March 2009 MOB Party - The Taste Of Yesterday's Wine

Miracles appear in the strangest of places
Fancy me finding you here
The last time I saw you was just out of Houston
Let me sit down, let me buy you a beer

Your presence is welcome with me and my friend here
This is a hangout of mine
We come here quite often and listen to music
And to taste yesterday's wine

"Yesterday's Wine" by Merle Haggard and George Jones


The Minnesota Organization of Blogs (MOB) has never really had any stated goals, but if you looked at what has happened over the past few years, and looked at what MOB members have blogged about over the past few years, you might get the impression that the MOB has had an agenda, and has been successfully implementing that agenda.

What do I mean? MOB members have written countless posts fisking the pompous platitudes of Star-Tribune columnist Nick Coleman. The MOB motto "We Know Stuff" comes from Coleman's famous anti-blogger screed from September 2004. It was made public this very weekend that Nick Coleman was no longer writing for the Star-Tribune.

And when the MOB members weren't writing about Nick Coleman, we were writing about the Star-Tribune, complaining about its partisan coverage and non-coverage, the ideas to which it gave prime editorial page real estate, and its war against new media. In January 2009, the Star-Tribune filed for bankruptcy. Many bloggers pointed out that it didn't have to end this way. But quite a few of us found the Star-Tribune's sense of entitlement as influencers, and their exaltation of journalism as some kind of noble science, to be good reasons for their demise.

If it makes you happy
It can't be that bad
If it makes you happy
Then why the hell are you so sad?

"If It Makes You Happy" by Sheryl Crow


The MOB party in July of 2007 was a crowded, raucous affair, with both the inside and outside of Keegan's Irish Pub filled to overflowing. By comparison, this party was relatively subdued. It could have been because I got there at 8:00 pm, instead of 6:00 pm when the party started. But it could also be because the blogging medium has changed.

How has it changed? It's become an internet marketing tool, a place where people put posts about certain things to attract people who will look at and click on certain kinds of ads, and buy certain things. And when blogging stopped being about putting something interesting to me in public view, and started being about not leaving influence on the table, blogging stopped being fun for me.

That's one reason why I haven't blogged very much here at Crossword Bebop lately. I've been having more fun at Twitter. It's all down to a science now, how to have a blog that gets lots of visits, and I break all those rules, and I don't get very many visits. But those who mind don't matter to me, and those who matter to me don't mind.

How has the blogging medium changed? It's become shorter and faster. When Jorn Barger coined the word weblog, he was thinking of making a log of neat web sites he visited. The microblogging space of Twitter, identi.ca, Yammer, trillr and related sites have recaptured some of that original spirit of blogging, where a Twitter tweet is linking to a news story or blog post. Twitter has clearly arrived as a cultural phenomenon when it's being mocked in Doonesbury.


But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day

"Both sides Now" by Judy Collins


So who was at the party? The "lifers," the people who were blogging before blogging was cool, and are still blogging even though blogging isn't really cool anymore. David Strom and Margaret Martin were walking out as I was walking in. Margaret gave me some very kind comments on my Twitter stream. James Lileks was holding court about halfway between the bar and the front door. Mitch Berg was the most official MOB person there, and was introducing people, but there weren't very many people who didn't know each other already. I had nice chats with John LaPlante and Craig Westover, and spoke briefly with Learned Foot, the Nihilist, Atomizer, Flash and Kevin Ecker. The only person I saw that I didn't talk to was Gary Miller.

So to me, the MOB party was a ruby red glass of yesterday's wine.

Flying Imams - DOT Isn't Buying What CAIR Is Selling

It was reported last week in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press that the Department of Transportation found that US Airways didn't discriminate against the Flying Imams when US Airways removed the imams from a flight in November 2006.

There are various things to consider from reading the February 18 David Hanners article in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press on the Flying Imams case.

The Saudi-funded radical Islamist front group CAIR must have decided that trying to market the Flying Imams as something other than a CAIR grievance theatre production was a lost cause. They submitted their complaint about the people removed from the AirTran flight in January of this year as an exhibit

Samuel Podberesky, Assistant General Counsel for Aviation Enforcement and Proceedings for the Department of Transportation, wrote a letter to CAIR. This letter basically said that Capt. Wood made the decision to deny transportation based on the behavior of the imams, as opposed to any racial or religious discrimination. This is an excellent development, in my opinion, because Omar Mohammedi, lawyer for the imams, told the media in July 2008 that the lawsuit was a racial profiling case.

I can only surmise that this letter was submitted as an exhibit by the plaintiffs, because it was a letter written to CAIR. I am bewildered that the letter was submitted at all. If I was one of the imams, I wouldn't want this letter, which clearly and succinctly shoots down a big chunk of my case, to see the light of day.

When I went over US Airways MSP Station Manager Penny Breedlove's statement, I snarkily commented "You can tell that US Airways probably doesn't have a protocol in place for rebooking people acting like terrorists." That actually is the case, and the rest of Podberesky's letter addresses how not having a written policy in place for rebooking people cleared to travel is a violation of Federal law. While the creation of such a written policy may very well be a result of this lawsuit, it was not the original intention of this lawsuit, which was to terrorize passengers by the threat of legal action out of reporting suspicious behaviors.

And speaking of terrorizing passengers, there's a loose end to consider.
Why isn't Michael McCombie, the passenger who wrote the note that started all this, talking to the media? While he's no longer facing legal action as a "John Doe," he didn't show his face on camera when he spoke to a local TV station in February 2007, and his identity was not reported. But since his identity was reported in the Pioneer-Press in July of 2008, it's on the Internet now, which, as we all know, is forever. I believe he's essentially been terrorized out of speaking to the media, which is a lowdown dirty rotten shame, in my opinion.

America Is Thinking To Itself Today

I've asked a number of people if they heard Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem. Most people didn't, and those who did said they weren't impressed. I didn't hear it read, as I was on the road at the time, but when I read it later, I thought "Oh, this is 'I Hear America Singing' by Walt Whitman, warmed over." It took her too long to get warmed up, in my opinion, but I particularly liked the last verse...

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

Readers of Crossword Bebop know that I'm no fan of President Obama. And in my mind, the spirit of possibility in Ms. Alexander's poem that was there on Inauguration Day has been put in a burlap sack and beaten with a baseball bat by the actions and events since then. There's a voice in my head that says "Ok, Mr. Smarty-Pants, if you're going to complain about Elizabeth Alexander's poem, why don't you write a better one?" I make no claim that this is better; I only claim that it is mine. I also want to write a poem that captures my feelings of that day, before I forget them.

America Is Thinking To Itself Today

Today is a cloudy day in America,
A great, cloudy day in America today.

The pathways of past days are crowded,
Crowded as the streets and the Capital Mall,
With reconsideration, reflection, recollection.

America is thinking to itself today.

The slaves stir from slumber and say,
"They really meant it, didn't they?"

The soldiers of Shiloh and Selma,
Of the battles of Birmingham and Bull Run
Believe it was worth it.

"Is His Justice satisfied?"
"Has the Eagle gotten his seat back?"

These anxious questions have a happy answer,

"It's a beautiful day for company to come!"

Tell me of our troubles tomorrow,
I'm in no mood to interrupt
The flowing stream of happy thoughts
America is thinking to itself today.

2009 LSSU Banished Words List

Instead of using the banished "It's that time of year again," I'll just write that it's time to consider the words banished from the Queen's English for mis-use, over-use, and general uselessness.

GREEN – The ubiquitous 'Green' and all of its variables, such as 'going green,' 'building green,' 'greening,' 'green technology,' 'green solutions' and more, drew the most attention from those who sent in nominations this year.

["Green" as a transitive verb is the use of this word that got me. But even the adjective could mean a lot of different things, such as requiring few resources to produce, energy-efficient, easily recyclable, biodegradable, etc.]

CARBON FOOTPRINT or CARBON OFFSETTING – "It is now considered fashionable for everyone, tree hugger or lumberjack alike, to pay money to questionable companies to 'offset' their own 'carbon footprint.' What a scam! Get rid of it immediately!" Ginger Hunt, London, England.

Mike of Chicago says that when he hears the phrase 'carbon footprint,' "I envision microscopic impressions on the surface of the earth where an atom of carbon forgot to wear its shoes."

[I love Mike's mental image. On further review, a carbon atom has 2 of its 6 electrons in an inner shell, and the remaining 4 in an outer shell. These four electrons stay more or less at four corners of a tetrahedron, so if a carbon atom really made an impression on the surface of the earth, it would be a little triangle.

