Brown Motion

I am making bold predictions in 2020.  Not hindsight but foresight.  So enjoy and profit from these. Before you discard these gems below remember that many a nincompoop in the media has been making money by commenting and opining with headlines more bizarre than mine. Stock market will continue to gyrate in the foreseeable future. Earth will experience several earthquakes of magnitude four or higher in four or more years. Anyone infected with Covid is more or less contagious for several days. Person infected with Covid can be asymptomatic and still infect other people at times more easily than them catching another virus from another. Every prediction has a small chance of success. There is a high likelihood that people will get sick and die in the next 24 hours. If only people stopped breathing we could have avoided this whole Covid mess. America is headed for an election year where both likely nominees are going to need a respirator or a pacemaker or both. I...

It is said one must focus on what one likes and have a positive outlook about life in general.  I say its worth trying.  In the spirit of that concept below I will share some of my simple joys that I can partake as I go through life. These also tend to actually improve the quality of my life.  In no particular order these are things I see, read or do.  Food or Drink I consume or people I meet.  I must say the latter is a relatively low percentage in attributing to quality of life but that's just me. I am sure people can figure out a similar matrix for themselves and figure out how to boost the engagement with things that matter to them most.  Perhaps we will all be happy that way! Humor is a big part of my life and I seek it out in many ways - sometimes it just happens to be in your face when you least expect it... While Bourdain is gone he left an amazing legacy behind.  I thoroughly enjoyed watching him delve into a new frontier using a...

It was a couple weeks of parallel processing.  As in consuming some new literary finds at the local libraries.  Here are the titles and synopses in no particular order - Eight Flavors - untold story of American Cuisine - by Sarah Lohman - a fun read if you like it spicy and hot.  Well not literally.  But Sarah does a good job of narrating the history of some of the most common spices on the American dining table and also explains through use of experiments the human ability to distinguish what the palate likes and does not.   Black Pepper is the most popular of spices in American cuisine today and held its own for couple hundred years.  Sriracha is gaining popularity in the last couple decades made right here in sunny California.  Another sauce Korean Gochujang is a 'hot' contender. Calculating the Cosmos - by Ian Stewart - a British math professor who explains a bunch of complex physics and math using language that is enjoyably easy.  For...

A Tamil American by birth, Aziz is a stand up comedian (I don't know too many successful ones that tell jokes sitting down) who is also a moderately famous actor on television.  With this maiden book he is now also an author. It is a borderline funny but fairly insightful, researched discussion on how the notion of love and romance has changed since our grandparents got together to eventually create us.  Of course the big deal is people did not really think or know how to define things like romance, soul mate, et al but simply figured out a way to procreate to address a functional need.   The book narrates feedback from actual surveys and polls conducted by Aziz and Eric (a doctoral student) along with interviews with some well known psychologists and people who know what they (think) are talking about when it comes to relationships. Sprinkled with one liners and observations from his own life including use or abuse of technology to drive meaning and sense of what ...

Sounds like a Ludlum novel. It could be but is not. Not yet. Perhaps I better call his estate and book my rights to the title and the plot. Once I saw the news about the toilet paper evolution in how people have started printing it with news, coupons, ads, even mysteries and stories in Japan I took it upon myself to expand on the ideas - now I am on a 'roll'. How about a toilet paper library? Especially in impoverished countries that do not have reliable source of sanitation to extract yourself after attending to the emergency. Use a toilet roll that you carry on your person all the time. But it does not have to be boring. Far from it. You could inscribe reams of stories on a roll. You may have left a stall with a story half read. You could pop into a local library and finish it by paying cents for the other half of the roll which can be produced on demand. Now Apple is shaking in its boots. They thought they could corner the third world market with its newest lon...

I have a proposal to get more efficiency out of two semi retarded operations that are being funded by tax payer dollars. Subsidized hospitals and city airports. How about we just combine the two? Call it Hospiports. That way we know to expect less hospitality and maybe a port to get the heck out of Dodge. There already are flight kitchens...now add a hospital. I say get that pace maker checked before you fly. The reason for this is simple. Off late the TSA (the ones that watch you strip and go through X-rays) much like the doc at the office, or hospital is taking on more of a clinical role in your fellow passanger's well being. They have been known to collect saliva swabs or samples at random from guests minding their own business at the airport and may soon be asking you to pee in a cup. I say why not bundle all your chores at the hospiport? Annual physical and a round trip to St. Louis brought to you by your local stew-nurses. Just arrive early and make sure you do no...

When you thought that we are moving rapidly away from paper products and paper in all its incarnations including the papier mache dolls (whatever that is - but seem to be in all ethnic stores in some shape and form) we are harshly reminded about much work still being done or wanting to be done with paper. Take for example the subject of Obama's birth. Republicans are up in arms (another blog on what that exactly means especially since normally arms are 'up' and legs are down - not sure what the heck someone is trying to say - whose arms are we talking? wives, cousins never mind) in trying to verify over and over that he indeed is he and confirm he was a citizen by birth and not naturalized (like say yours truly) or pasteurized. To prove said postulate there was a need for the original (you guessed it) paper certificate showing the place of Obama's birth. This document was tantamount to proving that there was a declaration of independence because without it there wou...

Its time to cook up a new metric to track the world's obesity in city and villages, in countries and continents. Hence the proposal to calculate the GIRTH of a nation. Birth as you recollect is passe. Other than Sudan or Syria further breaking up south of the equator I think we are all done with new nations being born - for now - hence focusing on Girth. I know Putin is still fuming after losing half the real estate he called his. Getting back to the lard at hand - responsible for the girth that is - we can safely say that the average girth rankings would list Samoa at the top followed by the United States. I mean have you seen an average Samoan? Nothing wrong I say - their food pyramid looks more like a cylinder and that is just as well. At least they eat local - being an island and all - assumption not based on any factual data. Now the skinniest would have to be the Congo. Or some neighbor of theirs given the rate of malnutrition therein. Every other Euro zone fella w...