Iraqis are not unwashed, do not live in hovels

Sunshine posts for the information of everyone getting their images of Iraq from "the media":

The thing that bothers me so much is the MEDIA, all the Medias, American's, Iraqi's, Arabians'..., they DO NOT show the real life in Iraq, specially the citizens' real state of affairs, they always show an old woman with Abaya, a dirty child, or an old man wear ripped dress (Dishdasha) & slipper . Showing that these people represents the Iraqis! Don't you see that often?!
Even when there is a questionnaire, the media do not ask a doctor, nor an engineer, teacher or any educated citizen, they do not go to a university or a hospital. They go to indigent neighborhoods & ask a cadger or a sloven woman & make the people round the world believe that we are all like that, it is unfair at all, why do the Medias do that?! I think they do that for certain purposes, maybe to make the other people feel sorry for us?! I got many E-mails saying that they had been shocked when they saw my sister & my brother's photographs. Well it is not weird at all; all the children in my family and in other families look beautiful, clean, & healthy.
Few months ago I got an E-mail from a reader, he said that he was surprised when he saw the number of the Iraqi bloggers who write in English, So many people in Iraq speak English (it's the second language here, we start taking English lessons in the 5th class primary school), I take private French lessons every Friday as well. I would like to learn other languages in the future.
This bad image that most of the people have for the Iraqis, related to the untruthful Medias , I wish I can start my own media , but unfortunately , I don't have that much money , maybe in the future , who knows ?!!
Few weeks ago I was reading some articles wrote about Iraq, they contained some pics for Iraqi children who were dirty , I do not think that they ever had a shower, they were wearing ripped clothes, and shoeless, I got so mad , the people who might read this article would think that ALL THE CHILDREN IN IRAQ LOOK LIKE THAT .

Check out the pictures in her post. She has a lovely home :)

Ah, Seth Godin

So there's an ad on MSN lately that annoys me. Here's what it looks like:

You can see why it annoys me, right?

The space is not blank. There's not only text there, there's a cow.

When you hover over the cow, you see this:

Ah, more non-blankness!

The word balloon gives you an idea of what you're about to click on. When you do click, you end up here.

I think this is the first time I've ever seen a banner ad on MSN go to an Amazon product page. MSN has its own Marketplace, or so I understood. Then again, I don't usually click the ads on MSN, so who knows how many Amazon links I've missed?

And that's the real point: the ad is annoying, but it sure as hell got me to click, didn't it?

That's Seth Godin for you. ("Author, Agent of Change.")

(Bear in mind that I did not click the first time I saw it. I clicked today in order to make this post. So make of that what you will.)

There's a neat aspect to all this: 100% of the author royalties apparently go to charity. That's pretty cool--and another brilliant marketing gimmick.

Well, I haven't talked about Kyou Kara Maou in awhile

I'm trying to figure out if Shibuya Shori's name is an elaborate pun.

You see, the word shouri in Japanese can mean "victory", which could be a reference to how Miko first pronounced her husband's first name--Kachiuma, or "winning horse", rather than Shouma. (She still calls him Kachiuma occasionally.) So they take the sound she got wrong, but change the ending so it means the same thing.

Shouri can also mean "commercial profit". At the beginning of the series, Yuuri explains in a narrative thought that his mother didn't name him "Yuuri" because his dad's a banker--yuuri, meaning "advantageous", can have a connotation of profit.

So Shori's name could have a double meaning, in-jokes for the family.

But the only way for that to be the case is for Shori's name to have a long o sound, and I'm not sure if it does or not. I haven't been able to find his name written in Japanese anywhere, so I'm unable to check my theory.

(A "cute" note--they took the first part of Shouma's name for Shori's name, and then they took the last part of Shori's name for Yuuri's name. Awww.

(And to go beyond the bounds of ridiculousness: shou can mean "wound", and yuu can mean "heroism". Yuu can mean a whole lot of other things, though, and I think I'm probably reading a little too much in.)

Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora

I watched the six-episode-long Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora today.

It is really, really good. I cried at the end.

Great characters, and a plot that refuses to dumb down a serious and painful issue.

Highly recommended.

BIG NEWS!

Heart-shaped carrot found in Nara

This is very important!

The heart-shaped carrot was found in the garden of Katsuko Nishikawa in Katsuragi and is 12 by 7 centimeters.

Officials of a Nara prefectural agriculture promotion office said that they often saw one carrot with a branch, but that it was infrequent for two carrots to merge together.

But how much does it weigh?!? And what about the rumors of a liaison between this Heart Carrot and Gutsy Radish? The public deserves to know the truth!

A cute car I can actually buy

Mazda's The Slut is pretty damn cute, but check this out:

The Yaris is Toyota's replacement for the Echo (and good riddance, I say). It comes as a "liftback"--in my day we called that a "hatchback"--and a four-door sedan.

I am terribly fond of the liftback. It's like my Subaru. And it's all modern and cute and stuff.

