Wolf At The Door

There's this very realistic cheap statue of a dog outside the bathroom at Rebecca's and it startles me every time I turn to close the door, and every time I walk out.

Sudden barking scares me, and I distrust dogs I see on the street.

Once, I was playing badminton in my driveway, and the neighbor's dog ran up to me and tried to bite me. It bit a hole in my shorts and I whacked it without remorse.

When I used to walk the 15 minutes home from Cilantro at 4 A.M., the dogs would all be asleep. I would walk in the middle of the road, lest I wake the snarls chambered under the wheel wells.

Garamond

I just changed my resume from Arial to Garamond and it looks much better. What does that say about me?

I created my resume around the time Helvetica turned 50. I read:

people use Helvetica because they want to be a member of the efficiency club.

And that sounded good to me. Then I sat back, and waited for somebody to notice.

Istanbul was Constantinople

I was just making myself coffee in a French press, with cardamom, and I was thinking to myself, "What would I call this drink if I were selling it in a shop?" and of course I thought, "Turkish coffee," because that's what it tastes like. But I wasn't 100% sure if that's what Turkish coffee is, and at any rate, the cardamom isn't ground with the coffee, and certainly, I thought, the Greeks would object. I remember hearing once that the Greeks call Turkish coffee Greek coffee.

I would need to name my beverage something that 1) does not claim to be Turkish coffee, since it is not prepared in the way I understand to be traditional 2) acknowledges the existence of the beverage's wider constituency and 3) sounds intriguing.

And then I remembered that song from fifth grade, that I can't remember if I secretly or openly loved. I remember really wishing I could understand the refrain of the verse. I would call my drink that.

Indar

"When we land at a place like London Airpot we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only not to appear foolish. We might even pretend that we had expected better. That is the nature of our stupidity and incompetence. And that was how I spent my time at the university in England, not being overawed, always being slightly disappointed, understanding nothing, accepting everything, getting nothing. I saw and understood so little that even at the end of my time at the university, I could distinguish buildings only by their size, and I was hardly aware of the passing of the seasons. And yet I was an intelligent man, and could cram for examinations."

Portfolios of the Poor, Chapter 2

Portfolios of the Poor highlights the need to focus on cash flows of the poor, rather than their assets, because that is how the poor see it. That makes sense. At the most basic level, you need cash—not an equity line—to get food. We chafes against the thought of paying for a savings program; discipline or education should be enough, we intuit. Or browbeating. Of course, I take something like a bank account for granted.

I think this is like Paul Farmer complicating the distinction between treatment and prevention. Savings is like prevention: we don't need fancy and expensive drugs (or financial tools) if we can convince people to adopt habits that will keep them from contracting AIDS (or debts) in the first place. We should make some ecological interventions, which we can feel good about. Dig a well, provide condoms, make posters (give to Kiva). But I've missed a basic dignity/autonomy component to providing treatment (or financial services, even if I think the ledgers shows they're treading water). Treatment and cash-flow-oriented microfinance acknowledge the dignity, rights, expectations, humanity of the poor, and allow them more space for hope in the present, rather than the future.

...lift all boats?

Would a free labor market...

Celebration Guns

There's been much ado about the operation that killed three Somali pirates and captured a fourth in the liberation of Captain Richard Phillips. Let me say that I know nothing about military operations, or the situation at hand, and it's hard to say what the right way to go about the situation would have been for whoever was in charge of liaising with the pirates. Certainly the skills of the Seals are awesome. That said, I'm rather disappointed that this is being hailed as such a tremendous success. Three young Somalis are dead. That is not a good outcome. Three out of five dead people is better than five out of five dead people—that's still three dead young men.

One detail seems to have escaped commentary, however: the Maersk Alabama was a US-flagged aid ship with an all-American crew. Why is that significant? Well, apparently, registering a ship under the US flag is not the cheapest way to go. Have you ever been on a cruise? Noticed it was flying the Panamanian flag? Noticed that none of the staff was American? That's because it's cheaper and more convenient for the ship's operators. Reports say the MA was carrying food aid for the WFP. One would think that the WFP would be interested in the lowest cost option—I assume, not a US-flagged vessel and an an expensive American crew. But of course, the United States is the only country that donates to the WFP in-kind. American food aid must be made on American farms, packaged in American facilities, and shipped on American carriers. What's the problem, it's our food aid? We can do what we want—the WFP should be thankful for whatever they can get! Well, the problem is that that's all very expensive, and if we simply gave the money we pay our farmers to the WFP, they would be able to provide much more food for those affected, with more flexibility, from local sources and for local tastes. The sickest part of all this is that American food aid represents another subsidy to American farmers, which distorts global markets to the advantage of the rich at the expense of farmers in poor countries, like say, Somalia (not that one could probably do much farming there now anyway).

Anyway, freedom should always be celebrated. I'm glad Captain Phillips and the rest of his crew is safe, and Captain Phillips' selflessness should be praised. Piracy and stealing is bad. But on a geopolitical scale, let's be clear about who here the beleaguered constituency is here.

drug/spiritual metaphor of choice

Well, I guess this explains Job 6.

NPR non-sequitors

I'm at work, actually working (woo!) but I'm listening to NPR. There was a segment on the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush. (What sounded like) an Arab woman called in, peeved and insistent, and rather certain throwing a shoe at someone in any culture would be an insult. The host basically told the woman that that was crazy talk and that shoe-throwing was special for Arabs. It reminded me of a similar comment on the inscrutable nature of the Arab honor system. Sure, notions of propriety and disgrace vary across culture, but I could understand why an Arab might be sensitive to 'expert' parsing of a blunt act of protest. I guess shoes may have been the most rhetorically pointed projectile the journalist could have chosen, but that seems a mere side benefit to the fact that they were the largest objects he could have brought into the room without raising any suspicions.