Mmmmmmm.... French Roast

a french erotic film

yes, it's worksafe (despite the title). a french erotic film is not to be missed.

so go there, don't miss it!

double (gay) tax troubles

this is what you'd classify as total suckage:

Double trouble on taxes for gays
Newly married facing two sets of filing rules
By Kay Lazar, Globe Correspondent | December 30, 2004

Ruth Davidson and Emily Sherwood waited years for the right to marry. The extraordinary tax fallout from the Lynn couple's union will come a lot more swiftly.

The state's first-in-the-nation same-sex marriage decision will soon produce historic tax headaches for nearly 5,000 same-sex Massachusetts couples who tied the knot in 2004. Because the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriage, couples must file as single on their federal income tax forms, but married on their state returns, a system that will require extra, complex calculations and will probably produce confusion, specialists say.

"The past year has been really a whirlwind, because I've been focused on making sure we don't lose this right" to marry, said Davidson, a 46-year-old marketing consultant who married her partner of 23 years in May.

"I'm nervous that when I talk to my accountant, she will not know about" the tax complications, Davidson said. "I haven't focused on my own personal financial dealings."

The arrival of W-2 forms in mailboxes across the Commonwealth in coming weeks will probably change that.

"No one is quite sure how this is going to play out," said Dana Levit, a certified financial planner with Back Bay Financial Group, which has an office in Wakefield.

Levit said tax preparation for gay couples will require calculating federal taxes twice. Each partner's income will need to be submitted on the federal forms as if each were single, because the federal government does not recognize them as a couple. Then the income taxes must be calculated again, based on what the couple would have paid the federal government as a married couple, because those calculations are needed to compute the couple's state income taxes. Massachusetts requires married couples to file jointly.

By comparison, tax preparation for heterosexual married couples does not require the pair's income to be calculated twice, once as individuals and again as a couple, Levit said.

While tax preparation often produces frustrations, the process married gay couples now face is galling, advocates say.

"Imagine if there were a separate tax system for black people in America," said Julia Maycock, 42, a Hamilton lawyer who married her companion, Jill Thornton, on Dec. 21.

"I pay the same taxes as all the heterosexual folks do," Maycock said. "Why should I bear the same tax burden without having the advantages of that, if I am willing to assume the responsibility of marriage?"

In November 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state constitution guarantees gay and lesbian couples the right to marry. That right became effective May 17. Since then, 4,837 same-sex marriage certificates have been filed, according to unofficial data complied by the state's Registry of Vital Records.

Marriage entitles same-sex couples to dozens of state financial protections and other rights, but not federal benefits.

That discrepancy, specialists say, can affect tax filings for same-sex couples in many ways. For instance, if one same-sex spouse is listed under the other's health insurance, the federal government considers that benefit as income and will tax the employee on the fair market value of the insurance.

But Massachusetts, which now recognizes gay marriages, will treat that health insurance as a benefit, as it does with heterosexual married couples, and will not require it to be reported as taxable income.

"Employers are supposed to be figuring this when they are doing your W-2, but I would advise readers to make sure that employers [deduct the amount of the health care benefit] when they figure your [state] income," Levit said. "I have a feeling that a lot of employers are not going to get that right."

The confusion newly married same-sex couples and their accountants may face for the first time in Massachusetts is similar to the financial uncertainties couples encountered in Vermont after civil unions became legal in summer 2000.

"We have learned a lesson from what happened in Vermont," said Karen Loewy, a lawyer with Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, a New England legal rights organization.

"We are strongly encouraging people to work with a tax preparer if they can," Loewy said. "We don't want people to be in a position where they are overpaying, or worse, underpaying their taxes and then owe penalties."

GLAD is also encouraging married gay couples to include a cover letter or disclosure form to the IRS clearly explaining that each partner is filing as a single person on their federal tax returns but as married on their state forms.

"When you sign your federal tax return, you swear that everything is true," Loewy said. "You don't want to have committed fraud. You don't want to have sworn you are not married."

That disclosure explaining the discrepancy could be crucial in the future for other purposes not directly tax-related, such as applying for student loans or a mortgage, when consumers often are asked for a copy of their federal income tax returns, Loewy said.

Still, Rowley software engineer Stuart Wells worries there will be computer glitches that trigger audits for married gay couples.

"Cover sheets are read by humans, but audits are triggered by computer programs," said Wells, 37, who married his partner in May. Wells has been doing both of their taxes for the past decade, often using the popular software TurboTax, and he wonders whether the program will be able to address the new questions from Massachusetts couples.

TurboTax software is ready, said Scott Gulbransen, a spokesman for the California-based firm.

"If you search for gay marriage or same-sex union, [the software] will give you instructions for how to handle that," Gulbransen said. Consumers who bought their software early may not have the updated information, but Gulbransen said the disc is programmed to automatically alert the consumer to download updates when it is inserted into the computer.

"If you have an early version," Gulbransen said, "my suggestion is make sure you go through with the updates."

euch, can you imagine having to do your taxes twice just to figure out what your state tax will be?

more morrissey

i know maybe i'm oldschool for this, but i really like the new morrissey album.

and one of the best songs on the album? all the lazy dykes.

All the lazy dykes
cross-armed at The Palms
their legs astride their bikes
indigo burns on their arms

One sweet day - an emotional whirl
you will be good to yourself
and you’ll come and join the girls

All the lazy dykes
they pity how you live
just somebody’s wife
you give, and you give and you give
and you give…

One sweet day - an emotional whirl
you will be good to yourself
and you’ll come and join the girls

Touch me, squeeze me
hold me too tightly
and when you look at me
you actually see me
and I’ve never felt so alive
in the whole of my life
in the whole of my life

Free yourself
be yourself
come to The Palms
and see yourself
and at last your life begins
at last your life begins
at last your life begins
at last your life begins

ahhhhhh....

improper use of furniture:the photoshopping version

nnnuts, a livejournaler, photoshopped the perching coarsette pic i love so much.

awesome.

More Digital Camera Fun

so, i immediately began photographing things when i got home. mittens didn't want to cooperate.

but, he finally gave in.

cleo, my sister's cat was a very good model.

miss kitty, in a glamorous black and white shot. actually, i made it black and white using GIMP because the color shot wasn't anything special.

chester, looking majestic in black and white too.

trixie, a very sweet and fragile elderly poodle.

emily0 and her cat spanky were also kind enough to sit for a photo.

Le Guin Fans Weigh In, And It's Not Pretty

reviews at imdb.

i made it through two pages of comments and it's uniformly thumbs down:

TheAscender:

To sum up, don't see it. Don't even give it a second glance. Anyone associated with this atrocity needs to have their head handed to them on a magician's staff. If you want to see an Earthsea worth seaing (a pun on the level of the Sci Fi production), get the books. Or borrow mine; but you'll have to wait a few days as I read them again to regain the enchantment.

Daniel:

The mini-series detaches the characters from almost any sense of motivation, turning them into pieces passionlessly moving about in something akin to a bad D&D adventure.

PaterPotato:

The story has not been changed, but discarded, and a hackneyed Swords & Sorcery 'epic' put in its stead. Ged's solitary search for understanding is replaced by a buddy flick, with Vetch now providing comic relief. In a curiously inconsistent approach to political correctness, women are introduced to Roke, but the black characters are played by white actors, with only one notable exception.

... snip ...

This would-be LOTR/Harry Potter comes across more as Dungeons and Dragons.

Donald Roy Airey :

This mini-series is a waste of time. My overall reaction after watching the opening segment is that you couldn't have placed more clichés in the movie if you had been trying to make a parody. In fact, if you had given the actors instructions to ham it up a little, it could be called "Not Another Fantasy Adventure". Now some may argue that it's unfair to review a four hour movie after just the first two hours, but my conscience compels me to warn others: This is an empty story that doesn't contain a single original thought. Everything is predictable.

We have Luke/Harry Potter/Ged meeting Obi Wan Kenobi/Gandalf and being sent to Hogwarts. While at Hogwarts, Luke/Harry Potter/Ged meets the generic, fat, comic relief sidekick. Later, Dumbledore/Gandalf/ Archmangus is killed by the generic, twisted bad guy King/General because Malfoy/Jasper is a traitor (and not a single wizard saw it coming). We have the sisterhood from Dune and elements of Lord Foul's Bane in the indestructible beast that is controlled by knowing its name.

