While Grown, Millionaire Men Cried after Losing a Schoolyard Game...

...dozens were killed in Gaza airstrikes and additionally an innocent boy was beaten by police.  These story threads are presented successively with complete unawareness and a lack of any perspective.

Photos of two people beaten Tuesday (David Luiz and Tariq Abu Khdeir), only one by life 

Brazilian soccer shirts, 98% off

Probably faked, but haha...

Like chocolate after Valentine's Day, tomorrow will be an opportune day to stock up on apparel for the Brazilian national team.  Germany male-raping your national team 7-1 will do that.

"You always buy just one tomato,"

...the check-out cashier said to me yesterday as I blushed tomato-red.  Yes, it's true.  I typically buy just one tomato.  One tomato is all I need.  I buy tomatoes only for myself, and I live close enough to the grocery store and eat them irregularly enough that I buy them as I need them and I always have fresh tomatoes on my counter.

I was more taken aback by being noticed.  I grocery shop typically twice a week, and I had myself recognized the cashier.  But I assumed from her perspective I was among the faceless mass of hundreds of produce-buyers she sees each week.  Yet among us all I was labeled as a tomato eccentric.  Walking home I thought to make salsa soon just for an excuse to buy multiple tomatoes at once.

But her one little comment ballooned into social paranoia: who else is noticing me?  Am I projecting other weird, OCD habits?  Robotic regimentation?

During college, I was a regular at Einstein Bagels and my usual order - and I remember it perfectly - was a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese and a blueberry strudel muffin.  We gave our names like Starbucks as our orders were prepared and pretty soon the manager Stephanie started calling out to me as I waited in line well before the counter, "raisin bagel with cream cheese, T.J.?"  The first time I could only think to call back, "am I that boring?!"  Even if she didn't say it, the cosmic answer was was probably "yes".  I started varying my order after that.

Yesterday's tomato incident might be the universe calling again.  Unfortunately, there are few true substitutes for tomatoes-on-the-vine.  Canned diced don't go well on sandwiches.

"I am lonely," said the Moon

Via Poorly Drawn Lines.

Now This Is Summer

Newspaper boys cool of in a New York City park fountain, April 1916.

Via National Geographic Found.

Fireworks Every Day but the Fourth

Boston's 4th of July fireworks over the Charles are cancelled tomorrow due to the approaching Hurricane Arthur and have instead been moved to tonight.  Next door, Somerville's fireworks always have been scheduled for tonight as well.  However, if they get rained out tonight they'd instead be moved to the 10th - a week later and still (inconveniently) a Thursday.  July 3rd is also Norwalk's traditional firework date.   This is because Norwalk is a cheap town, and does not like to pay holiday wages to its fireworks crew.  The decision was made several days ago to postpone Norwalk's fireworks to the 5th.  My only hope to see live fireworks tomorrow is triumphant yet reckless fans of the Brazil x Colombia World Cup match tomorrow afternoon.

White Noise, White Light

White Noise

When the low temperature at night is no lower than the 70s, I'm most certainly using an air conditioner & fan combo to keep cool and be able to sleep through morning.  My apartment is on the fourth floor, and collects much of the heat from the bottom three.  This situation is nice during the winters, when I only even open my radiators for the most frigid days, but more problematic during the muggier months.

A helpful side-effect of an AC in a small bedroom coupled with a fan at the head of the bed is all the white noise being generated.  That with the coolness greatly eases sleeping.  In early July last summer, I actually slept through a fire alarm and I completely didn't hear (perhaps with white noise, there can be too much of a good thing).  Only the next morning I found out about the minor basement apartment apartment fire when I walked out for work and saw some traumatized residents sitting on an ambulance's bumper.  If a fireman knocked on my door during the building evacuation, I slept through that, too.

White Light

Although I failed to hear any alarm over the sounds of the fan and air conditioner, I was awoken briefly that morning (4am or so) by the emergency response vehicles' flashing lights.  I recall that they seemed more yellow than red and having the annoyed thought that it was too early for the road construction crews to start working.  Then I just rolled over, put the extra pillow over my eyes, and seconds was sleeping again.

