High food prices = bad

Of course you don't need reminding-- not from this blog, anyway (but apparently this blog needs reminding*)-- but now's a good time to donate money to the World Food Programme.** If you like squinting at the horizon, you can invest in rural infrastructure by building a road or founding an institution like a small farmers' grain cooperative. Just kidding. Food aid will do for now.

*I heard my old boss, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, on NPR today with his weird Danish accent, making good Danish sense. Yesterday I talked to a friend who's teaching a course on the world food economy in Minnesota, and who related a story about getting a bit agitated in front of her students re: the food crisis.
**By the way, hats off to whomever coined "silent tsunami" over at the WFP. Marketing genius.

conversation transcript

Friend: Has anybody ever fucked a bear?
Me: No.
Friend: Dead bear?
Me: Yes!

2 important milestones

First appearance of an infectious disease epidemiologist in The Wire: season 3

First appearance of Mr. Boh's smiling visage glowing eerily above Baltimore: season 4

Motoring in the north

I don't know if you are aware of this, but it turns out that you can do a lot more with the internet than leaving agitated, punctuation-free comments on celebrity blogs.

A mildly interesting story follows. Read on only if you like old things.

I had some people over one recent night for some good old-fashioned drinking and garlic-eating, and I was cleaning my apartment in the morning. Picking some spent National Bohemian cans off my mantelpiece, I noticed something protruding through the bottom of the mantel, wedged between it & the wall above the fireplace. Upon fishing out the filthy thing, I realized it was an ancient postcard.

The front of the postcard features a pastel-colored photograph of a dull low skyscraper, with the caption "The John B. Starks Building. Louisville, KY." The rear of the card informs the inquisitive reader of the Building's size, location, and date of completion (1918). Apparently the choice of postcard didn't merely reflect an odd appreciation for the omnibus speculative office building: the entire text of the postcard reads "New Year's Greetings from 'The Starks.'"

Indeed, the postmark reads "December 31," but the year is illegible. It is addressed to a certain John S. Gibbs, Jr., at 1026 N. Calvert St. in Baltimore, MD. I live in a carriage-house, and enter from an alley running parallel to N. Calvert; 1026 is the address of the apartment building attached to the rear of my place. So this was John S. Gibbs, Jr.'s carriage house (and, apparently, postcard-storage facility).

30 minutes of Googling followed. To narrow down the date, I identified the stamp on the postcard. Not being a philatelist, this was kind of annoying, but still relatively easy: it's a 1c Washington of the Washington-Franklin series, issued from 1912-1922. So 1918-1922, probs.

Next, Gibbs. His dad was a fancypants finance man; he was a receiver of the derelict Baltimore Iron, Steel, and Tin Plate Company in 1897, and a director of the Union Trust, which had some trouble in 1903 when its railroad ventures in Mexico collapsed. The guy was a canning magnate: founded Gibbs & Co., Inc.

Our boy Junior was an usher at the Carr-Brown wedding in 1902, as covered by the New York Times. He had a lovely socialite wife. From the Baltimore Sun in 1918: "Mrs. John S. GIBBS, Jr., who has been occupying a cottage at Chatham, Cape Cod, since the early summer, where Mr. Gibbs joined her several times, is returning by motor and stopped over at Providence, R. I. On her return she will go over to the Eastern Shore, where she will visit her mother, Mrs. DIXON at her country home for the late season. Mrs. GIBBS, who was the beautiful Miss Anne RANSON, is with Mr. GIBBS motoring in the North. She has recently had her portrait painted by Mr. Alfred Partridge KLOTS, one of the most charming that he has done. It is to be placed in the home of Mr. and Mrs. GIBBS at Roland Park." Stop the presses.

By 1921 he was a director of the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland. By 1946 he was the President of the Board of Trustees of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Hats off, Junior.

He died in 1953. His NYT obituary tells us that he was 77, that he was president of the board of Gibbs & Co. canners, that he died at his "Baltimore County estate, Tyrconnell," and that he was fancy in various ways. One may trace his surviving relatives on the web in a similar fashion.

Finally, the John Starks building: it still stands, on Fourth & Muhammad Ali in Louisville. It was sold in 2006. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, and has its own unspectacular Wikipedia entry.

30 minutes of Googling. I realize this is all fairly boring, but the notion that all this was easily recovered from one dusty postcard? God-damned amazing.

