So, I was born. That much probably you guessed; also that I'm still alive as of Tue Sep 6 21:01:05 2011 . Actually that's wrong – the timestamp is Greenwich meridian time, and by the local time Tue Sep 6 21:01:05 2011 in the far west, who knows...

I was born Liviu Radu Lustman, in Bucharest, Romania on 3/27/47. My parents were both physicians, my father a general practitioner and my mother a dentist.

I started school early, before age 7. I also learnt French , starting maybe even before school, and violin , from age 8 or so. My parents, noticing how little I moved of my own accord, got me a special instructor for gymnastics, who also taught me how to swim during one summer.

In 1958 we applied for the permission to emigrate to Israel. Eventually, we got the official approval , and arrived in Israel in September 1961 – with 70 kg of clothing . However, my parents started working right away – my mother had her private practice as dentist, and my father was an employee of Kupat Holim. We never lacked anything, and by 1964 we had bought an apartment, which was paid off before 1980. My parents also bought an apartment for me, and later another after Nomi was born.

By November 1961 I had joined a class of newcomers, all from Romania, in kibutz Maabarot . At the beginning we learnt Hebrew, then the normal school curriculum. After classes, we also worked three hours a day, and during the vacations we also worked (I think full time, 8 hours a day, as we were old enough – younger kids worked less). Great holidays! But we also got a few weeks each year to go home to our parents.

In the meantime I got drafted, into the Atuda , and started my military training. I failed, of course, all the military courses, except boot camp. After my master, I started my military service, as a warrant officer in the Signal Corps. What I did was program computers for 4 years, the last one actually paid. I even got one day free each week for my studies, but didn't do much about that. In the meantime, I also married Liliana, in 1971. However, she was studying medicine in Italy, and I was in the military in Israel, so our marriage started in small doses – whenever she had a vacation and came home, or I had a vacation and could go to Italy.

In 1973 I got discharged and went to Rome, where Liliana was waiting for her last exam . As we reveled in Rome, the Yom Kippur war started in Israel; however we returned only after the war, because the embassy advised Liliana to stay till the completion of her course – she would be much more valuable as a physician than a student. I spent a few weeks with my military unit, still programming, then returned to Tel-Aviv University as an instructor, working on my Ph.D. It took a long time, and was even more disappointing than the master. In the meantime Nomi was born in December 1974. Eventually my thesis was ready in 1978; a few days afterwards Mike was born, on March 19.

I got a post-doc at MIT, and we stayed in Boston from 1978 to 1980. Then I got a job at NASA Langley , in Hampton, Virginia, where I stayed till 1986, with a break at UCLA during the academic year 1983-84. All this time I worked in research, publishing one or two papers each year. Liliana had much more trouble, as she was a foreign medical graduate. Finally she succeeded in getting an unpaid internship (still 25 hours a day) in Virginia, after which she got her license. But nobody would take her for a residence, as she was a foreign medical graduate. Finally, during our stay in Los Angeles she found out that the military accepts foreign physicians, even to residences, so she joined the Army in 1984. In 1986 she got her residence in Neurology at in San Francisco, so we moved there, living on the Presidio in military housing. I found a job with NASA Ames – some 45 minutes commute each way, but much fun, supercomputers, no need to publish.

And then, very unexpectedly, I unretard. Why? Just to show I can? Anyway, I'm again programming furiously, and don't notice time passing, except when I finally get home and flop like a jellyfish on Broadway.

A little more than one year later, got fired again – let's say it's the recession – but I am old enough to get Social Security, which, God willing, will start at the end of September. Maybe this time it's for real.

Glory Hallelujah! I actually got a check from them, unbelievable. Born again on 9/23/2009 – should I celebrate the date of the Equinox? problems, problems...

Even though I couldn't believe it, Liliana actually retired on June 1st 2011. Now let's see... But at least we started with lots of champagne.

Long story number one – it begins at age eight and ends around twenty six, when we were visiting an acquaintance of Liliana's from Italy, then living in Jerusalem. A lady of our parents' generation, educated and erudite, but also somewhat bohemian – a single mother. Her son, himself a psychologist who studied with Piaget, had sent a picture with a strange breed of cattle – with a horn-like hoof, protruding and curving upwards like medieval pigases . At which I had to butt in: "That's no breed, just selenium poisoning!" Because, on vacation after second grade, I had so much bothered my parents, till they bought me "Appealing Geochemistry" by some Soviet author, which I read cover to cover, finding all kind of tales about ytterbium, yttrium, erbium, terbium, and discovering pictures of pigased cows (is that where Pegassus comes from? Or maybe pig-ass). And I did not forget the stuff either – at any rate not till twenty six.
What's her name in Jerusalem picked up the Britannica – how admirable – to check me up, and actually found a reference.

Long story number two – age sixteen to forty. Sometime in Maabarot , at one of the music lessons we learned (or were taught – it's not the same) about dodecaphony. So I immediately composed a dodecaphonic piece – for flute and guitar – which I hoped somebody would play, which of course did not happen.

H  B  C# C  A  A♭ G  F# D  F  E♭ E
B  A  C  H  A♭ G  F# F  C# E  D  E♭
C# C  E♭ D  H  B  A  A♭ E  G  F  F#
C  H  D  C# B  A  A♭ G  E♭ F# E  F
G  F# A  A♭ F  E  E♭ D  B  C# H  C
A♭ G  B  A  F# F  E  E♭ H  D  C  C#
F# F  A♭ G  E  E♭ D  C# A  C  B  H
A  A♭ H  B  G  F# F  E  C  E♭ C# D
F  E  G  F# E♭ D  C# C  A♭ H  A  B
E  E♭ F# F  D  C# C  H  G  B  A♭ A
E♭ D  F  E  C# C  H  B  F# A  G  A♭
D  C# E  E♭ C  H  B  A  F  A♭ F# G

That particular series, and that particular tune stayed with me, and developed, as I found out more and more about music – not that I ever could play any instrument, or read notes. I kept composing versions, plinking with one finger on stray pianos; then I bought a melodeon , then Liliana bought me an electronic organ , then...

So I had some idea about how my composition sounded, but I never heard the stuff, unless you allow for one tape painstakingly patching my one-finger organ interpretation. In the meantime Shmulik had convinced me that I must go on, to harmony and polyphony and orchestral writing – actually why not? Can't sound any worse than Schoenberg.

Well ... eventually we all got into the computer age. I had already used mainframes to compose canons (optimize harmony over offsets and transpositions) but dawn really dawned when I got my first PC, a Commodore of blessed memory in 1983. It really played on three voices with several tolerable, variable timbres! All I needed was a free TV.

I progressed (progressed!? can that really be? but computers are the only known thing that becomes better and cheaper with time, so maybe, maybe...) from Commodore to Mac to IBM PC+Soundblaster, and had I not lost my programming knack, I would probably by now be working on the Perl/Java/Prolog version of the music editor. And, thank you Shmulik, I have my orchestral piece, with harps and timpani – all fake and sounding awful, but what a nice routine for harp glissando on the Soundblaster.

And I remember yet another success in life. When I started my military service as a programmer, the whole unit had just one room for some ten people, so all the non-essential personnel got exiled in an apartment outside the base, where we had the time of our life. So, until they finally got space for everybody on base, I could impress a few kids, right out of high school, with my masters degree, my exalted military rank and my knowledge of bridge. Of course, I was just as impressed by the fact they were impressed. As my words passed as the wisdom of ages (I was 5 years older), one of them repeated at home my favorite saying:

So I started again to walk "for my health" but mainly beacuse this summer was really cold, so I wouldn't end as a grease stain. And this time I have a camera, so I took a lot of pictures, and then tickled them as much as possible, and added text...

Follow the intrepid explorer

These are my basic itineraries.
The red one gets to a nice park, passing through a region of villas on Margaret and 16th streets. It's the default for when I'm not in the least adventurous. At my crawling pace, about 30 minutes.
The green one is the "South" itinerary. Not much to see there, except the trees in Kelley park. That park is very nice, with a lot of shade, a Japanese Koi pond, etc. There is also a kids' amusement park, where I think I took Rhys once.

This is the adventurous route: I went south to Keyes, and then took a path through the fields, to see where it might lead. Eventually it goes under Rt 280, ending in another small park in the center of some development. On the way I passed some bums encamped in the shade, with their treasure bags, etc. Afraid?
Basically, I had seen the path, a bridge over the local ravine (the green meander in the map) and wheel tracks, so I knew it could not be too savage. The biggest danger would be a deadend, and having to go all the way back.

This is an unclosed path, from the south tip (home) to SJSU library at the north tip. I walked it a few times, mostly to hide in the library when our aircondition was dead. Beloved wife came later, after her sports and shopping, to take me home.

Here I walked a little on 9th street. The point being that I crossed 10th and 11th, which have really bad traffic; I can't decide which way is worse, cross on foot or drive across. Maybe on foot it is a little safer, the drivers worry more about pedestrians and estimate better their motion.

Most of these walks start (and end) with crossing Rte 280 under the bridge, where you can usually find a hobo with his shopping cart. The houses around have low value, because of the noise and the pollution from the highway, and look accordingly. It's the right place for garbage, low maintenance, and lots of tenacious plants which thrive, and even look pretty. Then, the whole region away from 10th and 11th is peaceful, manicured, sometimes manorial. Almost no traffic – some streets have islands to slow down cars – and very few people, with two exceptions: gardeners/trashmen and students walking to SJSU.

Still, one day I met with blinking police cars, armed SWAT people lying among the roses ... all in an eerie silence. I went on, it's beneath me to notice reality; it was just an exercise, and of course they had picked a pleasant and calm neighborhood.

« Dreams

I was, of course in my house in Bucharest. Then, with my mother and Mike, in a tram going towards my school. But I only had my pajamas on, so I had to take the tram back home, to get dressed. Mike got down and I followed, although it was before our station. Also, somehow I was on the wrong side of the street, left – the trams ran on the right side. Never mind, I can go the rest on foot, carrying a suitcase on wheels. Mike walked in front of me, very fast and soon disappeared completely.

Finally I got to our station, which was across a plaza from my house. I was surprised I did not recognize the place – I told myself I had never seen it from that perspective in 60 years... Then I had to cross the plaza. It had all kinds of traffic islands and green spaces being built , so I started to find my way – with my suitcase – in a really bad traffic; I found myself twice on top of a bare plot, which was being prepared to become a park, but I could not cross it, just went around, and it kept getting higher – I could not get off either. There were also lots of huge trucks carrying asphalt and cement for the construction, and quite likely to run me over, or dump their load on me. Finally I got on the sidewalk, still across the house, and as I stopped for a moment my suitcase rolled over and hit some people. I apologized, and walked around the square, with big problems of crossing two streets, till I finally got home – the building had been changed, and I could not recognize it well, except by the address. Finally I got in and was telling my mother what an adventure it was to cross the square – when I found myself outside again, pulling the suitcase over hot, freshly poured asphalt. At which I woke up, very hot.

In reality, there was a square in front of my house, and that tram station was on the opposite side. There was not much traffic, but four tram lines across the square, so one had to walk around. There were indeed three streets to cross.

As for the meaning of the dream, alas, too clear: danger, danger, cannot, cannot.

...so I was with my friend Bibi in Bucharest, on his terrace, and I had just got a call for a stress test of the Army – basically for a run. But I cannot run, I had a heart attack etc... I rushed to my mother to get a medical exemption, very vehement: "Don't you know what they want to do to me?!" But even the doctor's note did not help – the commander insisted that I must run, even sick, even sixty... I woke up very upset.
I dreamt this quite recently, a few months after writing I'm no longer afraid of basic training.

Yesterday I was arranging some the South-America pictures, including some folk dances :

Although the pictures – newimproved, of course – look decent, I was not impressed in Nicaragua. So I arranged a much better performance in a dream:

We were visiting a music and ballet school, where the students started as small children, continuing till adulthood. They were having a big presentation, in a strange auditorium, with a tilted scene.

tilted scene

I told myself that just climbing to backstage top would certainly keep them in shape. There were hundreds of dancers, and lots of instructors, whispering "Keep your head up! Chest straight!" Colorful costumes and great choreography (ha! ha! by ME !! unless the dream is truly a message from above)

Now it is possible, in a dream, to tell yourself "it's wonderful!" and enjoy, without actually supplying wonderful items. But I remember (vs making up now) details:

a complex turning maneuver (each dot a dancer)
a big shawl, black on one side, white on the other, that the dancers carried to change color in mid-dance

The dream was, of course, much more complex: at one point we were viewing the show from balconies, which had no guards and I was afraid to fall; I picked one of the costumes and was worrying where to return it; there were also student orchestras...

Where I made a long pause, till I finally noticed that today is Father Day, so maybe I really should...

First, a big splotch of greasy schmalz: when I think of my father I get an immediate association with Mozart's c-minor concerto (tell that to the Marines! all fine Mozart connoisseurs). It starts with abrupt, furious music in the orchestra; the piano's answer is an unrelated melody, conciliatory and appropriately melancholic. This is how I would begin my rants against the universe, which, as always, had failed to satisfy my heart's desire. My father would talk about anything else, but he did talk with me. For instance, a diatribe against noisy neighbors and rug beating housewives evolved into a detailed discussion of sonic insulation. So with him I knew I was not alone in the world, and after our discussions felt much better.

And he had made all kinds of experiments for me and Justi, when we were small. For instance, a swimming fish – see the picture.

It's just a thin cardboard cutout, and, as it floats on water, you put a drop of oil in the hole H and the fish moves by reaction, as the oil flows along HT. But my father made the fish tail asymmetric, so it will move in circles! He also made us an apparatus to decompose water, using one of my mother's novocaine tubes and a battery. After a while enough gas gathered in the tube that we could light and explode with a neat pop! And many other simple tricks like skipping pebbles on a pond or blowing soap bubbles full of cigarette smoke.

But his specialty was shadow play: cut a silhouette, bend it a bit and glue it behind a sheet of paper. Then, when you move a candle behind the silhouette, its shadow moves gracefully on the paper. Very appropriately, he made such a Turkish belly dancer as our train was entering Istanbul, on our way to Israel. How? did we have scissors with us? And for one of my birthdays he had built a whole ballet of shadow dancers, after a photo from the opera program of "Lakme".

And I think that he enjoyed these games at least as much as we did. So, much later, I bought for Mikey by mistake a car model, which had over 200 pieces to be assembled in the right order, using some poisonous glue (adult supervision required! Mike was 3 or 4 at the time) So clearly, that was reserved for my father, when they would visit that summer, but he died in the spring – more ore less on Israeli Independence day, making Freud grin in his grave.

And yet... maybe I protest too much. A long time ago, when I was seeing a psychiatrist along with beloved children, I had also been talking a lot about my father, at which the doctor asked for one of his photos. Which I did not bring to the next meeting – I had completely forgotten. I was rather shocked when I realized what had happened, but the psychiatrist said nothing – had he also forgotten? Only in books you say "Hello!" and the doctor instantly replies with a lengthy and insightful analysis of your character, fate, and place in the overall design of creation. By the way, I had bought "What do you say after you say hello?" with the plain expectation to get some practical answer, because I always have had huge problems with small talk.

I realized that even in these memoirs there is no picture of my father... Well, now there is:

From:
« my parents still had their medical offices
parintii mai aveau cabinet particular – adica doua camere la noi acasa,

This is a plan – not accurate , but representative – of our apartment in Bucharest. My father had bought it, and my mother came to live there when they married. It was part of a big house, with yard and garden and a few smaller buildings attached. This is where I was born, and where I lived till we left for Israel.

Nothing special about my first home, except that I dream of it almost every night. I very seldom dream of my parents' house in Israel, and practically never of any other house I lived in.

(1) is the entrance hall, a big empty room at street level with a decorative cement floor. Probably supposed to be a shop, but, as far as I remember, was always just an empty room. The rest of the apartment was on an upper level, connected by the curved stairs.

(7) was another hall, connecting to the kitchen and bathroom, with an exit from the apartment at the end. It had windows all over, towards the yard; actually there were other parts of the building across.

(10) and (11) we used as pantries and storage areas, although they had special equipment: (10) had a sink, so it could be used as a kitchen, and (11) a toilet. Somehow the idea of two toilets in the same house did not fit – we never used (11), just waited for the main bathroom to be free.

Now I should mention that under communist law, the house did not belong to us – although my father had bought it – but to the government. So, when my parents had to close their private practice, two rooms became "available". I moved to my mother's former office, and grandma moved to my father's former office; the farthest room (2) was given to some other family. In order not to fight over the kitchen, we also gave them room (10); however all of us still shared the same bathroom/toilet.

I am at heart an Assembler programmer – I go for total control. You know a repertory of about 100 instructions, you know precisely what each of them does, and the program does what you tell it to do (not what you meant, alas!) You can look at any bit in the memory, and, if the Assembler is reasonably decent, you can follow it step by step – no surprises possible. But, of course, there ain't no such thing anymore. And it couldn't be, when every computer executes instructions from any other computer, with data from any other computer, while interactively waiting on your pleasure.

But suppose all you want is a plain filter: you tell the computer to start, then, unsupervised, it does something to input items to produce output items, then stops. That should not be longer than:

Anyway, while swimming with the trilobites, I started beefing about PL/1, with compound statements starting anywhere and ending just as anywhere. So I invented my code beautifier that shows the limits of compound statements, to which I stuck forever:

Since the beautifier is the only way to create a semblance of divine order in the mess I write, I favor primitive (preferably one statement per line) languages, mostly because they are easier to tidy. Just try to split a c file into individual functions, to see what I mean.

Then, as the dinosaurs were dying, I got a Mackintosh, to be programmed in Pascal (another straightjacket) and I still remember the shock at having to define a window before I could print a line! The Mac was aware that there may be lots of windows, each doing its own thing, but not aware that there should be some default, if you just want a "Hello world" program.

Just because these were the most popular enjoyable passtimes in Romania – I did not have then, as I still don't, any health consciousness. But I had, at age 10, the unchecked reaction to the idea of power: power is used to make others suffer, so you can be sure that they don't do what they want, but what you force them to do. Later, I found this written explicitly in "1984" ; I did not remember my own association of power with cruelty, although now I shudder when I see how fully natural it is. By the way, Orwell had this knack of bringing unpleasant facts out of the blue :

So in the spring of 1968 we had an unexpectedly long vacation – 4 weeks or so, and I decided to see the world. On my own earnings – that was what my salary could be used for: enough for fun, sadly insufficient for any serious purposes. I got the permission from the military, bought cheap student tickets and set on my second international trip – the first had been leaving Romania, 7 years before. All the necessary information I gathered from "Europe on $5 a day" – not quite practical even then.

Our plane was antiquated enough to have a breakdown between Tel-Aviv and Basel; I remember seeing the propeller in front of my seat stop in mid air, but was not particularly impressed. Then we landed in Athens, and waited till they fixed the plane. I found everything so exciting, because unexpected. We never moved from one waiting room, where I tried to read the Greek signs (I knew Greek letters from math). For instance, "grammatokivotos" – something to do with writing, "gram-" like grammar or graphics, and "chivot" in Romanian is a closet for precious things. So, clearly, "grammatokivotos" is a mailbox – as may be verified by inspection.

Eventually we got to Basel. The hotel that "Europe on $5 a day" recommended matched the price: a few beds in a room where some stinkingly unwashed people slept. Talk about the aristocratic and fashionable society of the European continent. But who cares! across from the hotel there were houses from 1528! In the museum, douanier Rousseau! etc. etc.

Then I took the train to Brussels to my uncle, and from there took a few trips to Holland, Paris and London. I went to all the recommended places: Bruges, Louvre, Place Pigalle, British Museum, tulips in Holland at Keukenhof, the Grand Place in Brussels, etc. In London I got to see "The importance of being Earnest", and in Paris got "Faust", at the old imperial opera, the one with Chagall on the ceiling. On my $5 budget, I sat in absolutely impossible places – e.g. at the opera in the back of a private box third tier by the stage, where all I could see was the four people in two rows in front of me. There was, however, a plush bed – opera was not just for the show. Eventually the people in front of me got fed up and left, so I moved to their seats, right above the timpani. I had a great desire to drop a coin on the drum, just to hear the boom – but wisely refrained.

I also tried every exotic and non kosher thing I could: mussels and snails and puppy dog's tails, Parisian crepes and raw oysters. In London I tried a Chinese and an Indian restaurant, because, as the guide explained, "there is no English cuisine".

Come to think of it, this was the only time in my life that I was on my own, which of course added to the exhilaration.

From:
« Sometime in Maabarot ...
« By November 1961 I had joined a class of newcomers, all from Romania, in kibutz Maabarot.

I remember we got there in November, because Lenin's portraits were still in the dining-hall, in celebration of the Great October Revolution – November 7th.

Maabarot belonged to Hashomer Hatzair – Mapam party, obviously, quite to the left. Our teachers could still tell us with a straight face what a pity it was that the Israeli Independence War did not evolve into a socialist revolution (come to think of it, you can hear similar stuff here, in various colleges, if not in school). I always kept arguing about socialism with everybody – without anyone changing opinions. I, for one, don't change my opinions, because then I'll have to answer the question: when was I an idiot? before or after the change?

Socialism, of course, goes with irreligiousness: on holidays (which are mostly religious: New Year, Purim, Pesach, etc.) we ate pork chops as festive meals ... yum! And the holidays got translated to agricultural celebrations, which no doubt they originally were. Those that wouldn't fit – like Yom Kippur – were passed over.

Practically it meant that we worked 3 hours after school every day, and 8 hours a day during school breaks. I probably was as bad at work as I was good at school. However, high school was not geared towards college, and did not prepare for the high school finals – whoever wanted to take that had to study on his own. As for our classes – tolerable level, with some good English and very good music – they would teach about sonata form and dodecaphony; also many kids played various instruments.

In Maabarot they expected that our group would remain there as members – after school and military service. This was actually the way their population was built up: groups which started together in the youth movement, and joined the kibutz together. In general, you could not join as an individual, or as a family. But the plan did not work with us: our parents saw Maabarot as an opportunity to learn Hebrew, then the children should go to a real high school; also, socialism was a bit much for people from Romania. The kibutz also expected us to rebel against our parents, even told us so, but... Anyway, about one half left after one year, then another such leftover half from another kibutz joined us, then another half left the second year, etc. About 5 remained through the military service – we started around 30.

I stayed to the end of the last high school class, but I left to study – that was the clear plan from the first moment, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to everybody – they helped me with the preparation and the formalities for the external exam.

Not to mention fried scorpions (black and yellow), cockroaches, etc... Beloved wife didn't let me approach street stalls, even when they seemed tame enough.

Nor did we buy these magnificent Siamese rubies,

mainly because they belong to the Queen of Thailand. As for all the other treasures of the Orient...

Neither did I find anyone to discuss chinoiserie, e.g. how to translate my name. In Chinese, usually one matches the sound of a foreign word, picking auspicious characters. But there are lots of constraints, because a Chinese name has, in general, three characters – the first is the surname, picked from a definite list of traditionally admissible family names, and the other two chosen as a given name – again auspiciously.

Finding characters by sound is easy, this is the standard procedure in any dictionary, but the sounds of my name do not exist in Mandarin: neither v of Levi or iu of Liviu (the written Pinyin iu is actually read yaw, and the written yu is read yü) Fortunately there is a Lu surname, for Lustman.

So I patched various versions, but who can tell how they sound to the Chinese, and what associations they create.

Lustman Levi 錄樂白 Lù Lèbái 錄 lù to record 樂 lè happy; laugh; cheerful 白 bái white;bright;clear Recording bright and cheerful stuff – not quite.
Lustman Liviu 鹿靂霧 Lù Lìwù 鹿 lù deer, surname 靂 lì clap of thunder 霧 wù fog; mist This Lu for Lustman is in honor of my father. He was called Baruch Tzvi, where Baruch means "blessed" and Tzvi is "roebuck", a male deer or antelope. The custom was to give children an animal name, so if the angel of death (God forbid) would look after them, it would kill the animal instead. Or one might call a baby girl Alte (the old one) so the angel of death won't find her at all. The thunder in the mist refers to my birth date, at the end of March, during the last wintery bad weather before spring actually begins. I have no idea what the weather was when I was born, but it was late at night, why not a dark and stormy night... But alas, the Chinese consider 2 fourth tones one after another ugly, and this name has three!
鹿禮嫵 Lù Lǐwǔ 鹿 lù deer, surname 禮 lǐ manners; courtesy 嫵 wǔ to please; enchanting This means "enchanting manners" – I wish!
鹿唳鵡 Lù Lìwǔ 鹿 lù deer, surname 唳 lì cry of a bird 鵡 wǔ parrot This one comes straight from Nabokov: What is translation? On a platter A poet's pale and glaring head, A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, And profanation of the dead... Tetrameter, Vladimir Nabokov: On Translating Eugene Onegin Maybe when I picked the "parrot" character, it was a subconscious comment about translating names, especially into an unknown language.
鹿麗呦 Lù Lìyōu 鹿 lù deer, surname 麗 lì beautiful 呦 yōu bleating of the deer This name doesn't make much sense, but it has a triple reference to deer – my father, again: the first character means deer, the character for "beautiful" contains the deer radical, and the last is deer bleating.

Да помнил, ведь не без греха, Из Энэиды два стиха.
	which should have been:
	Да помнил, хоть не без греха, Из Энэиды два стиха.

I can remember (not without mistakes, as you can see above) two verses from Onegin. Actually, a whole stanza:

Surprisingly, Babel Fish is about as wrong as me, although it has a much better lexicon. I know enough grammar to recognize "ni shagu" as a negative genitive with the less common ending u, but I can't, for the life of me, distinguish between zastavil/ustavil/vystavil or dobavljatj/zabavljatj – these prefixes carry the meaning of "under" in understand, although the experts are of a different opinion. Sometimes it doesn't matter much, like "podstavljatj", which is the usual verb for "substitute", and also means "put under", but "dobavljatj = add" and "zabavljatj = amuse". Then I mangled some cases shutku/shutke zhivotnym/zhivotnomu, not to mention that I brought in "animal=zhivotnoe" instead of "living=zhivyj". And I misspelled vozjmjot. And God knows what else. However I probably wouldn't mix up the devil (chjort) with the genitive plural of "cherta = feature, trait", mostly because I just found out about cherta.

Now the very interesting question comes up: how come that , ignorant as I am, I can enjoy these verses so much? The verses hooked me to Pushkin, just like

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once. On this occasion, time didn't function.

To get unemployment payments, I kept answering job offers and contacting employment agencies. I got to a company that makes newimproved Diesel catalytic converters – by computational modelling, not experimenting, and I was supposed to do the programming, because their own programmer leaves. They even accepted my music and language stuff as artificial intelligence (none of the natural kind, alas!) so I was really attracted. I went to an interview, and, guess what, they want me.

Of course I immediately started contriving escape plans. In the meanwhile, I also had scheduled a lot of medical exams, so I told myself: some infarct, or cancer, and I'm off the hook. Thursday, coronography – nothing. Friday, colonoscopy – rosy as the future (I saw my guts on the screen, even got a few pictures to go, which only with difficulty I abstain from putting on my site) So I still got to start work on Monday.

In the same meanwhile, the employment agency was nagging: they want to see my passport and Social Security card at their office in San Francisco. Not the socsec number, but the original card, that I got in 1978 and lost long ago. So, from the proctologist in Salinas we ran home to Monterey, maybe the card is still there. It isn't, so we ran to socsec office to San Jose (there isn't any SS in Monterey, nobody works there). But SS has the 1978 data, I don't appear as a citizen. So I show the passport, then:

Eventually we get home, it is too late to try San Francisco. Beloved wife, proactive as ever, calls Immigration to see if we can get some certificate from them about the name change. Response: Maybe, in 18 months... In the third meantime, the only document for Liviu that we have around is the Israeli passport, but will they like it?

Finally, today (Saturday) Mike brought the papers, and I discovered on the back of the naturalization act "name changed by court order from Liviu Radu Lustman". Ugh !! Let's see what surprises await us on Monday.

I still phantasize how I will make a scene at the employment agency and bang the door behind me, and spend my life retired at home sweet home (retirement home!?). Sweet dreams...

Later I saw in my own family why one should not treat anyone near. My mother started complaining of abdominal pain. She was a doctor, my father was a doctor, my father in law also, and even Liliana was already a doctor, after her internship. So everybody decided it was nothing, and nothing it remained for a week, till she could not stand it anymore, and was taken to the emergency room. There the first intern immediately diagnosed acute gall bladder infection, and sent her straight to surgery.

But in my case, there was nothing really bad to fear, no urgency... (on the other hand doctors know about many more horrible diseases than the average person, and have better reasons to hide their head in the sand).

So I understand that Liliana doesn't want to know about my problems, although it annoys me enormously to go through the delays and the expenses of using other doctors. I got accustomed to the idea that they don't particularly care about me – a doctor who really cared for all his patients would die of heartbreak. But I would expect some more professional curiosity, or willingness to take a challenge – the doctor might ask himself: can I fix this complaint? can I fulfill his request? Except they don't listen to complaints and requests, at most check analyses results. And my requests are not particularly reasonable; however a doctor who thinks they go against medical ethics could tell me so – but that takes time and is personal involvement, and the poor guy doesn't want to die of a broken heart. Besides, the professional attitude and the patient's attitude don't fit: all the poor sick man wants is the cessation of pain, but the doctor won't sedate him, because he needs a conscious patient.

All of which being said, my attitude still is: you are sick, you go to the hospital and return healthy. Strangely enough, it even fits my experience. One of my happiest memories is being told "Now you'll feel a bad taste...", passing out, and then waking after the operation was over, all the chopping and hacking done. This is how life should be lived – don't be there when there is pain.

So, as long as the doctor doesn't say otherwise, if you are sick, follow the treatment and get healthy. It wouldn't cross my mind to treat myself, or question a doctor's decision – basically he knows and I don't, and I don't even want to know. I still expect the doctor will be decent enough to tell me "cannot be done" or "the cure is worth than the problem". In fact they do go through the show, threatening you with death before any anesthesia, but maybe they will be truthful on the real occasion.

Another interesting question, which is mainly my pet peeve: is it possible for a doctor not to hate his profession and his patients after the misery of a medical training?

Lied des Danilo aus 'Die lustige Witwe' von Franz Lehar

O Vaterland du machst bei Tag
mir schon genügend Müh´ und Plag´.
Die Nacht braucht jeder Diplomat
doch meistenteils für sich privat!

Um eins bin ich schon im Büro,
doch bin ich gleich drauf anderswo,
weil man den ganzen lieben Tag
nicht immer im Büro sein mag !

Erstatte ich beim Chef Bericht,
so tu ich´ meistens selber nicht.
Die Sprechstund halt ich niemals ein,
ein Diplomat muss schweigsam sein!

Die Akten häufen sich bei mir,
ich find´, es gibt zu viel Papier.
Ich tauch die Feder selten ein
und komm doch in die Tint´ hinein!

Kein Wunder, wenn man so viel tut,
dass man am Abend gerne ruht
und sich bei Nacht, was man so nennt,
Erholung nach der Arbeit gönnt.

Da geh ich ins/zu Maxim,
dort bin ich sehr intim.
Ich duze alle Damen,
ruf´ sie beim Kosenamen:
Lolo,Dodo,Joujou,
Cloclo,Margot, Froufrou,
sie lassen mich vergessen
das teu´re Vaterland!

Dann wird champanisiert
und häufig cancaniert,
und geht´s ans Kosen, Küssen
mit allen diesen Süßen:
Lolo, Dodo, Joujou,
Cloclo, Margot, Froufrou,
dann kann ich leicht vergessen
das teure Vaterland.

Danilo's song from 'The merry widow' by Franz Lehar

O fatherland, by day you cause me
Enough strife and troubles.
Every diplomat needs the night
Mostly for himself, for privacy!

Around one I am already in the office,
But am I soon out elsewhere,
Because one cannot the whole day
Stay in the office!

I file reports with the boss,
But mostly I don't.
To the discussion meetings I don't go:
A diplomat must be silent!

The documents accumulate by me,
I think, there is too much paper.
The pen I rarely dip (in the inkstand)
Yet nevertheless get in trouble (lit. 'get into the ink')

No wonder, if one does so much
Then by evening one gladly rests,
Which may be called
Enjoying relaxation after work .

I go then to Maxim,
There I'm so intimate.
I call all ladies 'du', (vs the formal 'Sie')
I use petnames:
Lolo, Dodo, Joujou,
Cloclo, Margot, Froufrou,
It lets me forget
The dear fatherland!

Then we drink champagne
And often dance the cancan,
And get to cuddles, kisses
With all these sweeties :
Lolo, Dodo, Joujou,
Cloclo, Margot, Froufrou,
Then I can easily forget
The dear fatherland.

But the highlight of the text is the "fatherland" stuff. I was familiar with the "Merry Widow" since age ten, when my mother took me to see it at the Operetta theater. But when I heard the German song, in Germany, I couldn't believe my ears. That was just me at ten – imagine singing about how nice it's to forget one's fatherland, in communist Romania.

« ... ca pina la urma tanti Ada
« Ma gindeam la tanti Ada si la cultura...
I was thinking of tanti Ada and education ...

Nee Hadasa Vyrtikovski, somewhere in Bessarabia (Ungheni?). Her father was a Hebrew teacher, and spoke Hebrew to her and her brother Aminadav as children. Then, after WWI, Romania occupied Bessarabia, so she came to study law in Bucharest and eventually married my uncle, daddy's younger brother Avram, also a lawyer. Tanti Molcuţa always told how Avram, who was quite handsome, kept saying he would marry a beautiful blonde, but – tanti Ada was red haired and no great beauty (and a little older than him – I wouldn't have known any of that, except for Molcuţa, who adored her brothers, but not their wives).

Anyway, at a certain point Romania forbade Jews to practice law, so the only employer tanti Ada found was the Soviet Embassy – she spoke, of course, Russian as one of her mother tongues. The embassy also found a job for my uncle, with the net result that at a certain point – I think when Romania attacked the Soviet Union – they both got arrested and confined to the political concentration camp in Tirgu-Jiu. There – language again – tanti Ada became Russian teacher to Gheorghiu-Dej, the future communist dictator of Romania. So, finally, after the war, suitably Romanized as Ada and Miron Lupan, Hadasa and Avram Lustman became ambassadors! (they could speak French too).

In Ankara, presenting their letters of accreditation. If you look carefully, just by the lightbulb lines,
you can see the crescent with the star above it, the Turkish coat of arms.

They served in Yugoslavia, and ran away at the last moment, just before Tito purged his opposition. Then they went to Turkey, and then Vietnam. They met Ho Chi Minh, and told me how he drank every morning from a jar of alcohol with pickled poisonous snakes. When on vacation in Bucharest, they brought me chocolate from Turkey, kumquats from China, a tangram from Vietnam and even a bike. That bike I never used – I still can't ride a bike – but we sold it when we left Romania, with the prospect to get a camel in Israel.

Our decision to emigrate put an end to their careers. After that, they never met with my family in Romania – too unsafe – although they would invite me from time to time. Later they visited us in Israel; there was no family falling out, just communist circumstances.

