de fuerzas heteroclitas

i never had the strength to buy provisions last night, so there was nothing to eat for breakfast. there was also nothing to carry with me as a lunch. but i didn't blame myself of the previous night. you can't blame someone for refusing to go to the grocery store right after getting out of a 10-hour day of work. the entire atmosphere was leaden and this infused to my body while i slept. when i sleep the lead diffuses into my body because of the concentration gradient. other than waking, bathing and shaving, i couldn't be trusted to do anything useful in the house, so i took Bird, Steward & Lightfoot's, Transport Phenomena, a perennial best-seller, and eight dollars with me.

On the street I passed a woman, and after I passed her, she said my name. This was about to turn into a situation, because I didn't know who she was. I heard myself saying, "Dinah?" I don't know where this came from, but that was in fact her name. I only remembered her name. We talked about law school and I remembered that she was the girl from Azerbaijan with an identical twin sister, and I also learned that her boyfriend had left her that very morning. She was in a good mood, all things considered.

Some of the eight dollars I used to buy a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee. I had heard that coffee makes you alert and more productive. I thought that my condition was more particular, it was a case of letting the lead slowly diffuse out into the morning and afternoon air. Night air has lead in it, and especially early morning air. I drank the coffee then went to my first appointment. A gentleman came to me with a problem he had about this film of newtonian liquid that was flowing along the inner walls of a pipe, through the center of which a gas was flowing. You might think this problem is boring, but if people weren't able to solve it, there would be no such thing as affordable petroleum products. It was a serious problem indeed. Whether it was by the gravity of the problem, or the caffeine, I became alert.

One of my clients later in the day explained to me the practice of "making it rain," wherein a drug dealer or a wastrel brings several thousand dollars worth of one dollar bills, wrapped in clear plastic, and throws them in the about twenty at a time, so that they "rain" onto the stage.

My sister was in town and I met her so that she could watch me eat a hamburger, french fries, and two pints of india pale ale. She said that she was doing lobbying at the capitol. We discussed bingham fluids, passivization in French, and collateralized debt obligations.

I will buy groceries tonight. I want to make a oaxacan chicken recipe that I came upon by hazard when I googled "country boys eat cold chicken" in order to settle an argument.

debt securitization

Enron seems to have been an illustration. JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and several other banks lent had billions of dollars to Enron, but they appeared to have provided very little oversight, either while Enron was thought to be healthy or after its fortunes began to deteriorate. There no doubt were many reasons that the banks were
missing in action, but surely one of them was credit derivatives. The banks that financed Enron had used massive amounts of credit derivatives to limit their exposure
in the event Enron defaulted? by one estimate, they used more than 800 swaps to lay off $8 billion of Enron risk. The banks would have preferred that Enron survive, even after buying all this protection. After all, a healthy Enron meant the ability to keep making loans to Enron and to continue pocketing the fees. But the prospect of Enron?s decline meant much less to Enron?s banks than if their loans were fully exposed.

The phenomenon is familiar in business life. Bank managers may sleep better at
night if they hedge their nine digit exposure to a company like Enron, just as the
managers of well-diversified conglomerates slept well in the 1960s. But the protection dulls their incentive to actively monitor. And since banks are often particularly well-positioned to monitor? due, among other things, to their sophistication and the access they have to the details of a debtor?s finances? the use of credit default swaps can neutralize a very good monitor. There may be offsetting benefits when a bank hedges its risk, of course, as we saw in the previous part. But lenders? access to credit default swaps complicates the assumption that a significant bank presence invariably translates to active oversight of the borrower.

In theory, the counterparties to a credit default swap could take up the slack,
assuming the banks? monitoring role along with their credit risk exposure. Hedge funds that sell credit derivative protection may emerge, in time, as active monitors of the companies that are the subject of credit derivative contracts.29 But the pension funds and insurance companies that take on much of the risk are unlikely to provide meaningful monitoring. Unlike banks, they have no relationship with the borrower and are less skilled and experienced in evaluating risk. Overall this suggests that credit default swaps may reduce monitoring oversight, and can lead to moral hazard on the part of borrowers who are subject to less financial discipline from their lenders.