Au Clair de la Lune

If you haven't seen it nor heard it yet, here is the oldest sound ever recorded. 1860.

Happy World TB Day

9 million active cases per year. Rising.
Almost 2 million deaths per year.
#1 killer of those with HIV.
5% of cases multi-drug-resistant.
Most currently available drugs about 40 years old.
About 2 billion people-- 1/3 of the planet-- with latent TB.
Etc. Go wiki the hell out of it.

Correction

I did not survive the Holocaust running drugs in an East Baltimore tower with my mother, who does not have Asperger's. The queue forms on the left for publishers who would like to offer me book deals for my traumatic journey through the hell of attention-whoring.

Memoir

I survived the Holocaust running drugs in an East Baltimore tower with my mother, who has Asperger's.

In Praise of Cumin

I praise you, cumin.

Kool-Aid Dreams

Today's the first day that I actually believed-- momentarily, drunk & stoned & addled by thousands of neurofibrillary tangles-- that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.

Nuggets: let's be great in 2008!

• Power out here. A tow-truck driver in Canada once told me of how he lived "off the grid" for a year, starting on the highly symbolic 20th of April. (4.20!) He kept his beer cold by snaking an extension cord into his neighbor's electrical socket, and similarly powered his computer and desklamp. "It's actually really easy to go without hydro [in English: electricity]; I don't know why more people don't do it."
  
• Dead branches on the tree of possibilities: Paleo-Future.
  
• Lacking power (GIANT STORM! DID YOU HEAR?), and needing to finish an epidemiology paper by tonight, I have spent the past few days in Bay Area cafes with my laptop. Hmm. There do seem to be a number of people on their laptops who are "young, male, decently attractive and successful in a way that doesn't seem correlated to any kind of virtue" on their laptops. Notice the careful phrasing that stakes out a neutral position on the question of my membership in the group; I report, you decide. There are secret signs. There is a highly structured social order, saturated with ritual, that has almost surely been described on This American Life. Most surprisingly: cafes here give out free beef jerky to anyone toting a laptop.
  
• I've overheard un-gilded gems like, "Oh, he's your typical Sufi mystic..." [knowing chuckles].
• And a Lycra-clad man attempting to start a conversation with some Germans, using a tone more appropriate for 2-year-old retarded children: "I work with your leaders. The leaders of your country. They do not think about the future. They are very slow in adopting the e-lec-tric caaaarrrr." Here he turns an imaginary steering wheel, thereby creating a word-picture. One German says, "We are not fresh off the boat. We have lived here for 40 years." They subsequently ignore him.
  
• Also: "I want Obama, like, so bad." Memo to Barack: the voters of the SF Bay Area are spreading their electoral legs for you.
  
• Gawker has linked to Corn Chips & Pie. I now face a challenge previously confronted by countless bloggers before me: getting one's girlfriend to give a shit.
  

TIGER ATTACK UPDATE

The fact that it is now raining in the San Francisco Bay Area has resulted in a lamentable suppression of tiger attack news. For those of you unlucky enough to be elsewhere-- and thus starving for information-- I can report that each day here has brought a new banner headline, a new stunning revelation, a new angle to this horrorshow horror show. The world will long remember the date of December 25th, or "12/25," as some have now dubbed it. It was Day One of the tiger uprising, ushering in a spirit of justifiable fear and dread. Silent Night, Deadly Night, indeed.

In the experimental spirit of such 20th century writers as Stein, Joyce, Barth, and Larry King, I shall now run down a list of tiger-related "items." I hope these trifles amuse you and help to shepherd you into personal growth in 2008.

• At least two news organizations on the East Coast have run stories with the title "Tiger Attack-- Could It Happen Here?" (1) (2)
  
• The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story titled "Talking to Children About the Tiger Attack." Indeed, what do we tell our children? We must teach them to face hard truths. We must teach them that everything-- even things we think are cute, harmless, and friendly-- literally everything can tear you to shreds and devour you. Parents, please put photos of angry tigers mauling deer above your babies' cribs. Fear is a useful emotion; eternal vigilance is the only solution.
  
