Journeys
Images
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

Amazon Associate
Contact

Entries in economics (178)

Monday
Jun142010

Produce Children = Future investment

Greetings,

Yes, possible signs of intelligent life exist in Vietnam or Cambodia. Rumor control reports. Merely existing mind you. 

‘Mind yourself, how you go dearie,’ whispered an Irish ghostwriter Druid in Donegal. Well remembered.

Take my neighbors for example. Sam and Dave. Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new yin instead of old yang. 

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone, anyone to take care of them in old age. When they are sitting on their bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 smells from the kitchen. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000. Cash. Up front or no deal.

They pretended to need kids to support them in old age but when you’re young and naive pregnancy is always an option. 

It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. There are 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the wildly popular and heavily censored Party book, “Produce & Consume.” Get married early, the pressure is on. 

You do not want to be unmarried and sad, lonely and well forgotten. Loneliness dramatically increases the chances of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a well mannered society. 

Extreme pressure is on the girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa, which is not part of this tale, illustrates the value for rural girls to get married at the ripe old age of 16 and start producing genetic forms of themselves. Petri dish. Wash and tear.

Metta.


Saturday
Jun122010

Labor

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of: how to paint a curb in Cambodia.

Part 1. Get a plastic bucket. Throw in white language. Tie a blue and white checkered scarf around your neck. It's hotter than the mid-day sun on the Tropic of Cancer. South of the Equator. Slather it on with a broom. David Foster Wallace wrote: The Broom of The System.

DFW said: "what it feels like to live, to observe, to experience in absurd detail where others lack the self-scrutiny or courage to voice them."

2. Your four emaciated brothers walk past on their way to work. Three carry shovels. One carries a sledgehammer. They will transform the small sleepy river town into: (a) a hot tourist location (b) frozen ice inside the hard cold fact:  how necessities become luxuries which happens around Earth. Consider ice. Frozen water. Necessity. Yesterday it was water. Today it is white rice. Close as white on rice. Tomorrow it's Medicine. The day after tomorrow in the long now it's Education. Life's little luxuries. Plural.

They suck on life's plastic straw. They discard the plastic straw and cup on the ground. They walk. They paint. They shovel. They slam sledgehammers.

Their daily efforts will revitalize world economies. They will speak at G-20 economic forums. They will address important powerful people. They will speak to 5% of the world's richest people who control 98% of the total wealth.

They will have a voice. They will represent millions of peasants and poor people. Their labor will wear them down. They will lose the resolve, the focus the vision to alter history. They will be replaced by new workers.

They paint. They shovel dirt. They pound sledgehammers. They suck ice. They mill around. They watch the world pass by hearing inadequate impossible language. Their DAILY language is pure, raw labor. 

A Cambodian woman carries the world on her back. 

Metta.

  

 

Wednesday
Jun092010

Street 5

Greetings,

On behalf of the Hanoi Department of Tourism and One Party Neighborhoods filled with millions of well adjusted content poetic calligraphic citizens, welcome to our fair city! Stroll through parks and gardens. Smell the roses.

Enjoy wandering around. See amazing historical and cultural mysteries. Our number is on the wall. Call now. Make new friends. Get lost. Explore. Discover.

Metta.


 

 

  

Tuesday
Jun082010

Gadget man to the rescue!

Greetings,

Well before human fingers painted with blood, animal fat and ash on French and Spanish cave walls, and scratched images and dreams on sacred Aborigine sites; and well before humans in Mesopotamia etched Sumarian symbols on wet clay using sharp reeds and animal skins and dried parchment; and well before Gutenberg invented the printing press and well before paper, pencil, pen, illuminated vellum manuscripts, canvas and diverse materials there was THE GADGET!

Early humans were busy hunting and gathering. Survival was the game.  

To connect or not to connect, that is the question. Let's do the numbers. Text me baby. 140 characters dance.

Here is an image of a calculating machine gadget morphing into a super human computer capable of crunching millions of numbers, data and esoteric trivia. In REAL TIME.

 

 

...A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated...

In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows. Read the small print.

  Hooked on Gadgets...

Save my life! Save my marriage! Save me from electricity! Give me ash, blood, paper. Give me real time.

Give me a Cambodian man pedaling laboring a one gear gadget bike pulling a cart loaded with bags of cement. Give me two men pulling a cart loaded with discarded cardboard. One man squeezes an orange plastic toy - SQUEEK, SQUEEK telling residents to bring out their paper products. The plastic toy is his 21st Century gadget. 

Give me a man ringing a bell. Give me 221 seconds inside a time tunnel to cement a deal before I have a heart attack from the stress. My gadget addiction is killing me. Before we have sex my wife and mistress make me wear a gadget. This gadget nullifies the sensation of direct and immediate experience.

I'm a gadget. A living breathing, laughing gadget. I have a gadget son and a gadget daughter. They are artificial intelligence personified.

I have the precision of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table. 

Metta.

 

Asia's long now.

Friday
Jun042010

Dhaka

Greetings,

You find poetry while sweeping. Poetry finds you while weeping.

Metta.

Dhaka

Only five million humans 

Horns for beggars, their arms
Broken and bleeding
Hands extending through cracked windows
 
Floods send them into traffic
Unable to cope with land loss
Daughter sells body, father sells wife,
Son sells self
 
We sell them malnutrition,
Handfuls of rice
As sanitation system collapses
Under strain of poverty
 
Misery is a child
Bloated stomach a hopeless
Jaundiced eye full of tear
Never going to fall
Into streets where holy bull wallows
Next to a one-legged man
His crutch a stench rising
In dust, sleeping in a broken down 
Life

My fake pregnancy begs for charity in China. Save face.