It's a pity that LSSU didn't give any comments about carbon offsetting. Actually, carbon offsetting should have been banned last year, but better late than never]

MAVERICK – "The constant repetition of this word for months before the US election diluted whatever meaning it previously had. Even the comic offshoot 'mavericky' was terribly overused. A minimum five-year banishment of both words is suggested so they will not be available during the next federal election." Matthew Mattila, Green Bay, Wisc.

[I'm ok with this, because it now has multiple meanings. Senator McCain intended it to mean "a person capable of independent thought," but now it also means "a person who enjoys discouraging his political party."]

FIRST DUDE – "Skateboard English is not an appropriate way to refer to the spouse of a high-ranking public official." Paul Ruschmann, Canton, Mich.

BAILOUT – "Use of emergency funds to remove toxic assets from banks' balance sheets is not a bailout. When your cousin calls you from jail in the middle of the night, he wants a bailout." Ben Green, State College, Penn.

WALL STREET/MAIN STREET – "When this little dyad first came into use at the start of the financial crisis, I thought it was a clever use of parallelism. But it's simply over-used. No 'serious' discussion of the crisis can take place without some political figure lamenting the fact that the trouble on Wall Street is affecting 'folks' on Main Street." Charles Harrison, Aiken, SC.

[ACORN is to blame for this one.]

Internet and texting blues -MONKEY – "Especially on the Internet, many people seem to think they can make any boring name sound more attractive just by adding the word 'monkey' to it. Do a search to find the latest. It is no longer funny." Rogier Landman, Somerville, Mass.

Such as the Jonathan Coulton song "Code Monkey"



<3 – Supposed to resemble a heart, or stand for the word 'love.' Used when sending those important text messages to loved ones. "Just say the word instead of making me turn my head sideways and wondering what 'less than three' means." Andrea Estrada, Chicago.

[As far as I know, this is the first time an emoticon has made the banished words list. It will certainly not be the last.]

ICON or ICONIC – Overused, especially among entertainers and in entertainment news, according to Robyn Yates of Dallas, who says that "every actor, actress and entertainment magazine show overuses this." One of the most-nominated words of the year. "Everyone and everything cannot be 'iconic.' Can't we switch to 'legendary' or 'famous for'? In our entertainment-driven culture, it seems everyone in show business is 'iconic' for some reason or another. "John Flood, Bray, Wicklow, Ireland. "It's becoming the new 'awesome' - overused to the point where everything from a fast-food restaurant chain to celebrities is 'iconic.'" Jodi Gill, New Berlin, Wisc. "Just because a writer recognizes something does not make it an icon (a visual symbol or representation which inspires worship or veneration) or iconic. It just means that the writer has seen it before." Brian Murphy, Fairfield, Conn.

[I don't watch much entertainment news, so I haven't noticed this unwholesome two-fer of overuse and misuse. Jodi Gill actually used two banished expressions in one sentence when she said "iconic is the new awesome." In spite of a lifetime ban, people keep using awesome, and "x is the new y" was banished last year.]

GAME CHANGER – "It's game OVER for this cliché, which gets overused in the news media, political arenas and in business." Cynthia, Mt. Pleasant, Mich.

STAYCATION – "Occurrences of this word are going up with gas prices.'Vacation' does not mean 'travel,' nor does travel always involve vacation. Let's send this word on a slow boat to nowhere." Dan Muldoon, Omaha, Neb.

I wrote a post about the word staycation in August of 2008. Debra Hamel and Lucas Newcomer will be pleased to see it on the banished words list.

DESPERATE SEARCH – "Every time the news can't find something intelligent to report, they start on a 'desperate search' for someone, somewhere." Rick A. Hyatt, Saratoga, Wyo.

["Desperate search" has a lot more drama than "exhaustive search" or "complete search."]

NOT SO MUCH – "I wish that the phrase was used not so much," says Tom Benson of Milwaukee, who notes that it is used widely in news media, especially in sports, i.e. 'The Gophers have a shot at the playoffs; the Chipmunks, not so much.' "Casual language usage is acceptable. 'Not so much?' Not so much." David Hollis, Hubbardsville, NY. "Do I like concise writing? Yes. Do I like verbose clichés? Not so much." David W. Downing, St. Paul, Minn. "A favorite of snarky critics and bloggers." Jeff Baenen, Minneapolis, Minn.

[The David W. Downing is my colleague in the Minnesota Organization of Blogs, author of Downing World.]

WINNER OF FIVE NOMINATIONS – "It hasn't won an Academy Award yet. It has only been NOMINATED!" John Bohenek, Abilene, Tex.

[Actually, in the culture of Hollywood, a nomination is a significant accomplishment, since it confers membership in the Academy, and the chance to nominate and vote on the Oscars. On the other hand, it goes to show that Hollywood thinks what's important in Hollywood is important in America.]

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN – Nominated by Kathleen Brosemer of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., for "general overuse and meaninglessness. When is it not 'that time of year again?' From Valentine's sales to year-end charity letters, invitations to summer picnics and Christmas parties, it's 'that time' of year again. Just get to the point of the solicitation, invitation, and newsletter and cut out six useless and annoying words."

I looked at the 2008 list to see if there were any words worthy of rehabilitation. My head started hurting as I looked at the list...

2008 Predictions Recap

December 31, 2007 seems like such a long time ago, but it was really only a year ago. It's time to dust off the predictions made for 2008, and see how many of them came to pass.

While the New England Patriots didn't win Super Bowl XLII, they were in Super Bowl XLII. And while Randy Moss was not the MVP, he did score the touchdown that put the Patriots ahead, and made millions of football fans around the country think "Well, that's it on that." The victory by the Giants was a satisfying verdict on Bill Belichick's poor sportsmanship.

Canada’s Human Rights Commission decided in June 2008 that they’re not quite ready to muzzle Maclean's and Mark Steyn. Furthermore, Ontario's Human Rights Commission dropped the complaint in April 2008. The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal graciously allowed Maclean's to continue publishing in October 2008. The exposure of the censorship racket of the Canadian Human Rights Commissions was an encouraging development in 2008. I hereby withdraw my prediction for 2009 that Maclean's and Mark Steyn will be muzzled in 2009.

No radical Islamic leader in Canada publicly declared that Canada belongs to Allah in 2008. In fact, the phrase "Canada belongs to Allah" yielded only three results. I'm delighted to be wildly wrong on that one.

Not only was there an honor killing in America on the very first day of 2008, there was another honor killing in Georgia (the state, not the country) in July 2008. Irrelevant feminists said nothing, thus staying irrelevant. I was righter than I wanted to be on this one.

I got the part about "youths" rioting, but the city was wrong, this year it's Malmo, Sweden instead of Cliché-sous-Bois, France. And there doesn't seem to be much of a response. So much for that prediction.

I was completely wrong in predicting that Michael McCombie, the passenger in seat 26D on U. S. Airways Flight 300, November 20, 2006, who passed a note to a flight attendant about the Flying Imams, was in fact a co-conspirator with the six imams in their successful attempt to get removed from the plane before takeoff.

So, 2 for 6, or .333, which just goes to show that prediction is difficult, especially when it's about the future.

Sunday New York Times Acrostic - The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

Virginia Postrel recently wrote on Depression Chic:

If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship--without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s. (We're all yuppies now.) The Boston Globe's Drake Bennett asked a bunch of people, including me, what a 21st-century Depression might look like. The results sounded pretty damned good to some people--a sure sign of an affluent society, or at least affluent commentators.

But Depression Chic has even infected the Crossword section of the New York Times, with the selection coming from the book "The Worst Hard Tiime: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl" by Timothy Egan. Egan won a National Book Award for this book.

When the dust fell, it penetrated everything; nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom. Well, the eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away, like a walk in space.

I prefer doing this puzzle on paper, but I did this puzzle using the Java applet version. Getting the word "eeriest" in the grid was a little tricky, and I bit on the last word being "peace" instead of "space." I read in some blog somewhere that a good way to remember that Polk was the eleventh President of the U.S. was to think of eggs - add one more yolk to Polk and you have a dozen, so I actually knew that.

Sunday New York Times Crossword - Name That Phrase

Somehow when I moved Crossword Bebop to Word Press, I went on a lengthy crossword dither, for no particular good reason. But on further review, I'm going to continue my ongoing quest to make Crossword Bebop the premier crossword blog of the Anglosphere, and part of that is blogging on the New York Times Crossword...