This is a good movie to watch if you are hooked up to a life-support system and you've already seen every movie and television show ever made. This story is also a good idea for people who've never read a book or seen a movie and want to jam the entire fantasy genre into a single four hour sitting.

there are eight pages of comments so far.

improper use of furniture

coarsette (joyce su chang of berkeley), who does great art, posted a short piece on how her boyf thinks she's nuts b/c she likes to sit on furniture. woman alive, i never thought i'd meet another. i do the same thing - use furniture for things what it weren't intended - and everyone thinks i'm a nutter when i do.

i do it for many reasons. i like to feel like i'm a primate. i like to sit on my heels, which most people can't but i find comfy. i like to use furniture not only as it was 'planned for' but as it is convenient for me and i find useful.

and there's this great feeling, maybe you know, when you're 'perched' on something, eye-level with the world, and your toes are curled over the edge of the surface and holding on. i love that feeling.

of course, i also loathe any kind of footwear - you know those people who wear socks to bed? freaks me the hell out. yeah, i'm talking to you, roomie. sock-to-bed-wearing freak. eww. what a creepy sensation.

in case you missed the eight thousand blurry close-ups of some random southern family's pets we are currently hosting, emily1 got one of them fancy 'lectric cameras for christmas. maybe we'll get some updated pics of me, and maybe some will be of me improperly using furniture. and not wearing socks.

prolly, though, we'll get eight thousand blurry close-ups of some random northern collective household's pets. (that would be our pets, in case you missed the obvious.)

the ignorant faëries

i was insomniac last night and desperately flipping the channels (from first december till after new year's is always a wasteland for television) when i skipped past a movie that seemed to feature amanda tapping. if you know her, it's prolly because 1. you're from canadia or 2. you watch stargate: SG1 or 3. both. i consider this woman a paragon of hotness - on sg1, she plays a scientist-soldier and combat gear flatters her greatly - and so i stopped.

i quickly realised that the woman might be ms. tapping's clone, seeing as how much she moved and how her expressions matched in an almost creepy way the aforementioned british-canadian's, but she was not, in fact, the same woman.

i had stumbled upon a rather remarkable movie: le fate ignorante (2002) (the ignorant faëries, called in english his secret life). incidentally, here's a half-decent pic of the actress in question, though regrettably i cannot show you her in motion so you can understand how much she moves like ms. tapping does:

note the emily like me cooking behind her.

anyway, i'm afraid the linked page might be lost, so here's what it says, with links added to appropriate information about unfamiliar persons or topics:

The title of the film is the Italian name for a book of poetry by Nazim Hikmet, a leading 20th century Turkish poet, and the book plays an important role in the plot of the film. Ferzan Özpetek is a Turkish-born but Italian-based gay director. When the film was released in Italy it received good critical reviews and an unexpected excellent response from a middle-class audience.

The story is centred on Antonia, 40ish, for 15 years happily married to her schoolmate Massimo, living a very confortable upper-class life in a large villa on a nice pond in a posh suburb of Rome. She gave up her dreams and ambitions of medical career in favour of marriage, she gave up the idea of having children to indulge her husband's preference.

Suddenly, Antonia's life is shattered by the death of her husband in a car accident. Going through her husband's belongings in search for memories of the life spent together, Antonia, by chance, discovers that Massimo had a lover: an inscription on the back of a painting that Massimo kept in his office reveals to her the painful truth. She wants to know more and, through Massimo's secretary, Antonia dicovers the surname and the address where the painting has been sent. Antonia decides she wants to meet his husband`s lover and goes to working-class suburb of Rome where she finds out that his lover is not a woman but a handsome gay, Michele, who works at Mercati Generali and with whom Massimo had a seven year affair.

Michele lives with an extended family that includes gays, Turkish refugees ( considered Third World people in Italy), transsexuals, prostitutes, a young gay with AIDS. It is a completely new and "different" world for a mainstream society woman such as Antonia and she is accepted into the group with the openness that is evidenced by their diversity. Antonia learns more about her husband's secret life ("Massimo cooked?" Antonia asks after being told he used to make meatballs and Serra replies: "I'll give you the recipe if you want") and after the initial mutual suspicion and hostility, Michele and Antonia grow closer and closer and she becomes a regular at the community's Sunday lunches on Michele's rooftop balcony.

During one of their conversations, Michele and Antonia discover that they share the same taste in poetry: their favourite author is the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. When Michele confesses that he met Massimo in a bookstore while they were both trying to buy a copy of Hikmet's poems, Antonia reveals that the book was for her because Massimo had never heard about Hikmet. Antonia and Michele's complicity seems to lead to a love story (think of their passionate kiss on her sofa).

The director portrays the community gathering in Michele's flat from Antonia's point of view. We can see the strong contrast between her ordered, unadventurous, upper-class existence (in the words of her mother, Veronica, Antonia is a woman who was never very curious about life) and the chaotic life of Michele's open family.

The film becomes an intriguing exploration of a radically different reality that allows Antonia to cross the boundaries of sexual orientation, social class, urban areas and ethnic groups, although this does not imply that Antonia gives up her upper-class existence and morality (she doesn't want to be seen by her maid while she is having an ice cream with Michele).

Besides the main plot centred on Antonia's discovery of her husband's secret life, there are subplots portraying the lives of the multigendered and multiethnic community living around Michele in a working class suburb of Rome and stressing the solidarity and the ties that unify them.

Near the end of the film we learn that Antonia is pregnant (the child is Massimo's because she hasn't had any sexual intercourse after his death) but we are not told clearly the reason why she decides not to share her news with her "new family".

this outline of the film is very general, but it covers the bases appropriately. le fate ignoranti could have been a banal flick - if it were american, i'd bet my eyeteeth it would have been. but it really, really ain't - i wish i could find a way for you to see it, but unless you can hunt it down on cable, i think it might be some time afore you can, o my em'lys and henrys.

the scene they mention about antonia and michele kissing isn't exactly a love story. it's about two people who discover their dead love was pretending and lying to both of them, and they are drunk and lonely and they miss him, and yet so much of what he was to each turns out to have been stolen from the other - massimo's pretention to hikmet's poetry was actually antonia's, for example. i think that's why she leaves, incidentally. she's taking time only for herself, to give her distance and independence so that she doesn't get trapped in a new, 'safe' situation only. she gets to choose it.

the guide you just read isn't completed: it continues by introducing questions, which honestly have made me think pretty hard about the film despite the fact that they are not particularly deep questions. they are thin knives that cut straight to the heart of mysteries we don't realise have been hidden, and i must be slipping since i didn't ask any of them.

And now your personal opinions on this film will be greatly appreciated. A starting point can be provided by the following questions.

What do you think of the plot?

Did you find it unrealistic?

How is sexual diversity seen in your countries? In Italy homosexuality is still accepted with difficulty, with suspicion. You are considered "different". Maybe because we (Italians) have a strong sense of the family with children, maybe we are still influenced by religious values, etc.

Do yoy think this film is about homosexuality? or don't you think that it is about the difficulty in facing a world and situations that are simply unknown and people who are unusual, different from us? Do you think the film wants to stress the weakness of people (such as Antonia) who has always lived a sheltered, predictable life without unexpected events or emotions in contrast with the life of the multigendered and multiethnic group who lives from day to day?

In Michele's flat we meet typical examples of people who are not very well integrated in the Italian society. Italy is still very conservative in its attitudes towards diversity, towards anyone or anything that can be considered "different" from mainstream values and attitudes.

Italy still has strong "sexual taboos". How do you think Antonia feels when she is with Michele and his friends?

What do you know of Antonia private life apart from being married to Massimo and working as a "medical technician"? What do you know of Michele and his friends? What did you feel when you learnt that Massimo's lover was a man?

Apart from the two main characters, Antonia and Michele, which characters did you like the most and why?

The director doesn`t provide a clear ending. Can you guess the reason why she leaves?

What will Antonia do after her baby's birth in your opinion?

Can you guess a sequel of the story?

my favourite character is hard to pick. antonia grows from a sheltered, upper middle-class housewife to a slowly self-liberating woman, plus she is attractive and the main character. but i have a soft spot for the overweight, dykey turkish woman, serra, played by the eponymous serra yılmaz, who provides such an anchor and backbone for the 'michele household'.

and i have an obvious bias and love for mara, played by the unsurprisingly nearly unknown lucrezia valia - a lovely and brave transwoman. man, the rack on that one! but so many of the other characters have trite natures that are overturned in startling moments of beauty and depth, like the coarse, low-class napolitana slut luisella, played by rosaria de cicco, who late in the film sings with a beautiful voice. (both women are visible in the picture above.)

one of the more startling surprises for me was the discovery of nazim hikmet. i really, really need to go hunt down his poetry now that i've read about his life - what a remarkable man he was.

hammersley's radioPod app

here's a great link to a great app thanks to warren ellis. who also provides us with his characteristic raving ax-murderer-cum-attack-womb commentary on said program.

bad signal
WARREN ELLIS

Ben Hammersley, he say:

I’ve cobbled together a server app, RadioPod, to record streaming radio stations, convert them to MP3s, and then provide an RSS 2.0 feed for a PodCasting application to download and then throw into iTunes ready for my iPod.

It's TiVO for commercial radio, is what he's saying. What Ben does -- and he's living in Europe, one of those sweaty countries where they eat dogs and make very bad films about perverts and mimes, you know the kind of thing, which is why he came up with this --

-- what Ben DOES, is take the live stream of The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4, which is streamed on something disgusting like RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, converts it into a handy mp3, and dumps it on his computer to be moved into his mp3 player, so he can listen to it any time he likes. Like when walking the dogs, or smoking cigars, or, I dunno, doing strange foreign dances with the neighbours so they don't perform awful santeria rites with dead chickens and his underpants.

