HBRW overdose?

I wonder if I'm reading too much HBRW.

Like 3-4 days a week, I read 1-1.5 hours of the book of Judges in the morning.

It's a bit much and not directly related to what I do right now, but since I really am new to the language, I feel that if I don't use it, I'll lose it.

I also find it really enjoyable.

I do wonder if this unnecessarily displaces dissertation work.

Though - on the other hand - this is how my Latin and Greek got good, which makes me a better candidate for some jobs when I go on the market, I think.

An unnamed Union Leader on "Occupy"'s May Day activities.

I forgot that I had meant to blog about this a while ago, until I came across some old "Rolling Stone" issues I had lying around my apt.

Basically, it was about how silly a lot of "Occupy" was, and how they really didn't know how to interface with Democrats and Unions, and then somehow they ended up calling for a(n illegal) general strike for May Day of this year.

Quoted in "Rolling Stone" (7 July 2012, iss. 1158, p. 66) was an unnamed "high-ranking labor official, who wished to remain anonymous":


These are people who get impatient and frustrated because they don't want to talk to elected leaders.  Then they issue these declarations like some fat fuck in Iran issues a fatwa.  The general strike was a joke.  I mean, who gives a shit?

. . .

Olympic Game Opening Ceremonies (2 of 2): An American

I had been in a bar and caught part of the athletic procession on TV, and NBC coverage majorly pissed me off, because they would cut to commercial break during when all the hot North African teams were on - they'd cut for Libya, but be there for Lichtenstein, and continue through Monaco, but then cut for Morocco.

I got so pissed, I texted a friend of mine, this (African-American) (female) friend I made at the student bar who now lives in Memphis, and she texted back something like -

LOL

- and then a 2nd text, to follow up -

Moroccan men are gorgeous.  I learned that on a trip to epcot.

. . .

Olympic Game Opening Ceremonies (1 of 2): A Briton.

oplaAt a function a couple nights ago, I met a friend of a friend of a friend, who was British, so of course I asked him about the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

He felt it was great in that you could talk about it for hours - which and his (American) wife and (American) neighbors did - but it was just too loaded with self-referential stuff that not even all Britons got, but just maybe most Britons of Danny Boyle's generation.

He also said that they didn't scale a lot of the stuff right, so it probably worked on TV, but not for people in the stadium.

"But Beijing," he was like, "That was impressive, it was a spectacle of scale and synchrony."

"Yeah," I was like, "The hive-mind."

"Well, maybe," he was like, "But I don't think you have to be a communist country to do that."

At that, I laughed loudly, and I was like, "I think you do!  Let's respectfully disagree on that."

He laughed too, and I went on to say that fascism subsumes the individual into unthinking emotions, whereas Britain had the exact opposite, and had a "cerebral" opening games ceremony, to use the word that he used, since reflective thought is the opposite of fascism.

"I suppose so," he was like, "But I still think Beijing was impressive.  Every country has to play to its strengths, I suppose."

Cast Iron Frying Pans.

I had forgotten that I had an old cast iron frying pan that I had gotten from my maternal grandmother's attic buried in my dish cupboard in my apt., but then I noticed it in the pile of pots and pans a few months ago, and I've been using it to cook down vegetable sauces for pasta I make.

One of my favorite things to do afterwards, after it dries from my scrubbing it out, is to put some olive oil on a paper towel and then rub it into the iron to season it.

For some reason I find that really satisfying, to see how nice and shiny the iron gets.

More Mexican - Polish interaction.

The other weekend I went down again to the neighborhood around the city's smaller airport, where there's a 1/3 (white) townies, 1/3 Poles, and 1/3 Mexicans (not counting the Mexican-Americans who are 1st generation and grew up here).

The evening was pretty uneventful - a ton of old man bars that were very slow - but this one was a place that was owned by a couple that included a Polish woman and had a grill attached that served up a lot of Polish food, including stuffed cabbage and oxtail barley sup, though the clientele seemed to be mostly (white) (hard-bitten) American veterans - and -

This one (broadly-built) (young 20s) (Polish) girl with a stylish short haircut and a brown dye-job, and her (Mexican[-American?]) boyfriend, who was jacked up with tons of tattoos up his arm, playing pool.

A local Italian-American restaurant bar.

Earlier that same week, I had hit up an Italian-American restaurant bar in this neighborhood just immediately northwest of downtown, in a gentrified boutique-y neighborhood in which nonethless some lower middle-class (white) people have hung on to some homes and a few businesses.

This mid-50s (white) couple was at the bar finishing a meal, and the one kept saying how scared she was for the upcoming election, and then the guy was talking about some (white) woman he knew who lived in this townhouse right off the most expensive part of town and sent her kids to this expensive private schook, and how she was going off on social issues and Republicans, and all could he think was, "Yeah, you can afford to be a Democrat," and he commented to the woman, "She was a limousine liberal, you know."

FoxNews was on in the background, and the news story on was about how the Democrats wanted to raise taxes on job creators.