Kartika Upadhyaya

3/1 – 3/7

felt tired, sad, alone, wonderful, perhaps just like this. 

found “why hadn’t poor human eyesight selected out?” searches unsatisfying.

wonder if scholarly citations should be weighted by the impact factor of the citing journal.  tabernacle sounds made up, like samaflubo or quarskeziz.

grooming overrated, roam as thine creator intended.

read bulgakov’s a country doctor’s notebook.  in the years of the revolution, a physician fresh out of medical school sent to rural russia.

i suppose you’ve done a lot of amputations, doctor?

and since it was a man it could not be the worst of all – childbirth

‘a transverse lie is a wholly unfavorable position.’  too true.  wholly unfavorable both for the woman and for a doctor who only qualified six months ago

for another hour after that, sipping my cooling tea, i sat over it, turning the pages.  and an interesting thing happened: all the previously obscure passages became entirely comprehensible, as though they had been flooded with light; and there, at night, under the lamplight in the depth of the countryside i realised what real knowledge was.

the day turned out splendidly.  after doing my round, i spent the rest of the time lounging around my quarters, whistling snatches of opera, smoking, drumming my fingers on the windowpanes.  outside was a sight i had never seen before.  there was no sky and no earth – only twisting, swirling whiteness, sideways and aslant, up and down, as though the devil had gone mad with a packet of tooth-powder

no one is to be blamed for my death

hydrochloric morphium is terrifying stuff

and if the patient is a married woman, the husband will come to the surgery and throw a chair at you..we all smiled, although there is nothing very funny about people hurling chairs around the surgery

oh, don’t worry – i killed him all right.  trust my experience as a surgeon

3/7 – 3/14

untangled my mind.  agreed with einstein.  staying in the same place makes you age faster.

n: does this qualify as business casual?
j: yeah, if you drink rum from a shoe.

n: the churro with cream inside.
k: a cannoli?

k: it’s a puddle… of unidentifiable origin.
j: pee or mountain dew?
k: let’s find out.
n: let’s not.

downed dental rinsecup fireball pre-un headquarters raid.  hope to climb this one day, furthest point on the earth’s surface from the earth’s center.

learned five hundred russians with net worths greater than one hundred million dollars control forty percent of household wealth.  at dawn of agriculture, females reproduced at a rate 17-fold compared to males, i.e. as one of a rare male’s seventeen wives.

asked saniya how lincoln’s 1864 union opponents printed 10,000 flyers.  stone cold lithography, with crayons.

read the hard way to peace, surprisingly relevant 1962 book about the russian perspective..

after all, as the russians see it, only one nation has ever employed an atomic bomb.

..the need to eliminate nuclear arsenals..

a single plane can now deliver a bomb with an explosive power as large as the total amount of high-power explosives dropped on germany and japan in all of world war ii.

human history can be recounted as a series of interludes between wars.

the age of big bombs on a small planet

it takes one commander of a polaris submarine to shoot sixteen nuclear bombs into russia; it takes two madmen per minuteman to send a nuclear bomb from a home base to moscow..we have already suffered several narrow escapes from nuclear war caused by false alarm.  in the recent past, the alert was sounded because american radar screens recorded the rising of the moon, because meteors fell, because a flock of geese veered in their winter flight

negotiations were going along smoothly until one of the knights was stung by an asp and drew his sword to kill the reptile.  the others saw the sword being drawn and immediately fell upon each other.  a tremendous slaughter ensued..when the battle was over everybody except king arthur, mordred, and a couple of knights lay dead.

..and other bits of hysteria..

assume now that a man gets sick from a cause other than radiation.  not believing this, his morale begins to drop.  you look at his meter and say, “you have received only ten roentgens, why are you vomiting?  pull yourself together and get to work.”

in nuclear war the odds are almost overwhelmingly in favor of the attacker

in 1955, 55 percent of the american people were willing to engage in atomic war in order not to lose quemoy and matsu.

the american people do not know what war means.. its people have built up an enormous conviction of invincibility.

to drop atomic bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki, before the american public even knew that such bombs existed.

..the author reviews each possible strategy, argues for gradualism..

we need not strip ourselves naked to show the other party that we are willing to talk with him.

it may never satisfy the idealist, especially the supporters of unilateral or multilateral disarmament, since it requires that some arms and bombs be kept for a considerable length of time; but unlike more appealing programs, it has a chance to be agreed upon and to be carried out.  unlike multideterrance and arms control, it leads to disarmament.

as military researchers are transferred to peaceful work, as weapons factories begin to produce consumer goods, and as armament appropriations are used to build schools, we create a large variety of new interests vested in peace and we reduce the vested interests in the arms race.

gradualism offers the world a slow, hard but safe way – i believe the only feasible one – out of the continuous slide into the thermonuclear furnace.

..talks about cuba, predicts iran’s revolution, and reminds us how to behave. 

this communist success, thousands of miles from the closest communist country and only ninety miles from the united states, underscores the point that ideology and political movements know no distance and are not “deterred” by maginot lines or sac bombers.

iran itself, after $1.1 billion american military and economic aid, is still economically underdeveloped, ruled by an oligarchic landed aristocracy and a tyrannical shah, widely penetrated by communists and quite ready for a revolution.

linus pauling’s reformulation of the golden rule: “do unto others 20 percent better than you expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.”

3/15 – 3/21

aunty insisted dhaka different from japan by green background only.  uncle taught bangla, five written like a fortune cookie, verbs arranged a la yoda.