In this puzzle, composed by Trip Payne, the first letters in each word spellout the first name of the person mentioned in the clues.

Crossword puzzles love Isak Dinesen.

I saw a Yu-gi-oh episode in my mind's eye when Oh no was clued as "This can't be!"
"Your monster has lost 300 attack points for the next two turns!" I keep waiting for the line "I love wiping that confident smirk off your ugly face," but it never comes...

Mho appears from time to time in crossword puzzles. I love the word mho, as it measures the opposite of what ohms measure. I was discussing with my children what the opposite of a high-five should be called, and my 10-year-old daughter suggested "vif-hgih," where two people put their hands together slowly, then draw them away quickly. But it sounds too much like wi-fi, so I suggested "nega-five," as in "Ooh, nega-five for the Lions!"

I was defeated by the word enisles for "Banishes to Elba, e. g.", wanting it so badly to be exiles, and unfamiliar with the term in esse.

Everything John Lennon Knew Was Wrong

I'm thinking about John Lennon today, as yesterday was the 38th anniversary of his tragic death at the hands of Mark Chapman. But that's not what got me thinking about John Lennon. These young ladies got me thinking about John Lennon on December 8, 2007.



They were on the corner of Ford Parkway and Cleveland Avenue in St. Paul in the early afternoon of Saturday, December 8, 2007. They made and displayed these signs as a personal project. I was intrigued by their level of interest, and conversed with them briefly. I considered it ironic that they were unaware that the previous day was the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

There are so many people who are inspired by the John Lennon song "Imagine." I consider it a great pity that Lennon was so eloquent a spokesman for such horrible ideas...

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.


The apostle Paul wrote "If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied." (I Corinthians 15:19, NAS). Lennon thought that nations and religions were the cause of wars, but he obviously didn't read James 4, which tells us that wars and strife come from our own divided loyalties between God and the world. The Buddhists say that one should stop saying "This is mine" and "This is not mine," but even in heaven, there will be things one has that no one else has.

Sometime in 2007, I read about seven Columbian youth who experienced dramatic visions of hell. I found it curious that out of the many people in hell described in these visions, only one of them was mentioned by name...

The place was divided into different sections of torment and suffering. One of the first sections that the Lord allowed us to see was the "Valley of the Cauldrons" as we called it. There were millions of cauldrons. The cauldrons were inlaid at the level of the ground; each of them was burning with lava inside. Inside each one was the soul of a person who had died and gone to hell.

As soon as those souls saw the Lord, they started to shout and screamed, "Lord, have mercy on us! Lord give me a chance to get out of this place! Lord, take me out and I will tell the world that this place is real!" But the Lord didn't even look at them. There were millions of men, women and young people in that place. We also saw homosexuals and drunkards in torment. We saw all of these people shouting in such great torment.

It shocked us to see how their bodies were destroyed. Worms were coming in and out of their empty eye sockets, mouths, and ears; and were penetrating the skin all through their bodies. This fulfills the word of God written in the book of Isaiah 66:24 "They shall go forth; they shall gaze upon the dead bodies of those who have rebelled against Me; for their worm shall not die, nor shall their fire be quenched; they shall be an abhorrence to all mankind." Also in Mark 9:44, "Where their worm never ceases and the fire is not put out." We were just horrified at what we were watching. We saw flames about 9 to 12 feet high. Within each flame, there was the soul of a person that has died and went to hell.

The Lord allowed us to see a man who was inside of one of the cauldrons. He was upside down and the flesh on his face was falling in pieces. He remained watching the Lord intently; and then started to shout and call on the name of Jesus. He said, "Lord have mercy! Lord give me a chance! Lord take me out of this place!" But the Lord Jesus didn't want to look at him. Jesus simply turned his back on him. When Jesus did this, the man started to curse and blaspheme the Lord. This man was John Lennon, the member of the satanic music group "The Beatles." John Lennon was a man who mocked and made fun of the Lord during his life. He said that the Christianity was going to disappear and Jesus Christ would be forgotten by everyone. However, today this man is in hell and Jesus Christ is alive!! Christianity hasn't disappeared either.


I understand this is a most unpleasant thing to contemplate, but everyone has to, sooner or later, preferably sooner.

A Post On The Progress Of Parvanimous

I was positively pleased to perceive my referral log reporting that someone had visited Crossword Bebop because of a search on the word "parvanimous." I believe I've found a kindred spirit in Betty K., who offered some suggestions for new words

Another word that popped into my mind in quite different circumstances was PARVANIMITY. One of my favorite words and concepts is magnanimity, from the Latin magna, great, and anima, mind or soul. Parvanimity is its opposite, as parva is Latin for small. The word comes to mind when I encounter scrunched-up tight tiny minds in discussion of politics, religion, or the behavior of one's neighbors.


There were a grand total of 28 search results for the word parvanimous. Five of them were due to either the previous post on parvanimous, or some chit-chatting on Twitter on whether parvanimous is preferable to micronanimous.

Parvanimous made the Princeton Spectator glossary of absurd words.

Parvanimous made a list of words with an anima fragment at Robertson's Words For A Modern Age.

Harold Hark reports Australia has become a land of parvanimous squidgereens. (I think squidgereen is a Harold Hark invention.)

When A. R. Wells reflected on the attitude of Joseph toward his brothers, he wrote:

In dealing with my brothers who have wronged me, am I, like Joseph, magnanimous, great-minded? When I withhold forgiveness, is it always for their growth in grace, and never for my own vindictiveness? Is my chief desire not to humiliate them, but to better them? Am I parvanimous or magnanimous?

The last search result had a link to the word parvitude, which means exactly what it should mean; littleness, the opposite of magnitude. So if we have magnitude and parvitude, we should have magnanimity and parvanimity as well.

It would seem that parvanimous was part of standard usage 100 years ago, but fell out of favor somewhere along the way. Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote that four years of Latin in high school would dramatically arrest the decline in American education.

The Breath And The Day

There once was a breath,
The breath was sad because it had
The singular misfortune
Of being the breath of a dust mite
On a mote in plain sight
Of the hose of an elephant's nose.

The little breath felt cruelly bossed
By the elephant's breath, which
Tossed and turned like an angry sea, and seemed
In unhappy comparison,
Like the great, rushing mighty wind
On the day of Pentecost.

There once was a day,
A gray day that didn't want to play
Because it wasn't the birthday
Of anyone wise, mighty or noble.
A day where nothing
Of notable memory
Happened to happen.

There once was a man,
Who thought if he can
Consider the unhappiness
Of the breath and the day,
Then he also could say,
"Thank You for all these breaths,
Thank You for all these days."
So he did.

Flying Imams - Two Years Later

While the actual date was November 21, 2006, it occured on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and thus it is fitting to write another Flying Imams post. Here is my first Flying Imams post, here is the "one year later post,".

In the last year, the schedule for discovery and trial has emerged, with the trial taking place in June 2009.

Here are the number of Google search results for the exact phrase "flying while Muslim"

Past 24 Hours - 2
Past Week - 7
Past Month - 38
Past Year - 205
Anytime - 568

While the 24 hour, week and month figures are slightly higher than a year ago, the year and anytime figures are significantly lower than last year, from which I grasp the same thing I grasped last year. The "'flying while Muslim' is the new 'driving while black'" meme is not getting traction. Another piece of evidence for that claim is that Google Trends didn't consider the phrase to be important enough to monitor.

The identity of the passenger who passed the note to the flight attendant is now known. I could be wrong, but I'm currently assuming that if Michael McCombie won't talk to the media, then he won't talk to me either.

Another related trial recently finished. The Holy Land Foundation and five of its former organizers were found guilty of funneling $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Frontpage magazine reported in April of 2007...

Throughout his time with and after leaving ICT (the Islamic Center of Tucson), Shahin was involved in terror financing organizations. He was the Arizona Coordinator for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a Hamas charity whose funds were frozen by the U.S. government soon after 9/11. Under his leadership, thousands of dollars were raised for HLF through ICT. As well, Shahin was a representative for KindHearts, another Hamas charity that was shut down by the U.S. (February 2006).

Even though the first Holy Land Foundation trial ended in a mistrial, the connection between the HLF and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) became much clearer during the course of that trial. Over the past year, CAIR has been exposed as a Saudi-funded Islamist front group, an organization with only 1,700 members, funded by foreign potentates.

