DANCE PUNKIN . . DANCE!

sing again...

2009-04-12T23:34:00.000-04:00

Bring your voice to top the front

Don’t leave it at hind-sight

I remember when we were children

How we began to fight

Through silent nights

Too deep in fright

As we met, in bright light

And made it all disappear

Come back and clear the voice I sheered

Sing again with musical tears

Come back

new two. better two

2009-04-07T23:11:00.002-04:00

2009-02-07T12:49:00.001-05:00

where are we?
what the hell is going on?
the dust has only just begun to form
crop circles in the carpet
sinking feeling

spin me round again
and rub my eyes,
this can't be happening
when busy streets amass with people
would stop to hold their heads heavy

hide and seek
trains and sewing machines
all those years
they were here first

oily marks appear on walls
where pleasure moments hung before the takeover,
the sweeping insensitivity of this still life

hide and seek
trains and sewing machines (oh, you won't catch me around here)
blood and tears (hearts)
they were here first

early Lesbos

2008-12-04T22:50:00.000-05:00

more fun with bubbles..

2008-11-14T17:22:00.000-05:00

2008-11-12T14:29:00.000-05:00

So far away from where you are
Streets and Lights torn us apart
And I miss you
So far away
Standing in and out of the fog
And I wish you were here
I miss the years that were erased
I miss how sunshine would light up your face
I miss all the little things
I never thought that they’d mean everything to me
I miss you
And I wish you were here
I feel the beating of your heart
I see the shadows of your face
Just know that wherever you are
I miss you

Just Got to Thinking

2008-10-27T23:25:00.001-04:00

In between the sunny Saturday and the snowy Sunday here in Minnesota, I changed from a happy enlightened adventurer to a hermit with no desire or ambition to move a step outside the door. Snuggling up in the coziness of my studio as the cold settles in for what appears to be the last time, I got to thinking, is it true? Is it possible that multiple personality weather is the ultimate cause for multiple personality disorder?

2008-10-23T23:28:00.000-04:00

you think i'd leave your side
you know me better than that
you think i'd leave you down when you're down
i wouldn't do that
i'll tell you you're right when you want
and if only you could see into me
when you're cold
i'll be there
hold you tight to me
when you're on the outside
and you can`t get in
i will show you you're so much better than you know
when you're lost and you're alone and you cant get back again
i will find you and i will bring you home
and if you want to cry
i am here to dry your eyes
and in no time
you'll be fine
you think i'd leave your side
you know me better than that
you think id leave you down when you're down
i wouldn't do that
i'll tell you you're right when you want
and if only you could see into me
when you're cold
i'll be there
hold you tight to me
when you're low
i'll be there
by your side

Trash AIG, YOU paid for it.

2008-10-09T15:09:00.000-04:00

A Billion seconds ago it was 1976.
A Billion minutes ago it was 102 A.D.
A Billion hours ago it was the Old Stone Age.

A Billion Dollars ago in Washington is 4 hours ago.

Cash

2008-09-26T15:42:00.000-04:00

ok...am pissed

2008-09-26T12:50:00.001-04:00

John McCain has not only insulted David letterman. McCain has insulted the intellect of the entire American people by suspending a long fought campaign for political purposes.
McCain has NO role in the negotiating any bailout. he is there to prop himself up as his poll numbers tank.
is this what you want in a president? an older version of bush with a vice president who sounded, in her interview with Katie Couric like that Miss Teen America describing why Americans don't have maps.

IF THE MEDIA SLEEPS ON THE TRAVESTY OF THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN, IT WILL NEVER REST IN INTEGRITY AGAIN.THE MEDIA JUST STARTED TO GET ITS CRED BACK AFTER LETTING THE IRAQ WAR HAPPEN UNCHALLENGE. NOW THIS?!CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, PBS DON'T BE USED FOR GOP PROPAGANDA BY A CRIPPLED MCCAIN CAMPAIGN USING THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN AS A FIG LEAF OVER A CASTRATED LEADERSHIP IN THE ARIZONA SENATOR.

SORRY ABOUT THE CAPS!!

Yes We Will

2008-09-23T11:04:00.000-04:00

We will represent you, And not resent you.
We will honor you, And not dishonor you.
We will stand by you, And never just walk by you.
We will care for you, Always share with you.
We will consult you, Never insult you.
We will not be like you, though we'd like to.
We will do our best, not like the rest.
We will
We Will
We Will

2008-09-16T00:54:00.000-04:00

I hear the clock, it's seven a.m.
I feel so far away from where I've been
I got my eggs, I got my coffee too
Got my yogurt, everything but you
I break the yolks and make a smiley face
I kinda like it in my brand new place
I wipe the spots off of the mirror,
dont leave the keys in the door
I never put wet towels on the bed anymore cause

Dreams last so long, even after youre gone
I know, that you love me and one day you will see
You were meant for me and
I was meant for you

I called my sister, she was out for school
Consoled a cup of coffee but it didnt wanna talk
So picked up a paper, it was more bad news
More hearts being broken or people being used
Put on my coat in the pouring rain
I saw a movie it just wasnt the same
cause it was happy
and
I was sad
and
It made me miss you oh so bad cause

Dreams last so long, even after youre gone

I go about my business, Im doing fine
Besides, what would I say if I had you on the line?
Same old story,
not much to say
Hearts are broken every day

I brush my teeth and put the cap back on
I know you hate it when I leave the light on
I pick up a book and turn the sheets down
and then
Take a deep breath
and go walk around

Put on my pjs and hop into bed
Im half alive but I feel mostly dead
I try and tell myself itll be all right
I just shouldnt think anymore tonight cause

Dreams last so long, even after youre gone

Funny Funny! SNL

2008-09-15T14:20:00.000-04:00

Tina Fey: "Bitch is the new black! Deal with it!" (on Hillary when she was running against Obama)

Tracey Morgan: "Bitch might be the new black. But black is the new president, bitch."

Conversation with Boss During Review...

2008-09-12T12:26:00.000-04:00

Boss: so how is your dad doing?

Me: Not quiet sure yet, no news is good news I guess.

Boss: okay good. How come they don’t call you more often to keep you posted?

Me: Well….. my family don’t necessarily like me very much.

Boss: Really?.........why??

Me: Well …. I wanted a Curt, they wanted a Curtina.

Boss: got it….

2008-09-11T17:18:00.002-04:00

WHEN THE PAWN hits the conflicts he thinks like a king
What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight
And he'll win the whole thing before he enters the ring
There's no body to batter when your mind is your might
So when you go solo, you hold your own hand
And remember that depth is the greatest of heights
And if you know where you stand, then you know where to land

I loved

2008-08-22T10:00:00.001-04:00

hen said Almitra, "Speak to us of Love."
And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:
When love beckons to you follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

why do i?

2008-07-30T17:11:00.001-04:00

I do not love you as if you were rose water, or tulips,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, or you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Highlight this Image to see the secret message

2008-02-18T11:13:00.000-05:00


i love my papi and hello kitty and my bi
bi and my hummos i love my papi and hell
o kitty and my bibi and my hummos i love
 my papi and hello kitty and my bibi and
 my hummos i love my papi and hello kitt
y and my bibi and my hummos i love my pa
pi and hello kitty and my bibi and my hu
mmos i love my papi and hello kitty and
my bibi and my hummos i love my papi and
 hello kitty and my bibi and my hummos i
 love my papi and hello kitty and my bib
i and my hummos i love my papi and hello
 kitty and my bibi and my hummos i love
my papi and hello kitty and my bibi and
my hummos i love my papi and hello kitty
 and my bibi and my hummos i love my pap
i and hello kitty and my bibi and my hum
mos i love my papi and hello kitty and m
y bibi and my hummos i love my papi and
hello kitty and my bibi and my hummos i
love my papi and hello kitty and my bibi
 and my hummos i love my papi and hello
kitty and my bibi and my hummos i love m

beauty

2008-01-22T07:57:00.001-05:00

beauty
Originally uploaded by Kal Ruby

my danish angel

I am a Mommy

2008-01-05T19:45:00.001-05:00

Is this what it feels like to give birth? Because I feel so much joy and contentment. I have my first Puppy, my Baby Bibi and Her Daddy Papi are the two most precious treasures in my life.

Thank you to what ever entity that decided we all belong together, because we do.

End of Year

2007-12-26T20:16:00.001-05:00

1. What did you do in 2007 that you’d never done before?
I sailed a boat under the bay area bridge, I made a friend at work, I saw the UP, I had the best cherry juice, I met other gay Arabs, I re connected with a brother, I came out to a brother, I missed a chance to meet WAM, I re connected with a friend.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
to quit smoking hopefully, damn fags!!

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
some, not THAT close .

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No.

5. What countries/cities did you visit?
oh my. San Fran, Detroit, and many many other little cities.

6. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?
a warmer climate.