This is very clever. The BBC releases only one of his radio shows, IN OUR TIME, as mp3. The rest is streamed, or briefly archived for later streaming, but in the vile formats mentioned above, which don't work on my mp3 player.

BBC radio is brilliant. And I've paid for it. But I don't have time to listen on appointment any more. Dumping the good stuff onto my mp3 player and listening to it in the pub while working, or while walking? Excellent.

However, the Radiopod thing that Ben has devised is.. well, it's written in g33ksp3ak.

Anyone who could convert the gibberish on this page:

radiopod

into a working Windows front end (fuck you Mac people) that, you know, had big buttons and simple stuff for people like me to understand, would be storing up great rewards in heaven. Or hell. Or possibly even just in a bar somewhere.

And then we could all listen to very fine BBC radio whenever we wanted. Except for you Mac people. You had to push it, with your shiny flowery boxes and your i-this and your i-that, didn't you? Rat eaters.

-- W

mm, rats.

tonality

ever wonder about the tones of chinese - how they sound, what they are?

you can hear examples for the four tones of mandarin and the six tones of cantonese. especially notice that tone three of mandarin has an archaic trait: it has what is called creaky voice. if you compare the clear sound of tone one to the tightness of the throat the speaker has during tone three, you can hear it. cantonese has lost this, which made my experience with cantonese-speaking asian-americans learning mandarin amusing. cantonese has no creaky tones, so they always made tone three clear. tibetans from lhasa also have this problem, and learning lhasa tibetan in beijing required hours of practice relaxing my throat while pronouncing the low, even tone of that language. i still fight with not tightening my throat...

anyway, it's a neat resource innit?

Holiday Pet Blogging Again

i present EXTREME closeups.

a slightly blurry miss kitty.

a less blurry chester, who seems displeased that i dared to invade his personal space and disturb his sleep.

now, a not so extreme closeup of frisky, who doesn't really look like a dog.

More Holiday Pet Blogging!

trixie loves to take naps.

sleeping is a lot of work, so she has to rest afterwards.

sometimes, she has help from chester.

miss cup is tired of her long, exhausting photo shoot. you can expect a poodle to pose for only so many portraits of her sleeping.

frisky wonders why everyone is so lazy.

On The Pleasure Of Repetition

i rented little man tate, jodie foster's directorial debut, a few months after it went to video. after unsuccessully trawling the shelves at the local movie rental outlet, on a whim, i decided to give little man tate a chance. jodie foster was one of my favorite actresses, having recently made the utterly fantastic silence of the lambs. it was an unusual choice for me. at the time, i was interested mostly in good suspense thrillers. so, it was a great surprise to me that i loved the movie. it's both clever and and funny, not to mention touching. did i mention that i am not usually a fan of 'touching' movies? maybe it's because i always feel patronized by their characteristic lack of subtlety.

jodie, as always is great, but the real surprise is the performance of adam hann-byrd. i don't often like 'precocious' child characters in american movies. the roles are almost always over-acted and over-directed, and often the characters seem more obnoxious than intelligent. i also despise the cliched saccharine quality of some of these characters. hann-bryd's performance suffers from none of these flaws. there's a lot going on behind the normally solemn expression on fred's face. hann-bryd makes fred believeable as a 7-year-old genius. the character is touchingly sweet. i'm almost gagging as i type that, but it's true.

there are a few loose ends in the script, but nothing really detracts from the overall quality of the movie. even its employment of cliched plot conventions doesn't tarnish the overall work -- the contrived removal of fred's protective mother, played by jodie foster, from the story for part of the movie, for example. there's still something fresh and original about the film that smoothes over these minor flaws. i rented it for a second time about ten years ago, and saw it again on cable this morning. my opinion of the movie hasn't changed. it's still funny and charming.

Can You Tell I Got A Digital Camera For Christmas?

i present to you: holiday pet blogging!

my dear old girl, trixie, who is now so incontinent that my mom has to outfit her with newborn diapers, with holes cut in them for trixie's tail, of course.

next up is miss cup, who never tires of making fun of trixie for wearing a diaper.

miss cup is followed by frisky, a little ball of nerves who belongs to my grandmother.

frisky is a bundle of nerves partly because he lives in terror of miss kitty, who is sooooooo not amused.

chester is above it all. he prefers to think deep thoughts while looking far, far away into the distance.

The Christmas Spirit of Upper Management

this year, it's fabulous to be a corporate drone:

------------

You are bidding on my Christmas Bonus!

I am an Aircraft Mechanic, and the company I work for, Horizon Airlines, has blessed me this year with: a wonderful Collectable coffee mug. It is made of Fine China. I know this to be true, because when I turn it over, it says china, in fine letters. It is adorned with printed images celebrating our sacrifices to the Company, thanking us for our hard work at the Company, and even takes credit for our skill and knowledge.

It comes with 1 piece of chocolate candy wrapped in golden foil. The cup originally came with 5 pieces of chocolate candy wrapped in golden foil, but my kids ate 4 pieces before I could stop them. I know this diminishes the overall value of this excellent Christmas gift. However, the included unopened chocolate covered graham cracker cookie certainly overshadows the loss of the 4 golden foil wrapped chocolate candies. The Crowning Glory of this Testament to the Spirit of Giving is the tea bag. Yes folks, Horizon Air pulled out all the stops when they ensured we had something to actually drink from the cup of Fine China.

One single teabag. The movie Christmas Vacation was based around the fact that Ed Griswold only received; a "Jelly of the Month" club membership from his boss. I got a teabag.

You see, when a Company like Horizon Air makes a little less than a BILLION dollars a year in revenue, we understand that a ham, turkey, or even a 7-11 gift certificate could potentially wipe out a Director or VP Holiday bonus, resulting in Christmas Tree Chaos. Therefore we do without. Year after year we are snubbed with $5 Blockbuster gift cards, to unsellable, poorly written, meaningless books about the Airline itself. The Mechanics at Horizon Air have had no raises in years, but thankfully the raises and bonuses never end for our upper management.  The Spirit of Giving lives on at Horizon Air, except for those that make the airline great.

In the mean time, my kids want a Playstation 2 from Santa. I thought they could make up a clever sign, stand near a Freeway on ramp, and hold out the fine china cup to be filled with the Spirit of Christmas by total strangers. But there was someone already there, so I decided to sell this priceless Fine China cup to the highest bidder.

Before I forget, there is also a generic card thanking us for something (I was so overwhelmed with the Joy of Giving I couldn't read it) signed by the very upper management personnel that got their bonuses and raises yet made no sacrifice at all. You will also get hours of enjoyment through out the years hand washing this Fine China, because it is not dishwasher safe. You may also display this unusual piece of art for viewing each and every night, due to the fact that direct sunlight will damage and fade the intricate cut and paste designs embossed on this Fine China, it should not see the light of day. I will ship this wonderful piece of Fine China in UV protected packing material to ensure no sunlight damage occurs.

Let the bidding begin.

------------

the seller has kindly included photos of his fine china christmas bonus and its accessories:

[link via alas a blog]

can we take a moment to appreciate...

... jennifer garner?

my roomie and i have been obsessively watching alias - we watched all three seasons on DVD in under a month, which is a damn lot of television. it's kinda like crack, though, and we had to finish before the new season begins in january.

one thing i can't seem to get over is the main character, who is so. damn. hot. it's practically painful to watch. a little mental S&M. and when she's in some crazy, chick bond (as opposed to bond chick) outfit and is speaking arabic, it's like a little orgasm in my brain. sydney bristow. in the ninja-SWAT outfit. speaking lovely arabic. with a machine gun. *shiver*

thank you. you may now return to your normal duties.

draft-stopper snakes

stop your dirty minds, you filthy monkeys.

i'm talking about these - here's desdemona's initial question from the crafty vixens discussion:

I have so many drafts in my house, and this winter storm has me wishing I had those little sausage-shaped-under-the-door-draft-blockers instead of rolled up towels. Anyone know how to make those? What is the filling? Something that won't attract mice, but is heavy enough to stay put?

so there.

we are doing the same as desdemona, only with a lightweight raincoat, and it is sooooooooo ghetto. someone, please help!

rumi was a homo (but wahhaj is a fag)

taqwacore is a punk movement i am reasonably sure you've never heard of. it's a kind of rebel muslim thing. it started out with american muslims, gaining its name from mike muhammad knight's novel the taqwacores.

there's a new band, the kominas, which is composed of desi (ethnic indians) musicians, and MWU! has their MP3 track available for download: "rumi was a homo (but wahhaj is a fag)".

it's a little rough, but it's fun.

rumi you prolly know - he's the counterculture hero, a sufi who was also a homosexual poet. imam siraj wahhaj, however, is a sexist pig who, appropriately enough, used to head up masjid al-taqwa.

