this week i

feel moroccans from a different era.  maybe it's all the smoke.  cannot name an old world nation more facially diverse.  maybe all the smoke.  nothing like arabic script carved marble.  maybe the smoke.  men kiss one another on the cheek, women cover their hair in the fur of jungle cats.


made some friends at archana's wedding.  riya met me at intermission, mom and dad will leave baltimore soon but her hometown forever.


3/30

this week i

woke at five saturday to save seats.  a muslim father and a christian mother so  "combien de dieu?  deux dieu?"  she held up a sleepy index finger.



notice slight differences.  like the french word for seal.

live the life of a survey statistician.

[3/17/2017 4:53:03 PM] david rae: dude, I just grid sampled mao's mausoleum
[3/17/2017 4:53:23 PM] david rae: that guy is going to get a terminal disposition of "dead"

drove past the chocolate factory for an over the top evening.  my first menus on ipads since japan.


cooked sushi too.  but they were more interested in the fromage and then fucking destroying that wall.








boarded another airplane.  as any parisian brazilian will tell you, "viva la differenchy!"

3/23

this week i

had a perfect weekend on a tragic anniversary.  this week's google searches include: was justin timberlake a backstreet boy or an nsynchophant?  unlike china between north korea and russia, new hampshire touches the sea between massachusetts and maine.  oh, and alfonse is a great name.















continued the history of english podcast.

in tennis, the word "love" comes from the french word for egg.  so it's similar to how we say, "goose egg" for zero today.  the french word for egg is "oeuf" so when you put the article "la" in front of it, you get "l'oeuf" and that became anglicized over time as "love"

let me explain the history of the word escape.  it's a french word, and it goes back to late latin.  and in latin, it was a combination of the word "ex" meaning "out of" and the word "capa" meaning a cape or cloak.  so ex-capa literally meant "out of the cape" and at a time when most people wore some type of cape or cloak, it was used to refer to a situation where someone was seized by the cape, and he or she managed to get away by quickly unfastening the cape.  since the fleeing person was out of the cape, they were ex-capa.  and that produced the word, "escape"


3/16

this week i

believe trump won one hundred plus or minus three percent of voters who believe that professional wrestling is real and then a minority of voters who believe professional wrestling is fake.  impeach the president and this disregard for truth along with him.

received some press from flowingdata.

listened to beowulf deconstructed.  twelve hundred year old spoiler: he and the dragon both die of their wounds in the end, death of superman-style.

plunges its tusks into beowulf's neck.  blood pours from beowulf's wounds.  the poet writes, "his whole neck was clasp by bitter bones (or fangs).  heals ealne ymbefeng biteran banum.  he was bloodied in the soul's gore.  he geblodegod wearo sawuldriore.  sweat (or blood) in waves welled.  swat youm weoll."

3/9

this week i

initiated a massive re-write of my work on publicly-available survey microdata.  entrepreneurship comes in many forms.

slept over with marlene friday night.  she turned on the bedroom lights at three to read the bible for ten minutes, pushed me out of bed at six so she could sweep the floor and still make seven thirty mass.  i wrote the statistics textbook for a few hours, lit a joint at noon.  the goal has always been to experience as many human lives as you can.

consider good bread foundational to the meal.

imagine that five thousand years from now, historians will study this current moment of our existence mushed in with the rest of the industrial revolution, the same way that we now think of ancient and ptolemaic egypt as one culture.  could you distinguish the biblical pharaohs from cleopatra's court?  humanity's arc hasn't advanced as far from the steam engine as we might like to think.

keep meaning to clean that drain.

watched a little bit of the king.  "and fuck everybody, now that i think of it.  sometimes in comedy, you have to generalize."

am sure that is not what carl sagan meant, google.

listened to the history of the alphabet.

like many new letters, it was placed at the back of the alphabet.  but before i completely leave greek i, let me look at the modern name for this letter in english and the romance languages.  since the romans called this letter greek i, that name stuck in late latin and the later romance languages.  so today the letter y is called igrec in french and it's called igriega in spanish.  and these names literally mean greek i.  but of course we know the letter in modern english as wye.  the english name for the letter is probably based on its overall shape.  if you think about it, a y is basically an i with a v on top..the v was originally the same letter as u.  sometimes it was written in a curvy style, sometimes it was written in a straight line angular style, but it was considered the same letter.  and it not only represented the vowel sound of u, it also represented the w sound..but the point here is that the v shape often had the w, wuh, sound.  and of course the i shape had that eee sound originally.  so it's believed that the early english speakers looked at the letter y and saw the two letters that represented the w sound and the eee sound.  the wuh sound and the eee sound.  and they put those two together to create the name wee in early english.  but when english experienced the later vowel shifts, the eee sound became the i sound

3/2