7. What date from 2007 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Dec 12. My little brother (23 y.o) told me he was proud of me no matter what.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I almost landed a great job offer. And I am still proud of myself for being able to have done that. But I didn’t for reasons out of my hand (not having an American Citizen Ship)

9. What was your biggest failure?
trying to quit smoking about 9 times. And the fact that I did not get the jon mentioned above.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
in 2006 I burned my shoulder. This year. Nothing to speak of.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
my new Lappy : I love her so much, she is my Ebony Queen: an XPS M 1210

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
my Curt in every thoughtful thing he does.,

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Renee Nelson

14. Where did most of your money go?
Games, Metro Passes, Rent, Booze and Food.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I was told I can finally have a pup this year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

16. What song will always remind you of 2007?
Love is a Losing Game, Amy

17. Compared to this time last year, are you…

i. happier or sadder?
happier

ii. thinner or fatter?
same

iii. richer or poorer?
same

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
I wish I had composed more of my time to create more rewarding experiences.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
seriously, nothing. Maybe slacking. But I don’t feel too bad about that either.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I spent Christmas lounging, Christmas eve…a whole other story kids!

21. How will you be spending New Years?
not sure.

22. Did you fall in love in 2007?
yup, same guy.

23. How many one night stands?
none what so ever.

24. What was your favourite TV program?
Weeds, Deadwood, Entourage.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
once I hate, I always hate.

26. What was the best book you read?
Girls of Riyadh.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Amy Winehouse, Brits New Album and many Arabic things that no one I know will relate to.

28. What did you want and get?
a trip to San Fran

29. What did you want and not get?
ONE MILLION DOLLERS

30. What was your favourite film of this year?
Juno

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
friends, friends, friends. I turned 29

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
a month in the Maldives

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007?
knitted, nice denim and a touch of red.

34. What kept you sane?
booze, drugs and ambient toons.

I JOKE

My guy.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I thought I have lost in Angelina Jolie until I watched a “mighty heart”

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
Immigration Equality.

37. Who did you miss?
My Family.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Quinton, ML, Heidi, and Mrs. Peterson.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2007.
people aren’t who or what they seem to be at first.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
Oh My God That Kal is Shameless.

What were you thankful for this Thanksgiving

2007-11-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

1) Papi
2) Brie and White Wine Soup
3) The Smile on a Face That “Gets It” for the first time
4) When the People Stand for what they want:
5) In Lebanon
6) In Saudi
7) In the US
8) Inga, Sarah, Heidi, Miles, ML.
9) The End of the Epson all-in-one.
10) I love New York , Project Runway
11) I give thanks for drinks rejected and drinks drunken, and those who poured them. Dishes eaten and dishes washed and those who filled them. Desserts that were gulped, deserts, and those who dwell them. Conversations had and things left unsaid and those who called for them.

I know now what I never knew then because of you!

E8

2007-11-16T10:12:00.000-05:00

I have been trying to understand the E8 theory of everything and – for the longest time, everything I read left me with more questions than answers.

That is until iabervon showed up on Slashdot.

Thank you, Sir. Here is his explanation.

• “(I am not a particle physicist or a mathematician of the right sort, but I can kind of follow this sort of thing)

Okay, the context is that you've got particles, and they're fundamentally all the same, but they're "turned" in different ways. Think of a ball with 3-color LEDs inside: you can rotate it around three axes, and move it in three directions, and you can also cycle its color and change its blinking pattern. Particles are like that, except that the topology is weird: it's not back to the same orientation until you turn it around 720 degrees, instead of 360 like normal objects. The "gauge group" is the rules for how you can change things. For example, the total color of the universe is white: if you turn something from red to blue, you have to turn something else from blue to red; but you can also create a pair of a green and a purple (anti-green). They write all these rules up in math, and it's tricky because a lot of the features vary continuously (that is, you can rotate something an arbitrarily small amount). And due to the interaction of the rules for one property with the rules for other properties, there are only certain combinations of properties that you can get. They work out all the combinations that you can have and those are what you see as "different" particles that your experiments show. Of course, we don't know what the rules are, and we're trying to figure that out from what combinations of properties we've seen and which ones we're speculating are impossible. And it's hard and takes a lot of calculation to figure out what a candidate set of rules would even mean as far as results. And people are looking at known results and trying to describe them better than "we've done a billion things, and a billion things happened".

Now, the math of rules for how things can interact turns out to be sort of limited; there are basically 4 normal cases, which are boring, and then there are a few exceptional cases, which are interesting. Of these, the hardest to prove stuff about is E8, and it's just now becoming clear what combinations it allows. It's like one of those puzzles where you press a corner and lights change, and you have to turn off all the lights, but it's got dozens of corners and dozens of lights and every time you press a corner a bunch of things change at once, and there are different kinds of corners and it also matters exactly what angle you're holding it at, so there are hundreds of things you can say about each move.

And the mathematicians working on E8 recently said, "well, you can get positions like this and not like that", where "this" and "that" are big complicated lists. And this physicist read that paper and said, "hey, those lists are familiar; I made similar lists of particle interactions". So the proposal is that particles work like E8 in what kind of rules they follow. And it's a really nice theory, because E8 is essentially the most flexible set of rules you can have without it falling apart into just anything being possible (and some rules or properties just not mattering)”

My version of Overheard in Minneapolis

2007-11-06T22:01:00.000-05:00

20 year old college drop out: I AM smarter than you, ask me ANYTHING!

24 year old high school drop out: who invented America?

Number 6 Bus

What IS a Barking Spider?

2007-11-06T13:58:00.000-05:00

barking spider:

A highly elusive nocturnal specie of spider mainly from the Michigan area but have been spotted throughout parts of Minnesota (also known as the Michigan Barking Spider). While no live specimens have been caught in order to be studied, this is the only spider known to man with the capability to "bark". These spiders are attracted by the scent of Tacos and Burritos also been known to emerge on Carb Free Days. While you may not see them, you will hear them and at times feel them scurrying through the couch cushions. They do use a foul odor as a defensive mechanism. Beware the silent Michigan barking spider, it is a deadly sub-specie and should be avoided at all costs.

sentence example:
Holy Shit! Call pest control. We seem to have an infestation of Michigan Barking Spiders. I think Bob just got hit by a silent one cause I see him convulsing in the corner.

Wahhabism: A deadly scripture

2007-11-01T17:47:00.000-04:00

I have been waiting for ages for someone to write this article. Thank you THE INDEPENDENT

