My former boss visited the big don today. I got these Bill and Melinda Gates pictures in email followed by a message from ‘Hotmail staff’ telling me ‘your account is nearly full.’
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Xbox Diwali Extreme is amazingly lifelike in high def |
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Cappuccino with Sonia |
I loved this suggestion from the thread on Chrismahanukwanzakah:
All Mixed Up – i sort of have a soft spot for christmas trees… i think they’re fun. when i have kids i’m going to decorate my tree with Om ornaments and little sita, ganesha, and ram ornaments…and my tree is going to be topped with a flute playing krishna. [okay i probably won’t do that…but it was a fun picture to paint in my head]. Not mixed up after all – I actually did that last year. Put up a tree with ornaments and bulbs and topped it with a silver idol of Krishna playing the flute…My “Krishmas” tree 🙂
The Christmas tree already was up when I went home at Thanksgiving, and was quite pretty except for the hideously oversized red bow at the top. What to do with the top of the tree is an annual problem. Many years we’ve just stuck a random ornament, or left it bare. This year, I suggested that Mom replace the aesthetically distressing ribbon with a big gold OM that was gathering dust on a high shelf in the kitchen. This way we could avoid distressing the Christmas fanatics by not secularizing our tree, without having to put an angel or star in which we don’t believe there. Manish, this doesn’t fall into the schlock category of a tree in the shape of an OM, does it?
Yes, despite what you might have thought after reading my grumping about the made-up “discrimination” against Christians, I celebrate Christmas and have done so for years. My mom claims that when we were very little, she would give us gifts on Diwali instead (supposedly some people do this for Pancha Ganapati), but we would cry at Christmas because we didn’t get presents then. As they couldn’t easily afford two gift-giving seasons back then, my parents opted to assimilate a bit more and get in on this Christmas thing, and now that they’re better off, we go for the full materialist extravaganza of gifts, food and travel.
But thanks to William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the man who got Wal-Mart to fire the poor schmuck who knew about Christmas’s pagan origins (and now is launching a boycott of Land’s End), I might have to give up Christmas. Continue reading
For years I’ve said that EVERYTHING sounds better in Italian. I might have to eat those words (with Arrabiata, preferably). Via Reuters:
Calling a foreigner a “dirty negro” in Italian is not necessarily a racist insult, Italy’s highest court has ruled.
The verdict, relating to a case where a group of Italian men punched and insulted some women from Colombia, caused deep unease at a time when Italy is struggling to contain racism.
Punched and insulted women? Not cool.
The court on Monday ruled in favor of one of the men, who argued he was not being racist when he launched the assault with the words: “Sporche negre — cosa ci fanno queste negre qua?” (“Dirty negroes — what are these negroes doing here?”)
Most Italians would have no doubt that calling someone a “dirty negro” was a racist insult. The term is seldom heard and is considered no more acceptable in Italy than it would be in Britain or the United States.
It took me a few reads to grok why the court ruled the way it did; apparently it’s not the “crime of racism” to just dislike or reject someone based on their ethnicity or faith, it’s only racist if hatred is involved. When I was younger, I had the N-bomb hurled at me often. If only I had known whether it was uttered out of hate or dislike, I might have wept less.
Bad PR is never molto bene, whether inspired by the shitty treatment of Marc Zoro or this “it’s-not-racist!” verdict:
Politicians across the political spectrum criticized the ruling and said it could not have come at a worse time.