It doesn't come in the lovely pink (or "sakura") color the Laputa does, but that blue is fantastic.

I'm seriously thinking about going over for a test drive...

Middle school kids get to go to Mikoto for class

Lucky!

Through a Communities in Schools grant, about 70 pupils left the school cafeteria behind to experience the culture and cuisine of Mikoto of Kurama Japanese restaurant on Washington Road on Thursday and Friday.

"Many of the kids say 'This is the first time I've eaten at a Japanese restaurant,'" said Mary Crawford, the executive director of Communities in Schools of Augusta/Richmond County.

[...]

Pupils also are learning how to greet someone and order food in the foreign tongue, 13-year-old Janelle Jasper said.

"We learn something other than what we see every day," she said.

The purpose of the class is to do that and more, said Greg Davis, a Tubman Middle counselor, who helps with the grant.

The purpose is also to increase pupils' self-esteem, address attendance problems, decrease the number of discipline issues and boost academics.

"We're just trying to knock their socks off and make learning neat," Mr. Davis said.

As I recall, middle school curriculums were generally awesome, and middle school students were generally pricks. (Not that high school was much better. Ah, the teenage years.)

I rearranged a little today

Here are some pictures.

Our kotatsu came today :) I put it together and got rid of all the packing material and decided to rearrange the living room. I think it's more cozy this way.

Shoving that TV across the room was fun :>

After I finished in the living room, I unpacked stuff in the office, including the fabulous monitor from David. I can't wait to start using dual monitors. Just need to get a plug and a video cable for it.

I also did laundry and cooked dinner. So as you can imagine, I've been busy.

I'm not sure why I'm still awake. I'm going to fold the laundry and go to bed now!

Even more flower pictures (you can't get enough of them, right?)

I went for another walk around the station today (okay, fine, technically yesterday...I'm rarely up this late these days). This time, instead of going down Georgia Avenue to Martintown, I just ran across the street to Observation Way.

The lighting was much better for pictures than it was Thursday.

After awhile of shooting things I'd already taken pictures of, I turned down Sidereal Avenue to see what was back there. The houses were neat, and the yards were more farm-like than those of the houses along Observation. It felt kind of like being in a forest. At the corner, before Sidereal turned back towards Georgia Avenue, there was a trail leading off into the woods. It was the kind of trail that made you think it was really a natural stream that happened to be dry at the time. I wanted to explore it, but seeing as it was likely private property I curbed my natural instincts and turned the other way instead.

I followed Sidereal across the street and past the funeral home again, and when I got to the back street that leads to the station, I went the wrong way, eventually finding a street filled with wisteria. I'd seen it before, on my first walk from the station, back when I didn't have my camera. This time I took plenty of pictures.

I also got my best-ever pictures of bees in flowers.

(Hey, I said my best-ever.)

There are plenty more pictures here.

Hostages as mouthpieces

This is pretty interesting.

The [Christian Science Monitor] report says that contrary to comments [Jill Carroll] made in the video about lenient treatment by the kidnappers, who refer to themselves as the Revenge Brigade, Carroll lived in fear of the kidnappers who had killed her colleague Allen Anwiya, and that even the smallest details of her life - what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak - were at her captors' whim. Before making the video before her release, she was reportedly told that they had already killed another American hostage.

[...]

Her captors "obviously wanted maximum propaganda value in the US," [Jill Carroll's father Jim] Carroll told the Monitor. "After listening to them for three months she already knew exactly what they wanted her to say, so she gave it to them with appropriate acting to make it look convincing."

In the video, the journalist calls on President George Bush to send American troops home.

"He knows this war was wrong," she said. "He knows it was illegal from the very beginning. He knows that it was built on a mountain of lies. I think he needs to finally admit to the American people and make the troops go home.

"He needs to wake up," she said. "The people in America need to wake up and tell him what he's done here is wrong."

It was not possible to reach Carroll to ask her whether she actually held any of the views expressed.

I have a lot of half-formed thoughts about this.

The psychological impact the situation must have had on Carroll is intense. Could it be considered a form of brainwashing? Did she start to believe the things she said in the video? Had she always believed them?

Did the kidnappers believe she believed them? Why would they let her go free if they had any concerns that she might turn around and refute what she said in the video? Unless the purpose of the video was not propaganda, but terror...in other words, "Look what we can do to you. Look what we can make you say."

I'm just glad she's free...

[Update 4/2 1 pm]: The MSNBC article now reads:

Protected by the U.S. military and far from the country where she had been held hostage, Jill Carroll strongly disavowed statements she had made during captivity in Iraq and shortly after her release, saying Saturday she had been repeatedly threatened.

In a video, recorded before she was freed and posted by her captors on an Islamist Web site, Carroll spoke out against the U.S. military presence. But in a statement Saturday, she said the recording was made under threat. Her editor has said three men were pointing guns at her at the time.