I'd Like to Meet These Interior Decorators

unbelievable.

[link via boing boing]

Just Some Good Halloween Fun

consumer culture simply amazes me.

There Were Pillows

it was a franchise.

Before Political Correctness,There Was 'Injun Orange'

i shall not comment.

That Old-Fashioned Advertising

1964. a good year to be a chink.

[via suburban guerrilla]

Turn Your Back On Bush?

in order to participate in the kind of protest this website is organizing [link via the article em2 linked], you would have to actually believe that enough people are taking part in this protest that you'd be aware of the 'signal' to turn your 'back on bush.' the inauguration of president bush is going to be wall to wall people with historically tight security.

i went to a radiohead concert a few years ago at suffolk downs with my roommate and her two sisters. we lost The Teenager while we were racing to take spots in front of the stage. although we were within a few yards of The Teenager the whole time, we couldn't find her for over an hour. we saw her waving the pair of devil horns that she wore 24-7 above the crowd a couple of times, but we couldn't see anything or move in the crush of people. we were inside the most coveted section of the concert, surrounded by a mass of 30,000 radiohead fans in an open field. in return for being completely and utterly trapped, we were able to watch the concert on the stage, instead of video screens. that was a once in a lifetime experience.

the concert lasted for hours. it was impossible to move. there was no chance of finding a bathroom in that crush. there was a drunk asshole there with his long suffering girlfriend. he pawed her unconsciously like she was an inert object. total jerk. pushy. drunk. stupid. loud. drunk. aggressive. drunk. leaving involved negotiating a tsunami of bodies. they stepped on our stuff. they stepped on our feet. they pushed us from behind. this mob of thousands piled onto the trains waiting at the suffolk downs t-stop. the MBTA arranged a lot of extra service for that station. they did an amazing job of moving people through the system. miraculously, we fought our way through that bottleneck without losing each other.

president bush's inauguration is going to be attended by far more people than that. even if you turn your back, people won't know what you're doing. how are you going to get the signal to turn your back in that crowd? you won't be able to see anything more than four feet away from you. people will think you're just looking for someone. worse, someone might figure it out and decide to kick your ass. anyone involved in an altercation at this event will likely be arrested, especially protestors. those unlucky bastards can look forward to being on some future list of people who have to undergo full body cavity searches before they are allowed to travel by air in the US.

okay...

the exam BLEW... but this got a little chuckle from me. please please please never let me get old and cantankerous enough to find subversive little pranks like this funny.

dear practice of patent law:

at this moment, you can take your MPEP, DOE, IDS, divisionals, swearing back, specs, claims, disclosures... and everything else that i don't feel like wasting my time typing... and, in the words of teresa heinz kerry: SHOVE IT!!!

thank you. and good night.

diva dance music in da houuuse!!!

i found a track that makes my room sound not unlike a gay pride party. i know it's been around for a month or two, but i haven't been going out at all. here it is.

"after all this time" - sylver (jonathan peters full version)

patent law has never had such fabulous background music!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! i'm gonna die!!!!!!!!! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!! i hate exams!!!!!!

fuck all of you.

i'm sure you all know about the slain pregnant woman by now. what irks me is that the left and the right want to bring in the whole abortion debate into this horrific crime. really, it's disgusting. the next idiot leftie who yells at me for calling the kid a "baby" and screams about abortion rights will get smacked. hard. did the expectant mother CHOOSE to be slashed to bits by a psycho intent on abducting her child? how is this related to a woman's choice to have an abortion? if you even say "privacy rights" i will laugh in your face. and the next idiot rightie who insists that i refer to the kid as a "baby" and not a "fetus" will also get smacked. yeah, i KNOW it's a fuckin' baby, but until the baby actually exists as a separate being, it's a fuckin' fetus, okay? it WAS a FETUS, and now it is a BABY. go look this shit up in webster's dictionary if you're confused.

if you knuckleheads can't distinguish a revolting murder/kidnapping from a woman's right to choose, then you are a bunch of morons.

speaking of fatima mernissi...

she's featured in the daily kos' diaries in an excerpt from a chapter entitled "Size 6: The Western Women's Harem" from her book sheherazade goes west:

The elegant saleslady in the American store looked at me without moving from her desk and said that she had no skirt my size.  "In this whole big store, there is no skirt for me?" I said. "You are joking." I felt very suspicious and thought that she just might be too tired to help me. I could understand that. But then the saleswoman added a condescending judgment, which sounded to me like Imam fatwa. It left no room for discussion:

"You are too big!" she said.

"I am too big compared to what?" I asked, looking at her intently, because I realized that I was facing a critical cultural gap here.

"Compared to a size 6," came the saleslady's reply.

Her voice had a clear-cut edge to it that is typical of those who enforce religious laws. "Size 4 and 6 are the norm," she went on, encouraged by my bewildered look. "Deviant sizes such as the one you need can be bought in special stores."

man, don't you know it: check out my infamous post from when i was living in san diego.

incidentally, abayas'n'stuff and shukr (the latter of which is having a post-eid sale) have lovely collections of islamic clothing - not that i'll wear the hijab, but their dresses and shirts are quite lovely and are made to accomodate women's bodies. i'm a petite in their standards but my shoulders and hips make me a twelve in american sizes - i'm 5'9" tall and emphatically not generously-sized and yet finding clothing for me requires serious hard work.

i rather like the former over the latter site, incidentally; shukr is much more conservative and that's not my issue.

the battle for america

damn.

link: the battle for america

thanks to muslim wakeup! for pointing this out.

a republican makes sense!

go ah-nold!

like...

SCANDAL!!!

okay, it's old news, but i've been studying.

more here...

oh, this is classic:

"The Advocate notes that the situation with de Rossi echoes the beginning of DeGeneres’s relationship with Anne Heche in 1997. Both de Rossi and Heche are younger blonde actresses, and both apparently moved in with DeGeneres within a month of meeting her."

jesus h. christ... does the "gee, let's move in together on the second date" phenomenon still apply to queer women in their 30's and 40's? don't you girls ever LEARN?! trippin' i say... trippin'... and alexandra, if that ho comes crawlin' back to you, you just kick her to the curb, just like they say it on ricki lake. mmm hmm!!!

Little Coffee Addicts

em0's stovetop espresso maker requires regular tinkering in order to function, so we are looking for a replacement. an ibrik is on top of the list, but apparently, they are a bit of a hassle to use.

the brewing instructions:

* Put the water on a low to medium heat for one to two minutes. Add coffee: 7 grams (about two slightly rounded Tbs..) per 2 -4 oz. water, or to taste. The coffee should be powderized ... that is, the finest grind possible. (In fact, this is ONE thing that those whirling-blade type grinders do fairly well).

* If you want cardamom or sugar in it, add it with the coffee. Give the mixture a stir, or agitate it otherwise to get the grounds wet.

* when the heat setting is right it should slowly rise up to near boil-over in 2 minutes or so. As it rises to the rim, quickly remove it from the burner for 20 seconds and let it settle back down.

* Turn the burner down to the lowest possible setting. Put the ibrik back on, and let the coffee rise again, and remove it as before. Repeat this one more time.

* Allow to settle for a minute and serve in very small 2 oz cups. If you want crema you can scoop this off the top of the brew into each cup, then pour the remainder. Pour very slowly to trap as much grind as possible in the bottom of the ibrik.

* Brewing should take 7 minutes or so. If it takes longer, try raising the heat a bit next time.

this brew requires a hella lot of nursemaiding. not that we don't already go through a ridiculous song and dance to coax a few ounces of brew from our current implement. the ibrik is also muuuuuchhhh sexier.

Deny Cynicism

ginmar:

Every time we get out, there's something about seeing the countryside and the people that seems to refresh everyone's spirits. When I go home, I know there will be some part of me that will miss the palm trees, the sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, the heat and even the dust. I've lived in other cultures before, and in less segregated circumstances than here, but somehow, it's this one that has left some lasting mark. Maybe it's just that everything I was told was so wrong. The secret pleasure of cynicism, after all, is being proven wrong.