Wahhabism: A deadly scripture

King Abdullah's Saudi regime spends billions of pounds each year promoting Wahhabism, one of fundamentalist Islam's most extreme movements. Much of it funds children's education in British faith schools and mosques. Should we be worried? Paul Vallely investigates
Published: 01 November 2007
King Abdullah will go home to Saudi Arabia today with the charges of human rights protestors ringing irritatingly in his ears. But his controversial visit may well have left an unpleasant legacy for the people of the country which has feted him with full state honours.
There was a hint of it in a report written this week by Dr Denis MacEoin, an Islamic studies expert at Newcastle who previously taught at the University of Fez. Leading a team of researchers over a two-year project, he uncovered a hoard of malignant literature inside as many as a quarter of Britain's mosques. All of it had been published and distributed by agencies linked to the government of King Abdullah.
Among the more choice recommendations in leaflets, DVDs and journals were statements that homosexuals should be burnt, stoned or thrown from mountains or tall buildings (and then stoned where they fell just to be on the safe side). Those who changed their religion or committed adultery should experience a similar fate.
Almost half of the literature was written in English, suggesting it is targeted at younger British Muslims who do not speak Arabic or Urdu. The material, which was openly available in many of the mosques, including the East London Mosque in Whitechapel, which has been visited by Prince Charles, also encourages British Muslims to segregate themselves from non-Muslims.
There is, of course, nothing new in such reports. Investigative journalists have over the years uncovered all manner of material emanating from Muslim extremists in various parts of Britain. Earlier this year an undercover reporter for Channel 4 filmed preachers and obtained DVDs and books inside mosques which were filled with hate-filled invective against Christians and Jews. They condemned democracy and called for jihad. They presented women as intellectually congenitally deficient and in need of beating when they transgressed Islamic dress codes. They said that children over the age of 10 should be hit if they did not pray. Again the main mosque chosen for exposure was influenced and funded from Saudi Arabia.
And on it goes. A few years earlier one Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, a Jamaican convert who had studied at a Saudi university, was caught spouting about how "Jews are rotten to the core and sexually perverted, creating intrigue and confusion to keep their enemies weak". Later jailed for nine years for urging his audience to kill Jews, Hindus and Americans, he was recorded as saying: "You can use chemical weapons to exterminate the unbelievers. Is that clear? If you have cockroaches in your house, you spray them with chemicals." Among his followers was Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 bombers who killed 52 people and injured 700 others on the London transport system in 2005.
Small wonder, then, that Abdal Hakim Murad, the student chaplain at Cambridge University pronounced in the Channel 4 film: "I regard what the Saudis are doing in the ghettoes of British Islam as potentially lethal for the future of the community."
Muslims have always responded that such individuals constitute a tiny and highly unrepresentative minority of their community in Britain. But concerns are growing within Muslim circles about the increased reach of Wahhabism, Saudi's obscurantist and intolerant form of Islam in which Osama Bin Laden has his roots. There are fears for the increasingly baleful influence it may be having on young British Muslims.
Yahya Birt, an academic who is director of The City Circle, a networking body of young Muslim professionals, estimates "Saudi spending on religious causes abroad as between $2bn [£960m] and $3bn per year since 1975 (comparing favourably with what was the annual Soviet propaganda budget of $1bn), which has been spent on 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centres and dozens of Muslim academies and schools".
More than that they have flooded the Islamic book market with cheap well-produced Wahhabi literature whose print runs, Birt says, "can be five to 10 times that of any other British-based sectarian publication, aggressively targeted for a global English-speaking audience." This has had the effect of forcing non-Wahhabi publishers across the Muslim world to close. It has put out of business smaller bookshops catering for a more mainstream Muslim market.
The Saudis have also reserved for foreigners 85 per cent of the places at the Islamic University of Medina, which boasts of having more than 5,000 students from 139 countries. Despite the fact that British students gained the reputation in Medina of being unreliable, lazy, and prone to dropping-out, there have so far been hundreds of British graduates who have returned to the UK espousing the rigid Saudi worldview.
The strategy has in one way backfired on the Saudis. They accelerated their aggressive missionary work – targeting China and Russia as well as the UK – in reaction to the activities of Iran in the 1980s which, after its theocratic revolution, was pumping out propaganda across the globe. The Saudis had already been pump-priming Islamic terrorists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, at the behest of the Americans and funding among other things the schools in Pakistan that gave rise to the radicalism of the Taliban.
But the Saudis lost control of this new global Wahhabism. During the First Gulf War in 1991 there were splits among Wahhabis, both in Saudi Arabia and outside, over whether it was right to allow infidel American troops to protect the land of Islam's two holiest shrines, at Mecca and Medina. Anti-Saudi Wahhabis, such as the infamous hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza in Britain pronounced that the Saudi king had broken his divine covenant with God. It was therefore the duty of scholars to charge him with unbelief and incite the masses to rise against him in rebellion. Groups such as the radical Hizb ut-Tahrir capitalised on an anti-Saudi sentiment which spread throughout the Wahhabi community.
The focus of violent Islamic radicalism has shifted from Wahhabis in Saudi to anti-Saudi Wahabis in Iraq and other conflict zones where jihadists have learnt the heady lesson that if you are brutal and narrow-minded enough you can defeat the most powerful army the world has ever seen.
Since 9/11 the Saudis have begun to row back on their funding of fundamentalism abroad, according to Mehmood Naqshbandi, the Muslim advisor to the City of London police. Too late. The damage has been done.
The Saudis do not call themselves Wahhabis. That is largely a derogatory term applied by their opponents. Many Saudi religious leaders insist on calling themselves just Muslims, extending the implication that Muslims who do not share their particular interpretation of Islam are not proper Muslims at all. But some Saudis describe themselves as salafis. And it is salafism that has taken root among many second- and third-generation British Muslims.
To understand why you need to know a bit of theology. Salaf is the Arabic word for a pious ancestor. It refers to the generation of Muslims who personally knew the Prophet Muhammad, and those who knew that generation. Muslims regard any religious figure in the first three generations of Islam as a salaf. The term was first used in the 20th century by reformers in Egypt. But it has now been appropriated by the Wahhabists.
"Not all Muslims approve," says Dr Philip Lewis, who is the Bishop of Bradford's adviser on Islam. "Some say that the Wahhabi have hijacked a very venerable term for a very reactionary agenda to give them a bogus respectability."
Salafism comes from a way of looking at Muslim texts which date back to no later than that third generation after Mohamed. It disregards the four main traditions of Islamic law and practice which developed over the centuries since then. Rather like the Protestant reformers in Christianity it speaks of going back to the roots. Abdal Hakim Murad, who lectures in Islamic Studies at Cambridge explains: "Just as the Protestants wanted to get rid of the saints and shrines, the Aristotle and Aquinas of medieval theology, so the salafis declare as 'unbelief' most of the practices which are normative to Islam in the Indian subcontinent." Salafism is known for its scriptural rigidity, intense literalism, deep intolerance and rejection of traditional Muslim scholarship.
So why is this attractive to modern British Muslims? Because they are searching for an identity but rejecting the factional ethnic Indian subcontinental politics of their parents, says Mehmood Naqshbandi, the author of the City of London's guide to Islam for non-Muslims. "They are having an identity crisis." They have no patience with the old tribal rivalries of their parents' generation. They have weak links with the Indian subcontinent. They are unhappy with rural imams imported from Pakistan who do not understand the culture of sex, drugs, rock'*'roll, and politics that surrounds them. And they have been educated in a system that trains them to challenge and to research on their own.
"They are ripe for salafism, which claims to have the most transparent route back to the sources of the Prophet's time. And salafism's antagonism to mainstream orthodoxy makes it attractive to youth," he adds. They need not bother with the long tradition of Islam. The 7/7 suicide bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were salafis. So was the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. From there they provided easy prey to the al-Qa'ida notion that anyone who isn't a salafi is the enemy.
Hostile commentators such as Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam, dismiss salafism as a mere synonym for Wahhabism. It is cover, he says, just as in a previous age "euro-communist" became a palatable euphemism for Stalinist. Abdal Hakim Murad disagrees. "No one in the Muslim world denies that the theology preferred by terrorists is salafi/Wahhabi," he says. "But if most terrorists are salafis, most salafis are not terrorists. After the Iranian revolution the safe generalisation was the Shia were more dangerous [than the Sunni] because they had a martyrdom complex. You don't hear that said much today."
Naqshbandi agrees. "There's nothing in salafi principles which implies any relationship with political violence, it is just that if you are inclined that way salafism is a very attractive wrapper for you."
Some extremists have tried to take advantage of this by targeting salafi mosques in an attempt to recruit young Britons for violent jihad. They have adopted similar entryist tactics to those once employed by Militant in the Labour Party. Abu Hamza succeeded at Finsbury Park mosque, but a two-year infiltration plot at Brixton mosque, where the shoe-bomber Richard Reid worshipped, failed because non-violent salafis were alert to the danger.
The first individuals to report violent salafis to the British police were the non-violent salafis, who greatly outnumber the extremists, but the police largely ignored them. After 9/11 the leaders of several salafi mosques realised the danger of their position. "They recognised that they had become a useful vehicle for extremists and the problem of antagonism [this caused] between them and the rest of the Muslim community," says Mehmood Naqshbandi, " and they have gone to great pains to work with the authorities at all levels."
One conservative salafi leader went so far in an internet question session to tell Muslims that it was OK for them to work with the intelligence services to uncover violent jihadists. They had a duty to protect Britain, he said, which is a good place to be a Muslim. After 9/11 salafis in Birmingham subsidised the translation and distribution of a celebrated 1998 fatwa by Ibn Baz, the Saudi Grand Mufti, condemning terrorism, hijacking and suicide bombing.
Police are watchful but not unduly alarmed. Of the 1,526 mosques in Britain only 68 are salafi, according to Naqshbandi, and many of these are very small breakaways from bigger local mosques who refuse to take the salafi line. One Special Branch officer says privately that police have developed strong contacts inside salafi groups.
There is also an understanding that the non-violent salafi are their best allies against the jihadists. "They can pull people out of violence more easily than outsiders," said a member the Special Branch counter-terrorism unit. "They are the people they're going to listen to because they speak the same language. The closer you are theologically to the real hardliners the greater the chance you have of influencing them."
The problem is that terrorism needs only a tiny number of adepts to be devastatingly effective. And the fear is that the Saudis have created an ideological framework which makes that more possible. One mainstream Deobandi teacher told Yahya Birt that the salafi influence had bred such a climate of suspicion among his pupils that, even when teaching classic traditional texts, he had to leave out everything that could not be traced explicitly back to the Qur'an and the accepted sayings of The Prophet, the hadith. "British Islam has become more purely scripturalist," says Birt, "and petrodollar Wahhabism has been a key agent of this change."
It has also, says Abdal Hakim Murad, "made the public style of discourse and preaching more confrontational. . . . Salafis anathematise their opponents and their opponents internalise the violence of that language. It has soured the atmosphere considerably."
New technologies of mass communication have added to the problem. With the internet, videos and tapes ordinary Muslims are now studying texts once reserved for scholars in the higher reaches of clerical training. The result is a new highly individualistic theology which often reads holy texts in a literalist way with no understanding of the contexts in which different parts of the Islamic scriptures were framed.
It all facilitates interaction between young Muslims from Britain, Pakistan and the Arab world. But that is as true in an al-Qa'ida training camp in Afghanistan as it is on the internet.
"Violence is not inevitable," says Philip Lewis, "but it creates the environment in which it is possible for that to be the next step". Abdal Hakim Murad agrees. "Salafism increases the likelihood of combustion but doesn't mean it's inevitable. Wahhabism is Islam's unstable isotope, it regularly produces detonations around the edges," he says. "If you throw into the crucible racism, social exclusion and the other experiences of being a young Muslim in Britain's inner cities, and then combine that with British foreign policy blunders overseas, and then add that to a theology that divides the world in a Manichean way into good and evil, us and them, then – if you put all that together – you may have a very explosive mixture."
It is to be hoped, therefore, that when King Abdullah comes to leave for home today the Queen and British Prime Minister remember to say thank you.
Wahhabism: a history
By Michael Savage
Wahhabism is a conservative movement within the Sunni denomination of Islam which was founded by an 18th-century cleric, Mohamed ibn Abdul Wahhab.
The founder's intention was to return Islam to its early roots by stripping it of what he regarded as the alien influences added by the generations of Muslims since the death of Mohamed in 632.
Wahhab's principles were drawn mainly from direct readings of the Koran, and the life of Mohamed. He was also influenced by the writing of an earlier Sunni scholar, Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah, who shared a belief that Islamic practice needed to return to a "purer" interpretation of the religion's fundamental texts.
According to Ibn Abdul Wahhab, all the ideas that had been added to Islamic worship after the "Salafis" – the three generations which followed the death of the prophet Mohamed – were false and divergent from true Islam.
He is believed to have been motivated by what he saw as a decline in standards in the Arab world and a regression back into polytheism, which had been present in the Arab world before the development of Islam.
In particular, Ibn Abdul Wahhab criticised idolatry in the form of saint worship and shrine visitation. He also believed that each Muslim had an individual responsibility to learn and adhere to the commands in the Koran and the speeches of the prophet. He was prepared to be very critical of fellow Muslims whom he regarded as having developed "false practices", even going as far as to declaring jihad on those who engaged in the kinds of Islamic worship of which he disapproved.
The term "Wahhabi" was first used pejoratively by the opponents of Ibn Abdul Wahhab to describe both him and his followers. In 1924, Wahhabist fighters conquered what is now the western part of Saudi Arabia. It has been the dominant strand of Islam in Saudi Arabia since the kingdom was unified in 1932, and its growth overseas has in part been helped by wealth accrued from the country's oil reserves.
Today, Wahhabism is present in Muslim communities across the West. It is also a strong strain of Islam in Arab states such as Kuwait and Qatar, and has some followers in Somalia and Palestine.

