phonetics

i have found the first instance of the consonant cluster "kp", which appears mostly in African languages, in an English-language publication:


http://danarchy.youfailit.net/Spiderman/


I also have a sound clip of Olosegun Obasanjo pronouncing the phrase "a conducive atmostphere" as ['a.kpan.du.si | 'vat.mɔs | 'fi.jə]

Part 1 of 3

Forsooth, those were times when we were young. Some people like to look back on their youth and make some judgment about how foolish they were then:

"If I could do it all again, knowing what I know now?"

I am sensitive to cognitive dissonances, so I cannot do anything other than believe that I of then and I of now are the same person.

I had bought fresh squash in the morning because the season made the price low. I salt them and brush them with olive oil, then braise them. Now, only to think of a main course suited to this entremets. I called Baolichi, starting things off with a hypocorism, then with pretending to be a vicinal gay man.
"Balice-inha! How is your day? Let?s do lunch! We absolutely have to talk about what how our mutual friend Blarn has compromised her sex life!"
"Shut up. You are cute."
"I want to broil squash. What goes good with broiled squash?"
"I don?t know, whatever sounds good to you. I?ll eat whatever, so you act at your own peril."
"Chicken?"
"Fine. You?d have to take it out of the freezer. You don?t want to have to wait for it to thaw, do you? It?s not that I?m saying that I don?t want to eat chicken, but I?m just getting sick of eating the same thing every day."
"Then pork chops. Because those may be frozen, but they are thin and will thaw quickly."
"Make sure to use rosemary."

We had bound my ankle to hers so that as our corpses drifted down river, and as my abraded arm was seen protruding from the hollow of a patch of water hyacinths, which was how they found us, we would still be together.
Like this detail, most of them were planned out in the three days following the morning when we made the decision to go through with it. We both decided to take the day off of work to work through the mechanisms and the methodology, but it became three.
After we made up our minds to use a drug for the job, it took a full day to get a prescription from my cousin and godfather Blanchetto, who is a chiropractor. He said that there was certain paperwork that he?d have to file and that he had to receive a fax from the registry office.
"Do whatever you gotta do, bro, just get it for me when you can," I told him after he offered this excuse for the delay.
The next day involved choosing a spot and rehearsing the procedures. Baolichi went as far as defining the wardrobe, which was to be conservative but attractive. What we ended up choosing was a seventeen step dance move that we would carry out together, repeating it until we drifted off and our heads dipped under the water, humming seventeen notes of the ballad ?Todos somos de León.?

Pa / so / la / vi / da / llo / ran / do
Y / su / spi / ran / do
Le / ón / por / ti

On the third day we took care of practical matters, closing off any professional engagements and settling our accounts.
On the fourth day, we went back to work. I came home after a half-day. There was a minor public holiday that my company, out of generosity, observed partially.

Retirement is nice, but nobody says this until they try it. I would like to try to convince people that it is nice, maybe by going, as they did in the olden days, to a bus station, sitting on a bench and sipping from a green coffee mug that screamed out in rose red letters

WHO CARES? I?M RETIRED.

But no one here needs convincing. Everyone here is already retired. We spend most of the day playing cards, smoking and drinking coffee. The menu was recycled weekly, and on a night like this, a Wednesday, they ladle lobster lobscouse into warmed clay bowls, and we dip a crusty bread into it.
There is also hunting and parlor games.

my leg was crossed the boss came and said hi guys looks like nobody's wearing shoes today ha ha. there was a television camera so we kept still like a hand plunged into icy water for a full minute on a dare it only feels colder if you shake about.

