hunting gatherers

inter
Originally uploaded by jlovegren

i was kicking these nuts around them until i heard a woman, at a barbecue where healthy food was served, someone affiliated with a non-profit organization, saying:

"people, in other people's yards, you see their bags full of them. there they are, they don't even care. their cars are parked right there on the street."

she said that pecan comes from an algonquin word meaning "a nut that must be cracked by means of smashing it with a stone." she is moving to portland, maine, and her husband is going to sell the cat to me against her will.

i went out to the sidewalk and gathered for fifteen minutes.

current reading: Livres en feu, by Lucien X Polastron. like the book review in the economist said, he cannot make up his mind whether or not to be serious, but it is full of exciting stories. the reviewer said that matters are made worse when it is translated in english. i think so too, because his sentences barely hold themselves together. translating them is like carrying a performance artist's sculpture in medium of junkyard, metal stucco lab and lime mortar from one museum or the other, using the subway.

ahead of its time

This trend can be seen as following from a variation on a corrollary of Stent's (1978: 96-7) assertion that a scientific discovery will be premature in effect unless it is "appreciated in its day." In this context, for something to lack appreciation does not mean that it was "unnoticed . . . or even . . . not considered important," but instead that scientists "did not seem to be able to do much with it or build on it," so that the discovery "had virtually no effect on the general discourse" of its discipline, since its implications could not "be connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical . . . knowledge." (It was in this sense, e.g., that Collingwood (1946/1993: 71) described Vico's 1725 Nuova scienza ("New Science") as being "too far ahead of his time to have very much immediate influence.") In the case at hand, the relevant corrollary is that scholars tend to interpret and publicize their discoveries in ways which allow connections with the general discourse and canonical knowledge of their discipline. More particularly, however, scholars in a very new field -- one where canons of discourse and knowledge still have not solidified or perhaps even arisen yet -- are tempted to adopt the discourse and canons of more established disciplines, and it is this step that nineteenth-century organicist diachronicians of language like von Schlegel, Bopp, and Schleicher seem to have taken. Seen in this light, their actions appear understandable and even reasonable.

-Janda R., Joseph, B. Handbook of Historical Linguistics Blackwell Publishing Ltd.: 2003.

advint rien

"there's so much i don't know."

"do you know how to design a dam?"

"no. do you?"

"no."

most peace loving people they are very

commitment to excellence?

some people have a commitment to excellence. when you share a commitment to excellence with someone, it is a special thing.

a refined palate.

children should not be given sushi. they should be given a large bag of popcorn. their palate is not educated.

polygraphy.

there are three basic types of questions: control, relevant and irrelevant. the control questions are questions that nobody will be completely honest about, and they will get nervous because they know this. "have you ever lied to a loved one?" the signals you give off on the control questions are measured against the relevant questions.

persimmons.

you can eat the peel.

good hygiene.

there are many places in the house that contain germs. do not allow your clothes to become moldy. do not infect your children.

a separate place?

common rabble could come in to look at sharks, but that will make shark-watching and champagne-sipping less luxurious. two of the sharks have died from stress-related illnesses. a sustainable shark operation breeds sharks in a house whose rent is too high.

the voice of moderation.

the cloning drell

we walked out of the door, a plastic grocery sack with two bottles of cider from my hand dangling. a woman with long hear has placed one of her feet against the tree, and i greet her. it is meredith. she has her sunglasses knotted into her hair and appears to be in a desparate situation. she says something but with the roar of jets, we have to come very near her. she said that her jack o' lantern was stolen. i tell her about my friday night dinner guests, bloated with sake, puffing up about a "man peeping in on us, that creep, a man who only stayed fifteen minutes and she lighted the jack o' lantern and put it out after he left, he can't have any sushi, that's what he wants, he has to be her dealer." i know people who are capable of stealing pumpkins, but it probably wasn't any of my guests. she said that it probably was that guy, who was capable of such things if he was drunk and lonely. she kept untangling.


The Laws of Aethelbert

9. If a freeman steal from a freeman, let him make threefold bot; and let the king have the wite and all the chattels.

10. If a man lie with the king's maiden, let him pay a bot of fifty shillings.

11. If she be a grinding slave, let him pay a bot of twenty-five shillings. The third (class) twelve shillings.

12. Let the king's fedesl be paid for with twenty shillings

13. If a man slay another in an eorl's tun, let him make bot with twelve shillings.

14. If a man lie with an eorl's birele, let him make bot with twelve shillings.

15. A ceorl's mundbyrd, seven shillings.

16. If a man lie with a ceorl's birele, let him make bot with six shillings; with a slave of the second (class), fifty scaetts; with one of the third, thirty scaetts.