2007-10-16T13:47:00.000-04:00

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”

Maya Angelou

Happy Columbus Day!

2007-10-08T13:44:00.000-04:00

Here is my Art Work for this special occasion

why...

2007-10-02T23:50:00.000-04:00

why is you in bed?
metal struck you in the bone
covered in white sheets and studs
making you forget me
longer than I needs
why is you in bed?

no no no they can't

2007-08-15T09:56:00.000-04:00

There are many many crazy things
That will keep me loving you
And with your permission
May I list a few?

The way you sing Mmm Bob
When you’re scrubbing clean
The way you drive your SAAB
No they cant take that away from me

The way you tickle me blind
Until you get shoved a knee
You are one of a kind
No they cant take that away from me

May I never never have to live, away from the goof you are
But if I have to, I will always keep the memory of

The way you moon at noon
The way you cross it for me
To give it one sloppy kiss
No they cant take that away from me

2007-07-09T14:21:00.000-04:00

Qoute of the day

"You have not reason then to be ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the marks and notes of vanitie upon you: by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse."

King James I of Great Britain In 1604, wrote about smoking Tobacco.

38 hours and counting.

CLOSED

2007-07-05T10:48:00.001-04:00

Good Question:

2007-06-27T12:39:00.000-04:00

what is the meaning of your life?

I ask those questions all the time, you know the ones. What’s my purpose? The meaning of my life?

I still struggle with staying in my job, but it offers me some opportunity to do things I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do or try – it allows me to plan. and it is a part of my long-term plan to do more, and see more. It takes great courage to let go of the known in order to find what is in store for you in the unknown. I plan to pay off bills and save so that I can just take off with my life. I am going to be specific and focused. We all know how to dig ourselves out of a hole, that’s not the issue; what we don’t know is what is “out there” that would allow us to know what makes us be fully us. I believe my parents gave me a great gift… They sent me here when they did so I could start the next chapter of my life exploring parts of the world that they knew I wouldn’t be able to see with them; they are okay with that, at the end, I know they are okay with me. As far as a relationship, since meeting Curt, I now understand how valuable it is to have someone who helps me become a better me simply by their presence and meaning in my life; that’s a great gift in itself. I have found that, I am holding onto it. I won’t fret about this job or that job… I will just get focused on how I want my life to look and begin to live it out just like that… as if it’s already here.

Thanks for asking..

FUCK!

2007-06-24T23:47:00.000-04:00

am gay...

War of a Melody

2007-06-21T19:27:00.000-04:00

This song, which I will shy away from naming it’s origin – is so infectious and addictive that it ignited a war among the Greeks, the Hungarians, the Arabs, and the Jews and many other nations on who should claim its origin. It is a new classic and the most recent, most heard “artist unknown” melody thus far in that part of the world

here are the different army's of one...

Greek: Sotis Volanis -Poso Mou Leipei

Hungarian: AZIS - Obicham Te

Israeli: Moshik Afia Shlomy Saranga - Halom Matok

Arabic: Fadel Shaker -Ya Ghayeb III

Turkish: Beni Unut - Serdar Ortac

twins

2007-06-20T22:38:00.001-04:00

Good Question

2007-06-19T10:16:00.000-04:00

Q: what do you do during the uptown art fair?

A: The Uptown art fair commemorates that time of the year when all the white mothers of nine or more from Wizata, Edina, St. Louis Park and neighboring farms and their SUV's, trucks and noisy little shits invade our neighborhood and our parking lots. Leaving behind excrements and trails of half eaten gyros , lemonade cans, and dead puppies. It is the time Curt, and I always escape by creating a drinking oasis of gin and tonics and leave our doors open for any friends in the neighborhood to come in and join us.

And after we have had our share of oasis water, we walk downstairs in large groups speaking in tongue loudly ( travelers at hand, of course) and start yelling at people, mostly seniors and children, sometimes pretending to be pan-handling lepers. After that, we go and watch the free concerts, after which we stumble up to our apartment and pass out in glory piss.

That's normally the Friday of the fair,

Saturday: repeat.

In The Closet

2007-06-13T23:14:00.000-04:00

There's Something
I Have To Say To You
If You Promise You'll
Understand
I Cannot Contain Myself
When In Your Presence
I'm So Humble
Touch Me
Don't Hide Our Love
Man To Man

He's Just A Lover
Who's Doin' Me By
It's Worth The Giving
It's Worth The Try
You Cannot Cleave It
Or Put It In The Furnace
You Cannot Wet It
You Cannot Burn It

He Wants To Give It
(He Wants To Give It)
(Aahh, He Wants To Give It)
Dare Me
(He Wants To Give It)
(Aahh, He Wants To Give It)

It's Just A Feeling
You Have To Soothe It
You Can't Neglect It
You Can't Abuse It
It's Just Desire
You Cannot Waste It
Then, If You Want It
Then, Won't You Taste It

He Wants To Give It
(He Wants To Give It)
(Aahh, He Wants To Give It)
Dare Me
(He Wants To Give It)
(Aahh, He Wants To Give It)

One Thing In Life
You Must Understand
The Truth Of Lust
Man To Man
So Open The Door
And You Will See
There Are No Secrets
Make Your Move
Set Me Free

Because There's Something
About You Baby
That Makes Me Want
To Give It To You
I Swear There's Something
About You Baby

Just Promise Me
Whatever We Say
Or Whatever We Do
To Each Other
For Now We'll Make A Vow
To Just
Keep It In The Closet

If You Can Get It
It's Worth A Try
I Really Want It
I Can't Deny
It's Just Desire
I Really Love It

'Cause If It's Aching
You Have To Rub It

He Wants To Give It

(Aahh, He Wants To Give It)
(He Wants To Give It)

Just Open The Door
And You Will See
This Passion Burns
Inside Of Me
Don't Say To Me
You'll Never Tell
Touch Me There
Make The Move
Cast The Spell

... but why?

2007-06-09T21:38:00.001-04:00

Americans have a puzzling distaste for any government-run socialized programs. I suspect that comes from the inability to distinguish between socialized programs and communism, a bias that arose during the Cold War. However, I think Americans are throwing the baby (socialization) out with the bathwater (communism). What's so inherently bad with socialized programs?

................................

2007-06-01T16:58:00.001-04:00

Oh the quiet child awaits the day
when he can break free
the mold that clings like desperation
Father can't you see
I've got to live my life the way I feel
is right for me
might not be right for you
but is right
for me...

2007-04-29T17:05:00.001-04:00

“Getting old is when you start becoming aware of your insides”

`ME

Qoute

2007-04-17T17:06:00.000-04:00

"No people in the world manifest such enthusiastic admiration for literary expression and are so moved by the word, spoken or written, as the Arabs. Modern audiences in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo can be stirred to the highest degree by the recital of poems, only vaguely comprehended, and by the delivery of orations in the classical tongue, though it be only partially understood. The rhythm, the rhyme, the music, produce on them the effect of what they call "lawful magic"..