One interesting point – why is she more prominent in my thoughts than my uncle? It's always " tanti Ada si nene Miron", and I find much more to say about her than about him. Maybe she was more attracted to small children (das ewigweibliche)? For instance she played tablanette with me (and won, which chipped another bit off my reliance), she told me the story of Yak Tzidrak , also about the ugmaeetz incident...

« 2007 Far East vacation

The trip was organized more than one year ago, a cruise from Thailand to China, with stopovers in various ports and countries. Unfortunately, we also caught two typhoons, so we did not stop in Vietnam, Taiwan and Okinawa. On the other hand, the stormy sea rocked the ship, and we felt like babes in a cradle, and slept wonderfully (Liliana has some sleep problems, but had none on the ship – and when she did not sleep, she was at the casino, so she fully enjoyed the voyage)

Even so, we got to Bangkok, Singapore, Hong-Kong, Shanghai and Nagasaki, before the final stop in Peking. There were organized trips in each of these places – otherwise there is no chance to function in the local language and the local traffic. All the cities are huge – 10 million people, 20 million and the only way to get somewhere is on bike or motorcycle – the cars mostly stand idle and pollute. Or maybe by elephant – on the country roads, besides bus stations one could see platforms 10 feet high, for climbing on top of elephants. On a motorcycle, however, you can see the whole family riding, father mother and children, plus whatever they bought.

Local colour is rather hard to find among the enormous city buildings, some very fancy and modern, but none east Asian, IMHO. On the other hand, nature is precisely as shown in their paintings, which are quite realistic, not stylized. The harbors, with their rocks, islets and mountains are remarkably scenic.

We saw a few shows, rather Hollywoody for my taste. But we also got to the Peking opera, which – as far as I can tell – looked authentic and satisfactorily exotic. Besides they give you tea, nuts and cookies for the show – just like popcorn at the movies; originally this was popular entertainment.

But, of course, the main tourist attraction was shopping – we went to some bazaars and some shops with museum quality pieces. I have expensive taste, so I really admired Siamese rubies, jade, pearls and coral – as for buying... Still my business sense improved in the Far East. When we came home, I had to restart the unemployment procedure, because one cannot get money when on vacation, and I could not fill the forms in time anyway. After a few days on the phone, when all I got was the recording "We are getting more calls than we can answer. Try later. Goodbye!" I finally called the number for Mandarin (there is one for Cantonese, too), and got a human, and he even spoke English, so maybe the papers will start coming again.

On the other hand, my mother was an only daughter, which I think was unusual then. Maybe that says something about my grandfather, Avram Catz – the one grandfather that I knew, because my father's parents both died relatively young, before I was born.

My family always said that I am physically exactly like him, and mentally too, in all probability. Tanti Pepi used to say " a iesit coinul din tine " – "you show you're a Cohen" when I got furious.

I certainly don't look at all like my father, who was always thin and liked to move. When we finished military basic training, our families got invited to the training base, and he straight-away climbed up the rope on the obstacle course, using hands only, which I never could (I was 19 and he 62). And that just for fun, not to show off or to put me down. It did not chip any of my confidence, because I could not care less about fitness and such goyische naches . My father also had a bit of devil-may-care attitude, which, alas, I did not inherit.

My grandfather was rolly-polly like my mother and me, and a drunkard – which did not prevent him from making good money from some mysterious business. I say mysterious because all I know about him is that he traded in old rags – and how can you make money from that? (but what do I know, especially about making money). Still my mother had had a few houses, and for my birth he bought a cabriolet – a small two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage – for the family! For me to take air? to exhibit me in opulence? the cabriolet joins Cinderella's pumpkin and such legendary stuff. I vaguely remember my grandfather teaching me "אני ילד קטן" which I repeated as babies do. He adored me, of course, as the so much expected progeny – my mother was 36 and my father 43 when I was born. But I did not like my grandfather, because he spat on the floor. I am probably just as disgusting to my grandchildren.

Before I start working, I must timepunch, and before I timepunch I must login, and before I login I must type in my name and password, and before I type in my name and password I must connect the damn laptop, and before I connect the laptop I have to take it from the drawer, and before I take it from the drawer I must unlock the drawer – which stays locked when I am home as a security precaution against the cleaning people in the office, and before I unlock the drawer I have to find the key – which I already dumped somewhere because I cannot stand heavy things in my pockets...

All that assuming that I want to start working... you can supply the amount of wanting. Certainly none is left after the whole procedure – UNIX can read and execute .profiles before each instruction, which .profiles contain statements which need .profiles – but I can't... I can't go on, I'll go on ...

It works just as well in the opposite direction:
I am at the office now, so what next? Take off the rain jacket. What next? start working ... connect the laptop. What next? find the keys ... in the rain jacket pocket? on the desk? Now I have the keys, what next? I wanted to open the drawer, open it, take the laptop out and plug it in its holder. What next? log in. What next? log in again, without typos – repeat until...
I had to look at flight path generation. Wait! first punch in. Start the internet . What next? Wikipedia – no, timepunch first ... Open 'favorites' for timepunch – 'abhorites' would fit much better – then finally Wikipedia! No. What next? timepunch link. What next? log in. What next? log in again, without typos – repeat until... What next?

If not Alzheimer, then Parkinson , which I'm sure to get because I never smoked .

"Prefaced action", q.v. , is a technical linguistic term having to do with Greek verb classification. "Postponed gratification" is a technical psychoanalytical term, but if you search it on the net most of the results deal with investments. What I suffer from is acute awareness of postponed gratification, caused by an allergy to nitrogen. So I go around whining , and people either ignore me or educate me. Nobody says "How interesting!" nor "What a pity!".

Dubito ergo cogito

For example, the Korean alphabet. And I don't mean the Korean language, or the Korean grammar, just the alphabet, which is a brilliant feat of logical design: all tense consonants are written twice, all aspirated consonants have an overbar, ya, yo, yu etc are a, o, u plus one dash, etc. Compare, for instance, the Korean:

Or another example: we went yesterday to 'Lucia di Lammermoor' and I wept like a cow at the bell' alma inamorata – not at all for the romantic tragedy, but of envy – when will I do anything even remotely like that, all the schmaltz and imbecility made true by a few well chosen notes? So then I went home to find out the the text, especially 'ne congiunga il nume in ciel'. Wept again, etc., and ten minutes later had no idea about the text (the melody holds itself better) all I could say was 'ci unisca Dio in ciel', which, of course, is no operatic Italian. The real stuff is (at least to me) unbearably fancy:

Tu che a Dio spiegasti l'ali,
o bell'alma innamorata,
ti rivolgi a me placata,
teco ascenda il tuo fedel.
Ah! se l'ira dei mortali
fece a noi si cruda guerra,
se divisi fummo in terra,
ne congiunga il Nume in ciel.

explained to God ?!

teco!

ne not ci ?!

You who have spread your wings to heaven,
oh beautiful, beloved soul,
turn towards me serene ;
let your true love ascend with you.
Oh, if the anger of mortals
brought us such cruel strife,
if we were kept apart on earth,
may God in heaven unite us.

Besides, I think it should be "spiegasti gli ali", just as "del Egitto sei lo splendor!" After all the effort I made memorizing Italian articles! They still don't come naturally to me, just because I know that I will have to choose among il/l'/lo and doubt my choice, and have to think about the rule, and keep being.

For instance, Slanic. BTW, there are two of them, Slanic-Prahova and Slanic-Moldova. This was Slanic-Prahova.

There were a few salt lakes to swim, and a lot of therapeutical black mud; the children (of course) and everybody else painted themselves black as devils. The whole region lay above a salt mine, which one could visit. The salt – they say – draws water, on the principle that an open salt cellar becomes moist; and it really rained regularly every day, but only for an hour or so in summer. Justi was with us, and two families with girls, all in a big house with a well and an outhouse (no plumbing, one family per room, who cares; one time the doorknob jammed, so we had to jump in and out through the window). When we weren't at the lakes, we passionately played "Go Fish" , "Old Maid" and Rummikub, and my father even taught us bridge – I think I play at the same level ever since. He was actually one of the kids, went with us on walks and snail hunts, built a swing on a tree in the yard and even led us in an expedition on the salt mountain.

That was an actual cliff of hard salt, that had been mined inside, so it had an open top. Water had accumulated in the bottom, and one could enter by a tunnel and see the pool below, full of timber from the mining, and a round patch of sky above. But the daring climbed on the salt face, to look at the lake from the hole rim.

My father thought that was too unsafe, so he took us all to the hill, to the other side of the cliff. But we got bogged in mud, and lost our sandals, which then could not be distinguished from any other mud lump. A big adventure, and satisfyingly dirty, except that we didn't get there. Later on, when my parents weren't watching, I climbed the usual way, over the salt to the top. Rather risky, because the outside was all cracks and sharp ridges, made by running water from the rains.

My father also took care of my education: bought me Schweik – what a revelation, "shit" and "arse" on the first page – and had me practice my violin and stenography.

The legend goes that my family met once in Slanic with Liliana's family, so we know each other since age eight, although we two don't remember the event. Slanic, of course, we remember well, and beloved wife plans to see it on our trip to Romania. But witout sploshing in the mud, much charm may be lost.

Other places, other times... most of what I'm talking about was more than 30 years ago.

The basic idea was that that math students were curious about math. That was not true about every student and every course, but was never questioned. So one could teach anything ("one" including me, who was just a graduate student, tending to tenured student). Syllabuses were rarely written down, and there were no textbooks: the teacher would usually provide a list of books that covered the course, and then you had the library to look for more – remember, you were curious. Another basic assumption was that the teacher knows, and the students don't.

Which allowed some very strange results: there were classes where 80% of the students failed, and 50% dropped Maths and Physics after the first year, consistently (didn't they know any better selection procedure? Those that passed the first year usually completed the B.Sc., at least).

On the other hand, you didn't need a life's investment for college education. One year's tuition was one month of my father's salary, and he paid it only for the first year. After that, I had grades good enough to get a grant for next year . That solves to my satisfaction the tricky question "Would I have made it on my own?" In fact, I never thought the money could come from anywhere except my parents, or that I could work, not even during the summer – I felt I deserved a vacation , and in those days even went one hour by bus to the seashore, to swim. On the other hand, when I began earning – quite early, we were paid to correct the homework of lower classes, starting from the second year – it never crossed my mind that the money could go anywhere except to my parents' bank account. It was a big surprise when my mother told me to open my own. Now the whole discussion is purely academic, the highest salary I ever got in Israel was $300 a month – maybe enough for Zambia.

All in all, Israeli universities were not self-sustaining businesses; like all the Israeli economy, they depended very much on the government, public help and of course, Zionist funds from all over the world. The standard joke was: "Drought in Israel? Who cares, USA should have good weather!"

« Erratum

« This is a (failed) tour the force , fitting a Romanian word into English rhymes...
It is "tour de force", of course.

« literature or sylistics ...
Another typo, for "stylistics", but how witty: sillystics! silly sticks! almost פוילע שטיק

Poor rabbit! I think that was completely fortuitous – I have found out the meaning of "wight" right now, at dictionary.com. But maybe I knew, and forgot, and the subconscious... On the other hand "whig" is just a British party.

« The gown should be badly split, obviously craracked like everybody's poor life
This one does look Freudian, a long ripping sound crararak!

« ... had to take a fool look at "The Tempest" ...
How true! "full look" does not compare.

« ... impresia ca sint bun de parinte. Si taca trebuia sa treci examene...
"şi dacă" – Probabil ca mai bine taceam la aceste subiecte.

« ... drept acre a botezat-o ginerele "Furtunica".
drept care, dar daca asta nu-i Freudiana!...

« ...if he had told me "cannot be done" or "the cure is worth than the problem"
the cure is worse than the problem

« "the cure is worth than the problem". In fact...
Again?! I think I was too lazy to type and just copied the text from one paragraph to another.

« ...the cuckoo (coucou) hidden in the "cu coupé"!
Le cul beaucoup plus interessant que le cou (echos du pere Ubu)

« ... strike is actually "word_stoppage", not "hit", and then ...
That should be, of course, "work stoppage". As k is far from d, reasonably Freudian, a hint from the unconscious to shut up.

for "elephant". How did l get there? it is far from h, but near to p on the keyboard.

Asta ar fi trebuit sa fie cuvintul romanesc "mai" . Se vede cît control am pe ce fac.

I mean throwing away all grammar, linguistic universals included. For instance, the paragraph:

Of course, the purist might say the (small?) effort needed to get the meaning is actually learning the grammar: qualifiers follow, "is","or", "but", "therefore","quote/endquote" used to delimit phrases, etc. Or they might say it's just a pidgin.

It is not; although it is not very clear from this short example, LAN does not recognize parts of speech or sentence roles: each word merely qualifies the preceding word, within the delimited phrases – I promised to flaunt some universals. It sounds somewhat natural, and works reasonably well, if kept short and simple.

The choice of English is not really right; grammatical English is just too near the mangled form. I am curious how would it work in, say, Japanese. Would it convey any meaning (while insulting everybody with abrupt forms) or be completely sunk in the flood of Japanese homonyms? Inflection as such is no great barrier – Italian is inflected enough, but the derived Lingua Franca uses one single form per verb.

If education is not for life, but against it, art is even more so. Its purpose – says Burgess – is to restore a semblance of divine order, of unity in a world split like an abscess (the Duoverse, see below). To which I fully agree – life is chaotic, art is organized, life is meaningless, art comes to a point, in short art is artificial . This I embrace with all my soul: poetic diction, sonata form, sonnet form, aria da capo – all the dirty little tricks that distance art from plain everyday experience. Just as simplicity has nothing to do in the kitchen, naturalness has nothing to do in art. And sincerity very little: I think that a good actor should be able to play, and a writer to imagine, someone very different from themselves. As for the slice of life – quick to the trashcan (or recycling bin, to be politically correct).

Mr. Burgess likes to portray the universe as a "duoverse," that is, a cluster of contending opposites which agitate against moderation. "The thing we're most aware of in life," he writes, "is the division, the conflict of opposites – good, evil; black, white; rich, poor – and so on." And since living in the center of this conflict is, to use Mr. Burgess's illustration, like trying to picnic in the middle of a football field, we gravitate naturally (and gratefully) toward any ideology which is able to convince us that this conflict is actually an illusion, that in fact there is somewhere an ultimate unity in which all extremes resolve themselves. To this end the Church proffers God; socialism, the classless society; and the artist, his art.

"Art," according to Burgess, "is the organization of base matter into an illusory image of universal order." The artist is an alchemist, drawing on the inherent disorder and dissonance of the human...

Rubik cube and Rubik cone

Obviously, we went to the Sixtine Chapel. In the sixties, Mme Moretta had sent us there on a gratis weekend, and we had walked to the Vatican, entered, walked around and gazed at the old, faded frescoes. But now! there was a line of thousands waiting all around the palace wall, and, although we were on a private tour and skipped that, the same thousands were already inside, everywhere. The guides communicated by radio only – the noise of people around was enough to prevent any normal level conversation – just immagine everybody yelling to be heard. But at least thay had restored Michelangelo's ceiling, at which most critics protested as much as they could.

Still, on one of the corridors, we found some seats to rest. That walls were decorated with XVIth century maps of Italy, which might have even be used sometimes for practical purpse, as they seemed accurate enough. So I noticed on the panel in front of me a river labelled Rubicone. Now Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his troops, meaning that he was invading Italy to seize power. I had always though that the Rubicon must be somewhere near the borders, maybe on the way from Gaul, say near Milano or Torino or Como... the map showed it south of Ravenna, on the eastern coast!

I thought maybe the map was just an artistic fiction, but its details were quite reasonable, as far as I know Italian geography... Maybe another river called Rubicon... As soon as I could I checked – I think they had a big atlas onboard. It is indeed south of Ravenna. So travel really is educational.

Or is it? With this kind of queues and crowding, all the wonderful cultural sites inspire just revulsion, unless you already are a confirmed culture fanatic (or some VIP who can avoid them). I can't think of any solution, although the Internet, or even the local library might help.

What I remember from Physics

Ehrenfest urn model

The daemon calls very often, and there are lots of tiny particles, such that one alone is not noticeable, and they can only be seen in bulk. If at the beginning all of them are in one container, what one notices "in the large" is a flow from the full container to the empty one, fast at the beginning then slowing to a halt as the two containers become equally full. If the containers are tall and narrow, one also sees flow from a high level to a low level, mimicking gravity.

But there is no gravity and no flow, just Maxwell's Daemon commanding the random particle to jump.

To warn you that the model is not the reality – many beautiful explanations will do, and all must be taken with a grain of salt.

Eddington's model

This is an even deeper statement about models: what we can know is based on our net, i.e. the method of research (mathematics in science) and even the physiology of human thought. This is how Eddington reached the conclusion that the universe consists of precisely 2^2⁹² atoms – or something like that – as he decided that this is what our mind can conceive, or must conceive. They laughed him out of physics, but the poetry...

Non-conservation of parity

« Bright ideas.

« Pearls of wisdom

The only answer to "I want!" is "Keep wanting."; the only answer to "I beg you..." is "Of course."

2008 Cruise

But, as usual, God has his own plans, so our Monterey house caught fire. As we were about to embark on Wednesday, Mike called me Monday at work, telling me that he is rushing home because the house is burning! So I could not remain at work, and I played hookey on Tuesday, too. But we did not get to Monterey, nobody was allowed in the house – possibly unsafe. So we left the whole joy to Mike and sailed the ocean blue.

Of course, the best time in the cruise is the sea days, the ports may be intersting, but having nothing to do is so much better... And if the port is interesting, what can you get to do between 10 AM and 4 PM, at most? I also found out that what I had learnt in school does not fit reality. At the Equator, instead of heat and daily showers, we had the wonderful cool weather of San Francisco. I was exuberant, after sweating buckets in Mexico and Central America. From Antarctica there comes a cold current which cools the shore, just as in San Francisco. And at Cape Horn there was no hurricane or storm, just calm clear weather – probably global warming.

And he was ready to talk with me about it, although I never had any serious intentions – neither did he; he told me that he wanted to be an engineer, but chose medicine so he won't have bosses. You can imagine how well he succeeded, in communist Romania; and in Israel, with socialized medicine, almost all doctors were employees.

My father used homeopathic drugs because they worked, and considered homeopathic approach very reasonable – the disease is the set of its symptoms. Theory he took with a grain of salt: till you know why the wart appeared on the left side of the second finger, and not on the right side of the third finger, just treat the wart. He did believe in personalities: "N'importe qui ne fait pas n'importe quand n'importe quelle maladie" was one of his favorite quotes – "No matter who doesn't catch no matter when no matter what illness". His main theory was that illness is mostly a manifestation of something happening in the central nervous system – you might say a show put on by your brain. If you find pathogens in the lesions, it may just mean that they like it there (this is a clearly exaggerated statement, but with a grain of salt... one scientific fact is the huge variation in the amount of pathogens needed to infect an organism) He told me about Speransky's experiments: put a small bead on the sella turcica, and get physiological manifestations, including skin lesions mimicking erysipelas . I hope it's not another example of Soviet science ...

This one is a good example of intraductible poetry (obviously! poetry is what is lost in translation) but, more interestingly, of language-independent poetry. I mean, what if I succeeded with my language, and built something conveying meaning only, without the possibility of 'date', e.g. 09/07/07, accidentally suggesting the sweet fruit 'date'. Could there be poetry in such language? But of course:

Et se déplacent rarement comme les pièces aux échecs : and they seldom move, like chess-pieces.

The point is that Apollinaire imitates the bad accent of the emigrants, so Argentine/fortune and perruque/boutique rhyme (they don't rhyme in French). How to render this in another language... Actually, how to render the cuckoo (coucou) hidden in the "cu coupé"!

And this is almost what I answered – song, dance, silver fox boa and all – when Shlomo Breuer, one of my professors who died of cancer at 61 , asked me why my Ph.D. takes so long .

I definitely was lazy all my life – never saw why should I make efforts without a visible immediate result. Fortunately I also was the ideal student – I loved learning and enjoyed college as if I were viewing some new, unexpected and incredibly interesting play each day, every day. I made no efforts, and I had great results. Of course I read a lot and spent a lot of time on maths, but that was no effort, it was fun. I should have been the eternal student, even as a yeshive-bokher if no other option was available.

All of which stopped when I had to do research and make discoveries of my own. The story goes that John Nash , whom you can find with me and David in the list of MIT instructors , spent his time at NYU being proved wrong by experts – until he finally got his bright idea about parabolic equations. It more or less happened to me when I exposed my ideas about spaces with the fixed point property to Eliezer Dorembus – but since every failure stays with me forever, the only conclusion I drew from that was to stay away from pure, i.e. wondrous, mathematics. One conclusion – that there is more to learn – I didn't draw. No need to learn anything, didn't I already have 100% average? So if they expect me to discover new exciting stuff, it must be done with what I already have... Or else they would give me many years to learn, before I make my discoveries...

How exotic the Romanian vacations! Lasting about one month – quite unheard of by American standards. My father, as an employee, only could come for 2 weeks, but my mother could take off a whole month or more – she was self-employed. Did she pass her patients to a colleague in the meantime? I don't know. Anyway, every year we used to go to some resort; Olanesti, for instance, had mineral springs, so we drank stinking water at various points, and my mother had hot baths and mud packages. But it was an escape from everyday life in Bucharest: a real village surrounded by a real fir-tree forest with cones, berries and mushrooms, and there were glinting mica-stones everywhere, and lots of lizards. I was trying to catch them, to see if they really shed their tails to escape.

We rented a room from a peasant, on the bank of a small stream where I went bathing. One day, as I was splashing the water turned red: they had slaughtered a cow upstream. I was not particularly shocked, rather regretted not seeing how it's done.

But, by and large, it was really boring – no other kids to play. So I bothered my mother to read to me, till one day she told me: "You can read yourself!" and after first grade, I could, because Romanian has a quite phonetic spelling. So I read my first book, "The adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn" and had lots of fun, even if I didn't get fully the situation in the Southern slave states. Nor could I make much sense of Sunday School – that was anticlerical communist Romania – or Injun Joe. As for floating downstream to Cairo, I knew very well that Cairo is in Africa, not America, and I assumed Jim was simply too ignorant.

From:
« Not to mention how cheap it is to violate taboos and break the rules.

Then there is the American idea that questioning authority and generic nonconformism is a great quality, not a defect. Obviously, rubs me the wrong way.

In any case, there is always the suspicion that your verse is free because you can't manage rhythm and rhyme, and your painting abstract because you can't draw. Which, evidently, need not be so; Picasso was a master of every technique, but he chose to draw the ugliest imaginable things (far uglier than I could imagine) But then I choose not to look at them – although I'd buy them – purely as investments...

If you do break the rules, the result should be remarkable despite that, not because of that; certainly not only because of that. Somehow, I prefer artists who don't break the rules, but use them naturally like a fish water (not that I know much about creating art; besides, you should pick the right rules, e.g. compose a classical symphony, not a baby Bach symphony.)

Basically, the artist does what he must (so he insists) and I buy what I like. That seems fair to everybody.

Besides medicine, my mother kept in her cabinet chemicals for various technical purposes: she used to prepare plaster for dental casts, wax temporary dentures, silver amalgam for fillings. To make amalgam, she had a small vial of quicksilver, which was incredibly attractive to me. I could play forever with the heavy shiny drops, but of course they would not let me, because, besides being poisonous, quicksilver vapor may attack various metals, and destroy the dental machinery.

In addition to all that, the glass cabinet plays an important role in another turning point in my life.
I had been playing soccer with the kids. Too lazy to run, I volunteered for goalkeeper. Being a total klutz, and completely unwilling to move, I let in too many goals, so the other kids beat me.
So I went upstairs to my mother's office: "Give me some poison, I want to kill myself !" At which she opened the cabinet, took out a little bottle with clear fluid in it, and gave it to me. Then she went on working on her patient.
In my twenties, I used to criticize my mother – because she was a conformist, because she was a worrier, because she insisted to clean my room, because... But, in fact, I always knew she was everything one should be: brave, humorous, wise, and she even could take me seriously . Because of the poison from the glass cabinet.

There is, of course, a sequel. With that bottle in my hand, I went to the other room. I thought deeply – didn't even open the bottle. I decided I wouldn't kill myself right then, but at 13 (I knew it was an important age, but was not really sure why; at that time I was 10). Nobody ever mentioned the event; I never played soccer or other team games again, unless I had to at school.

Dictionaries and Word Lists (from the site above)

But, of course, they disagree completely among themselves. Besides, the hieroglyphs in the picture come from yet another source (which I could not rediscover). Anyway, if you really are curious, here are some possibilities for go, shadow, and burn. Enjoy the glorious mixup of English, German, transliterations of Egyptian, and hieroglyph fonts! Besides, the text is read left to right or right to left, depending on which way the images face. E.g., if the chick looks left

one reads left to right.

What I want: to sit down, have some cocoa with toast and yoghurt. So I set the pot to boil, and a tortilla in the oven, and I took a cup out of the dishwasher, which spilled some water on the floor. Then...

As I turn to put cocoa in the pot, I slip on the spilled water, fall over the open dishwasher and bump my head (first thought: now I get brain concussion and retire!) My head hurts, I sit on the floor for a while, then I notice cocoa everywhere and some bits and pieces of the dishwasher on the floor. Still, I can at least shut the dishwasher, the landlord will fix it, we'll see... I try to wipe the cocoa off the floor, it won't work, so I bring the vacuum cleaner. In the meantime, the tortilla has caught fire in the oven. I throw it in the sink, the dishrag catches fire. Till I wet them to put the fire out, the smoke detector starts howling. In this harmony, I vacuum, clean up somewhat. When I unplug the vacuum, the cord pulls down again the cocoa box, the kitchen gets smeared again, I vacuum again. But at least the smoke detector shut up.

Finally, I made my cocoa and second tortilla. I even restored the various pieces into the dishwasher, maybe at their right places. I didn't sit too much, but I'm done with eating. As I go to the bathroom to comb my hair, surprise – at the first stroke of the brush, a cocoa cloud. I have to shower and wash the brush.

Neat and tidy, I get to work – ten minutes walk. Woke up at five, start at eight.

Poetry can indeed suggest above and beyond what words can say, so more power to it! But, remember, poetry is lost in translation, and meaning conserved in translation, and language is primarily about meaning.

And what shall I say about "more numberless"? I have grave doubts it actually refers to unequal infinities, but maybe I'm maligning poor Gică.

ty·phoon
n. A tropical cyclone occurring in the western Pacific or Indian oceans.

[Greek tuphon, whirlwind, and Arabic tufan, deluge (from Greek tuphon), and Chinese (Cantonese) taaifung (equivalent to Chinese (Mandarin) tai, great + Chinese (Mandarin) feng, wind).]

Word History: The history of typhoon presents a perfect example of the long journey that many words made in coming to English. It traveled from Greece to Arabia to India, and also arose independently in China, before assuming its current form in our language. The Greek word tuphon, used both as the name of the father of the winds and a common noun meaning "whirlwind, typhoon," was borrowed into Arabic during the Middle Ages, when Arabic learning both preserved and expanded the classical heritage and passed it on to Europe and other parts of the world. Tufan, the Arabic version of the Greek word, passed into languages spoken in India, where Arabic-speaking Muslim invaders had settled in the 11th century. Thus the descendant of the Arabic word, passing into English (first recorded in 1588) through an Indian language and appearing in English in forms such as touffon and tufan, originally referred specifically to a severe storm in India. The modern form of typhoon was influenced by a borrowing from the Cantonese variety of Chinese, namely the word taaifung, and respelled to make it look more like Greek. Taaifung, meaning literally "great wind," was coincidentally similar to the Arabic borrowing and is first recorded in English guise as tuffoon in 1699. The various forms coalesced and finally became typhoon, a spelling that first appeared in 1819 in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.

That's not a typo. I started to think about it, when reading: "I'd noticed a touch of decline here and there, but one puts these things down to Anno Domini..." So I checked to see what 'ano domini' might be:

Besides being the planet nearest to you – nearer even than Earth! – Uranus reminds me of my great escape.

One winter afternoon, when I was in first or second grade, I quarrelled with my mother, and decided to leave home. I took my sled – did I hope to find some slopes to slide? – and walked along Uranus. About four or five tram stations, maybe two miles, to the firemen's baracks (which was a historic place with a monument: the firemen had fought the final battle there, when the Turks occupied Bucharest for the last time, in 1848). Then I returned home the same way. It took some time, because I was never fast, and I was small, tightly wrapped in winter clothes and lugging the sled.

In the meantime, my parents had discovered I was missing, so my father went out to search for me. He did not find me, but we reached home at about the same time. I don't remember my parents being angry. Were they really so tolerant? Was I the normal child that erases rebukes or punishment from its mind? I think I remember – but that may be quite false after 50 years – that I was not particularly angry on my way, nor really emotional when I decided to come home.

I did not leave home after that. I wanted to leave when I found out that Liliana was pregnant and wanted the child, but

In Ceausescu's time all the region north of "my" map was completely restructured; recent maps show the current Parliament there, a park and some other fancy public buildings. I certainly cannot now walk along Uranus, in search of childhood.

From:
« it turns out one can safely ignore all the Malay prefixes and suffixes, the meaning remains the same

And the more I think, the more I believe that the only purpose of speaking a language correctly – as opposed to speaking it anyhow – is purely social: to be accepted as "one of us". The main purpose of language – communication – does NOT require correct speech! Horribly mangled sentences convey meaning quite well. I used to say "poetry is what is lost in translation, therefore meaning is what is conserved in translation", now I would say "meaning is what is conserved after severe mangling".

How disgusting! My only linguistic insight, and it's sociolinguistics! I kept dreaming of going and actually studying linguistics – say with McWhorter – but first yelling on the rooftops that I won't touch sociolinguistics. In the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the same language – that's the language that interests me; more precisely, the written form of ancient ballads where the lord and the peasant speak the same language. I am a philologist more than a linguist, that is, I would be... Not that I appreciate literature or sylistics so much, rather I wouldn't go into political correctness, or field work.

And I do care for "right" language – even allowing the tyranny of an Academy. If not, if any way of speaking is a valid linguistic phenomenon, then each and every one can each speak some not quite comprehensible idiolect – e.g. the Romanian part of the site. It's fun, but only for the speaker, just as jazz is most fun for the performer, not the listener. So give me the written language of " the best authors ", and maybe the written grammar of the written language...

Le ciel bleu sur pourrait bien s'effrondrer 
Et la terre aussi s'écrouler. 
Que m'importe, si tu m'aimes? 
Je m'en fous du monde entier.

The blue sky might well fall down,
And the earth might crumble, too.
What do I care, provided you love me?
I don't give a damn.

Le ciel bleu sur pourrait bien s'effrondrer 
Et la terre aussi s'écrouler. 
Que m'importe si tu m'aimes? 
Le bilan serait le meme.

The blue sky might well fall down,
And the earth might crumble, too.
What do I care whether you love me?
The end result would be the same.

( Clumsy English translation, to stress the sense )

The first three verses differ only by a comma. And when spoken, even more so when sung, one cannot hear the difference.

I was thinking of tanti Ada and education – she spoke French and German, Romanian as the n‑th foreign language after Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, which she still remembered after 50 years. She also knew some English, was a lawyer and a diplomat, had played the violin (like me? better?) And, in fact, all our parents' generation: even daddy played the violin – one song actually – but with four flats, which made me feel outclassed and chipped another bit off my reliance. And he didn't play worse than me – or I just couldn't imagine him worse than me. He also used to hum and sing all the time, which I inherited, to the great mortification of my beloved children. I think nobody in the family had any special vocal gifts, but we two hit the notes, without embarrassment, with pleasure even.

In fact, the first time I heard my voice – recorded, not Eustachian – was at MIT where we made a teaching test, and, although I remained confident I knew all about teaching, I hated my voice – too high and strident. For in general I don't like, just adore, myself – and when I see myself in a mirror I wonder why it doesn't crack.

As for teaching, with time I found out I was not quite so perfect, especially after I got knocked at NPS , many years after. I was listening, because there might have been a vague chance of tenure. Actually, I always knew that if something is interesting to me, it is deadly to the student; but teaching is precisely the dialogue with the one (whose existence is axiomatic) who understands you and is curious about what you say. At least I did my duty as that student.

The first, maybe the only duty of a work of art is to be unforgettable . "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." When I read this for the first time, I knew here was something I would never forget (and then, of course, I forgot it, but now there is the Internet). Music or literature must hook you this way; probably visual arts too, but I am less sensitive to that - words fail me . Anyway, in many cases I can tell precisely what the hook was, and I can grade pieces by their memorability. For instance, from whatever I read for the English high school final exam in Israel, two poems struck me as unforgettable: "Do not go gentle" and "Annabel Lee". Musing about changing the first lines:

into "a republic by the sea", I decided then that if I write my biography, it will be called "In a republic by the sea" – not very informative, there are few landlocked lands, and some are not republics, e.g. Nepal. But that would not be accurate: I was born a loyal subject of His Majesty King Michael II of Romania and his communist government, whose anniversary was three weeks before mine. In December, before my first birthday, the king left and then we got our republic by the sea. I remember these details not because of teething troubles, but because the dates were commemorated in Romania when I grew up: "March 6th" was the street where all the movie theaters were, "December 30th"... I forget.

I insist on the "educated" part. I read in Romanian a lot, but mostly before 14 – then I switched to English (I almost never read Hebrew for fun – it is fair enough to say I never read Hebrew at all, except Ephraim Kishon and "May 35th"). I kept reading French whenever I could – for a long time I thought I knew better French than English. I even read some Italian, and forced myself to read German, hoping to learn the language this way – didn't work.

But let's return to Romanian.
I do enjoy Romanian poetry, but elegant literary language puts me off. Can I really qualify sentences as well formed? I wrote well wormed – what a beautiful Freudian sleep... Freudian slip ... What I am qualified, and what I am qualified only in Romanian, is to express myself to my heart's desire, with reasonable ease. I speak or write in a way that satisfies me, and I can compose doggerel. In Romanian I actually write as I speak, so I can't use an elevated style, but that I don't care about.

And maybe that's not even Romanian, but an idiolect, with bits and pieces of English, French, Hebrew, whatnot... This is why I called it ROMANIAN, ETC. I do believe that the Romanian half of the site is better written than the rest. Certainly more fun to write. But to enjoy it, you must be very much like me, fluent in Romanian, Hebrew, French and everything else. And assuming that you're like me , I omitted most of the diacritics, and left most stuff unexplained.

On the other hand, the English part is over detailed, because the progeny might read it.

Actually, the first map of Bucharest that I ever saw was in Rome, in 1973, brought by a Romanian tourist. I think that in my time in Romania the maps were considered military secrets – or there was so little private traffic, there was no need of maps. Anyway, I was surprised to find my house somewhere far in the south – although the main train station, Gara de Nord (North Station) was on the other side of the city, which should have been a hint.

The trams ran on Calea Rahovei, Cosbuc and Uranus, and four lines clanged right in front of our house – which I don't think disturbed me. I could take the tram to the middle school, or walk – about half an hour, which I sometimes did. I had walked to the elementary school – 10 minutes or so.

Another essential detail: one of the streets across from my house was called Vistieri, "treasurers", because the latrine cleaners had lived there – before my time.

And another – on the bottom right corner of the map, you can see a blue spot inside the park : it was a pool where one could hire boats and row. It was also a scene of great heroism.

