15 Comments
founding

Here in the US, we are beyond the "last flowering of the culture". The bloom is definitely off the rose.

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Thank you Linh!

What a ride. First part made me hungry and second somehow made me kind of want to puke, but that will go away rapidly. However bitter, the truth pill is always welcome.

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Yesterday in St Louis a young man walked up to a homeless man, he had to fiddle with his gun for quite a bit (incompetence?), and executed him in plain sight daylight.

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It’s so wonderful to read about Cambodian children learning English, aiming for the United States. I wonder, will they arrive in time to learn to hate the Imperialism and the Patriarchy, or will that be for their mixed-race children? I embraced multiculturalism in the 90s, and now I get to be hated by multicultural people who are lucky to be here, for the fact of my white skin. Being poor in SEA seems like a better bet.

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English Kicks A$$!!!, because it is so thoroughly corrupted and corruptible. I, being equipped with a general inablity to make intelligent career decisions, found myself studying foreign languages for the USSA military-hiccup-complex on a number of occasions. There was no logic in our assignments, and so I got to study, on one occasion, a language from Southeast Asia, which had very little grammar as understood in the Indo-European languages, and then, after 2001, I found myself assigned to learn a language that was very much Indo-European, in fact more "Indo" than "European". The drastic differences between the langages, and perhaps the fact that I was about forty years old for the second round, nearly drove me insane, especially when it came to trying to form sentences off the top of my disorderly brain for speaking practice. Words from the Asian lingo kept popping up, but I was struggling to think backwards according to the strict grammatical rules of the Indo language. (Very much like German, with the verb at the end of the sentence. It makes me curious to glance at Thai, I wonder if it follows the "easy" grammar of the "Asian" or if it follows the rigorous tense structure of the "Indo.") Anyhoo, this particular Indo language was formulated out of necessity, to accomodate yet another wave of invaders and conquerors of Northern India. While the Court spoke a form of Persian (the "lingua franca" of that time and place), the troops in their camps and in the bazaars mixed their Turkic dialect with that of the local people, which is natural. From this mixing of basic economics and social interactions, another language was born. (It is now fading away before the onslaught of English, as the most popular writers of South Asia now write almost exclusively in English.) I struggled to learn the grammatical rules at a far deeper level than I ever had to in English. (I had never thought about the subjunctive case before, and I was quite adrift when the teacher started talking about the oblique.) This experience made me curious enough to learn a bit about English, Old and New. The history of the British Isles is really a history of migrations and invasions. The reason that "there is an exception to every rule" in English grammar and spelling is because English is a monster which devours what it wants from every language it encounters. On a similar note, when I explored my ancestry online, I began with what my grandparents had told me was my family tree, but I also submitted a DNA test. (Not being a serial murderer.) On one side I expected only to find English, Scottish, and Irish, while the other side was supposed to be about half Scandinavian. Over ten years ago, when I began, my DNA profile matched that supposition. However, as more and more DNA libraries are connected, every year my profile has updated to more and more dominance by Scandinavian ancestry. Those intrepid explorers from the North obviously did much more than raid and explore. However, somehow the British Isles did not end up speaking like Ole Olafsson. Somehow, the Angles must have had mightier tongues than Viking axes. Sorry for subjecting you all to my digressions. America was the Shit. Now America is in the Shitter. Life in American cities is Shitty. Hope that you score some Good Shit. Keep your Shit highly squared away at all times.

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Linh, if you run into a skinny deaf shoeshine/newspaper guy with a saddle bag over his shoulder, be especially kind to him. I know you would be anyway. Buy him a beer and sit with him, it'll be worth your time. He is a delightful human being, and a privilege to know. His photo was plastered all over the world when the stampede happened, but because he doesn't even have a known name, he didn't get the financial benefit for his loss as the others did. If I'd known about crowd funding back then I would have tried to remedy that.

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Mar 2, 2023·edited Mar 2, 2023

Wow, nice header photo. Should we have a caption contest? "Who the hell does he think he is taking pictures of us? Chut-zpa! You, driver. Hurry up!"

Alternate- "Alas, a style of travel worthy of our status"

Seriously, that could be Bernie Madoff, but that is definitely not Ruth.

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1/i was "doored" - accidentally - while riding a bicycle in boston in the early 1970s - the parked cars were to my right, the lanes of traffic to my left - a car stopped to let a passenger out and as the passenger door was opened i ran directly into the edge of it - it hit me in the center of my chest and took my breath away - also my front wheel was bent

after the collision the driver of the car got out - surprisingly he only had one and a half arms, one forearm wasn't there - after seeing his permanent misfortune i didn't want to complain about my temporary misfortune, i just wanted to leave the scene, which i did, on foot - i was about a mile from home

2/it could have been worse - i still have scars on my arm from a different bike accident the year before - it is all part of life's rich pageant - everyone needs someone or something to love, something to do, and something to look forward to - and you never know when something surprising might happen

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There is girl like the girl in red in your last photo working as a cashier at the market I go to. I think she is Thai though, it sure is nice to see as the background around her is like your other photos but a bit less diverse. Non white people show up but tend to choose a different place to shop. I don't think anyone is mean but it may be that the feel is a a bit rednecky with overalls and hunting attire a common feature. Perhaps those with darker skin equate that attire as a sign of a racist, I don't know.

I've noticed that all the shops have gotten sloppier, with less merchandise, and less concern to keep the place tidy. A lot of the employees have colored their hair not to mention the shoppers. It's going to be a strange world where everyone identifies as something different but really aren't. Everyone going about wondering just what is going on in the heads of all these peculiarly outfitted folks and afraid to say anything for fear of offending. Welcome to the oxymoronic United States where diversity equals strength. Just not for the diverse.

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Thank you Linh. Always happy to see you in my inbox!!

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Đọc anh miêu tả cuộc sống ở Phnom Penh làm em nhớ đến những ngày lang thang ở Yangon, sinh hoạt của người dân ở hai thành phố có nhiều điểm tương đồng. Qua ảnh thì người Kampuchea có vẻ hồn nhiên dễ chịu hơn, có lẽ vì chưa bị các tổ chức phi chính phủ G Soros bơm tiền làm nhàu nhĩ hơn chăng…

Một chuyện khác ở Mỹ: năm ngoái sang thăm người thân, em đưa đám cháu trong nhà đi học tự vệ và bắn súng, sau khi một đứa nhỏ đang học ở Baltimore suýt bị bắn vỡ sọ và một nhóc khác suýt bị cướp đâm thủng bụng ngay gần Quince market - trung tâm Boston. Vậy mà các trưởng bối trong nhà vẫn nhìn em như thể em bị tâm thần và lo quá xa… Họ ngắm anh đào ở Potomac và kết luận Huê Kỳ vẫn đẹp và an toàn.

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English; my grandmother HATED when I answered “yeah” instead of “yes” but of course I didn’t understand. And my rebellious boomer mother refused to teach me to say “yes ma’am”. Now kids text or say “ya” or “yah”, the e is too hierarchical apparently. (I don’t know what is in store for the humble h ending.)

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