I keep seeing the Internet cafe guy hanging up lights because he thought it was a nice gesture. I keep remembering the mini-riot we got stuck in in another city, where the person who waded in to to shout down the shouters was a Catholic schoolmaster who taught at a Muslim madrassah. There are the truck drivers who beam at me like I'm their grand daughter, the grumpy postal NCO who teases me about my boxes and DVD addiction, and the Poles who---when they're fully dressed----try out their English on us. If it were up to the little people, we'd probably be roasting a lamb and figuring out a way to combine Ramadan, Christmas, and Chanukah into one maximum-gift-giving frenzy. Plus mashed potatoes. Because when it comes down it, the more I have to do with all the different nationalities here, it boils down to a bunch of very simple things: Heat. Hot water. Electricity and good books. Bad books. Good conversation----and bad conversation, to give one some perspective. Being seen as one's self, not as one's country or religion. Finding out that other people have good points, after all. And, finally, a good year-ending holiday that involves presents and hope and mashed potatoes and good friends.

a little town you know so well...and have never heard of

in 1986, UNESCO declared the libyan town of ghadamès (known in libyan arabic as jamahiriya) a World Heritage Cultural Site.

this town is familiar to you. it is part of your cultural knowledge - because it is where george lucas filmed the tatooïne building scenes from his star wars twin trilogies.

that's not why UNESCO declared it a WHCS, though. their website is succinct:

Ghadamès, known as 'the pearl of the desert', stands in an oasis. It is one of the oldest pre-Saharan cities and an outstanding example of a traditional settlement. Its domestic architecture is characterized by a vertical division of functions: the ground floor used to store supplies; then another floor for the family, overhanging covered alleys that create what is almost an underground network of passageways; and, at the top, open-air terraces reserved for the women.

the city is covered, keeping it cool during the heat of the day and warm during the cold desert nights. many of the long corridors were known by memory because they were so deeply buried in the city they were lightless. and as the UNESCO article notes, the topmost level of the city was limited to women.

the key phrase here, however, is pre-saharan. see, when the romans arrived, berber peoples already lived in their ancient town; that means we have copious written evidence for two thousand years of continuous inhabitation, and the city was already old. the sahara's spread over time means this city once wasn't in the desert, but a savannah much like exists in kenya today: full of gazelles, ferocious wild oxen, lions, hyaenas, baboons and giraffes.

ghadamès is so ancient it has its own language, proper only to the city itself. not a dialect, not a local accent for a wider language - its own language, as distinct from its nearest kin as french is from spanish or rumanian. speak ghadamès? then i know in which city you live.

the city was abandoned - with the copious use of force by the government - for new ghadamès, a nightmarish communist-style pile of poured concrete, whose attractions did include running water and modern plumbing. with the added bonus of not being shot by the government and the joys of living in a hideous concrete bunker totally ill-suited for life in the sahara. however, the old town was maintained by loving citizens who returned during the day to keep their houses and streets in order, and these days things are a-changing.

there are plenty of sites out there that have pictures of ghadamès, like this one, for example, so i'm going to turn my attention to who the ghadamès are. they are part of the indigenous peoples of north africa called in english 'berbers'. the berber languages - some twenty-six of them - are widely spoken in the maghreb, from the siwa oasis of the west egyptian desert to mauritania in the west, and as far south as mali, nigeria, niger and burkina faso. their stronghold has always been the atlas mountains, and algeria and morocco by far contain the majority of native berber speakers today.

berbers are not arabs. they have their own writing system, mostly forgotten today, called tifinagh - this is derived from the word punic, because they are derived from the letters used by the phoenicians who settled in carthage and created a new state there (until the romans killed them all, anyway). the greeks also borrowed the phoenician writing system, and from them the etruscans, and from them the romans. the roman letters are what we use today.

however, the berber languages are cousins to arabic. they fall within the boreafrasian ("north african + asian") clade of the afrasian language family, one of the largest language families in the world. boreafrasian's western component includes berber, the recently extinct guanche from the canary islands of spain, and ancient egyptian, which lives on as a liturgical language in the egyptian christian churches as coptic.

the eastern branch of boreafrasian includes the large semitic family, which includes the many arabic dialects/languages, the aramaic (including syriac) and canaanite languages (hebrew and the aforementioned phoenician, extinct except for in placenames such as beirut beyruut, 'the wells') as well as many others - ethiopian languages, the unwritten south arabian languages, etc.

today, many berber languages and their distinct cultures are in danger of being elided by larger ethnicities. arabic has been a major source of trouble for berber since nearly all berbers are muslim - spain was conquered not by arabs, but by berbers. ironically, what has helped keep berber alive is not only the isolation of its settlements (i am reminded uncomfortably of the tusken raiders of the star wars films at this point) but also its extremely patriarchal treatment of women. whether this is a native or adopted cultural trait, berber women are mostly illiterate, monolingual and stay in their settlements and homes away from foreigners (arabs). this leaves an ongoing legacy of children raised in an all-berber environment and the languages continued to survive.

when the french colonised north africa, they helped this process. seeking to break up the nativists, they forced french-language schooling on the nation. this means that young people of both sexes didn't learn arabic, though boys' fathers often had them take additional classes. berber women now could speak a language of power, and it did not contest berber in the home like arabic did. arabic, after all, was a prestige language because it was doubly the language of the elite and of religion. now it had lost its elite shine.

still, the legacy of the oppression of women is strong in berber and non-berber cultures of north africa. there is a conflict in the way educated women often write in french; there is a way in which the master's language is best used to subvert his programme. still, it will be an interesting future if things keep changing the way they are. there are so many interesting feminists - fatima mernissi (some of her books in english & her website), fatima sadiqi (books on berber language and culture & her website), the egyptian nawal al-saadawi (some of her books in english and her website.

i know this post rambles, but that's what blogs are for. i couldn't miss an opportunity to talk about native feminists, now could i?

Technology and Anxiety

i'm an open content cheerleader. i love the folks over at the gutenberg project. i was all excited when i heard about a project to make all public domain newspapers available online.

when google decided to digitize and scan a huge trove of books from the harvard, stanford, and oxford libraries, i was happy as a pig in shit. novelty always has its irrational detractors. michael gorman, dean of library services at Cal State Fresno, weighs in on google's plan with a hysterical, the sky-is-falling reaction. granted, google's new initiative isn't an open content effort. much of the material they plan to digitize is under copyright.

i still think this is a great thing. it doesn't spell the end of libraries in my opinion. if anything, it should expand any wired library's ability to function as a research center. it should also be a boon to those people who don't live near any public libraries. in other words, digitization of books would actually widen access to scholarly information. i thought that was what libraries were all about.

[link via kevin drum, whose strong reaction to gorman's reaction is out of the bounds of his normally mild-mannered commentary]

Response To Islamic Wingers Who Hack

muslim wakeup is back with a new addition to its Sex and the Umma series, which was a real problem for the hackers who felt the need to single that section out for disapproval.

i like this sentiment from Ahmed:

Someday, two gay Muslim men will marry each other in Saudi Arabia, and they won't even keep their hijabs on - are you scared, yet?

Ladies And Gentlemen, We Present The Starship Enterprise of Espresso

just in case you were thinking of opening a cafe in your neighborhood.

Low Laughter Of Glee

oh yes. yes, my precious. preeeecccciiiooooous.

a beloved wife

ahram (cairo's daily newspaper since 1875) has a small article with a nice pic.

A Beloved Wife

Last Sunday, the Valley of the Golden Mummies in Bahariya oasis was a playing stage for a thrilling archaeological adventure; the largest tomb ever found for an average middle class woman has been uncovered. The size of the tomb, according to Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, is testimony to the husband's love of his wife. The tomb has a beautiful anthropoid clay coffin bearing the face of the deceased with her long fair hair.

Other treasures have been unearthed but dust and humidity prevented excavators from moving further into the grave though they had uncovered another sealed doorway.

I'm A Sucker For Middle Eastern Fare

my is mouth watering. for much of the last ten years, i've lived in and around the neighborhood that hosts an indie rock club annexed to a middle eastern restaurant. for a long while, this composite bar/restaurant/rock club ensemble was known as 'The Middle East'. the restaurant is now known as 'Zuzu.'

_great_ food.

i'm pleasantly surprised to learn that some people drink wine in iran these days. :-) it's hard to wipe out old traditions.

asshat wakeup

damn muslims, they always hijacking shit.

well, some stupid frelniks hacked muslim wakeup! - how childish, that people should respond to disagreements with force. (hacking is force.)

in case you are wondering, murtad is the technical term for an apostate - one who leaves islam. the penalty for apostacy is death - you can be a religious person of another faith under islam without any trouble, but you can't leave islam.

Cue: Asshattery

His Dark Materials is unfriendly to organized religion. not to god. thank you. move along now.

dang.

dang, i mean... read andrew sullivan's blog a year ago, and then read it now. i mean, dang.

News Of the Gross and Bizarre

i wonder if they were doing meth beforehand. for some reason, people go crazy on that drug.

[via pesky apostrophe, who i discovered via circe]

exams...

...really suck.

that is all.

Our Household's Favorite Quick And Easy Dinner

1 small roaster chicken
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1/2 tablespoon oyster sauce
1/2 tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon five spice powder
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon basil
3 cloves garlic

put cloves of garlic inside chicken
mix oil, sauces, and spices and pour over chicken
roast in the oven at 375 degrees fahrenheit for 90 minutes

very delish.

[update -- cooking time for your roaster may vary depending on the size of the chicken. practice good sense. if you notice any blood when you stick a sharp instrument into the chicken it needs to cook longer, obviously. check the meat close to the bone if you're not sure.]

