the news from the
(ivica)
"People
wish their enemies dead---but I do not;
I say give them the gout, give them the stone!"
(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)
Mr. Bart N. Pycku invited me to hang around and enjoy his convention. He
gave me a neat little pass with "ivica" written on it. Yes, Fat City
was hosting fun-loving economists from all over the
Bart lost half his
retirement nest egg when his first wife divorced him three years ago (and
bought herself a luxury spa outside of Baden-Baden with her new boy friend
Karl). The other half he lost investing in Russia last year. He said he felt
like it was World War II all over again...he was being "marked" and
"rubled" into oblivion....
He
presented to his fellow bean counters his new economics theory (stand back all
you supply-siders and deficit-spenders, libertarians and socialists, conservatives
and liberals, rich and poor): The Ten Theory: Essentially, whenever you have an
economics problem (and we ALWAYS have an economics problem) you imagine that
there are only 10 families in your village dividing up the food, or 10 cities
on your planet dividing up the energy, or 10 actors in a movie dividing up the
time. The 10% on
top (start a war and) try to end up with 50% of everything. The top 10% of
those remaining try to do the same thing. And so on down the line....
"His
ambitions were the modest ones of most immigrants:
to buy a place of his own, marry, and have children."
(Hugh Garner)
"I didn't fight to get women out from behind the vacuum
cleaner to get them onto the board of Hoover."
(Germaine Greer)
Over-excited, over-loaded,
and over-economized, I took in a workshop from a neighbouring
convention of naturalists in the same hotel. I recognized "The
Professor" (otherwise known as the little Z from Barnfire
U.). He explained to us that crows are very sociable animals; they like to wander
around in small gangs to do their business and settle down in the thousands at
night in huge roosts. The Common Crow (also known as the American Crow) is officially called CORVUS BRACHYRHYNCHOS. It should be called
CORVUS AMERICANUS but
scientists are like that....
Omnivorous, they like to
eat insects and other small creatures, garbage and carrion, a farmer's crops
and wild crops, bird eggs and little birds.... The young are
incubated for 18 days in tree nests. Both parents feed and take care of
the young and sometimes they use "baby sitters". (Why is it
"baby sitter" but somebody "baby-sits"? Shouldn't
they be "baby-sitters"?) After about a month, the young are ready for
employment in the waiting world.
"The
great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like
prostitutes."
(Stanley Kramer)
One economist lecturer
demanded a financial moratorium on new immigrants: no welfare or social
assistance for their first five years in this country. Another one claimed that
the federal, provincial, and city governments were all in debt...that
businesses were all in debt...and that individuals were all in debt...the Crash
of 1929 was coming again! Another economist tied money-flow theories to
alcohol-flow theories.
(I had met Peter a long time
ago. We had some business in common. A little while ago
he was waiting at a busy intersection when a drunk driver plowed into his car.
The drunk driver lived. Peter did not. It was not the drunk's first murder (or
his last). Peter was very wealthy and superficial and
easy-going (not my favourite qualities in a friend
but we stayed in touch over the years for some reason or other.... I think it
had something to do with music.). He wasn't the only friend I saw go down
to drunk ,drugged, or whacked-out drivers. I
especially hate it when a young person is destroyed by one of
those zombies.)
In between conventions I
passed by an open tv in a
bar. While the economists and naturalists were playing with their video
gambling machines, I caught a bit of the tennis game. Tennis Canada had sold
out to a cigarette manufacturer. (I hoped that no kids that I knew were
watching the young people play tennis with nicotine money.) I thought tobacco
advertising was an outlawed cancer in this country, but this whole show was a
constant blatant stream of advertisement for cigarettes.... The civil servants
in charge of this policy must be asleep on the job again, or else they couldn't care less, or they're being paid off.
Crows are found
coast-to-coast in the
"This
thing which we call America, as I have said, goes around the world today."
(Frank Lloyd Wright)
So I get into an argument
with some dressed-in-dark-blue economist. (Now you know me:
gentle, cosmopolitan, a good speller,
never-wanting-an-argument-but-an-argument-always-seems-to-find-me....) I try to explain to this guy (economists are just chubby nerdy guys
(or gals trying to be guys) with cool uniforms) that a good bean mixture
contains soya beans (cook for 2 hours) as a base,
garbanzo beans (cook for 1.25 hours), navy beans (cook for 45 minutes), kidney
beans (cook for 45 minutes), and THEN any other beans you might have lying
around as left-overs. I throw in some barley
(cook for 45 minutes) and rice (cook for 30 minutes) for the sake of the neighbours.
Now (and here's
the tricky part to try and explain to an economist) you can improvise here and
put in anything you like (during cooking or even afterwards): noodles,
macaroni, tomatoes, chicken, pizza, garlic, spices, salsa, et cetera. This
whole potful is then just put
in the fridge. You can use it as you like: a salad with salt+pepper+oil+vinegar,
throw in a handful and make some chicken soup, plop it on your plate as a side
dish like you would with plain rice, re-fry it, omelette
it, mash it into your hamburger meat, et cetera.
"Let
us leave theories there and return to here's here."
(James Joyce)
Make enough of a pot to
last all week as a sudden meal or quick food and reach into the fridge whenever
you feel like it. It saves time and money. (But no
canned beans please, just dried beans: hand sort the beans, leave them in some
water all day, then dump that water, rinse, and cook.) But
the economist claims that if I make things at home all the time, I'm not really
a consumer! He can't measure me. His economic theory doesn't like this kind of stuff. And I explain to him that it's okay...my theory doesn't really
recognize him either.
A bunch of crows is called a murder of crows. (There's also
a charm of hummingbirds, a grit of bees, an army of frogs, a cry of hounds, a
book of writers, a summer of hookers, a six-pack of jocks, a snore of teachers,
a cough of smokers, a gram of grandmothers, a sin of nuns, a tub of Elvises, a smile of politicians, a nag of wives, an ugly of
mothers-in-law, a grateful of dead, and a wallet of economists.)
To crows, of course,
"downtown" and "ten" are just two more interesting theories
in the great big world of light and dark. Crows are intelligent...noisy...very
prolific...very dark...and very (very) secretive.
grok, ivica-counting-his-beans
"The perpetual struggle for room and food."
(Thomas Robert Malthus)
[ECONOMIA ET ECOLOGIA]
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