• You may not be aware that there have been reports suggesting that the kids who were attacked had been "taunting" the tiger, making roaring noises & such. Because of this, I have repeatedly heard people saying things like, "Well, I have no sympathy. What did they expect?" MM has noted that, despite the intrinsic hilarity and meaninglessness of the suffering of strangers, it does seem as if death-by-mauling may be excessive punishment for taunting. Normally it's 15 yards, tops.
• In any case, what did they expect? We can never know the answer. Nonetheless, I posit that they expected the tiger to remain in its enclosure, and not to leap out and maul them. This is a naively common expectation in zoos.
• Why, you may ask, has the tiger attack so gripped our imaginations? I suggest that one explanation may be that we have a deep, primal need to shit ourselves for no good reason.
• Bruce Chatwin once suggested that our fear of the dark, and our fear of the other, derives from our evolutionary struggle against predatory big cats (back when natural selection liked to do weird shit with our psyches, apparently). I dunno. I recently found out that the elder Mr. Chatwin used to dress up in a tiger costume and scare the crap out of 5-year-old Bruce, if that helps solve the puzzle at all.
  

Right in the ol' Kornheiser

I've long suspected that life is a zero-sum game. The awful symmetry is usually cloaked by a baroque accounting system that obfuscates via geography, temporality, scale, and old-fashioned smoke & mirrors. But once in a while, you can see a tight little couplet of yin & yang just hanging out, untroubled by its own obviousness.

I really enjoy football, but this enjoyment is perfectly canceled out by how much I fucking hate football commentary. Every Devin Hester juke is negated by an absurd causal narrative involving "momentum" spun by Jaworski. Every Adrian Peterson spin move is negated by smug moralizing from Kornheiser. For every time Urlacher reads the play and splits the offensive line, someone will say "in the National Football League" or "at the end of the day" or "no question." Where are today's Summeralls?* End the reign of the sports talk radio paradigm!

*Summerall would never discuss the "fantasy implications" of Brian Westbrook's flop on the one-yard line. He would spit out his mouthful of brandy and bellow "A heads-up play by Westbrook, tackling himself on the one," and for a minute you'd think it was Dylan Thomas reading "And Death Shall Have No Dominion." Then Summerall would call him "Michael Westbrook," breaking the spell; Dylan Thomas wouldn't make that mistake.

Most e-mailed stories of the future on NYT.com

1. Jogging Cures Autism, Researchers Find
2. Seder for Foodies
3. 36 Hours in a Self-Absorbed Haze
4. “Malice” is Nearly an Anagram of Islam
5. Feel Special? The Smugness Gene, Identified
6. Op-Ed Contributor: I Have a Strange Rash
7. At This Preschool, Nobody Spares the Rod
8. Starbucks Makes a Tentative Foray into the Yoga Trade
9. Maureen Dowd: Mildly Provocative Choir-Preaching
10. First “Metrosexual,” Then “Man-Crush,” Now Simply “Homo”

I have two things to say

1. A Baltimore story. Someone I know was walking down the street at night. She saw a man attempting to cut down a tree (planted by the city in an interstitial sidewalk space) with a handsaw. The man was determined. Then (suddenly, out of nowhere, without warning, etc.) a man jumped from a third-story window onto the would-be lumberjack. The jumping man's leg hit the ground with a sickening crack, and his head slammed against a wrought-iron gate. The jumping man allegedly shouted, "Don't cut down my fucking tree." The lumberjack proceeded to beat the shit out of the jumping man (who presumably had little shit left in his system after the jump), and also attempted to beat the shit out of the observer's male companion. This is on good authority.
2. Jason Elam, the placekicker for the Denver Broncos, has written (with his pastor) a "novel" called Monday Night Jihad, in which ex-football players battle radical Islamist terrorists in the Middle East. One may infer that football metaphors ensue. One may also infer that the hero kicks a ticking time bomb through an impossibly narrow window from 52 yards, saving a buxom but devoutly Christian cheerleader from death-by-shrapnel. Please, please read this link. It is AWESOME. Teaser quote: "If Osama bin Laden himself were to pick up this book and read it, I'd want him to say, 'Yeah, that's why I do what I do.'"

Briefly noted

Also on the Wes Anderson front:
The attorney for Travis Henry, the Broncos running back who faces suspension over smoking some weed, is named Steve Zissou.