One winter break, in the first or second grade, our teacher took our class to a trip to the park. The pool was frozen, and the kids started sliding on the ice. Bibi did too, but the ice broke and he fell in. I pulled him out, and accompanied him home. After which I kept boasting how I had saved his life. No matter that the pool was so shallow, that he had stood comfortably on the bottom (and murky enough that it wasn't obvious at all).

From:
« ...because the medical shitheads don't trust you

Or "medical establishment", if you prefer. Come to think of it, this is the only class of people I would gladly personally shoot one by one (Liliana too? she is a member of AMA!). No, poor beloved wife is safe, I mean all the people who created VQE and ECFMG and FLEX and boards and requalifications, and all the greed and slavery around this profession. The people who found out that there are enough physicians in USA, anyway, and all the foreign graduates are witch-doctors, anyway. The people who decided that the right medical training is working 36 hours a day, and being picked apart afterwards.

The typical story is when I called (UCLA, I think, to ask about registration for Liliana) and said "Good morning!" and they said "We don't accept foreign graduates." Complete conversation.

Another story – I tried to document this on the net, but couldn't, so believe it or not:
In our times, the immigration questionnaire ran:

Have you ever been convicted of...
Have you ever been consigned in a mental institution...
Are you a physician arriving to the U.S.A. for the purpose of immigration?

without any breaks.

So when I was at UCLA I was fantasizing about putting a big bomb under the medical center, during the exam period – that would make a few places for foreign graduates .

I used to care about things before I took Prozac.

From:
« I also had a few programs for automatic musical composition

Once upon a time...

I got accepted as an instructor to MIT, so I got all kinds of papers from them, among which "HOTOGAMIT: How To Get Around MIT", including the famous FINAL EXAM, including, among others:

MEDICINE: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze and a bottle of scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have fifteen minutes.
PUBLIC SPEAKING: 2500 riot-crazed aborigines are storming the classroom. Calm them. You may use any ancient language except Latin or Greek.
MUSIC: Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with a flute and drum. You will find a piano under your seat.
BIOLOGY: Create life. Estimate the differences in subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million years earlier, with special attention to its probable effect on the English parliamentary system. Prove your thesis.

Now the music part immediately caught my eye, because nobody said that the concerto must have any esthetic value; as for what a concerto is... So I would do it automatically by computer (including performance); anyway I was right in the middle of my dodecaphonic period. This has been, ever since, the goal and vision of my music composition, and, although I did not get as far as a concerto (relatively long, with relatively big orchestra) I have been in many places on the way. Alas, in the meantime I somewhat lost the enthusiasm, for both music and programming, but

I am proud to report that the concerto is now ready.

From:
« ... as for the slice of life ...

I have just seen "A long day's journey into night". The first half was just painful – I don't hate these people, seeing them suffer doesn't make me feel better, quite the opposite. But the second half was a big improvement – just because of the operatic ensemble arrangements, with set arias and duets, with a lot of artificiality – how right I am (all the time!) the moment it escapes reality it becomes art, and shields me from misery, instead of sticking my nose into it.

One point I'd like to make. At the very end, the morphine addicted mother appears in her wedding gown – after many lines about how tight that gown had been, how she had held her breath during fitting, etc. The play also opens with her husband complimenting her "how fat you are, how well you look !" in the vain hope she recovered after desintoxication. The gown should be badly split, obviously craracked like everybody's poor life. When I produce the play...

The really macabre part about the play is its perfect realism – not one single gory detail has been invented, this actually happend to Eugene O'Neill. Should he have inflicted it on me? Of course he wrote, and quite beautifully, because he had to, without worrying about me any more than Mozart while writing the Turkish violin concerto . But to Mozart I am grateful. If there were a God, that's what I would thank him for.

From:
« I probably was as bad at work ...

Most of our work was on orange plantations – the main crop. There were also apple and bananas. One of the jobs was to cut the dry leaves off the banana trees. At this I excelled – probably because of the Romanian expression "taie frunza la ciini" – cut leaves for the dogs, a proverbial description of inactivity (one would have guessed useless activity, but it is not employed that way). So much so, that I was almost assigned to work permanently on the bananas – till they let me drive a tractor and I promptly took down a fence – another Romanian expression: "oiştea-n gard" "cart axle in the fence" used for great stupidity. How neatly reality imitates (folk) literature.

Eventually I got to the kitchen, washing dishes – not bad, because I could sleep in the afternoon, after lunch, when I worked dinner shift. Everybody was away working, all peace and quiet – except they sometimes mowed the lawn.

But I actually did work a few times at the ideal occupation: watering young orange trees. These had a small basin dug around the trunk, and I was walking around, with a water hose and a spade to repair the basins, filling them from tree to tree. All alone, no hurry, cold water to drink, and the mind completely free to roam.

The worst occupation was one day in the barn. I was supposed to scatter sawdust fom a sack on cow's shit, for fertilizer. Never mind the stench and the flies, the sacks were very heavy and I could not grab them – other workers had a hook to catch the sack, but I didn't.

So, before I forget the horror of that moment, let me make a memorandum.

I was just starting to feel that maybe, maybe, I am not as imbecilic as commonly thought: after the official fjords cruise vacation, I was supposed not to go to work, because my contract had not been renewed (all of which surfaced while I was in Norway, with the corresponding midnight phone calls etc.) But not going to work made me quite euphoric, I even got an idea, I could feel the mental wheels turning... Early in the morning, as the cleaner came, I had to get out, so I had a greasy breakfast at Denny's and was returning to the library. Alas, it only opens at nine, so I had to wait.

I could not come back home, since the cleaner was still there, so I went to the Gym toilet (appreciate the tension building: I went ... to ... The ... GYM(!?) with the appropriate release). When I returned to the garage, I found out that I had forgotten my glasses and keys in the toilet, and climbed back to get them. Then I waited half an hour in the car – but there are Bach records – and finally I got to the library. I even read for a while and enjoyed myself greatly, but had to rush home to ~~work~~ play with a new idea. I was at the door when I discovered I had no keys – I ran back to the library and fortunately found them there, but that careless mood of excitement was gone for good.

Actually, when I'm happy I don't want to trouble my upbeat humour with mundane stuff, which I hate in toto, so I become even less practical than usual.

From:
« Giovinezza, giovinezza

Not as poignant without Schubert, but Müller's poetry is quite good. I'm particularly pleased that I can understand the German words – Heine has the same great quality. Because out of Wagner, e.g., I can only, sometimes, recognize ha-ja-ja-ha-ja! Which, in idiomatic German, one says "Ich verstehe nur Bahnhoff!" = "It's Greek to me!". Geh' weiß.

The Old-Man's Head

The frost has spread a white sheen
All over my hair;
I thought I had become an old man
And was very pleased about it.

But soon it melted away,
And now I have black hair again
So that I am horrified by my youth -
How long still to the grave !

From the sunset to the dawn
Many a head turns white.
Who can believe it ? And mine
Has not on this whole journey !


Der greise Kopf

Der Reif hatt' einen weißen Schein
Mir übers Haar gestreuet;
Da glaubt' ich schon ein Greis zu sein
Und hab' mich sehr gefreuet.

Doch bald ist er hinweggetaut,        (hin= from here, weg=away, ge=German verbs add that to show German origin; tau=dew)
Hab' wieder schwarze Haare,
Daß mir's vor meiner Jugend graut -
Wie weit noch bis zur Bahre !         (German Bahre = English bier)

Vom Abendrot zum Morgenlicht
Ward mancher Kopf zum Greise.
Wer glaubt's ? und meiner ward es nicht
Auf dieser ganzen Reise !

                         Wilhelm Müller: Die Winterreise, set by Schubert

The comments on the side are just to show how one can enjoy German, without knowing it.

From:
« children are superior ... more creative ...

We had recently a meeting at work, where the speaker defined creativity by the following test: they give you a paper sheet with a circle, and you have to add a dot. If you put it inside, blah, if you put it outside, better, if you put it on the other side of the sheet – really creative. So far so good, I would have put it in the center, and I always rated myself low for creativity, as confirmed by my mathematical career. After which she told us how little children are creative, but it gets lost in the educational process... At which I couldn't keep still (usually in such meetings I am quieter than the furniture, not a squeak!) and had to say, "Of course a small child will try anything, but creativity is for Beethoven and such!"

The whole stuff was about Kaizen . I think that requesting your employees to have good ideas is unfair – good ideas are as rare as pearls. Even small ideas – I might have had some neat piece of code, but who else will use it – in general it is much easier to write down your own small programs rather than fitting existing code to your particular task; and besides, many will be shocked by my Neanderthal programming style . As for non programming – the only mentionable thing is writing notes (which I must do, because I forget so fast) on spare sheets of paper, then putting the sheets in order in a binder... Is this really worth mentioning?

And it stinks very much of "all the patents developed while working for COMPANY belong to COMPANY"...

Indoor recreations

Justi and I were sitting, each on a bed, each throwing a nut to the other. The game ended when the nuts collided in mid-air. That's my kind of athletics, really move only when you missed the nut, a more fitting penalty then losing points.

Some more energetic sports: on the hall outside their appartment, we would play some kind of tennis, Justi defending the staircase, so if he missed the ball he would have to run down a floor or two (I, obviously, wouldn't; making him run was the point of the game). With slight complications, because the neighbors didn't like the idea. We used some small rubber ball, and, as racquets, eggplant choppers. What!? eggplant choppers: as the internet explains:

Salată de vinete
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Salată de vinete (eggplant salad) is a Romanian salad (similar to the Indian dish, baigan ka bharta and to baba ghanoush) made from grilled chopped eggplants, sunflower oil and chopped onions. The eggplants are grilled, unpeeled, until they are covered with ash crust, then cleaned of that crust and mashed with a blunt wooden tool. Then they are mixed with sunflower oil and chopped onions and salt is added to taste.

Actually I searched the Wikipedia in the hope of finding a better expression than "a blunt wooden tool", but... It looks like a Chinese cleaver made of wood, and really is blunt.

At that time we were on our way out of Romania, in hope if not in fact, so I played as the Belgian champion, while Justi was the representative of Israel.

From:
« is supposed to be " avrekh meshi", a "silken lordling", i.e. a delicate scholar,

The Viceroy – avrekh is applied to Biblical Joseph, when he was Pharaoh's viceroy.
Avrekh in Hebrew.

Since rekh can mean king (see 2 Samuel 3:39, Radak ad loc.), this word can be interpreted as "father of the king" or "arch-ruler" (Sifri on Deuteronomy 1:1; Bava Bathra 4a; Rashi; Rashbam. See Genesis 45:8; note on Genesis 20:2). It may also be related to the Akadian word abarakhu, denoting the chief steward of the royal house.

Others define Avrekh as "merciful father" (Shmuel ben Chofni). Still others see it as a command, "bow down" (Ibn Janach; Radak, Sherashim; Sforno). It may thus be related to the Egyptian expression a-bor-k, "prostrate yourself," or aprek, "head bowed." Others see it as related to the Egyptian ibrek, "attention," aabrek "to the left" or "stand aside," ap-rekh-u, "head of the wise," ab-rek, "rejoice!" or abu-rek, "your command is our desire."

According to other sources, Avrekh was the public name given to Joseph, while Tzaphnath Paaneach (41:45) was the private name used in the palace (Agadath Bereshith 73). Others interpret the verse, "as he passed [the people] called out, 'I will bow down' " (Ibn Ezra). (from the Internet, of course)

And my interpretation is av-rekh : the father is a king, so prince or lordling (like Avner ben Ner). Anyway, there aren't many viceroys, but every Jewish girl is a Jewish princess, so why not every boy a prince?

From:
« ...we toured the Mont Blanc and Switzerland

That was the first time we both met with winter driving – only Liliana could drive, I got my driver's license in USA, 5 years later. But we both were nonplussed seeing the car frozen, with half an inch of ice on the window! What to do? Did we pour hot water on? How? we were at a hotel, would they give us hot water? I don't remember exactly what followed, only the strangeness of the situation – I had not seen frost since Romania, some 13 years before.

Then we drove in the mountains, and the passes were blocked by snow; in places the car slid freely on ice, to which Liliana reacted by holding my hand instead of the wheel. And yet we escaped, and quite enjoyed ourselves : ate our first Swiss fondue, climbed to a rotating restaurant on mountaintop, and visited an "ice palace" – rooms, corridors and a balcony carved into a glacier. To that purpose we wore every clothing item we had with us, including pajamas – and it was still cold, neither Israel nor Rome had prepared us for visiting the inside of a glacier.

I should also mention the "paté de choucas" that we sampled at Chamonix in France, at the feet of the Mont Blanc. The choucas is a small crow that flies in those mountains, and tastes like any fowl. But think of eating crow!

From:
« the Egyptians say "Everything fears time, and time fears the Pyramids".

But, except for scaring time, what's the use of the Pyramids ? Are they just an eternal monument to indestructible primitivism and imbecility, the general belief about 2500 BC that the king needs an ultra fancy tomb? Are they a show of power?

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

(didn't particularly impress all the conquerors of Egypt) Or, even worse, the ancient version of the Belomorkanal – keep the populace busy, so they won't revolt. In any case they stay there as a big memento that Marxism cannot be 100% right: what kind of ecomomic role can you imagine for them? (The Bible did: the Pyramids were supposed to be grain silos, filled during the seven good years and emptied during the following bad ones).

The other thing that comes to mind is hubris. Now, as a programmer, I should consider hubris a virtue, although Zeus zaps you for it. But not in Egypt – few thunderstorms. Probably this also explains the fantastic buildings and landshaping in the Emirates – few thunderstorms there too. So they did it just to show it can be done, and who knows, maybe someone will actually profit from the very advanced techniques. And, as G B Shaw is said to have said about St. Donat's : "This is what God would have built if he had had the money." Actually, I don't feel any great curiosity to visit these places, till they put them under cover, with airconditioning.

From:
« Nothing wrong with the Bible – quite readable, even in translation .

And, of course, King's Version of the Bible is one of the feet on which literary English stands (the others being Shakespeare and Alice in Wonderland – if you want to make it stabler, the fourth foot is Ulysses).

But here is one of my bright discoveries about Bible translation. The Latin mass begins with

"Introibo ad altare Dei – Ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam."
"I will go in to the altar of God – To God, Who giveth joy to my youth."

Not that I ever heard a Latin Mass, but, like everything else, this is to be found somewhere in Ulysses . Anyway, it seemed very fishy to me, because of the youth part – the Bible usually has nothing positive to say about youth. So I looked at the Hebrew original, psalm 43 (or 42, there are various numberings). Here is the relevant line, in Latin, Hebrew and a recent English translation:

42:4 et introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam; confitebor tibi in cithara, Deus, Deus meus.

מג ד אבואה אל מזבח אלהים אל אל שמחת גילי ואודך בכנור אלהים אלהי

42:4 That I may come to the altar of God, to God, my joy, my delight. Then I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God.

The explanation is the Hebrew גיל which means both "age" and "joy"; the Latin translator – St Jerome? – took it as "age", or "young age", but "joy" makes more sense, and the English version has "joy and delight".

From:
« a diatribe against noisy neighbors and rug beating housewives

There was many and many a year ago
In a republic by the sea
An Abominable Snowman, whom you may know
By the name of Lustman Levee.
And this monster, he lived with no other thought
– That was his perpetual sorrow –
Than fall asleep one night, in peace and in quiet
And sleep undisturbed till morrow.

But! the sharp soled neighbors above
Coveted him a lot,
So they kept going and going and going
With a rhythmical tot-tot-tot,
And the sun never rose, but there was the sharp prose
Of miss Spodik the street nearby,
And the moon never beamed, but some darling child screamed
And a thousand yelled back in reply,
And the stars never shone, but there was the loud drone
Of the radios, or some ring on telephone,
Or some plane wrooming up in the sky,
So poor Lévee just wished he'd die.

Oh, he sighed and he wept
And in winks only slept,
Till one day everything changed, because
He remembered how Abominable he was.

When rugs boomed overhead
He just uttered "Drop dead!"
Stiff on their rugs the housewives then fell;
And to each shrieking shrew
He said "Devil take you!"
And they promptly were taken to hell;
Every cute child he spotted
Like a fly he just swatted,
And, having killed big and small
Silence sweet fell once and for all!

So he could, by night tide
Lie on back or on side
On their sepulchres by the sea,
On their tombs by the silent sea.

From:
« oprime el pulsante

That's "push the button", although to me it will forever sound like "the opressed masses". Spanish always seemed to me very exotic (among the other Romance tongues):

esperar = to wait (IMHO it should mean "to hope")
regresar = to return (suggest "to regress", with overtones of "retard")
amarillo = should be bitter, but it's yellow
etc.

But that's probably because I don't know Spanish – cannot speak at all, so I try Italian, with reasonable results – and I have to guess much more. I can read Spanish and even Portuguese – i.e. I can get the meaning of a page even if I miss lots of individual words. Unfortunately, I don't enjoy reading Spanish – I tried Borges, whose stories I mostly know by heart in English. As for spoken Portuguese, from a distance it sounds so much like Romanian, it can fool even me.

On the other hand "sounds like" is not a really good criterion. In Germany, I was listening while driving to an opera on Bayrischer Rundfunk (oh the civilization! one might forgive them Hitler for that). It sounded Italian, and I couldn't get one word of it. It turned out to be in Finnish (oh the civilization!). Where did all the umlauts go? It really sounded Italian – in part, of course, because it was opera, still...

From:
« ...to the military for my basic training ...

That was the worst thing that ever happened to me (shows what a pampered life I've had. And still I am dissatisfied with it, as I have every right to be, cause this right is not mentioned in the Constitution ). I got there after the second year in college, convinced I was a somewhat decent person, not only the best student they had. Then I was completely miserable, hurting everywhere, sleeping three hours a night if at all, and treated like shit. The last probably deserved, because I couldn't do any of the required stuff – like run or load a machine gun, nor could I see why I should. And there was absolutely no respite, they might come at any moment with some new torment and punishment for doing it wrong.

The misery cured some skin sores I had had for years; I also lost a lot of weight. So when I came home the first time, my mother exclaimed "You look so well!". I didn't strangle her, however.

After basic training I remained firmly convinced that Hell is open and waiting. The conviction starts to fade, slowly, about now, after a few years of Prozac and the realization that I'm too sick to be taken to the military, even if I return to Israel – I think one owes military service till 65 there.

From:
« So I beat on the computer, and after years? months? of joyful creation ...

I was adding the last curlicue to my precious music editor (first version "AMUSED", next version "BEMUSED", then "CALLIOPE", then "ERATO" – but not up to all the nine muses) I was programming the machine to synchronize automatically its three voices. The whole program was 8 bit, and because of integer division two eighth notes might be shorter than a quarter, etc. So I was trying to fix it automatically: whenever two voices would start a note at times differing by two jiffies or less, I would force them to start together. Now a jiffy on the Commodore was 1/60 of a second, so I certainly could not hear the difference – talk about conceptual art! Anyway, I was debugging furiously, when I suddenly discovered it was three in the middle of the night. I had never stayed awake so late, and so easily, for any purpose – not for mathematics, not for fun, not for beloved children or adored motherland. So I understood I was a programmer and this is what I should do, and it lasted a while, but now it's over.

Actually it lasted as long as I felt impelled, or at least was able to add curlicues. When I get the feeling of "not now, maybe later", or "I don't want to break a working program", or "I know how to do it, but won't" or, finally, "what's the use?", the subject is dead and buried. I read the story about a guy with refined Japanese taste , who kept fixing the sounding rocks in his brook.

—Will I ever get to the perfect sound?
—Depends which dies first, you or your soul.

My father died a few days before the Israeli Independence Day. I went to memorial services a few times, when the parasha "Kedoshim" is read (always the same, because the Jewish date is fixed by Iyar 5th, the Independence Day):

קדשים תהיו כי קדוש אני

Be holy as I am holy
(God's words to the whole people, LEV 19:2)

Now how the hell am I going to do that? As holy as God? My idea about Imitatio Dei is to try and be creative – the first and foremost fact we know about him:

בראשית ברא אלהים
In the beginning God created

Now that is already incredibly hard, not to mention

וירא אלהים כי טוב
and God saw that it was good

Most of what I create is very far from good. Although cavillers may say that "holy" merely means "taboo", i.e. respecting some special formal rules and being set apart from everyday life. Even so, a tall order for a whole people. So I gave up, as I always do.

By the way, the parasha before "Kedoshim" is "Aharei mot", i.e. "After the death", and the two are usually read together. I don't think the Bible was designed in honor of my father, although it should ...

And talking about imitatio, what about God taking my example? This is why I give to beggars, so God should learn to give when asked, without considering merit, or what is expedient.

From:
« My grandparents were then living with us...
« Băbica
« the coat rack I used to climb on .

Grand-grandma

Besides grandmother and grandfather, my grandmother's mother lived with us. I remember her as a a very bent, very frail, very old woman. But actually in the pictures she is not so frail, rather plump, like grandma, or mother, or me.

In those ancient times my parents still had their medical offices – i.e. two rooms, and the patients were waiting in the hall. For them, there was a green cast iron coat rack, which was sturdy enough – and I small enough – that I climbed it, like a tree. On top of the coat rack I would hang great-grandma's milk pan – she was the only one in the family that kept kosher, and had to separate milk from meat. Great-grandma was too short to get it down. What fun!

She would not live in the same room with my grandparents, so she slept on a cot in the kitchen. One winter night she caught a cold that killed her.

Later on my mother told me that great-grandma often used to complain to her "A kind muss folgen zane mame!" – "A child must obey his mother!", the disobedient child being, of course, my grandmother.

From:
« The real story is even more fantastic...

Somehow, I always found reality much more extraordinary than fiction – it is probably because I lack imagination, and also because fiction is damn hard to do – the only example that comes to the mind is Ursula K. LeGuin. Almost impossible to maintain consistency and flaunt everyday experience, which badly needs flaunting! As for Ruritania, or even Asimov's laws of robotics... but then Asimov wrote the truly remarkable " Nightfall ", serious food for thought once you realize that the first human science was astronomy.

Literature is exactly the possibility "you say so, but I say different" and its value is mostly in how you say it – basically you must convince me I can't say it better. But reality is for real .

And how queer can it be! consider the platypus, or radiolaria and acantharia , or the etymology of "nice", or the Bernadotte dynasty, or the measurable cardinals – princes of the church at the tailor's, being fitted for their robes.

Mathematics is full of such incredible stuff, plus "I say so and nobody can say otherwise, because it's proved". But trying to convince people that math is wonderful is like trying to convince me that basketball is fun (I had to play basketball in school and somewhat know what it is about).

From:

...and in fact...

And in fact I don't feel any desire to go on writing this, I'd rather dump it like every other project. Instead of which I keep tickling details, and playing with exotic encodings.

I added with great exertion my divine music to the web page, mostly because everything has been ready for years. And it also was lost for years – the Soundblaster stuff cannot work with multitasking systems, which interrupt my program and sabotage its clock, so I had to change everything from direct sound production to midi file output. Then a browser can play the midi, but it's not quite the same. Or, probably, a few years ago I was interested in this music, but now it annoys me. I certainly don't have the patience to adjust instruments and dynamics, and have no idea how – that's interpretation, and I never could play any instrument.

I also had a few programs for automatic musical composition – reasonably interesting, if I say so myself. Those got lost because their BASIC sources fell between the cracks as I changed computers. There are a few remnants – just the results, no programs – and if I feel sadistic enough I'll put them online.

Well, after a great musical revival while retard, I did put them on line. Many more than I thought.

From:
« doing ... good to others counts.

For instance, at one of our New Year parties, a friend complained he could not really enjoy the stuffed cabbage because of his peptic ulcer. At which Liliana replied: "Have you checked for Helicobacter pylori?" So he did the test, it was the correct diagnostic, and after a few weeks with the right antibiotics, the ulcer was gone.

I have never done anything so positive, nor do I expect to do in the future, unless I raise Nomi's children, which I won't.

On the other hand, you may say that this is an everyday experience for a doctor. But I think an even more everyday experience is knowing full well that nothing can be done, and basically holding the patient's hand. For another instance, my father used to ride forever the bus from Holon to Tel-Aviv, to do Novocaine infiltrations to a friend with chronic pain of unknown origin. Sometimes he took me too, for company. That friend was a rather uninteresting person, but on the other hand was no monstrous criminal, to deserve excruciating pain for life. And in such misery, it would have been improbable for him to remain a sparkling wit.

From:
« I was born a loyal subject of His Majesty King Michael II of Romania

The first Michael of Romania was an able general who, in 1600, ruled for a few months over all the Romanian lands: he was prince – not king – of Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia. The Austrian emperor, who had plans of his own for Transylvania, quickly assassinated him. However, he is a great Romanian hero, and a famous historic figure, although this first Romanian union proved ephemeral: Wallachia and Moldavia remained separate for another 250 years, and Transylvania remained part of Hungary for more than 300. Romania in its actual boundaries – more or less – exists since the end of WWI, 1918-1919.

As for the second , he is a very successful person: twice king of Romania , Order of Victory of the Soviet Union, U.S. Legion of Merit, Swiss businessman...

My son Mike is not named after either, although I wish he were a Swiss businessman – no need to be a historic figure, and kings are passé.

Actually I called him Reuben, which is Hebrew for "see, a son!" because I had been threatened with twin daughters – ultrasound was not that well developed then. Liliana liked the name Michael, and Nomi too, so he is Mike, except officially.

From:

« ...a good hint for suicide.
« That was not the first time – I am quite a precocious suicide .

So is Nomi. One weekend morning in San Francisco, as I was cleaning the house while Liliana was at the hospital, I told Nomi to do the laundry, because it's educational for kids to have chores, etc., but mostly because she could tell apart her clothes from Liliana's or Mikey's, etc. At which she went into grand tragedy:

She:  I don't want to live anymore!
Me:  You're telling me...
She:  Give me a knife!

It so happens, there was a big knife near the washing machine, that I used to stick into the toilet so it won't flush forever all by itself. But that knife wasn't sharp enough!

She: If you didn't let Mikey use the knives to chop wood for his tree house...
Me: ...I could let you use them to chop your arteries.

After which she didn't kill herself, nor did she do the laundry.

Nomi went on to a second suicide in Monterey, when she had a girlfriend staying with her, who in the middle of the night woke us up, because Nomi had swallowed some pills... We took her to the local hospital (why not the military one where Liliana was working?) and she remained there a week "under psychiatric surveillance" and then she could not return to school, so she finished high school via a few courses at the Community College, as is traditional in the family.

Sight unseen

Some places we missed, besides the obvious Nazca, Machu-Picchu and Cuzco :

Chanchan carvings, Peru

Huaca de la Luna, Moon Sanctuary, Peru

Chanchan fishnet ruins

Sanctuary, Peru

Some beasties we missed:

Howler monkey; not seen, not heard

Chestnut-mandibled Toucan

Another fancy toucan

Tamandua anteater, Costa Rica

Coati (coatimundi is a misnomer) They should be found in trash cans, like raccoons in California.

Just a few more places in Brazil, with sights as extraordinary as Rio and resounding names: Vale da Lua, Roraima – which inspired Conan Doyle to write "Lost world", Chapada Diamantina, Pantanal – try the slide show there. Not to mention Iguassu! But, of course, Brazil is enormous, and many such locations are not accessible to comfy tourists.

What we missed most is the wonderful tribal ceremony

fuegians

not only it wasn't on the itinerary, but the Selk'nam have been massacred a long time ago. They always went completely naked – the place is called Tierra del Fuego because they had open fires in their boats to keep warm – and at most painted themselves for these ceremonies of initiation into manhood.

From:
« Ulysses ' more abstruse passages...
« like everything else, can be found somewhere in Ulysses .

Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint...

That is, on my way to courses, I used to read Ulysses. An hour plus in the bus each way, I got quite an education – besides what was supplied by the Doctors of Mathematics. Saints? But now I can't read, period. Although quite recently I found a bit of Ulysses on the net, and was still amazed at the literature.

Also, in the good old times there was a bookstore at the Tel-Aviv University – just one room, but full of treasure. There I got Gore Vidal's "Julian", my first linguistics book (Simeon Potter?) and the history of the Hittites.

How could I exist without their king Shuppiluliumas, the dragon Iluyankas, lalamis and dusdumis, or Ishtar and her attendants Ninatta and Kulita – "Ninette et Colette, Salon de coiffure" !

By the way, I met Ninette and Colette at the Pergamon museum in Berlin.

And when we lived in San Francisco, on my daily drive to Ames, I once noticed a huge placard by the roadside: "Is this all you have time to read on your way to work?" That was supposed to convince people to take the train, but it struck my heart.

From:
« arrived in Israel in September 1961 – with 70 kg of clothing

This was all we were allowed to take away; also bedding, kitchenware, and similar stuff – all within 70 kilos. Works of art could not be taken out of Romania – this is an old law, long before the communists. My father tried to take his microscope, that he had bought as a student, but it was held in customs. Books had to be sent separately by mail – a good idea, because books are inordinately heavy, or so they seem to me. That was my job, one of the few useful things I did on the occasion. I sent all the math, physics and chemistry school books, ninth to eleventh grade, so I would have some base before I knew Hebrew.

Besides, we had to leave the house – which was government property – in perfect condition: walls repainted, floors refinished, etc. The furniture – some of it quite fancy – and my mother's Astrakhan lamb coat we sold. The money remained for the care of grandma, who had not got the permit to leave, and came to Israel a few months after us. In any case money could not be taken abroad, but people usually bartered the medieval way – it was given to acquaintances in Romania, to be returned by their relatives in Israel.

From:
« In the sixties, Mme Moretta had sent us to the Vatican Museums on a gratis weekend

Mia Moretta was our host in Rome. Signor Moretta was your typical European, an Italian born in Odessa, Russia and living in Bucharest, where he published several books in Romanian. Mia had been his secretary, then wife, then they fled the communists to Rome, as he always had had Italian citizenship. In Italy he busied himself with Vedanta and other Indian philosophy, and kept publishing, while she rented rooms in their appartment for a more concrete income. This is how Liliana made her acquaintance, when she transferred to the University of Rome.

The first time I met them, we had just arrived for our honeymoon – I had carried our suitcase on my head (best balanced position) from the railway station. Mia received us with fruit preserves and cold water – a wonderful Romanian tradition, which I had heard about, but not often actually observed. From then on, it only got better. She really was a very charming person, knowledgeable about everything, and a great friend. Liliana staid with her while she completed her medical studies – a few months in Rome, then vacation home, then again Rome, etc.

From:
« ...my father could do no wrong

So let's make complete list of all the things he did wrong – that's easy. Will I be able to tell everything he did right?

Anyway, when I finally had my own room (which had been my mother's medical office), he still would sometimes come early in the morning to piss in the sink. Even if I protested, he didn't care. Now if anybody else woke me up, I would definitely hate his guts forever, but my father...

Much later, in Israel, my parents bought a neighboring apartment and broke the connecting wall, and that was mine. But in the new apartment they put a TV – the great novelty, Israel started its own TV broadcasts in 1967 – and would gather every evening to watch the bad news (almost all that Israel produces is news, and there are no good news by definition). So of course I wanted the TV out, at which my father told me squarely that he won't enter my apartment anymore. Imagine my reaction when someone prefers shitty TV to me! but I gave up. Eventually they bought a second TV, which stayed in their apartment.

Some time before that, when Robert Kennedy was shot, he had to stay on the radio (there was no TV) all night catching foreign posts with parasites, to find out – what? We were still all living in the same apartment, and it drove me completely crazy, till I left for a walk in the middle of the night. I don't think he noticed.

That's all I can think about.

From:
« ...if you believe my resume
« cum scrie la curriculum

Only Dorothy Parker 's Resumé is fully believable. All the others are mostly bullshit, in violation of the essential command יהללוך אחרים ולא פיך – Let others praise you, not your mouth! Pe romaneste, "Lauda-ma gura, ca ti-oi da friptura!" sau mai succint: "Cucurigu, vită!" (din expresia latina "curriculum vitae", sa nu zica nimeni ca nu ne tragem din Traian)

On the other hand, I abhor recommendation letters even more. So what's left? This is why we have diplomas and lists of publications, and everything is on trial basis anyway. The employer fires at any time, the employee leaves at any time. As for mutual trust and truth in advertising... And being dedicated! "I couldn't live if I weren't an automatic phone programmer"; "I can't conceive existence without managing your sales division!"

I think the whole rigmarole is just for social purposes, to show you're "one of us" , know the ropes, and can use the prescribed forms. Quite important for business, not particularly related to technical skills, especially as USA buys its technicians and scientists abroad.

I always fantasized being brave enough to send "Razors pain you" when asked for a resumé. Or at least:

אחת שתיים
ירושלים
שלוש ארבע
אמריקה
חמש שש
אתה טיפש
שבע שמונה
תחכמוני
תשע עשר
אתה פרפסר

From:
« It is everyone's sacred duty to be exactly like me .

And I am ever ready to throw out of the human race anybody who isn't like me. They may be Uebermenschen for all I care, but I certainly don't want anything to do with them. Some small deviation I can tolerate, but the following are unforgivable sins:

Telling me that sleep is wasted time.
Changing the channel when classical music starts to play – even more so with comments "That's church music!" or "That's just opera".
Caring about how you look. This is a definite sign there is no space left in your brain for any serious thought. Most offensive are expensive hairdos to look "careless", and unshaven models.
Criticism or unrequested advice; and I don't care if you are right, or are an expert, or are well intentioned. Also, don't ask me for advice, unless you're ready to follow it.
Blatant lack of interest in food .
Body piercing, tatoos, etc. One might think I'm very devout – these are forbidden in the Bible (Lev. 19) and by some Muslim commentators.
Claiming that children are somehow superior to adults: less prejudiced, more innocent, more creative ...

From:
« when I got my permanent residence through labor certification
« ... All that's left from my spectral methods.

The point of labor certification is to prove officially that there is no American capable or willing to do your job – you being an alien, somewhat more gruesome than the one in the movie. So my employer submitted a job offer for someone to do spectral methods for transonic aerodynamics (yes, I actually did that! I don't believe it, either), to be published in the "AIAA Journal", and we waited. In August it did not appear, because the Journal is not published in August. In September it finally did – except that it asked for a specialist in telescreen design. I didn't get a heart attack (then). But I got the certification, because Liliana finally went to the Labor Office in Hampton and wept, so the lady there took pity on us, and called the state Labor Office in Richmond, and the lady there took pity on us, and called the Federal Labor Office in Philadelphia, and the lady there took pity on us, so the papers came within a week, instead of a few months as advertised.

From:
« Nomi is my favorite daughter ...

Poor Nomi! she will always be the intruder, the one who spoiled my life irreversibly. Of course, all the responsibility is Liliana's, but Nomi probably felt it from the first moment, even though I was polite – or I think I was polite. Not that she ever did anything to fix the situation – we often had this conversation:

—You don't love me!
—What have you done lately, that I should love you...

I did not have these feelings about Mikey – when he was born, the harm had been long done, and it really did not matter much. BTW, one day when Nomi felt overwhelmed by her three kids, she told me

—It's all your fault, you always said that many children are no more trouble than the first.