View from bed at 6:03am, July 1st, 2014

In my bedroom, sound is muffled but light is not.  Sunrise was at 5:10am today, and the blinds on my south-facing window are poor enough that the morning's rays woke me up at 5:36am and approximately this time every morning during the summer months, a good half-hour before the alarm I set.  Although I do have heavy curtains which do block-out the sun, unfortunately they also block my window air conditioner unit.  I'd much rather face the light than lack air conditioning.  Although it's possible to Macgyver to solution to my too-long curtains using an elaborate series of clothespins, I have to admit I increasingly enjoy my natural, sun-light alarm, being greeted by the dawn each day.

And did she see this coming?

A cheerless faced was passing out business cards for psychic readings as I passed the Porter Square subway station.  Her expression suggested that, if she was herself the medium, all portents would be bad.

I wondered on the walk home if a psychic's business runs counter-cyclical to the macroeconomy.  Everyone is searching for answers and hope in the bad times, and when the money starts coming in again, many are satisfied to have found what they're looking for and stop asking questions.

Or maybe these businesses are as affected by the the downturns as everyone else, and no longer have extra cash for such luxuries as divination.  But I can't imagine the same sympathy is offered.  Across the street from where she stood Cambridge's last 24-hour quasi-diner closed a few months ago, citing hard times.  Most agree it's a shame.  And the tea leaves also tell me that many of those same yuppies refusing to take the one of the psychic's business cards would like to have suggested that she consider a "real job".

"Thank You for Showing Me the Futility of Human Endeavor"

Actually a Swedish bartender's response to Bart Simpson's prank call, but also a good thing to say if you ever called-out in a seminar.

In the presentations and workshops I attend, there is no shortage of egos who desperately need their pomposity deflated, and to gain the perspective that ultimately the work they do matters very little.  Remind them that "...All is vanity; What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?"

Reminder: All is Vanity.  Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The failed handshakes of French president François Hollande

Les défaillances... Mon Dieu!

In high school we agreed that the worst possible diss is when you offer out your hand but the other guy makes no move to take it, so that you have to withdraw rejected.  When the other person just doesn't notice is mostly devoid of insult - just that you're not important enough to have their attention - but you feel as sheepish with your hand out unmet.  Much worse is when your whole country world sees this happen.

Deep Dark Fears, Illustrated

The website Deep Dark Fears illustrates (often irrational) fears than readers submit.  It's someone reassuring to see that some of my common worries aren't mine alone. Especially now in Cambridge's icy season, I've had enough almost-slips to totally have this one, too:

Another variation of this fear is that I'll slip and my leg will fall out into the street - oddly just my leg - and be run over by a truck.

If I were to submit, I'd send my long-had fear that when I see an unfamiliar insect, I worry that it's actually a pregnant alien queen beginning an invasion.  I imagine Earth overrun with giant insect hordes and feel the regret of having not squashed it and prevented all that misery when I had the chance (I usually squash it).

Younger me would send in the fear that swallowing a watermelon seed would cause a melon to grow inside of me, and I'd either die from as the vines growing into my throat suffocate me or the growing watermelon stomach cancer bursts me out from within like Alien.

W.M.B.s

Back in grad school our first-semester macroeconomics professor assigned William Easterly's critique of development efforts, The Elusive Quest for Growth.  I so appreciated his accounts of failed efforts due to unintended consequences that on my own I later read Easterly's follow-up book, The White Man's Burden, with titled borrowed from Rudyard Kipling's poem.  I read a chunk of it during an airline flight - I took my seat and pulled it out, and minutes later my definitely non-white seatmate joined me.  If you ever have to explain a title like that you've already lost, so I spent the entirety of the flight consciously hiding any trace of the book title (else, "Oh, so I'm your burden now??!" )

Over this past long MLK weekend I read Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines about (obviously) the American experience in the Philippines, which I've always wanted to learn more about, particularly the Philippine war immediately after American took possession.  Karnow mentioned several times that Kipling's poem was actually written to encourage American imperialism in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war which won the islands for the U.S. (with the subtitle the poem is actually called "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands").  Karnow included a knowing vignette touching the ironies of black U.S. soldiers sent to fight in that war: 

By the summer of 1899, straining the levels set by Congress, some sixty thousand Americans were serving in the Philippines, and a year later their number had grown to more than seventy-five thousand - three quarters of the entire U.S. Army.  They included two Negro regiments known as "buffalo soldiers," a label pinned on them by the Indians, whom they had fought in the West.  "What are you coons doing here?" a bystander shouted as they landed in Manila - the which one of the blacks replied, "We've come to take up the white man's burden."