new evidence

there seems to be a dearth of information about the possibility of the lizard that is currently pulverizing the coastal areas of japan. I feel like the focus on this has all been wrong. Everyone is worried about the reactors and the possibilities of a meltdown, and while I agree that it would be a terrible situation a far worse one is underway. After all I just read that suddenly many of the areas affected are low on food and water. Do you know what consumes copious amounts of water and food all at once? That's right godzilla does, and I think it is not hard to imagine that after tearing apart huge swaths of the island the beast has eaten. After all the destruction has slowed for the last day and thus we must consider that godzilla was busy doing something. Eating and growing stronger for his next bout of rampage. Probably. Be afraid be very afraid. If I remember my 1950 and 60s monster documentaries correctly there was always a lull in the action after the first sighting and bout of destruction. When the monster returned it tended to be much much worse.

movement

i am watching the news and it seems that godzilla has begun to attack the nuclear facilities in the east of japan. I knew it was only a matter of time before he turned to wrecking that which created him. When will the UN step in and put a stop to this madness. I may have to form a rogue mercenary force to stop this monster. how long can we all sit idly by and wait while it ravages a country? Will we stand up when it crosses into Korea or china? Are we willing to wait and see if it has the stamina to trounce across the silk road(by and by who makes a road out of silk) and into the middle east and Greece? Where will we make our stand? I for one have had enough of this monster. I call on everyone to join my ranks and force this beast back into the watery depths from which it came. Begone foul lizard. Let the good people of japan rebuild their lives. You have caused enough damage. Dont make me get the mechagodzilla out of the storage shed.

nature or

i am not of course saying that these events happened at the same time but it does seem like there is a little too much damage to discount godzilla in all this.

warmth

i know that there is still winter in the world. it is a sad truth that it has left the part of the middle east where I reside. It is pretty consistently getting up into the 90s. which is stupidly hot. though I am told it will get into the 120s before i am released from this purgatory. One of the people that I work with has recently converted to islam. I just cant bring myself to take it seriously as a faith as it is practiced here in the kingdom. Dont get me wrong I have loads of respect for people that read and think and decide for themselves, but when many of the core beliefs of the religion are trounced in the name of state and then the state makes rules based on the portions of the religion it can use to keep itself secure it seems disingenuous at best. Let me give a concrete example. The king. now the king is a good guy from what i can tell, he pays for all schooling, he has established a social safety net for people that get fired, he is generally doing goodish things with the money he gets from the sale of the oil. So what is my problem. Well islam states pretty clearly that there are no hereditary roles. That leaders should be chosen in order to ensure the best and brightest. So how can the country that has both Mecca and Medina also have a king? Right through total disregard for the portions that are inconvenient. The guy actually has himself called the keeper of the two holy sites. In every way possible he insinuates himself into a role as a muslim guard but then he breaks a fairly simple rule for to keep power in the family. I can see the logic in the no hereditary business. Consider if you will the idea that the king knew that when he died his children would have to make it on their own and all the wealth that has been gotten would revert to the people. I think that he would be even more likely to use the money and other resources to truly benefit all the people. After all why hoard when it could serve the interest of all now and will certainly not serve the familial interest in the future. But then again this keeper feels that he knows better than the prophet(pbuh). There are loads of other examples. It makes me think people are all the same. So long as I get mine,fuck you.

off to the

Races.... This weekend I went (weekends happen thursday and friday here) to my very first ever car race. It was, interesting to say the least. I think that being from the US has spoiled me with regards to cars. Outside of the race track there were lots of young men with their cars all tricked out and polished to a shine but sadly even the best they did was a sad imitation of some of the low riders with hydraulics that used to bounce through AZ when I lived out there. I would have thought that having and spending loads of money would have given the Saudis the edge in this single category but alas it is still the homies that are reigning kings of the bouncey cars. There were of course some silly gauche cars that made me happy. And the races themselves were not that exciting. Mostly it was interesting to be in a place where Saudi youth could relax and be themselves outside and not have to worry about the religious police. There was a stage set up with just some music playing and one would have thought it was a full blown concert there were literally hundreds of young men gathered around just to move a little and listen to the music. I can see why places suddenly fall apart. These regimes think that everything is going fine because no one fights and everyone acts happy, then out of the blue there is something to do, I truly think that half the folks in tahir square in egypt and pearl square in bahrian and elsewhere are not there because they yearn for freedom at the polls, or are willing to die for a representative government, but instead are there because it is the only thing happening in town. It shouldnt be termed the jasmine revolution, but the revolution of the bored. I can almost hear the cries coming out the palaces, "let them play halo." Sometimes people just want to dance, dance revolution.

a new me

I am going to try to live a day as if i were an art exhibition. I was shown a random show name generator and decided to live out whatever the name of the show was. I will do this for a day or two and then go and get a new show name. The first exhibition

Parsing Relevance: Daring to Defy Progress


I can do that. If you want in on the action and I of course suggest that everyone should give it a try the website that generates the names is at
http://www.mit.edu/~ruchill/lazycurator.html
give it a try and see what the art exhibit of your life could be.

ok bitches

and here is why i think it is almost always a really bad idea when some nation whinges about getting their antiquities back. from now on i am coming down on the firm side of fuck them. it is always the case of those who have "lost" or had their antiquities "stolen" that they say, no we are stable and have a right to our stuff. Well when the shit hits the fan it isn't the museums at harvard or yale or the london museums that get destroyed. in fact it is exactly the places where those artifacts were sent that get stormed and destroyed. I am looking at egypt and to a lesser extent greece. I am not sure if any of the things that were looted vandalized and destroyed in these last few days of rioting were actually repatriated but if they were then egypt owes every last living soul a personal apology. I cant believe that any institution would willingly give anything of value to a nation that has such a tenuous hold on safety. When the germans started raining rockets into london, the government made sure to move the art housed in the museums into a safe place. The other argument that is used is of course that the artifacts were stolen during war or colonization or some other time that the "true" owners were unable to protect them. Well to that i say again fuck em. It is war. you don't get to the end and say, "that was fun now give me my stuff back." it's war. you lose that's it. ask the Polish their country disappeared. It's just ridiculous.