Anyway, that silly stanza is uncomfortably true. Not that I ever thought myself fit to be a parent, and in any case, if they had parenting licensing tests, I would have taken great care to fail. But I tried, convinced like every idiot that somehow I'll manage, and somehow the misery will miss me. At least I had to try, because the babies certainly were innocent of all the trouble they were making. Not so the teenagers...

From:
« I devoured all his books, and even learnt some Malay .

Tuan penulis yang menglipor lara... another gift for Anthony Burgess. (try "lipor lara" on the net)

And the first Malay book I got in Italy, in Florence – I was supposed to be somewhere else at a math seminar, but... And Florence is so beautiful! (although horribly hot and steamy that summer). Besides the teach-yourself book, I also got Stalin's linguistics theory – communism was rather popular in Italy, and may still be for all I know. And anything sounds so sweet in Italian, even Stalin, not to mention Tricomi's partial differential equations – that is pure opera:

    Deh vieni alla finestra,
   O, gioia bella!
   Ti voglio dar minestra,
   Ti voglio amministrar!
   Purtroppo mi tradisti, oh, ribella!
   In vece di minestra,
   Se vieni alla finestra,
   Ti faccio difenestrar !

Anyway, I have a nice Perl script to translate Malay. It actually works word for word, because the lack of inflexion, and it turns out one can safely ignore all the Malay prefixes and suffixes, the meaning remains quite clear.

From:
« Worms is an historic city for our family

I actually got to Worms, in ancient times when we dwelt in Germany – about 3 hours drive from home. I ran straight to the Romanesque cathedral, which is in all the art books. I expected to hate it, because I thought all Romanesque too square, i.e. not Gothic. Surprise! It is truly beautiful, in lovely russet local stone, with elegant decorations. Certainly not the box from illustrations.

Then, on the streets, I saw indications for the Jewish bath, and I was curious to see what it might be. A mikve! – the only one I ever went to. A room dug deep under the Rhine, with the ritual running water (the washroom was at ground level, some eighty stairs above). And, since I need the Rhine to go to the mikve, the only synagogue I went to of my free will was "Santa Maria la Blanca" in Toledo. Built with a forest of pillars in graceful Moorish style, it was the town synagogue till it was finally converted into a church around 1400.

Also, when in Worms I went to the Rashi museum, but found it closed (I had come, of course, Friday afternoon). It is a reconstruction, as the whole Jewish quarter was destroyed by the Nazis.

From:
« ... desi ma lupt acum cu java

« ... my rants about java.

Didn't anyone notice that at last count java has well over 3000 built in classes, and one must keep in mind the differences between

FilterInputStream 
InputStreamReader 
ObjectInputStream 
CheckedInputStream 
BufferedInputStream 
DeflaterInputStream 
InflaterInputStream 
PushbackInputStream 
SequenceInputStream 
ByteArrayInputStream 
FileImageInputStream 
LineNumberInputStream 
StringBufferInputStream 
FileCacheImageInputStream, etc.

Probably for practical use only 10% of the classes are really needed, still... And the COBOL-fingers you get from typing:

BufferedInputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(
new FileInputStream( inputFileName ) );

And the burden of remembering that in is a BufferedInputStream (or else creating a long name, say myBufferedInputStream instead of in to indicate the class).
And the horrible Math.sqrt – the square root belongs to Math just as much as the plus sign does!

There must be items that are not objects, and functions that are not methods.

From:
« ... replace some of the platinum with cheaper metals

At the New Year party, I met some wunderkinder, young enough to come with their parents, amazing enough to...

One brought, with the laptop, some book on myths by Eliade. The other asked me what I was doing, so I told him about our transition metals, computer modelling on ruthenium, rhodium and palladium. At which he replied "Is palladium more expensive than platinum? I don't think so. Besides, it's the only element in group 5 which has no electrons in shell 5" All of which was news for me. Then after some more learned discussion, he asked me – the typical 16 year old question – what would I do if I had the power. My immediate answer: "I don't know. But I can tell you what I thought about doing when I was 10: forbid smoking and soccer". He, however, had some plan, which included a ban on tobacco, and some rule about cutting medical bookkeeping "because that costs the patients most". In addition, he liked the pig-foot jelly that I had brought, and asked for the recipe.

If you didn't notice, I am still green with envy, especially considering the children in the family.

From:
« ... the biblical view ...

Genesis 3.

16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Where we learn that childbirth is a punishment, and work is a punishment, and a husband is a punishment. But people seem hungry for punishment.

Besides, etymologically, work is punishment: the Romanian "muncă", has a Slavic origin "mo,ka" meaning "suffering, torment", and so does the French "travail". That one derives from the Latin tripalium – an instrument of torture.

The English "work" has no such painful correlations; it is related to Greek "-erg-", which also means work, as in "energy, synergy", which then relates to "orgy".

From:
« did not trust her bookkeeping ... suspicious of her gold accounting

I deeply believe that my mother was honest, not only law-fearing. But, of course, IRS did not think so, not in Romania and not in Israel. So my mother had to present some cooked up accounts, to which they would add something, so eventually she paid more or less what she would have to, under a legal, but trusting agreement. Or at least this is what I believe.
Anyway, since the government does not ask for your leave before it sinks its hand into your pocket and takes whatever it pleases for taxes, it is your sacred duty to cheat as much as possible while staying on the law side, or not being caught.

As for gold... In communist Romania possessing gold (not as jewelry) was a crime. In non-communist Romania, Jews needed some kind of safety – the government did confiscate property, forbade employment and deported people quite unpredictably, so my parents did hide one kilo of gold inside a ceramic bird. My father showed me later the patch in the bottom, made when he took the gold out after the war. That bird had stood in our curio cabinet, for as long as I can remember.

From:
« She was our charwoman – dare I say servant?

charwoman, char, cleaning woman, cleaning lady, woman – (a human female who does housework; "the char will clean the carpet")

servant, retainer – (a person working in the service of another (especially in the household))

chambermaid, fille de chambre – (a maid who is employed to clean and care for bedrooms (now primarily in hotels))

=> maid, maidservant, housemaid, amah – (a female domestic)
=> domestic, domestic help, house servant – (a servant who is paid to perform menial tasks around the household)

So I went and did a search on Wordnet, not only because of political correctness, but also to somewhat match reality: she worked for us, lived in a room in the attic which went with our apartment (and she kept staying there after she stopped working for us), but we were in an egalitarian communistic society, and as a worker she counted more than say, my father, who was just a bourgeois intellectual.

Which word fits best? "amah" fits least, nothing Oriental about Papina. Maybe I should fit some Chinese meaning to Pa-Pi-Na (easily done on the net).

杷枇哪 which loquat?

跁屁吶 ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta

From:
« I also learnt ... violin ,

The main result of which is that I did not get tennis lessons, too. My violin teacher told my parents it would spoil my hand. I was enchanted.

Besides that, I learnt to read notes – that is, recognize them; I wish from all my heart that I could read silently a score as I read a book, but I never made even the first step in this direction. I would sometimes decipher a tune on the violin, as I do now on the computer. I got some feeling for what it means to play an instrument – mostly awe and envy for those who can. I never had enough patience or discipline to actually practice as I should. The crisis came when I reached the second position, and suddenly all the notes I had learnt so hard to play with the third finger had to be played with the second! That I simply could not manage, so we dropped the whole idea.

Later on, I thought that my parents should have sent me to music school. Then I would have done my homework, and could have played an instrument.

From:
« ... some tall acacia trees.

The acacia flowers, besides smelling sweet, have a delicious nectar, and taste sweet too. But they grow on tall trees, with lots of spines. However, below Bibi's terrace there were other buildings' roofs, which were exactly at the level of the tasty flowers. So we tied a string around my waist, and Bibi lowered me on the roof, and I picked the flowers, but now there was the small problem of getting back...couldn't go either up or down. At the end my father gathered me and my harvest from the roof.

I always loved to climb – probably because it is a slow and deliberate action. I got to tree tops, marvelling how thin were the branches holding me (I was never thin, just small). I got on the top of our iron gate, which had some ornamental spikes, looking quite dangerous. I even got on the roof of our building, three or four tall floors, and sat on the edge with my legs hanging down (I shudder now!) All the people in the yard had gathered – to see me fall? – but I just pulled up my legs and climbed down. I probably did relish the attention.

I can only guess how much my parents enjoyed all this. But they did not punish me, or even scold me for climbing. I still climbed trees in my thirties, but then stopped.

From:
« ... Orange, motanul roscovan adorat al lui Mikey ...

On the counter in the kitchen, by the microwave, stood a big box of color markers. Long before grandchildren were even plans – as if they ever were! Once, I even asked Nomi to guess what the markers' purpose might be, but she could not. So here is the secret, a dumb involved story such as I love.

In ancient times, Orange the tomcat had not only many supernumerary toes, but also an extra long and somewhat kinky tail. Which he lost in an accident, trying to cross the street. After the surgery (which got repeated twice, because it kept failing) we wanted to keep him in a cleaner environment than the garage, so we locked him upstairs in the library. At which he got crazy, jumped and climbed all he could, and left his shit everywhere. Well, he was an invalid, his ass probably uncontrollable and in pain from the tailectomy, etc. While racing around madly he also knocked off a beautiful Capo di Monte vase, a gift from Coca, that we kept on top of the bookcase (it was too big to fit anywhere else).

The vase broke, of course, but I decided I could fix it, so it would serve as a monument for Orange. So I bought crazy glue, and stuck pieces as well as I could, and bought the markers to disguise some of the raw unglazed broken parts that showed.

From:
« I had never stayed awake so late...
another memorable occasion when I stayed late

So, when did I actually stay awake? I can count the occasions:

a few New-Year celebrations in Romania, when I was old enough so I was allowed to stay with my parents and their guests;

some other New-Year celebrations with our friends in Israel;

one night idiotically wasted on a strip-tease club in Jaffo – I still feel the mad rage that struck me when we came out and I saw the dawn;

one Israeli Independence Day, when we listened to classical music al night – my records in some apartment in Jaffo . When I got home, I put on the Vivaldi 2 trumpet concerto for the benefit of my neighbors – they woke me up every un-independence-day .

the famous New-Year celebration in Monterey with our friends, with sleep-over and extensions over the next days. I am proud to say our children were shocked.

But except for that, I very much prefer my dreams to run of the mill entertainment – TV and movies – and unfortunately to most conversation.

In the meantime we moved (now we have THREE unpaid houses in California), I had heart surgery twice (both didn't work) and finally I'm on Coumadin, which I had tried to prevent with surgery – ablation, oblation, blablation. Surprisingly, it curtailed my creativity:

"The complete cartoons of the New Yorker", ca 1963

So I just filled my time with the New Yorker cartoons, till I suddenly got inspired:

Worms, Germany, is an historic city for our family, not just the Nibelungs. Both Nomi and Mike were born in Tel-Aviv, in the Vermayza Street Maternity Hospital:
Worms' name is of Celtic origin: Borbetomagus meant "settlement in a watery area". This was eventually transformed into the Latin name Vormatia that had been in use since the 6th century, which was preserved in the Medieval Hebrew form Vermayza וורמיזה

And I was surprised how easy it was to build a cartoon from ready-made images on the Internet. So easy, that I made another:

From:
« English stands on King's Version, Shakespeare and Alice in Wonderland

That is, IMHO, you cannot read any English text without finding quotations from, and allusions to these three.

For myself, I was deeply sunk into Alice, and kept quoting it to my beloved children, till it actually stuck. But it is a strictly literary piece – e.g. Disney's movie does not begin to do it justice. Nor do Dali's illustrations, which I saw by chance in Paris – Dali keeps at his own obsessions, and there is no ambition, distraction, uglification or derision, much less fainting in coils (which Dali was the one to actually show, had he wanted to).

As for Shakespeare, I feel strangely unatracted. Mostly because his dramatic poetry doesn't scan to me. I was spared detailed analysis in school, but I stil had to take a fool look at "The Tempest" when Mikey had to. To me it's mostly claptrap, with huge diamonds stuck here and there. For instance, 90% of Prospero - Ariel interaction is just "Well done, my chick!" – I would really love to do the count, and find the real percentage, let's leave that for when I'm retard, but it does feel like 90%. And then:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air ...

From:
« mathematicians don't make money , physicians do.

Physicians are supposed to make money, and play golf on Wednesday afternoons. Liliana didn't – but she definitely earns more than I do.

I was long convinced that people become mathematicians because of lack of business sense (certainly mathematical thinking goes very much against business practice, which is based on hunches and rapid decisions with incomplete information). Every time some college shamelessly listed the ability of getting grants among its requirements, I would think: "If I could make money, I wouldn't be a mathematician . If I could make money, I'd make it for myself, not for you!" Without noticing that around me my colleagues, who were not any less mathematicians, were getting grants and tenures. I'm not too good at noticing.

Then, this summer as I was still babbling about how mathematicians don't get rich, someone mentioned Adi Shamir (I heard him at MIT, as he presented the newly created public key encryption). Cryptologists certainly have an important and probably lucrative share in modern business. All I could blurt was: "But this is not what mathematicians should do! They should produce theorems !"

From:
« Eventually I got fired

So, before I forget the horror of that moment, let me make a memorandum.

About my birthday this year, the fatidic 60th, we had the employee evaluations at work, at which I found out I was the worst, so I didn't get a raise, and the idea – not mine, but the expressed expectation of the top management – was that I shoud leave. Which I didn't, so finally I got announced that there is a reduction in forces. So, after September 6th, I'm officially retard. The same management also expects I should look for some other job, and I may go through the motions, especially if there is unemployment money ... but. Unfortunately, I am not the only one fired, although I may be the only one euphoric.

In the meantime, I discovered I don't have any more CVs, not on paper and not on disk, which is a clear sign from God, as if I needed signs.

So, instead of croaking, I get reborn at 60. As for croaking, there are still fair chances, because any change – even for the better – is a source of stress, and under stress I crumble.

From:
« academic places where I worked didn't ask for diplomas, ... word of mouth from the right people
« About 4 years ago I was talking on the phone with David – after about 10 years of silence.

I got to MIT because David put in a good word for me.

David is David Gottlieb , and we were colleagues at Tel Aviv University, and good friends. I remember walking with him on the campus, in the best of spirits, and telling him "Don't you know of something positive to do, like building the fatherland , but easier?"

He quickly finished his Ph.D. and went to MIT, where he published his first book – the first analysis of spectral methods. So his recommendation counted, and he helped me again and again in the States. He got me to NASA Langley , there I met Stan Osher who called me for one year at UCLA; there I also met Joe Oliger, who recommended me for NASA Ames, then I regretably? dropped out of math. Of course, I never returned any favor,
    not cause I wouldn't,
      just cause I couldn't,
        and not only cause I'm the laziest boy in town !

From:
« The golden Horus name is "Sceadugenga"

Who am I? Unix® knows... Some possible anwers:

Sceadugenga – shadow-goer. Applicable to my walking style in the heat of the day, especially in Israel.

Finbad the Failer – yet another high literary pedigree.

Cereal killer – at least should be tried; I'm sure a cereal diet would kill me.

In case you wondered: swordsman without head

And probably the most relevant, wordsman. I collect words from obvious sources, like schoolbooks: Gaugamela, Honduras-Tegucigalpa, poikilotherme, and some not so obvious: a silly story I read as a kid, had a fish called Rapetipeto. I read a Soviet sci-fi story with some Siberian prehistoric tribe, and the hero maries two women called Anuen and Anuir – short for Anu-enen and Anu-ngirăk (both were actually Anu, so the names meant Anu-one and Anu-two). Lo and behold! after 50 years, I discover that enen and ngirăk (which I never forgot) are authentic Chukchee!
Possibly I collect words as a rug collects dust.
I was not aware of this till Dalia told me so. Thank you very much, Dalia!

From:
« incit nu pot decit sa laud pronia divina, xebekol dor vador omdim aleinu lekalotenu,

I'm getting more and more fed up with Passover – because of the following verses, sung on a merry tune:

והיא שעמדה לאבותנו ולנו:
שלא אחד בלבד עמד עלינו לכלותנו,
אלא שבכל דור ודור עומדים עלינו לכלותנו,
והקדוש ברוך הוא מצילנו מידם.

That means:

"This is what stood firm for our ancestors and for us: as not one alone prepared to destroy us, but in each and every generation they prepare to destroy us, and the Lord saves us from their hand."

Such an excellent arrangement, as if I had made it. And for this we're supposed to thank God!

(The translation is clumsy, especially because of the Hebrew עמד – usually translated "stand" – which means "to stand firm" when first used in the passage, and is an auxiliary "prepare to" after that. But it is a correct translation.)

From:
« would not publish... although it makes great reading

So what would I publish? All the news that's fit to print? I hate news, no news are the only good news. I also have a gut feeling against knee jerk reactions: if I'm going to shock my reader, the conscious brain should be involved, not just the reflex arc. Not to mention how cheap it is to violate taboos and break the rules. Much more fun, of course, is absolute sensationalism. Or maybe: startle someone by your wit (I wish), not by boxing his ear.

As for "great reading" it is true that discovering Shakespeare's laundry list would be more pressworthy than discovering some unknown poem of his. But why should I care? I'm not even very interested in gossip, because most people seem so strange to me, I cannot develop any empathy – just astonishment sometimes. And altough I like finding out about unexpected and exotic things and facts, finding out about people I don't find so enjoyable – people are not only totally unpredictable, they are also dangerous. In fact, l'enfer c'est les autres. That is, all my problems have been caused by others, who shall(?) remain nameless.

From:
« king Carol's Jewish mistress, then wife, Magda Lupescu .

Have you heard of Magda Lupescu
Who came to Romania's rescue?
Such a wonderful thing
To be under a king!
Would a republic measure, I esk you.

This is a (failed) tour the force , fitting a Romanian word into English rhymes. IMHO, the two languages have no sound in common: certainly none of the vowels, Romanian stops are unaspirated, /t/,/d/ are alveolar and so on ad nauseam. This is why I have such a gross accent in English.

We lived in Boston on 62 Union street. Every time I said the address on the phone, it got understood as 63. Why? English t in "two" is near English th in "three", but Romanian t is not similar to either. Then there are oo and ee, both long and clear. It shall remain an unsolved mystery of the universe.

From that time on, I gave up on improving my speech. I decided Professor Higgins was really needed, not to mention Eliza. Reading and writing will make do.

From:
« ... Mozart, while writing the Turkish violin concerto .

That one is in A major, his fifth, which Mozart wrote at 17. What did I do at 17? what did you?

But more importantly, this was the piece that hooked me to Mozart. I remembered, a few weeks before this essential event, listening to the "Linz" symphony, and to Tchaikovsky's 4th. Mozart was losing badly! so little happened in the "Linz", as compared with Tchaikovsky. I didn't realize that although they are both called "symphony", they are very different beasts. Much less did I know about Bach's "sinfonias", short keyboard pieces, intended as exercises (the three voice inventions).

Then I heard the violin concerto on the radio. Suddenly there was no need of comparison, or explanations, or anything. God had beckoned, and I followed – to my huge advantage. Mozart may well be the best thing that ever happened to me.

So, after many years, I took beloved children to the "Marriage of Figaro", convinced that I was giving them the best thing in the world. At which they behaved as normal children – Nomi was 11 and Mike 7 – and I severed diplomatic relations.

« Models of happiness

When I was small enough, I imagined my own personal paradise as a big library room, with a built in pool. Because I loved to read, of course, and I liked swimming – it was the one sport I could somewhat do, and I was proud I knew something that not everybody knew – as opposed to, say, running.
This idea did not evolve much, which talks volumes about my psyche, till I found out about measurable cardinals (at this point I'm dumb enough to waver between cardinals and ordinals, and had to check ). Anyway, if they exist, they are inaccessible – the perfect model of happiness!

The real story is even more fantastic: measurable cardinals exist or not according to taste (which somewhat spoils the model). The axiom stating that they exist is independent of the other axioms, so you can add it at will, or can add its opposite.

Right now I have no model of happiness. But if for eight years I will wake up after eight, it will certainly change my attitude...

From:
« Books had to be sent to Israel by mail
« Probably because I had once been nicknamed Pythagoras.

I also sent Hadamard's Lecons de Geometrie Elementaire, which I had got as a prize at the the math olympiad. That was neatly translated into Romanian from the Russian edition, with all the exercises fully solved, a big hardbound book with lots of illustrations. That I also took with me to Maabarot, and when we unpacked our stuff the first day, the other kids saw it and nicknamed me Pythagoras. Somewhat prophetic – maybe this is why I got into mathematics.

My father finally inherited Hadamard. When he retired, among other things he busied himself with was the construction of a right triangle, given its angle bisector AD and the difference between the hypothenuse BC and the side AB (or something similar). Which may be tougher than it sounds, by purely geometric means. For instance, the very obvious statement that a triangle with two equal angle bisectors is isosceles, was proved only in the late 1800s.

From:
« ... manage in the local language

I tried my best, but nobody was impressed by my Chinese. And it is easy to see why – our guides, who had professional training in English, with a rich vocabulary, had such fantastic accents, vacillating between 'presently' and 'pleasantry'; so what are my chances with tones and aspirates? And I probably read like a first grader – I remember reading signs from the tram in Bucharest, and complaining to my mother that the tram is too fast. I did just the same in China – the buses were not fast at all, mostly idling in a jam ... But I have an excuse, China uses simplified characters, which, as a classicist, I cannot recognize.

For instance, here is the character for 'car', which is used in lots of other combinations:

The traditional picture actually looks like a two-wheel cart, seen from above:

but the simplified one looks like nothing! I am sure they did it just to spite me.

From:
« ...and Molcuţa (Malca) the youngest sister of my father

Molcuţa had her own words of wisdom:

פֿון ״על חטא״ װערט מאן נישט פֿעט

"Fun "Al-Het" wert man nisht fet" "You don't get fat from "Al-Het", which is the Yom Kippur prayer recited while beating your breast, to confess all the sins; and of course Yom-Kippur is the day of complete fasting. This sounded even better because she was rolly polly, certainly not from breastbeating – she was an excellent cook.

Her other saying is almost untranslatable: "A zis, a spus". Both words mean "he said" in Romanian; while they are not fully interchangeable, they are much nearer than "say" and "tell" in English. The expression usage underlines a sad truth:

—But he said that he will...
—A zis, a spus.

i.e. all you can conclude from what he said is that he said it.

Sapir-Whorf

Wojenko, wojenko, cóżeś ty za pani,
Że za ciebą idą, że za ciebie giną,
Chłopcy malowani?
Chłopcy malowani, sami wybierani,
Wojenko, wojenko, wojenko, wojenko,
Cóżeś ty za pani?

War, war, what kind of a lady are you, 
so to you go, so for you die
handsome boys?
Handsome boys, chosen ones
War, war, 
what kind of a lady are you?

My guess is that the song would not refer to war as a lady, if the noun "war" was not feminine in Polish. In Romanian, for instance, it sounds definitely odd, because "war" is neuter, and all females – like "lady" – must be feminine.

And if you get a little deeper in the text, it becomes quite exotic:

"wojenko" is an endearing diminutive "dear little war"

"malowani" is literally "painted", but means "beautiful" or "handsome" here. In Russian "krasivyj" also means "painted", but is the common word for "beautiful". Color and beauty strongly associated, somehow.

the same preposition "za" with two different cases "za ciebą" "za ciebie"

a Polish curiosity, a question word with a verb ending: "cóż-eś" = "(what kind) - (you are)"

Le chat est mort, vive le chat! So our old cat died while we were in China, and Liliana was desperate – she wouldn't even sleep in the old bed she shared with her, and spent her call nights crooked on the sofa. Till we got a three month old female kitten, very sweet. We spoil her all we can, and she sleeps in our bed.

Kitty tiptoes over me, little heavier than a dream. Then she becomes a predator, all fangs and claws, must hunt my toes through the quilt. After a few runs up and down, finds a cozy place to curl and purr – good, now we all get to sleep. But in a few seconds, she climbs up to nose my face.

A few months later...

The trouble with a kitten is that
Eventually it becomes a cat

She is grown, quite heavy, not particularly cuddly, but hyperactive. She can cross in one multiple leap the whole room, landing on me on the way, on her claws. Besides, she has shredded all the furniture, including my beloved computer chair, which now scratches from tears in the naugahyde. Even more besides, she loves miaowing at impossible hours, so we have to shut her at night in the toilet in the carrying box (if left ouside the box, she bangs on the glass shower doors).

From:
« Do Ut Des...

This silly stuff, the killer and the tribade were – in my heart of hearts – what I would proffer to Anthony Burgess – how appropriate, arrive bearing gifts! Actually, "do ut des" is the ancient sacrificial formula "I give so you give too", talking to God in Latin . I even found out Burgess' address – 44 Rue Grimaldi (obviously), Monaco – but that's as far as our acquaintance got. I had even more pearls for him : "I am your cheap edition, music, languages, even a wife called Liliana...", but. Besides, they say he was not too sweet to admirers. I saw him once on Public TV – at 11 PM, another memorable occasion I stayed late , and was quite fascinated. But why I really got hooked is one sentence about Enderby, who, in Rome, listens to the Italian conversation "probably full of subjunctives". After that, I devoured all his books, and even learnt some Malay .

From:
« ... rush home to ~~work~~ play with a new idea
« ... my composition

Little Latin and less Greek

In my youth, I was vaguely dreaming of a novel about someone writing nine symphonies to commit suicide. Of course, the symphonies would be composed by computer – that's the other autobiographical part. They would also provide employment to the Russian immigrants to Israel, who were all very musical (the saying was: if he doesn't arrive carrying a violin, he's a pianist). But yesterday I realized that

Δις κραμβη θανατος

"twice cabbage is death", so one could commit musical suicide much easier by playing C A B B A G E often enough, in case twice is not the precise count (bis repetita placet). So I built my program for repetitive cabbage pieces, resulting in, e.g.:

If that kills me, I'll let you know.

From:
« ... I never smoked .

Basically because I did not feel the need to try something new (even then? I was under 19) and I did not feel any need to follow the fashion. My father smoked like a chimney, my mother did not, except on special occasions, like a big festive meal, although my grandmother did.

Anyway, at 19 I got to the military for my basic training , and there I saw how the smokers – the great majority – suffered when not allowed to smoke by our superiors, or if they were religious, on Shabat. So I decided very consciously that smoking is not for me – I don't need another master.

For the same reasons – fear of the new, being unfashionable – I didn't try any other drugs, although I am well aware that real life is something one mostly needs escaping from. In my case, sleeping, useless knowledge , art – all weak drugs, but

From:
« ... as I go on typing this masterpiece (doctorpiece!)
« ... found out about stream of consciousness.

Doctorpiece – User's Manual

Follow the links! It is, of course, possible to read one section after another, but it doesn't make much sense. In a way, this is a form of realism: life doesn't make much sense either, and there is no obvious ordering, except for yesterday before today before tomorrow. But, certainly, no development and definitely no plot. The random associations, mostly puns, are much better guides from an idea to another.

This is not a book, and relies completely on search for text (made easy by hyperlinks). By all means, if something suggests potatoes, do a text search on "potato". It's a great advantage over printed matter.

Still, the sections have to appear somewhere. They are classified by overall properties, such as language or the dates of the various trips. Within such a category, I just put the longest section first, following the venerable example of the most important religious book. So the text is Coranized, and the place of each section is variable, depending of what has been recently added or erased.

From:
« My uncle, a man of the most honorable principles,

I should also mention that, as reality imitates art (and quite decent of reality to imitate such masterpiece)...

Liliana's uncle Imre was in hospital, with a heart infection. I obviously thought he would come back healthy, but he would be angry if I didn't visit him, so I went to LA. I spent the whole day watching the poor man delirious in his bed; at a certain point a Russian nurse came by, and I almost started

Ей дядя самых честных правил

but I refrained, wisely. As I was learning Rosetta Stone Chinese at the time, I amused myself by looking out to the street and muttering to myself "Na liang qi-che shi hei se de", "Na liang qi-che shi lan se de", etc. Then after a few days Imre called us and talked with Liliana on the phone – it seemed a miracle to me. But he died a few days later, in the same bed.

Once, when our mothers were in Monterey for the summer, Liliana took Edith and Fredi (and mainly herself) to Las Vegas, and I remained with my mother – I was probably at NPS and had no vacation. So one afternoon I took her to "Jurassic Park" – I think the second installment. So much fun – as the big monsters romped about devouring everybody, we giggled and cackled like teenage girls.

This was the last time we went to a movie together, just the two of us.

Which reminds me, when I was small, my mother used to take me and Justi to the movies. That was mostly Wednesdays afternoon – we didn't know about golf in Romania, but she did take a break from patients. I was small enough to prefer cartoons, with little birds and flowers – but Justi already was big enough to go for war movies, and there were lots of them, the war had ended about 5 years before.

From:
« a library full of thrilling medical books .

I actually read some of them, dealing with homeopathy and clinical personality. I could not then, or ever, read real medical technical stuff, but the homeopathy books were very much in Oliver Sacks ' style, cinical stories, and full of really outlandish details: e.g. a Colchicum patient cannot stand the smell of cooking.

The personality book described the "alchemistic" or "astrological" personalities: Leo, Virgo, Mercury... Quite interesting, with pictures too: e.g. a "leonine" face.

Now all this looks like a corroboration of the official American policy that all foreign doctors are quacks. In fact my father was a good physician, and quite up-to-date in medicine , although nobody – execept his conscience or curiosity – forced him to.

I also remember being attracted/repulsed by his dermatology manual – I would open it often, and immediately put it back after getting shocked by some color plate of a really disgusting lesion. But if – God forbid! – I had become a physician, dermatology would have been a prime choice: no emergencies!

Fable

Once upon a time there was a most horrible witch : half lion, half snake and the third half spider. But nobody knew, as she lived in a house with a silver bell; anybody about to enter would ring the bell, and then she changed into the most charming fairy: half rose, half butterfly and the third half blue sky. Till somebody forgot to ring the bell; when he came in, what could the witch do? She ate him.

Morality: please knock at the door.

Legend

A frog heard that it would become a prince, if kissed by a princess. But, living in a stream by a small village, where to find a princess? Then it heard that all Jewish girls are princesses, and there were some Jews in the village (that was a Polish frog). So it made its proposal to a Jewish boy with peyes – frogs cannot tell people's sex any more than we can tell theirs. The boy threw a big stone at it.

Ever since boys chase frogs.

From:
« So I treated them very politely – I think this is what Adult-Adult means
« ... desi am fost politicos, sau am impresia ca am fost politicos.

Polite means "treat someone as if he matters" – of course, in the end, the only one who really matters is me.

But some I treated respectfully – remember, that means I could envy them, although I knew math and they didn't. For instance, a woman who was a dispatcher at the helicopter base. I heard her describing how she directed a pilot in an emergency: "Of course I spoke very calmly, the last thing he needed was to hear me getting hysterical!"
In an emergency, I break down.

Some more definitions of politeness:

"When someone is with you, behave differently than when you are alone". In this sense I am very polite, and then resent anybody who won't leave me alone – or almost anybody.
"Politeness is the distance between hedgehogs" .

From:
« That particular series, and that particular tune stayed with me

My first series

G♭ A A# G A♭ C# C D H E♭ E F

contains BACH, but not by design. I built the series/tune by taking

first, all the five notes using G A and one accident – the only case where two neighboring letters make five distinct notes;
then, some the big jumps in the scale C# to C;
then the smallest jumps remaining in the scale.

It just happens that A A# G A♭ inverted and transposed yields BACH – I think I discovered that much later, while making by computer listings of all the versions of my series. But the fact that BACH appears twice, is a clear sign from above that the whole venture was blessed.

BTW, I did not know anything about Bach at the time, much less did I divinize him. I was reasonably familiar with symphonic Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, and that's about it – I had heard (mostly about) Brahms, Schubert or Mozart. But I remember listening on the radio, still in Maabarot, to the landler from Bach's violin concerto in E. That was the hook; I liked it so much I could not believe it was Bach when the announcer said so.

From:
« So I go around telling everybody how my life is just a crock of ...

I don't want to live forever, I want to live well. It's not in the cards, so I projected my death, as follows:

When I got the heart attack in 1999, I said to myself: all the systems break down, one after another, diabetes started 4 years ago, high blood pressure 10 years ago, now the CABG ... So the breakdowns will follow, with the period between them reducing at the ratio 4/(10 - 4). Summing the geometric series, we have all the breakdowns during 18 years. Since this cannot mean there will be no more breakdowns after that – I must eventually die – it means I will die within these 18 years .

The corresponding age is 60, there is still hope, but that would be too easy. I don't trust my modelling so much, although it's cute. In olden days I was sure I would live into my eighties, with wife and children and grandchildren, precisely because that was never in my plans. But after all my illnesses , I'm not so worried anymore.

From:
« 1500 years ago the Peruvians already worked platinum

And so do I, in a very roundabout way. The company I program for produces Diesel catalysts, which are mainly made of platinum. The novel idea is to replace some of the platinum with cheaper metals, e.g. gold. That would be serious savings, as platinum usually costs twice as much as gold. Alas! due to the current financial crisis, there is much demand for gold, so it is not cheaper anymore! So we lost some funding, and work only four days a week – at which I exult.

But one of our possible investors mentioned that they do not worry about the gold/platinum closing gap; they have their own revenue from gold. How? They run ads on TV: "Send us your jewels, and get cash by return mail!" Now, who would be foolish enough to send away gold, hoping for the best? Well, they make about a million a month from those ads.

I hope this is not some undisclosable trade secret. As for pre-Columbian platinum, see here and here.

From:
« It wouldn't cross my mind to treat myself...
« Probabil fiindca am avut destule infectii de piele

Actually, I did treat myself, and even successfully, when I was young and reckless. Also somewhat unwashed, or not enough for the Israeli steamy climate. Anyway, I had a messy fungus infection, which did not go away, even with all kinds of stinking undecyl ointments. So I discovered in my mother's office some silver nitrate and iodine, both standard topical disinfectants, which I unsparingly applied – I figured these cannot hurt too much, and will be poisonous for the fungus. My skin turned brown, dried and crumbled, but it ended my infection. I was 18 or 19.

Strangely enough, I did not remonstrate against my father because he didn't cure me, and I had to do it myself. Not strange at all – my father could do no wrong – or better said, he did so much right nothing else mattered.

From:
« ... on the map ... a river labelled Rubicone.
« supposed to be somewhere else at a math seminar, but...

Another classical connection: one afternoon I skipped the lecture and took the train to Assisi, hoping to see some monuments, but on the train discovered the station at Trasimeno. Lake Trasimeno was the place where Hannibal had badly defeated the Romans, so I really had to go see. Besides, I was in shorts, and they would not have let me enter the holy places of Assisi. From the station I walked some ten minutes to the lake: nobody there, just rushes and water. It was July, so I took a swim, somewhat historic, in any case eerie: I was enchanted to discover that some of the stuff in my history books was real, and I was alone, so free.
On the way back, some peasants commented on my shorts "Primavera!" at which I answered: "Ma che primavera, gia Luglio! Pien' estate!"

