this week i

described the population of americans eligible for but not enrolled in health coverage under medicaid

flew to louis armstrong intl to drink corner store beers with jerome beneath flickering porchlight.  he recounted the chaos of vietnam, andy griffith's mayberry played on television.  waffle house dinner, octagonal overnight, elderly gentleman at grand hotel placed baseball cap on the floor and asked, "how 'bout a mimosa, heloise?"  milkshakes at the athletic fields of the university of south alabama (usa) then barbecue among bayside alumni



 


read..


(1) famine in ethiopia

the punitive carthaginian operation

the shift from severe poverty to famine as like freezing water turning to ice: it's not just a lower temperature, but a change in state.  during the early stages of a food crisis, the graph of excess deaths resembles the foothills of a mountain range.  then comes a sudden, precipitous rise

war is primarily an intellectual activity


(2) edgar allan poe the scientist

an accidental voyage to the moon in a hot air balloon

in 1839 he wrote an illustrated taxonomy of seashells, the conchologist's first book, a school textbook that sold better in his lifetime than any of his subsequent works

(3) not the first archbishop of canterbury

becket and henry ii fell out in 1163 - over the primacy of church v. monarch - the dispute revolved around what was or wasn't written down

a fragment of becket's skull

henry ii made a barefoot pilgrimage to becket's tomb and been whipped before it by the monks

much to the consternation of the clergy, becket began rapidly to acquire a post-mortem celebrity.  townspeople who were in the cathedral at the time of his death instinctively dipped their handkerchiefs or fingers in the congealing blood.  taken home and diluted with water, it became a drink with powerful effects.  the paralysed walked, the blind saw, stillborn children were revived.  in effect, the laity invented a form of eucharist for themselves


(4) cali, branch office of heaven, salsa-protesta

ceibas, jacarandas, caracolis

guerrillas, industrialists, indigenous peoples, a shaky middle class, afro-colombians

the media most often show the anti-riot squads in their darth vader get-ups, the beatings and the shootings and the tear gas bursting into the air in great clouds.  what appears less often are the ecstatic marches that are also celebrations of being alive


(5) right-wing vigilantes have long been with us

you could hold an official-sounding rank, feel you were defending your country, and still come home for dinner

the genial senator warren harding, who campaigned for a "return to normalcy"


(6) the golden horde, the black sea to the pacific

the vast expanse of its sovereignty could be covered only on horseback

the mongol court never settled

hoarding was anathema.  there was no difference, declared one great khan, "between buried treasure and dust"


(7) nigeria wants the bronzes back

their ju-ju broken

in the edo language, sa-e-y-ama means both to make a bronze cast of and to remember

france should return to africa all 'objects taken by force or presumed to be acquired through inequitable conditions'



(8) who now has ever smlled the burning of a spermaceti candle or worn a baleen corset?

dead whales come apart as they drift downward to the ocean floor, a kind of spring rain of cetacean morsels falling into a barely imaginable biological zone, a realm of extremeophiles whose existence depends on that intermittent bounty from above..globally there may be nearly 700,000 whales "coming undone at this very moment."  in their afterlife, whales become something entirely different from the animals we yearn to know.  they turn into "decomposing ecosystems that amass, pulse, twitch, and dissolve"



(9) the hovering life of the hummingbird

equivalent to about 155,000 calories for a human-sized animals

 

(10) chinese factory workers follow a 996 schedule: 9am to 9pm six days per week


11/25

this week i

published my tenth employer health benefits survey.  matthew blurred the library background


reenacted the cow devouring scene from jurassic park

 

 

emptied two storage lockers.  eyes are weird


installed a tropical visitor





read factfulness by hans rosling

 the chimps' errors would be equally shared between the two wrong answers, whereas the human errors all tend to be in one direction.  every group of people i ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless - in short, more dramatic - than it really is

the child mortality rate..takes the temperature of a whole society

archaeologists have to get used to discovering that a large proportion of all the remains they dig up are those of children

ddt's creator won a nobel prize

syphilis..in russia it was called the polish disease.  in polish it was the german disease; in germany, the french disease; and in france, the italian disease.  the italians blamed back, calling it the french disease

a funeral at uppsala castle
 


11/18

this week i

caught lisztomania from a guitar arrangement.  dan fed ciara and me pizza, naiose demonstrated his hot wheel-engulfing megatruck.  next night we drank near clinic, re-lived the farshtunken origins of every ngo and k01.  rupak and i manned momo edition of lucille ball's chocolate conveyor belt


see museums as future-oriented rather than historically-facing endeavors.  categorizing humanity's achievements etches what's yet to be discovered.  at the met and amnh, spotted jeffrey tambor, greco-roman wasp nest response to baltimore beehive, prehistoric open-ocean navigational cheat sheet

