Telugu: A transliteration experiment (English below)

బ్లాగర్ అండ్ గూగుల్ వేరే సొమెహౌ స్కేరి-స్మార్ట్ ఎనౌఘ్ తో పిక్ అప్ ఆన్ అ తెలుగు కనెక్షన్ తో ది కాయ్లవ్రాల్ బ్లాగ్.  ఐ'మ నాట్ సరే హౌ, ఎక్ష్కెప్త I హవె ఉసెద్ ది తెలుగు టర్మ్ అఫ్ ఎన్దెఅర్మెన్త చిన్నమ్మ (లితెరల్ త్రన్స్లతిఒన్ "లిటిల్ మదర్" ఓర అల్తెర్నతివేలీ "లిట్ట్లేస్ట్ మదర్" ఈఫ్ తేరే అరె మోర్ తన ఒనె ఫెమలె సిబ్లింగ్స్) ఆన్ సం అఫ్ ది ప్ద్ఫ్స్ లింకెద్ తో ది బ్లాగ్, సో పెర్హప్స్ ఇట్ కేఎద్ ఫ్రొం తేరే (ఐ'వె బీన్ ప్రోఫిలేడ్!). 

అన్య్వయ్, ఇట్ తేన ఒఫ్ఫెరెద్ మే ది ఛాన్స్ తో పోస్ట్ అ త్రన్స్లితెరతెద్ ఎంట్రీ.  థిస్ సుర్ప్రిసెద్ మే - అప్ ఉంతిల్ రేసెంట్లి, అ తెలుగు-ఇంగ్లీష్ దిక్తిఒనర్య దిద్న్'త ఎవెన్ ఎక్షిస్త.  అండ్ నౌ తేరే'స తెలుగు కెపాసిటీ ఆన్ అ ఫ్రీ బ్లాగర్?! 

ట్రన్స్లితెరతిఒన్ ఇస్ సొర్త్ అఫ్ అ హెడ్-జాబు, బింగ్ అ పూర్ సుబ్స్తితుటే ఫర్ అచ్తుఅల్ త్రన్స్లతిఒన్, బట్ ఐ తౌఘ్త్ ఐ'ద ట్రై ఇట్ అన్య్వయ్.  మయ్బే ఇన్ ది ఫుతురె, త్రన్స్లతిఒన్ విల్ బె ఫోర్త్కమింగ్, అండ్ వే వన్'త హవె తో రిలీ ఆన్ ది హుమన్ బ్రెయిన్ తో డో త్రన్స్లతిఒన్స, అస్ I దిద ఫర్ అ కోప్లె అఫ్ పిక్చర్ బుక్స్ I వ్రొతె వెన్ కాయ్లేయ్ వ్యాస్ అ బేబీ. 

నాట్ తట్ ఇట్ విల్ మేటర్ ముచ్ - కాయ్లేయ్ హస నెవెర్ దెమొన్స్త్రతెద్ ముచ్ ఇంట్రెస్ట్ ఇన్ తట్ పార్ట్ అఫ్ హర్ హెరితగె.  బట్ ఇట్'స ఇంతెరెస్తింగ్ తో సి వాట్ టెక్నాలజీ కాన్ డో.

Blogger and Google were somehow scary-smart enough to pick up on a Telugu connection to the Caylawral blog.  I'm not sure how, except I have used the English spelling of the Telugu term-of-endearment "Chinnamma" (literal translation - "little mother" or alternatively "littlest mother" if there is more than one female sibling) on some of the PDFs linked to the blog, so perhaps it keyed in from there.  Wow, that IS scary!  Mutter something in passing and you can end up profiled, essentially!

Anyway, it then offered me the chance to post an entry in Telugu transliteration.  This surprised me: up until recently, an English-Telugu dictionary hadn't even been published, and now there's Telugu capability on a free blogger?! 

Transliteration is sort of a head-job, being a poor substitute for actual translation, but I thought I'd try it anyway.  Maybe in the future the translation capacity will be forthcoming, and I won't have to rely on a human brain to do it, as I did for two picture books I wrote for Cayley when she was an infant.

Not that it will likely matter much - Cayley has never demonstrated much interest in that part of her heritage anyway.  But still, it's interesting to see what technology will do next. 

Play time

Cay's second summer theatrical production is The Fantastic Mr. Fox, produced by Upstage Arts. 