And Omar Shahin himself has been in the news lately. This recent article in the Arizona Republic mentioned both the Holy Land Foundation trial and the Flying Imams attack, but the bit about the AK-47 target practice was news to me...

Shortly before noon on a sunny Sunday in March, two Toyota SUVs rolled to a stop along a dirt road in north Phoenix.

About 20 young Muslim males climbed out, armed with assault rifles, a shotgun, a sniper rifle and handguns. The location near Happy Valley Road and 51st Avenue is a desert recreation site for off-road motorists, hikers and bikers, dozens of whom were enjoying the spring-like weather.

For more than an hour, the shooters blasted away at a granite rock and empty cans in front of a hill.

Officials estimate the fusillade totaled 500 to 1,000 rounds. Some shooters left before police arrived and detained 10 adults and five boys, including an 11-year-old.

The young men and boys told officers the weapons belonged to their parents. They said they were not aware it was illegal to use firearms in the residential area.

Six were arrested and charged with felony weapons violations in Maricopa County Superior Court. Among them were the 20- and 21-year-old sons of two imams at Phoenix-area mosques, as well as the 20-year-old son of Abdallah [Akram Musa Abdallah of Mesa, Arizona, indicted by a grand jury in August on one count of lying to FBI agents].

Phoenix police then notified the Arizona Counter Terrorism Center, a clearinghouse for intelligence, and the case was referred to the FBI, Lewis confirmed. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was called to trace the guns, its Arizona chief said.

One of the six arrested was Oday Shahin, 20-year-old son of Omar Shahin. So Omar Shahin owns an AK-47?!? But that's not what got me. This is what got me.

Shahin and his son share other connections with people involved in events that drew the FBI's interest. Omar and Oday Shahin work with a third imam from the plane, Didmar Faja, a 28-year-old Albanian, at a conservative Islamic school in south Phoenix. Saiaf Abdallah, son of Akram Abdallah, accused of lying to the FBI, also works there, and his mother is a board member.

Shahin declined to comment except to say that his son's target-shooting arrest is "no big deal" and to caution against drawing unfair conclusions. "All I want to say is there is no connection between these things."


No big deal? No big deal?!? I can just hear it now..."I think you're really overdramatizing the whole AK-47 thing..."

And if that wasn't enough, Robert Spencer wrote about Omar Shahin this week:

“A Muslim must try his best to abide by the rulings of Sharia [Islamic law] whenever possible as much as he can. He should not allow himself to be liable to those western laws that contradict the clear-cut Islamic rulings.” The rulings of Sharia, mind you, include stoning for adultery, amputation of the hand for theft, and institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims. But the speaker was not some fanatic Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia; it was the Phoenix-based imam Omar Shahin, president of the North American Imams Foundation. This is probably one reason why, as The Arizona Republic reported Monday, the FBI has stepped up scrutiny of Shahin and other Muslim leaders in Phoenix.


When I think of Omar Shahin, I think of Simon Cowell's comment to Sanjaya Malakar on American Idol: "You are in your own universe and if people like you, good luck." While Omar Shahin is in his own universe, he is being in his own universe in my country, and worse, as a citizen of my country. As Scott Johnson said, the truth in this trial will set us free. I'm looking forward to the trial.

Thinking About Names

If you only think about the parts of the Bible that you understand, you are missing out on the full experience. Here is one of those parts of the Bible over which I am mystified. Jesus is closing his message to the church at Pergamum in Revelation 2...

‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.’ (Revelation 2:17, NASB)

This message to the church at Pergamum is one of seven messages given to churches, and each message concludes with a promise to those who overcome. Apparently at the time when this was written, it was the custom for someone on trial to be given a white stone to signify their acquittal, as opposed to a black stone to signify their conviction. That would go along with some of the other promises made to overcomers. But that new name is a precious mystery. It's a name that signifies what you mean to Jesus, who Jesus says you are...

I recalled this verse when I read this poem by Rumi...

Names

You should try to hear the name the Holy One has for things.
There is something in the phrase: "The Holy One taught him names."
We name everything according to the number of legs it has;
The holy one names it according to what is inside.
Moses waved his stick; he thought it was a "rod."
But inside its name was "dragonish snake."
We thought the name of Umar meant: "agitator against priests"
But in eternity his name is "the one who believes."
No one knows our name until our last breath goes out.

No, I don't get the Umar reference. And that Rumi poem was in the same book of poetry with this Emily Dickenson poem...

I'm ceded -- I've stopped being Theirs --
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I've finished threading -- too --

Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace --
Unto supremest name --
Called to my Full -- The Crescent dropped --
Existence's whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.

My second Rank -- too small the first --
Crowned -- Crowing -- on my Father's breast --
A half unconscious Queen --
But this time -- Adequate -- Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown --

I know I don't grasp the full significance, but that name on the white stone is something I'm supposed to aspire to, to look forward to as my name in eternity, my supremest name...

Happy Birthday, Ask For The Old Roads!

How many million blogs are there? How many blogs have I started? Why, sweet why, does the world need another blog? Why, sweet why, do I need to start another blog?

Because as far as I know, no one is blogging about what I will blog about at my new blog Ask For The Old Roads.

I don't exactly remember when it was, but there was a time when I was asking people to conduct a thought experiment with me. I asked, if they were given the power to require three books to be read by humanity, which books would they select? My choices were at first, the Bible, the Federalist Papers, and The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. However, King Banaian suggested that I replace The Wealth of Nations with The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. And given that King is an economist and all, I decided to take his suggestion.

So Ask For The Old Roads is what will happen when ideas from those three books connect. Part of that will be connecting the ideas in these three books with current situations. Part of that will be clothing the ideas in current language. There will be connections with blogs with similar visions. But given the way I've blogged in all the other blogs I've started, I'll probably write some posts that aren't even tangentially related to this original vision.

The title is from Jeremiah 6:16, from a chapter describing God's exasperation with the wickedness of Jerusalem, and its eventual destruction:

This is what the LORD says:
"Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, 'We will not walk in it.'

I hope Ask For The Old Roads helps...I hope you'll stop by and say hello!

Word-To-Be Of The Day - Breedist

I'm making this a word-to-be of the day for multiple reasons. I was inspired by the positing of possible Presidential pooch preferences:

Because Malia, 10, has allergies, the family wants a low-allergy dog. But Obama said they also want to adopt a puppy from an animal shelter, which could make it harder to find a breed that wouldn't aggravate his daughter's problem.

"Obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me," Obama said with a smile. "So whether we're going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household."


Now, it's plain at this point that I'm no fan of President-Elect Obama. And quite a few pixels were darkened about how race was pushed into the selection of the Presidential dog. But I'm wanting to give President-Elect Obama some credit for attempting to make a self-deprecating remark. You may not have believed that he meant it, but I consider it a definite step in the right direction of dialing back the messianic hubris.

It's only been pointed out countless times that the word "racist" is technically meaningless, as what were called races at one time are merely varieties of one species. If you want to get technical about it, the vast majority of people are mutts, as genetic material from all sorts of places are in most people's DNA. As I reflected on this, I grasped that the "muttiness" of the human race is one of its great strengths, making it much harder for any one particular enemy (disease, environmental stress, etc.) to wipe us out. Furthermore, I've owned purebred dogs in my life, and sometimes they've paid a terrible price for the purity of their breeding by having the breed's common disease (hip displasia in German Shepherds). So when applied to human beings, muttiness is both common and underrated.

The Bible doesn't talk about races. It uses a finer distinction. The word translated as "nations" is the same word from which we get the word "ethnic." It has nothing to do with nation-states. There a quite a few more nations then there are nation-states. People involved in Christian missions refer to them as "people groups."

But ethnicist is a hard word to say. So instead of saying racist, one should say breedist, as someone with the prejudiced belief that one breed, one people group (usually their own) or is intrinsically superior to all others.

Will it catch on? Like I know.

Barack Obama And The Spirit Of Violence

In September 2008, speaking in Elko, Nevada, President-Elect Barack Obama encouraged his followers to become more confrontational...

In Elko, Obama tried to anticipate his critics and called on the crowd of about 1,500 to sharpen their elbows, too.

"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face," he said.


Iowahawk observed this and recruited Alex and his droogs from the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange, as Obama campaign volunteers...

LAS VEGAS, NV -- Barack Obama stepped up his attacks on Republican rival John McCain today during a campaign stop in Nevada, telling supporters to "get in the faces" of waivering voters with his message of hope, change, and "brass fisties."