Every Time You Think... Nah! They Wouldn't...

they will.

not only will they go there, they won't even be properly ashamed of it. they'll sell you tickets to let you see them go there.

while watching the earthsea miniseries on the sci-fi channel with em0 last night, i saw an ad for an original sci-fi channel movie -- puppet master vs. demonic toys. it's a christmas special!

i sooooo don't regret giving up tv.

Blog Gossip

i think i'm beginning to understand 'blogger burnout.' over the last year or so, several bloggers decided to shut down. i was dismayed when billmon quit. i was starting to visit the whiskey bar regularly when he called it quits.

i have to admit, his complaint about the commercialization of blogs made me want to scream. after a technology market meltdown when billions of dollars in investments in the 'internet miracle' disappeared into thin air, the first thought that came to my mind when blogging 'went 'commercial' was: "holy shit. the internet can make money. " i was delighted ... and surprised ... to see the DIY zine spirit flourish online. in fact, i'm still having trouble assimilating the knowledge that the daily kos gets 300,000 visits a day. the daily kos isn't even what i'd call a blog anymore.

blogs aren't anything truly new. in the late nineties, one of the venture capital buzz phrases that was certain to set investors salivating was 'online community.' investors fell for a lot of stupid ideas in those days, but they were on to something there. the online world has always served to cultivate niche obessions. politics is a popular obsession that flourished under the blog format.

blogging doesn't scale well. that's why kos evolved into something new. the blog format couldn't handle the traffic or serve the diverse interests of such a large readership. it's also why some bloggers decide they can't take it anymore. managing a growing online community is a lot of work. it's also usually thankless. or it was until BlogAds underwent its stratospheric success and proved that there was money to be made from online communities. all in all, i thought this was a good sign. it meant that good bloggers would keep blogging.

blogging becomes annoying after a while. when a blog reaches critical mass, it inevitably draws the attention of one or more dedicated trolls. trolls always try everyone's patience. they ruin what is good about 'hanging out' online. they distract. derail. obsfucate. push buttons. kevin drum appears to be losing his patience with charlie. kevin held out for a remarkably long time before getting testy. i'd have flamed charlie to a crisp a long time ago.

what an annoying twit.

Cats Do Not Like To Diet

last week, i noticed that one of my cats looked even more enormous than usual. i think he has an eating disorder. he will eat, throw up, and return to the food bowl to repeat the whole process over again.

i decided to ration my cats' food.

toby and mittens still haven't accepted the new state of affairs. they compulsively pace the kitchen, staring at their empty food dish in disbelief. toby became so impatient for his dinner yesterday that he very pointedly threatened to bite me several times. 'playfully'. just a 'love nip'. he paced across my keyboard. cried. stared.

at meal times, they eat until full, leaving very few leftovers. i give them what they need. it's clear that they don't think this is enough, judging from all the whining and fighting. em0's tiny little cat has to swallow her dinner whole, or my cats will sneak in and devour it. toby stares at me in the morning, willing me to get up. if i get up, he gets fed, so his goal is to stare a hole into my head. he knows if he gets pushy, i will lock him in the bathroom. he doesn't paw my face anymore like he used to. but, his stare is *so* reproachful.

these power struggles are so draining.

being in a house full of hungry cats is a singular experience. cats seem to turn up everywhere. they're always underfoot. they become increasingly pushy and downright pissed off. it's rather menacing actually.

flying lizards.

a neighbor just knocked on my door asking if i had an entrance to the courtyard - her iguana had jumped out of her window and she needed to retrieve it. i don't have an entrance to the courtyard, but she seemed to be distraught, so i offered the only solution i could: if she could jump out my window into the courtyard and land without breaking any legs, she could do so if she wanted. she left in a huff.

nuking it & paving it

so i was reading my email this morning and i came upon a link to an article entitled "marines learn how to fight for allah [sic]" from the times of london, wherein a US marine was interviewed about his experiences in iraq. here's how the article opened:

American marines and military intelligence analysts are studying the tactics of insurgents in Iraq — staging mock hostage takings, roadside bombings and suicide missions, as well as studying the Koran [sic], praying to Allah [sic] and learning to think like jihadists.

The Pentagon is struggling to adapt to an enemy that has just claimed the life of the 1,000th combat soldier in Iraq.

“The department simply has to be more agile,” Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, admitted last week. “We have got to focus more on the post-conflict phase.”

we now take a giant leap to the conclusion of the article, wherein a US marine was interviewed.

One marine had returned only six weeks ago from a seven-month posting in Iraq. He will be going back soon. “It’s what I do,” he said. Had the course taught him anything he had not learnt in the field? “It’s helped me to know how the enemy thinks and appreciate how sophisticated they are.”

If he were in charge, how would he deal with the Iraqis? “I’d kill them all,” he replied. “They don’t know what democracy is.”

There may be more to learn.

yeah, i suspect there might. especially since the times, as sophisticated as it is, continues to use the tired term "allah" when it is the term used by all arabic speakers to refer to god, whether they are jews, christians or muslims. i mean, i understand the use in the title for clarity, but couldn't they have said "learnt to pray in arabic as muslims do" instead of "pray to Allah [sic]"?

just for clarity: allâh cognate to the hebrew word found throughout the hebrew bible (i.e. christian "old testament") as elôhîm: both the arabic and the hebrew come from *ilâh, the ancient boreafrasian ('semitic') word for 'god, star' (*il) with an intensive suffix. arabic added the article al-, hence al-ilâh. in fact, in the qur'an, there is an incident involving pagans who worship a goddess simply called "the goddess", or "allat", which is the same proto-form *il with the feminine ending -at-.

in comparison, the so-called "canaanite vowel shift" changed the form *ilâh to elôh (quite regularly) with the additional intensive/respectful addition of the plural -îm. the simple hebrew form el appears as well, particularly in proper names: ishmael, israel, and all the other names ending in -el.

next time a newspaper writes about judaism, see if they say "jews pray to elohim". or even "catholics pray to deus", since the Bible forms we use are in Latin. i don't think so, darling.

and nevermind the incredibly archaic "koran" - it's qur'an, the same as we call muslims "muslims" and not "musulmen" anymore.

so for all their high-horsery, i fail to see how much progress we are seeing even in the supposedly sophisticated world of the intellectual press. i mean, this ain't a tabloid, this is the frelling times, people.

via CAIR.

eww.

i know this is another parasitical bOING-bOING steal, but... eww.

Radtke entered the hospital weighing about 245 pounds. She left weighing about 160 pounds...

wanna know why? because they removed a 66# tumour from her.

additionally, it was described as a "mucinous ovarian tumor". mucinous means it contained mucin, a primary sounce of mucous fluid.

that's right, she had a 66-pound mucous-y tumour.

EWW!

cartoon skeletons

well, michael palus has done what we all wanted done - found out what the skeletons of our favourite cartoon characters look like.

it did somewhat surprise me that the freakiest of all the proposed skeletons was of the powerpuff girls - those girls are definitely not human, that's for sure. frankenstein's monster was at least built of human parts...

via bOING-bOING.

[ ... Expletives Over and Over ... ]

mission:

complete part a and part b.

part a:

preemptive scheduler

write an interrupt handler for the hardware timer to provide preemptive scheduling in the rudimentary 'operating system' we've developed over the semester.

difficulty: low.

there is a ready made API to handle the timer. no big deal. my hardware programming class from last semester required me to learn all about interrupt driven routines. yup. been there. done that. i learned how to program the timer in c and assembly.

objective:

make the timer send an interrupt every ten miscroseconds. call the tiny OS's scheduler to give each 'process' alternating access to the CPU for roughly equal shares of time.

think: several user programs running at once.

the OS must efficiently divide the CPU's resources between these programs. while the CPU can only perform one 'instruction' at a time, it can process a lot of them in 40 microseconds. the 'OS' we have built is so very very rudimentary. the department has a repository of useful example code for this kind of assignment. all of it is well-documented, so this assignment was easy.

_totally_. *not*. like. the. real. world.

part b.

implement this weird new thing i learned about this semester and sort of still don't really understand: the 'semaphore'

there are two processes. one process produces what the other process consumes.

difficulty: [expletive]!?*_!!

objective:

synchronize them.

the producer puts things into a 'bag' and the consumer takes them out. the producer can never put too many things into the bag because the bag has a fixed size. the consumer can never take anything from an empty bag.

the producer and the consumer can never be allowed to have access to the bag at the same time.

the semaphore is an algorithm that makes sure all this happens. this assignment required an understanding of the scheduler and the not so well documented API we've built for it in previous assignments. it was absolute and utter hell. very subtle and difficult to find bugs.

no, sam i am, i do not wish to write about the semaphore. i simply cannot think about these things called semaphores anymore.

A Little Bit O' Boston History

this explains so much. boston is as neurotic as new york in its very own messed up little way.

[Update: Link now goes to the specific post i was referring to. thank you. move along now.]

the malkin award

here. courtesy of andrew sullivan via peaktalk.

scroll up from the first link for award nominees. i don't know whether to laugh or cry.

this one made me laugh though:

THE MALKIN AWARD: I'm afraid Ann Coulter cannot be considered. No one else would stand a chance. But her abuse is more original than Malkin's.