17. If any one be the first to make an inroad into a man's tun, let him make bot with six shillings; let him who follows, with three shillings; after, each, a shilling.

18. If a man furnish weapons to another where there is strife, though no evil be done, let him make bot with six shillings.

lives

maybe i was leaning on the balcony looking down on a group of people in a shopping mall atrium. or maybe it was the boundary of a skating rink. it could have become a brick wall. a barrier. i listened to the story.

"so frank's father had 1.5 million dollars and he vomited. then he ate all of the money and left."
i considered how this would have gone down, and asked some questions to show that i was paying attention
"i suppose he could then afford to pay the plastic surgeon to remove the money from his body. it would only be interesting to convince her."
"this was an act of desperation, but how did he swallow that much paper?"
"the only he could have pulled that off is if they were casino chips."
"but still."

at the reenactment, i was in a place that was a casino only in name. it went on being a casino because everyone believed it was." it was several tables, and lights from above. half of the room was not visible. or i didn't look at it. there were no poker chips. frank's dad, who did not resemble the man i have met before, and who did not show signs of having swallowed $1.5 million in poker chips, said to his wife,

"let's leave."
"what about the others?" she asked with concern.
"that's easy, I just tell them that i'm leaving. watch"
#1: passed out
#2: passed out
#3: passed out

i then realized that everybody in the room was completely drunk. but no alcohol was being served. there were no glasses. perhaps everybody was sleepy. but people don't dress up to go to casinos with no gambling to sit at tables and take naps. where there really tables?

#4: "hey, we're leaving." -- "OK"

as we walked out, she said, "it really was that simple."

i had become frank's father.

morbidity

[l] appears in both the lebang and the lewoh dialect, but [h] is exclusive to lebang. in lewoh, [h] is replaced by either [l] or [g], leading to the following situation:

lebang:
bwaha: to frighten
bwala: to soften

lewoh:
bwala: to frighten
bwala: to soften

what if the two dialects evolved separately? what if one evolved from the other? were homonyms formed, or broken up? what are the semantic consequences of this happening?

what goes through someone's mind when you learn, contrary to what you once believed, that "wander" and "wonder" are pronounced and spelled differently?

sub specie naturae

the onion has stolen my idea of using the word "preemptive" in a comic context

Jaguars

A man went fishing with his wife. He climbed a tree to capture some parakeets that he threw down to his mate. But she ate them. "Why are you eating parakeets?" he asked. Once he came down, she sliced through his neck with a gnash of her teeth. When she returned to the village, her children ran up to her to see what she had brought back. She showed them the head of their father, and claimed that it was an armadillo's head. That night, she ate her children, and went into the bush. She had changed into a jaguar. Jaguars are women.

Métraux, A. Myths and Tales of the Matako Indians, Ethnological Studies, 9, Goteborg, 1939. cited in C. Lévi Strauss, Le Cru et le Cuit

bombs!

Syed Saleem Shahzad, from Asia Times, who reports extensively on affairs in Pakistan

This is the same Benazir Bhutto who only few years ago was banned from lecturing at European institutions because of her links to corruption scandals. But times have changed, and Bhutto once again has won Western favor. link

He wrote this on 11-Oct, referring to bombing raids in warizistan visant the taliban:


The flames of Waziristan fires always reach Islamabad and Karachi. When Benazir Bhutto?s aircraft lands in Karachi on October 18, the battle of Waziristan will be reverberating there. The top commander of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, has already openly vowed to kill her, and a strong Taliban cell in Karachi is ready to perform the task. link

it all on one play

1. racked my present batch of beer to the secondary fermenter and measured the density. when you measure the density you get to drink the sample. tastes good, and strong. most importantly it shows no signs of spoilage. presently the alcohol content is 8.9 ? 0.3%, and i expect it to increase to about 11%. belgian-style beers for you...

2. Ms. Bhutto said today she had specific information prior to the attack about people in the Pakistani security services who were plotting against her, and had written to the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, on Oct. 16 giving the names of those in his administration and the security forces she suspected of supporting the militants and terrorism. link

what the fuck?!?!

3. universality: one technique i use to make the students, who usually like hip hop, to remember metric system conversion factors is: "so how many stacks makes a million?" "so how many grams makes a kilo?". so yesterday i says to a young lady from plano, tx, working on a physics problem and thinks there's 100g in a kilo. "look, how many grams of cocaine can you get from a kilo?" "what?? i don't know, i don't use cocaine."

cipolla

Mr O'Leary, how can we, in the news media, do a better job of focusing on bullshit and really hounding candidates on these petty issue?

onion news poll

cognates

can you spot the cognate word in these two pages?