"Righty right, me malenky droogs," said Obama, nonchalantly spinning a steel baton while pacing the stage before a packed audience at a Las Vegas baseball stadium. "Come with uncle and hear all proper! Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are all invited. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their faces, with bootsie-woots if thou it suits."


Actually, the bit about hearing angel trumpets and devil trombones was when Alex was in the record store chatting up the two teeny-boppers, and the part about "bootsie-woots if thou it suits" was pure Iowahawk. But I have something to share with you that directly relates to Iowahawk's post. It comes from a gentleman named Steve Foss. But before I share it with you, I should provide some context and disclaimers.

I came across this message while browsing the message digest of a Christian Yahoo! group to which I belong. I am repeating this message in its entirety, with no edits. Here is a page with Steve Foss's account of his life and ministry, but there seems to be very little independent information regarding Steve Foss. I only have his word for it that he prophesied what he said he did in 2000. I had never heard of him before reading this message.

A Prophetic Warning from Pastor Steve Foss Sat, 25 Oct 2008

I am writing to you today an urgent message concerning the coming American election. God has released me to share with you a powerful prophecy He gave me eight years ago. I have shared this prophecy in a number of public meetings, but I have never published it for all our friends and partners.

In January of 2000 God gave me an incredible insight into what was about to happen in the coming elections in America over the next decade.

I am not using this e-mail to tell you, who are citizens of America , who to vote for. However, you need to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying. Never in my 22 years of ministry have I seen such a spirit of delusion released upon our country.

In January of 2000, while the Republican nomination for president was far from being decided, God spoke to me that George W. Bush would be the president of the United States .

He told me it would be the hardest fought election in American history. I'm sure we can all remember the incredible battle that took place in Florida . He told me that President Bush would be elected to two terms. He told me that during Bush's term there would be a season of unprecedented economic prosperity.

Now despite what the media has said, the economic wealth created during the last eight years was unprecedented. I know the media and one of the political parties has been trying to paint the last eight years as the worst economic time in American history, but it is absolutely untrue. If you look at the wealth created, there were more millionaires created in the last eight years than any time in history.

Multitudes of people were able to sell real estate before the housing market collapse, and received incredible transfers of wealth. I could spend hours showing documentation of the wealth created, but suffice it to say, the evidence is there.

God then said to me, "At the end of President Bush's second term there would be an economic collapse." As everyone in the world knows, we have just faced the greatest economic threat since 1929 and the Great Depression. I will speak a little more about the present economic situation a little later in this message.

Every detail that God gave me has come to pass exactly as He said. Now there is one more important thing that God spoke to me. This is the purpose and the reason I am writing this e-mail today. God spoke to me that after George W. Bush, America would elect its most ungodly president ever.

I'm going to say that again. God spoke to me that after George W. Bush, America would elect its most ungodly president ever.

As of the writing of this e-mail we are now less than two weeks away from voting for our next president. At this time the polls are strongly showing that the Democratic nominee for president will easily win the White House.

Now in 2006 I began to ask the Lord, "Is that guaranteed to happen in 2008?" He spoke to me very clearly and gave me the key words to what I believe holds this election in the balance right now. He gave me these key words that can forever change what is about to happen in America .

He said, "It depends on the Christians."

I am not going to endorse a candidate, nor am I telling anyone who to vote for. I am simply sharing what God has shown me.

I had a vision earlier this year. I saw Barack Obama in this vision. He was speaking to a large crowd and being broadcast on television. He was speaking incredible words of unity, peace, and bringing all sides together; the words were elegant, the words were comforting, and the words were inspiring.

But while he was speaking I saw all a powerful spirit of violence coming out of his spirit feeding into the spirits of those that were hearing him. That spirit of violence was directed at anybody who opposed what he was saying. Those who heard his words and received it had the spirit of violence being implanted inside of them. It was a rage like I have not seen before.

It was the rage that would be unleashed against those who oppose and stand in the way of Barack Obama's agenda. We are already seeing the beginnings of this spirit manifested here in America . The vicious attacks against Sarah Palin have been unlike anything we have ever seen before. The sheer hate for this woman from people who knew nothing about her, and who claim to stand up and protect the little people, and women, has been shocking.

We now see it with Joe the plumber. These people who are under the influence of this demon spirit of rage desire to completely destroy this man because he dared to question Barack Obama. In fact it wasn't just the question; it was because Barack Obama revealed his true agenda that Joe the plumber became a threat. So the supporters of Barack Obama who had been fed and affected by the spirit of violence went into full swing to destroy a fellow citizen; the very kind of person that Barack Obama has been speaking about in his eloquent speeches, saying how he is the only candidate fighting for them.

I want to put this deep in your spirit. I am speaking as a prophet. The words I'm about to tell you are "thus saith the Lord". If Barack Obama is elected, the attacks against free speech, against those who believe differently than he does, and the systematic use of the government and laws to silence the voice of fundamental Christians will be unlike anything ever seen in this nation before.

I have talked to many Christians, including pastors, not only here in the United States but around the world, who strongly support Barack Obama. Many of them are angry with the Republicans, and understandably so. Others are inspired by the thought of electing America 's first African American president, while others believe Barack Obama to be a Christian who is very concerned with the poor and needy. I am not going to address any of the many concerns about Barack Obama and his form of Christianity. I am only speaking the words of thus saith the Lord, and you have to decide what you're going to do with it.

But I want to remind you, every word God has spoken to me over the last eight years and every word which I have prophesied about the American government and the elections has come to pass.

God does not give this prophecy to scare us, but to prepare us.

God said that the 2008 election is in the hands of the Christians. Just like when God spoke to Jonah about the judgment coming to Nineveh , when the Ninevites repented God withheld judgment; the same can happen in this election. Even though God spoke that America would elect its most ungodly president, He has given us the ability to stay this judgment.

Now you may be asking, "Are you saying that Barack Obama, if elected, would be America 's most ungodly president ever?" Yes!

Now I'm not telling you who to vote for. Some people want an ungodly president. That's their choice. I have watched throughout the world, Christians support political leaders who are blatantly ungodly. So again, this is the people's choice.

I believe if the Christians will pray, repent, and hear the voice of God, a miracle can happen on Election Day. This nation lies in the hands of the Christians. Will we humble ourselves before God and pray for His kingdom to come and His will to be done? Or will we allow our emotions, our feelings, our angers, our greed, our race, the opinions of the media, our fears, to dictate to us and affect who we vote for? If you allow these things to affect you, whether you vote for Republican or Democrat, you are not being led by the Spirit.

We must spend time in deep intercessory prayer and cry out for God's mercy upon America . For all our friends who are not in the United States , if Christianity comes under the assaults that it would under a government controlled by Barack Obama and the Liberal Democrats, it will have horrible negative effects on the Gospel throughout the world.

All truth is parallel. People say when America catches a cold, the world suffers a flu. This present financial crisis is proof of that. When America is moral and bows its knee to God, it has incredible positive spiritual impact around the world. However, we have seen over the last several decades, when America becomes more immoral that too affects the world.

We need all the Christians around the world to pray for revival to come to America , and for God to have mercy and spare us from this judgment.

Finally, a brief word about the financial crisis. This is not the end time financial crisis. It is very serious, and it is shaking the foundations of the world's economic system. But we will come out of this, and there will be a time again of incredible wealth creation. However, the cracks in the financial system will not be healed. The door has been opened and the way is being made for a one world government system to overtake the world's economics.

The world will falsely look at this situation and say that when the governments individually, and with some unified coordination, jumped in to rescue the world, that it prevented a worldwide depression. In the future, when the true end time financial collapse takes place, it will be very easy for the nations of the world and the peoples of those nations to allow a new worldwide governing body to come to the rescue. Understand that everything that is happening has a significant spiritual purpose.

So don't panic by what you see happening today, but take this as a spiritual warning from God. Prepare yourself. Get out of debt. Hear the voice of the Holy Spirit in regards to how you handle money. Let God position you to handle the future complete economic collapse and the overtaking of the world's economic system.

Please pray for America . May God have mercy on us all.

Your friend,
Steve Foss

Steve Foss Ministries
P.O. Box 1592
Keller , TX 76244
817-898-0440
www.stevefoss.com


When Foss refers to the amount of wealth created during the Bush administration, I recalled the "DUDE, WHERE'S MY RECESSION?" posts at Instapundit during this year. (Actually, James Pethokoukis first coined the phrase, but Instapundit made it famous).

