this week i

wrote a custom script for my new friends at the brazilian ministry of education, but with a few extra hours of generalization it's useful everywhere.

struggled for one solid day on how to fix a sqlsurvey bug, gave up, begged dr. lumley for mercy, and dammit if he didn't make me feel stupid.

delivered an hour-long virtual lecture at the university of illinois-chicago on how and why to use r.  same content as always.


misspoke.  the best version of the st. louis blues comes from ella's concert years.  there are sounds she makes in why don't you do right that would require an orchestra's worth of conductors to elicit from any other instrument.

rather like portuguese translations.  mind = blown ; mente = explodido.  also love how few fucks brazilians give about tourists like me.  or maybe if you visit somewhere for three months, you live there?  odd to think i live in rio de janeiro now.  but really, shouldn't we all?








will parrot this description of the wire whenever asked.

read the new york review of books' article on the 75th anniversary of orwell's voice..

waiters were running restaurants

a revolution that came not, as in stalin's russia, from the top down, but from the bottom up

what it feels like to be hit by a bullet?  ('the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion')

it is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes

..and then read the book.  to find that voice, george orwell took a bullet through the throat.

a state of affairs worth fighting for

in trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy.  in the winter on the zaragoza front, they were important in that order

i should like to make an exception of the manchester guardian.  in connection with this book i have had to go through the files of a good many english papers.  of our larger papers, the manchester guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty

the morse-like tapping of machine guns

a fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within the sound of guns

the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all

no one i met at this time - doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients - failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive.  i could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all

2/20