Partnoy & Skeel. The Promise and Perils of Credit Derivatives http://lsr.nellco.org/upenn/wps/papers/125

quase seis horas

foi coisa de se o pão ainda estivesse bom para comer. ela fez, se pode mesmo comer-o, e eu, o que procuro é não ter fome pois te pergunto só uma vez mais se queres que faça a tua ao lado da minha. simplesmente foi uma pergunta que te fez. pois a silencia até agora. leio Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, pois é preciso seguir as pensamentos na mesma língua se quero bem entender quando me ponho outra vez ler

ascending hooked

a pregnant woman was at the atm. she took out the card and put it back in. a man came out of the car and they put the card in and took it out twice. i stood a safe distance but made myself visible to assert to a third customer that i should go next, thinking that there are only delays when time is important, then revising, thinking that i only monitor time when necessary. the third customer was a middle aged black man. he said two things to me and i responded "hmm" then "yup" because i could not understand a word he was saying. he was speaking a dialect of english that i've never been properly exposed to.

outside of the restaurant another woman was telling me that she was a pothead and lamented it. she showed her purse, with a cannabis leaf embroidered on it, saying "i mean look. really." i told her don't worry, you're 23, you're still in college. there are many reasons to believe your life is directionless. we were waiting for lorenzo, negotiating some pork buns, who was resembling a yakuza instead of a hawaiian, wearing a t-shirt that said "smart, good looking, and MEXICAN"

the host put his hand on my shoulder and asked if he could get me anything. another buchanan's on the rocks. he smiled, defeated, by what i don't know, and nodded twice, saying "yeah.. yeah." it was in a large styrofoam stadium cup. in the room were four aspiring television producers who wondered how the relationship between NBC and the former producer of "The West Wing" reflected on their own nascent projects. they would never speak loosely about television industrialists. you can learn more about television from these people than you can learn from the preemptive cynics of existentialism, who say so there's this one guy talking about how religion sucks and the other guy is going on a completely different level saying it's good and they're both masturbating into their own ears; god, give me a fucking break you think you're so smart. they aren't conditioned to be composed before the camera. "it's only that you shouldn't judge," i said to no one in particular. "they say that your essence is secondary to your existence, not the other way around." someone told me that he didn't even remember applying to that job, but now he's cloning livestock, performing the brutish task of cutting out dna from an egg with a micron scale pipet, inserting dna from skin cells, running electric current through and repeating a hundred times.

i'm not sure why i bother with weekends.

works progress

the lexicon:

i have noted the proper tone regime of all of the verbs in the digital copy, and can now begin entering records into the lexicography software. i have also secured keyboard layout settings to make the special symbols easy to type.

the booze:
[from the recipe log]

15-Sep 11:56am

g: 1.009 ? 0.001. will bottle now. still tastes of ester. this is likely a fermentation by-product. perhaps caused by failure to properly aerate before pitching. we will see if it dissipates somewhat after bottle conditioning. this could also be due to contamination.

sanitized 5 gal. stock pot with steam. sanitized 56 bottles.
boiled 1.25 cups (125g) of dry amber malt extract in 16 oz. water for priming.

bottled about 40 bottles.

20-Sep 10:12pm

tasted the first bottle. the ester taste is not as pronounced, and has transformed into a lightly sour aftertaste that most resembles raw flour. it won't win any prizes, but is drinkable and refreshing when chilled. needs another week to develop stronger carbonation.

tutoring statistics

consider two days

type A: days in which I ate a turkey sandwich at 3 o' the clock, then was unable to effectively tutor in statistics from 9-10pm
type B: days in which I ate a milanesa steak, mashed potatoes, salad, pão de queijo and two margaritas at 3 o' the clock, (those times when you meet someone you haven't seen for long {or perhaps have seen every day but with whom you would reenact such a situation} and you say "this was fun," "we should do this again some time," ) then was able to effectively tutor in statistics from 9-10pm

we will now try to establish a correlation between calories consumed between 3 and 10 o'clock and number of hours spent effectively tutoring statistics

x y
--------
250 0
1800 1

null hypothesis: there is no correlation between calories consumed and work effectiveness
alternate hypothesis: there is a positive correlation

conclusions: we are unable to reject the null hypothesis at the 95% confidence level; there are not enough degrees of freedom.