"today's assignment is longer than usual, Bedrew."

i was on the sidewalk and i saw a flash of paper from the mailbox of my approaching house and all manner of wild ideas fluttered through my head about buying raw milk blue stilton from the specialty stores when the fancy struck me because it was manila with an address label and letterhead and one glance later i began to wonder how the mind works and how your breathing and heartbeat and train of thought can wildly swing because of one glancing glance or seven scented molecules because the paper was really white which means junkmail.

i made it to 48 on freerice.

rhetorical device:

anacoluthon

"i don't think she's yet mature-but you have no reason to pry!"

they have to be made so that we aren't embarrassed by their disheveled appearance, made up only until people lie in them and roll around.

to feel your breath

balice is a substitute teacher who had an assignment at a school, which is a place where children are treated like criminals. police with a drug-sniffing dog interrupted the class and the dog ran straight to balice's briefcase and they said to balice 'don't worry, it is only suppose to sniff the children.'

nioul nop

Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike; yet each believes his own.

-Alexander Pope

a corporate author

"if you like idly chatting so much why don't you write a harlequin romance novel?"
"romance novels are stupid. if i wrote a novel it'd be a dark comedy."
"a dark romantic comedy, let's get started. i'll write the first paragraph."
...five authors later

Fingers of crepuscule through her silken braids, Bernice pushed on towards the occident, squinting as if she was critical of what she beheld, though because of the sun?s glare. It had been four days since she last slept with Barry. By then, her body had developed muscle memory towards his embrace, which in turn infected her conscious memory so that she would say things like:
"Barry and I always go to the Borreal together and he puts his hand on my knee."
Or "Every time I see him I?m always on the phone with Balice."
Her face was flushed and she was sniffling when she got to the door. She knocked.
"It's open!" called a voice. The aged handle was cool against her sweaty palm as she struggled to turn it. With one powerful thrust the door swung open.
"Barry!"
" Bernice, it?s so nice of you to stop by. There are some things that we need
to..."
"Look Barry, you don?t have to say anything. Bedrew doesn?t have to know."
Barry placed his cup of coffee onto the table and stood up. He walked toward her and placed his hands on her hips. As he closed his eyes, he slowly leaned in to kiss her. Starting at the nape of her neck his tongue searching for that place it was four days ago, tasting the sweetness of her skin, a taste so intoxicating yet completely familiar. And while he felt the weighted guilt of betraying Balice the warmth of Bernice?s long slender body through her thin silk chemise burned his skin like a wildfire burning through the Californian redwoods.
The sound of Barry's suitcase crashing to the floor abruptly brought them out of the trance. Bernice?s eyes widened as she saw the contents of the suitcase spill out onto the floor.
"Barry...what the hell?" she said, hearing her voice as if from far away.
"Jesus, what am I doing here? I was supposed to be at Ban's place an hour ago..."
Barry?s red-shot, sleep-rimmed eyes wandered from the mess on the floor to Bernice?s ten-month-old son, blissfully snoozing on the coffee table, on top of a stack of magazines. Poor little guy, Barry thought, struggling to keep his loosening grasp on reality.
Bernice looked at the baby. It looked just like Bedrew and Barry. It was still in the box that they had used to take it, tossing the box and the baby out of Bedrew's third-story bedroom. The box still had 3-foot thick foam padding over it.
"Damm I told Bernard I?d get that back to him," Bernice thought. She looked at her clock, and for a brief moment she thought she could pull off the maneuver, returning the long foam pad back to Bernardino before he got off his shift at Bred's Boamations, the foam emporium, and still make it back in time to send Bedrew a "sorry about his missing baby" sympathy card before the post office closed. But the clock didn?t move and she noticed it was slightly off-kilter.
"There's no way I have time. God dammit." The battery was out.
"Barry, you don?t have to tell Bedrew anything."
"No, it Has to be right between us."
"No...this is so Hard for me, but I Have to tell you the truth?..we agreed it would be best in the end...
"the truth is, Bedrew knows everything. She always has. She?We, we both love you, and you?ll always be special to us, but the truth is we met long ago. We were both working the night shift down at Blugglers. One night some squares got jibey and we had to take them down. Afterwords things got steamy. We were up till 7 am fixing that boiler for that rat bastard Billy Bluggler. Later we went out for coffee and realized there was chemistry we?ve never felt with a man. Remember that weekend Bedrew was "getting her boobs done" and I had that "conference in Reno?" well, this is really hard to say, but we weren?t in Reno?.we were in the Bahamas down at Bluggler?s mama?s Babe Ranch and?
"So that?s why you were both so tanned. You bitch! You sick bitches. Well if you think you?re gonna get this baby back and raise him to your sick ways you?re way off!"
"Are you fucking insane? We?re raising that baby and its gonna love us."
Barry?s body wracked with sobs, he collapsed onto the sofa. Bernice paused at the door for a last look at Barry?s prostrate figure before picking up the boxed baby and walking out the door. Maybe they?d finally take that trip to Reno...

