Keywords

A young Obama asks his Indonesian step-father, Lolo, about war:

“What are those?” “Leech marks,” he said. “From when I was in New Guinea. They crawl inside your army boots while you’re hiking through the swamps. At night, when you take off your socks, they’re stuck there, fat with blood. You sprinkle salt on them and they die, but you still have to dig them out with a hot knife.”

I ran my finger over one of the oval grooves. It was smooth and hairless where the skin had been singed. I asked Lolo if it had hurt.

“Of course it hurt,” he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”

We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts. A queer notion suddenly sprang into my head.

“Have you ever seen a man killed?” I asked him.He glanced down, surprised by the question. “Have you?” I asked again. “Yes,” he said. “Was it bloody?”

“Yes.” I thought for a moment. “Why was the man killed? The one you saw?” “Because he was weak.” “That’s all?” Lolo shrugged and rolled his pant leg back down. “That’s usually enough. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.” He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, “Which would you rather be?”

I didn’t answer, and Lolo squinted up at the sky. “Better to be strong,” he said finally, rising to his feet. “If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

It wasn’t too long ago that I was writing posts comparing Firefox vs. Safari. When Chrome came along I thought it would solve the problem, combining the best of both worlds and adding some nice new features as well. However, since Safari 5 came out I’ve noticed that my iMac functions much faster. This is strange, because I run apps to measure memory and CPU usage and Chrome was very good on both counts. It is true that memory usage is slightly better in Safari, but Chrome wasn’t so much of a memory hog that this can explain the difference. And Chrome seems to actually use less processor power than Safari! I suspect that OS X simply doesn’t like having too many processes running at the same time, and Chrome would spawn multiple new processes for each new tab. But that is just a guess. Another possibility is that Safari is even better at reducing its memory usage when it is running in the background? Whatever the cause, I hope a future update to Chrome will solve the problem…

The main advantages Chrome has over Safari are the “omnibar,” which I’ve come to prefer over having search and URL separated, extensions, which can now be enabled in Safari (and for which there are already a bunch of decent options, including AdBlock), and keyword search. Only in switching to Safari do I realize how much I’ve come to depend on Chrome’s keyword search feature. Without it I feel like I’m web browsing with one hand tied behind my back. There is an application, keywurl, which adds this feature to Safari, but so far it isn’t working with Safari 5. I tried the work-around on this page, but I found it just caused Safari to crash… There are some other apps which provide similar functionality, but they don’t seem as good. I guess I’ll just wait and hope that the keywurl developer comes out with a fix soon…

Trying to make sense of the economic crisis in Europe and I wanted to put a few things together: First, Paul Krugman has been harping about how the Euro is a major problem because Greece and Spain can't simply devalue their currency. But, second, I heard an interview with David Harvey who said that the economic crisis in California is as big, if not bigger than some of the ones we are seeing in Europe. OK, but then why isn't the Dollar a problem for California? I finally got a tantalizing answer to that question in an interview with a hedge fund manager on Doug Henwood's Beyond the News [episode not up yet]. I forget his name, but he suggested that while there are no legal barriers to labor mobility in Europe, cultural and linguistic barriers make it hard for labor to move from low productivity regions to high productivity regions. That, seems, in part, to suggest why the common currency is less of a problem in the US than it is in Europe. But I'm not sure if this point really addresses the issue raised in #2? And also, do linguistic and cultural differences really explain Europe? I know a heck of a lot of Eastern Europeans moved West in search of work… So still something that I need to understand better. Comments welcome.