the true meaning of christmas

excerpt of alf christmas special dubbed into spanish

excerpts from the day's work

so my cousin who's full korean but if we could actually just, the low-wage earners, and what happens to their incomes? i mean their wages, it's saying that, wait it doesn't say exactly really my mind has shut off since you're our most popular shit dog that shit's no, as a business man the liga, you can go to turkish league if you like, he says him to be a-va-ri-cious and what does cogitate mean [circling finger gesture] so they shot him in the back and two buses passed by, people smoke too much banga there i mean this one guy passed, and let's just say his russian is not you'd probably say she's boring too

team fala para mim

an interesting article published in 1999 about the jacksonians, a supposed socio-cultural group in american history that the writer contrasts with the wilsonians, the jeffersonians and the hamiltonians. good insight from a historical perspective, dangerous in the hands of a politician. one would apply jared diamond's caveat "over large geographical areas over long periods of time"

the jacksonian tradition

The absolute and even brutal distinction drawn between the members of the community and outsiders has had massive implications in American life. Throughout most of American history the Jacksonian community was one from which many Americans were automatically and absolutely excluded: Indians, Mexicans, Asians, African Americans, obvious sexual deviants and recent immigrants of non-Protestant heritage have all felt the sting. Historically, the law has been helpless to protect such people against economic oppression, social discrimination and mob violence, including widespread lynchings. Legislators would not enact laws, and if they did, sheriffs would not arrest, prosecutors would not try juries would not convict.

This tells us something very important: throughout most of American history and to a large extent even today, equal rights emerge from and depend on this popular culture of equality and honor rather than flow out of abstract principles or written documents. The many social and legal disabilities still suffered in practice by unpopular minorities demonstrate that the courts and the statute books still enjoy only a limited ability to protect equal rights in the teeth of popular feeling and culture.

Even so, Jacksonian values play a major role in African-American culture. If anything, that role has increased with the expanded presence of African Americans in all military ranks. The often blighted social landscape of the inner city has in some cases re-created the atmosphere and practices of American frontier life. In many ways the gang culture of some inner cities resembles the social atmosphere of the Jacksonian South, as well as the hard drinking, womanizing, violent male culture of the Mississippi in the days of Davy Crockett and Mark Twain. Bragging about one's physical and sexual prowess, the willingness to avenge disrespect with deadly force, a touchy insistence that one is as good as anybody else: once over his shock at the urban landscape and the racial issue, Billy the Kid would find himself surprisingly at home in such an environment.

how to starve a child

i kept tapping the funnel against the jar into which it did strain red onion ketchup (not tomato) and i heard a muffled resounding noise.

from C. Lévi Strauss: Le cru et le cuit:
To the credit of its enterprise, couldn't one invoke for abstract painting the preceding argument about music, and claim that it is free to organise forms and colors, not completely liberally, but by following the rules of a code independent of sensory experience, as music does with tones and rhythms?
Proposing this analogy, we'd be the victim of a grave illusion. For, if there exist "naturally" colors in nature, there do not exist, except in a fortuitous and ephemeral manner, musical sounds: only noise.

i open the bedroom door and duylinh is standing in the doorway, wrapped in bedsheets. she cannot explain anything and only says "i'm going back to bed."

when i have several children and one is an orphan and not my own child, and all of the children are eating, i give the orphan a piece of tendon. tendon makes you late. this morning i was eating pho and i was chewing on a piece of tendon. the bowl of soup was half full. i had ten minutes to leave for work and i wasn't dressed yet. but i couldn't argue with the tendon. i had to keep chewing it. i didn't get to finish the bowl, and orphans hardly get anything to eat because the proper children chew their second and third pieces of meat while the orphan is still working on that one piece of tendon.

cervix: lat. "neck"

"...repair damage to Everett's third and fourth cervical vertebrae..."
"Cervical cancer is caused by several types..."

ad jectum

a good english speaker, who has competed in national english speaking contests in china, says to me:

"i'm saving all of my left vacation days"

it seems incorrect, but i can't explain why. at the least it's highly irregular.

so can anyone think of an adjective that cannot alternate between these two forms:

"all of my left vacation days" [x]
"all of my vacation days that are left"

but

"my red hammer"
"my hammer that is red"

"the sizzling fat"
"the fat that is sizzling"

"the repressed anxiety"
"the anxiety that is repressed"

"the iconoclast medicine"
"the medicine that is iconoclast"

some cases where it is awkward, but still acceptable

"my seven friends"
"my friends who are seven"

"the girls who are stuck"
"the stuck girls"

update: we have a proposal that in the case of "left", the word is a passive perfect participle for which there is no clear agent. viz. it would not be possible to say "leave the vacation days!" or "i will leave the vacation days to use them next year.". HOWEVER, you could say "this action will leave four vacation days", but i think that there is an implied indirect object (you, me, etc.), and that this is would be equivalent to "this will leave me with four vacation days", so "vacation days" would be more properly considered an adjunct, not an object.

bona fide

lat. "in good faith"

 
i am enjoying the album of the ethiopian rapper k'naan.