Pero a Irene solamente le entretenía el tejido, mos­traba una destreza maravillosa y a mí se me iban las horas viéndole las manos como eri­zos plateados, agujas yendo y viniendo y una o dos canastillas en el suelo donde se agitaban constantemente los ovillos. Era hermoso. - Julio Cortazar, Casa Tomada


Hetres tenaces, tourmentés de vents perpétuels (...), gardant meme dans les calmes, l'aspect hirsute de la tempete (Malègue, Augustin, t. 2, 1933, p. 244).

tan solo de pan

endings, dont 3:

1. i get a letter from bank of america telling me that my application for a savings account has been declined. the letter wasn't even on their proper letterhead, but photocopied, with this coding at the bottom "00-16-xxxxNSBW 11-2006 SF-Letter-Decline Generic". i must have overstepped my bounds in trying for the %0.50 annual interest rate

2. opened a bottle of pale ale. vile filth. the worst beer ever. contaminated with bacteria. cheer myself up with a bottle of cider, which, along with the sake, is the only batch that hasn't spoiled.

3. got to the end of Ensaio sobre a Ceguiera. everyone regains their sight, and i believe that i now know all the appropriate uses of the personal infinitive.

the best thing about today is that i had to collect signatures from the people saying that they had decided which show they would see for their piano class, and slipped in the phrase motu proprio in the cover sheet.

mergulhar

"Living with humans isn't the difficult thing. The difficult thing is understanding them." - Jose Saramago

above we have my latest work of art. the medium is acrylic on an eight-foot lead slab, later sprinkled with salt, à la Anselm Kiefer's Lot's Wife. While i drew major inspiration from that painting, i chose to contrast his story of perdition with mine of hope, though relying on the same basic signifying structures.

the waiter at são paulo's is expecting to be born a daughter, mia, and i will not go there for a good two weeks, having implemented certain austerity measures.

"what's the matter?"
"there is no matter" / "nothing's the matter"

what differentiates the two responses is that in the second, "the matter" is not reducible into "the" + "matter", but it serves as a predicative adjective. in the first, it is reduced.

here is the best famous quote on working full-time, from césaR brutO's Lo que me gustaría ser a mí Si no fuera lo que yo soy:

PRESO POR TODA LA VIDA

Si yo tengo la suerte algún día de ir preso, no digo mucho, pero aunque sea por 20 anios, me daba el gusto de darme na vida de bacán pansa arriba y sin procuparme por la carestía de los produptos de primera nesesidá, del voto femenino de la muger, ni de inportarme que sea quien sea el que estea arriba del gobiernO, porque total, que estea quien estea, en la presióN a mí nada me podía haser. Sin contar que entonce yo le podía mandar a quien mediera la gana lindas cartas con insultos, disiendo a cada cual las cosa que se merese, y nadies me podía mandar preso. Fígensen ustede que la cosa es macanuda y a ver si seaviban de una vez todos: los questán libre en la calie tienen el peligro de que los maten los auto, los coletibo, losónibu y los carro; le sacuden arriba de la cabesa la salfonbras y le tiran al agua de las maseta; no lo dejan pisar arriba del séspe, no lo dejan escupir arriba del suelo, no lo dejan desir piropos a las muger, no lo dejan estar en los boliche despué de la una de la maniana y no lo dejan ir en manifestasión sienpre y cuando no les conbengo; tiene que casarse y alimentar a la muger, a los hijo, a los nieto, pagar el alquiler, pagar el lechero y pagar a todos, y si no tiene plata tiene que pedir un crédito y enterrarse hasta el cogote con las deudas... ?Me quieren desir qué bentaja hay con la cosa de ser libre?

in my office on monday morning

?A word to the wise ain?t necessary,? Mr. [Bill] Cosby likes to say. ?It?s the stupid ones who need the advice.?

this saying traces to the Latin "Verbum sapienti satis est," A [one] word to the wise is enough; do i need to spell it out for you?

preterite treacheries

yesterday afternoon i was in a coffee shop, watching CNN, where everything is a "Developing Story," and watching college girls and boys walk in and out of the library. I started to become nostalgic about six days ago:

Kate: so what did you have for lunch?
I: i had a cheeseburger and a beer over at posse
Kate: haha, good old posse. we used to have happy hour there for the [sign language] department