"During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me I would be released if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. So I agreed," she said in a statement read by her editor in Boston.

"Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not."

[...]

"At any rate, fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear, I said I wasn’t threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times," she said. "Also, at least two false statements about me have been widely aired: One - that I refused to travel and cooperate with the U.S. military, and two - that I refused to discuss my captivity with U.S. officials. Again, neither statement is true."

The remarks have drawn criticism from conservative bloggers and commentators, but the Monitor said "Carroll did what many hostage experts and past captives would have urged her to do: Give the men who held the power of life and death over her what they wanted."

That bit about the conservative bloggers and commentators has been there since the article was first written, back when we didn't have Carroll's own words disavowing the video. So I'm not sure if they're criticizing what they thought she said, or her for saying it in the first place. I find that paragraph a little misleading.

Are you ready for Masters?

Yes, it's that time again! The thirteenth month. The time when Augusta gets turned upside-down and inside-out and there are like famous people here and stuff.

Masters Week!

I have never borne the full brunt of a Masters. For the last three years, I have spent Masters Week in blissful ignorance of the absurdity of Masters traffic, hiding out in Martinez.

This year, I get to drive to North Augusta every day of Masters Week. Including the weekend.

As Han Solo once said, "Here's where the fun begins."

Fortunately, I have this weekend to relax before the craziness starts...

Today's lunch

I strolled around near the station today. First I headed down Georgia Avenue, taking pictures of all the neat houses. I don't know what is with the weird sloping roofs in North Augusta, but I think they are awesome.

Then I turned right on Martintown Road and headed up to Observation Way, where I made another right. That road is absolutely gorgeous; it's like a huge garden in there.

After that I was out on Georgia Avenue again. I wandered down the street a little bit, then crossed and headed back behind WBBQ.

And that was my lunchbreak. Nice way to spend my time, if I do say so myself!

I'm glad I got to see so many blossoms. They were gorgeous. As the day was beautiful and bright, the pictures don't do the flowers justice, but I hope they at least partially convey the loveliness that surrounded me on my walk.

Getting settled

I'm making curry for dinner. It occurred to me as I placed the onion on the cutting board that I don't have any knives! So I used a steak knife, which was interesting. I had to use it to cut up the chicken, too, since I don't have any kitchen scissors. Where has my brain been? Obviously, those two items are next on my list.

Right now, the meat and vegetables are simmering on the stove. My new pots and pans are awesome (thanks Mom!). They're so shiny and nice. And they're not difficult to use. I seem to be able to understand them pretty well. I'm using one of the Metro pots with the glass lids. It's neat to be able to see what it looks like in the pan when it's simmering.

We ordered a kotatsu, and it's scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. I can't wait. Once it's here, I can figure out how I want to arrange everything else.

We keep going back and forth about a dining room table. I think we're going to hold off for now. We definitely have to get a chest of drawers, and I think Sean is pretty eager to get a bed, but that pretty much covers the absolutely necessary furniture, as we plan to eat at the kotatsu. So we'll see what happens about other furniture.

My car is still at the shop. They haven't even looked at it yet. I'm getting pretty annoyed with *cough*Gerald Jones Subaru on Washington Road*cough*. Depending on what I hear tomorrow (if anything), we may be buying a car as well as furniture this weekend.

I'm hoping for a PT Cruiser.

Check out this awesome email I just got.

From: Benavides Chester [mailto:irrespectively@atlas.cz]
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 4:24 PM
To: Bender Chi
Subject: Re[2]:

muttered in a sleepy voice but without malice : ' All right, then . . . but you'll pay for it ... I warned you, but if you want to ... What interests me most now is Pontius Pilate . . . Pilate . . .' And with that he closed his eyes.
'Vanna, put him in No. 117 by himself and with someone to watch him.'
The doctor gave his instructions and replaced his spectacles. Then Ryukhin shuddered again : a pair of white doors opened without a sound and beyond them stretched a corridor lit by a row of blue night-bulbs. Out of the corridor rolled a couch on rubber wheels. The sleeping Ivan was lifted on to it, he was pushed off down the corridor and the doors closed after him.
'Doctor,' asked the shaken Ryukhin in a whisper, ' is he really ill?'
'Oh yes,' replied the doctor.
'Then what's the matter with him?' enquired Rvukhin timidly.
The exhausted doctor looked at Ryukhin and answered wearily:
'Overstimulation of the motor nerves and speech centres . .

Wow :D

A little Googling turns up that this is a copy and paste job from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Is this the new strategy? Rather than try to create realistic blocks of text, simply copy existing blocks?

Regardless, it's funny.

(And who's Bender Chi? That name is awesome. I may have to use it somewhere.)

Car = dead

Well, not dead so much as making a weird noise rather than, you know, starting. The engine seems like it's going to start, but then it hangs and doesn't catch.

Car's on its way to the shop and I'm at work now. Here's a silly audio post I made while I was waiting for Sean to come pick me up.