[refrain in somali]
how come they only fix the bridge after somebody's already fallen
x2
[refrain]
how can they go to war with terror when it's war that's terrorizin'
x2
[refrain]

in the grocery store we encountered, standing besides a small margarita dispenser atop cardboard boxes a boy with colored contact lenses, spiked hair and one earring. he gave me a sample of some alcoholic slurry. next to him was an old man with a creased suntanned face, small eyes hidden under his bushy eyebrows, and a large sunburned nose. he had a cowboy hat. both of them wore a t-shirt with the same symbol as was on the bottle.

"six ninety two," the old man said.

one word's story

from Arabic qarraba:

french: caraffe
portuguese: garrafa
english: carboy
spanish: garrafón

opticon/optica

something disturbs me about david brooks' column in the new york times. it seems to me that it makes coded elitist remarks that are appreciated because they remind us of utopic communities that we see on tv or read about in harlequin romance novels.

his main argument against full government health care is that it is something for europeans, and that we are different people from europeans, who have always had it in their blood to cooperate with this kind of thing. if we can believe that large groups of people over large areas of land over large periods of time are genetically disposed to behave a certain way, we can also be open to the suggestion that slaves are dishonest and women are unserious

Some liberals, believing that government should step in as employers withdraw, support a European-style, single-payer health care system. That would be fine if we were Europeans. But Americans, who are more individualistic and pluralistic, will not likely embrace a system that forces them to defer to the central government when it comes to making fundamental health care choices

he goes on to endorse somebody's idea that health care can be managed through insurance trusts managed by trusted organizations such as churches, unions and other social groups. the reasoning is that america has a unique social web that can control an important part of a vast and complex system that provides something that people need without becoming corrupted.

we should believe that these groups in american society can manage so much money and so much power without losing the qualities that they are admired for. community groups lose their focus when they are willing to compromise their ideals in order to safeguard their existence. they would become quasi government agencies, and have to rewrite their constitutions. if social groups controlled a health system, would social groups spring up, promoting the interests of idiots, gangsters and junkies and providing them with health insurance. government is the only organization that routinely treats despicable people with respect, and despicable people deserve the same political and human rights as model citizens. american society is based on the equality of rights and opportunity, just as european societies are.

by claiming that americans have differences with other humans that preclude a share of ideas, he makes it an easy sell for those who agree with this

loneliness

"The only person I have left to talk to is a linguist and talking to a linguist is no fun."

Remark made to the linguist Joshua Fishman by a speaker of a dying amerindian language

productivity

1. get out of bed and go to the recliner to finish waking up
2. after twenty minutes, perceive a feeling of impurity, as if the air were a window splattered with soot and grease.
3. after feeling troubled for ten minutes, decide that this feeling is due either to the condition of the house or the condition of my body.
4. take a shower. return to the recliner to wait for the mirror to unfog.
5. collect dirty pieces of clothing and dishes, placing them where they belong.
6. shave and clip fingernails.
7. take all of the pieces of paper on my desk and place them in a neat pile. place the pile of paper on a plastic letter document holder.
8. go to the store to buy toilet paper. also buy 2 litres of olive oil and fruit. wait in the parking lot in a car with the windows partially rolled down. it is raining but the air and ground are hot so the environment is steamy.
9. go to my brother's house. debate with duylinh what kind of a woman his girlfriend is and if she is in fact looking for a man, according to her definition.
10. drink some wine for fear of it turning sour.
11. return home. line the coffee table with newspaper.
12. melt butter in an electric skillet. add sliced beef, shrimp, mushrooms and capsica.
13. my brother wants to practice french. he is a french major.

est-ce que je dois laver mes baguettes? parce qu'ils ont touché de la viande crue.
ne t'en fais pas.

...

27. read four pages. become anxious about my professional life.
28. go to the computer. forget why i decided to go there. read a story about dna. look at the etymology of the word cohort. make an inquiry about three pidgin words. another iniquiry about some powerpoint presentations that do not relate to a syllabus that they are related to.
29. return to my seat. read two pages. think about gathering beer bottles.
30. pour myself a beer. rinse the bottle.
31. by consulting the dictionary, make sure that the adjective cru is regularly marked for gender.

old papers

a piece of posterboard:

PUBLIC NOTICE

The general public is informed that a pig (sow) will be slaughtered in Lewoh Market on the 21st of April 2006 at 9.00am. Interested persons wishing to buy pork should contact Rev. Atembe John, and register their names, indicating the number of Kgs they wish to buy. The said sow will be subjected to public inspection from 6.00am to 8.55am on the above date.

Price per Kg 1200 Frs C.F.A.