this week i

published a multi-survey analysis of retiree employer-sponsored insurance and then beneficiary counts on an approval pathway for the latest blockbuster.  john oliver presented our work focused on those without coverage: even before the chaos of the unwinding, in 2022 about a quarter, a quarter of uninsured people eligible for medicaid were not enrolled in it.  none of it as impressive as rosemarie launching her south jersey book club

 

argue with dad beyond his grave whether rhubarb good.  i'm in this, like school of athens' surreptitious raphaelfie.  pallbearer applications accepted


visited oxford for near east tiffin, mongol jug, livia, lapis lazuli at ashmolean, bodleian tour, botanic garden, scribble-beaked bird.  if only treasure of sierra madre were bogart's empty sack rather than philippine access to south china sea.  i won one, drew theater masks two, in red, white, and blue












no swords in the library

one sees nothing except what the librarian chooses to show you
 


 


 

 

read..

(1) the history of instant replay

to remind fans: 'this is not live!  ladies and gentlemen, army did not score again!'

like listening to several non-pilots trying to land a plane

 

(2) moscow's useful idiots

after the concert hall attack, russian authorities took the unusual step of releasing footage of security services torturing and beating the suspects.  all four were bruised when they appeared in court on march 24

 

(3) the times of the joy of sex

free healthcare - or free childcare - seems more radical today than free love

comfort made important contributions to gerontology and to training doctors in geriatric medicine - 'for a long time looked upon as just another branch of embalming' - as well as working with the grey panthers to agitate for change in the social treatment of the elderly.  but his big project, a 'test-battery' that would follow a group of people as they aged to determine the biomarkers of senescence, never got funded, despite years of effort

 

(4) a frozen military parade

gaza has been the deadliest conflict for the press on record.  earlier this month, the un reported that more than 122 journalists and media workers had been killed, a death toll unprecedented in modern wars.  yet the systematic murder of their palestinian colleagues has barely been registered in the western press

the tank commander said he thought shana's camera was a rocket launcher

 

(5) the book that told botanists how to name plants

botany's bulwark against a potential babel of names

above all, take notes; don't got to bed until the day's observations have been written down in proper order

 

(6) if our damp pizza box or polythene bag gets sloughed off to landfill, well, at least we tried

a recycling sorting centre, or materials recovery facility, in south london

the plastic soup foundation

ban unnecessary single-use plastics

at the sorting centre, i'd watched a large, ornate bible drift down the paper stream.  feeling, irrationally, that someone should draw attention to its existence, i gestured towards it and asked if it might clog the machinery.  'oh no,' anne said.  'we get them all the time'

 

(7) what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning

metaphysical overreach

borges..became obsessed with zeno's paradox

the very notion that we can discern the difference between heat and cold, light and shade, necessarily entails a self embedded in time and able to bridge two disparate moments.  without a self, kant argued - without a sense that someone is looking and can register the beginnings and endings of sensations - experience itself would not exist

quantum physics, too, has suggested that reality cannot be described without reference to an observer

"enchanted by its rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels."  what we forget, in other words, is that the world ceases to make sense when we imagine we are transcendent beings who can stand outside it, not the players of a board game whose rules are formulated by our own limitations

nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, the notion that, given infinite time and a finite number of atoms, the universe must inevitably run through all possible permutations of reality and start repeating itself 

 

(8) darwinian personal life

i also daily smoke 2 little paper cigarettes of turkish tobacco

the animal wilfulness of plants

in "on the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history," huxley argued that all organic beings, including people, were essentially automatic machines, their consciousness a mere "collateral product" of the mechanism..terminally ill and writing to thank huxley for a note of advice and comfort, darwin teased, "i wish to god there were more automata in the world like you"

the fundamental unity of the human species

we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms 

 

(9) the twenty-sixth census director

we're trying to compete with space camp

i was really fond of ed sheeran

 

(10) it will be easier to design new drugs - and novel viruses

if i were advising governments, i would say that there's a 10 per cent chance these things will wipe out humanity in the next twenty years.  i think that would be a reasonable number

we will see highly accelerated technological progress, driven by but not limited to ai, that there are very significant risks associated with this and that 21st-century politics isn't well placed to deal with these challenges

of the 692 ai systems that have so far been approved by the fda for medical use, 531 target radiology, and yet today there are 470 vacancies for radiologists listed on a us job board

the simplest form of artificial intelligence predicts the appropriate label for some form of data


(11) galen, who wrote a flabbergasting 12 per cent of all surviving ancient greek

many in the ancient mediterranean world - enslaved and free people - lived barely above subsistence level.  but among the comfortably off, eating habits ranged from the demonstrative asceticism of the stoic philosophers to the decadence of trimalchio, a fictional roman freedman at the time of nero who held a banquet at which all of the many dishes on the table were made of disguised pork 

 

(12) dan savage has published how many short-response columns

you're arguing for the benefit of gullible people who might be following that idiot.  the point of arguing with idiots online is peeling low-information non-idiots away from them, not bringing malevolent idiots to their senses