Dignan learns to laminate

"So he's like, 'Hey, Darjeeling, that's a kind of tea, right? Or, like, a place in India?' And, I'm, like, 'Uh, yeah, dumbass, it's both.'" -- a guy wearing a Sonic Youth baseball cap, standing in line at the Charles Theater in Baltimore, MD, smug as all git-out

So. Wes Anderson, then.

[This is a good article. It articulates a pervasive unease I feel re: Wes Anderson & race. Nothing riles you up more than race, I know, except perhaps liquor stores that won't accept payroll checks after midnight.]

[Here's what may be the prelude to a thoughtful stance. Come on, "cinetrix," you inconstantly third-person narrator, you. Flesh it out, if only for the children.]

We all expected more from Wes Anderson, mainly because of his adroitness at tapping veins of retarded emotion bulging near the surface. We mistook this for depth. It's amazing what a slow Rolling Stones song & borrowed nostalgia can do to the ol' Longing organs. Throw in some Jarmuschish humor & stage it as an elaborate diorama by Dieter Roth or Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and you've got a dedicated following. But that's ok; that's really ok.

A common defense of simple pleasures: they don't pretend to be anything else. But really, why should intent matter at all here? Who gives a fuck if the guy who made my burrito was hoping for a Michelin star? It's a goddamn decent burrito, and it's delicious.

So. I go to Wes Anderson movies for aesthetic rapture. For mild, offbeat laffs. For cheap heartstring-tugging and shallow symbolism. For material fetishization. For Owen Wilson. Not for "ideas," nor for character exploration, nor for the untangling of moral Gordian knots, and least of all for an admirable treatment of race relations. WA is the first half of WASP, and I've learned to live with that reasonably happily.

6.5/10. CC&P says check it out.

Cheap QALY-saver

Here's to topes. ¡Topes!

Concrete mile

I wanted to just briefly serenade a particular kind of bitterness: it's the long walk on a hot day through blinding daylight along some pedestrian-unfriendly stretch of urban desert. You've been there: along the back end of a convention center parking lot on an off day; underneath the Bangkok elevated train; past the unfinished development site in Delhi with weeds growing through the boxy modern concrete houses; plodding from one car dealership to the next, 1/4 mile down the marginal commercial road with plenty of streetlights but no sidewalks.

You feel vaguely ill, inexplicably weary, despite little physical exertion today. You wonder how you could have ever jogged, sprinted, played a game. It is really far to the next thing. It is really hot. There are no other pedestrians around and the air smells like exhaust.

Fantasy Football Wrapup

I caught a few minutes of the Patriots-Cowboys game at a local Baltimore bar. The bar is half-gay, half-straight, 100% depressing. The hilarious yet (for Baltimore) unremarkable 15-minute circus that ensued fits poorly into a blog nugget; nonetheless, I feel compelled to note a few highlights:

• The bar was nearly empty. I requested that they change the TV from a rodeo broadcast to the game.
• 2 beefy straight 40ish guys were too drunk to notice that they'd lost control of their 20ish trashy-hot girlfriends.
• One trashy-hot drunk girl insisted on being taught how to sign "S-E-X-Y" in ASL by the gay identical twins sitting in the corner playing erotic touchscreen. "Oh my God you're deaf and that's so sad, but it's also awesome, really!!!!"
• Her attention was diverted by a Baltimore Dude (30 but looks 50, no teeth, wiry strong, tattoos, white, shaved head) sobbing into his hands on the counter.
• The trashy-hot girl then proceeded to ostentatiously comfort the Baltimore Dude, buying him shot after shot. "It's ok, sweetie, everything's going to be ok, you know that, right? Get drunk with me."
• The Baltimore Dude attempted to touch the labia of the trashy-hot girl during one of the 116 hugs they engaged in. She slurred "That's not appropriate," then bought everyone another shot.
• One of the 40ish beefy dudes pulled her away after he'd been rejected whilst hitting on a 45ish botoxed horror.
• The Baltimore Dude then sobbed for 5 straight minutes. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he was ok, which of course he wasn't. He said "yeah," then collapsed backward off his barstool and lay on the floor amid spilled beer, overturned barstools, and wretched shame.
• I've been to this bar twice in the past 6 months or so, and it's the second time I've helped someone up the stairs. The first time, it was a man who looked 150 years old, a ruined Statler/Waldorf, his mouth hanging open so wide it looked like he was cruising for plankton. With his son.
• New England beat Dallas but may have lost Sammy Morris, making Kevin Faulk an acceptable desperation #2 back for week 7.