From:
« As for the second Michael... twice king of Romania

Twice, because his father Carol had to abdicate while still crown prince. So baby Michael ruled for a while, then papa returned from exile and ruled himself, then papa had to abdicate again. All of which makes for entertaining – or boring – reading , and is somehow connected to Carol's Jewish mistress, then wife, Magda Lupescu .

mamere To add to the fantastic story, one night – still in Israel – I dreamed that I was myself Carol's son. In the dream my mother, like every well-to-do young lady should, had been sent to Switzerland to a finishing school, and Carol had become her lover (if one Jewish mistress, why not two? and my mother was younger and prettier!) Which made me prince Hohenzollern , although fully Jewish – only the mother counts for the Jews, and is enough for Hitler, too.

When I woke up, the dream somehow had congealed into a novel "My brother Michael" :

My brother Michael, is very successful: twice King of Romania, hero of the Soviet Union, and moreover, Swiss businessman. Quite unlike me. His only problem: five unmarried daughters...

From:
« as we were enjoying ourselves in Rome , the Yom Kippur war started in Israel

Well, I had just finished with the military service, and I was a tourist, perfect reasons for having some fun. Liliana in principle prepared for the Forensic Medicine exam, but was not too worried. Besides, there were some of our friends in Rome, so a good time was had by all. We should have travelled some more, but Liliana was waiting for her exam.

Liliana had a friend, Wanda, who worked at the phone central in Rome, and let her talk to Israel for free. At the central they already noticed too much phone traffic to Israel, so Wanda called Liliana, to connect her with her parents. They remarked among other things that there were too many planes flying on Yom Kippur. Bad news travel fast, but we didn't notice. So we went for a Yom Kippur outing – to a monastery, of course, for which the Lord promptly chastised us and all Israel.

From:
« ...my beloved wife, who... is a board certified neurologist

She passed the board twice, because the medical shitheads don't trust you after you pass, but want a renewal ever 10 years (which, among other small details, involves a fee of thousands). At least Liliana finally got in touch with computers , because by now most exam material and most papers are online. And she got a really fancy framed certificate.

What would I do in her case? I forgot all the math I ever knew, and I cannot follow a paper because I forget the terminology from one page to the next. Would I be brave enough to send them straightaway to hell? Fortunately nobody ever was curious about my credentials, except Jeppesen when they hired me. Certainly all the academic places where I worked didn't ask for diplomas, probably word of mouth from the right people is enough. Or, a Marxist explanation: mathematicians don't make money , physicians do.

From:
« ... partly mythological

Basically, everything I heard about as a child, but could not see, had this kind of aura of irreality; I felt compelled to verify, preferably to see, preferably to touch. It was also very attractive to me – since it was not real, it might be magical. That certainly included the historic past (and the not so historic: all the gossip about people I could not meet) as well as everything abroad – there was practically no chance to leave Romania. Besides, it was quite clear that a lot of stuff I learnt in school was not real either, propaganda or worse, so it also registered to be verified later. This is where I got my tourist instinct: I have to see all that, so I can really believe it exists. And, sadly, unseen stuff remains somehow better.

From:
« ... fiindca Mikey nu vorbea ...

Mike started speaking after age three. Before that he was mostly silent, sunk in deep thought – a real philosopher. I remember him as a baby – we were driving, and he was lying quietly in the back of the station wagon, only remarking "Do" when we passed a McDonald's sign. Always attuned to America, unlike me.

The first time he actually talked with me was on the phone – Liliana had left with the kids to Israel, and I stayed in Hampton. I was surprised how clearly he spoke. Then the family returned, and we all travelled to a meeting at NASA Ames. As we were entering the motel room, Mike saw the alarm watch by the bed, and exclaimed "Daddy, plock!", which has remained a treasured addition to the family lexicon.

Nomi, on the other hand, started speaking very early. We recorded her on her first birthday – a lot of words (that tape, probably, still is somewhere in our house in Monterey). And she was really agile with words: she didn't know how to say "peel the banana" so she said "undress the banana".

From:
« including skin lesions mimicking erysipelas .

Erysipelas is an infectious skin disease – the whole point is that the animal was not infected. Sella turcica is one of the zillion named parts of the brain.

Now I realize I must have read Speransky's book – how else would I remember such technical terms? (I am not sure about the reference, and it looks quite quackish to me, but the book date, 1943, seems right.) Actually now an illustration comes to mind – a poor rabbit with an inflamed, hairless ear. Fortunately in black and whighte , or dull gray, as communist printing was at very low standards – I could not have borne it in color.

Just yesterday we visited Nomi in Santa Cruz, and saw a car with "Free lab animals" I wanted very much to add: "Replace them with humans (Jews if possible – actually, are Jews human?)".

From:
« la inmormintarea lui Dorel

It was much too enjoyable for such a sad occasion. I really liked Dorel, he was a man after my own heart, quoting to me "terima kasih" in Malay... And, although I knew he had all kinds of diseases, his death was quite a shock. May he rest in peace! But meeting Justi, and Yolanda, and all the extended Inghel family (tanti Pepi's brothers with progeny) was such a pleasure.

And some of these people were partly mythological – like Desi, whom I knew only from the Inghel legend about "Tzipor andaka". When Desi was in school, she had to memorize a Hebrew verse (tzipora daka? tiny bird?) and everybody in the house, including the Romanian maid, eventually knew it by heart – not Desi. Now she was a grandmother, who remembered me as a little boy that she had met before their family left for Argentina.

Or the cousin, now from LA, about whom I only knew how he started his acquaintance with English: "Clock five"!

So I chattered all day with Justi and Yolanda and everybody. As the literati say, Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake!

From:
« after I got knocked at NPS , many years after...
« ... so I transferred to NPS , then to the Navy research Lab.
mi-au facut morala la NPS ...

NPS is the Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey. I taught there for a while – and my current boss, who has been a Marine pilot, studied there – ain't I clever. It seemed an ideal place to work, considering the commute to NASA Ames! But the students did not particularly like me , and the faculty would not even mention tenure, so I found a more ideal place to work across the street, at the Naval Research Laboratory. No neeed to teach – I love teaching, but my students don't – no need to publish, so I wrote my C music editor on the Cray (and played the music on a PC, which allowed a C-compiler, even C++ which the Crays hadn't) A lot of fun, but we left for Germany.

From:
« The coins at the site top

From:
« ... poate cind o iesi Liliana la pensie.

Fake Bar Kokhba coinage

These are imitations of Bar Kokhba's coins, the last emitted by an independent Jewish state before 1948. They bore the inscription "year one of the freedom of Jerusalem/Israel", "year two of the freedom of Jerusalem/Israel" – there is no year three. But freedom had the right ring to describe retirement, so my coins bear the text "month/year x of the freedom of Levi/Liliana," in the same ancient script. x is a variable, if you look at it at the right time it will change.

There used to be only one coin, for me, but since beloved wife also retired, I added the second. So I played a little more with Java. Let's see how many years our freedom lasts.

From:
« ... studying – maybe I'll get certain ...

This quest for certainty is probably why I got into mathematics. Also why I stay away from philosophy – "What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance", says Bertrand Russell, and I think philosphy actually does that. But my attitude to learning is truly primitive and strictly non-adaptive: what's the use of learning something that's not sure, or something that will change later?

I want to learn, then know forever – just the way I don't want to clean the toilet, because in the best case it will stay clean just till the next crap, and I'm not going to clean after every crap! So I am really interested in reading the encyclopedia, but not the newspaper. There is, of course, a huge area where lack of certainty would be extremely beneficial – politics, but that isn't my cup of tea, either. And, since in my youth I learnt very fast, and never forgot, I still have all the prejudices of an 8-years old boy, very superficially modified by life experience.

From:
« ... cannot sound worse than Schoenberg.

Famous quotation by Schoenberg:

One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one's taste or one's upbringing or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive.
(letter to Kandinsky, 1911)

I.e., one's creations should be without intelligence, knowledge, skill, taste or upbringing (mal élevé). Of course, his compositions ain't: it would be rather extraordinary to produce by inborn instinct :

And then, maybe not. Considering my musical abilities, and a professional musician's, who can notice, say, that the red D is out of tune, or entered too early, or is not really mp, I am in a very poor position to decide what is extraordinary. Schoenberg also said:

"...if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art. "

and he was probably right. The way the artist perceives his work, and the way I do are perfectly incomparable.

In conclusion, I buy what I like.

From:
« Molcuţa always told how Avram ... kept saying ...

I know of five siblings in that family:

my father,
his elder sister Roza,
his elder brother Joseph ,
his younger brother Avram,
and Molcuţa (Malca) the youngest sister.

I met all of them, except Roza, who was killed during WWII. She, her husband, her son and her daughter Eva were hiding during the last days of fighting, when they were discovered by the Germans? Romanians? and killed – no reason necessary. But Eva escaped "because she was young and pretty", my father said. She lived with my family in Bucharest, and was about 17 when I was born. Soon after she emigrated to Israel, but somehow I seem to remember "tanti Eviţa" since I was a baby in Romania, before I met her again in Israel. My second name, Ross, (or the original Romanian Radu) is after my aunt Roza, as it is customary to name children after dead relatives. Malca's daughter Shoshana is also named after aunt Roza.

From:
« ... word associations ... resonances ...

There are foxgloves, and there are tigergloves: Guantanamera!
"Guanti" = "gloves" in Italian; "namer" = "tiger" in Hebrew.

Which means absolutely nothing, but for me is a straightforward association. I also automatically associate "executive" with "executioner", and "meatballs" with "metabolism". Many words carry these resonances with them, and the more farfetched are lots of fun. The word "farfetched" itself – sounds perfectly Yiddish to me: פארפעצ׳עט

For a long time I had the theory that the more abstruse passages in Ulysses are just Joyce's effort to note all the resonances of all the words – then I found out about stream of consciousness.
And, is ratification the converse of deratization?

From:
« ...I want to kill myself !
« ...de la 5 ani ma tot sinucid

That was not the first time – I am quite a precocious suicide . About five, upset with something or another, I told Papina : "I want to die!" and she answered: "Stick a finger in your butt, and you'll die." Some time afterwards I was taking a bath, and thought about the finger in my butt, but did not try . One disillusion avoided!

For some reason, I don't think Papina as admirable as my mother, but people certainly had then a healthy attitude to silly babies.

My last suicide was when I was stuck on a point (quite trivial, believe me) in my thesis. I remember lying on the floor and visualizing ( visualize world peace) how I would bring the gun to my head and press the trigger – I was in the military at the time, and probably could get weapons .

But now I'm taking Prozac, so who cares? And I don't admire people who kill themselves again and again and again, like Dorothy Parker, although she certainly knew a thing or two .

From:
« About my birthday this year...

At the same time Liliana got the good news that she must also take a qualifying Psychiatry exam at the end of April. Fortunately, she had been preparing for it for a while, so she got to San Diego on full steam, only to discover that she was not registered (the State of California did the registrations, booked hotels, assigned places and dates, etc.) I would have burst a vessel – beloved wife just spent the night at an Indian casino near San Diego.

So the whole fun got postponed to the end of May; fortunately she passed the exam. Which does not mean she is payed like the 'official' psychiatrists, who get about 20% more...

After only two and a half years

One of the places she works started paying the salary difference – for the whole period, it is true, but it took a federal judge decision to do it, and this only because California prisons are under federal supervision after some inmate sued them successfully (Coleman vs California). The other place is still delaying.

From:
« ... mostly because Shakespeare's dramatic poetry doesn't scan to me.

My latest informed guess is that's because English is stress-timed, and Romanian syllable-timed. That means that in Romanian, as in the other Romance languages, all syllables have the same duration, while in English, all words – no matter how long, each word carries at most one stress – have the same duration. This is also why we, poor aliens, find it so hard to understand spoken English, and so impossible to reproduce it. BTW, was Shakespeare's English stress-timed? A nice thesis subject for when I'm retard – but of course has been done long ago.

I found out about stress-timed and syllable-timed a few years ago. There is also mora-timed...

From:
« ... the furniture – some of it quite fancy ...

The furniture was custom-made by one of our relatives, who was a skilled carpenter. I think I met him in Israel, but don't remember the name. My father even had worked for him for a while – as a Jewish medical student he had got beaten too badly, and decided to emigrate to Palestine and be a carpenter there. But he changed his mind, so I lost my chance of being the Messiah. After a similar adventure, Liliana's father left Bucharest and finished medical school in Italy, but, alas, returned.

In any case, I remember our last night in Bucharest. The people who got our rooms had already arrived, so my father had to take one closet away. I remember how he took it apart – in a few minutes the big monster – I had hidden inside and climbed on it – turned into a few boxes, neatly stacked aside. If I remember right, no tools were needed, everything held together on wood pins.

From:
« ... I hope it's not another example of Soviet science...

Soviet mathematicians and physicists are second to none. But Stalin thought he should interfere in biology, with the expected results. Also, any publication had to sustain loudly that absolutely anything was first invented in the Soviet Union, or at least by a Russian: conservation of matter (Lomonosov), balloon flight (some monk in the 1400), rockets (Tsiolkovskiy), telegraph ( Slonimsky ) aviation, telephone... you name it.

About this kind of Soviet science:
At a surgeons' international congress, each was presenting his most advanced technique. The Soviets came with the subject "Tonsillectomy". Everybody was stupefied – any medical student can do that! But the Soviet surgeon replied: "We do it per anum, in the Soviet Union you keep your mouth shut!"

From:
« I immediately composed a dodecaphonic piece for flute and guitar

And right now composed something like it again, with all the electronic means I have. In principle, I take a series, stick to it its crab, mirror and table forms transposed, and follow this stream, playing chords. Since some chords don't work on the guitar, notes are left over for the flute. With some random choice of volume, duration, etc., sounds tolerable.

The whole thing is a moderate Perl program; it will make a similar/different composition of a few input integers. I am really curious if the chords I produce are really playable (and I tried for easy playing, minimizing left hand motion and using simple strumming in the right hand). But it all depends if I really understood guitar playing, beyond '6 strings, 4 fingers'. Anyway! it was fun for a few days – in good old times it would have been great fun.

From:
« And I misspelled vozjmjot. And God knows what else.

That is, Nabokov. The man was firmly convinced that nobody except him knew Russian.

Actually, I'm exaggerating, my mistakes are probably obvious to anyone, and they could not be considered an improvement, or even a variation, on the original. But in Romanian, I can improve on Eminescu:

Ce mi-e vremea, cind de veacuri
Stele scapara pe lacuri...

The original:

Ce mi-e vremea, cind de veacuri
Stele scinteie pe lacuri...

has a wrong rhythm, at least in my Romanian (Eminescu's language was different, he actually created literary Romanian, more or less like Dante had created Italian 600 years before). And, in conclusion, it's not that I am a better poet, I just like my version of these two verses better.

From:
« fitness and such goyische naches ...
« the eternal student ... a yeshive-bokher

Goyische naches are everything a non-Jew would enjoy, and by implication a Jew shouldn't. That includes, but is not limited to, any form of sport or bodily exertion. A Jewish young man is supposed to be " avrekh meshi", a "silken lordling", i.e. a delicate scholar, to marry at fourteen and be forever sustained by a rich father in law, while he continues being a scholar – no need to continue being delicate, may grow a big belly, must grow a beard and lots of children. All in all, a rather enviable fate, except for the children – but the wife will take care of the brood while the husband studies.
Well, although I am convinced that Judaism is just a one-way ticket to Auschwitz – see here and here and here – I fully agree with the traditional Jewish attitude to sports.

From:
« ... the Hittite king Shuppiluliumas ... lalamis and dusdumis

See, e.g., C.F. JUSTUS, "The Case of the Missing dusdumi and lalami", Minos, 29-30, 1994-95: 213-238, for the Hittite case of Ukkura, "decurion" in charge of transport of royal goods between Hattusa and Babylon, and his son Great-Stormgod, over missing goods, such as mule-yokes. A cuneiform tablet in Hattusa preserves the oaths of the principal parties involved (the accused, accusers and other witnesses) and reference to administrative recording devices (dusdumi and lalami) that could have had evidentiary value. The lengthy record of effectively "depositions" has as its introduction the formal accusation made to the Queen and her official response setting the investigation in motion and authorizing the taking of sworn statements from the "Queen’s elite chariot fighters, her grooms, Mr. Great-Stormgod and Mr. Ukkura...under oath in the temple of Lelwani".

From:
« ...no surprises possible.

Dewey thought that one's beliefs or theories are true, if they shield one from surprise. You know what's all about, if your conclusions don't get contradicted by reality. Too beautiful to be true. I'd dearly love to be shielded from surprise – there are no pleasant surprises, since the surprise by itself means I'm ignorant (wrong beliefs and theories) or plain stupid (can't draw conclusions). So I concentrate on axiomatic systems, like programming or math – where knowledge at least has some clear beginning, and there are no wrong beliefs, although my wrong conclusions are plentiful as berries.

From:
« il conseguente diploma e in corso di compilazione .

That's Liliana's story – when she finished her medical studies in Rome, in the fall of 1973, we celebrated at our first Japanese restaurant, which she hated, and the next day went to the university to pick up the certificates. As we were standing in line , university clerks passing by called everyone "Dottore" "Dottoressa" – how sweet. But they could not deliver diplomas, because the diploma calligraphers had been on a strike, and were behind with their work. So she got a certificate "the diploma is being drafted" and it kept being drafted till some time in the eighties, when we finally got it.

From:
« told me the story of Yak-Tzidrak ...

There were three Chinamen:
  Yak, Yak-tzidrak and Yak-tzidrak-tzidrak-tzidroni.
And there were three Chinawomen:
  Tzimtzi, Tzimtzi-rimtzi, Tzimtzi-rimtzi-lampamponi.
So Yak married Tzimtzi,
  and Yak-tzidrak married Tzimtzi-rimtzi,
    and Yak-tzidrak-tzidrak-tzidroni married Tzimtzi-rimtzi-lampamponi.
And they named their children:
  Yak-Tzimtzi,
    Yak-tzidrak-Tzimtzi-rimtzi,
      Yak-tzidrak-tzidrak-tzidroni-Tzimtzi-rimtzi-lampamponi.

This is a Russian mother goose piece. Try a web search on цидрак.

From:
« I didn't strangle her, however.

My mother had this talent to say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. Like declaring that we are all tired, just as I was in full verve and talking nineteen to the dozen about subjects dearest to my heart. Another memorable occasion was as I was preparing for the final high school exams, sitting quietly and cramming all kind of stuff I had never heard of before – a really interesting and advanced chemistry manual. At which my mother came with "Why don't you go for some fresh air?!"

My father, on the other hand, was much better attuned to me. One time, after we returned from to a party by a lady who had decided I was just fine for her daughter, he said: "The girl has a thicker moustache than you!" – just what I wanted to hear... He, by the way, always wore a moustache, because as a child he had been bitten by a dog and had a scar on his lip. So I have a weakness for moustaches, although I never could grow one.

From:
« ...I deserved a vacation

Now, let's not exaggerate. After the first year of college, I really had a full summer vacation. After the second year, I went to hell to basic training. The third summer was the 6-days War, plus an NCO training from which, mercifully, I was quickly thrown out.

Then I started my Master's. The following summer the military took me only for a 2-week refresher, tolerable, so there was some kind of vacation. After the second year, with the Master done, I got drafted for real, starting with an officer's course, from which, mercifully, I was quickly thrown out.

Then four years of military service, another war, work, children, Ph.D., more work ... I still deserve a vacation.

In olden days, when I found out that Liliana had been accepted in a medical residence in San Francisco, I came for West Coast interviews. From a motel in Palo Alto (that was at least near Stanford – how near was I to Stanford?) I took a taxi to Berkeley. I did not have that much cash, so I showed my credit card to the driver.

– Liviu? that sounds Romanian.

You could knock me down with a feather! An American noticing such stuff must be at least a professor of Romance languages. Of course, he was not American: a refugee from Lebanon, with a Mexican wife... I don't remember if he actually studied in Europe, or East Europe, but that seems quite reasonable, I met an Egyptian student from Budapest at one of my Math summer courses, so why not from Bucharest?

From:
« ... by elephant ...

We had a short walk 'in the jungle', i.e. among the trees, but it wasn't particularly dark or mysterious, and the only exotic animals that we saw were some very pretty butterflies. The elephant also walked into and along a watering channel; we were high enough not to get wet, and I hope she enjoyed the bath (most tame elephants are female; and the heat was horrible everywhere in Thailand, and, of course, even worse in Singapore). I also noticed that most elephants had holes and tears in their ears, like the fringes tomcats get from fighting. I asked why, but did not get an answer.

Later that day we had a picture taken with two tigers.

I had great desire to pull their tails – about 3 fingers thick – but refrained, wisely, even though the poor beasts were chained.

From:
« ...that would make a few places for foreign graduates .

On the other hand, when I was at NPS there was a math faculty meeting, where somebody complained that 40% of the math graduate students in USA are foreigners. And what percentage of the teachers and researchers? USA buys scientists, it is cheaper, and anyway the established American native tends towards law or management, much more rewarding. Also medicine, much less rewarding – but maybe actually doing some tangible good to others counts. Even programming is swamped by immigrants: we went with Jeppesen to a baseball game, and one bench enjoyed the play, while another bench – just as long – strove hard to get it: people from Argentina, China, India, Israel, Russia...

From:
« Experience is what we call our failures.

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never try to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
"A Pig's-Eye View of Literature – Oscar Wilde", Dorothy Parker

And he did. The original is:

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

I thought it was my own deeep insight , but... After which I discovered another of my permanent themes:

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

Both from "Lady Windermere's Fan."

From:
« way to teach math .

Most people I taught – including at UCLA and MIT – studied math because they had to, not because they were in the least interested (in Israel it was somewhat different ). Certainly all my students in Germany – where I taught for the military – would have never taken the courses, if at all possible. And some had very little ability – like using a calculator to divide by ten.

But then they were otherwise decent human beings, forced to do something they hated – like me with basketball. So I treated them very politely – I think this is what Adult-Adult means, and it all worked reasonably well. As for professional responsability – just as much as academic freedom. I needed the money, they needed the grades, and the glory of mathematics – which is quite real, although complex – does not depend on them or me.

From:
« probably visual arts too, but I am less sensitive to that - words fail me .

I can't talk about shapes and colors, so I can't think about shapes and colors.(BTW: Can I talk about music? somewhat, and I can whistle, so music is with me, while painting stays in the museum). But then, nobody can talk about shapes – witness Gray's anatomy that I bought for beloved wife, with all the ridiculous naming of parts – no matter how many words, one still needs the picture. As for colors, would you distinguish "moderate, light, or brilliant violet to moderate or deep reddish purple" (heliotrope) from "strong, vivid purplish red" (magenta)? I'd forget which is which halfway the definition.

From:
« and even could take me seriously .

So I go around telling everybody how my life is just a crock of shit and I am fed up with it. Some ignore me, which I don't find acceptable. Others have to point out that it ain't quite so, for the sake of truth (I can say that in Latin: Amicus Livius, magis amica veritas). I find this even less acceptable: if they can't indulge me that much – notice that I don't ask anyone to fix my life – then let them have their Veritas, or any of the other 6 billion people in the world, and leave me alone.

I always thought maturity means precisely that: can live alone. It is not the ideal life, more managing somehow than living, but if you need others, you're as helpless as a child.

From:
« ...so I was with my friend Bibi in Bucharest, on his terrace ...
« look into the Customs compound from Bibi's terrace.

Bibi, on his full name Strutinschi Valerian, was my friend and school colleague till the fourth grade – then we went to different middle schools. He lived in the same building as ours. His aunt and two cousins moved to stay with them after Bibi's mother died of cancer when we were in second grade. The terrace that I keep talking about lay on top of one or two second floor apartments, so it was quite large, and a great place for us to play.

His family were white Russians, who had escaped the Russian Revolution to Romania, only to be caught by communism one generation later. The family was quite large, I also met some of his uncles who told me some strange stories about the tzar's navy...

From:
« ... all my illnesses ...

Real horror story follows.

About 4 years ago I was talking on the phone with David – after about 10 years of silence. Finding nothing to boast about, I mentioned my health problems... Which reminded him about our fellow students and teachers – in a few minutes he listed 5 or six dead. My colleagues, about my age – could be a difference of about 3 years, if they did their military service before college; our teachers older, but dead in the early sixties! and what a death, brain cancer with blindness first! On top of that, David himself had been diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, but medication helps...

David died in December 2008.

I am surprised how much jewishness there is all over the text; my basic stance being that "I happen to be Jewish", just as I happen to be born in Bucharest or to have diabetes. That is, somehow these are supposed to be accidents and the "essential I" is something else – what? I cannot, as expected, provide any positive answer . Whatever I considered my deliberate choices – mathematics, Israel, music, programming – I just as deliberately dumped, and everything else gets mentioned only to stress how little I fit: American, Romanian, Jew, family man, citizen... What's left? some vague intellectualism, so nobody can stand talking to me.

On the other hand, not mentioning that I'm a Jew would be just as silly as not mentioning my diabetes. Or not mentioning that being a Jew is at least as dangerous as diabetes . (What to do about that is left as an exercise for the reader.)

From:
« she told me ... about the ugmaeetz incident...

Hadasa's father was teaching the children to say "and a smoothing iron" in Hebrew : ומגהץ ; but instead of умагээц they kept saying угмаээц. No use in transliterating into English, or even Romanian. What then? probably nothing, just annoying papa.

But the whole story is so farfetched for me – she told me about Hebrew in Romania, when I had no idea about the language, but of course never could forget ugmaeetz; later in Israel I realized what a revolutionary her father must have been, pronouncing Hebrew the Sephardi – i.e. Israeli – way; typical Ashkenazi Hebrew would be umogeyss. I marvelled about the long tzere ээ and the missing he – in Israel one would say u-mag-hetz; but Russians cannot pronounce H anyway, they only have a very heavy KH sound, and spell Gemingvei (Hemingway) and Le Gavr (Le Havre). On the other hand, there are lots of H in Yiddish, so how come?

Talk about farfetched...

From:
« ... ma cheama Mike la lucru sa-mi spuna ca arde casa,

The fire burnt a hole from the basement through the two floors through the roof. But it did not touch the structural part, so the house is safe. It also did not hurt the building esthetics: the facade, or the fancy living room with marquetry floor and wood panelling. Of course, everything is sooty, and the firemen broke all the windows.

The insurance tells us that they will clean and fix up the house by the end of February – hope springs eternal...

Now every time I talk in English about the fire, I mix up "roof" and "ceiling". Why? even in Romanian the words are distinct. Besides, the Romanian words for ceiling are all exotic:

plafon – from French
tavan – from Turkish (Persian?)
bagdadie – clearly meaning "something from Baghdad"

Very curious, did the locals build uncovered rooms?

What I remember from the military

(besides the essential horror)

Actually, the army didn't bother me too much; compared with the average Israeli, I wasn't in any dangerous situation, nor did I spend much time in service. The main thing I learnt was just sometime in the fields, where we ate our food with the sand and dust very clearly cracking between the teeth. And nothing further happened. So I deduced that cleanliness can take its place far behind godliness, and there is no real reason to scrub your pots, in particular on the outside, or wash your fruit with soap, as our parents recommended.

Which being said, you are heartily invited: I will be always happy to cook for you, as long as you don't tell me what and how. The invitation is for real: I usually like what I cook, so at least I will enjoy it.

From:
« There were also some of our cousins from Jordan or Syria who weren't standing in line.

Arabs are traditionally descended from Ishmael, a son of Abraham, and Jews from Isaac, another son of Abraham. So we are cousins. The fun part is that there are significant genetic similarities between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, which IMHO is odd, because the Jews mingled with (or were raped by) everybody, and Palestine was conquered at least by the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines , Crusaders and Turks – assuming that Palestinian Arabs are local, and don't come from Hijaz. But maybe conquerors don't mix with the lesser breeds conquered, and rapes aren't that frequent. Or what we see is the dominant genes of "everybody".

As for biblical origins, I'm curious if my grandchildren will even hear about that.

From:
« Liliana first found work for a few months in Minnesota ...

She was in Duluth, during the winter. In sunny Monterey, I met around Christmas a guy who was a civil engineer, and had worked on drainage, sewage purification, etc. On hearing about Liliana:
— Duluth?! that's where shit freezes solid!

Actually, that was a rather mild winter. Besides, they were so organized, they never had to go outside (maybe for smoking – but these are Californian ideas, hopefully have not spread so far) The three hospitals where she worked were connected by passages, with restaurants, a gym, and the hotel where she lived. And her salary there was more than we had ever earned together.

So, of course, we did not move to Minnesota.

Fauna

To convince myself that I actually got somewhere else, I have to see what I haven't at home, so exotic animals are a great priority. This time we had our fill of penguins: Magellanic penguins and rockhopers. And on the way to the penguin beach near Punta Arenas we went through the pampas and met a pair rhea / ñandu, the local ostriches. These danced for us: as the bus went by, they rose from the grass, fluffed their feathers and flapped their wings. Later, we saw a condor flying above – too fast for photos, but truly remarkable, huge wings with spread "fingers". They look very much like their Nazca image:

although the stylized beak and tail are too long.

From:
« ... work only four days a week

Letzte Naies

I just went for a checkup, and I am in blooming health, even lost some weight since last time. Which I cannot explain, since I have been eating like a human all the time after the cruise, not to mention the cruise itself. Unless the reason is that I only work 4 days a week (recession!) As I always said, less work, more health – but I didn't expect to have that verified.

Besides, beloved wife gave me for my birthday "The Complete Cartoons of The New-Yorker" where I immeditely hunted for my favorite cartoon

BTW, the cartoon is 20 years old, from what was then a recession. Liliana also gave me "Born to kvetch", which is a very funny book about Yidish, and great reading for antisemites. Then I gathered the energy to ask for the Social Security pension, as I'm finally old enough. Happy birthday!

From:
« ...some terrible brain-misfunction diagnosis, and then it's over !

There was a time when I was very interested in Transactional_Analysis , and somewhat a believer. The thing that hooked me to it was the description of death thoughts; there are two options:

Finally it's over!
I feel I'm becoming God!

(guess which fits me). It fits so well, that I accepted the rest as probably true, especially the very consoling idea that your fate is sealed by the age of five. I tried to be somewhat nicer to my children (under five at the time) and use mostly Adult-Adult interaction – which is probably a sane way to teach math .

From:
« ... asked me why my Ph.D. takes so long

He was not criticizing me – which would have resulted in eternal hate and damnation. He was a particularly nice man – the Romanian expression comes to the mind "bun ca piinea calda" – good as freshly baked bread. And so my answer might have been Marlene Dietrich's number – it was just some mumble.

But I did tell him that my military rank was stable in the sense of ordinary differential equations. That just means "tends to zero with time". I could not be promoted, because I failed officer's course anyway, and would be discharged as corporal.

From:
« and would be discharged as corporal.

Like Napoleon – le petit caporal! Beloved wife, on the other hand, is a full colonel, like Nasser or Gaddafi or Peron, or the generic member of the generic junta, which might explain some of the dictatorial inclinations.

Come to think of it, do you know of any colonel with positive connotation? Even honorary Colonel Sanders may be accused of sabotaging national health.

Now that's not a criticism of Liliana, she is far from being a negative personnage. But, had I thought about it earlier, that would have been a reason to try for general – the Army sent her the application, but she thought it was too much trouble.

From:
« When Nomi was a little girl ...

She was about two or three, and we were visiting Justi's parents in Tzfat, on the way to see the snow on mount Hermon. As we were talking, we noticed that the baby was nowhere to be seen or heard... she was in the other room, rubbing vaseline on the furniture, which was somewhat cracked and scruffy, truly in need of healing.

Once we went to a museum, and were looking at a still life with a bowl of cherries. I asked her if she knew what a "still life" was:
—Life is not a bowl of cherries!

Another time the dentist told her she might need a tongue cradle:
—My tongue is too old for a cradle!

Then she used all her wits to spite us.

From:
« ...Liliana got in touch with computers , because most exam material is now online
computers... become better and cheaper with time

But also more annoying. My beloved wife, who abhorred computers and never touched one of her own free will till about a year ago, of course keeps cursing the machine, but so do I, not any less, and I am a dedicated professional with more than 35 years in scientific and industrial programming (if you believe my CV ). The damn things of course do much more than they used to, but what they can do is so well hidden under the intuitive interface, the information highway, and whatever, it takes just as much effort to do anything. And probably more frustration, cause I get old, old and stupid ! and I don't enjoy the effort any more, can't even believe that once I did, even if I remember so.

From:
« his elder brother Joseph ,

Joseph was probably the adventurous one in the family. After WWI, he left for France, then Belgium, where he married and had children. During WWII he was taken to a concentration camp, but survived – his family did not.

After the war he remarried and lived in Brussels. When it became clear that the Romanian government won't let us leave for Israel, my father wrote to him, to get "lettres d'hebergement" for Belgium – basically Joseph assumed the responsability for us, should we get there. With these papers, my parents went to the Belgian embassy in Bucharest, where they were awed by being addressed as "monsieur le docteur", "madame la doctoresse". But we could not leave to Belgium, either.

When we finally got to Israel, Joseph and his wife visited us, and I also went and stayed with them in Brussels during my grand tour .

From:
« ...and finally I'm on Coumadin

Coumadin is rat poison, generic name Warfarin (make peace, or warfare on rats) It prevents blood clotting, and is dangerous enough to require blood level measuring forever, initially once a week. I was very much against, and beloved wife even more so – she has had pacients with brain hemorrhage from Coumadin. As I am quite accident prone...
Fortunately, there is a new drug, "Pradaxa", which does not need this lab tracking, but is expensive ($150 per month, vs Coumadin at 5$ per month) Even more fortunately, our military insurance covers it, so I'm on Pradaxa. May be considered good news, plus a sign of the general progress of humanity.

From:
« My mother ... and the other girls at the University

They were girls, and would have been insulted if called "women", because they were unmarried. Only one of my mother's friends married before graduation; but she had always been somewhat of an original, wearing short sleeves to class! Her husband was also from the same student group; they emigrated to Palestine, where he actually served in the British army during the war. Eventually they became wealthy dentists in Haifa. In their house I saw the first Encyclopedia Britannica.

From:
« After a similar adventure, Liliana's father left Bucharest and finished medical school in Italy

He was my mother's colleague, and the same age. There had been talks about them marrying each other, but it did not work (otherwise I would have been my wife). This is why our families kept apart in Bucharest; but were really glad to meet in Israel, where we lived one block apart in Holon.

I always taunt Liliana – "Think what a great husband you could have found, had you looked farther than the next block!"

From:
« Language expresses what is socially expedient.

How I hate the idea! but that's that. Or, maybe, maybe, I think it's true because I hate it ...

But language is when someone speaks to someone else, so it is a social act. So is sex a social act. Strangely enough, friendship is also a social act, but that does not spoil it for me. Probably because there are imaginary friends, although I never had any. Actually, due to newimproved techniques, there are virtual friends, or at least virtual audiences.

From:
« then I bought a melodeon, then Liliana bought me an electronic organ ...

This one was another marvel of technology, and could play three distinct timbres – one a very sour "reed" imitation. It had its oscillators grouped by three, so you couldn't play, say, C and C# together, or C and B – a severe limitation of my non-existent harmonic sense. Its range was four octaves from the viola C up, so maybe my fugue would fit on two violas? Any takers?
But in Israel, of course, the organ was taxed as a luxury, so after Liliana bought it in Italy I had to wait for some happy event to actually get it – a customs strike, or an immigrant willing to bring it.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun with it, as did my friends (organul lui Liviu).