STILL ... : Just for the record, this Coulterism is classic Malkin Award material:

My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call 'women' at the Democratic National Convention.

Cliched? Check. Playground insults? Check. No originality? Check. Assumption of reader agreement? Check. But as I said, too easy.

- 5:58:47 PM

ann IS a drag queen. i'm so convinced.

i'm going to go for the malkin award... *clears throat*

honey, if you look good, you don't need to cake on make up. if your breasts don't sag, you don't *need* a bra -- you're absolutely correct. but i wear one anyway. if your legs and bush don't look like amazon brush in its natural state, you can forego shaving for a few days (are you sure you're not a man? i haven't shaved in a week, and my legs are still as smooth as silk, baby). and girl, "corn fed" and "natural fiber" generally refers to the republicans' base constituents, those strappin' hardy gals in the corn-growin' states - the exact opposite of the often skinnier, tofu-eating, more urbane, and less "farm hardy" libruhls in that oh-so-reviled place called "boston," you know... where the democratic national convention was held. and speaking of sandals, they're off season, but i'm sure the three inch heels of my calvin kleins can be shoved up your ass next summer. or maybe i'll relent and purchase those fabulous st. john slingbacks that are on sale, as those heels look like they could do more damage. whoops, i just outed myself as a vile century-21-barneys-warehouse-sale-shopping new yorker. i guess my le feu d'issey "fragrance" doesn't help mask my blue-state stench.

you can't even make an elementary school level insult properly. thank you, please try again.

hee hee! :D

the supreme court of canada votes in favor of same-sex marriage

here. cool, eh?

Strike That

that is, i couldn't keep my eyes open until i tried to go to bed. i think i have a sleep disorder.

the MMWR

i knew there was a reason i subscribed to the CDC's morbidity & mortality weekly report, and this just clinches it. hint: the title includes the words wood chippers.

All decedents were male; mean age at death was 35 years (range: <20--60 years). Of these deaths, 12 (39%) occurred among persons aged 25--34 years. Seventeen (55%) occurred in the agriculture, forestry, and fishing industry, and seven (23%) occurred in the manufacturing industry. Twenty-one (68%) were the result of being caught or compressed by the chipper, and nine (29%) were the result of being struck by the machine or a machine part. Thirteen (42%) of the fatally injured workers were groundskeepers, and five (16%) were machine operators, assemblers, and inspectors. The remaining were classified as managers, forest conservation specialists, farm workers, carpenters, cutters/welders, miscellaneous machine operators, and construction and nonconstruction laborers. Approximately one third of the events occurred in July or August. Of 26 cases among persons for whom ethnicity was known, seven (27%) were among Hispanics. Societal costs of all chipper-related fatalities (primary source code 3231) for 1992--2001 are estimated at $28.5 million in 2003 dollars (CDC, unpublished data, 2004§). [emphasis mine]

two-thirds of all (accidental) wood-chipper-related deaths in the last two decades were the result of people being (accidentally) wood-chipped. yeek!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!

wtf. i couldn't get more than a couple hours of fitful sleep at a stretch for several days at a time for the last three weeks. so, i cut WAAAAAYYYYYYYYY back on the coffee. today, i've been treating myself to an excessive amount and now i can't keep my eyes open.

Peaktalk *Is* A Good Blog

i find myself visiting peaktalk regularly since em2 posted a link to it.

i've been perusing pieter's posts about the culture clash due to the influx of muslim immigrants in europe. it is fair and balanced as opposed to faux news' treatment of the subject. fox hosted a video at their website about the challenges sweden faces in assimilating a large population of muslim immigrants. the video was a juxtaposition of images designed to give the impression that sweden was being overrun with noisy, unruly muslims who were getting the cops called on them all the time.

the only crime depicted or even mentioned directly was the burning of a mosque. the commentator hinted ominously that the swedish were being driven to distraction and that some felt that they had to take matters into their own hands. one was left with the impression that the speaker approved of vigilante 'justice.'

pieter's posts provide a much more thoughtful analysis of the limits of 'tolerance' when confronted with religious fundamentalism. i'm no fan of religious fundamentalism, as anyone who reads this blog knows. i've long thought that it is a second cousin to fascism. what i find annoying about the dialogue surrounding 'islamofascism' is the relative silence from american conservatives regarding fundamentalism of the christian variety. people who bomb abortion clinics are terrorists too. i'd just like to hear something from the republican leadership acknowledging that.

Ahhhhhhhhhh..................

there's nothing as delicious as a good night's sleep after an unrelenting bout of insomnia. please let this be the end of it. i've been petty and mean to the cats, and i've wanted to bite off people's heads and eat their brains.

ibm sells its pc branch to chinese company

wow

how stupid can you be?

let's say you were caught red-handed by your boss stealing from the company. do you say something similar to: "i'm sorry, please don't fire me *grovel grovel grovel*"... or do you say, "you better not fucking talk, boss!"

some members of the u.s. special forces threatened pentagon workers who witnessed abuse of prisoners of war. gee, let's mess with pentagon agents! what a good idea! "hubris" doesn't even begin to explain this. i don't know what can...

what the eff?!

hey, check out usnews.com -- it seems that tuition, room & board at our alma mater is a hair's breadth away from $40k.

when we were there it was barely $30k.

?!?!?!?!????!

just a quick drive by in the midst of studying. and oh, my law school is one point away from tier 1. so close, yet no cigar.

the next iranian revolution

after visiting a website to see the changing face of iranian women, i ran into a great essay. don't miss the barely-scarved women of the picture series, though - i have been reading persepolis and persepolis II, and what a remarkable change in tolerance there's been. you could be jailed for showing a centimeter of hair a decade ago, nevermind makeup or tight jeans!

XXX Revolution

I would like the next Iranian revolution to be sexy and bloody
Siamack Baniameri, iranian.com, December 5, 2004

We are due for another revolution. And I'll be willing to participate in the next Iranian revolution only if the leader is a delusional cross dresser who aspires to be a crack-addict-rock-star with bad inflammation, violent temper and a knack for inserting sharp objects in his ... throat. That's my kind of a leader.

I'll not participate in velvet revolutions. That's gay. I also refuse to be a part of any kind of sit-ins, hunger strikes, passive resistance or nonviolence movements. I'm sorry, but I do not sing Kumbaya. I would like the next Iranian revolution to be sexy and bloody. I have a few people in my shit-list that I need to pay a visit. I envision the next Iranian revolution as kind of like MTV meets Aljazeera: hardcore avant-garde rap yet politically incorrect and traditional.

I would like to form a revolutionary party with militant prostitutes and activist pimps. I also like to merge the party with fundamentalist drug addicts and radical panhandlers. I will form a military wing for the party and outsource it to the former members of Taliban who left Afghanistan due to the lack of adequate five-star vacation beach resorts.  I also would like to eventually elevate the party's status to Code Orange.

I will charge a twenty-dollar annual fee for all party members except those who are willing to participate in an experiment to study the affect of suppository chemical weapons. The party leaders will be selected among members who can survive a weekend of hardcore orgy with a group of pissed off lesbian grandmothers.

I can not see myself involved with a revolution that underutilizes the power of transsexual assassins.  I also refuse to contribute to a revolution that discriminates against midgets with out-of-control bowel movement. And I definitely will not have any part in a revolution that ignores the rights of custodial engineers who show up to work naked due to early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

I would like the next Iranian revolution to follow a certain codes of conduct. For example: the revolution should not start before 9 am and should be closed for the day at some time around 3 pm. Weekends should be optional. The dress code should be business casual and revolutionaries should be compensated for any overtime.

I also think that it's a good idea to provide the midlevel management responsible for supplying [Molotov cocktails] with company cars. And lastly, those who suffer from hangover due to a wild night of hard drinking should be excused from participating in the revolution until they are fully recovered.

now that's my kind of revolution!

how i feel about the holidays...

... is like spider jerusalem, i mean warren ellis, does.

All teh death are belong to me.

And the pub is playing Xmas music again. They turn it up when I walk in. They are killing me. I hate them. They are getting a sack of burning dogshit for Xmas. I am Santa.

that man can turn a mailing list into a flaming hail of poison darts of black humour like no other writer since we lost dorothy parker.

only warren ellis will say "dogshit".