Many of you may not be fluent in the Christian terminology used by Foss, so I offer a translation of a portion of it into religion-independent English. I will also unpack this translation and submit evidence. Before I give this summary, I offer the disclaimer that I would take great joy in being wrong about this.

During the next four years, those who oppose the agenda of Barack Obama will experience covert, passive-aggressive, encrypted aggression from Barack Obama and his administration, and overt, active-aggressive, plain aggression from supporters of Barack Obama with no official connection to the Obama administration. Furthermore, the aggression from supporters of Barack Obama will receive no censure, rebuke or condemnation from the Obama administration.

What do I mean by covert, passive-aggressive, encrypted aggression? I mean the instances of Barack Obama flipping off Hillary Clinton and John McCain. I mean the instances of playing of the race card by the use of the words "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled," in reference to Bill Clinton and John McCain. I mean the leak of the supposedly private conversation between Barack Obama and George Bush within hours of their meeting.

What do I mean by overt, active-aggressive, plain aggression? I mean the snooping and leaking of Joe the Plumber's child-support records by Helen Jones-Kelley, Director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, a maximum $2,300 donor to the Obama campaign. I mean the frightfully clever and eloquent person who came up with the "Sarah Palin Is A C---" t-shirts. I mean 5th Grade teacher Diantha Harris, who mocked one of her students to the verge of tears for her support of John McCain. I mean the two Black Panther thugs who stood outside the polling station in Philadelphia on election day. And it just goes on and on and on. I could provide additional examples, but I believe you get the idea.

Have Helen Jones-Kelley, the witty t-shirt artist, Diantha Harris, or the two Black Panthers received any censure, rebuke or condemnation for their actions from the Obama campaign? None that I know of. And what will these people likely surmise from this lack of censure, rebuke or condemnation? At the very least, they could surmise that what they did wasn't really such a big deal. At the most, they could surmise that Barack Obama approved of what they did, and his lack of censure expressed his tacit approval. No matter what, the chances are good that they will do something like this again.

Maybe you don't like the word "spirit." How about the words "meme" or "memeplex?" How about the phrase "self-reinforcing and self-propagating pattern of thought and behavior?"

And what's worse is that lots of otherwise decent, law-abiding Democrats are complicit in this behavior, because they didn't condemn it either.

Word of the Day - Bifurcate

To "bifurcate" (BY-fur-kate) - from the Latin for "two-pronged fork" - is to divide into two parts.

Example (as used by Amy Tan in The Bonesetter's Daughter): "There it was, a sliver of a million-dollar view: the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge that bifurcated the waters, marking bay from ocean."

Another use of the word bifurcate is when you have a disagreement with someone, and it's not something that can be fixed with flowers and window treatments. It's a major, philosophical disagreement that leads to two wildly different sets of consequences. To say something like "It seems we are bifurcated..." means "We're on two different paths. I'm going on my path, you're going on yours, and I suppose we'll find out soon enough which path is better."

Thinking About Sudoku Variations

I actually thought about this some time ago, but never got around to writing about it. I was looking at a book of Sudoku puzzles I had purchased for my now 12-year-old son, who is taking great joy in, and showing great skill in solving Sudoku puzzles. I was looking at an easy puzzle, and wondering to myself how to make this puzzle a little more challenging.

I gave myself the additional constraint of filling in the empty squares from left to right, starting at the top row, and going top to bottom. So if I found that a number had to go in an empty square, but I hadn't gotten to it in my ordering yet, I had to remember the number that should go in that square, and keep that information mentally to help determine the number that should go in the next empty square in my ordering. My 12-year-old son and I did a Sudoku in this fashion a couple of weekends ago. Calling it blindfold Sudoku isn't quite right, but calling it ordered Sudoku isn't as interesting.

My ordering was based on the way people read text, but there's no reason why there couldn't be all sorts of different orderings of the way the empty squares have to be filled in. Rows, columns and boxes could be used to come up with all sorts of amusing variations.

I wrote this in November 2005

...since all the numbers are being used, no essential change would occur to the puzzle if one edge was connected to its opposite edge, making a cylinder. If the surface was flexible, it would also be possible to connect one end of the cylinder with the other, making a doughnut, or torus. It would make the puzzle very interesting to use pictures on a doughnut…provided that the pictures were done with frosting, and I could eat the doughnut after solving the puzzle of course.



The kind of donut I was originally thinking of was what Mathworld calls a ring torus. If a spindle torus was used, then some of the squares would have zero area, so that wouldn't work. There's no reason why a Sudoku puzzle couldn't be created on a horn torus, but that would presume that you had the ability to fly around on the inside of the horn torus and mark numbers on the empty squares on the interior.

I would like to map the standard Sudoku grid onto a ring torus in such a way that 1) the "squares" stay as square as possible, and 2) the squares on the inside of the torus are as close as possible in area to the squares on the outside of the torus. These two design goals are contradictory. I'm seeing a mapping in my mind's eye where the squares on the inside of the torus are stretched vertically to compensate for the horizontal stretching of the squares on the outside of the torus. But I don't want too much stretching. What to do?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "You've got an awful lot of time on your hands, don't you?"

Maximizing Value And/Or Fun Out Of Twitter

I wrote a post in July 2008 about Twitter's difficulties and identi.ca's opportunities. While there are two more players in the microblogging space (Yammer and trillr), I'm pleased to report that Twitter has pretty much overcome the difficulties it was experiencing then.

Twitter put an upper bound on the number of accounts someone could follow, and did some behind-the-scenes technical work, making the failwhale a much less frequent phenomenon. That brings up back to the problem of how to make Twitter valuable and/or fun.

Aaron Strout, VP of Marketing at Powered, wrote five things to do that will cause people to go a long way on Twitter. I follow these suggestions, and I encourage you to do likewise...

1) Be human, be funny & NEVER take yourself too seriously. A bit of self-deprecation goes a long way toward building relationships!

2) Try and reply to as many "@'s" as possible - it makes people feel good and fosters good dialogue. And DON'T be EXCLUSIVE!

[This is the Twitter version of "People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care." This means that one of the first things to do when you get on Twitter is to check your replies, your "@'s."]

3) When you know that someone is new on Twitter (and they are trying to "get it"), throw 'em a bone & help them get followers.

[Actually, that's why I'm writing this post.]

4) Keep a balance between signal and noise. It's OK to talk RE personal stuff but make sure you're adding value 2 UR followers.

[I believe that by "signal," Aaron means providing what you say you're about in your Twitter profile. A marketing person might refer to it as one's Twitter brand. I call it "what you've demonstrated that people are likely to get generous portions of when they follow you on Twitter." I believe that by "noise," Aaron means everything that isn't signal, such as "I'm drinking hot cocoa on a Sunday afternoon." You could say something about your favorite kind of cocoa, and why it's your favorite. James Lileks is on Twitter, and he provides many examples of picturesque speech. I believe by "Keep a balance," Aaron means to introduce noise every so often to introduce an interesting variety. You want to stay focused, but you don't want to people to have a chance to be bored with you.]

5) I try and always follow people back because I've found that it's a good community thing to do. To me, more = more fun & value!

[You never know when someone you follow is going to tweet something that will be a golden opportunity knocking on your door.]

Here are some colloraries...

Twitter coolness is where you find it. There are multiple services that rate people on various Twitter metrics, such as Twitdir, Twitter Grader, and Twinfluence, but at this stage in Twitter's development, maximizing any of these metrics is no guarantee of the relationships you seek. I suggest that if you use the Twitter measuring services, don't take them too seriously.

Taking a genuine interest in people goes a long way. In Twitter, this means, among other things, clicking on links that people provide, even it's for a short period of time. They put that link there in the hopes that you would click on it. It means showing appreciation for nice things people do, and there are a lot of nice things that people say and do on Twitter. Retweeting something cool that someone else tweets has become part of Twitter culture, for example.

Make good use of Twitter's message modes (update and direct message). It's good to praise in public and rebuke or criticize in private. If you're inviting the world, use an update; if you're inviting a particular person, use a direct message. If you make an update starting with @douglasbass, it appears in my replies screen, but it also appears on the home page of all your followers, and on the public timeline, so an @ is something you do when you want to say something to someone in public.

Here is a list of technical things I mentioned as useful in April 2008, but I'm adding one more at the beginning...

