of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The informant, Jesus Contreras, also known as Lalo, had infiltrated the Santillan organization and, under the watch of ICE agents, participated in many of the murders in Ciudad Juárez. Narconews)

karma police arrested this girl i

Supporters of the bill, however, argued that something had to be done to prevent student cheerleaders from mimicking the provocative dances seen on MTV, the routines of some professional sports teams' cheering squads and suggestive performances in cheerleading movies like "Bring It On" and its sequel, "Bring It On Again."

i saw a scene on the sketch comedy show Mr. Show where an investigative television news program interviews different parties relevant to the growing popularity of ventriloquism, the feuding and increasingly violent east coast/west coast fractions. they bring on an actual gangster rapper who says "man, y'all got your fucking talking dolls and shit," and shrugs his shoulders

whatever i read in between, i have been reading the same two books for the past 9 months or so, both of which seem to have been written to defy any interpretation, suggesting that the only necessary interpretation is the readers' own. so to demonstrate to myself that my idle time was not spent more idly than usual, i will now present all of my emotions via allegories, which can be interpreted or simply consumed as is.

in reading the french newspaper, i have discovered several important conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions: lors, sitôt, tandis, vers, ainsi, puisque, dont. in the seventh grade i was made to memorize some 48 english prepositions. seeing the list they all seemed so natural to me that it was unnecessary to commit them to a single block of memory. one day the teacher asked us to write them all down. i got a failing grade then. i hated that teacher.

je ne veux pas mourir sans avoir appris porquoi j'avais vécu

Similarly, bribes were distributed to local warlords in Khost and Paktia to ensure smooth elections, which the US-backed Karzai won easily. At the same time, to gain support among Afghan warlords, the US and the Kabul administration turned a blind eye to the huge number of poppy fields in Afghanistan, from which the majority of the world's heroin is now produced.

However, in doing all of this, a major factor was ignored: the powerful tribal bonds of Afghan society. In giving money to people like Rocketi and Mansoor, it is a sure bet that some of it made its way to the Taliban. Similarly, by allowing warlords to grow poppy, some of their profits would filter through to the Taliban.

The logical result is the re-emergence of the Taliban - more monied, more resourceful and better organized.
(Asia Times)

bibliothéque

nearly complete works of julio cortázar available online

mama năo que brinca mais

A robar corazones voy al molino,
a robar corazones voy al molino,
porque la molinera,
porque la molinera,
porque la molinera, morena, me robó el mío.

i threw the sanbur-encrusted yellow duck to the floor and laid on the mound of pillows and sleeping bags covering the couch with my french bilingual dictionary and the article Le Japon est "d'accord pour discuter" sur la possibilité... and duylinh read about public transport in Managua on La Prensa
there are five names i know for cassava: yucca, manioc, mandioca, brazilian arrowroot, tapioca. along with potatoes, it was first domesticated in south america. last night we went to fiesta and bought a large cassava, some bolillos, basil, beer and stew meat. late at night the shoppers at fiesta are mexican waitresses with their children buying huge large sacks of beans, onions, tortillas, jalapeńos, tomatoes, and lard; guanaco and chapín day laborers come in pairs and buy crčme fraîche, tamales, beans and jocotes, single women buying huge bags of dog food, and me buying fried cassava, green onions or gummi bears

it has occurred to me that traditional latin american songs whose lines end in morena or negrita are songs of women telling their problems to the maidservant

duylinh made some baked pork ribs with the red marinade and i made the cassava stew. neighbors came over and ate everything. i have been dreaming of a system of low-friction trackings around my ceiling and a harness i can sit in which allows me to maintain a reclined position, so i can glide around the apartment for whatever reason

einstein's riddle

this is the answer to the riddle on the main page:

House1: Norwegian Yello Hollywood Water Cats
House2: Danish Blue Charms Tea Horses
House3: English Red Marlboro Milk Birds
House4: German Green Camel Coffee Fish
House5: Swede White Free Beer Dogs

U.S. Congressmen Roscoe Bartlett

has been making speeches in congress about peak oil production

I've had very interesting responses from people. People who had never heard of this, they tell me, one of the members told me, "Gee, I had CSPAN on I couldn't tell you anything anybody said about any of the special orders but when you came on I really tuned in and I remember everything you said." One of the leaders of the conservatives here told me that he tuned in to one on at 11:30 at night, don't know what he's doing up that late, tuned in at 11:30 at night and was spellbound by what I said. And he's one of the conservative leaders. A three-star General the other day out here in the hallway here had never heard of peak oil. One of the things that we're trying to do is just get the word out—that there is such a thing as peak oil; we probably are there now; if not now then shortly.

look at his own website