*Philip Hitti

Saudi Rumors = Childhood Memories

2007-04-13T14:21:00.000-04:00

What do you get when you combine a medieval culture, a Wahhabist educational system, and some good old-fashioned anti-semitism?

Magical things, my friends.

“Beware of Israeli melons infected with AIDS arriving in Saudi Arabia!” is the latest rumor being spread throughout Saudi Arabia like a wildfire.
An SMS message being sent around the country this week said, “The Saudi Interior Ministry warns its citizens of a truck loaded with AIDS infected melons that Israel brought into the country via a ‘ground corridor.’”
The Interior Minister’s spokesman General Mansour al Turki responded to news of the message and made it clear to a-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper that the Ministry “did not issue any such announcement. This is just a rumor.”…

The rumor, despite being denied several times, has gained so much steam in the Arab world that it made it to the front page of one of the most important Arabi language newspapers.

Sales of yellow melons are down roughly 90% in one Jeddah market.

best.pic.ever

2007-03-22T16:52:00.000-04:00

me and the Inga (my german sweetheart)

By Request

2007-03-11T10:57:00.000-04:00

WAM,

This one's for you!

and this one's for me

here comes the sun

2007-03-08T11:40:00.000-05:00

There is something very promising about the way the sun peeks through the windows in March. Like rays of hope and promises of another tomorrow – a tomorrow that is warm and no longer gray.

There is something very promising about the moister meeting the warm wind and fogging up downtown in complete swathe.

Here comes the sun

Here comes the dusting off of the Hello Kitty Bike
Here comes the green walkways of Minneapolis Uptown

weeeeeeeeeee

Norah

2007-03-05T11:01:00.000-05:00

Norah Jones just released a song that is – to me – is so hilarious. The style of the music is defiantly 1930’s gangster cabaret with a flapper touch. And she starts singing and this how it goes:

MY DEAR COUNTRY

'twas halloween and the ghosts were out,
and everywhere they'd go, they shout,
and though i covered my eyes i knew,
they'd go away.

but fear's the only thing i saw,
and three days later 'twas clear to all,
that nothing is as scary as election day.

but the day after is darker,
and darker and darker it goes,
who knows, maybe the plans will change,
who knows, maybe he's not deranged.

the news men know what they know, but they,
know even less than what they say,
and i don't know who i can trust,
for they come what may.

'cause we believed in our candidate,
but even more it's the one we hate,
i needed someone i could shake,
on election day.

but the day after is darker,
and deeper and deeper we go,
who knows, maybe it's all a dream,
who knows if i'll wake up and scream.

i love the things that you've given me,
i cherish you my dear country,
but sometimes i don't understand,
the way we play.

i love the things that you've given me,
and most of all that i am free,
to have a song that i can sing,
on election day.

2007-03-01T15:37:00.000-05:00

I am writing today to let you all in on my blissful day.

About a half a mile or so from my final destination to work this morning, riding the cities accordion bus ,I looked adoringly outside my window at the ice pallets faster than slowly falling, Air playing “Alone in Tokyo” in my airs, I watched the last traffic light turning green. But as I woke up from my morning haze, I actually realized something,

“wait a minute. this is the second time this light turned green”

I carry my massager bag and myself to the front of the bus – I look at my driver and he looked like a refugee in a state of helplessness, trust me, I know what that looks like. Another winter storm in Minnesota, but first of its kind this winter, another stuck city bus. He had just hung up with BUS CENTREL and informed us it is going to be awhile. Another bus was on its way to take us where we needed to go. Knowing how the Minneapolis bus system worked, I instantly asked to be let off and walked to work ice pallets and all.

As I walked into my office; time: 8:28. Weather: ice pallety: Sit in Receptionist: smiling. Me: Grumpy. I was informed by her right away that we will be closing early. “Due to weather emergency” – “of course we will” I thought. “why wouldn’t we be???”

At least that way I saved my PTO!

I ask a co-worker of mine to take me to the nearest mall so I can hop onto a bus to downtown, she said okay. 10 am,

I get to the mall, I do a little shopping. I am overtly mesmerized by Express’s spring selection,
I miss my bus.
I do a little more shopping. What else was I supposed to do?!?!?
I go to the bus shelter early because I know if I missed the second one an hour later, I will not be home until 5:00 p.m

When I walked outside, the snow was heavily falling at this point. I walk into the shelter, and I saw the epitome of “what do Minnesotan kids do when they have a good excuse to miss school?”

Go to the mall and hit the hash pipe.

I wait, bus is late, 10 minutes. I get on, smile at the good-sport bus driver and I get to downtown to get to my second bus.

My second bus gets stuck.

I stick this one out, I get home an hour later.
Mind you, this is a trip that most of the time takes me 40 minutes at most.
I hated it, I wanted to cry at some point. But I didn’t,
I am really happy to be a Minneapolis uptowner

Why do you ask?

Because on the way home on the second bus, I saw 20 grade school kids jumping up and down, sliding, kicking each other, making snow men, and playing tag in my neighborhoods elementary school. I saw couples laughing their ass’s off as they were stuck out side the Apple store because – maybe- all they wanted to do is run and get a an iPod shuffle. And I saw a Pug trying to catch flakes, a German Shepard trying to attack flakes and a pizza delivery guy being chased by a basset hound.

Or maybe because the minute I got home, missing the desert and all, I dropped my shopping bag and walked right out, why? I just wanted to… it was almost like saying to myself: “I am not missing the excitement”

I went and bought some heavenly water called

Guinness

And some fruit juice

PORT

I took some pictures,

Mother nature: BRING IT ON!

Cabby

2007-02-26T12:05:00.000-05:00

My cab driver this morning asked me:

“why do you come to America? All the money in the world is in Saudi”

With a “I really think you are an unappreciative dumb-ass” look.

I told him that I already have all the money in the world and handed him my credit card.

was that mean?

Relax....it's just Words

2007-02-23T11:57:00.000-05:00

"Homesickness is... absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time... You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find."

-- John Cheever

"Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one. But I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the NSA, and somebody puts a code on my desk, somethin' no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, cus' I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding... Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, Send in the marines to secure the area" cus' they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, cus' they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there takin' shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, cus' he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work. He can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin' cus' every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President"

~Will from Good Will Hunting

Overheard in the Mall of America

2007-02-21T12:52:00.000-05:00

Middle-aged woman with children yelling into a cell phone: This is very important! We lost Grandma!

Hidden Magic

2007-02-18T01:36:00.001-05:00

TONS of high quality olive oil sautéed garlic

Fresh tomatoes

Slat

Pepper

[pita bread]

Don’t ask questions

DRAIN ME ALL YOU WANT

2007-02-18T01:29:00.000-05:00

I LOVE MY FRIGGIN PAPI!!!!!

uhmmm

2007-02-18T00:31:00.000-05:00

why do you fart more as you grow older?

2007-02-16T13:44:00.000-05:00

What PizzaMen Talk About When They Talk About Delivering Pizzas

Here's an excerpt of a phone conversation I recently had with "The Snake", a fellow pizzaman:

Snake: "Dude, guess where I delivered to tonight?"

PizzaMan: Where?"

S: The apartment where I lost my virginity"

PM: "Nice. What was the story? Who lives there now?"

S: "It was the total classic delivery, two dudes, totally baked out of their minds. They came to the door and I was like 'Hey, pizza's here' and they were like 'Sweet!' and I was like 'You know what else is sweet? This is the apartment I lost my virginity in."

PM: "What did they say to that?"

S: "They were cool about it. The one dude asked which bedroom, I pointed to it and the other dude was like 'YES!'"

PM: "That's pretty good. I had a delivery kind of like that, recently"

S: "Oh yeah? Where?"

PM: "Remember Amy and Jenny's place? The place where they had that one party?"

S: "Yeah".

PM: "Yeah, that place. I delivered there the other night and when the guy came to the door, I said 'Dude, I've had sex in this apartment'".

S: "What did he say?"

PM: "He said 'Me too!'"

S: (laughs) "Sweet!"

PM: "Then we high-fived."

S: "Nice"

Hello - Kal

2007-02-13T10:40:00.000-05:00

It's me ....Punkin

Well, it looks like it's getting warmer a bit and some light is showing at the end of this Minnesota tunnle. What will you do when it hits 40 degrees again?

I think I'll go buy a Honeydew Melon and eat it alone and then make a huge bowl of white wine Sangria ! Drink some and make some popsicles for an afternoon snack.

Clippy - GONE

2007-02-09T17:27:00.000-05:00

R.I.P CLIPPY!!

Pretty Randomness

2007-02-08T10:13:00.000-05:00

- I had a dream last night that it snowed in:

- I asked my boyfriend last night to stop making me lunches to take to work because that made me feel "less independent". It was a stupid fucking idea.

- there is beauty in watching a guy in his early 20's and winter gear, a messenger bag in one hand and a book in the other, walking up steps of his snow covered parents house.

- I like Wyzata : with its hilly housing, randomly scattered skating rinks, curved roads and beautiful men.

- if you skip work to stalk someone who barely knows who you are, is that like really bad..?!@?

Perfect Party Cake--Googly Madonna

2007-02-06T13:39:00.001-05:00

Perfect Party Cake--Googly Madonna
Originally uploaded by curtprins.

