Portuguese Vowel Sounds
Here’s a trick that I figured out to speak Portuguese with less of a foreign accent. It goes back all the way back to elementary school. Do you remember when you were learning your vowels, and we learned that there are 5 vowels and each vowel has two sounds, long and short?
Well in Portuguese (and also in Spanish), each vowel only has one sound. So therefore, rather than 10 vowel sounds in English, Portuguese and Spanish only have 5. The trick if you are an English speaker is to throw out the other vowel sounds because they do not exist in Portuguese. See the table below. Read More »
One of the greatest travesties to this bubble is the incredible American deficit under the Bush administration. The deficit has ballooned by over $5T in a scant 8 years. We can all agree that this is highly fiscally irresponsible, but the question remains, “Where did all this money go?” 
The media is calling this bubble the worst since the Great Depression. That sure sounds scary, but where are the facts? What makes them believe this bubble is so severe relative to other bubbles? Are there any facts to feed the panic or just pure fear?
Yesterday, the House of Representatives approved the $700B bailout plan, and President Bush quickly signed it into law. Sigh! What I dislike most about this bill was that everyone including the President was acting in a panic. No one was calmly analyzing the underlying magnitude of the credit crisis, and the fundamentals that would drive our great country so close to the edge of a cliff. I’ll try to do that here.
I am shocked at what is happening to our country right now. It is like an incredibly bad dream. I put together the following two charts (see below). The first chart is the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the last 18 years. I drew a line (just a guess) of the normal sustainable rate of growth of the American economy. Independent on where you draw the line, it is easy to see 2 bubbles in the last 18 years. The first one is commonly referred to as the internet bubble or the dot com bust. And the second is the mess that we are experiencing. When looking at the magnitudes of the bubbles, they are similar in size. It is true that the DJ is not a surrogate for the market as a whole, but certainly if there is excess liquidity driving the mortgage market, then the DJ would at least have a residual bubble from the liquidity. 
One of my favorite Chinese vegetables in Bok Choy. I like to put it in soups, and many Chinese recipes. Unlike many other vegetables, both the leaves and the stems are tasty in their own unique way. Perhaps, one of the best Bok Choy dishes is beef/chicken with oyster sauce. I was having a problem that each time I cooked this dish, the dish would turn out very runny, and the delicious oyster sauce was diluted. After many starts and stops, I finally figured out some of the intricacies of cooking with Bok Choy. 
I just finished watching the first presidential debate, and one of the first questions was what are some of the lessons that can be learned from the war in Iraq. This should have been a softball question for Obama because in order to learn we have to admit our mistakes. McCain response was clear that he was not going to admit any mistakes. In fact, he just reveled in the wisdom of the surge. Worse yet, Obama did not seize the opportunity, basically said we should leave Iraq and shift to Afghanistan.
Please find my campaign donation for $2300. I wish there was a way that I could legally donate more money, because I would do it in a heart beat.
Our last stop before on our vacation was in Lisbon, Portugal. I really wanted to visit some new cities since I had never visited Portugal. Furthermore, it was a chance to try out my Portuguese in a new land. The weather was great, and we took a tour bus which took us all around Lisbon and finally stopped at the Lisbon Zoo. It is a fantastic zoo and I took lots of pictures. 
We went to a lot of places on our cruise, and perhaps the ugliest place was Tunis, Tunisia. We had a some fun dressing up in the local costumes and also riding on a camel’s back. That is the basis for this slide show. 
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