From:
« ... got accepted to Applied Mathematics , at Tel-Aviv University

In Hebrew מתמטיקה שימושית "matematika shimushit". With obvious associations to בית שימוש "beit shimush", "a house for use", i.e. a toilet – the word "shimush" merely means "use". So when I got my permanent residence through labor certification – my employer proving that it has to hire me because there are no qualified U.S. citizens available to fill the position – I could say: מצאתי שימוש למתמטיקה שימושית "I found a use for applied mathematics!"

As for other uses, see Hardy's opinion – that was a real mathematician, although too fond of cricket.

From:
« The Finnish alphabet goes a,d,e,g...; no wonder Sibelius was a violinist .

The strings of a violin are tuned e,a,d,g. The letters b,c and many others are not used in Finnish; g itself may appear only in the group "ng", as a variant of "nk". For instance, the genitive of "Helsinki" is "Helsingin", as in Helsingin Sanomat ; but the word for "Greece" is "Kreikka". The language is quite extraordinary, and remarkably sweet sounding (as opposed to its near relatives Estonian and Hungarian). So it served Tolkien as a model for elves' speech.

As for Sibelius, I like him very much, and I think of him as a descendant of Tchaikovsky, which is high praise, because I love Tchaikovsky, too. Sibelius had the misfortune of living late into the 20th century, and being denigrated by the modernists .

From:
« I don't want to live forever, I want ...
« ... dupa cum am mai spus, vreau numai imposibilul ...

In general I only want impossible things : like not to work, or wake up after eight. I never thought "If I had a bigger TV / a bigger car / a bigger house how happy I'd be!" Not even "a bigger computer", and I'm addicted enough, but it is not speed or bells and whistles that I miss – rather ease. "If I had a paid-for house"... that would make me happy, because it's impossible.

So I had great doubts about our recent trip to faraway lands, as I feared I only would get disappointed, because it was not exotic enough. But I quite enjoyed it, and beloved wife dreams ever since about the next cruise.

From:
« All the cities are huge – 10 million people, 20 million ...

And now they have one town of 30 million! These numbers are more or less guesses, because although they can count the population officially registered as living in a certain place, there are many more unofficial and illegal residents, plus commuters, especially in the big cities. For instance, our guide said that Bangkok has 10 million inhabitants – but the Wikipedia says that during the day there are 20 million people in the city (we have seen them all crossing the street, while our bus was waiting to move ahead).

From:
« my son ... Reuben

Email from favorite son:

FW: Account Suspension Warning: llustman.com; This is your Web Page account?
From: Ruben Lustman (rlustman@hotmail.com)
Sent: Mon 5/21/07 12:41 AM
To: llustman@hotmail.com

Hi dead, this is your web page you need to pay them it was attached to the British Card.
This is so much fun :/ Keep getting overdue notices.
From: Hosting-billing@cc.yahoo-inc.com> To: rlustman@hotmail.com>Subject: Account Suspension Warning: llustman.com
Date: 16 May 2007 16:51:44 -0700 This is an automated notice. Replies to this address will not be received. If you have questions, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care. For your protection, Yahoo! will never ask you to provide your billing information via email.
Dear Reub Lust,
This is the third notification to inform you that your Yahoo! Web Hosting Starter account is past due.

Freudian?

From:
« I am surprised how much jewishness there is all over ...

Just as I was surprised, 30 years ago, how much Romanian lore stuck to me. I was writing my diary in Hebrew then... very different from reading Hebrew, I was put off by the literary language, stinks of the Bible – but my version, or Kishon's for that matter was OK. However, to keep to the point – over the time I realized that what really sticks is just childhood. By and large, not a bad thing, my childhood was lovely, even though in Romania. Not particularly healthy – almost everybody is a stranger almost everywhere, but the majority of people aren't minorities.

From:
« ...Yahoo (search engine, etc.)

Nobody noticed what yahoo means?

Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy. ... Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head; however, I escaped pretty well by sticking close to the stem of the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth, which fell about me on every side.

But of course, some stink helps with publicity.

From:
« learnt cho=dog, meo =cat.

About the same time, we got a Siamese cat from some friends, and called her Meo – seemed quite appropriate, like calling a Swede an Italian . She was very beautiful, lean with sharp dark points, loved to climb straight up on our lace curtains, and stole chicken chunks from the soup boiling on the stove. Meo had a few lovely kittens from stray toms in the yard – one that I remember in particular, all black with long, silky fur, so fine that it almost looked flimsy.

From:
« Happiness is the state which you don't want to change.

This I discovered under the table, at tanti Matilda's. I was sitting there with Justi and Yolanda, quite satisfied, when I suddenly realized what happiness is. At the time I thought that philosophy should provide the recipe for happiness – well, at least the definition of happiness.

You can deduce my age then, and maybe marvel at my unchanging views. Or I might say that my life experience since has not provided any data which would change my views.

From:
« ... she did not get promoted ,

At that time, the Army was convinced they had too many physicians, and the right solution is to pay for civilian medical services. In any case, while Lilian was in the Army, military medical care got definitely worse, first cutting services for dependents, then for personnel.

Not to mention physicians' conditions. The first time she ever contacted the military was in Virginia, after she got her American licence. As a civilian, she would do calls at Ft. Eustis, because the military doctors did not do calls in those happy times. Not so in her military times...

From:
« the Hebrew literary language – stinks of the Bible

Nothing wrong with the Bible – quite readable, even in translation . I tried it at 13, in Romanian (or French? can't remember... that is Freudian) Bibles were not readily available, the whole idea of religion was not quite kosher in Romania. Anyway, I preferred the New Testament – it seemed better written then; but there were enough strange stories and exotic stuff all over. However, when I knew Hebrew, I quite enjoyed the literature.

This is a schematic of the streets around my house in Bucharest. It shows the location of my first schools and, more importantly, Justi's house. I never met Filip in Bucharest, but he used to live somewhere near the "Rond", now renamed "Queen Mary". The region was not very high tone – in particular, Ferentari was where the gypsies (now renamed Roma) lived.

See a more detailed map here. Also some satellite pictures, including street labelling.

From:
« ...places we missed, besides the obvious Machu-Picchu and Cuzco

There was a possibility of a side-trip to Machu-Picchu, but one has to fly in a small plane to the mountaintop, which beloved wife is very much against. The price was also quite noticeable. But the real problem is altitude shock: unless you take about a week to gradually climb up – preferably chewing coca leaves all the way – the local thin atmosphere will make you really sick, in particular if you already have heart trouble. Not to mention the dreaded HAFE! So I contented myself with virtual travel.

From:
« I can't open my mouth without being asked " Where are you from ?"

That's the American reaction. The French correct me, and Italians don't care. Viva Italia! Romanians that I meet for the first time compliment me on my language, but when Justi arrived to Israel – two years after I had left Romania – he made a lot of fun of my accent. Would I go unnoticed in Bucharest after 45 years? would I go in Bucharest at all? In Hebrew I thought I spoke like everybody, till I got to the military after 5 years in the country, and they said I sounded like a Romanian.

From:
« ...few useful things...

I was never good at anything useful or practical, but at that time I was also a child, and none of the clerks and officials we bothered with would have even looked at me.

This did not improve with time. My attitude about all the messy details of real life – and what is not included here? – is: leave that for later. So my parents, and my wife and everybody else dealt with it, just because they could not wait till I would. For which I am not thankful.

The latest example was when my mother got Alzheimer. All I could have thought about is to take her to live with us. The practical solution – finding a senior home, getting her there, undoing her home, renting the house – was done above me, mostly by Edith. All I did was the weeping.

From:
« ... bartered the medieval way ...

"bartered" is the wrong word – this was the normal medieval banking system, you gave some money to the Jew in London, and got it back from the Jew in Vienna. And, if you were noble enough, you could also confiscate all the money of all the Jews in London...

Anyway, this is the Marxist explanation of Judaism: why would the Jews, hated and persecuted everywere, hold so tightly to their identity. They were a banking network – this is what our socialist teachers in Maabarot taught. It makes some sense, but is too logical. People cherish their beliefs for very unreasonable reasons, and hate each other just for being other.

From:
« ... Liliana got assigned to Wuerzburg,

Wuerzburg is, of course, a beautiful town in Franconia. In addition, at the local university, Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895. So there is on the campus a Roentgen museum, where you can see all his expriments and diplomas. The loveliest is some honor certificate from 1900, where the clerk started 18.. and then had to correct, with a big crossmark at the bottom of the fancy calligraphed form.

I should try and steal his identity, at least our birthdays are the same.

From:
« ... Romanian ... school books, ninth to eleventh grade,

I used to read some of them in Maabarot, especially at the beginning, when it was clear that we were lagging behind school program – we were just learning Hebrew. Then I lent them to a friend who left the kibutz. He, of course, disappeared and the books with him. But in the meantime I could use Hebrew textbooks just as well. Actually, the material required for finals was at a much higher level than my Romanian manuals.

From:
« they brought me... kumquats from China, a tangram ...

Called tri-uan in Vietnamese, if I remember right, modulo a few hooks. It had a booklet with translations into French, Russian and English, where I was surprised to see the pronunciation чи-уан, and learnt cho=dog, meo =cat. I started right away to memorize the various constructions – it didn't cross my mind I could try and discover them, and in fact I couldn't. However, I had a wonderful memory then.
Eventually, they took the tangram back, to some toy factory, to serve as a prototype for the Romanian tangram. Haven't seen any of those.

From:
« Much better not to try than not to succeed .

In my case, anyway. If I remember a few successes, my failures I can't forget; they keep rankling and pester me forever, and each and every one chops permanently a bit of my self-esteem and ability. That's the advantage of being young, you haven't failed much yet and can believe in success.

Francis Bacon is of a different opinion, q.v. , so what shall I answer? Bacon ain't kosher.

Beloved wife, alas, is also of a different opinion, and keeps telling me how I poisoned poor children's mind with such ideas. What can I answer? If our children listened to what we say, they would all be doctors.

From:
« Live and learn – I have nothing against the latter, the former...

A few years ago there opened a little mall near us in San Jose, which I rather like, because there usually is parking and there isn't too much fancy stuff (read: expensive clothing/accessories) Useless stuff I am all for: what other possible gifts? Near the gift shop, they also have an arts and crafts shop, where I quickly bought a sharp blade, officially for wood carving. I still keep it in my briefcase, although beloved wife explained that cutting your veins is very inefficient suicide. Maybe arteries...

From:
« I certainly could not hear the difference ...

Except for that, it was remarkably simple to debug my editor just by listening. Certainly classical music will easily let you spot wrong notes, even if you cannot distinguish chords – my case. Now modern music is something else, but then, who cares? By the way, my dodecaphonic music has almost Palestrinish harmonies – at that time I thought that any interval of 1,2,6,10 or 11 semitones is a definite no-no! Hadn't found out about V7 and vii7b yet...

From:
« ...being a Jew is at least as dangerous as diabetes .

Notwithstanding the official American position, it's unsafe to be different!

So, how come that all my life I never felt the need to be like everybody else? Probably I knew that I can't , and saved myself the effort of trying – but that assumes too much wisdom. Actually, as I got to Israel, at 14, I decided that I must at least go to parties, like a normal teenager. Net result? I went once. In my youth was a fast learner.

Conclusion? – not quite five paragraphs... is a conclusion OK? let's call it

Corollary: If you're different, at least don't advertise it.

From:
« ... learn, then know forever ...

Strangely enough, can be done, if the subject is limited and useless enough, e.g. high school trigonometry. The feeling which I had at the high school finals, that I can solve any trig problem – it is just manipulation, and must end up right – is something that I still long for. No matter that I did not feel much like this since.

This is a good reason of learning all kind of procedures by rote: they can't take that away from me! They can't, I forget all by myself.

So right now what I mostly say is "I don't know!" with the proviso "I'll never know", because if I ever find out, I'll soon forget.

From:
« ...went to Italy, where Liliana was waiting for her last exam .

Waiting somewhat the way we're supposed to wait for the Messiah... In Italy in those ancient times, exams – always oral – where held whenever the professor had time – no scheduling months ahead. That particular professor had a busy meetings season that year, so he was absent from Rome all the summer and nobody even knew when he would return, much less about examination dates. Eventually the exam was held some time in October. In the meantime we toured the Mont Blanc and Switzerland, then rested for a week in Ischia. Ognuno s'infischia dell'isola d'Ischia!

From:
« In the meantime I got drafted, into the Atuda , and started my military training.

The Atuda is the Israeli version of ROTC: instead of getting drafted at 18, you may study, but must go through basic training, NCO course and officer course in the summer breaks. So, after 3 or 4 years, the military gets an officer who is a college graduate; as a reward the officer also has to sign for additional years of service, but that, at least, is paid. In my case it was one year, and I served a total of four. Medical students would sign for six or seven, because their studies lasted six years or more.

Anyway, this was in the good old times. I have no idea what the arrangement is now.

As I was blossoming at my corruscating prose, beloved wife returned from the gym: "Let's do the laundry!" Without any notice that I was in the middle of deep thought, and in the middle of Beethoven's second. I prefer to think she's unaware, the alternative is unthinkable. To keep the illusion, I say nothing. Or keep the illusion that I say nothing.

Besides, on a CD Beethoven is easily restarted. And it may well be that my inability to listen to music is just perfectionism – on the Media Player it is impossible to set the volume once and for all so Beethoven won't be too loud or too soft, and I'm annoyed by the need to attend.

I remember the first pages of Genji, how his mother was of such a low rank, that she had to walk in the palace, instead of being carried on a litter. Despite Violetta's famous literary talent, I did not get any further in that book, but this part stuck. So I shocked a few of Liliana's colleagues – she had just joined the military, and everybody was into running – with "Gentlemen walk sedately, or are carried!".

From:
« ... the first dead person

Actually, I saw the dead brother of one of the kids in the yard, who had died as a baby. I was in first grade or so, and it did not unduly distress me. According to custom, the corpse was laid on the table for a while, and people "paid their respects". So we get the Romanian saying:

What do beer and mothers in law have in commmon? both are best cold, on the table.

On the other hand, Nomi, at age three, saw a dead bird on the pavement as I was taking her to kindergarten, and went completely hysterical. What could she know about death? How?

From:
« ... But the students did not particularly like me ,

Then eventually I found out what students expected, and did it, and everything went smoothly. For one trimester I was even popular, and the students invited me to a Christmas party, to which I promptly answered I had a previous engagement. Quite automatically, and completely untruthfully, and not because I had anything against the students in general or that particular group. Why then? Because I am that I am, like Popeye or the Lord of the Universe.

From:
« ... yesterday before today before tomorrow

Myself, when young, read Huxley's "Eyeless in Gaza", where the chapters are not ordered chronologically. That annoyed me so much, that I added, after every chapter "GOTO page" (I was learning FORTRAN at the same time). But, of course, it was a novel, with a plot, and it really mattered what had happened before. At the time I liked Huxley enough to read again and again, till it made sense.

From:
« ...there is also a "Cabbage waltz" by Slonimsky .

This guy is completely extraordinary: not only did he live to be one hundred, but also composed a concerto for belly-slapping and orchestra. Among many other contributions to modern (i.e. 1920-1930) music, and to my vocabulary: quaquaversal.

Any of his books, especially the autobiography, is fun, the music... I don't think humor can be expressed musically. See (hear!) also here.

From:
« ... and the program does what you tell it to do (not what you meant, alas!)

This is why I was addicted for such a long time to programming. The computer is the only thing in the universe that does what it is told! Anything else exists just to spite you – buttered toast always lands buttered side down – and everybody else knows better, and must argue, and must object, or at best just ignores you.

From:
« One of the many gems one can find on the Internet

« HOM MANI PADME HOM!

A lotus is pretty enough, but a jewel in the lotus really makes your day. So here are some more jewels from the net:

A cup of Java
Jewish mothers, with Jewish sons (obviously)

Shoshandukht
Nurbanu Sultan
Khadija Muazzez
Bezmialem

Mollusclever
Just deserts

Polish Sahara?
Oltenian Sahara??

Jewish cossacks???
Jewish Roman war no. 1½. Never heard of that (even in Israel) till I saw it on Wikipedia.
Invidia medicorum
Invidia medicorum bis

From:
« Papina
« ... because Papina wouldn't

She was our charwoman – dare I say servant? on her full name Eumenov Agripina, but I was a baby so it got to be Papina. Actually the name was quite a mouthful, for on her ID card she was Harpina – that clerk couldn't manage Agripina either. She was from Tulcea in Dobruja, and of Russian origin, as her name shows – there had been Russians living in Romania, before the white Russians who fled the communists, because they belonged to some obscure sects not allowed in Russia. Papina could speak some Russian, and taught me жопа, хамно, саки, The rest of my education had to wait till Maabarot, where I found about хуй, залупка and, to my great astonishment, пизда.

From:
« Shoshana is also called after aunt Roza.

Shoshana is "rose" in Hebrew.

No it ain't! Shoshana is "lily" in Hebrew, so the right English translation is Lillian, or Susan, or the Spanish Azucena. Rose would be Varda in Hebrew, for a girl, or Vered for a boy.
Anyway, my full "torah" name is Levi Shoshan ben Baruch Tzvi; shoshan being the same lily/rose, but also a nail head (did I get hit enough?).

From:
« what a beautiful ... Freudian slip ...

Actually, as I go on typing this masterpiece (doctorpiece!) I find that the typos are not particularly Freudian, mostly missed letters and anticipated letters – e.g. "withe the". Still, the results are sometimes funny.

Does the anticipation mean anything – except that my mind is faster than my fingers (I should hope!) ? Somehow I expect some terrible brain-disfunction diagnosis, and then it's over ! The missed letters are just that, I don't press hard enough ( oprime el pulsante )

From:
« Sweat is the dirtiest thing .

I got this as a revelation when I was 15 or 16 in Maabarot, and we were doing some pre-military training. It dawned upon me that I want to spend my life in comfortable clothing, without sweating. Somewhat succeeded.

Yet another profound thought: you don't have the option not to shit, but you do have the option not to sweat.

From:
« conquered at least by the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines , Crusaders and Turks

Yes, Byzantines count separately from Greeks and Romans, e.g. they had Slavic troops and Viking mercenaries. There is a Bedouin tribe originating from Vlach slaves sent by the emperor in Constantinople to St. Catherine monastery, on mount Sinai! Vlach only means "Romance speaker", but they might have become, just as well, Romanians.

From:
« ... I can even enjoy Spongebob

Actually, some of the latest cartoons are quite clever, although ugly as sin. But in the good old times...

We used to get one Popeye each week on Israeli TV, and I deeply appreciated it, especially the fixed pattern : Olive flirts, Blutto gets fresh, Olive yells "Popeye, save me!", Popeye loses the fight, then eats spinach, then wins. A never changing plot, so you could concentrate on the ingenious details: how do they fight, how does Popeye get his spinach. It seemed to me an art form, like a rondo going AABACA ... Or maybe I was just young.

From:
« complimenting her "how fat you are, how well you look !"

This may sound as a post facto justification, but I seem to remember from my childhood the combination "grasa si frumoasa" – fat and beautiful. Certainly the ideal women were far from slim, e.g. Marylin Monroe in "Some like it hot", with a waist like mine. And "A long day's journey into night" is about the 1910s ...

I also remember visiting the Heidelberg castle, when the guide insisted how the local prince and Winter King was shown much fatter than he actually was – because thin was for the rabble.

From:
« finished high school ... the traditional way in our family

None of us finished high school by staying to the end. I took "external" final exams, and so did Liliana when she found out how that worked for me. Mike also took some exams and was done with high school by sixteen, and, being bugged enough by us got his associate degree before 18. Even though we kept bugging him, for the bachelor's il conseguente diploma e in corso di compilazione .

From:
« I'd rather dump it like all my projects

The real problem is that I cannot tolerate failure, especially since I'm convinced I cannot learn anything anymore (certainly cannot memorize anything anymore). So how many times will I lose and restore my precious Chinese characters, before I dump the whole project? And I hardly dare add anything, for fear that it will break what I already have. And, God knows, I broke it enough, and fixed it, and fixed the fixes...

From:
« ... reality is for real
« - Parca n-am destule probleme si fara epistemologia mă-sii!

Epistemologia mă-sii. Ba nu, tontologia.

How real is the absolute thruth of mathematics? Some of its most beautiful creations exist only by definition; the Banach space without a base exists because a long involved proof; you can't stumble upon it like a boulder which exists because it broke your toe.

From:
« useless knowledge , art – all weak drugs, but

I used to boast to my children "I know everything – provided it's useless!". Not too far from truth.

I think the purpose of all education is not to prepare you for life, rather to serve as an antidote to life. Nothing prepares you for real life – nor should it, too painful– but it is nice to have something else to think about besides debts and taxes, e.g. Yanaon, Chandernagore, Karikal, Pondicherry, Mahe.

This list I inherited from my mother. She had learned it by heart for school, and never forgot. Then, one day she mentioned it to me, and I never forgot either – we were probably very much alike.

From:
« Well, at least in Romanian I am the proverbial educated native speaker

That creature is supposed to have linguistic competence, i.e. can judge if an utterance is right (correct, acceptable, "well formed", etc.) or not. I added educated because I am mostly interested in languages that have a large literary corpus, which must be familiar to anyone who passed through school. But just try a net search on "educated native speaker" or even "native speaker" – e.g. here , to see how controversial the whole idea is.

On the other hand, "non-native speaker" is a clear-cut practical classification. I can't open my mouth without being asked " Where are you from ?"

From:
« depend on them or me.

Still, to still my conscience, I showed every class the proof that the square root of two is irrational. And I told them that it was the only bit of mathematics in the course.

Probably because I had once been nicknamed Pythagoras. Which profound philosopher, beside his brilliant insight about reality and proof, originated by square root two, also believed one should not eat beans. Me, I love beans, they're good for your heart...

From:
« ... and telling him "Don't you know of something positive to do...

The fact that I was so open shows how intimate we really were, because usually I shut up like an oyster. Not very apparent, however; if the subject is myself, I cannot stop chattering – in particular to an abstract Internet audience.

From:
« If not Alzheimer, then Parkinson , which I'm sure to get because I never smoked.

As I gathered from Oliver Sacks , Parkinson's disease is this inability to start an action. Don't take my word for it, see the net.

On the other hand, my beloved wife, who, among her many accomplishments, is a board certified neurologist tells me that smokers do not get Parkinson. The one case I knew, tanti Pepi , fits: she did not smoke.

From:
« I never could find anything positive to say about work

Ce qu'il y a de merveilleux
Ouvrez braves gens les oreilles
Ce qu'il y a de merveilleux
Ouvrez braves gens vos grands yeux
C'est que le travail ne soit plus
dans le monde socialiste
C'est que le travail ne soit plus
Une honte un poids comme il fut. 


          Louis Aragon, Hourra l'Oural

And I almost forgot

From:
« "Na liang qi-che shi hei se de", "Na liang qi-che shi lan se de", etc.

that car is black ... that car is blue

That is, if you also supply the correct tones – maybe you can, I can't. By the way, I found this pearl on the net: "Chinese tones are child's play" ; indeed you must be a child to get them, for an adult (me) they are both imperceptible and inimitable.

From:
« Which made me prince Hohenzollern ...

Not really.
The Romanian ruling house was deprived of its Hohenzollern title, when Romania fought against the German Empire during WWI (the Kaiser was himself a Hohenzollern). Or so I heard, but then the Wikipedia has Michael bestowing Hohenzollern titles on his sons in law; they also call him Michael I, when I remember silver coins with Michael II, so I don't know what to think anymore, and will keep worrying all night every night.

I cannot even read silly thrillers – I get too tired, as the characters act and act in action novels. The worse is at the end: I see that the pages get fewer, end everything must soon come to a stop, instead of which the plot usually becomes more and more frantic. So usually I just dump them well before the end and rush to the computer.

The end reversals remind me of the "topologist's sine curve"; but, come to think of it, the curve is a good model for history, or art history. The nearer you get to the present, the faster and more violent the changes.

From:
« Dostoevski

In Romania the Russian authors were, of course, the most and greatest, so when I escaped I decided, very sillily, to ignore them completely. Still I dutifully read through the Brothers Karamazov, because Rozalia had sent me the book, but I was less than impressed. It took a long time till I read any Russian writer, in small doses (i.e. "The Kreutzer Sonata", "The Overcoat", but not "War and Peace"). One day, however, I found "The House of the Dead" on the Internet and devoured it from end to end, even though I cannot read anymore. So there is something to it, probably the lack of soul searching.

From:
« Ce nu cade din cer n-are nici o valoare.

Very roughly translated, "If it's not a windfall, it's worthless".

This is something that I believe deeply: if you toil for a thing, if you pay for a thing, you don't become richer when you get it. It's just a swap, like everyday work: I exchange eight hours of my life for money. On the other hand, I am infinitely richer because Mozart existed – and what could I have swapped for that?

From:
« ... to my great astonishment , пизда

What do you know! "Pizda" is the same in Romanian and Russian, as the Romanian word is of Slavic orgin – but it might well be inherited in both languages from the original Proto-Indo-European! See the venerable Pokorny PIE dictionary, items 831, 146, 819, 829. Prehistoric obscenities, treasured for 5000 years!

And apropos, I thought that "putain" is just some slangy form of "pute". Wrong! "Pute/putain" (likewise "gars/garçon") are ancient forms, from the happy time when French had cases, and for these nouns the nominative and oblique had distinct stems. Live and learn – I have nothing against the latter, the former...

From:
« ... the damn fugue
« ... my first musical work in progress was known as "Shein ietzire"

Here is the fugue, but, as advertised, the sound is between ugly and unbearable, and that after serious tinkering with instrumentation. By the way, and without implying any justifiable comparison, I found a wonderful site about the Well Tempered Clavier – a true work of love, plus excellent teaching.

The fugue is op.3, here are some more: op.1 (the famous Scheine ietzire ) and op.4 (op.2 is too fishy). These are somewhat longer, and may well tax your forbearance; the numbering is chronological.

From:
« Ti faccio difenestrar !

Or, if you prefer:

    Bella figlia dell'amore,
   Schiavo son dei vezzi tuoi;
   Con un solo dito puoi
   Il mio pene consolar.
   Vieni, e senti del mio cuore
   Il frequente palpitar.

Alas, it doesn't work in French! PENE, with one or two n-s and various accents on e may mean feather, lock pin, bunch of strings, a beam or mast, and some other technical items, anything but ... Otherwise, "J'ai le coeur en pene" would be the best summary of most French belles lettres and movies.

From:
« Nomi ... ramine agresoarea
« Poor Nomi! she will always be the intruder

Which reminds me of the Falashas – wretched and opressed, but the name means "invader".

Wikipedia translates "exiles" or "strangers", but "invader" is "polesh" in Hebrew, and that's the same word: vowels don't count, and F is a variant of P.

From:
« We were still all living in the same apartment...

There were three rooms: one was my mother's dentist office, the largest served as waiting hall for patients by day and bedroom for my parents by night, and in the last one I dwelt, with my grandmother. When I fussed about the arrangements, one of my colleagues at the university said: "You know, we don't have grandmothers". She was from Poland, most of her family had been wiped out in the war.

From:
« protruding and curving upwards like medieval pigases.
« incovoiata si ridicata-n sus, de parca poarta vaca conduri .

One picture is worth a thousand words; here are two:
http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/plants/toxicagents/selenium.html

http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/004/X6512E/X6512E18.htm Fig. 5

From:
« ... I could not find lutefisk

This is fish soaked in lye, a Scandinavian treat. If successful, it is some kind of jelly, if not it is soap. But I discovered – on the Internet, of course – one better: hákarl, a fermented poisonous shark from Iceland. No longer poisonous, it just smells of ammonia strong enough to gag you, so you should taste it while pinching your nose. Bon appetit!

From:
« Is palladium more expensive than platinum?

Palladium costs less, although it is rarer, as you can see in the brown spot below:

          with translation for the chemistry challenged:
         Au – gold
         Ag – silver
         Pt – platinum
         Pd – palladium

From:
« ... in short art is artificial .

Miss Prism.    Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
Cecily.    Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Miss Prism.    The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

The Importance of Being Earnest

From:
« Poetry is what is lost in translation, therefore meaning is what is conserved in translation...

Now this is a neat example of mathematical thinking. To justify that "therefore", at least a paragraph of proof is needed, and philosophers would write volumes. But as literature it can stand as is, leave the reader to his wondering and wonderment.

From:
« apropos models

Actually, apropos the scientific method.

A scientist trains a cricket. When he says "Cricket jump!" the cricket jumps. Then he pulls out two of the cricket 's legs. He then says "Cricket jump!", and the cricket jumps. He pulls out two more legs, and the cricket still jumps as trained. But after the scientist pulls out all its legs, and says "Cricket jump!", the cricket doesn't.

Conclusion:

A cricket without legs cannot hear.

Which is perfectly valid, since crickets' hearing organs are tympanic membranes on their knees.

From:
« Everybody is right all the time .

Anyone does what he does for some reason that he thinks valid, and can even state the reason to you. So all people are right all the time , including myself, although I am convinced I only make mistakes, and the less I do the better. Liliana, on the other hand, is convinced that she would do everything she did again, because it was right to begin with. We should agree to disagree, but she won't.

From:
« as far as I can tell the Peking opera looked authentic

So how do I know? As part of the local immersion program, I read the newspaper (supplied by the hotel) and even turned on the TV in our room. And I caught a Peking opera channel, so I knew more or less what to expect. The interesting thing is that it had Chinese subtitles – maybe the sung language is not understandable, like any opera, and certainly it is the wrong dialect for some people.

As for news, I got the following:

From:
« Maabarot belonged to Hashomer Hatzair – Mapam party

Here are some references; like everything concerning Israeli politics, the real story is incredibly complex – at any time there were between 15 and 30 parties and political movements, at daggers over minor theoretical points and major power issues.

MAPAM : former party
Hashomer Hatzair: youth movement

And then, I don't like Israeli politics because I know something about it; only politics that I don't know about doesn't stink.

From:
« ENGLISH, IMHO

If you noticed, I'm compulsively quoting. This is because I am never sure that my expressions are quite right. And I am speaking as I write, so certainly many things I say are stilted or just wrong. But if I quote " the best authors "... Besides, that was a poetic feature in medieval Hebrew poetry: bits and pieces of the Bible scattered through the text, a procedure called "shibutz", bejeweling. But it may well be they were just as insecure in their Hebrew as I am in English.

From:
« ... when my father retired ...

He was over 75, I think. But then, he had his first heart attack at 74, and I started at 52 ... I don't know if his mind was getting weaker – I could not tell, and he did not believe it, certainly did not say it. Unlike me.

From:
« – but all under complete sedation...

Now what sane person would sleep away one month (say) of his life? I would, of course, and much more than one month, but

A normal person would probably count on finding some kind of extra fun, to compensate for the annoyance of dieting. I, however, live at the maximum possible fun (which of course is much, much less than what I want). In any case, I cannot think of any additional fun thing to do – actually I cannot think of any undisgusting thing to do – so I'd rather sleep (and dream, no Hamlet).

From:
« ... if she did not sleep at night, Liliana was at the casino ...

One night she was staying late, and hit a jackpot, but the machine did not have enough coin to pay, so she needed a casino assistant to help. Alas, the casino personnel had already gone to bed! She watched that machine all night, so some stranger wouldn't come and cash the winnings, till I decided to look for her in the morning. That's divine justice for you! When she saw me, she rushed to the bathroom relieved, then we took turns watching the machine till the casino workers finally appeared.

From:
« ...like building the fatherland

That was Israel, some of our parents and grandparents had done just that.

"Fatherland" sounds somehow wrong, should be "forefatherland". It's also sexist, and "motherland" no better. The Hebrew word מולדת is even worse in this context – its root is ילד "child" or "birth", and very few of the people who built Israel had been born there.

There are also in Israel, on the way to Jerusalem, two communities מולדת א׳ and מולדת ב׳ i.e. Motherland one and two. Which makes me think of me and Romania and Israel and USA... I had patriotic feelings for Israel, and left it just the same.

From:
« ...developed all the dirty tricks

And I mean dirty. I was trying to hit the toilet bowl in the dark, standing, with the results you can imagine. It took me a long time to realize I could sit down.

More reasonably, I covered the toilet window, so the toilet would stay dark. There is light during the summer at 4 o'clock, which I certainly don't want to see. Actually I don't want to be awakened by light at any hour. By the way, in Israel bedrooms had quite efficient blinds, which actually blocked the light, so I didn't have to mess with those windows.

From:
« so our marriage started in small doses

Fortunately, the academic year in Italy was brief: starting in October and ending in May, with nice breaks for Christmas and Easter. So we did not pine and languish overmuch. It has rather contributed to the stability of the marriage.

From:
« ... etymologically, work is punishment ...

Etymology is the most attractive part of linguistics. As a sample of its offerings, here is this doughty lady of paradise.

It is also the most useless, as it emphasises the incessant, often startling, change in sound and sense. So it has very little to do with how language is used for communication, with meaning. But, obviously, it was the thing that hooked me to linguistics.

În română, vezi: "a desmierda", "un puşti".

From:
« ... corrugated iron buildings

Valparaiso, Chile

Punta Arenas, Chile

Caminito, Buenos Aires, Argentina

This last one is from a poor region in an Italian quarter of Buenos Aires. They used corrugated iron because it is cheap, and painted it with left-over paint bought from ships. But that particular street, Caminito, has been turned into an open gallery, which all the gaudy colors just make happier.

From:
« ... Liviu? that sounds Romanian.

Here is the secret: any name ending in u (and Latin sounding, i.e. not Maddhu or Sabu) is usually Romanian, e.g.:

Alexandru Claudiu Corneliu Dinu Doru Dumitru Flaviu Horatiu
Iuliu Laurentiu Liviu Nelu Nicu Octaviu Ovidiu Petru Pompiliu
Radu Sandu Septimiu Sergiu Silviu Tiberiu Valeriu Virgiliu

From:
« We are better described as killers than workers .

That is, in Semitic morphology. The root QTL = kill is much more regular than P`L = action. In Hebrew, the roots produce qotel="I/you kill, he kills, killer" and poel="I/you work, he works, a worker". Traditional grammars use P`L for Hebrew (and the related F`L for Arabic), but QTL would be simpler.

From:
« or radiolaria and acantharia , or the etymology of "nice",

If any of this makes you curious, you have my heartfelt blessings – go and find out, it is truly Alice's trip through the looking glass! You will also find me, young, bright and hopeful.

From:
« As we were standing in line

There were also some of our cousins from Jordan or Syria who weren't standing in line.

I fully agree with the attitude – waiting in line is a personal insult. At a restaurant or theater or whatever they should wait for me, not me for them.

On the other hand, I learnt Italian standing in line. One day, when we had to wait for hours for some carta bollata , I started reading one of the famous "gialli", meaning "yellow books", meaning whodunits. By the time we got out of the line, I knew Italian.

From:
« Dear Reub Lust,

"Reuben Lust" is rather profound biblical exegesis. Reuben, the first-born, lost his primacy because he bedded Bilha, his father's concubine (Gen 35:22). But then Robert Graves comes with the theory that in good old matriarchal time men became kings by bedding the queen, so maybe it was not plain lust, he wanted to be the patriarch. See also the story of Absalom, the son of King David (2Sam 16:22).