I remembered the whole incident of attending a meeting of the american sign language research team, and i was paranoid that people were talking behind my back in sign language, then I thought how at lunch time on friday I am normally at work. and even if i slip out for a quick cheeseburger and beer, i surely would not have had time to linger around a sign language conference, trying to ask intelligent questions. it didn't make sense. i do have this bad habit of being bored on one day and tarrying about somewhere i amn't normally found, perhaps even saying out loud that i'm bored, only to receive a phone call like "where have you been? you missed the meeting, and you were supposed to lead the meeting. / where have you been? you promised to drive me to the airport"; so i thought things through: on friday, the workplace is thinly populated, and i may not have been missed. but if i forgot to go to work on friday, then i also forgot to turn in my time sheet. if i wanted to get about $242 i would have to go to the boss, a week later, and explain what happened. but one of the clerics would have taken note earlier. it would require too much sorting out.

but really, who simply forgets to go to work? you might forget and then remember after five or six hours, and manage to call up the place and tell the truth, in the form of a long story, but six days? i consulted my appointment book, which said that i was to work from 9-11am, work on the deaf baby videos from 11-1pm, have a cheeseburger and beer from 1-2pm, then attend the lab meeting, which was my last actisse erant item.

to extend its wings

jokes gone too far!

d'accord

There are certain terms that have a peculiar property. Ostensibly, they mark off specific concepts, concepts that lay claim to a rigorously objective validity. In practice, they label vague terrains of thought that shift or narrow or widen with the point of view of whoso makes use of them, embracing within their gamut of significances conceptions that not only do not harmonize but are in part contradictory. An analysis of such terms soon discloses the fact that underneath the clash of varying contents there is unifying feeling-tone. What makes it possible for so discordant an array of conceptions to answer to the same call is, indeed, precisely this relatively constant halo that surrounds them.

-Edward Sapir, Culture, Genuine and Spurious

like i didn't eat

i left my debit card at the pub. they have a policy of closing your tab with a 20% tip when you do that, then giving the card back when you come and ask for it the next day. the reason i went there was that it was my brother's birthday. on tuesdays they dissuade you from buying a pitcher because "it's cheaper to buy pints". tuesday is an important day for bargain boozers because you're usually not supposed to be drinking on this night. there is dollar shitty beer at cain & abel's, fifty cent wings at Plucker's, and "pint night".

in the morning i filled a pho bowl with tomato seeds, dried-out spaghetti and gnocchi, garlic peels and two rubber bands. there were two spider webs on the way to the compost heap, but i saw them by their nine thirty am glisten of the sun. i try to perform at least one symbolic gesture of servicing the kitchen each weekday morning.

i'm modifying the first version of my personal statement. attempting to be "authentic," the first version had a subdued irony that came out confused and a self-deprecatory tone. this next one will strive for candor and subliminal conceitedness, and I will replace an in-line citation from the Aeneid with a paragraph-length epigraph about gods pulling nations from holes.

hungry like i didn't eat

non est priorum memoria sed nec eorum quidem quae postea futura sunt erit recordatio apud eos qui futuri sunt in novissimo

the days long and it hesitates to get cold. a man came on sunday and raked the leaves from my front lawn. no one knows why he does this, except for him and i.

parrots

necdum etiam causae irarum saevique dolores
exciderant animo: manet alta mente repostum
iudicium Paridis spretaeque iniuria formae,
et genus invisum, et rapti Ganymedis honores.

and the cruel pains of the source of that ire had not yet destroyed their spirit: the outrage of beauty spited by Paris' judgement, that nation so despised, and their dignity snatched away by the people of Ganymedes, remained high in their minds

it's like this one time...

foxnews

On the main screen:

5 minute special on Britney Spears: Will she go back to rehab?

One bottom scroller:

Credit Suisse cuts 170 jobs in its investment arm ... 16,000 unemployement filings last week, higher than forecasted ... Factory orders down 3.3% from last month ...

UPDATE!! Economic Recession

Actor Charlie Sheen, from "My Uncle Charlie," now on syndication in France, called his wife a pig in an email. A bad mother too!

bigger than the president

economists like myself have a tough time deciding the difference between leisure time and productive time. some people run a failing business as a leisure activity. as for me, i call responding to personal emails "updating correspondence"

i updated one piece of correspondence, and got one response

Mr __________ is terribly sick, in fact his voice cannot even came out, that is he cannot talk, it started during our local election, he is in a [coma] so i may say, we really have to pray for him,

i had asked after the health of the gentleman, who is a highly popular local politician. he has two wives and about eight children. he also has a dog named duke. his main virtue is that he hardly embezzles any money at all. so when a 12 million franc contract produced a building that was halted mid-brick when the funding ran out, he completed a similar building with 3 million francs from a foreign embassy.

i wonder if he got poisoned.