this week i

wonder who turned the historical society over to big tech?  a 14kb webpage loads faster than a 15kb webpage.  oh roger, you are an idiot


watched barry lyndon, stanley kubrick's transfer of eighteenth century paintings into cinematography.  what am i looking at here, a legoman?

 

read hypocrisy in reproductive health.  'my dear lord, what are all those young girls doing here?'  'same as you', i replied.  'dirty little dames' 

 

read meditations by marcus aurelius, translated by gregory hays

 marcus composed his own meditations in greek

the catastrophe of a.d. 9, when the roman general varus and three legions had marched into the forests of germany, never to return

pontifex maximus, the head of the roman state religion

marcus does not offer us a means of achieving happiness, but only a means of resisting pain

prosopography


 

not to waste time on nonsense.  not to be taken in by conjurors and hoodoo artists with their talk about incantations and exorcism and all the rest of it.  not to be obsessed with quail-fighting or other crazes like that.  to hear unwelcome truths.  to practice philosophy and tu study with baccheius, and then with tandasis and marcianus.  to write dialogues as a student.  to choose the greek lifestyle - the camp-bed and the cloak

duration:
momentary.  nature: changeable.  perception: dim.  condition of body: decaying.  soul: spinning around.  fortune: unpredictable.  lasting fame: uncertain.  sum up: the body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion

survey the records of other eras.  and see how many others gave their all and soon died and decomposed into the elements that formed them

yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash

the thread was spun long ago

no matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good.  like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, "no matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished"

and you can also commit injustice by doing nothing

stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: am i afraid of death because i won't be able to do
this anymore?

if you're still angry, then get to work on that

 

9/29

this week i

ate afghani food before hamilton, revati forgot her mask.  my father's father born (1898) closer to the american revolution (1776) than to present day

 

admired wallpaper over fish tacos.  nobody wanted to wear gondolier regalia, paddle through the suez with me.  october is the new september

 

seared a side of cod and watched rocky.  apollo creed meets the italian stallion.  sounds like a damn monster movie

 

showed up for a chili pepper bonsai (sapling contortionism) class, leave grow lighting on 24 hours.  wiring should be applied at a 45 degree angle


attended frauke kreuter's survey methodology workshop, repeated warnings your sample reflects your population and understands your questionnaire



read the rifles by william vollmann

the people with bushy eyebrows

do you know how to dance in english?

kiss it to see if it's dead

you use thirty-thirties for polar bears.  you hunt walruses with thirty-thirties or thirty-ought-sixes.  you go after caribou with twenty-twos or two-twenty-fives.  a twenty-two for a seal

the moon through a rich man's telescope

smooth-worn as a narwhal's horn

dazzle them with..knowledge of an upcoming eclipse

it's a sin not to enjoy what you have.  i think i'll just go out into the snowdrifts and jerk off a few times.  it's this kind of landscape that really gets me going

it was the first sunset of the year

my friend suzy up in dc, last summer she got hit by lightning!  it was pouring down rain.  she was on her bike.  i guess she was pretty lucky.  if you get struck by lightning on the bottom of your bike you've had it, 'cause you're grounded or not grounded or something.  but she got hit on the top of her bike.  she felt tingles going up her.  she was pretty freaked out and ran into the bus shelter.  she told them she'd gotten struck by lightning, and they said: you can't stay here.  what if you're contagious?  and when she came closer they all ran away screaming

magnetism may affect the pineal gland, they say, and what the pineal gland does to your brain nobody knows.  so watch your thoughts at the north magnetic pole

inukshuk [canadian inuktitut] a man-shaped "statue" made of stones, used to scare caribou in the direction wanted by the hunters

9/22

this week i

traded shower with a view of christ the redeemer for 334sqft of back alley city center comfort.  matthew completed canoe despite 2018 start date.  monument flags at half mast for elizabeth the second.  the older i get, the more i enjoy paul simon. population pyramid could be a georgia o'keeffe


watched belfast.  there's nothing wrong with an outside toilet, except on an airplane. van morrison soundtrack, judi dench wears exquisite wrinkles

stole a potted tree from gibson's without penalty.  dorm maid watered it for years after we graduated.  laura corrected: not gibson's.  bank next door

delivered brazilian portuguese reinterpretations of ruffles, photographed experiencing his worry that cruella de vil might mistake him for a dalmatian


watched zelig, woody allen's leonard the chameleon discovers he has opinions first by insulting mia farrow's cooking

 i'm twelve years old, i run into a synagogue, i ask the rabbi the meaning of life.  he tells me the meaning of life but he tells it to me in hebrew.  i don't understand hebrew.  then he wants to charge me $600 for hebrew lessons

 i love baseball.  you know, it doesn't have to mean anything. it's just very beautiful to watch


read..

(1) marronage in northeast brazil


(2) siberia is burning

the convulsion of a dying state

about two thirds of russia is covered in permafrost, a mixture of sand and ice that, until recently, remained frozen year-round.  as permafrost melts, walls built on it fracture, buildings sink, railways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines break.  anthrax from long-frozen reindeer corpses has thawed and infected modern herds.  sinkholes have opened in the melting ground, swallowing up whole buildings.  ice roads over frozen water, once the only way to travel in some remote regions, are available for ever-shorter periods.  the arctic coast is eroding rapidly, imperiling structures built close to the water

why don't you ukranians heat your rooms properly?