1) Use ping.fm to coordinate your messages to multiple microblogging services. If Twitter made TinyURL indispensible, then using multiple microblogging services makes ping.fm indispensable.

2) Use a URL minimizer to add links to tweets. TinyURL is the one I've seen used the most, but a number of rivals have recently emerged. URL minimizers were useful before Twitter for making links that didn't break in emails, but Twitter has made them positively indispensible.

3) Use a specialized Twitter search engine to search for people to follow, such as TweetScan or twittersearch.

07/29/08 UPDATE: Twitter has acquired Summize, which is now the official Twitter search engine.

These sites will help you find people on Twitter tweeting about things in which you're interested. You might ask "Why can't I just Google it?" The answer is because individual tweets are linked to relatively rarely, and a tweet with some particular search term isn't going to show up on the first page of search results, or the 17th for that matter.

4) Use Twitter to show the variety of your online enterprises. Just about anywhere you hang out online has an RSS feed to which people can subscribe. But it's not just people who can subscribe to an RSS feed; Twitter can subscribe to an RSS feed as well, through the magic of Twitterfeed. The hardest part is getting an OpenID, but once that's done, you can tell Twitterfeed how often to check a particular feed for updates to be put on Twitter. If you have multiple feeds (I do), you should give Twitterfeed some information identifying the particular feed.

5) Put a Twitter widget at your blog. This widget will display all your tweets. If you use Twitter to show the variety of your online enterprises, it means people can see all the cool things your'e doing online at your blog. This can go at your blog, or at any other online hangout you can customize, such as MySpace or Facebook. I would like to be able to put a Twitter widget at every place I do anything online, because it shows everything I do online. I hereby confess that I have resisted this passionately for about the past year, because, well, I like my blog, and I didn't want to admit that Twitter could do things my blog couldn't do, or that I could use Twitter to cleverly do things that I didn't want to do by means of my blog.

6) Adopt a strategy for finding people to follow. shawnz uses a modified random walk. brianshaler suggested the following:

Want to make your Twitter experience more interesting? Go to a friend's profile. Click "favorites" in sidebar. Follow one of those people.

When he said "a friend's profile," that means the page that shows some biographical information about the person. For instance, here's my profile page. The Favorites link on the side shows tweets I have really enjoyed, both by myself and by other people. If you follow someone who said something your friend really liked, something interesting will happen.

Three Words That Describe Senator Barack Obama

Guy Benson, Mary Katherine Ham, and Ed Morrissey have written a much more detailed closing argument against Senator Obama's election as President of the United States, but I have a few thoughts to add to what they wrote. There are three words that describe Senator Obama for me.

Senator Obama is SECRETIVE

No matter what you know, or think you know about Senator Obama, there's a lot you don't know. There's a lot I don't know. There's a lot most people don't know, because Senator Obama has chosen to keep it private. What information has he chosen to keep private, you ask?

• Medical records 1961-Present


• Certified Copy of original Birth Certificate


• Embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth


• Occidental College 1979-1981


• Columbia University 1981-1983


• Columbia University Thesis


• Harvard Law School 1988-1991


• Selective Service Registration


• Law practice client list 1993-2004


• Illinois State Senate Schedule 1997-2004

When Representative Keith Ellison (MN-5) was disinvited from campaigning on behalf on Senator Obama, an Obama aide appeared at Ellison's Washington office to explain that Obama has “a very tightly wrapped message.” Indeed, it's a message wrapped in layers of secrecy, unacceptable in a candidate for President of the United States.


Senator Obama is CORRUPT

Senator Obama's campaign has left a wide open door for campaign contribution fraud.

Newsweek magazine reported on the cases of Obama donors "Doodad Pro" of Nunda, N.Y., who gave $17,130, and "Good Will" of Austin, Texas, who gave more than $11,000—both in excess of the $2,300-per-person federal limit.

Kenneth Timmerman reported that Federal Elections Commission has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million.

Some people might argue that these problems were reported quite some time ago, and the money was returned, so what's the big deal? It was reported TODAY that the Obama campaign web site does no verification that the name on the credit card is the name of the person making the donation. It doesn't ask for the three-digit code on the back of the credit card. As long as the card is active, the Obama campaign will gladly receive a donation. This was proven by experiment, with the experimenter concluding...

In short, with the system set up as it is by the Obama camp, an individual could donate unlimited amounts of money by simply making up fake names and addresses. And Obama is doing his best to facilitate this fraud. This is truly scandalous.


How much of the money received by the Obama campaign has been contributed illegally, either in terms of the amount, or in terms of the source? You don't know, I don't know, nobody knows, and if Senator Obama knows, he's not telling.

Senator Obama has had a long-standing partnership with the organization ACORN, going from 1997 to the present. ACORN and its affiliates have been involved in various kinds of vote fraud in 15 different states over the past 10 years, including, among other activities,

• falsifying voter registration cards


• registering people to vote multiple times


• attempting to register non-existant people


• forging signatures

This is not something that happened in the past, but is all over now. TODAY, an ex-employee of ACORN was arrested for turning in voter-registration cards for already registered voters, altering information, and forging signatures.

When Senator Obama gave his jettison of Jeremiah Wright "More Perfect Union" speech, I commented on how someone of his education couldn't not know, that his phrase "America's original sin of slavery" would have a certain connotation with a large portion of his audience. In the same way, someone of Senator Obama's experience couldn't not know about ACORN's long history of vote fraud.

Finally, Senator Obama, taking a page from the Clinton playbook, said something in the third Presidential debate that was true in a limited, technical sense, but quite a bit different than the whole truth. The independent website factcheck.org reported the following...

Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, Obama wasn't entirely forthcoming about his relationship with ACORN:

Obama: The only involvement I've had with ACORN is, I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs.

He did, but that wasn't his only involvement. He also worked closely with ACORN's Chicago office when he ran a Project Vote registration drive after law school, and Obama did some leadership training for Chicago ACORN. The Woods Fund, where Obama served as a board member, gave grants to ACORN's Chicago branch; both organizations are concerned with disadvantaged populations in that city. And during the primaries of this election, Obama's campaign paid upwards of $800,000 to the ACORN-affiliated Campaign Services Inc. for get-out-the-vote efforts (not voter registration). Those services were initially misrepresented on the campaign's Federal Election Commission reports, an error that some find suspicious and others say is par for the course. ACORN's Chicago office and CSI have not been under investigation.


Senator Obama is THUGGISH

And by thuggish, I mean willing to use intimidation, the threat of lawsuits, and mob action by dedicated volunteers to prevent voices contrary to his message from being heard. Michael Barone, author of the Almanac of American Politics, recently wrote:

They [Senator Obama's supporters] seem determined to shut people up.

That's what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign emails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg's WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama's relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago -- papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

Obama fans jammed WGN's phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest emails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg's example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.


This is actually an innovation, taking its inspiration from the distributed-denial-of-service attacks against websites. Barone continues...

Other Obama supporters have threatened critics with criminal prosecution. In September, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce warned citizens that they would bring criminal libel prosecutions against anyone who made statements against Obama that were "false." I had been under the impression that the Alien and Sedition Acts had gone out of existence in 1801-02. Not so, apparently, in metropolitan St. Louis. Similarly, the Obama campaign called for a criminal investigation of the American Issues Project when it ran ads highlighting Obama's ties to Ayers.


Just because you've been told many times by many different people that it's not a problem that you don't know big chunks of Senator Obama's personal and professional history, doesn't make it so. That should be a problem for you.

You don't know how many dollars have been contributed illegally to Senator Obama's campaign. That should be a problem for you.

You don't know how many voter registrations turned in by ACORN and its affiliates are invalid. That should be a problem for you.

You don't know how many votes will be cast in how many states based on invalid voter registrations. That should be a problem for you.

You don't know what will happen if you express disagreement with or criticism of President Obama. That should be a problem for you.

Word of the Day - Bamboozle

To bamboozle [bam-boo-zuhl] someone is to to deceive or get the better of (someone) by trickery, flattery, or the like.

The first appearance of the word was in 1703. Jonathan Swift used it in 1710, in a rant about the corruption of the English language. Actually, I'm amused to consider that an author who gave us "Brobdingnagian," "Lilliputian" and "Laputan" should be complaining about the corruption of the English language. There seems to be a difference of opinion as to the root of the word, with some contending that it comes from the Scottish verb bombaze, to confuse, and others claiming it comes from the French verb embabuiner, to make a baboon out of.