Its first showing was this afternoon, with the second scheduled for tomorrow at 2:00 p.m.  After today's production, I had to listen to both Cay and Lawrence howl about how AWFUL it was.  While it's probably true that the direction was lacking and the main characters forgot many of their lines, I find myself unable to establish expectations.  Theatre is most definitely not my thing!!  My kid is cute and does a good job of her parts.  Beyond that, I mostly just sit there passively in the audience and decline to judge.

 

Who let this unlikely cat out of the bag?!

Ten thousand restaurants in greater Houston, and my favorite since around 1995 has been a tiny hole-in-the-wall where I was definitely one of the first white people ever to tread.  Thirteen years after my initial discovery, it was voted the best Indian restaurant in Houston by Houston Press, and the love affair continues with a front-page article in today's Houston Chronicle.
 

(JPG linked from Houston Chronicle)

If the shoe fits, whore it.

A "something's wrong with this picture" hunch reveals yet another nefarious plot to screw the consumer.

I used to be able to walk into any sporting goods store and find narrow-width running shoes that actually fit.  This ended several years ago when the chain stores unilaterally stopped carrying narrow widths, and I had to start buying my shoes at high-end specialty stores and via the internet.  A few weeks ago in frustration, I re-checked one of the larger chains and counted ONE HUNDRED AND TEN different models of womens running shoes for sale, NOT ONE of which was narrow. 

Something about this situation kept nagging at the back of my mind, so while shopping yesterday, I set about closely examining all 110 pairs, approximately 30 of which were offered by my favorite manufacturer which shall remain nameless, and guess what I found?  There actually WAS a narrow-width shoe concealed in that collection - it was just tagged as a medium width.

Why would they do this?!? 

Because narrow-width shoes are considered a "specialty product" and are correspondingly very expensive - two to three times the cost of a comparable-quality shoe by the same manufacturer.   If they reserve those shoes for higher-end stores, they can demand MUCH more money while incurring NO additional manufacturing cost.  Yet simultaneously they don't necessarily want to lose ALL sales from the hoarde of mainstream middle-class consumers, so if they put the same shoe in the chain store but call it "medium", some of those consumers are going to stumble upon it and buy it simply because - surprise - it fits. 

So they sell the same product using two different representations in a way that maximizes profit.  At the expense of the well-heeled (pun intended) consumer, of course, who gets suckered into going the high-dollar route when she can't find the product in the mainstream.

And the fact that they call a "narrow" shoe a premium product but leave the "wide" ones openly advertized on the lower-priced shelves is no accident, either.  Sloth doesn't sell and, as Lawrence pointed out to me the other day, the idealized female form has been steadily progressing from the "fat goddess" archetype that was exalted when food was in short supply...

...to the lean, muscled trendsetter now that food is so over-available that it has risen to the level of being a systemic poison.

Only wealthier women have the means to attain that form (and they have thinner feet as a result of it), because it takes TIME, and time is money. And money is what they want - from us, the women whom they know full well have it to spend on their shoes. 

So I'm onto them now, those cash-vacuuming cretins, having finally outsmarted them at their own game and, with luck, I'll never have to pay $100 for another pair of narrow-width running shoes that should cost $40, like the ones I bought yesterday. 

Geez, the crap I have to go through just to jog with a dog...

(clipart courtesy of Microsoft;

famous fat goddess pic

courtesy of just about anyone)

Saturday night at the movies

Actually, just 38 seconds worth of movies, featuring Cay and Nyx.  Note that Nyx will play her game of dog 'n' mouse and stay meticulously inside our property line without having to be told.  She seems to instinctively realize the restrictions imposed by our over-regulated society (keeping dogs leashed is de rigueur in this neighborhood, but it's technically not against the law to have a dog loose on your own land).  Lawrence is panting like Darth Vader behind his iPhone in this one, as he'd just completed his turn at sprinting after Nyx for all he was worth.

Sheep-shifting

I've been watching a series of economically-related documentaries through Netflix streaming and a theme has emerged: the institutionalized fleecing of the American lower socioeconomic classes. It's easy to make money off the poor because (a) they are unsophisticated, uneducated, easily led, and can't identify when they're being sucked in, followed by (b) they aren't organized or well-represented politically so they have little recourse once they DO get sucked in.


Ordinarily I tend to take a laissez-faire attitude about all this: if people are too dumb to spot a scam, well, to hell with them - Darwin rules. However, I mollify that attitude when deceptive practices are at work. Some of the lending practices that led to the economic collapse in 2008 appeared to be deceptive.  And now something very similar appears to be happening with respect to education.

