Sayonnara Summer

Summer was minimal here. June was all rain & cold. Some pleasant days occurred in July, but then August was mostly rain or horrible hot and humid weather. The past few days plus perhaps another two weeks was all we had for a pleasant summer. With the Labor Day weekend approaching, it's over. Often a bad winter is offset by a good summer. Not this year. Last winter had enduring extreme cold. This summer had excessive rain and cold. Uh ... I guess global warming took a break.

Languages

My language self-learning program re-started successfully yesterday with hour-long lessons in German, Polish and Latin. Having previously scoped and explored the entire grammars over the past few months, I am now going back to the foundations and doing a multi-sense approach: reading, listening speaking, and writing all together slowly with simple sentences and concepts first (except French gets more complex sentences as it's a year further along). Today I'll hit French and German and Polish again. This weekend, Italian and Spanish are re-started. Over the next year I hope to get all six languages on good learning paths. This is a five year plan for fluency in all six by age 60.

Here's a tidbit. All my languages derived from old Indo-European. Let's explore this a bit. Below I list the word for third person plural of "to be" in all seven (including English).

English: are
Latin: sunt
French: sont
Italian: sono
Spanish: están or son in different senses.
German: sind
Polish: są (pronounced 'so' with a bit of nasalization of the 'o')

The similarities are obvious, but English is the odd one. I wonder why ? There are other peculiar aspects of English, such as its "do" constructions and its mandatory progressive verbs in present tense. These can be traced to old Celtic, but then, where did Celtic get them ? They are not Indo-European. From an aboriginal people in Europe before the Indo-Europeans ? Genetic data suggest this is possible. More to come in a future blog ...

Markets

A decent rally occurred yesterday after a few down days. This is how the prior pullback ended. One might note that the levels of support here are higher than for the last pullback. My list for buys is not progressing well. I'm not having ideas for good, individual names. Most of my ideas are large cap stocks already in Mrs. B's Sky Fund (UTX, MMM, ITW, etc.). I'll keep working, though.

Perhaps I'll do nothing, except ride this bull elephant to the next waterhole.

Food

This weekend I make my world famous spring rolls - a few dozen. I'll post the recipe sometime, but as they are reminiscent of a pile of gold bars, they are totem for much future good fortune.

Word of the Day

"Abreaction" - noun [$10]; and "Abreact" - verb [$10]
Abreaction means (psychology) the free expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion.
Abreact means (psychology) release (an emotion) by abreaction.
Sentence: The August town hall meetings seemed to cause large numbers of the American people to abreact their fears of being dominated by an oppressive government. I've wondered for awhile whether this quality of Americans is learned or has a inherited component from self-selection of their ancestors to move to the new world.