Mid-October nuggets

• You hung over? Feelin' like you need to reboot the works? Wanna purge the toxins? Read this article about Gawker. It's nauseating.
• A quote from the Washington Monthly about the article: "The vast emptiness at the core of what these people do is almost unfathomable, and their self-loathing ranks right up there with crack addicts..."
• Concert Review: 10/14/07, Of Montreal. Good music, wanted to punch Kevin Barnes in the throat. Biggest divergence between singer/song impressions since Telly Savalas' "Telly" (1974). I don't have anything against preening pretension, honestly, but I was in a bad mood; Freddie Mercury was in retrograde or something.
• I was all set to launch a spirited discussion of Gary Taubes' piece on epidemiology (as made manifest in diet/chronic disease etiologic research: weak associations, unmeasured confounding, shaky conclusions), but then I got bored. And you would have too. So instead, I thought we could-- together, you and me-- launch a jihad against the phrase "junk science." Consider this an amateur fatwa (the hottest kind).

Instructions for making a nuclear bomb

Here is a surefire recipe for constructing a nuclear weapon:

1. I have always been curious to see who searches for this kind of thing. Radioactive Boy Scouts, for instance.
2. Presumably, there's all kinds of crappy or scarily useful information posted online by lunatics.
3. Therefore, this post probably won't make it into Google's top 100 search results.
4. I might need some specific ordered combination of terms, like "bomb recipe" or "step by step nuclear bomb" or "nuclear bomb instructions."
5. Nonetheless, it would be awfully interesting if I got hits on this site from people searching for such a thing. I will report back to you.
6. I'm sure the NSA and the FBI and the BBC and BB King have posted all kinds of lures and traps online, and play the "track IP address" game.
7. By simply posting about this topic, I may find myself face-to-face with scary waterboarders in dark suits tomorrow.
8. Tell my mother I love her.
9. Mix 3 cups of flour, 1 tsp of baking powder, and 1 tsp of salt in a bowl.
10. Add 2 oz bourbon, a dash of bitters, and 1/2 a teaspoon of Triple Sec.

Colbert didn't quite nail it

Although I wish he didn't look quite so smug in his photo, I think Frank Rich writes good columns. Here's one you should read. I'm looking at you, you complacent ass, stuffing your face with grilled chicken panini. You!

Don't roll your eyes at my motto, bro

Apparently I was out of the loop. I thought "Don't tase me, bro" was a sufficiently obscure reference to serve as this blog's motto. Apparently not. Apparently I need to read blogs produced and owned by Wired magazine.

A quote from the story: "For those of you who've been on vacation on a Greek Island, or are just logging onto your computer from a remote location in China..."

This kind of embarrassed disclaimer preceding an explanation chafes my nerves almost as much as the phrase "Party foul!" does. Yes, for those of you who aren't pale men aged 15-40 who spend all day checking out the "most viewed" videos on YouTube...

Ok, fine. I'm just mad that I didn't hang out backstage with "Don't tase me, bro" before it was signed to a major label. Before the Nigel Godrich production and the string section. Anyway, I've replaced the slogan with a new one, a non-jokey one, taken from a nice essay by John Updike. I like this phrase. It is just the right flavor of bloggy narcissism.

24-23

Hyperbole never tasted so sweet:

"Yes, in the wake of the greatest upset in college football's entire history--a history that stretches back to 1869, four years after the Civil War came to an end--one can fairly say that somewhere in a land of peace and joy, Bill Walsh is smiling broadly as he looks down on pupil Jim Harbaugh, and a bunch of Stanford men who have just attained a considerable measure of gridiron immortality."

Arabbers, dirtbikes, wheelchairs

The streets of Baltimore prominently feature three means of conveyance that are at best rare in other cities. Bullet points!