The worst part of the whole scheme is that it smacks of assisted suicide: it's difficult to pin full responsibility on any one entity.  One person acquires the drugs, a second person mixes the cocktail, a third person inserts the needle, a fourth person loads the cocktail into the IV, and the guy who wants out actually turns the dial to start his own fatal drip.  Who, then, was responsible for killing the guy, especially if one or more of the precursor people weren't informed of the final intent?

Similarly, corporations and now educational institutions, including legitimate ones, hire outside contractors to do the marketing that brings them clients.  Often times, those corporations claim NOT to know what tactics their hired recruiters are using (whether this ignorance is intentional or not is a separate debate). 

What was once the dominion of the subprime mortgage market has made a predictable progression to education:  take on too much debt, lose your job because other people have lost their houses and the economy tanked, then lose YOUR OWN house, then look for ways to improve your income potential so you can get out of this mess - the obvious recourse is education.  And now I see the same lines of bull being used to sell access to education (which means student loan debt) as were previously used to sell access to houses that people could not afford.

Sometimes those ads even use the same graphics and stylistic wording as were used by the subprime mortgage ads of yesteryear.  And sometimes they just seem to be downright deceptive - AND sexist to boot!  Yesterday, NPR ran a piece that included commentary on "Obama's educational program for single Moms".  If you are an uneducated, unsophisticated woman, of course you'd automatically associate "Obama" with "bail-out" - some kind of great financial deal for you, as it was for so many others!  Yet NPR stated unequivocally that no such program exists.  The Obama administration does NOT have a free or even partially-free money program for mothers, single or otherwise.  And yet the ordinary person can't surf the internet for ten minutes before seeing claims that include the terms "scholarships" and "grants", which are both euphemisms for "free money":

WHY is this worth commenting on?  Because when poor people take on student loans under the guise that it's tied into some larger good deal that Obama created for them, they default on them in significant numbers, just as they did with houses.  Yet ANOTHER form of mass loan default!  And who pays for all of it?  The taxpayers, of course.  The very same people who paid for the subprime mess.  As such, it's not "their" problem, the sheep being led to the shearing - at the heart of it, it's OUR problem.

I don't have much sympathy for stupidity, but I have far less sympathy for deceptive practice.  I'm not sure why little is being done about this situation.

Cay-nine communi-Cay-tor

When I mentioned to a family member that we were facing some dog discipline challenges, she said, "Try rolling her onto her back to teach submission."

This made me laugh. 

We can't get her OFF her back.

"What was that you said? 

I shouldn't chew things

that don't belong to me?! 

You're kidding, right?!?"

The two star-crossed lovers

gazed intently into each others' eyes,

until the younger one said...

..."Feel free to count my nipples -

I sure as hell won't be

needing them for anything!"

..."but waitaminute -

you can't leave me now!"

("Hmmm, maybe if I nudge her lovingly

in the ribs, she'll get the message...")

Mama's got a squeezebox

Oops - that's The Who's S-word, not mine - I meant, Mama's got a SIXPACK.  And no, I don't mean Negra Modelo either - I mean abs!  Gut muscles! 

I didn't notice this until Lawrence let out a surprised yodel about it last night.  There, for the first time in my life, in the midst of that thoracic real estate which is happily headed for the half-century mark, and in defiance of the the vestigial volume imparted by underlying bio-hotel room formerly occupied by my then-larval daughter, there are dimples.  Chiseled surfaces.  A discrete valley down the middle. 

I caught this washboard off our livingroom floor like a delightful disease while watching my idol Morgan Freeman (a Mississippian who shares some of my views on racism) narrate the space physics documentary series that he himself executively-produced.   My brain doesn't like to do discrete tasks - I feel like I'm wasting my time unless I am accomplishing at least two objectives at any given moment.   So now that our house is set up and I'm spending less time on prep-work, I have increased the floor exercises that I do while trying to learn more about quantum mechanics and other docu-subjects.  

I have a strong preference for Callanetics.  Twenty seconds into this one-minute video clip below, you can see a time-lapse series which tells the story: "this is your ass... this is your ass on Callanetics... any questions?!"
 


Nineteen hours produced those results - even if a TV presentation of string theory is not your thing theory, that represents only about a half-season's worth of Law and Order!  As Ms. Callan calmly states, "You don't need plastic surgery to make these improvements."  No, Americans just need to move two feet off the couch to the floor in front of the TV and make a little effort.  Ass, abs, whatever - it's all right there immediately available to whoever wants it, like so many other things here in the Land of Opportunity. 