On an unrelated note i learned today that though westerners say son of a bitch (referring to a female dog) the Saudis will say the same thing but instead refer to the male dog. This society is so strange that even the insults suffer from gender apartheid. made me laugh.

working

I have finished about half the work which I need to do for this term. I have given midterm exams and graded them and all. Now it is just a matter of sitting around for a few weeks waiting for the students to return. The it will be a 6 week half term until midterms and of course after that it is only a few weeks until I finish. Time has certainly been on fast forward since arriving here. I actually had a really productive day, I left the school early and went to set up my bank account. Almost everyone that I have spoken to has had some issues setting these accounts up, from not being able to because of improper papers to getting told that the ATM card would be mailed and never receiving it.Needless to say I was prepared for the worst and allotted plenty of time for this adventure. I waltzed into the bank and took a number. I waited. and Waited. About an hour later my number was called and I went to the desk. I gave over all my paperwork from my employer and waited while the customer service rep filled out form after form. Eventually he got to the part about my cell number. Of which I have none. I told him that I didnt have a cell and he was taken back. Then he told me I must have one to open an account. I asked why? He explained that every time I try to do any online banking or any phone banking the system will need a code that will be sent to the registered phone number. Makes sense. So I asked where the closet place to get a SIM card was and it turned out to be about a block down the road. I had plenty of time and finished what I could with the teller and then walked down to get a SIM. That went off without a hitch and then I walked back to the bank. I took another number and waited. After the first customer got up I was called by name even though there were still about 12 people in front of me. I walked up and the same rep asked if I had a # I handed him the SIM card expecting it to be on the card, but of course it was not. So he was kind enough to put the Sim into his phone and call the teller next to him where the number came up. He entered it into the system and them told me that the ATM producing machine was broken. I figured that after the kindness and all it was ok there was no reason to play press my luck. I told him thanks and asked when I could return to pick it up. He asked if I was in a hurry. I told him not really, after all I had all afternoon to get this done. He then called the womens bank(separate facilities here) and told them my account details, they printed my card, he sent the security guard around the bank to the womens section to get my new card handed it to me and told me to have a nice day. It was in short amazing. So now I have everything I need to get paid. All in one short afternoon. also yesterday there were torrential rains, and there was a hailstorm that passed on the way to work. Fun stuff. The rains were bad enough that the King canceled classes for students today in Riyadh. Teachers still had to go but no students.

believe it

I had an interesting discussion with some of the students in my class. They asked me out of nowhere before the class had started who caused sept 11. I asked what they meant and they said you know the buildings in NYC. I told them I was unsure and that the planes flying into those buildings along with the fire and heat caused them to fall. What a shitstorm that brought on. Each one of my students believes that Sept 11 was an inside job arranged by the jews to start wars in the middle east. The jews want iraq so that they can have a jewish state on either side of the heart of the middle east and thus can crush arabs between the two. The students had loads of "information" to back up their claim. Most of it produced by nut job conspiracy theorists in the US but hey just because it was meant as a indictment of the US military industrial complex doesnt mean it cant be applied to so other equally radical and hateful organizations. Other things I learned that day. Osama bin laden has been dead since the early 90s and this new one is purely made up so the west hates all arabs. There were no jews that died on Sept 11, thus proving their culpability. How this doesnt point a finger at the other countries without a dead citizen I was unclear. Like say denmark, or vanatu. I learned that the plane that everyone saw fly into the second building was empty and military. I learned that there were no bodies or parts of bodies recovered. I learned that the buildings were in fact blown up from inside like any other structure that was being collapsed. All in all a day which I learned more about the way this side of the world is encouraged to view the world than anything else. Remember these students I have are 18-19. Which means they were 8-9 when these events actually happened. nothing like getting them young.
The very next day of course a vulture was arrested in the north of Saudi Arabia because it was wearing a tag that said Tel Aviv University. It was arrested for spying. the tag had a GPS tracker. I had no cameras no mics nothing but a tracker. I asked how the Saudis knew it was a spy and the answer was that it had been trained to avoid danger and people. You know a bird that doesnt want to get caught. Spy. The mind hurts at how hard it must be to live in a world where faith rules.

it was a year

As year10 draws to a close I wanted to take a minute to reflect on the mundane. I personally took as many naps as my schedule would allow. I procrastinated when I could, I kept up appearances and I generally stayed out of trouble. That said I also wanted to leave year10 with a few thoughts and a few things that the year has taught me. first I learned that there is nothing I can not do for one more minute. Nothing is so bad that it is unendurable. I learned that people have an amazing capacity to surprise me almost always in a good way. I learned that what i need and what i want are far apart. My needs are met and exceeded daily whereas my wants I am trying to work on. I also learned that putting things away right away makes my life better. And I learned that few things beat ironing with music up really loud. As for whats ahead I am reminded of a Tom Petty song,"It's time to move on, time to get goin', what lies ahead we have no way of knowin'. It's time to move on." Its funny to me that so many people try to make resolutions for the new year. I cant think of anything that I want to resolve to do. Alas, as the clock ticks ever closer to the moment when the year ends, not a soul is near for me to mark the moment with. I guess a book and a cup of tea will do for this year. after all it is only one minute and I know I can do absolutely anything for for one minute.