• Arabbers. They deserve their own post, if not Presidential Medals of Freedom. They are a dying breed (by a recent count, only 6 remain) of street vendors who hawk fruit and sundries from pony-drawn carts. They maintain an African-American tradition dating back nearly 200 years. I once noticed horseshit in my alley, and wondered: what the fuck? Then I saw some Arabbers passing through the neighborhood, shouting and vending, and I understood.
• Dirtbikes. This is unreal. Groups of dirtbike riders careen through Baltimore like showboating swallows at dusk. Wheelies at 60 mph. Flying through parks, cutting through yards. Dodging traffic, even flying the wrong way up Highway 83. You hear the buzz of the motors after the kids are already past you, all pulling wheelies and exhibiting daring beyond anything you've ever displayed. Cops can't stop them. Every black kid in East Baltimore wants a dirtbike. The 8-year-old kid I mentor covets one like you'd covet a Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock. When we draw, he asks me to draw dirtbikes. I've thought about pedantically drawing him pictures of massive head injuries, but my artistic skills are limited. So I draw him dirtbikes. Dirtbikes!
• Motorized wheelchairs. There are neighborhoods where they clog the streets. Distressingly piloted by young men, who exhibit an "I got nothing to lose" indifference to automobiles.

Lonely at the top

I won both my fantasy baseball leagues. Yes, that's right. Shout it from the mountaintops. I won. And you know what victory looks like?

Victory looked like this: a slouched posture in front of the computer. An empty beer bottle in my right hand. Outside, ruined Baltimore briefly flattered by the dying sun. An empty apartment. The mild annoyance of friends. The utter indifference of loved ones. Countless hours of life wasted. And for what? For what?

All the National Bohemians I can drink. I don't think King Pyrrhus ever got that reward. Time to pay up. You know who you are.

stop the coming war

Time to write your congressional rep. Really.

Be my Mal Evans

I've spent the last week shirking my trivial epidemiological responsibilities and immersing myself in the Beatles. If you've never watched the 8-part Anthology-- and I hadn't-- it's well worth the time.

Much of it is crudely sequenced and laughably staged. Paul is interviewed while apparently captaining a tugboat. Later, he is interviewed while casually tending a campfire in the woods. Paul is kind of an ass. George, though admirably humble, sardonic, and down-to-earth, is interviewed in his palatial home. It appears to have been decorated by a billionaire Uzbek immigrant. 1994 brought some questionable sartorial choices. Paul's mullet. George's colorful sweaters. Ringo's LA Raiders cap.

But the documentary is riveting. Their Elvis encounter is a Liverpudlian Rashomon:

• Ringo & George seem to be telling the truth about it (I paraphrase): "We were stoned out of our minds & all of us forgot where we were going. Then we realized, oh yeah, we're gonna meet Elvis. We fell out of the limo giggling, and there he was, hanging out on the porch watching TV and playing a bass guitar. It was weird. He was surrounded by sycophants and seemed kind of out of it. We stayed a few hours. Shame he was so threatened by us later, telling Nixon that we corrupted America's youth and all. Whatever."
• Paul: "Oh, yeah, I was blown away. What a historic encounter."
• John: "We just jammed with him, you know, all the old rock & roll standards."
• George: "John said he jammed with him. Must have been when we were out of the room."

Much of the footage is surprisingly moving. Some highlights:

• A performance of "I Am The Walrus" from Magical Mystery Tour.
• Music videos of "Paperback Writer" and "Rain."
• Twickenham bickering and jamming.
• Yoko perched like a vulture, watching the lads play "Let It Be."
• John being consistently clever and acidic. If you're going to be an asshole, might as well be interesting-- take note, Sir McCartney.
• Ringo comes off well.
• The transition from publicly well-behaved lads to irreverent hippies is shockingly rapid. It was only four months between "You're Going To Lose That Girl" and "Norwegian Wood," and less than a year between matching suits and Sgt. Pepper.
• The transition from goofy hippies to gaunt, bearded sages is similarly rapid.
• The mythopoiea of the Maharishi sojourns and lysergic trips is deflated by all the footage of young confused folks behaving in entirely recognizable ways. '60s envy is ameliorated if not cured.
• Just watching the 4 of them play together is pretty damned thrilling.

The Semaphore of Squamuglia

You really ought to check this out.

It was forwarded to me by DR, who says "It's hard for me to imagine something you'll find more interesting." DR knows me; what can I say?

[clarification: DR is not the Dominican Republic, with whom I have had little correspondence, other than a series of increasingly urgent communiqués in 1973 stemming from a diplomatic misunderstanding. Apparently "puta" is not Spanish for "put," FYI.]