Of course, if you'd prefer to go the plastic route instead, you COULD pay up to $10,000 for a Brazilian butt lift.  Do the math: you'd save yourself the equivalent of up to $526 per hour just by doing leg lifts in front of your favorite telly shows.  But proving that there's every bit as much stupidity in this country as there is opportunity, Americans spent $14 billion on cosmetic surgery in 2007. 

I'm glad I've now got these abs, because I'm going to need an increasingly strong stomach just to handle the continued sight of our bizarre cultural priorities. 

Carte Verte, and not judging a book by its cover

I spend time working by myself in areas of Houston where middle-class white people do not go.  I used to get hassled by pimps and pushers, but that was before I smartened up and put the signs on my van, the ones that say "environmental".  This plus my other nonconformances to white stereotype (the facts that I'm skinny, unafraid, wearing steel-toed boots, don't dye my buzz-cut greyish hair, and am driving an 11-year-old vehicle) give people pause.  The result is that the neighborhood folks don't know whether to shoot or shake hands, but they end up concluding that if I'm obviously not in-their-faces wealthy and am doing something "environmental", my presence is tolerable and maybe it's even for the greater good, so they don't invade my space as I am sorta doing to theirs.  God bless the green scene - it's my ticket to social legitimacy. 

I love driving through the Wards (Houston's oldest neighborhoods, now flagships of urban decay) because one never knows what interesting and unprecedented scenes one is going to encounter there, such this motor vehicle crash fragment discarded on a rubbled vacant lot, which basically says it all:

While tooling about the area yesterday, I decided I would stop at a Subway sandwich shop, which is the only fast-food franchise we patronize in my family.  This was the first Subway I had visited with bars on the windows and doors.  I don't mean the decorative kind - I mean the kind you couldn't get through unless you drove a car at high speed through the front of the store. 

In order to get to the ladies room to wash my hands, I had to wait until the cashier was free.  She then unlocked the doors for me.  In other words, at no time was a key handed to me.  I had to be escorted.  To the restroom.  Part of the deterrence programs for junkies and johns, I assume. 

It was without a doubt the cleanest restaurant bathroom I've ever seen in America, or Canada either for that matter.  It was cleaner than the restrooms in my own home.  Then, as I was sitting there in the booth eating my oven-roasted chicken six-inch and my coveted Miss Vickie's jalapeno potato chips, a worker swept the floor that didn't need to be swept, then washed the floor that didn't need to be washed.

So the Subway in the Ward turned out to be the best Subway of all.  We'll probably never know the story behind the place, but my first guess is that some poor person in that neighborhood worked very hard to acquire that franchise, and was giving it all they had, because maybe it was their only shot in life (I do realize that this postulate is, in itself, stereotypical).  That's exactly how I felt when I took on massive student loans in university: I didn't intend to be the academic star I became - my performance was driven by the fact that I was spending a fortune of money that wasn't mine, and I couldn't look myself in the mirror unless I gave it my best effort.

When I told Cayley about this great "things are not always what they seem" experience, she asked me if I would one day take her to that Subway in the Ward.  I do believe I will. 

:-)

  

A Home Is Born

For all the folks who have exclaimed, "But you spent six months building a house, and then you didn't send me any pictures!!" - here you go!!  Click the link above da pic!!  :-)

http://www.envirosteele.com/2010_HOME_IS_BORN_PRINT_071310.pdf  

Would you believe...

...that you can buy a $1,500 treadmill for a dog (mind you, I have a very good HUMAN treadmill manufactured by Vision Fitness that only cost me $1,400), but you CAN'T buy the equivalent of a $20 butt pack for a dog?

Nyx and I jog a 2.3-mile route through the neighborhood several times a week (we're working up to longer sessions but it's HOT right now!!).

I want her to carry my house key, ID and cellphone.  If I put a fanny pack on myself, it flops around in an irritating and distracting fashion, plus it throws off my center of gravity (not by much, but at my age and with my bones having been rearranged by childbirth, every bit of stability helps).  With her easy lope and one-year-old legs, she's a better candidate for this task. 

But even with the hundreds of thousands of consumer products out there, including said $1,500 treadmill, there seems to be no product that fills this need.  There are dog backpacks, designed so that they can carry their own food and water on hikes, but those are too big, bulky, hot, and expensive. 

The best I've been able to do so far is to take a generic waist case with a velcro belt strap and attach it to her harness.

She tolerates it without complaint, but it flops to one side or the other and it can't be comfortable. 

Yesterday Lawrence said that he ordered me some type of carry product from a service dog website, so we'll see how that works.