minced mint

on the local news channels:

if you have guns and are planning to kill people, you are a terrorist.
if you have guns and are in the process of killing people, you are a gunman.

why do you get downgraded?

Suppose the Iranian government arrested and beat Katie Couric, held her virtually incommunicado for six years and promised to release her only if she would spy for Iran. In such circumstances, Iranian investments in public diplomacy toward the United States wouldn?t get very far, either. Kristof - NYTimes

i think that people have become interested in voting in this election because they have seen how badly things can go wrong while they're not paying attention. in the first two elections where i was allowed to vote, we ended up with bush. it will be strange, after eight years of shaking my fist at the government, or sullenly ignoring it, or having to explain myself when i am traveling abroad, to be interested in what it might do next for the public benefit.

in the first few years of this decade i thought it fashionable for myself to criticize the government for its past and present acts of murder, fraud and cruelty. then this task became too easy, and everyone started doing it. now, when people criticize the government the usual response is something like "what you are saying is self-evident, so you needn't waste your breath convincing anyone."

what ordinary gets you

The opposite of laughing and joking is seriousness. Accordingly it consists in the consciousness of the perfect agreement and congruity of the conception, or thought, with what is perceived, or the reality. The serious man is convinced that he thinks the things as they are, and that they are as he thinks them. This is just why the transition from profound seriousness to laughter is so easy, and can be effected by trifles. For the more perfect that agreement assumed by seriousness may seem to be, the more easily is it destroyed by the unexpected discovery of even a slight incongruity. . . That the relations of the sexes afford the easiest materials for jokes always ready to hand and within the reach of the weakest wit, as is proved by the abundance of obscene jests, could not be if it were not that the deepest seriousness lies at their foundation.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea

n!/(n-k)!k!

in the front lawn of a frat house there is an old, broken-down military jeep that has been placed there as a decoration, painted a brighter green. a police officer parked an unmarked car across the street, got out, 7:50am, took his clipboard and crewcut over to said vehicle and wrote it a citation.

epigrams

one of Balzac's characters, Mr. de Saintot, would always managed to be interrupted at the exact time he was shuffling papers or adding ink to his pen, and he would waste away his time by searching through a volume of Cicero for quotes he thought relevant, then would gently guide dinner party conversations to a vulnerable state of Cicero quotage, drawing everyone's admiration at his erudition.

dixit Socrates:
"For ignorance in the strong is hateful, because it is hurtful to everyone both in real life and on the stage, but powerless ignorance may be considered ridiculous, which it is."

dixit Balzac:
"Il doit se faire entre le lecteur et l'auditoire une alliance intime, sans laquelle les électriques communications des sentiments n'ont plus lieu. Cette cohésion des âmes manque-t-elle, le poète se trouve alors comme un ange essyant de chanter un hymne céleste au milieu des ricanements de l'enfer."
[between reader and listener there must be an intimate alliance, without with the electric communication of feelings doesn't take place. this cohesion of souls lacking, the poet finds himself like an angel trying to sing a celestial hymn amidst the obscene cackling of the inferno.]

the color orange

"can you give me two slices of gum? mmmm the flavor so sweet. what the fuck??? [honk] biiiiiiiitch!"

bi was furious that someone had taken advantage of the wide gap in front of her to make a lane change in the go-slow in which we had spent an hour so as to "run and pick up a sandwich"