?!?@##!? please...

sometimes, all a person wants is an ice cream bar made with REAL ICE CREAM, not that tofutti or soy milk stuff. and not low fat ice cream either. a real, rich, creamy, and decadent ice cream bar.

now i understand that some people are on diets, and it's great that these products are available... but isn't it a bit silly not to have the real thing available at your local grocery store?!

i can't order half and half in my coffee at manhattan restaurants anymore. instead they only have 2% and skim milk.

sometimes splenda is more readily available than good old fashioned sugar.

it's driving me insane.

i searched the ice cream freezer for way too long at my supermarket just now only to find tofutti cuties, weight watchers ice cream bars, and some soy milk abominations. finally, at the bottom, furthest corner of the shelf there were some klondike bars pushed towards the back. i would have preferred something by haagen dazs and ben and jerry's, but i felt as if i had struck gold.

isn't this a bit ridiculous?

one-upping the edible baby jesus

yes, em'lys & henrys, it's the baby jesus buttplug. whoopee!

via the quality-control alliance.

am i crazy to feel this way?

i adore morrissey's new album. the first song on it bothers me, though. it bothers me because the singer, who also wrote it, is english but has captured my exact emotional state about my own damn country, america is not the world:

america, your head’s too big
because america, your belly’s too big
and i love you; i just wish you’d stay where you is

in america, the land of the free, they said,
and of opportunity, in a just & a truthful way

- but where the President is never black, female or gay.
& until that day, you’ve got nothing to say to me to help me believe

in america. it brought you the hamburger
well, america, you know where you can shove your hamburger.

& don’t you wonder why in estonia they say,
“hey you, you big fat pig, you fat pig, you fat pig!”

steely blue eyes with no love in them scan the world
& a humourless smile with no warmth within greets the world
& I, I have got nothing to offer you
no, just this heart deep & true

which you say you don’t need.

see with your eyes, touch with your hands - please...
hear through your ears, know in your soul - please...

for haven’t you me with you now?
& i love you, i love you, i love you
i love you, i love you, i love you

man, that just sums it up for me, all in one lovely-sung tune. how come an englishman can say in so few words what no american seems to be able to? to wrap up all the bits that are broken and still not come off as hating this place?

doesn't the baby jesus look so cute you could just eat 'im up?

the appalling taste of americans is one thing i wonder about. do people in other countries have such amazingly shitty taste? in beijing, they certainly did; in indonesia, malaysia & hong kong they didn't; in paris, köln & the benelux, they definitely didn't.

Over at Santa's Depot, you can buy a kit to make a nativity creche out of S'mores. Says Lee's cousin Luke: "Doesn't baby Jesus look adorable? And tasty?"

via bitter shack of resentment.

you can get your own (*shudder*) here.

but don't tell me about it.

tens of millions may die

yeah, that's right. via bOING-bOING we have a report out of the WHO about impending influenza epidemic:

Fears of Global Bird Flu Outbreak Increase
Human Pandemic Would Kill Many Millions, But Crucial Facts Still Missing

Daniel DeNoon, WebMD Medical News
Reviewed By Brunilda Nazario, MD 20041201

Dec. 1, 2004 - Last fall, a 26-year-old Thai woman spent the night holding her 11-year-old daughter in her arms. The little girl died after catching bird flu from an infected chicken. On Sept. 20, the mother died, too. She was the first known person to catch bird flu from another human being.

She may be far from the last. Officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) warn that millions of people, perhaps tens of millions, may die if the bird flu virus spreads among humans.

That isn't happening yet. It still takes very close contact with infected birds -- or, it seems with another infected human - for a person to catch the bird flu virus. It's a rare event. There have been only 44 known cases. Why the worry? Those 44 human cases resulted in 32 deaths.

"The great concern is there is an incredibly virulent avian flu that shows ability to jump to humans," Jeremy Farrar, MD, DPhil, tells WebMD. "And when it gets to humans, it is clearly a very nasty disease with a high mortality rate."

Farrar should know. He's director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit at the Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Farrar's team recently described 10 cases of humans infected with bird flu, officially known as type A H5N1 avian influenza virus.

In an editorial appearing in the Dec. 2 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Farrar argues that efforts to combat a worldwide flu outbreak -- what public health officials refer to as pandemic influenza - should be top priority.

"The current situation is not a concern. There are not hundreds of people dying," Farrar says. "But this reminds us that avian influenza is not just a runny nose. It is a phenomenally destructive virus. If this came to be -- if this virus developed a more efficient way to jump from human to human -- you'd have a very virulent virus with high infectivity. It would be a very nasty global event."

The WHO is paying close attention, according to spokeswoman Maria Cheng.

"We are closer to a pandemic now than we were in the past," Cheng tells WebMD. "This is a virus that has the ability to jump to humans. As long as it circulates in animals, it will jump to humans. The more that happens, the greater the chance a human pandemic will occur. We think this is a very worrying situation. Now is the time to take action."

Bird Flu Virus Evolving

Why worry? In the 20th century, there have been three global flu pandemics. The first, the 1918 Spanish flu, was the worst. Coming on the heels of World War I, it killed between 20 million and 40 million people. Milder outbreaks in 1956 and 1968 killed about 1 million each.

All three times, a bird flu evolved a way to spread among humans. For decades, experts have predicted another outbreak. In 1976, for example, it looked as though swine flu would do the trick. But to the embarrassment of health officials of the time, it fizzled out almost before it began.

This time, the fears are based on more solid science. Modern genetic techniques have traced major flu outbreaks to birds. Birds can carry 15 known types of type A influenza, the most serious kind of flu virus. Humans -- so far -- get infected with only three of them.

There are two ways a flu virus can jump from birds to humans. One is evolution; the virus simply mutates into a form that infects humans.

The evidence so far isn't reassuring. Someone sold chickens that died of bird flu to a Bangkok zoo. Keepers fed the chickens to captive tigers. The virus not only infected the big cats, but also spread easily among them. So far, 147 of the zoo's 441 tigers have died.

The other way flu viruses figure out how to infect humans is reassortment. When two flu viruses infect the same person or animal, they swap DNA. So far, that hasn't happened. But pigs get infected with human flu viruses. And Chinese health officials report that the bird flu has been infecting pigs for more than a year.

Early hopes of eradicating the bird flu virus have evaporated. Now the virus is firmly entrenched in domestic and wild birds in Southeast Asia. Could it spread? Recently, officials in Belgium stopped a man getting off a plane from Thailand. They found that he was illegally carrying two hawk eagles. Both birds were infected with H5N1 bird flu. And the veterinarian who examined them came down with a suspicious eye infection, although swab tests were negative for bird flu.

Public Health Response Slow

The WHO last month convened an informal meeting of all 11 companies that make flu vaccines, regulatory authorities, and the health ministers of several nations. The bottom line: If and when bird flu breaks out in humans, there won't be a vaccine for at least several months.

"The most basic thing we are recommending is increased surveillance. It is important we have a global surveillance system in place," the WHO's Cheng says. "We are working with national authorities to accelerate the process of making a vaccine."

Surveillance means identifying human-to-human bird flu transmission in its earliest stages. That's not an easy task, given that bird flu is spreading in some of the most remote and rural areas of Asia. And people whose livelihood depends on small flocks of chickens are loath to report bird deaths when it means that public health officials will exterminate their only source of income.

Fortunately, there's hope that a worldwide pandemic could be contained. Ira Longini, PhD, professor of biostatistics at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, is part of an international team that's developing mathematical models of flu outbreaks. The models, nearing completion, predict exactly how far a flu outbreak will spread under different circumstances.

The models are sobering. For example, Longini's earlier work shows that if a flu outbreak were like the relatively mild 1957 Asian flu virus, it would infect 93 million Americans and cause 164,000 U.S. deaths.

Would a bird flu outbreak be worse? Probably. But Longini says it's highly unlikely that a bird flu would be as deadly as some people fear.

"Based on past experience, we don't have to panic," Longini tells WebMD. "It's clear that pandemic flu is inevitable. It is going to happen, and it could be a fairly pathogenic strain and could be a real problem. Right now, H5N1 bird influenza looks like it is fatal in 70% of cases. But this 70% figure is totally absurd. It has never been true of any human flu strain. I have never seen any evidence that human influenza is anywhere near that virulent. Case fatality of even highly virulent strains are a couple of deaths per 10,000 people infected."

It's also likely that human-to-human bird flu infections would spread slowly, at least at first. That would buy time. And since the bird flu bug is sensitive to Tamiflu, an oral flu drug, public health officials could buy even more time by giving the drug to all contacts of infected people.

"With good surveillance, with antivirals, and easy-to-implement public health methods -- strategies such as closing schools and public places and limiting movement -- we should be able to contain the pandemic at the source, wherever that may be," Longini says. "That would buy time to make vaccine to deal with it if it should spread. Emphasis should be on good surveillance everywhere, especially in Southeast Asia, and quick response with targeted use of antivirals."

SOURCES: Farrar, J. The New England Journal of Medicine, Dec. 2, 2004; vol 351: pp 2363-2365. Jeremy Farrar, MD, DPhil, director, Oxford University Clinical Research Unit, Hospital for Infectious Diseases, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Maria Cheng, spokeswoman, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. Ira Longini, PhD, professor of biostatistics, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta.

as bOING-bOING's source points out,

Since yesterday, the rest of the world has been buzzing with news of the World Health Organization's warnings of a impending flu pandemic that could kill up to 100 million. These warnings are suspiciously missing from American news sites - we get things like Godzilla Honored with "Walk of Fame" Star from CNN's front page.

fuckers.