God Bless My Boyfriend and My Friend!!
Please all, pray to her holyness a nice win!!

poem

2007-02-06T09:49:00.001-05:00

I wrote this poem with hope that it comforts whoever reads it in those gruelingly freezing days.

"WINTER"
by Punkin

SHIT!
It's Cold!

nice!!

2007-02-03T00:31:00.000-05:00

Hidden Facts Overdose

from over heard in minneapolis

2007-02-01T10:31:00.000-05:00

[ Boys talking about how to spice up a "not quite had sex yet" sex life ]

Guy #1: Why don't you try using food?

Guy #2: What? She's into organic. Here's an organic wafer on my breast. Yeah, that's exciting.

haven't had one of these is a while

2007-01-31T09:48:00.000-05:00

Papi and Punkinz One Liner of the week

[ a party at a friends]

Punkin: do you know which one is JB?
Papi: the one that looks like an overgrowen termite?
Punkin: that's the one.

Overheard in Minneapolis

2007-01-26T10:48:00.000-05:00

Teenage girl: I think that tapeworm is the best diet!

-------

Dumbass #1: Amy* really likes to hug everyone.

Dumbass #2: Yeah. She's like an Amish whore.

-------

60 year-old ballet instructor: We were driving all over! Wisconsin, Iowa, and th-
8 year-old girl (interrupts in utter seriousness): (gasp) I LOVE Iowa!!

------

One man to another man: What?! I'm not a vegetarian! I run from vegetation!

and so it begins again

2007-01-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

May the One and Only G-d
who gave you your zealous allies and jealous foes - forsake you
For the absence he parades around is reminiscent of the bleeding gashes
you once had,
May the One and Only G-d
who dispelled your soldiers to distant lands - forsake you
And if he returns, he shall stampede the pilgrims that are burning Cedars
that are long gone
May the One and Only ONE confesses to you, Liban,
that he has sinned
And asks your valleys forgiveness, your rivers pity
and your nation to be calm

for the ones who ask the right questions

2007-01-24T21:30:00.001-05:00

It’s only my second visit and she has already unearthed so many dead things that I have ignored for such a long time. Not so obvious things, but I feel like I am finally successfully stealing the maps to the future me, the maps that my dad refused so hard to willingly give.

As Promised

2007-01-18T11:17:00.000-05:00

It is that last minute before my eye lids are finally closing. And though my face is saying good night to the world, the patron guard sleeping inside is just starting to come around. He rises - almost not -like the trapped soul of a Roman god in a bitter winter, lightly humming songs of hail for the near and far alike. But when he is finally fully awaken and perked up, the shock of unfamiliar wind sends a shiver down his olden spine. From corner to corner he flies asking the greater might for the places he belonged. They tell him times have passed and his old house is now gone and past. That he ought to – to live to tell the tale– take on the new gates glaring ahead. And that whatever he’s foreseen before falling asleep a decade ago, is till there to be found if he keeps striding on. That spring, with its misty flora and undergrowth, shrubbery and plants. Is expecting with great faith, the seed of chance I am carrying around.

2007-01-18T09:58:00.000-05:00

A voice from Gitmo's darkness

A current detainee speaks of the torture and humiliation he has experienced at Guantanamo since 2002.
By Jumah al-Dossari, JUMAH AL-DOSSARI is a 33-year-old citizen of Bahrain. This article was excerpted from letters he wrote to his attorneys. Its contents have been deemed unclassified by the Department of Defense.January 11, 2007
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba —

I AM WRITING from the darkness of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo in the hope that I can make our voices heard by the world. My hand quivers as I hold the pen. In January 2002, I was picked up in Pakistan, blindfolded, shackled, drugged and loaded onto a plane flown to Cuba. When we got off the plane in Guantanamo, we did not know where we were. They took us to Camp X-Ray and locked us in cages with two buckets — one empty and one filled with water. We were to urinate in one and wash in the other. At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense lights in my face. They have placed me in cold rooms for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for prayers. They have wrapped me in the Israeli flag and told me there is a holy war between the Cross and the Star of David on one hand and the Crescent on the other. They have beaten me unconscious. What I write here is not what my imagination fancies or my insanity dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees, representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators.During the first few years at Guantanamo, I was interrogated many times. My interrogators told me that they wanted me to admit that I am from Al Qaeda and that I was involved in the terrorist attacks on the United States. I told them that I have no connection to what they described. I am not a member of Al Qaeda. I did not encourage anyone to go fight for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I never fought, and I never carried a weapon. I like the United States, and I am not an enemy. I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen. I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.But, why, after five years, is there no conclusion to the situation at Guantanamo? For how long will fathers, mothers, wives, siblings and children cry for their imprisoned loved ones? For how long will my daughter have to ask about my return? The answers can only be found with the fair-minded people of America.I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center. If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the United States. Show the world the letters I gave you. Let the world read them. Let the world know the agony of the detainees in Cuba.

deep breaths, am on the surface.

2007-01-10T12:16:00.000-05:00

i think it is amazing what people can do for each other when they truely love eachother. I am living a spiritual euphoria. I have no clue how and why I reached this point which seems so strangely enlightening for me, but I know thanks to someone I know, two nights ago –he walked into a dark apartment and found me slumped, lifeless, on a couch, and a few words later – he cried and said them - they were like water to a desert.

New year’s resolutions

2006-12-24T03:07:00.000-05:00

To be wise enough

To be strong enough

To be brave enough

To be hungry enough

To be full enough

To be resolute enough

Rosie Vs. Trump

2006-12-21T13:57:00.000-05:00

What you are missing is that they are in fact the same person. Has anyone ever seen them in the same room at the same time? Nope. Rosie is just Trump when he turns his wig on backwards.

Strange multi-cultural America

2006-12-18T10:17:00.000-05:00

If you have worked under an American corporate hierarchy, you would probably know buy now that we do not allow saying “Merry Christmas” anymore and people are asked to say “Happy Holidays” instead, but when you walk into our office, you will only see a Christmas tree and stockings, no Menorah, No lit crescent moon, or Buddha incense filling up the air. And since all these religions have holidays at the same time. Hanukkah, Eid-Al Aha, and The Chinese New Year. Why does a country who claims to be one that honors and encourages multi-cultures and religious freedom, literally passes by all other holidays unnoticing them, ignoring them, not even including them on public calendars or corporate ones for that matter. Not sell cards for them, or be wished to have good ones for them by news anchors, weathermen, bosses or president. You know what country does?? Singapore. You get days off for the Muslims, Christians, Chinese, and Jews. When will America truly live up to it’s claim?

i ate

2006-12-17T04:10:00.000-05:00

One of my most favorite childhood memories is sitting down on the floor in grandmother’s house in the qaseem province in Saudi and having deep fried, salty dthab fat for the first time. I think I was 10 years old and she thought the best way to introduce me to my ancestors cuisine is to let me eat it first and THEN let me know what it is. I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it hugely but then I asked what it was and then she told me. I crave it to this day. And I have seen it get cooked alive like a lobster, and I have also seen it get served while it still has not died completely.

DThab

the ungrateful guest.

2006-12-17T02:57:00.000-05:00

I love food. I love tasty, light, articulate food. I hate presentation if it is un required. if you cut a blob of water melon in a shape of a stake. I hate that. I love food that is not so much functional to function but pallet filling. I love the difference in pallets people have and hate the disrespect of other people’s pallets. Don’t call something “puke” or “shitty” unless you are eating puke and shit. If someone has the courage and dignity to cook, bake, blend something for you. Appreciate their effort but show respectful criticism if you hate it. They went throught the length to make something for you after all.

we lost another specie

2006-12-17T02:46:00.000-05:00

When will we ever realize that being a human is a privilege NOT a right. We are doing SO much destruction to our planet; we (humans) are like a filthy crack addict who has not cleaned his living room, kitchen, and bathroom in 2000 years.

I Love Anthony Bourdain

2006-11-28T10:50:00.000-05:00

"Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by those who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone ... Bad food is fake food ... food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives. Food that’s too safe, too pasteurised, too healthy – it’s bad! There should be some risk, like unpasteurised cheese. Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation….as much as it is also about freshness."

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demiglace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living."

Love You old lady

2006-11-12T20:48:00.000-05:00

Khadeja daughter of Josephine

Most of us didn’t even bother

While you sinked your whites

And soaked your burgle

And washed your cucumber

In river damns and springs

Most of us looked at you

As a duty lives – duty do

My eyebrows and shoes

Look fit to be seen

Because of you

Metal bucket of fresh water

Pomegranates and fig jam

Grapes dusted with white snow

And a bathroom tiled with you

That’s how I will always see you

I am so sorry I missed

your last breath

Hey

2006-11-03T13:30:00.000-05:00

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows.
Here is the root of the root and the bud of the fruit
And the sky of a tree called life;
Which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide.
And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.
I carry your heart.
I carry you in my heart.