Bear in mind however, that this is the same supreme court which ruled that grabbing a female coworker’s ass wasn’t harassment and that rape isn’t possible if the victim is in extra-snug jeans. Sigh. Continue reading
The New York Press, an alternative weekly, printed two stories last week which provide interesting bookends to our debate on Orientalism. In the first, a columnist uses Calcutta in the City of Joy sense, as synonym for grinding poverty:
The mayoral election was still fresh in everyone’s mind… “The billionaires have won,” Ken said. “They’ve been given a billionaire’s mandate…”It’s time to start making New York City more homeless-friendly again… Before the rest of us are completely shoved out of Manhattan, we do our part to repopulate the streets with smelly, drunken and drug-addled bums. We turn street-level New York into Calcutta. Doing that will destroy the property values these people have worked so hard to build up. Multimillion-dollar real estate isn’t worth shit when it stands along Calcutta streets. [Link]
That will come as a surprise to homeowners in posh South Calcutta, I’m sure. In the second, Sam Sacks begins an essay on modern American short stories with a 40-year-old tale by R.K. Narayan, a self-referential parable about writing which foreshadowed works like Adaptation:‘Multimillion-dollar real estate isn’t worth shit when it stands along Calcutta streets’
In R.K. Narayan’s novel The Vendor of Sweets, a young entrepreneur pushes his father to invest in what seems like a dubious venture: a short-story machine. How the machine works exactly is never made clear, and the hapless man squanders the family savings.Still, if Narayan floated the idea ironically 40 years ago, today a short-story machine is probably within technology’s grasp. Given a set of common parameters… a literate engineer could surely create a serviceable program. [Link]
It’s already been done. This post was generated by our AutoBlogger™: works day and night, doesn’t demand the abuse meted out to interns, and is just as repetitive as our own writing. I’m actually kicking back in Ooty right now. If you get too many M.I.A. posts, tweak a checkbox or two.
Sacks criticizes the bland homogeneity of stories from writers’ workshops:
… I was reminded of Narayan’s machine recently while reading the Best New American Voices 2006… Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator’s difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible…
As stated previously, there isn’t much that I like about the Holiday season. The one thing I do appreciate however, are the movies. Hollywood studios, greedy for Oscar gold, always release their best movies in December. I still haven’t found a date to go see Syriana with despite the fact that it has been out for two weeks already in L.A. This weekend marks the opening of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I can hardly wait. Next weekend however is when the biggest film of the year will open up. Peter Jackson’s re-make of the 1933 classic King Kong. But…did you all know that Bollywood re-made King Kong in 1962? Would I lie to you? I give you Kong:
Unfortunately this one blurry picture is the only visual evidence I could find that the movie really exists (Update: Manish who unlike me can read Hindi, points out that this poster may be of a film called Shikari which also seems to have a giant ape??). It was a cached copy on a defunct webpage. I do know a bit more about the ’62 version however (even if the above picture is not the King Kong movie poster). It was directed by Babubhai Mistri and starred Dara Singh:Prolific Indian director Babubhai Mistri filmed a Hindi version of the simian classic that starred world-wrestling force Dara Singh. We were unable to ascertain, however, whether Mr. Singh played a human or Kong himself — this movie never made it to the United States because of the copyright infringement lawsuits that would have resulted. [Link]
I wasn’t really paying attention to the Billboard Music Awards until my browndar started dinging rather violently; I looked up and saw “Lost” actor Naveen Andrews with BMA host LL Cool J.
I know that there are many lawyers and current law students that read SM on a daily basis. Therefore I thought it might be of value to point out that the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments today in a case pertaining to the Solomon Amendment. The Christian Science Monitor reports on the crux of the debate:
At the center of the legal showdown: to what extent military recruiters should have access to law school campuses. The case involves conflicting conceptions of free speech. It also could erode some civil rights laws, which use federal funding to encourage nondiscrimination. On one side of the current case are a group of law professors and law schools seeking equal treatment of gays interested in serving the nation as members of the armed forces. In protest of the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning openly gay individuals from the military, the law schools restricted military recruiters from fully participating in school-sponsored employment events.Military recruiters could still come to campuses, but the law schools’ employment placement offices would not assist them. The message was that the schools would not abet military discrimination against some of their own students.
I have thought a lot about this issue. I am a big time supporter of the military but on this issue I would side with the law schools. The law schools could bar any other employer that openly discriminates, so why not the U.S. military? I understand that a ruling in favor of the law schools could set a dangerous precedent. It would embolden people to protest all kinds of federal laws based on the logic that they were following their conscience. Take for example the pharmacists that oppose filling a prescription to the morning-after pill. In many instances they HAVE to fill the prescription by law. I would not want that to change. The threat of federal money being taken away from a University that only has the best interests of its students (i.e. protecting is LGBT community) in mind does not seem fair to me.
Law schools have “a Hobson’s choice: Either the university must forsake millions of dollars of federal funds largely unrelated to the law school, or the law school must abandon its commitment to fight discrimination,” justices were told in a filing by the Association of American Law Schools.Continue readingThe federal law, known as the Solomon Amendment after its first congressional sponsor, mandates that universities, including their law and medical schools and other branches, give the military the same access as other recruiters or forfeit money from federal agencies like the Education, Labor and Transportation departments.