 

(13) the houseless and their advocates

the dickensian plight of the homeless

a man dying of cancer..back in the alley with his buddies, pouring vodka down his feeding tube

he finds a model in sisyphus - or sisyphus as imagined by camus, who converted the tale of futility into a parable of purposeful striving.  although sisyphus is condemned forever to watch the rock he pushes uphill tumble back down, "the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart," camus insisted.  "one must imagine sisyphus happy"

as a source of other destabilizing conditions, childhood sexual abuse may be more common and more damaging among the deeply disadvantaged than is generally understood

an abstract painting looks like "the face of a dude i beat up"

 

(14) nusantara and more

it is illegal to be an atheist in indonesia

prabowo's team gave the head of one pesantren a new car.  another was given funds for a new dormitory.  someone else was promised a trip to mecca 

 

(15) shell famine

a drone operator told me how he had watched as russian soldiers dashed across open ground, only half of them making it across alive

today 30 to 40 percent of injuries were drone-related, compared to almost none six months ago

no matter how good we are, medical services don't win wars

no one talked like this two years ago

between 16,000 and 17,000 russians died in the five months they took to capture avdiivka.  between 1979 and 1989 the soviets lost 15,000 men in their failed attempt to control afghanistan

 

(16) computational ecology

the poopsing trends in digital technology and biodiversity: as the former was expanding exponentially, the latter was plummeting

a bar code reader for zebras

if the global tech sector were a country, its total power usage would rank third in the world behind the united states and china

training just one algorithm created five times as many emissions as an average us car creates over its entire lifetime

 

(17) sans eyes

a blind man goes into a department store and starts swinging his guide dog by the tail over his head.  'can i help you?' the clerk asks.  'no, thanks,' the man replies.  'i'm just looking around'

that astonishingly durable 70 percent unemployment figure

the quinze-vingts, denoting its three hundred

when a blind person reads braille, neuroscientists have discovered that the area of the brain mediating vision is activated in much the same way as that of a sighted reader

seeing starlight for the first time


4/25

this week i

would brand my line of toothpaste crimean warrior.  guilherme chose career in survey methodology maybe for life more glamorous than two dentist parents, lie flat business seats remind him of their office chairs.  also latte flower art generally genus magnolia. just look at those two aroused lions



drafted multidimensionality.  nancy's cedatos made the big four.  metal mayflower and black swan, but no river itchen boats christened scratchen.  cameron starting to look like zuckerberg in his old age, perhaps that's why clegg deputy for both.  nuclear family geometry before winchester tour














drew alternate universe samson and delilah by peter paul rubens, her thwarting the barbers at the gate coining a parallel idiom in that dimension


drew archangel gabriel at 2010 world cup, adoration of the musketeers: a bar is born, reports of my asexual reproduction are greatly exaggerated





read mudlark'd by malcolm russell.  riverbed findings from the era when dental anesthesia was a dude in a clown suit

opposite.  hairpin.  ad 150-400 found at city of london by the author

a wax and silver fir writing tablet found near the river walbrook, a thames tributary, records the sale of a gaulish female named fortunata

the east india company..what historian william dalrymple aptly termed 'the supreme act of corporate violence in world history'

coiners [counterfeiters], the slang term for whom was 'bit-faker'

a 'palmer' - a professional pilgrim who could be paid to travel on behalf of another

 


 rosary bead..memento mori

 

over the next five months, the frail septuagenarian made perhaps one hundred and seventy trips to hammersmith bridge under the cover of darkness, casting more than a tonne of type from that bridge

between 1400 and 1835, there were twenty-four recorded winters when the thames froze over

buffalo bill's wild west show in london for queen victoria in 1887 as part of the golden jubilee

the ojibwe..supposed that men wearing sandwich boards were doing so as a form of punishment

 


selina young is shown crossing the thames..1861

she gave away her jumping accessories..and settled into full-time work at her aunt's feather emporium

consul fabius maximus was given the nickname 'jupiter's chick' after being struck by lightning on his buttocks

in a case of drowning in 1746, it was suggested a pipe be inserted into the victim's rectum and smoke blown into her body to help revive her.  the woman was indeed revived, and equipment for administering tobacco smoke enemas was later deployed along the thames

the romans officially prohibited the wagering of money on games of chance, such as those played with dice.  the only exception was supposed to be during the saturnalia festival

an itinerant tooth-drawer on a public stage at a country market or fair, extracting a patient's tooth, while his assistant in a clown's costume provides entertainment and distraction

a fashionable dentist's practice in which healthy teeth are being extracted from poor children and inserted into the jaws of the wealthy