Lee's sandwich is a glittery shop with a seating area, some plasma screen tv's, and a couple of food vendors, most particularly a bakery that makes banh mi ba le. a man was going over trays of dough ready for the oven, spraying them with water to facilitate crust development. mike huckabee was on the television and speakers throughout the building played the tv sound. one stand was giving out samples of moulded custard cakes, prepared 24 at a time in an iron especially for that purpose.

i always say that houston is a city for cars, not people. you sit in traffic and your heart suffers from the road rage that grips you in the go slow and the anxiety of the aggressive freeways. from the time we left A Kitchen Near You, stated destination the aquarium, we spent two hours in the car. bi had periodic bursts of vitriolic outrage towards certain cars, personifying them to tap into more refined forms of hatred, then resumed chatting gaily about gum or tigers. Kitchen is a west african restaurant whose proprietress is a bamenda woman, mama beatrice. the ndolé, egusi soup and gombo are up to standard and better than would be had in most village chop houses in the old country. a church group was having a meeting at the long table and some children eating mcdonald's pancakes were at the table next to us, coming up to talk to bi and na, first asking "are you asleep?" she opened a small tub of pancake syrup for the youngest one and he spilled it on his shirt. men came in and sat near the cash register, waiting for the waitress to bring them their fufu and soup to go. there was no menu, no receipts, prix nets. the waitress speaks english like a bamenda person, but said that she was "south american," born in the philipines. mama beatrice flagged us down as we were leaving so she could get my phone number to inform me of upcoming dance parties.

your heart suffers in many ways but there are some of the world's best cardiolgists here. the downside of mama beatrice's food is that you'll get hungry again after 36 hours.

sil and matthias had trouble eating their pho, but claimed to like it.

because i

he like comes up to me and is like you need to choose this sock or the other one and i'm like excuse me it's pronounced sock asshole.

the weekend will be an emotional reunion with sil, the first time in the united states.

it is not practical for everyone to be a jack of all trades, but to what extent should people rely on other individuals or entities for their needs?

if it is a public need, common to all (res publica), we would like to depend on the state. if it is a more specific need, then you can wonder whether someone else can do a proper job and demand a fair compensation from you.

se fiato in corpo avete

from H. de Balzac's Illusions perdues

"...diplomatie, la science de ceux qui n'en ont aucune et qui sont profonds par leur vide; science par ailleurs fort commode, en ce sens qu'elle se démontre par l'exercise même de ses hauts emplois; que voulant des hommes discrets, elle permet aux ignorants de ne rien dire, de se retrancher dans les hochements de tête mystérieux; et qu'enfin l'homme le plus fort en cette science est celui qui nage en tenant sa tête au-dessus du fleuve des événements qu'il semble alors conduire, ce qui devient une question de légèreté specifique."

...diplomacy, the science for those who haven't one and who are profound for their emptiness; a science which happens to be quite convenient, in the sense that it is known by the exercise of its best uses; which, needing discrete men, allows people who know nothing to say nothing, to bury themselves in mysterious nods; and the most able of men in this science is the one who swims holding his head above a river of events that he seems to control, which then becomes a question of specific fluencies.

potassium tartrate

today was a day for resting. we came home a bit drunk and hungry and made some fondue with some gruyère that had been set aside for the occasion, but after eating a bit our hunger was at least quenched and then it was more important to sleep. i turned off the hotplate and covered the pot. in the morning all that had to be done was to turn the hotplate back on and it was better than the previous night, the bread having had time to stale. (havendo dormido nos e o pão, a janta foi melhor)

i learned colors and numbers in vietnamese from rosetta stone, yelling at the computer, then we went to play pool, five games, the rule being that you have to say the number and color of the ball you want to sink. if i ever teach a language class, i will take the class down to the billiard hall for this kind of activity. the viet word for billiard ball is the loan bi da.

my sources tell me that i am moving to the state of new york.