 







 











drove to brigantine.  joe fried sausage, chick peas, tomatoes enough so second dinner with absecon italians only allowed one more cheesesteak.  wine jugs tucked in crathie lane closet actually oil vessels.  mahjong before bed, we sleuthed mom watercolored one of the paradise flycatchers


read the lost weekend by charles jackson

last night it had been merely drink.  it was medicine now

he downed his drink and then started to pay, as if he were about to leave.  "before you get married" - he waved a finger at her - "be mighty sure, gloria, that your wife isn't frigid"

he recognized, like a veteran before a neophyte, the stage of drinking the other had reached - the confidential, the confiding stage - he began to feel superior, amused, tolerant, generous, and warmly friendly himself

he can help himself to the salt-tablets.  we encourage that as much as possible.  no sedatives in the daytime.  we try to maintain or restore the normal sleep-cycle, you see - make them stay awake during the day.  put them to sleep now and they'll be raising hell all night.  that fellow over there took a running jump at the wall around three-thirty this morning and got a terrible shaking-up.  thought it was the ocean and wanted to jump in.  that wouldn't have happened in the day-time.  delirium is a disease of the night

"why do you only come to bed with me when you are drunk?"  he roared with delight. he knew damned well she had reason to ask; but in his relief that it had been no worse he was able to laugh as if it were terribly funny and he almost shouted "because i'm always drunk!"

the bat had flown his cloister'd flight and come to rest at last

11/11

this week i

updated our overview of the privatized medicare marketplace and prescription drug plans

attended laura's passyunk square art fair.  ben healed my rearview mirror dreamcatcher, replaced leonardo.  puppet cowboy riding that white bronco



 anna saw yo-yo ma at a bar.  all of her friends were like, "that's not yo-yo ma," but she kept looking at him and being like, "i'm pretty sure that's yo-yo ma," and her friends were like, "no, it's definitely not yo-yo ma," but she was pretty sure so she went up to him and was like, "excuse me.......... do you play the cello?"

glitter crab side hustle

i like that you're not even sure if you sent something

world's gonna end.  you at least gotta try kangaroo once

(strokes marvin's back with his tail high in the air) i wish cats were like dogs and showed a little less anus

oh bong boy

why am i playing with two rain mans

 

trick or treated down abbott boulevard




checked into astoria



 

watched jennifer lawrence's twin gemma chan in crazy rich asians it's very disco cleopatra, but in a good way and the taiwan dispatch of lwtwjo

taiwan was the fastest growing economy in asia last year and is the world's key manufacturer of semiconducters which are used absolutely everywhere in products from cars to sex toys.  so if the next time that you fire up a buttplug that has a hundred thousand times more computing power than the apollo moon mission, make sure you say, "thanks taiwan!"


read the mesoamerican chronology entry.  jaguar-worship began before christ.  they illuminated codexes, potted potbelly sculptures (barrigones)

the city-state of teotihuacan dominated the valley of mexico until the early 8th century

the olmec culture represents a milestone of mesoamerican history..state organization, the development of the 260-day ritual calendar and the 365-day secular calendar, the first writing system, and urban planning

many of the olmec figurines and sculptures contain representations of the were-jaguar

maize, beans, and squash, the mesoamerican agricultural trinity

base 20 number system

the use of nails in architecture

quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent

the aztec empire dominated central mexico for close to a century before the spanish conquest


read harper lee's to kill a mockingbird.  atticus feels too shrewd for his time.  now on broadway

 

the radley place fascinated dill.  in spite of our warnings and explanations it drew him as the moon draws water

angel-bright, life-in-death; get off the road, don't suck my breath

foot-washers believe anything that's pleasure is a sin

atticus said naming people after confederate generals made slow steady drinkers

i was becoming nervous.  atticus seemed to know what he was doing--but it seemed to me that he'd gone frog-sticking without a light.  never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to, was a tenet i absorbed with my baby food

a jury never looks at a defendant it has convicted

"when a man says he's gonna get you, looks like he means it."
"he meant it when he said it," said atticus.  "jem, see if you can stand in bob ewell's shoes a minute.  i destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with.  the man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does.  so if spitting in my face and threatening me saved mayella ewell one extra beating, that's something i'll gladly take.  he had to take it out on somebody and i'd rather it be me than that houseful of children out there.  you understand?"
jem nodded

scout, i think i'm beginning to understand something.  i think i'm beginning to understand why boo radley's stayed shut up in the house all the time...it's because he wants to stay inside

 

11/4