2006-10-05T22:08:00.000-04:00

The Qur'an - Islam for beginners pt.3

LMAO

HEHEHE

2006-09-01T15:36:00.000-04:00

Horse Fat

2006-08-24T14:50:00.000-04:00

I have had the pleasure of eating horse meat, It is by far
considered the biggest honor a host can do for a guest of high prestige in the
Arab peninsula, is to ...well ... kill one of his horses to feed his guests.
But by gosh darn, I missed out on the fat.

chez pim: On Horse Fat, Fries, and Harold McGee

On Horse Fat, Fries, and Harold McGee
horsey

Last week I wrote a little post about one of our cooking adventures while in the South of France last year, where we cooked our first batch of fries in horse fat, which our friend Mikael sourced from one of the horse butchers in Nice. Jeffrey Steingarten who is one of my favorite food writers –I have a soft spot for grumpy old men, especially the pedantic ones- also wrote about horse fat fries in one of his columns in Vogue magazine a while back.

Quite a few of you left comments and emails, asking what about the horse fat that makes it such a great medium for fried potatoes. Alas I had no idea. I could only tell you what I tasted. Frankly, I was quite curious about it myself.

And so I thought who'd be better to ask than Harold McGee? So I did. I fired off and email to Harold, who promptly wrote back:

Can you describe how the fries were different, or especially good? Horse fat is actually sort of intermediate between solid animal fats and liquid vegetable oils. It's harder (more saturated) than the latter, but softer than tallow or lard, not too different from chicken or duck or goose fat. So I wonder whether it was maybe a difference in the flavor more than the texture? Because I don't see how the consistency of the fat itself would make a distinctive difference in the texture of the fries. Tell me what you remember about them, and I'll see how good of a rationalization I can come up with!

Hey, I usually get by with random guesses or just outright make things up, so a rationalization would do me just fine, especially one from Harold McGee.

So I replied with my best recollection of the experience:

The fries were really delicious. It's hard to describe why I suppose, since it may have to do with the type of potato we used as well. We used Ratte Mona Lisa potatoes, by the way. The oil itself stank to high heaven during the rendering, but produced a beautiful, dark golden oil that had a strong, complex, almost meaty flavor to it. I was worried that the fries would somehow tasted 'horsey', which I suspected I wouldn't like. They didn't, luckily. They only tasted like fried potatoes, but with a deeper flavor than just regular cooked potatoes. They crisp up beautifully though, didn't crisp through and through but had a nice but not super crunchy skin and a soft, perfectly cooked inside.

prayer

2006-08-19T22:11:00.000-04:00

Is when all the hatred in your heart is gone

Pray

2006-08-19T20:20:00.000-04:00

Zaza bellydance class

he is a master . . .

take it from me

I call for a Muslims-Only Airlines as well

2006-08-16T11:27:00.000-04:00

Fox news airs that Muslims must go through a special line and outrage ablaze like wildfire on the bloggsphear.

While for past 5 years the government of the United States has made it arbitrary for people in its country who are Muslim/Arab nationals to register with homeland security, get finger printed, get interviewed and possibly get detained indefinitely for as little things as name similarities.

Open your eyes people. This is an assault that inherently and fundamentally exists today in the US on a wider and more destructive scale than a line in an airport.

News Hounds: Fox News Airs Call for 'Muslim-Only' Line

Fox News Airs Call for 'Muslim-Only' Line Reported by Judy - August 15, 2006 - 141 comments A Fox News guest proposed having a "Muslims only" line for airport travelers, an idea that "Dayside" co-host Mike Jerrick called attention to it so that viewers did not overlook the proposal. Conservative radio host Mike Gallagher suggested the idea during a segment Tuesday (August 15, 2006) with constitutional lawyer Michael Gross discussing racial profiling. "Dayside" co-host Juliet Huddy set up the debate by noting that all terrorists have been Muslim extremists, and Jerrick claimed that some people oppose racial profiling as "politically incorrect." "It’s not just a matter of political correctness, please," responded Gross. "It’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, unethical, immoral, it shouldn’t be done. We do not in this country prejudge a person based upon their race, creed, color, country of national origin and it’s wrong to do so and it addition it’s not effective. It doesn’t work. It actually perpetuates the problem. That is, it separates us." Gallagher responded that Gross's statements were "absolutely absurd" and claimed that the Traffic Safety Administration is aggressively targeting uniformed members of the military. "Let's have a Muslim-only line," Gallagher said, as Gross started to talk. Jerrick asked Gallagher to repeat what he said. "It’s time to have a Muslims check-point line in America’s airports and have Muslims be scrutinized. You better believe it, it’s time," Gallagher said, garnering tepid audience applause. Gross attacked the proposal as "absolutely wrong" because "most Arabs are not Muslims, most Muslims are not Arabs. You don't even have your facts straight. How would you feel if we had a line for the Irish, which the English proposed during the IRA problems?" He pleaded not to turn the United States into a "tyrannical, imperial country." Still, a woman in the audience asked a question about being "politically correct" by not allowing racial profiling. Gallagher claimed that opposition to racial profiling amounted to not wanting to hurt people's feelings. "Most Americans want prejudice. Let’s be prejudiced against those who want to slaughter innocent American men, women and children. It’s time we start exercising some prejudice and stop these bloody terrorists," Gallagher said, this time drawing more robust applause. The segment had all the attributes of a typical "fair and balanced" debate. Although Gross was effective with his comments, Fox News did all it could to favor Gallagher. Jerrick's set-up downplayed the significance of the issue by labeling opposition to racial profiling as merely "politically incorrect" rather than unconstitutional, creating a larger burden for Gross. Then, when the two men first appeared on the screen, Gallagher's image was on the left and Gross's on the right. When Gallagher complained, Fox News flipped the images to accommodate him. Nor did Huddy or Jerrick attempt to press Gallagher as to the specifics of the proposal. How, for example, would the airport screeners determine whether someone is a member of the Muslim religion? Or would Gallagher make all Arabs, including Christian ones, go in the "Muslim-only line"? And how do we tell who is an Arab? Jerrick might have asked Gallagher for these kinds of specifics when he asked him to repeat the proposal, but he chose not to, making the idea seem more plausible and feasible than it is. And when it came time for the wrap-up, Jerrick went first to Gross, allowing Gallagher to go last so that his fear-mongering rhetoric could go unrebutted. With such a lax journalistic performance, Jerrick and Huddy deserve to go from the national Fox News Channel line-up to that morning show for a Chicago station that Roger Ailes has planned for them. The sooner the better.

"routine frisking" RIGHT!

2006-08-14T16:38:00.000-04:00

Police Officer Frisks More Than He Expects

Police Officer Frisks More Than He Expects
Arab News

MADINAH, 14 August 2006 — A rookie police officer at a checkpoint in Ghazala on the Madinah to Hail Road ended up thumbing more than he expected when routinely frisking a Filipino “man,” the Okaz daily reported yesterday. The police officer was making a routine check on two “males” in a car, when he unexpectedly realized that the “man” he was frisking did not feel like a man but rather had some lethal female assets. Hilariously, the rookie was left feeling rather flushed and so called for the help of an elderly colleague. After questioning the Filipino it soon transpired that the “man” was a housemaid who was running away from her employer in Riyadh and so had adopted a male dress. Both the maid and the Filipino driver of the car were taken into custody while police conduct further investigations

Technorati

2006-08-14T14:24:00.000-04:00

Technorati Profile

how often

2006-08-12T12:32:00.000-04:00

do you think of your mother’s childhood?

just a question

Whirling Dirvishes of Istanbul

2006-08-12T10:33:00.000-04:00


I MISS ISTANBUL

Good Read

2006-08-11T14:14:00.000-04:00

Welcome to My Lebanese Dream

Take my hand.......

I am dutch-israeli, an IDF veteran of Lebanon 1982, and since that experience a committed peace activist. My thoughts on the current human tragedy:

Civilian deaths and displacement are UNACCEPTABLE regardless of one's point of view.

You can say whatever you want about who started what and when and why, but the fact remains that the human suffering in Lebanon is absolutely and totally unacceptable. If you believe it is acceptable, then please explain your view: why the great majority of the dead, injured and displaced, who have NOTHING to do with Hezbollah should deserve what they are receiving? Why? What crime have they committed? And if you say, well.. you know.. lots of them support Hezbollah.. then I say to you, since when is someone's opinion or feeling about something justification for death? I must have missed that lesson.

So again, whatever side of the debate you are on, Israel's actions and reactions to Hezbollah, is causing a humanitarian disaster. (Yes, I know there are lots of disasters around the world, but that doesnt mean this is not one so spare me that line). And you can believe what you want that the ultimate responsibility is Hezbollah's, (and there is some truth to that which will have to faced in honest introspection) but I guarantee you, all the dead in Lebanon are lying under Istraeli bombs and shells.

True military victory is not possible.

Anyone with any knowledge will know that short of a level of destruction and death, which everyone will have to face as meeting normative criteria of war crimes, there is no military solution. No modern conventional army has succeeded in defeating an entrenched 'guerilla' movement once it has reached a critical mass of military prowess and social support. So you have two choices: stop because killing isnt going to achieve the goal anyway or raise the level to that which will undeniably be one of war crimes. Or do like the babylonians and romans used to do... kill indiscriminately in huge numbers and forcibly disperse huge numbers in order to pacify a country. Anyone here really willing to do that? So, you can just as well stop now then.

