More Brad's blog reader comments

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "2/13/2007 03:48:00 PM":

Robert, forgive another grumble about Brad DeLong's blog. Happily the blog no longer has any technical problems, at least as far as I can tell with my limited knowledge :)

The complaint now and before is that more is not more, and Brad's blog is so cluttered that conversations in comments seem to be coming to an end. Possibly it was too much to handle, but I have enjoyed reading you and Kate and others for years. Also, there really is so much that I have trouble reading as quickly as I wish and immediately finding posts. But, possibly more is more and I must be more patient.

Just thinking; and do post lots yourself.

Anne

Ouch. The hope of having a commenter like Anne was one of my main motives for blogging (really honestly no exageration here).

Oddly my complaint about Brad's blog is that there is too much economics mixed in with the Bush bashing, press bashing, worlds silliest dog reports, general reflections etc etc etc. this is odd, since in real life, I get paid a salary to be an economist. But I just skip it.

Now Anne's complaint about me is very valid. I am posting less. Oddly I think of posts but don't post them because of internet access issues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/books/chapters/0218-1st-mont.html

February 18, 2007

'Dancing to "Almendra"'
By MAYRA MONTERO

On the same day Umberto Anastasia was killed in New York, a hippopotamus escaped from the zoo in Havana. I can explain the connection. No one else, only me, and the individual who looked after the lions. His name was Juan Bulgado, but he preferred to be called Johnny: Johnny Angel or Johnny Lamb, depending on his mood. In addition to feeding the animals, he was in charge of the slaughter pen, that foul-smelling corner where they killed the beasts that were fed to the carnivores. A long chain of blood. That's what the zoo is. And, very often, life.

Juan Bulgado isn't dead, he lives in an old-age home, he's forgotten that his nom de guerre is Johnny, and the nuns who take care of him call him Frank, later I'll tell you why. When I met him, in October of '57, he was close to forty. I think he turned forty, in the middle of the crisis. But I was very young, I'd just gone through the calamity of my birthday party, number twenty-two, celebrated in a way that was very like the twenty-one that preceded it: Mam· on her cloud, a little dizzy because of the Marsala All'uovo, the only liquor she was in the habit of drinking back then; Pap· with his arm around my older brother, an engineer like him, both of them smoking their H. Upmann torpedoes; and my sister, seventeen and uncomfortable in her lace-trimmed dress. The three of us were very different from one another, with a father who was similar to my older brother, and a mother who wasn't similar to anyone: ungainly, tense, a smoker, with a voice like hysterical glass and hair that was totally white. As far back as I can remember, she'd had white hair, and probably turned gray even before she gave birth to me. She might have been all interesting woman, but the women who were her friends considered her tiresome. And the children of her friends, some of them my classmates, took care to pass that opinion along to me....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "2/18/2007 04:51:00 PM":

Yum; though I am sympathetic to hippopotami. Edith Grossman is tha translator, and when Edith Grossman translates I have learned "read" and I read Spanish.

reply: Huh ?

Anonymous (anne?) has left a new comment on your post "2/18/2007 04:51:00 PM":

Dear, Dear Robert, I will be forever apologetic. I think your wry, always wry posts and comments are terrific and check for them regularly and need to respond more. And, who knows from economics anyway since I just found a Cuban writer along with her latest book who is a delight. So, all I will urge is that between skiing (bloody sport) and battling (good grief) for the internet, post as uou will.

Thanks Anne. You are, as always, wonderful. I have no idea why you are apologetic.