4/18

this week i

read about 35-year-old lina khanjon stewart's interview also features her brilliance.  an ancestral misstep: one can have arms or wings but not both

in her spacious washington office lined with 1920s political cartoons

concentration of corporate power can in some instances be deeply antithetical to liberty

some of her backers have speculated that if trump wins this year's election, he could reappoint her

the agency she saw as the "tip of the spear" for economic justice

unlike some young leftists these days, khan and her fellow antitrust travelers aren't socialists


wrote as i hear the mostly-paired syllables.  these next forty maybe wildest stretch since durer painted woaer half a thousand years ago


could not fit "outlook not so good" nor "not bloody likely" into clairvoyant triangle real estate of the scalp.  before i was bald, i was magic 8-balled


might call poison control if i realized that i had swallowed this.  garry kasparov often says, i believe in coincidences, but i also believe in the kgb
 
 
drew anthropomorphic facepalms, a stretch for fish, not advised for cact-eyes.  hannes cautioned 42kb parquet file might contain four compressed petabytes.  dr. lumley highlighted only with a factor variable, can you distinguish "this is not a level" from "this is a level but we don't have any"

unprompted by fails,
shame trails, or droll quips
the cosmic facepalm
a solar eclipse

 

drew fridge train magnet and door to door solicitor wins interest of one human and six cats.  uni-ball 207 mechanical pencil on recicle filibook



laid over in lisbon, malo dental roadside loiterers drinking breakfast.  would poe's raven perch on rembrandt's pallas?  in demon dreams, perchance





stared at pepper no. 30 for a moment like hisham matar in front of siena d&g caravaggio.  surname ferreira signifies smith, cristo rei imperial decline

 

read of love and other demons by gabriel garcia marquez, an eclipse in there too

her hair, which had never been cut

the animal contracted rabies during the naval siege by the english, bit its owner on the face, and escaped to the nearby hills.  the unfortunate man was clubbed to death while suffering fearful hallucinations, which mothers still sang about many years later in popular ballads meant to frighten children

the courage to poison the food of their rabid kin in order to spare them a ghastly death

 don't just stand there like a corpse

 "horses frighten me as much as chickens do," he said.
"that is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress," said abrenuncio.  "if we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur"

the curative harp

"i am not talking to you," said abrenuncio.  "i think in low latin"

she arrived from spain with the disassembled parts of a clavichord, which she put together herself

inspired by the lyricism of the holy spirit

the hands of an artist and the ear of an artilleryman

dona olalla was struck down by lightning..when he returned from the cemetery, he was surprised by a storm of little paper birds falling like snow on the orange trees in the orchard.  he caught one of them, unfolded it, and read: that lightning bolt was mine

nostalgia for what had never been

hurried, heartless siesta love in the evangelical shade of the orange trees.  the madwomen encouraged them from the terraces with indecent songs, and celebrated their triumphs with stadium ovations

with judas she learned to chew tobacco and coca leaves mixed with ashes of the yarumo tree, like the indians in the sierra nevada.  in the taverns she experimented with cannabis from india, turpentine from cyprus, peyote from real de catorce, and at least once, opium from the nao of china brought by filipino traffickers

pickled iguana and armadillo stew

from san lazaro hill they observed the fatal swamps to the east, and to the west the enormous red sun as it sank into a flaming sea.  she asked what was on the other side of the ocean, and he replied: "the world"

a portuguese jew expelled from the peninsula..resurrected a tailor in the district of getsemani

hundred-year-old horses are not the work of god

the ocean, always in its place

he adjusted the mosquito netting so the bats would not drain her blood

the last memory he had of sierva maria was her crossing the gallery in the garden, dragging her painful foot, and disappearing into the pavilion of those interred in life

she played diabolo with the adults in the kitchen and the children in the courtyard, and won every game.  she sang in yoruban, congolese, and mandingo, and even those who did not understand listened to her, enthralled.  for lunch she ate a dish of the goat's eyes and testicles cooked in lard and seasoned with burning spices

maritime charts, an astrolabe and other navigational instruments, and a globe of the earth with additions and emendations that successive cartographers had made by hand as the size of the world increased

"for you was i born, for you do i have life, for you i will die, for you am i now dying."  sierva maria smiled without looking at him.  he closed his eyes to be sure she was not an illusion of the shadows.  when he opened them the vision had disappeared, but the library was saturated with the scent of her gardenias

all the stars came out at the same time

 the nun in his service bought a candle and several pieces of smoked glass for looking at the sun.  the bishop sat up in the hammock and began to observe the eclipse through the glass

the counterfeit night

she stood on a cloud surrounded by a court of submissive demons

i've seen snow

in the orchard, wearing his saracen djellaba and toledo cap, the marquis was taking his siesta in the hammock, his entire body covered in orange blossoms

voltaire in latin is almost a heresy

it is the demon, father..the most terrible one of all

the burlap tunic worn by those who nursed lepers

"whoever you may be," he shouted.  "i command you in the name of christ, lord god of all that is visible and invisible, of all that is, was, and will be, to abandon this body redeemed by baptism, and return to darkness"..the bishop took a deep breath and opened his mouth again to continue the exorcism, but the air died inside his chest and he could not expel it

if you bit your tongue you would poison yourself

grapes that grew back as soon as she ate them

 

4/11