And last, yes my Lebanese friends, at some point, you too will have to make a choice.

You do know, that a democratic country can not function with an independent militia that is actually stronger than the army of the central government. I understand what Hezbollah has meant for you. They were the ones who lead the way to Israel's withdrawal from (almost all of) Lebanon. They fulfill a vital function in many areas in education, healthcare and welfare. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the fact that your country is still a fragile democracy, an emerging democracy, with many rivalries that if not managed delicately can threaten your emerging democracy. So tell us, tell the world, how we can help, what we can do (after stopping this war) to aid your country move to the next level of stable democracy. But first, you do have to decide about an independent army that can, if it wants, probably bring down the central government.

I know one thing, to solve my pain I need your cooperation and you need my cooperation to solve your pain. We are then each other's key to solving the other's pain. And I will start by saying, no more will I try and prove that my pain and suffering is greater than yours. And make that my justification for inflicting more pain on you. Pain is pain. A dead baby is a dead baby regardless of color, religion, place or time. The mother hurts the same. So take my hand, and lets stop this nonsense. Together, in peace, jew, muslim, christian, druze, shia, sunni, whatever.... together we can recreate the garden of eden in the middle east.

peace and love

lennybruce

Let Us ALL Rejoice!!!

2006-08-10T15:27:00.000-04:00

Heidi Klum's bra honour

Heidi Klum's bra honour

Thursday, 10th August 2006, 11:47
LIFE STYLE EXTRA (UK) - Heidi Klum has had a bra named after her.

I LOVE HER BLOG

2006-08-10T14:04:00.000-04:00

Farah's Sowaleef

B) LEBANON!!!!!!!!!!!! NO NO NO!
Not the pretty Arabs, not the peace-loving, tolerant, openminded, cultured, eloquent, queer-friendly, etc etc, Arabs. Why, why why?? Seriously, KHALAAAAAAAAAS! I'm very angry. Very very very angry.
On a side note: is it wrong that I'm wondering what will happen to all the saudi investors/tourists? It is, isn't it? Fine, I take that back.

I'm never traveling again.

Nana

2006-08-02T15:57:00.000-04:00

I wonder
If you still take a spoon of honey
At sunrise
Before you light
Your first cigarette
And if you still put cold yogurt
On your face
Every morning
Sitting against the open kitchen window
Picking the stones from the lentils
On a tray
In your lap
Letting the new sun
Dry your face

I wonder
If you still stand
Facing the clock
With your two fingers
On your left wrist
Counting
While you cook the best stuffed stomach
Or chew on your home-grown alfalfa sprouts
Or your left-over macaroni with no sauce

I wonder
If you still have your hair
Neatly pulled back
And the gold cross
Hanging around your neck
And the Heart of Christ
Pinned inside your warm bra
And if you still gently beat
Your chest
As you pray your rosary
Lighting a candle
For Mar Charbel
And one for Mar Elias
Pleading
For cures
Safety
And money

I wonder
If you still get scared
Every time
A door is slammed
Or one of us kids cry
Thinking of bombs
Jumping on your feet
Calling Jesus
Mary
And never forgetting Saint Joseph

I wonder
If you still sneak to the closet
To take a sip
Before you make a wish
On the deck of cards
In your rough hands

I wonder
If you still sleep
With the radio on
Next to your ear
Listening to the news
And Sainte Rita
Under your pillow

And I wonder
If you ever knew
You would be the first to leave
If you ever knew
You were leaving
And if you really wanted
To burn
All the saints
Before
You died

2006-07-21T15:49:00.000-04:00

يا بيروت

يا ست الدنيا... يا بيروت

نعترف أمام الله الواحد

أنّْا كنا منك نغار

وكان جمالك يؤذينا

نعترف الآن

بأنّْا لم ننصفك ولم نرحمك

بأنّْا لم نفهمك ولم نعذرك

وأهديناك مكان الوردة سكيناً

نعترف أمام الله العادل

بأنّْا جرحناك واتعبناك

بأنّْا أحرقناك وأبكيناك

وحملناك أيا بيروت معاصينا

يا بيروت

إن الدنيا بعد ليست تكفينا

الآن عرفنا أن جذورك ضاربة فينا

الآن عرفنا ماذا إقترفت أيدينا

قومي... قومي... قومي

قومي من تحت الردم

كزهرة لوز في نيسان

قومي من حزنك قومي

إن الثورة تولد من رحم الاحزان

قومي من تحت الردم

قومي إكراماً للغابات

قومي إكراماً للأنهار

قومي إكراماً للأنهار والوديان... والإنسان

قومي إكراماً للإنسان

قومي يا بيروت... قومي

إن الثورة تولد من رحم الاحزان

يا بيروت... يا بيروت

O Beirut,
Mistress of our World Beirut

We confess before the One God

That we were envious of you

And your beauty upset us

We confess now

That we've battered you
And ill-treated you

And we blamed you
And unexcused you

And we gifted you a dagger in place of a flower!

We confess before the just God

That we disfigured you,
alas; we tired you

That we have vexed you
and made you cry

And burdened you with our sins

O Beirut

A world without you is not for us

We now realize your roots are deep inside us,

We now realize what our hands committed
So Rise … Rise … Rise ….

Rise from under the rubble

Like an Almond Blossom in May
Rise from your sorrow

Revolution is born from the womb of grief

Rise in honor of the forests,

Rise in honor of the rivers
Rise in honor of the valleys

Rise in honor of the grapevines

Rise in honor of the humankind

Rise, O Beirut! Rise!

:*(

2006-07-21T12:00:00.000-04:00

PEACE

KHALAAS!

2006-07-13T11:34:00.000-04:00

HELL what Israel is doing is pissing me off big time. These are people having survived a shoah and what do they do? It must be jungean or some deeprooted psychological human trait but abusee's tend to become abusers themselves. In this case: those subjected to genocide if given a chance will do it themselves.The problem is, we have a severe problem, the rest of humanity, with being dependent to that accursed arab oil. I wish it were not the case. But if those damn nutcase Israeli will keep doing this, the goddamn arabs will start making demands or trouble. And the only way the Saudi and Iranian scum can vent their frustration with this unholy zionism, is to pump conscience money into the damn hamas and hezbollah. Israel doesn't give a shit. They have nukes, they probably wont get attacked by a neighbour. They have their state completely ass-backards with security infrastructure. But what they are doing exports terrorism infrastructure all over the goddamn globe, like Typhoid Mary spread Typhus all over the goddamn US.I guess the US have picked up a good trick from the Irseali: use terror as a pretext to instritute far right legal tools, police state measures, decaying wellfare, eager voters. The rest of the world humanity should pressure both the US and Israhel to stop doing what they are doing ASAP.

The Old and New

2006-07-11T17:28:00.000-04:00

Forgiveness Hides

by Kal A

On every page pictures dwell
Of teary words in musty smell
My books are here, and live to tell
As he follows in blissful hell
Father laughs as I complain

His laughter haunts me in my sleep
In my dreams, I see him creep
Shackled, over holes I leap
I run but tumble miles deep
To ugly swamps of fog and rain

Crossing islands of weeping oak
A wretched man in a soaking cloak
Dark as coal, lite as smoke
Twisted over and swiftly broke
My gentle soul in prying vain

Forgiveness hides and lives in fear
Let me be, my father dear
So Sorry I was born a queer
The gods you pray wont make me steer
To the path of ancient wholesome saints

Weak
By Kal A

His face echoes
And his grassy eyes glitter of forbidden glare
They come closer to bringing him food
That his soul has long longed for
As he retreats into the night

So a dusty, moon lit street
Puts him in time imprisoned holes
So he can lurk in revenge
For all the un-nurtured souls

A child’s heart
Full of smiling faces
Imports the white wave
Of indistinct dreams
There he comes
Travel, into his castle

Two, tall, charming brothers
With gray shoulders
And wild eyes

They seat the child across a silvery horse
O, hills where the saint air bathes a sea of flowers
And on his soft cheek where the dew falls
Move their delicate, fearful, and enticing fingers

He feels in warmth their apprehensive breaths
Which smells of long rosy orchids?
And in which time, a tear interrupts his burning desire

Lost and Found
And then lost again

He hears their hearts heating on his back

Silence…

See in his blushed face, maps of confidence
And travels under the sea of shame
Boats of fire

All but a smile
Falls onto his face
And he keeps on loving
What he feels

Papi’s One-Liner of the Week.

2006-06-22T11:07:00.000-04:00

{Surgery on shoulder over 10 minutes ago, nurse aside bed – Papi with Punkin on the phone}

Nurse: how are you feeling?
Papi: Good.
Nurse: Can I get you anything?
Papi: Got any Malt Liquor?

I misss

2006-06-15T00:50:00.000-04:00

and love my WAM

I am just in the mood

2006-06-01T11:49:00.000-04:00

to do a very pointless post