Dozens of groups have filed briefs on both sides of the case, the first gay-rights related appeal since a contentious 2003 Supreme Court ruling that struck down laws criminalizing gay sex.
As I posted earlier, some fitness instructors have been Christianizing yoga out of fear that its Hindu origins open you up to demonic possession. It’s the same kind of assimilation which annoys theologians about Hinduism:
When Cathy Chadwick instructed her three yoga students to move into warrior position… she read aloud the prayer of St. Theresa of Avila. “Good Christian warriors,” Chadwick softly said as the women lunged into the position…
Chadwick is one of a growing number of people who practice Christian yoga, incorporating Biblical passages, prayers and Christian reflections. Occasionally, teachers rename yoga postures to reflect Christian teachings or, as Chadwick did with warrior position, include religious metaphors… [Link]
Good Christian warriors, assume the position! Apparently Catholics in yoga haven’t gotten the memo:
In a 1989 letter, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, said practices like yoga and meditation could “degenerate into a cult of the body…” [Link]
Never mind that meditation is designed to do the exact opposite. Trying to keep up with the times, the Vatican issued the memo over IM. Here’s an actual, unedited transcript:
c^th0l1k: omg y0gA rOxX0Rz LOL
V^tic^n_1: newayz h0 dAt sHiZz b3 d3m0nIc ROTFL
The NYT reported recently that HinJews are now jumping in. Well, technically, they’re shuffling in while complaining about the weather 
A similar movement is taking place in Judaism, with teachers merging teachings or texts into yoga classes… Stephen A. Rapp, a Boston yoga teacher, developed Aleph-Bet yoga, a series of postures meant to represent Hebrew letters… Rapp expresses the Hebrew letter ‘bet’ in the posture Dandasana, where one sits on the ground with legs and arms straight out in front. [Link]
The Drew Carey Show begins with a song and dance called ‘Cleveland Rocks!’, the joke being, of course, that Cleveland is pretty far down on the list of best cities in which to party. It sounds like a slogan concocted by the Cleveland department of tourism on the theory that if you repeat it enough, someone’s going to fall for it.
Last week, a judge upheld the NYC subway’s questionably random bag searches, deferring in part to the judgment of former U.S. antiterrorism adviser Richard Clarke. It may be the first time that anyone in the government has taken Cassandra Clarke’s warnings seriously (if you ignore ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,’ you’ll pretty much ignore anything).
It may also be the least effective. Look who’s one of the latest suicide bombers in Iraq:
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Muriel Degauque, |
Muriel Degauque, believed to be the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack, started out life as a good Roman Catholic girl in this coal mining corner of Belgium… Ms. Degauque, 38, detonated her explosive vest amid an American military patrol in the town of Baquba on Nov. 9, wounding one American soldier…
… European women who marry Muslim men are now the largest source of religious conversions in Europe… European terrorist networks were trying to recruit Caucasian women to handle terrorist logistics because they would be less likely to raise suspicion. [Link]
On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans… A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it. [Link]
Patient and steady with all he must bear,
Ready to meet every challenge with care,
Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,
Strong in his faith, refreshingly real.
Isn’t afraid to propose what is bold,
Doesn’t conform to the usual mould,
Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight won’t do,
Never backs down when he sees what is true,
Tells it all straight, and means it all too.
Going forward and knowing he’s right,
Even when doubted for why he would fight,
Over and over he makes his case clear,
Reaching to touch the ones who won’t hear.
Growing in strength he won’t be unnerved,
Ever assuring he’ll stand by his word.
Wanting the world to join his firm stand,
Bracing for war, but praying for peace,
Using his power so evil will cease,
So much a leader and worthy of trust,
Here stands a man who will do what he must.
Hint: Write out the first letter of each line.
Over the past few days we have learned that the U.S. has been placing news propaganda stories in the Iraqi media. Is it possible that they are doing the same to the Pakistani education ministry in order to counteract the teachings of those darn madrasas? Ummm, no. That’s a bit farfetched. But then how in the HELL did the above poem end up in Pakistani school textbooks?? Where is that panel of historian fact-checkers when you really need them?
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