In the mean time, think about it:

Thirty-nine percent of American households own at least one dog (says the Humane Society).

Sixy-four percent of American adults are seriously overweight or obese (says the United States).

Yet are ANY of those 130 million getting off their fat asses and getting out there to jog with their readily-available dogs??   Not really - or else the market would have been stimulated to offer dog jogging products such as I've described above.

And oh - just in case you didn't believe me that someone is marketing a $1,500 doggie treadmill?  It's manufactured by a company called Jog-A-Dog and here's a snippet of it in action:

Ten seconds of perspective

I was in Whole Foods an hour ago after a client's attorney meeting and an elderly black man looked at me in my dressed-up, hairsprayed form and said, "Thank God you white" (meaning, he was telling me that I should be thanking God that I was born white and not black).

If I hadn't been in such a hurry, I woulda replied, "YOU thank God that you AMERICAN! It took me THIRTEEN YEARS OF WORK to earn the basic rights that YOU was born with!"

But I was in a big hurry and didn't have time to go there with him.

Sky's the limit, Part II

I get a lot of sympathy pats because people assume it must really SUCK to live in a brand new neighborhood that does not yet have mature trees. 

While I'd prefer the trees, the prairie scene has its benefits.  First, the breeze is almost always blowing across the fetch, making it feel significantly cooler and suppressing mosquitos, thus making midsummer evening walks downright pleasant (say THAT about a 30-year-old subdivision).  Second, I've never in my life spent so much time looking at the sky, because now I CAN - there's an actual full dome above us with a distant horizon - and I see things that are lost to people who are wooded in. 

Case in point tonight, this radiating pattern from the southeastern horizon 180 degrees from where the sun was setting - in other words, exactly at the point where sun will rise tomorrow morning.  This happened during an otherwise-unremarkable sunset, and neither of us can figure out why (one aerospace engineer and one scientist with some astronomy background thusly strike out).  Even if the sunlight were refracting around the atmosphere, I still don't see why it would appear to converge like that at the horizon.  The streaks appeared to extend across exactly half of the dome - that probably has something to do with the explanation.

I'll leave some thinking space here in case someone writes me and says, "Oh yeah, that's caused by _______________________________________________________________"

Darkness in donax land

Quoth today's headline story in the Galveston Daily News:  "Officials have not confirmed if large oil sheets that washed up on Galveston’s west end last week were connected to the BP spill."

I saw free oil in the surf zone yesterday but I initially assumed it was either something that Hurricane Alex had upchucked, or perhaps something the revellers had dumped in situ (the beach was insanely packed with drunks who were "celebrating" Independence Day by trashing the place).  There's no cell service out there, so I hadn't read the stories (links below) until we returned. 

Furthermore, I saw tar balls for the first time in twenty years, but again, I assumed that they were old ones, dredged up by the recent storm which, by the way, had also buried the place in massive amounts of seaweed.

I wouldn'ta even noticed the tar balls except for the fact that, since the time of Ike, I've been collecting COAL on my west-end wanderings.  Yes, coal.  How it got there I don't know, but I speculate that there's a mass of it somewhere on the bottom, having gone down many decades ago with one of the old steam ships.  When we have storms, it gets tossed back up like every other large inexplicable object. 

And of course coal and tar are indistinguishable at a distance.  Here's a pic of a tar ball I pulled apart (upper) and a fragment of coal.

 By the way, donax is a highly mobile species of clam that lives only in the surf zone.  They came to my mind re: the title of this entry because they were migrating like crazy yesterday, as they will often do around sunset.  If we've got pollution, it doesn't seem to be that bad yet, because they were unusually vigorous.

http://www.galvnews.com/story/160958
http://www.galvnews.com/apnews?report=/dynamic/stories/U/US_GULF_OIL_SPILL

Smoke on the water

Fourth of July fireworks from the beach house.  One of these days, I swear I'll remember to bring my tripod.  As usual, these were taken with camera balanced on nearest stable object (deck railing).  Kinda fun to watch, but it sure scared the bejesus out of the dog.

All in the paternal family

She'll probably want to kill me for posting this, but from L to R:  First cousin and new mother Namrata, first cousin Sneha, Auntie Nalini holding first-cousin-once-removed Shriyan, Herself patiently dressed and dotted, grandmother Bharati, Auntie Kalyani.  Click on photo to enlarge.

She's like the wind

And she's winging westward through the remains of Hurricane Alex.  I never function properly until I know she's back on the ground and safe.  We love you, Chinnamma!!