FOUND

Blog number 4 **** 23 May 2006

There's a book called, "Found" that I was reading this morn at Barnes and Nobles. It's a collection of fotoed notes people have found in different places -- in library books, on the street, in trunks of bought cars -- things like that. The description of where the note was found, the circumstances surrounding the find are sometimes described.

I ran across this one that had only a picture of a swarthy man with a Saddam mustache and a rendition of how the picture came to be in the finder's possession. As follows: "I was on a city bus on the outskirts of town when the guy in this picture climbed on board. I was sitting near the front, but my Spanish wasn't too good, so I couldn't totally follow the conversation between this guy and the driver. They started arguing, maybe about the amount for bus fare or something. Things got really heated really fast, and suddenly the guy in this picture pulled a two-foot machete out of his belt and started waving it around menacingly in the air. In a flash, the driver produced an enormous bullwhip, turned halfway toward the machete guy, and whipped the whip with a sizzling crack, snapping the machete right out of the guy's hand, and all of this while still steering the bus! Finally he pulled the bus over; there was a brief scuffle and both guys crashed to the floor, and then the machete guy picked up his machete and dashed off the bus. The driver dusted himself off and got back behind the wheel with surprisingly little fanfare from the rest of the passengers, which made me wonder if this was a commonplace occurrence.

I noticed that a few papers and pictures from the machete guy's breast pocket had scattered into the aisle -- I kept this little passport picture of the guy himself, a souvenir of the coolest thing I ever saw."

FOUND by Maurice Reeder in San Pedro Sula, Honduras

In another portion of the book, there are descriptions of found animals -- two of which are female babies found in China. The describer says she heard that the word we translate for "abandoned" in regard to such kids is more precisely translated as "placed in order to be found." ,