A new compilation I've been working on.

No es lo mismo ser una poeta maldita que ser una maldita poeta... pero lo peor es ser una poeta malita y de esas hay muchas.

--Lorena Mancilla

Mis verbos pasado: ir

yo fuí
tu fuiste
el/ella fue
ellos/ellas fueron
nosotros fuimos

(I'm gonna get all those past tense verbs conjugated! Even the irregular ones!!!)

I'm gonna give it another try this semester:

Tratar = to Try

(Photograph by Marc Trujillo.)

One more blog-post about LA: this Martin Kersels sculpture at the Hammer was hilarious and brilliant. The "arms" moved up and down to the audio of Kersels himself singing the Carpenters' "At the Top the World" at a Japantown Karaoke bar.

More Art 'n' Kids: Chris Vasell @ Blum & Poe.

(Christian Marclay's sound installation Shake Rattle & Roll @ the MOCA Los Angeles.)

Serengeti/Escondido:




(I usually have an incredulous attitude about amusement parks, but this one was different.)

(Installation by Choi Jeong-Hwa at LACMA's Your Bright Future show.)

Blasting southward by lovely Clear Lake, CA:

Mom: Ya know, when you wanna do something, ya need to go somewhere where there is something you want to do.
Kid: yeah. I get it...

An Historic Day:

Cocksure: Banks, Battles, and the Psychology of Overconfidence (click here)

This is what social scientists mean when they say that human overconfidence can be an adaptive trait. “In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning,” Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, writes. “Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.” Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. According to Wrangham, self-deception reduces the chances of “behavioral leakage”; that is, of “inadvertently revealing the truth through an inappropriate behavior.” This much is in keeping with what some psychologists have been telling us for years—that it can be useful to be especially optimistic about how attractive our spouse is, or how marketable our new idea is. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, humans have an “optimal margin of illusion.”