From:
« ... sa ma spal ceva mai des decit la Bucuresti.

Washing in Bucharest was a rather serious project, one had first to boil the water in the bathtub tank – there was no other source of hot water. That involved lighting a big gas burner under the tank, which I was not allowed to do as a child. As for the gas, it was bought in containers, that we had to lug up and down the hill from the Rond, where the supply shop was. In the winter, the gas container rode on my sled, and, while I was small enough, I rode on top of the container.

From:
« So we went and had lunch...

That was the epilogue of our far east trip. We were quite near to Chinatown, and went to Kan's for pressed duck – alas, they don't make it anymore! In China we couldn't find pressed duck, just Peking duck, which Liliana doesn't like. The guide said we could buy pressed duck as a staple at the market, but one cannot bring food to US. So God is against!

From:
« and when I see myself in a mirror ...

I took great care not to say "I look in a mirror". I don't, but sometimes, unwillingly, I see my reflection in one of the many mirrors ambushing me – even outside Versailles.

From:
« Ciupercuţe saprofite
Care-ncearcă să profite

A saprophyte lives on decomposing organic matter. And in good old times, when I read and listened to music, I felt I lived on Mozart or Burgess or Apollinaire, except that they had to compose, not decompose. I would be glad to be a parasite (that lives by exploiting a living organism) except that most of my life sources are long dead, and no living person would be dumb enough to be parasitized by me. The verses are from my school days, when fungi were plants, mais nous avons change tout cela.

From:
« ... beneficial lack of certainty in politics ...

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell.

I love this bit, especially the bowels, especially in the bowels. It came from a dictator, but should be addressed often to any ruler, body politic, and any kind of busibody – especially to disinterested ones.

From:
« The vase broke, of course, but I decided I could fix it

In contradistinction to beloved wife, who cannot stand anything even minimally damaged, and throws it away on the spot. She inherited this from her mother.

I always make big noise: "First have the replacement ready, then throw the thing away!" Which helps like all the noise I make.

From:
« sôle a l'amiral

That's a classic fish garnish of mussels, oysters, crayfish, and mushrooms in sauce normande, enriched with crayfish butter. And the mushrooms must be ciselled, and the mollusks served in elegant little patés, and sauce normande is a fish veloute with mushrooms and oyster liquor, thickened with egg yolks and cream, and enriched with butter... as I said, simplicity has nothing to do in the kitchen.

From:
« ... the Selk'nam have been massacred a long time ago ...

They were warlike and avoided contact with Westerners. The settlers treated them as pests, and organized hunts against them. One (in)famous enemy of the Selk'nam was the "king of Tierra del Fuego" Julius Popper, a Jewish engineer born in Bucharest. Before he got killed at 35, he had a private army in Patagonia and minted his own gold coins.

From:
« The hero of these paragraphs is me – but Djerassi published first!

Which is quite in keeping with the rest of the novel, which quickly evolves from the bathroom to the problems of scientists of the Nobel caliber.

As for me, I neither published nor perished, but then I am no scientist.

From:
« toti copiii au zis "aviator", asa si eu. Conformist ca mamere .

Unlike Thoreau, my father used to say: "If you march to a different drummer, everybody will step on your feet". Which is a partial consolation for being a conformist, like my mother – she couldn't even imagine a different drummer.

From:
« as a Jewish medical student he had got beaten too badly...

My mother had a similar story: she, and the other Jewish girls at the University would go as a group, escorting one male Jewish student to the tram station, then return and pick another. This way the men would not get beaten – the hooligans were that much gentlemen. Actually they were no hooligans – the Law students beat the Jews in Medicine, and vice versa.

From:
« the pampas

I keep talking freely about jungles and pampas, but probably the terms are all wrong – there is Atlantic forest, cloud forest, steppe, Magellanic subpolar forest, cool semidesert, God knows what.

From:
« then I bought a melodeon ...

That was about one foot long; you could blow at one end and push keys. Each key had its own vibrating hole, so you could even play chords – maybe you could, but I couldn't, my technique being strictly one fingered. Very maybe, one finger each hand; and then, which chords? Even the cat walking on the keyboard outvirtuosos me, as it uses all its fingers (and toes).

From:
« ... they are remodelling our building

I always say: till the roof doesn't fall on you, put off remodelling.

And another story: in the ancient days in San-Francisco, we used to go to open houses – beloved wife found it amusing. So we found a one-floor house in St. Francis Wood – with another four floors continuation in the ravine. The price also four floors beyond the expected; then the realtor added: "And think how wonderfully you can remodel!"

From:
« Nothing takes less than half an hour.

That was my (very silent) response to orders in the military "You have 15 seconds to be on top of that hill!", etc. Currently, nothing takes less than 45 minutes. For instance, if I take a lunch break, I never remember to timepunch before 45 minutes, even if the break lasts less.

From:
« ...she wouldn't even sleep in the old bed she shared with the cat

Beloved wife sleeps in the living room when she is on call, so all the phones she gets won't wake me – for which I am infinitely grateful. For that purpose, she first bought a sofa, which proved unconfortable, then a folding bed ; if there were any space, I am sure she would buy some more. From the bed she watches "Law and Order" till lulled to sleep, like a true teenager she is.

From:
« Nee Hadasa Vyrtikovski, somewhere in Bessarabia (Ungheni?). Her father ...

During the war, Ada's parents and the whole local Jewish community were gathered in the synagogue and burnt alive.

From:
« the ancient sacrificial formula "I give so you give too", talking to God in Latin .

When Nomi was a little girl , somehow I mentioned Latin, and she asked what it was:
—An old language.
—Does Mimi speak Latin?
Mimi was her great-grandmother.

From:
« limba a nu-stiu-cîta, dupa rusa, idis si ebraica...

Yiddish doesn't count. What do you mean? It doesn't have an army and a navy, but has some great literature. Still it doesn't count, just as Nnapolitanu and Nuormand and Ripoarisch don't count – too ugly, too ridiculous.

From:
« Not to mention how cheap it is to break the rules.

As profound as:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have vanquished every teacher - we have broken every rule

However, it really happened to beloved wife – her middle school burnt down; imagine the joy coming one morning and not finding it there!

From:
« Bach's French suite no. 6... a scale algorithm !KY 4# ...

And I expect you to rush to the Bach French suites score, to discover that the 6th suite is in E-major, so it has 4 sharps in its key.

From:
« ... some are not republics, e.g. Nepal

Nepal became a republic, more precisely a Maoist republic, as everybody longingly desired. But recently, the Maoist-led government was toppled ...

From:
« All I could blurt was: "But this is not what mathematicians should do! They should produce theorems !"

אז ארצח מישהו – סוף סוף יהיה משפט לוסטמן

Unfortunately, this only works in Hebrew: "I'll kill somebody, then there will finally be a Lustman trial". The same word משפט is used in Hebrew for trial or theorem, so I'd get my theorem, at last.

From:
« Tanti Pepi used to say " a iesit coinul din tine "...

And that kept puzzling me for a long time. What Cohen? I am not called Cohen. Till I discovered that my mother's family name Catz – I thought that meant cats – actually is a Hebrew abbreviation for "Cohen Tzedek" – the priestly/royal clan of Aharon and the Maccabees. As befitting such a noble origin, the Cohens are supposed to be irascible and bossy.

From:
« ... not only because of pickaxes, jackhammers, power-drills ...

At which I discovered that I don't know how to say jackhammer and power-drill in Romanian. In fact, I don't know how to say that in English either, but I can use Wordnet and look at hyponyms of "power tool"...

From:
« ... sa fii tata

Vater werden ist nicht schwer,
Vater sein, dagegen, sehr.

Nice exercise on werden/sein. Means: becoming a father is not hard, but being a father really is.

From:
« it means I will die at the end of these 18 years .

If you cannot follow the arithmetic, it means you're still in primary school, or an ignorant boor. Or so it meant when/where I was in school.

That's the insane way to teach maths, but does it feel good!

From:
« ... find it so hard ...

‘...and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable –"’
‘Found what?’ said the Duck.
‘Found it,’ the Mouse replied rather crossly: ‘of course you know what "it" means.’
‘I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,’ said the Duck: ‘it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?’

From:
« At that time we were on our way out of Romania ...

In order to prepare for the expected Israeli climate, one day Justi and I lay in bed covered with all the thick down pillows we could find. I should mention it was August in Bucharest, as hot as August gets.

From:
« ... was returning to the library

This is the San Jose public library, combined with the University library, on the same block with our appartment. When we first moved, I considered that a big attraction, but I very seldom get there – the computer is at home. Still, from time to time, there are some unexpected finds at the library.

From:
« ... the microscope ... was held in customs.

The Bucharest customs was right next to our building. It was surrounded by a tall brick wall, and had a gated entrance, with military guard. But we could look inside from Bibi's terrace. Down there were the customs building, including a railway spur; there grew some big acacia trees. The only time we went into the compound was when we left to Israel.

From:
« ( visualize world peace)

I was very hard put to translate "visualize" into LAN : "pretend see" ? "do as_if see" ? Still pending. As for world peace... You need the Aleph .

From:
« ... reading the encyclopedia, not the newspaper...

The composition of feldspar won't change, nor the athematic Sanskrit verbs.

From:
« The first, maybe the only duty of a work of art is to be unforgettable .

This is why all the muses are daughters of Mnemosyne.

From:
« ... This is what God would have built if he had had the money

I have frequently heard this about Hearst Castle; but Shaw said it – if he did – about another Hearst property, a medieval castle in Wales, which was remodelled (probably) just as furiously as San Simeon. We used to go to Hearst Castle reasonably often from Monterey, but lately – five years? ten years? – we didn't get enough tourists.

From:
« ... I tried to read the Greek signs ...

The magic of Greek – besides polyphloisboio thalasses – is that you can enter a restaurant in Athens and request a trapeze for two atoms – i.e. a table for two individuals. This one I found in Slonimsky.

And on the streets there are lots of cars labelled "metaphora" – merely means transportation, I have actually seen some in Athens.

From:
« grades good enough to get a grant for next year

And, of course, this is what I expected from beloved children (in my dark little heart I believe they could)

No inkling that American higher education institutions give grants on need, not on merit, and their main interest is to get paid.

From:
« A story ends for ... practical considerations.

That seems almost obvious, but, e.g., Lady Murasaki probably never intended to finish "Genji's Tale". Besides, there are all the comics, cartoon strips and movie sequels and prequels – but maybe that ain't art.

From:
« Orange jumped and climbed all he could, and left his shit everywhere.

After poor kitty healed, I cleaned the room – i.e. what I could see. Liliana remembered about the shit on the top of the closet a few months (years?) later, one day when we had guests from LA; so I vacuumed it off then.

From:
« It's always " tanti "

"Tanti" is a kid's way of addressing an adult woman in Romanian. It means auntie and is pronounced just the same, to a t.

From:
« diabetes started 4 years ago, high blood pressure 10 years ago, now the CABG ...

CABG stands for Coronary Artery Bypass Graft, and is pronounced cabbage. CABBAGE is, of course, a musical theme, used so by Anthony Burgess in "The Pianoplayers" ; there is also a "Cabbage waltz" by Slonimsky . And my composition, too.

From:
« waiting for some carta bollata ,

That is, a document on stamped paper. There is also "carta libera", paper without stamps, give me liberty , or give me death, or a tuna sandwich (hold the taxes).

From:
« Fashion is there to be ignored.

In Hebrew there is the expression לפי צו האופנה for "fashionable". Literally it means "according to fashion's command". What's the fashion, that it should command me?

From:
« ... something that I believe deeply

Deep, sincerely held belief in something does not make it true or right.

From:
« In general I only want impossible things : like not to work, or wake up after eight.

What exactly is impossible? It was not impossible to be a tenured professor – it just did not happen. But it was clearly impossible to be a millionaire – I should say a rich millionaire, cause I have been a poor millionaire already: our apartment in Israel was worth a million Israeli lira at the peak of inflation (about $30000).

From:
« ... various versions of my Chinese name ...

It turns out that none of the "Lu" that I picked are actually used as a family name (although the dictionary says so). Xiaoyin Zhou, a colleague of Liliana picked some others "Lu" for me, which I proudly deciphered from her handwriting (try it sometime). Here they are:

From:
« Then she used all her wits to spite us.

The real word is "davka" – untranslatable, but ask any Israeli. "A ose davka le-B" more or less means "A, in order to annoy, does exactly the opposite of what B expects". It fits wonderfully the Israeli national character. On the other hand, it's not quite Hebrew, but Aramaic, and the literal meaning is "precisely", somehow stretched into "precisely the opposite".

From:
« Sincere, deep belief in something does not make it true or right.

Here I must quote Mencken (qv). He was a journalist – i.e. automatically beneath contempt, still:

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.


			Oops! this is Thailand! Maybe you meant Costa Rica...

From:
« ... telegraph ( Slonimsky ) , telephone... you name it.

This Slonimsky was the grandfather of that Slonimsky.

From:
« I cannot ... provide any positive answer .

Actually I can: the essential self is the sum total of all prejudices. Tat tvam asi .

From:
« Blatant lack of interest in food .

Eating is the only thing about which I feel adventurous. It is clear to me I should never try new things, except new food – maybe not cockroaches as street snacks, as they do in Thailand, still... If anybody asks me what I want to eat, the answer is "something I haven't tasted before", so I never get taken to a new restaurant .

From:
« and later a house after Nomi was born.

From:
« After which she didn't kill herself, nor did the laundry.

After a few such experiences, I gave up on her. I fully entertain the illusion that I'll never ask her to do anything for me.

From:
« ... we caught two typhoons, so we did not stop in Vietnam ...

For my part, it seems much more fitting for Vietnam to get typhoons rather than American tourists.

From:
« There is also "carta libera" ... give me liberty

During his European stay, Mike had this to say about Freiburg and Fribourg: One for freedom, one for McDonalds!

From:
« (no apology to Edith Piaf) :

L’amour, c’est l’infini mis à la portée des caniches et j’ai ma dignité, moi!

Besides, she lifted the text from Chicken Little.

« See the Sixtine Chapel; the fresco is entitled "Creation of the Sun and the Moon".

From:
« .... the Pokorny PIE dictionary, items 831,146,819,829.

PIE here is Proto-Indo-European – simple as pie. But I remembered listening to a MacDonald comercial in Spanish ; when the speaker got to "pies" he pronounced "piés" – "feet" – then burst into laughter.

From:
« ... if they exist, they are inaccessible

which is just a technical term: they cannot be obtained by arithmetic operations on smaller cardinals.

From:
« for correcting homework .

For instance, in the second year I was checking the first year students' exercises. Strangely enough, the same mistakes I had made just one year before now seemed glaringly obvious, as if already marked in red. Maybe that's professional maturity.

Or the same exercises every year.

From:
« every Jewish girl is a Jewish princess...
« the other kids ... nicknamed me Pythagoras. Somewhat prophetic...

Every Jew is either a prophet or the son of a prophet.

From:
« ...with the traditional Jewish attitude to sports.

I also have the traditional Muslim attitude about the future: it belongs to Allah. If I mention some prospective goal, it's just a challenge to God to spoil my plans, and what do you think, will he succeed?

From:
« ... in nici un caz n-o sa ma citeasca.

Souls are like arseholes,
  everybody has one,
    nobody (except professionals and perverts) is interested in someone else's,
      and few have looked into their own.

From:
« ... Genji ... Despite Violetta's famous literary talent...

The name of the author, Lady Murasaki, translates as "purple".

From:
« This is a plan – not accurate ,

Suddenly, at age 59, I realize that room(1) was actually beneath room(2) ! The building was supposed to have shops at street level, and living quarters above. Under (3) there was a tailor's shop, under (4) a pharmacy, etc. There was no zoning in those times/places, and people would live where their business was.

From:
« – quite appropriate, like calling a Swede an Italian .

I'm quoting here. Whom? I do expect you to search the Internet.

From:
« "twice cabbage is death"

One of the many gems one can find on the Internet, when not looking. I was puzzled initially, because I like cabbage, and cannot imagine it as bad as to be lethal. There's ancient literature for you – and a good hint for suicide.

From:
« I would think: "If I could make money, I wouldn't be a mathematician .

I am not.

From:
« "shit" and "arse" on the first page

Palivec byl známý sprosťák, každé jeho druhé slovo byla zadnice nebo hovno.

And when we got to Prague I think I saw some of of the taverns from the book. BTW, these are called "pivnice" , which in Romanian became "pivniţă" sounding almost the same, but meaning cellar or basement.

Rejoice, rejoice greatly!
(שישו ושמחו)

This masterpiece is already novel size, over 50000 words. And I counted words fairly, after discarding HTML stuff.

Of course, nobody reads it.

From:
« ...eating, too, is a prefaced action. I can't go on, I'll go on .

And in Israel, Samuel Beckett was considered humorous enough to be broadcast on Purim: I remember one evening of "Happy days" – minus the Fonz – on the one channel of the national TV.

From:
« the first time I heard my voice...at MIT

From:
« ... because I love Tchaikovsky

A listener asks: Is it true that Tchaikovsky was homosexual?
Radio Yerevan answers: Yes, it is true, but this is not the reason we love him.

From:
« ...don't do what they want,

And I also realize why I always do the most useless things I can think of: to make sure that this is my own free will, and I don't do what others want, because it certainly couldn't be of any use to others.

From:
« On a motorcycle, however, you can see the whole family riding, father mother and children...

In China there is the one child policy – per family, not per motorcycle.

From:
« Friday, colonoscopy – rosy as the future

But what misery to get such rosy guts! One day of transparent liquid diet, plus 32 – thirty two, count them! – proctoscopological pills, some to be taken at 4am !

From:
« ...si nene Miron"...

"Nene" is a Hawaiian goose – not quite, it's "uncle" in Romanian; this is how a child will call a male adult.

From:
« I passed the external exam

From:
« I was trying to hit the toilet bowl

Inscription over the fountain:

We aim to please
You aim too, please!

From:
« if I quote " the best authors "...

I also keep quoting myself.

From:
« ... in the fall of 1997 we returned to Monterey

From:
« 6 billion people in the world...

There were 4 billion when I was in school. Sounds ominous!

From:
« La diatribe est l'attribut de la tribade de la tribu .

Four "trib"s with three etymologies! But I'm sure there are profound minds who will assume the phrase has something to say about life, or the sociopolitical situation, or the universe.

« Positive thinking.

If I say "I will succeed", then fail, I'm a stupid failure. If I say "I may fail", then fail, I'm a wise failure. There is also the possibility to succeed, but why worry?

From:
« ...no central character ... who is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work in order to make a living

Why else ?

From:
« old and stupid !

I can say that in Malay: lama tua lama bodoh. "Bodoh" even sounds stupid.

From:
« brought me to NASA Langley
« Then I got a job at NASA Langley , in Hampton, VA

As delicately hinted – see highliting – the supreme achievement is toilet paper.

Which reminds me an old cartoon:

– Do you think that all my achievements are behind me?
– Don't say that while coming from the restroom...

From:
« ... rhea / ñandu, the local ostriches.

The fact that there are ostriches in Africa, rheas in South America and emus and cassowaries in Australia suggests that the three continents were once united in Gondwana.

From:
« ... after some unwelcome delay , found a job

From:
« ... there was no chance to leave Romania

This is why I believed in God as a child: only God could take you out of Romania. And once he did his job, we parted ways.

Both Argentina and Uruguay display un-heraldic flags: the rule of tincture is broken, with a sun or (yellow) on a field argent (white). So here is a newimproved Uruguay flag, if this is what you meant.

From:
« ... so I got announced that there is a RIF (reduction in forces) ...

Which reminds me how I found out what a riff was, in the military bookstore in Wuerzburg – I was looking at a jazz guitar handbook.

From:
« the opera... turned out to be in Finnish

When I can catch by mistake a Finnish opera on the radio, I will become an ardent American patriot.

From:
« ... the conquistadors beheaded each other.

From:
« I was in the military ... probably could get weapons .

Nowadays all Israeli military carry a weapon when off base, and many civilians too.

From:
« ... I learn, and then immediately forget ...

see "learn, and know forever"

From:
« Won't sell 'im to anyone ...

...unless they give me 27¢ in stamps.

From:
« I couldn't do any of the required stuff – like run ...

The only part of me that runs is the nose.

From:
« bis repetita placet

But:

Numero deus impare gaudet = Le numero deux se rejouit d'etre impair.

Giovinezza, giovinezza

So I'm eighty three! I fully agree, I fell just as tired and dull. On the other hand, the right honorable IQ = 133 it gives ( 83/62.2 in percents ).

When your life is on the go — take your life with you. Try Windows Mobile® today

When your life is on the go — take your life, period.

From:
« the king's communist government

The Romanian communist government was first installed on March 6th 1945.

From:
« the written language of " the best authors "...

from the very lovely Handbook to English Heraldry, on Project Gutenberg.

From:
« records in some apartment in Jaffo ...

Sir George's aptronym. (XXX rated)

From:
« Then I thought some more about Orwell, Dickens, idleness

A longer quote from the essay:

... He has an infallible moral sense, but very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us – that he has no idea of work.

With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely Dickens himself), one cannot point to a single one of his central characters who is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work in order to make a living and to marry the heroine, not because they feel a passionate interest in one particular subject. Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, is not burning with zeal to be an architect; he might just as well be a doctor or a barrister. In any case, in the typical Dickens novel, the deus ex machina enters with a bag of gold in the last chapter and the hero is absolved from further struggle. The feeling 'This is what I came into the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this even if it means starvation', which turns men of differing temperaments into scientists, inventors, artists, priests, explorers and revolutionaries – this motif is almost entirely absent from Dickens's books. He himself, as is well known, worked like a slave and believed in his work as few novelists have ever done. But there seems to be no calling except novel-writing (and perhaps acting) towards which he can imagine this kind of devotion. And, after all, it is natural enough, considering his rather negative attitude towards society. In the last resort there is nothing he admires except common decency. Science is uninteresting and machinery is cruel and ugly (the heads of the elephants). Business is only for ruffians like Bounderby. As for politics – leave that to the Tite Barnacles. Really there is no objective except to marry the heroine, settle down, live solvently and be kind. And you can do that much better in private life.

Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens's secret imaginative background. What did he think of as the most desirable way to live? When Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up with his uncle, when Nicholas Nickleby had married money, when John Harman had been enriched by Boffin what did they do?

The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas Nickleby invested his wife's money with the Cheerybles and 'became a rich and prosperous merchant', but as he immediately retired into Devonshire, we can assume that he did not work very hard. Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass 'purchased and cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit.' That is the spirit in which most of Dickens's books end – a sort of radiant idleness. Where he appears to disapprove of young men who do not work (Harthouse, Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his reformation) it is because they are cynical and immoral or because they are a burden on somebody else; if you are 'good', and also self-supporting, there is no reason why you should not spend fifty years in simply drawing your dividends. Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the general assumption of his age. The 'genteel sufficiency', the 'competence', the 'gentleman of independent means' (or 'in easy circumstances') – the very phrases tell one all about the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie. It was a dream of complete idleness.

But I think that this is just another version of "and they lived happily ever after" from the fairy tales. The novel has to end somewhere – a formal requirement that turns it into a work of art, rather than a newspaper column – and the total stasis "nothing ever happens" is the equivalent of a musical full cadence. It is quite clear to me that in order to live happily work has to be banished, because, after all, work is what you don't want to do, but must. It's not that Dickens has no idea of work – he has my idea of work.

The same, more geometrico:

Axiom. Happiness is the state which you don't want to change.
Axiom. Art must contrast with real life.
Theorem. A story must end.
– Why must a story end?
– Because of practical considerations. Besides, it is a work of art.
– So?
– A work of art must contrast with real life. In real life there are all kinds of things happening haphazardly. Since the story deals with somewhat plausible "real" events, it needs an obvious structure to contrast with life. So it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
Theorem. A story cannot end unhappily, unless everybody dies (your typical tragedy).
– Why can't it end unhappily?
– Because happiness is the state which you don't want to change. So if there is unhappiness, and somebody can do something about it, there will be change, and the story cannot end, but should go on describing it.
Theorem. If a story ends happily, it shows " ... the spirit in which most of Dickens's books end – a sort of radiant idleness ... "
– Why idleness?
– Because this is precisely what happiness means: a state you don't want to change, and don't have to change, so nothing is done.

Now here is a possibly original idea, expressed twice, first in 100 words, then in 200. I thought I had something to say about the oyster bed, and I would have written an essay myself, if I could. But all I can do is explain my idea till it is clear (read: clear to me) then write it down. Basically, the text just gets shorter, certainly not an essay.

« THE DIALOGUE OF PESSIMISM

A classic text – http://www.gatewaystobabylon.com/myths/texts/classic/dialoguepessimism.htm – with my Romanian version.

I- DRIVE TO PALACE
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– Quickly! Fetch me the chariot and hitch it up. I want to drive to the palace.
– Drive, master, drive! It will be to your advantage. When he will see you, the king will give you honors.
– O well, slave I will not drive to the palace!
– Do not drive, master, do not drive! When he will see you, the king may send you God knows where, He may make you take a route that you do not know, He will make you suffer agony day and night.

II - BANQUET
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am
– Quickly! Fetch me water for my hands, I want to dine!
– Dine, master, dine! A good meal relaxes the mind! ...
– O well, slave, I will not dine!
– Do not dine, master, do not dine! To eat only when one is hungry, to drink only when one is thirsty is best for man!

III - HUNT
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– Quickly! Fetch me my chariot. I am going to hunt!
– Drive, master, drive! A hunter gets his belly filled! The hunting dog will break the bones of the prey! The raven that scours the country can feed its nest! The fleeting onager finds rich pastures!
– O well, slave, I will not hunt!
– Do not go, master, do not go! - The hunter's luck changes! The hunting dog's teeth will get broken! The raven that scours the country has a hole in the wall as a home. The fleeting onager has the desert as his stable.

IV - MARRIAGE
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– I want to set up a home, I want to have a son!
– Have them, master, have them! The man who sets up a home ...
– How could I set up a home!
– Do not set up a home; otherwise you will break up your father's home!

...

VI - REVOLUTION
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– I want to lead a revolution!
– So lead, master, lead! If you do not lead a revolution, where will your clothes come from? And who will enable you to fill your belly?
– O well, slave, I do not want to lead a revolution!
– Do not lead, master, do not lead a revolution! The man who leads a revolution is either killed or flayed, Or has his eyes put out, or is arrested and thrown to jail!

VII - LOVEMAKING
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– I want to make love to a woman
– Make love, master, make love! The man who makes love to a woman forgets sorrow and fear!
– O well, slave, I do not want to make love to a woman!
– Do not make love, master, do not make love! Woman is a real pitfall, a hole, a ditch, Woman is a sharp iron dagger that cuts a man's throat!

VIII - SACRIFICE
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– Quick! Fetch me water for my hands and give it to me. I want to sacrifice to my god
– Sacrifice, master, sacrifice! The man who sacrifices to his god is satisfied at heart. He accumulates benefit after benefit.
– O well, slave, I do not want to sacrifice to my god!
– Do not sacrifice, master, do not sacrifice! You will teach your god to run after you like a dog. Whether he asks of you "Rites" or "Do you not consult your god?" or anything else!

IX - BUSINESS
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– I want to invest in silver.
– Invest, master, invest. The man who invests keeps his capital while his interest is enormous!
– O well, slave, I do not want to invest in silver!
– Do not invest, master, do not invest! Making loans is as sweet as making love, but getting them back is like having children! They will take away your capital, cursing you without cease. They will make you lose the interest on the capital!

X - PHILANTROPY
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– I want to perform a public benefit for my country!
– So do it, master, do it! The man who performs a public benefit for his country. His actions are exposed to the circle of Marduk!
– O well, slave, I do not want to perform a public benefit for my country!
– Do not perform, master, do not perform! Go up the ancient tells and walk about. See the mixed skulls of plebeians and nobles. Which is the malefactor and which is the benefactor?

XI - CONCLUSION
– Slave, listen to me!
– Here I am, master, here I am!
– What then is good? To have my neck and yours broken, Or to be thrown into the river, is that good?
– Who is so tall as to ascend to heaven? Who is so broad as to encompass the entire world?
– O well, slave, I will kill you and send you first! –
– Yes, but my master would certainly not survive me for three days!...

cu versiunea mea in română:

Un domn isi cheama sclavul si fac proiecte:
– Poate ma apuc de politica?
– Buna idee, zice sclavul.
– Dar n-o sa-mi fac dusmani si mizerii?
– Nu merita politica, zice sclavul.
– Poate umblu dupa cocoane ...
– Ce minunat si-ncintator!
– Dar daca umbla ele dupa mine sa-mi puna coarne si tapete si ...
– Lasa cocoanele, zice sclavul.
– Poate filozofia ...
– Foarte profund, zice sclavul.
– Parca n-am destule probleme si fara epistemologia mă-sii!
– Nu-ti pierde timpul ca alde Gîgă, zice sclavul.
– Si atunci ce sa fac?
– Rupe-ti gitul si sari in Eufrat! (culoare locala)
– Stii ce? poate incerci tu intii, zise stapinul.

unde urmeaza clou-ul cuneiform: sclavul raspunde "Crezi ca ai sa-mi supravietuiesti trei zile?", ceeace cere interpretare. Era Oblomov? moare de plictiseala? ce stiu eu...

« ROMANIAN , ETC.

Bine-am ajuns, sa bocesc la nunti. Cica nu din sentimentalism, de prea multa cultura: ceremonia se termina cu un pahar spart, spre amintirea templului din Ierusalim, distrus si nu inca reconstruit. Cu o referinta directa la psalmul 137:

Daca te voi uita, Ierusalim,
Sa-mi uite dreapta
Sa mi se lipeasca limba de cerul gurii daca nu-mi voi aminti de tine
Daca nu voi pune Ierusalimul deasupra celei mai mari bucurii.

Cu citeva minute inainte se binecuvinteaza Domnul "care bucura mirele cu mireasa". Ce mi-a dat lacrimile este textul complect al psalmului (doua trei linii pe ecran in ebraica, noua versuri):

Pe riurile Babilonului, acolo am sezut si am plins amintindu-ne de Sion.
De salcii ne-am atirnat harfele
Cind cei ce ne-au inrobit ne-au cerut muzica, cei ce ne-au distrus, veselie: Cintati-ne din cintecele Sionului!
Cum sa cintam cintecul Domnului pe pamint strain?

Daca te voi uita, Ierusalim,
Sa-mi uite dreapta
Sa mi se lipeasca limba de cerul gurii daca nu-mi voi aminti de tine
Daca nu voi pune Ierusalimul deasupra celei mai mari bucurii.

Tine minte, Doamne, Edomitilor ziua Ierusalimului,
Cind spuneau: Darimati, darimati pina la temelii!

Fiica Babilonului pradata! Fericit cine o sa-ti rasplateasca dupa cum ne-ai facut!
Fericit cine va apuca si sfarima pruncii tai de stinca!

Originalul e mai complicat decit pare, de asta am adaugat si o traducere oficiala (bineinteles ca a mea imi place mai tare) De exemplu: "sa-mi uite dreapta" e foarte ciudat, findca in ebraica complementul direct e obligatoriu "maninca piine" si nu "maninca" singur. Aici verbul sta gol, si chiar cu alte forme posibile, de exemplu "sa fie uitata" tot straniu suna. "Fiica Babilonului pradata" e o alta curiozitate. Forma verbala e participiul trecut, ca si in romana : "care a fost pradata", "care e pradata", desi referinta e la viitor, ori optativ "fire-ai pradata", ceeace de altfel nu exista in ebraica. Si in fine "ne-am atirnat harfele de salcii in ea" care "ea" nu se refera la nimic precedent – genul si numarul nu se potrivesc. Poate "ea" e Babilonul, ţarile sint feminine, ca si cuvintul "ţara" sau "pamint".

Dar toata filologia nu acopera ferocitatea si primitivismul tribal, si, deasemenea, pasiunea si poezia. Dupa care vine rabinul politically correct sa explice ca pentru cei doi insuratei, paharul spart de fapt inseamna ca s-a terminat viata veche si incepe alta ... ideea americana ca religia e ceeace ti se pare, daca-ti convine. Ei bine, nu; daca are vre-un sens (ceeace eu nu cred) e exact sfarimatul pruncilor de stinca.

Dar daca deja, sa trecem la ceva mai vesel: cintecele de nunta sint in buna parte inspirate de "Cintarea Cintarilor", care e de fapt o prelucrare poetica a obiceiurilor populare: musafirii se adunau si cintau lauda mirelui si a miresei si alte cintece de dragoste:

Ape multe nu pot stinge iubirea, riurile n-o clatesc...

(nu o spala, si in sensul "a clati = a zdruncina". Intimplator cuvintul ebraic din versul asta e chiar cuvintul comun pentru a clati vasele, dar inrudit si cu "inundatie" ). Dupa care deodata mi-am dat seama ca pot spune asta in bască:

Amoria ...
Suiak bano gaizkiago erra diro gizona ;
itxasoak ez iraungi eratxeki dadina.
Amoarea ... mai rau ca focul arde omul; marea nu poate stinge ceeace arde.

Nu ca as sti bască; nimenea nu stie bască. Legenda spune ca dracul a incercat s-o invete, dar s-a lasat dupa sapte ani. Carmen, in schimb, o rupea binisor, cu care i-a intrat in gratii lui Don Jose, Navarro fino. Toate astea fiindca Merimee, ca si mine, era nebun dupa limbi (vezi, de exemplu, Lokis) si chiar a terminat "Carmen" cu o discutie despre cuvinte de origine tiganeasca. Mult mai elegant decit amor,Amor,AMOR!!! – in general nuvela e chiar mai buna decit opera, care e stralucita.

From:
« ... ma invirteam in bucatarie ...

Man Bobă

Adica bunica mea. Cred ca nici macar nu-i corect, ar fi trebuit sa fie "mane bobă", dar se potrivea mai bine cu cintecelul:

Mambo, mambo
man bobă
mambo, mambo!

Si in orice caz eram convins ca idis se poate vorbi oricum.

Cind o birfeam, era boboroanţă sau babiornis. Dar ii cintam si

Man bobă klein
Man bobă şein
Man bobă mexicană!
Man bobă şein
Man bobă klein
Man bobă mulă hein!

ceeace, nu stiu de ce, ii placea ("mulă hein" e idis/ebraica biblica, in romana eleganta "plina de har").

Double, double toil and trouble...

Printre bunici, doar pe ea am cunoscut-o bine, cind eram si eu matur(?). Cind a murit, aveam 22 de ani. Parintii, bineinteles au stat cu ea, dar eu m-am ascuns in apartamentul meu. Mi-a simtit lipsa? Parintii mi-au spus ca ma binecuvinta pina in ultima clipa, dar nu m-au chemat, si singur nu mi-a dat prin cap sa ma duc s-o vad. Pe de o parte, ideile mele juste ca daca esti bolnav, are doctorul grija si te faci bine. Pe de alta parte, tinar si ferice, nu vroiam sa aflu de batrinete si moarte.