(3) the john birch society

the birch society's version of events..that president eisenhower was a communist, the soviet union had faked the hungarian revolution, sputnik was a hoax, and communists within the us government had planned for the bay of pigs invasion in 1961 to fail in order to help fidel castro.  it was welch who came up with the epithet "comsymp" to disparage americans who weren't communists but were said to be sympathizing with them

goldwater called the birchers, "the finest people in my community"

goldwater's famous line from his acceptance speech at the 1964 republican national convention - "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" - can be read as an apologia for the birch society

 

(4) siege medicine

without blood banks, transfusions must come directly from donors, often the medical personnel themselves

international aid workers have a higher rate of violent death than us soldiers and police officers

 

9/15

this week i

watched brazilian volleyball players defeat argentina, guilherme in the hammock.  he bought banana-flavored potato chips at the japanese market prior to also japanese coffee.  prince charles' first day of work.  72 years old.  likely last day with a queen in england.  cinnamon featured in captcha, unaware of upheaval to come.  your new house has a living gargoylebolsonaro dispatched paratroopers who merely rained men.  we all experience surprise sometimes, suburb-specific sambas, unmarked prisons, do you use shampoo to clean your butt?  ipso facto ketchup for my hair




9/8

this week i

enjoyed meier's festa junina, matthew ate figs.  brazilian airplane bellies show the national flag, portuguese meu deus sounds a bit like greek medusa

 

shared chope, pizza with christiana, mariluce, they live even closer to rui barbosa than i do.  other cats weren't having it: he's always a little angry




 

read the diversity of life by edward o. wilson, written before widespread acceptance of the chicxulub crater.  koalas play australia's tree sloth role

ballooning spiders are members of what ecologists..have delightfully called the aeolian plankton.  in ordinary parlance, plankton is the vast swarm of algae and small animals carried passively by water currents; aeolian refers to the wind.  the creatures composing the aeolian plankton are devoted almost entirely to long-distance dispersal

most animals are miniature arks laden with parasites.  they also transport accidental hitchhikers in soil clinging to the skin, including bacteria and protozoans of immense variety, fungal spores, nematode worms, tardigrades, mites, and feather lice.  seeds of some species of herbs and trees pass live through the guts of birds, to be deposited later in feces, which serves as instant fertilizer.  a few arthropods practice what biologists call phoresy, deliberate hitchhiking on larger animals.  pseudoscorpions, tiny replicas of true scorpions but lacking stings, use their lobster-like claws to seize the hairs of dragonflies and other large winged insects, then ride these magic carpets for long distance

every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle

to visualize the tenuousness of life, imagine yourself on a journey upward from the center of the earth, taken at the pace of a leisurely walk.  for the first twelve weeks you travel through furnace-hot rock and magma devoid of life.  three minutes to the surface, five hundred meters to go, you encounter the first organisms, bacteria feeding on nutrients that have filtered into the deep water-bearing strata.  you breach the surface and for ten seconds glimpse a dazzling burst of life, tens of thousands of species of microorganisms, plants, and animals within horizontal line of sight.  half a minute later almost all are gone.  two hours later only the faintest traces remain, consisting largely of people in airliners who are filled in turn with colon bacteria

a half dose of sickle-cell genes, one per cell, is advantageous in those parts of the world where malignant malaria is common

flies, wasps, moths, and butterflies, relative newcomers of insect evolution.  they are preyed upon by dragonflies, paleozoic relics that still possess stiff outstretched wings and other archaisms that date back to the dawn of flight

a change in courtship behavior or a shift in the mating season..is enough to create a new species

the contemporary mammals of the world are primarily the products of three great adaptive radiations, and three only..the first of the three continents on which mammalian radiation did attain full expression is australia..the second body of land spacious enough for mammalian radiation is the "world continent," comprising africa, europe, asia, and north america as far south as the southern rim of the mexican plateau.  the world continent has been more or less cohesive throughout the age of mammals, during the past 66 million years, because the closeness of its parts has allowed many kinds of plants and animals to emigrate from one to the next.  north america, the most isolated of the elements, was joined to europe across present-day greenland and scandinavia during the early age of mammals.  alaska and northeastern siberia have been connected off and on by land bridges, the most recent about 10,000 years ago.  the third continental center of mammalian evolution is south america, which was isolated during the breakup of gondwanaland, drifted north, and was finally linked solidly to north and central america 2.5 million years ago

nearly half of the families and genera of south america belong to stocks that have immigrated from north america during the past 2.5 million years

in a marshy glade of the north central states, reedgrass is eaten by short-horned grasshoppers, the grasshoppers are eaten by orb-weaver spiders, the spiders are eaten by palm warblers, and the warblers are eaten by marsh hawks

the greatest multipliers of tropical diversity, however, are the epiphytes, plants growing on trees that do not extract water or nutrients from them.  orchids make up a majority of the species of epiphytes, but they are accompanied by vast arrays of ferns, cacti, gesneriads, arums, members of the pepper family, and others

from tonga in the west to hawaii in the east, the polynesians extinguished at least half of the endemic species found upon their arrival

marsupial lions


iguanas can be made to yield up to ten times the amount of meat as cattle on the same land if managed carefully, while leaving a large part of the forest intact

if there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.  and thus humanity closes the door to its past

 

9/1