Pe de a treia parte, cit a trait, daca ajungeam in vre-o soţietate buna, ma retrageam zicind ca trebuie sa ma duc acasa sa fiu bobă-sitter.

Pina nu mi-au cumparat un apartament, am stat cu bunica in camera, si, desi nu m-a incintat, nici revolutie n-am facut. Dar mi se pareau cutremuratoare toate obiceiurile de om batrin – mai ales ca isi lua o bonboana pentru noapte, dar trebuia taiata in doua! Ca alte tabieturi, ce avea? Vroia sa asculte stirile, si sa spuna dupa aceea – "Numai pace sa fie!" iar eu pe loc raspundeam: "Imposibilul, nici lui Dumnezeu nu-i poti cere" si citea cu sfintenie ziarele si revistele romanesti din Israel, la care eu strimbam din nas. A citit toata viata tot ce gasea, desi avea exact doua clase de scoala primara.

Cind eram mic de tot, mergeam in vizita la bunici pe strada Iepureanu. Dupa aceea s-au mutat la noi. Nu numai ca ma invirteam tot timpul la man boba in bucatarie, dar imi si povestea tot felul de povesti, mai ales cu Mariţa care avea o suta de pisici (mai departe?... inventa ea ceva, nu mai tin minte, poate nici nu urma nimic dupa Mariţa cu o suta de pisici). Cit am fost mic, ne-am inteles perfect, decit ca mai tirziu ma trimitea la piata prea des. Asta a continuat si in Israel. Cit a putut, a gatit – si gatea foarte bine; de cite ori gatesc si eu, si-mi iese cu gustul de la man boba, sint tare mindru. Dar la bucatarie isi mai aducea aminte ca-i mai trebuie cite ceva, si ma trimetea sa cumpar, la care faceam tare urit.

Eu ascultam la radio muzica clasica, si daca era de fata neaparat spunea "Ce bine cinta vioara!", indiferent de piesa. Tot la radio, intre stirile in romana si in idis, erau si stiri in araba marocana, "arbia mughrabia". Man boba le asculta cu sfintenie, ca nu cumva sa piarda inceputul programului in idis, "cind se termina grobianul". Eu bineinteles faceam zimbre, desi toate aceste programe durau un sfert de ora fiecare.

Cea mai frumoasa poveste a fost cind au ajuns americanii pe luna. Eu pe loc mi-am scris in jurnal "S-au urcat pe luna si si-au lasat acolo steagul si cacatul..." dar man boba s-a uitat pe geam si a zis: "Nu se vede nimeni pe luna."

Dupa care am ajuns si eu bunic. Mi se potriveste tot ca nuca-n perete, desi e mai usor decit sa fii tata – doze mici. Pe de alta parte, acum ma distrez tare bine cu ultimul nepot, jidanul Rhys Williams, ca e asa dulce si mai ales adoarme in brate, ca un pisoi. Dar mai are toata viata inainte...

From:
« my father had me practice stenography.

Printre alte idei de-ale lui taticu, era sa invat stenografie. Mi-a vindut ideea de cod secret, ceeace m-a atras, desi n-am folosit-o asa niciodata. In schimb, mi-a placut chiar partea serioasa: scrii repede si pe scurt, mai ales toate polologhiile care ni le dicta tovarasul invatator, sa le copiem curat acasa din maculator (Mai stie cineva ce-i aia? Si, in mod uimitor, tovarasul invatator a avut intelegerea sa ma lase sa stenografiez, desi eram in clasa a doua sau asa ceva, si toata ideea era sa-ti deprinzi mina la scris)

Ce scriam eu era metoda Stahl, creata special pentru româna. Henri Stahl a fost stenograful oficial al parlamentului, iar fiica lui Henriette Yvonne Stahl a devenit scriitoare (n-am citit nimic de ea; dar si papà a scris un roman stiintifico-fantastic, "Un Român in Luna"). Român ca mine: erau elvetieni impaminteniti.

Stenografia era bine inteligenta: economisea ne-scriind vocale, si folosind semne simple pentru combinatii de consoane comune: TT (tot, toti, atit, ...), DD (dadea, dadu), FC (fac, foc, ...), CER (cer, cere, cioara ...), FR (fara, afara, fur ...) , etc.

Si, deasemenea folosea acelasi semn pentru (S, Z, Ş) ori (T, Ţ), dar deosebea (C, K) si CE.

Mai erau si o multime de prescurtari:

si exercitii de neuitat:

Cind a dat potopul, peştii, fireşte, nu s-au inecat.
Asta foloseste un semn special pentru EŞTE in cuvinte ca moaşte sau Bucureşti.

Oaia aia e a ei.
Cum il scrii fara vocale? pentru asta exista un sistem de puncte si sageti pentru diftongi, pe care niciodata nu l-am stiut pe dinafara:

Desigur, e foarte rar sa ai intr-adevar nevoie sa specifici vocalele, intr-un text normal sint usor de ghicit. Dar... Taticu mi-a comunicat odata ca are o pacienta pe nume Aieroaiei; ca sa intelegi de ce, chiar trebuie conectia cu stenografia Stahl. Iar eu ma gindeam la un roman despre colectivizare – gen "Setea" – intitulat "Pasiunea si pamintul":

Din cauza ca existe prescurtari pentru -ţiune/siune, -ment/mînt, super/supra-, circum-, -ism, etc., încît pasiune si pamint sint litera P cu codiţe jos si sus.

Scriam stenografia rezonabil, desi nu la viteza profesionala ( cica la fel de repede cum vorbesti, 150-200 cuvinte pe minut ), poate 50 de cuvinte pe minut. Dar problema serioasa e cu cititul: mult mai incet decit textul normal, chiar daca citeam ce-am scris eu. Probabil tot de asta n-am citit niciodata literatura ebraica – prea incet, prea multa munca sa complectezi scrisul. Iar ebraică vocalizata nu pot sa citesc deloc – prea multe semne in toate directiile, limba are 6 vocale si se scriu 14. Spre deosebire de engleza cu 15 vocale plus, scrise cu 5 litere.

In alta ordine de idei, nu mai pot sa stenografiez. Literele se deosebesc prin marime, dar in loc sa scriu linii lungi si linii scurte, scriu tot felul de marimi intemediare. Nici scrisul normal de mina nu prea merge: daca n-am ochelari, sau stau in picioare, sau hirtia nu e pe o baza plana si solida, ies niste rezultate de groaza, chiar daca textul e doar un cec. cam tot ce trebuie scris de mina sint cecurile, ca avem computer! Beţele alea sint "pe de alta parte", vide supra ; decorativ, nu?

M-ar fi invatat taticu si sah, dar era prea bun si eu tare rau pierzator, cum am si ramas. Dupa ce am jucat de citeva ori cu el, m-am lasat de-a binelea. Iar table n-am invatat niciodata, fiindca trebuie sa deosebesti stinga de dreapta, ceeace nu-mi iese (Liliana, in schimb, joaca bine table).

From:
« ... dreams about the next cruise.

curbe

Croaziera 2008

« Am plecat pe o luna plus, de la sfirsitul lui Noiembrie pina la Craciun. Plimbarea de la San Francisco pe toata coasta Pacificului pina la Capul Horn, si apoi insulele Falkland si coasta atlantica pina la Rio. Special ne-am dorit sa ajungem la Magellan si Capul Horn, ca acolo sint furtuni, si aveam mare pofta sa ne legene nani-nani cu vaporul.

Apropos de Tara de Foc, a luat foc casa din Monterey. Plecarea era Miercuri; Luni ma cheama Mike la lucru sa-mi spuna ca arde casa, si e pe drum spre Monterey. N-am mai reusit sa stau la lucru, am tras chiulul si Marti – a quelque chose malheur est bon. Iar pe de alta parte, nu era nimic de facut, nu se putea intra in casa fiind riscant. Asa ca i-am lasat bucuria lui Mikey cu asigurarea, si am pornit in larg.

Croaziera e usor de rezumat:

Cu mincarea
Treci marea.

Sau "cu putoarea". De altfel, cel mai placut e oricum intre porturi; chiar daca portul e tare interesant, tot mai bine e sa zaci si nimica sa nu faci. Iar daca portul e interesant, te doare inima sa stai acolo intre 10 si 4, cel mult.

Principala invatatura de minte in excursia asta a fost ca nu se potriveste ce stiam din scoala cu socoteala din piata. La ecuator, in loc sa fie cald si sa ploua zilnic, o racoare ca la San Francisco. Am fost foarte incintat, dupa ce m-au trecut toate sudorile in Mexic si America Centrala. E un curent rece din Antarctica pe acolo – partea asta ori n-am invatat-o, ori am uitat-o. Si combinatia curent + Anzi impiedica precipitatiile, asa ca in loc de ploaie e desertul Atacama – pe asta il tineam minte. La capul Horn, nici un fel de furtuni si uragane, ci calm si senin – gurile rele zic ca asta e global warming.

Dupa ce ne-am intors, am intrat in fandaxie cu pozele. Stau pina la 12 noaptea sa retusez si sa fac colaje, dar nu cu fotoshop, ca costa parale. Mi-am gasit altele pe gratis, inclusiv un program GNU, care se cheama GIMP, si ar trebui sa faca minuni, dar inca nu stiu cum. La asta ma duce mintea, ca literatura e mai greu. Si imi zic ca pozele sint arta, sau cel putin ne-violare de copyright cind lipesc si imaginile altora.

Dar, totusi, m-am pus pe scris. Cu ex-memoria prezenta si viitor de sanatate, tot pe poze ma bazez – au cel putin data atasata, si, impreuna cu programul croazierei, pot identifica ce unde. Dar daca nu-i poza? De exemplu tin minte un parc unde-am vazut o statuie cu un car cu boi, reprezentind pionerii locali. Tin minte ca dansau tango pentru turisti, tin minte ca nu ne-am luat o sticla cu apa, ca era scumpa, tin minte un porumbel care s-a instalat pe mina vizitiului din statuie ca un şoim de vinatoare, dar in nici un caz nu tin minte unde a fost asta. Chile? Uruguay? habar n-am, fiindca desi tare vroiam sa fotografiez porumbelul, a zburat.

Mi-am zis ca cel mai simplu e in ordine cronologica, din nou folosind programul croazierei. Dar repetitia " ... apoi am ajuns in Mexic ... dupa aceea in Nicaragua ... dupa aceea in Costa Rica ... apoi in Panama " nu-mi suride.

Asa ca mi-am aranjat aceasta poza in culori tipatoare – daca nu chiar strigatoare la cer. Reprezinta mintea mea, cu toate amintirile, imaginile si gindurile talmes balmes.
Clicati, va rog!

Mai sint si alte poze, la fel de tare organizate.

From:
« Eu, cu atitudine studioasa din totdeauna: "Cind ti-e lumea mai draga, hop si madam!"

« Alte sclipiri

Nevasta mi-a facut copíi, nu cópii – nu-mi seamana destul sa-mi placa.

------

Ce nu cade din cer n-are nici o valoare.

------

All things shall be well
You shall see for yourself that
All manner of things shall be well -- Julian of Norwich

...şi la vară cald.

------

ישעיהו (שייקע) ספיר - מראשוני רמת-גן ומיסדיה. תאר את הוית בנית ארצנו ביצירותיו ״מָקֶבֶת״ ו-״המֶלֶט״

Realitate: cind ti-e lumea mai draga, hop si madam!

Exista mai mult ca perfect si exista mai putin ca perfect. Care din astea se aplica ...

Nevasta mititea : dacă era mare, era vastă, dar fiind nevastă...

------

Chanson du brame Shastasid:

Ma-nsurai luai nevasta
De la noi a treia casta
Tinerel m-am insurat...

------

Baba isi facuse amniocenteza, dar mosul nu-si facuse amniocintezoi.

------

La noi domneste ordinea si curatenia. Dar e monarhie constitutionala – nu domnesc chiar de tot.

Garantat dam in mintea copiilor, da' ei cind dau in mintea noastra?

------

Ciupercuţe saprofite
Care-ncearcă să profite.

------

             La Marseillaise annotée

Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie,
L'étendard sanglant est levé !        (mal élevé!)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes.
Aux armes, citoyens !
Formez vos bataillons !
Marchons, marchons !
Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons !        (quelle notion!)

------

ATHEISME

Mon Dieu
Ton Dieu
Son Dieu
Leurs Dieux a eux
Qu'ils sont odieux!

------

la vie est rose
comme une virose
la vie est belle
comme une poubelle
la vie me plait
comme une plaie

------

כל יום שבת.

כי כל יום הוא היום,
והיום הוא
aujourd'hui,
et aujourd'hui c'est le jour de hui,
et le jour de хуй c'est
יום זיין,
כלומר שבת קודש!

------

Hai la moara hatulenţa-flatulenţa

Mîţa caţă se rasfaţă
Si pe dos ca si pe faţă
Caţa rea cu rautate
Toate ghearele isi scoate
Mîţa caţă mititică
Sau pisică
Mîţa cu ferocitate
Gheare scoate
Scoate cu ferocitate
Scoate cu gherocitate
Toate ghearele isi scoate, gheare scoate, gheare scoate ...

From:
« tanti Pepi

Ce vorbe de neuitat avea tanti Pepi:

(Justi slabise) "Te ascuti ca lupta de clasa!"

Sa-l puna la punct pe Justi " Pastreaza distanta legala !"

Ii cinta lui nene Jean:

Ce-i al meu al meu ramine,
Iankl, sa-mi traiesti!

Dupa o masa buna, stateau toti culcati, la care tanti Pepi: "Hai sa batem cu pantofii in podea, sa creada ca dansam!"

"Banii nu aduc fericirea, dar calmeaza nervii."

"Raci umpluti cu moţămeil" – culmea gastronomiei, unde eu as fi spus sole a l'amiral.

"Corbeille de fruits" – adica un mar ca desert.

La o stire proasta: "S-o punem pe jazz!"

La stiri si mai proaste: "A cazut Salonicul "

Si, dupa 75:
Ce fac eu cel mai repede? Obosesc!

Drept care ce face bunul Dumnezeu, mult prea repede? O binecuvinteaza cu Parkinson. Multi ani, cred ca din 1985, n-au mai iesit din casa, ea si nene Jean care a ingrijit-o cit a fost in stare. Iar eu i-am vazut ultima data cind a murit taticu, in 1982. Dupa aceea, cred ca nici n-am mai vorbit cu ei. E adevarat ca tanti Pepi se ferea de lume, dar...

Asa ca bine-mi sta sa ma pling ca nu alearga nimeni dupa mine sa-mi faca bucurii . Ca si eu sint un ingeras cu suflet de aur – tot ce ma duce mintea e sa dau cite-un dolar la cersetori in drum prin San Jose.

From:
« Twisting my tongue in English for the benefit of future generations / progeny

Ce sa-mi scrintesc limba pe englezeste si alte langues de chats...

Deci... Ma gindeam la tanti Ada si la cultura – franceza, germana, româna ca limba a nu ştiu cîta, dupa rusa, idis si ebraica, pe care o mai tinea minte dupa 50 de ani, ceva engleza, era avocata, diplomata, cintase la vioara (ca mine? mai bine?) Si de fapt toata generatia parintilor – macar si taticu cinta la vioara – ce-i drept, un singur cintec, dar cu patru bemoli, la care eu m-am simtit outclassed si mi-am mai pierdut ceva incredere. Si nu cinta mai prost ca mine – sau nu puteam eu sa mi-l imaginez mai prost ca mine.

Iar din gura cinta tot timpul, ceeace am mostenit, to the embarassment of my beloved children. Cred ca nimeni in familie nu avea vre-o voce speciala, dar cel putin nimeream notele, fara rusine si chiar cu placere.

De fapt, prima data cind mi-am ascultat vocea – imprimata, nu pe trompa lui Eustache, Ianke si Cadîr – a fost la MIT cind am facut un "test de predat", si, desi am ramas convins ca tot eu stiu mai bine cum se preda, vocea tare nu mi-a placut, prea inalta si stridenta. Ca in general nu ma plac – doar ma ador – si cind ma vad in oglinzi ma-ntreb de ce nu crapa.

Cit despre predat, cu timpul m-am convins ca nu-s chiar asa perfect, mai ales dupa ce mi-au facut morala la NPS , peste multi ani. Stiam eu din totdeauna ca daca e interesant pentru mine, e mortal pentru studenti, dar predatul e exact conversatia cu acela (existenta axiomatica) care te-ntelege si chiar e curios ce spui. Macar mi-am facut datoria pe postul acestui student.

From:
« ... everything ... happening at once

De-a valma

Deci, ca sa iau bani de somaj, am continuat sa raspund la anunturi si sa iau legatura cu diferite agentii care-ti cauta de lucru. Ba chiar mi-au si gasit: o companie care inventeaza un nou material catalitic pentru gaze de esapament la Diesel. Ceeace se face prin calcule si modele , nu experimental, iar programarea mi-ar cadea mie, ca chinezoaica lor pleaca. Foarte interesant, si ei toti sint tinerei si indo/chineji/coreeni afara de sefu, deci ne potrivim perfect. M-am dus la interviu, si ce crezi, ma vor...

Pe loc am inceput sa planific cum sa scap. Intre timp, aveam si o multime de examene medicale la inimaţ – adica coronografie si colonoscopie. Macar descopera vre-un infarct sau cancer si scap de lucru. Joi inimioara – nimic. Vineri colonoscopia – totul roz ca viitorul (mi-am vazut maţele la televizor, ba mi-au dat si poze, care cu greu ma abtin sa nu le pun pe Internet) Dar scutire nu mi-au dat, asa ca adio vacanta! Luni la lucru.

Intre acelasi timp agentia de plasament, care de fapt e stapinul – ca la lucru o sa fiu consultant – incepe sa ma bata la cap sa le aduc la San Francisco pasaportul si buletinul de la Social Security. Nu numarul de Social_Security, ci fiţuica pe care am capatat-o in 1978 si de mult am pierdut-o. Dar vezi ca le trebuie originalul! De la proctolog (Salinas, linga Monterey) am plecat acasa la Monterey, poate a ramas cu multa alta hîrţogărie acolo. Nu-i. Agentia continuie sa biriie. Ne intoarcem la San Jose, la oficiul de Social Security, sa cer alta. Ăştia in schimb au datele din 1978, si nu apar ca cetatean. Le dau pasaportul:

– Da de ce esti la noi Liviu Lustman, si pe pasaport Levi Lustman?
– Ca mi-am schimbat numele cind m-am facut american, sa poata citi si americanii.
– Ne trebuie dovada...

Nu-i dovada, nu-i fiţuica. Cu nevasta fierbind si mai tare – era cu mine, ca n-aveam voie sa conduc in ziua aia din cauza medicamentelor de colonoscopie. Eu tineam vag minte ca apare numele original pe documentul de incetatenire, care îrtie sta la Monterey si o vazusem dimineata, dar n-am luat-o cu noi. Îl chemam pe Mike sa se uite, nu gaseste. Chemam agentia, vor sa le aduc Luni toate documentele care le am, nu par convinsi c-o sa ma creada. Eu imi zic ca daca nu ma cred, macar scap de lucru. Acasa, diferite fandaxii – unicul document unde apare numele Liviu a pasaportul israelian, dar o sa le placa?!

In fine, azi (Simbata) Mike ne aduce incetatenirea, unde scrie (pe verso) ca numele a fost schimbat din Liviu. Uf !! Sa mai vedem si ce alte surprize Luni. Eu imi fac iluzia cum am sa-mi ies din pepeni si pina la urma o sa le trintesc usa-n nas, dupa care stau cuminte la mine acasa, de cinismu si de lene – visuri, maica, visuri.

Tanti Matilda

E un subiect foarte potrivit, mai ales ca sint in plina degenerare.

S-o luam deci de la coada. Ultima data cind am fost impreuna, era in Israel. Venise sa-si viziteze familia, si a stat mai ales la tanti Pepi la Ţfat. Dar a fost si la noi la Holon, vre-o doua saptamini. Eu eram inca la facultate, dupa tironut si bine ingrozit de ce urmeaza. Plus pesimismul si antisocialitatea, cu ştelul de 20 de ani. Ea, in schimb: plina de viata, totul i se parea minunat, totul interesant. Nu-i vorba numai de birfe – tinea condicuta absolut oricui, cu detalii – ci in mod evident se bucura de orice, ceeace mie niciodata nu mi-a iesit : dragoste de viata. Si, slava Domnului, trecuse prin destule – era de virsta mea actuala sau mai mult, si urma intoarcerea in Romania Ceauşista. Dar fara griji si fara frica – dupa cum spunea de avion: "In aer nu ramin!"

vraja marii Vraja Marii: tanti Pepi, eu, Justi, mamere, tanti Matilda

Atitudinea asta mi s-a parut asa extraordinara – atunci si acum – desi, desigur o cunoscusem foarte bine in Romania; nu-mi inchipui ca se schimbase ea mult, dar probabil ma schimbasem eu. Din Romania stiam ca e tare descurcareata, gateste grozav din tot ce nu se gasea (reteta de tort Matilda: "iei un picior de scaun..."), are tot felul de povesti extraordinare si casa model. Tin minte servetelele brodate de pe pereti (ea le brodase la scoala:)

Curat si bine aranjat
Faci din coliba un palat!

Bucate bune am gatit
Pentru sotul meu iubit.

Dupa clasa-ntii, cind eram cu mamica si cu ea la Olanesti in vacanta, m-a invatat sa fac doua salate de rosii: cu brinza sarata si piper, si cu brinza de vaca si usturoi. Chiar bun. Si facea niste cornulete cu rahat, la care stringea caimac cite-o saptamina pentru aluat. Iar la Holon ne-a gatit o gaina – la care eu in principiu strimb din nas – dar ce gust avea!

De cind eram mici admiram cu totii "metoda Matilda" – intii dai la copii, si-o sa-si tina botul! Alta metoda: daca intilnea o famile cu un plod pipernicit si antipatic, ii complimenta "E vioi!"

Dar toate astea nu m-au pregatit, cind ne-am revazut in Israel, pentru valul de euforie – desigur, era fericita sa fie impreuna cu tanti Pepi, si fara bucuriile din Romania. Dar, la baza, era un optimism care mi se pare de necrezut si-l invidiez (adica respect) cit pot.

Ce vrei sa fii cind o sa fii mare? Vreau sa fiu Tanti Matilda. Pofta-n cui.

Viorica

Am cunoscut-o prin tanti Ada. Era fata de general, si fusese sotia atasatului militar al Romaniei la Ankara, cind unchii mei erau ambasadori. Cu care ocazie a invatat turceste, si cind s-a intors la Bucuresti incerca sa lucreze ca instructor de turca la Universitate, sau cercetator in folclorul turc, sau macar sa publice ceva – dar vai, originea nesanatoasa ... Era mai tinara ca parintii, si de cind ne-am cunoscut insista sa nu-i spun tanti. Venea din cind in cind sa ma vada – poate de doua ori pe an, si astea erau mari evenimente pentru mine.

Cred ca lingvistica mi se trage de la ea. O data, nu stiu cu ce ocazie, i-am zis ca n-am nevoie sa stiu indiana, la care mi-a raspuns "Macar sa stiu vreunul din dialectele indiene!" si mi-a si explicat ce-i un dialect: la Bucuresti spunem "cartofi", in Moldova "barabule". Mi-a povestit basme turcesti pe care le culegea – mai tin inca minte "ihtiyar püf yaptı" ( "moşul facu puf!" ) – cred ca scotea fum de tigara pe nari pretinzind ca-i balaur. Altadata i-am aratat o poezea care-o scrisesem si mi-a spus "Poeta nascitur". Nu numai asta, dar odata mi-a adus o traducere dintr-o poezie Çagatay, zicindu-mi s-o stilizez – bineinteles ca a trebuit si sa-mi explice ce-i aia.

Vazind ca aveam o cutie in care tineam citiva bani vechi, chiar si vre-o 2-3 kuruş adusi de tanti Ada din Turcia, mi-a adus o multime de monede de la ea din casa, printre care si una din 1700 si ceva, de nepretuit. Si mi-a spus ca nu sint monede, ci monete – in latina moneta – ceeace n-am mai uitat. Moned/tele astea le-a mostenit Michiduţă, cind am plecat in Israel.

Intre timp dadea meditatii, asa ca a fost invitata la serbarea de sfirsit de an, si m-a luat si pe mine. Am inghitit tot "Luceafarul" cu o nu prea frumoasa fata, si ca sa ma consoleze, m-a dus in vizita la profesorul ei de Osmanlı. Hruba lui Ali-Baba ! Chiar o hruba, o camera una la subsol, dar tapisata de carti, care de care mai exotice: araba, ebraica, chineza, mongola scrisa vertical, pe linga toate textele turcesti. Am apucat sa discutam cum in ebraica sint 3 de 'h' – deci eram pe la bar-miţva, 12 sau 13 – si mi-a aratat o carte cu semnaturile sultanilor.

Alborada

Ziua buna se cunoaste de dimineata

M-am sculat la cinci, si pe la sase, cind am vazut ca nu mai adorm, mi-am blestemat zilele, mi-am facut injectia si am asteptat jumate ora (citind) sa pot sa maninc.

Vreau: sa stau jos si sa beau cacao cu toast si iaurt. Deci pun ibricul la fiert, si tortilla in cuptor si scot o ceasca din masina de spalat, la care se varsa ceva apa pe jos. Dupa care...

Ma-ntorc sa pun cacao in ibric, lunec pe apa aia, cad peste masina de spalat deschisa, ma pocnesc bine la cap (primul gind: acum fac comotie cerebrala si ies la pensie). Doare capul, stau nitel pina imi revin, vad toata bucataria plina de cacao si diferite bucatele din masina de spalat cazute pe jos. Totusi se inchide, o s-o repare proprietarul, om mai vedea...

Ma apuc sa sterg cacao, nu functioneaza, aduc vacuum. Intre timp tortilla a luat foc in cuptor. O arunc la chiveta, ia foc cirpa de vase. Pina le ud si le sting, incepe sa urle smoke detector. In aceasta armonie, trag cu vacuum, se curata cit de cit... Cind sa-l scot din priza, snurul iar trage jos cutia de cacao, iar se umple bucataria, iar vacuum. Dar macar s-a calmat detectorul. In fine, reusesc sa-mi fac cacao si a doua tortilla. Ba chiar am restaurat si bucatelele in masina de spalat, poate la locul lor, si Dumnezeu cu mila. Jos n-am prea stat, dar am terminat sa maninc. Ma duc la baie sa ma pieptan - ce sa vezi, cum dau cu peria, un nor de cacao. Mai trebuie sa fac si duş, si sa spal peria.

Curatel si spalatel ajung la lucru - zece minute pe jos. Sculat la cinci, incep la opt.

      Grava ca o rugaciune
      Si posomorita ca o
      Figurina de carbune
      Cu nuante de cacao;

From:
« ... tot felul de elucubratii

Stenografia Stahl: Oaia aia e a ei.

Roman in trei volume:

Idila ideala – Duel si doliu – Dulaii iadului

DL DL – DL si DL – DL DL (hellhounds)

La al doilea deal de Efim Trofimovici locuia Agafia Filofeevna, si, dupa ce s-au intilnit la pîrîul dintre dealuri, se iubeau cu pasiune. Dar, din gelozie, locotenentul de husari Timofei Pafnutevici Haritonov l-a provocat pe Efim la duel si l-a impuscat. Dupa un lung doliu, Agafia se razbuna pe intreaga familie Haritonov.

Alt roman, cu gladiatori:

Rani in arena – Orion iarna – Ruina eroinei

RN in RN – RN RN – RN RN

Nu poti deosebi intre:

pasta si peşte (dar amindoua de post)

PST si PST (dar amindoua de PST)

braţ si burtă

BRT si BRT

spaima si spuma

SPM si SPM

sarutari si sertare

SRTR si SRTR (Venus aux tiroirs)

onoare si noroi

NR si NR

glorie si galerie, galera sau guler

GLR si GLR, GLR sau GLR

javra si juvaier

JVR si JVR

Liberalism american:

libertatea lăbărţată

LBRTT LBRTT

Studii avansate:

somnuri la seminar

SMNR la SMNR

Eveniment:

Înca o nucă, neică? Unchiul meu unic, eunucul, se îneacă cu nuca.

NC o NC, NC? NCul meu NC, NCul, se NC cu NC.

Nu poti deosebi:

mirele, marele amiral, de maiorul imoral

MRL, MRL MRL, de MRL MRL

Philosophie dans le boudoir:

Fumul faimei, foamea femeii
Faima afuma foamea femeii
Foamea afuma faima femeii

FMul FM, FM FM
FM FM FM FM
FM FM FM FM
etc...

Tot cu dieta?

Şoptise şi-l ispitise să ospăteze

SPTS si-l SPTS sa SPTS ...

Conformism – oda de adio

De idei, dai de iad.

D D, D D D.

Effects based on javascript libraries and examples from http://www.howtocreate.co.uk, provided for free. Thanks!

From:
« Suiak bano gaizkiago erra diro gizona
itxasoak ez iraungi eratxeki dadina.

Asta din Encyclopedia Britannica, care mi-a luat-o Jack cadou de nunta – multumesc din suflet! Am tot citit-o (cit nu era Internet) si m-am bucurat de ea ani de zile, atit in Israel cit si in America. Acum mucegaieste undeva in pivnita, impachetata cind a ars casa si inca nu despachetata – poate cind o iesi Liliana la pensie.

In cioclopedie am citit despre limba basca, si cele doua versuri erau date ca exemplu. Faptul ca le mai tin minte e un terminus post quem la fosta mea memorie. M-am apucat sa caut "etchasoak" pe net, si uite ce-am gasit:

Dar am gasit si poema complecta, pe care nu ma pot abtine sa n-o adaug:

Amoria ezin zenzuz ezin daite goberna,
anhitzetan honesten du guti behar duiena ;
arnoak bano gaizkiago ordi diro persona ;
sarri estaka, berant laxa, hark hatzeman dezana.
Amoria itsu da eta eztazagu zuzena
eztu uste berzerik dela, lekotmaite duiena ;
Suiak bano gaizkiago erra diro gizona ;
itxasoak ez iraungi eratxeki dadina.

cu profunde observatii:

Ce frumoasa e limba (adica: suna ca italiana). Nu va speriati de puzderia de x si z: z este s, x este ş, si litera s un sunet undeva intre ele.
Se pot ghici ici colo cuvinte (de origine spaniola sau franceza) amoria, zenzuz (sensus), goberna, honesten, persona. Restul e misterul cel mai absolut, fara vre-o relatie cu alte limbi si cu o gramatica incredibila.

Cine-i curios (tare as vrea sa-l intilnesc) poate gasi mai mult. Si, in fine ne intoarcem la nunta: poezia se cheama Ezkonduien Koplak ("Poema celor casatoriti", "koplak" e versia lor pentru "cupluri")

From:
« ... sint in plina degenerare.

Ce fac? Nu pot sa dorm, ca nenorocitii construiesc: sfarma piatra, naruie ziduri, sfredelesc gauri in beton si-n creier. Mintea, de altfel, nu merge chiar daca nu sfarma piatra sau naruie ziduri. La programat – mai ales cu Javra n-am rabdare, si nici pe Internet nu gasesc nimic. Asa ca tot ce sint in stare e sa gidil la limba mea, si sa compun cuvinte din altele, mai simple. Unul cite unul, mii de cuvinte, trece timpul si IQ scade.

Consider what I do. I cannot sleep, because they are remodelling our building: pickaxes, jackhammers, power-drills, etc. I cannot think, not only because of pickaxes, jackhammers, power-drills, etc. Of course I cannot program, I get fedup with Wikipedia browsing, so I tinker at my language.

I have a long list of words that I try to replace with periphrases and compounds. "Girlfriend" is "friend+female", but "friend+female" might also be"friend of a woman". Then "westernizing" could be "causative+alike+person#west", and "strikebound" "strike+causative+no#work" but I must remember that "strike" is actually "word_stoppage", not "hit", and then "word stoppage" could be probably periphrased, and so on and so forth. Can you immagine anything dumber?

But of

Searchable online dictionary of ancient Egyptian	The Ancient Egyptian Dictionary Project, a division of the BBAW, possesses the most comprehensive lexicographic archive of hieroglyphic texts in the world. This compilation provided the basis for the preparation of the "Woerterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache", published in book form between 1926 and 1963. The complete archive was made available on the Internet for the first time in October 2001. MUST REGISTER AS USER, BUT IT'S FREE!
The Beinlich Wordlist	The handlist of Ancient Egyptian words known to Egyptologists as the "Beinlich Wordlist" was announced by Horst Beinlich and Friedhelm Hoffmann in Göttinger Miszellen 140 (1994), 101-3. The raw data of the Wordlist is simply the Egyptian word in transliteration, a German translation, and brief references to the Wörterbuch or more recent publications.
Cooperative online dictionary of ancient Egyptian	This dictionary operates very much like a wiki, enabling users to add their own entries. PROVIDES HIEROGLYPHIC FONTS, WHICH YOU MUST LOAD FOR FULL PERFORMANCE.

'And now hath Satanas,' said he, 'a tail
Broader than of a carrack is the sail.		a great ship of burden
Hold up thy tail, thou Satanas,' quoth he,
'Shew forth thine erse, and let the friar see
Where is the nest of friars in this place.'
And less than half a furlong way of space		immediately
Right so as bees swarmen out of a hive,
Out of the devil's erse there gan to drive
A twenty thousand friars on a rout.		in a crowd
		Canterbury Tales, Prologue to the Sompnour's Tale


Tamandua anteater, Costa Rica	Coati (coatimundi is a misnomer) They should be found in trash cans, like raccoons in California.

	Valparaiso, Chile
	Punta Arenas, Chile
	Caminito, Buenos Aires, Argentina

La Marseillaise annotée

Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie,
L'étendard sanglant est levé !		(mal élevé!)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes.
Aux armes, citoyens !
Formez vos bataillons !
Marchons, marchons !
Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons !		(quelle notion!)

ENGLISH, IMHO

Tue Sep 6 21:01:05 2011

« Plain history

Life and death

Esthetics

Commonplace

Technique

Follow the intrepid explorer

« Dreams

« 2007 Far East vacation

Dubito ergo cogito

« Erratum

Rubik cube and Rubik cone

What I remember from Physics

Ehrenfest urn model

Eddington's model

Non-conservation of parity

« Bright ideas.

« Pearls of wisdom

2008 Cruise

Dictionaries and Word Lists (from the site above)

Indoor recreations

Sight unseen

« Models of happiness

Sapir-Whorf

Little Latin and less Greek

Doctorpiece – User's Manual

Fable

Legend

Fake Bar Kokhba coinage

What I remember from the military

Fauna

Letzte Naies

« HOM MANI PADME HOM!

Oops! this is Thailand! Maybe you meant Costa Rica...

Rejoice, rejoice greatly! (שישו ושמחו)

« Positive thinking.

Giovinezza, giovinezza

The same, more geometrico:

« THE DIALOGUE OF PESSIMISM

« ROMANIAN , ETC.

Man Bobă

Croaziera 2008

« Alte sclipiri

Hai la moara hatulenţa-flatulenţa

De-a valma

Tanti Matilda

Viorica

Stenografia Stahl: Oaia aia e a ei.

Rejoice, rejoice greatly!
(שישו ושמחו)