I'm making this the Word of the Day for a number of reasons.

I like it because the end of the word is like puzzle, and if someone is bamboozling someone, chances are good they are trying to puzzle them.

I like it because it is fun to say. Bamboozle, bamboozle, bamboozle.

I'm also making it the Word of the Day because it will soon be impermissible to say or write. While there is no direct evidence that Malcolm X actually used the word, Spike Lee put the word in Malcolm X's mouth in the biopic, in his speech to the people of Harlem:



I'm gonna tell you like it really is. Every election year these politicians are sent up here to pacify us! They're sent here and setup here by the White Man!

This is what they do!

They send drugs in Harlem down here to pacify us!

They send alcohol down here to pacify us!

They send prostitution down here to pacify us!

Why you can't even get drugs in Harlem without the White Man's permission!

You can't get prostitution in Harlem without the White Man's permission!

You can't get gambling in Harlem without the White Man's permission!

Every time you break the seal on that liquor bottle, that's a Government seal you're breaking!

Oh, I say and I say it again, ya been had!

Ya been took!

Ya been hoodwinked!

Bamboozled!

Led astray!

Run amok!

This is what He does....


The presence of this word in the movie would have been a mere cinematic footnote, but Senator Barack Obama has brought Malcolm X back from the late 1950's and early 1960's, and made him a part of his campaign. He used the words "hoodwink" and "bamboozle" to great effect in the South Carolina Democratic primary. I was preoccupied with the Republican primaries, and, truth be told, I was taking too much pleasure in someone politically outmaneuvering Bill Clinton, and driving him to purple-faced rage. But Cinque Henderson, writing for the New Republic, performed a valuable decoding of Obama's choice of words...

His [Obama's] use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of “the White Man” masquerading as a smiling politician: “Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us,” he says. “You’ve been hoodwinked. Bamboozled.”

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin.


Now it would be one thing if the whole thing faded into political memory after the South Carolina primary, but the success with the Malcolm X reference encouraged Senator Obama to use it again, which he did this week, as related by Allahpundit. The money quote:

It’s code, in other words, used by The One when he wants to accuse his opponents of racism but doesn’t want to do it so directly that he’ll be held accountable.


Alas, the innocent word bamboozle has been overloaded, freighted with new and unpleasant racial connotations. It is a mathematical certainty that sometime between now and January 1, 2010, there will be multiple flaps, kerfuffles, and all manner of twisted knickers over the use of the word bamboozle. Therefore, I hereby predict, that the word bamboozle, along with "hoodwink," "voting 'present,'" and "that's above my pay grade" will be on the LSSU Banished Words list for 2010. Not 2009, mind you, but 2010. In spite of making some incorrect predictions for 2008, I'm not only continuing to predict, but I'm predicting further in the future. Enjoy the word bamboozle, while you still can.

Flying Imams - Running Out Of People To Sue...

David Hanners of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press has written an article about yet another legal maneuver in the Flying Imams lawsuit against U. S. Airways , the Metropolitan Airports Commission, and six Airport Police officers

The Metropolitan Airports Commission has told a judge that six Muslim imams who sued after being kicked off a flight almost two years ago shouldn't be allowed to add an FBI agent as a defendant in the case.

Lawyers for the imams claimed last week that they should be allowed to amend their suit because the FBI agent's involvement in the incident was "new evidence," but lawyers for the airports commission said that wasn't the case.

[This is not "new evidence" at all, this is "ancient history," as it was discussed at the hearing on the motions for dismissal and summary judgement in August of 2007. I was at that hearing, and wrote...

The lawyer for the MAC went down a list of counts mentioned in the imams’ complaint, asserting various reasons why the claims failed. He pointed out that it wasn’t just US Airways that wanted the imams off the plane, but some of the John Does and Jane Roes on the plane as well. So both him and Mr. Jaques mentioned that there were multiple reasons for Captain Wood to request that the imams be removed from the plane. He pointed out that the imams were detained for questioning at the request of the FBI. Later in the hearing Judge Montgomery would comment “Hmm, we’re going up the ladder…”]

"The FBI's specific role was disclosed in the police report and in court filings, well before the deadline to amend passed," the commission argued in a document filed earlier this week.

[The deadline to add parties or amend pleadings was set in the court order for discovery back in March of 2008, and passed sometime around the end of March 2008.]

Attorneys for both sides will argue their positions in a hearing Tuesday in U.S. District Court in St. Paul.

The airports commission's co-defendant, US Airways, said in a motion this week it wasn't taking a position on the imams' request to add the FBI agent as a defendant.

The imams were kicked off a US Airways flight at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in November 2006 after a passenger passed a note to a flight attendant saying the men had prayed loudly in Arabic and made "anti-U.S." statements.

[Is it a good thing or a bad thing that the passenger passing the note, Michael McCombie, was made public in a July 12 Pioneer-Press article? One thing that's good is that I no longer have to refer to him as "the passenger in seat 26D" But it seems that we won't hear from him until the trial in June 2009, as the July 12 article said he didn't return calls requesting an interview.]

The rest of the article is a recap of the events on the evening of November 20, 2006.

I confess to not getting this even a little bit. It's as if the imams are saying, "We would like the rules to be suspended, because if they're not, we're up a creek without a paddle." It's as if the imams are saying, "We'd really rather be exempted from the consequences of our stupid decisions on who to sue." I'm hoping the motion gets smacked down with extreme prejudice.

Technorati: Flying Imams

Schneider Drug - It's A St. Paul Kind Of Thing

I'm a little fuzzy on why, but I do recall that in the summer of 1999, shortly after moving to Minnesota, I was on the 3400 block of University Avenue on the western edge of St. Paul. I filled up at the gas station on one side of the street, and I noticed a drug store on the other side of the street. The drug store was not your usual drug store, as the windows were full of political displays. I thought was a little odd, but I had been told that some people were quite passionate about politics in Minnesota, so I thought "Oh, this is what they were talking about." Schneider Drug looks pretty much the way it did when I first clapped eyes on it in 1999, but I haven't seen any drug stores like it in my nine years in Minnesota, so I thought I'd take some pictures...



Some of the pages say "A society that protects the disadvantaged," "A society that supports higher education," "A society that invests in research." There is a digital display on the left side of the picture that displays quotations from the late Senator Paul Wellstone in red, foot-high letters.



The window says, "Support candidates who will unite us, not divide us, inspire nobility of our character, not prejudice and fear, articulate our need for a moral position in our world."



"The purpose of politics and business is to create community." I'm not finding who said it, but it was most likely Paul Wellstone.



I like this quite from Hillel, as it contains a healthy dose of self-preservation along with its altruistic sentiment. We don't know for sure, but some believe that Hillel is the father of the Simeon who beheld the infant Jesus in the temple.

Schneider Drug is one of those places you don't see everyday, and one of those places you don't see everywhere.

Technorati: Schneider Drug, St. Paul

XM, Inno, TV, TiVo, They're All Sort Of Blurring Together To Me

I wrote a post about rev-ed's testimony regarding Sirius satellite radio in April 2006, and a post about Planet Jazz, one of the five Sirius jazz channels, in May 2006. Since then, Sirius merged with XM to form Sirius XM Radio.

I'm mentioning this because I had the opportunity to drive a car with an XM receiver. I would love to tell you that I grooved on Channel 70, the traditional jazz channel, but what hit the spot for me was Soul Street and The Groove, more music that just doesn't get played on terrestrial radio.

As I was driving with my 10-year-old daughter, who was enjoying Hearts of Space on Audio Visions, she remarked "They should have a button that you can press when you hear a song you like, and it saves that song and burns it to a CD." I couldn't see any technical reason why that couldn't be done. When XM introduced the Inno, an XM receiver with recording capability, the recording industry sued XM, but Universal Music Group has since settled with XM and withdrawn from the suit. While there is a car kit which allows an Inno to be powered/charged by a car's cigarette lighter, what my daughter envisioned doesn't seem to exist yet, where the song goes from the XM receiver to your car's hard drive at the touch of a button. The Inno seems to be the closest thing yet to a TiVo for XM radio. I'm not quite up to the level of desire where I could be said to be hankering for an Inno, but on the other hand, it certainly wouldn't hurt my feelings if I had one.

On yet another hand, I not only do not own a TiVo, I have never owned a TiVo, and furthermore, I haven't felt deprived at not owning a TiVo. Until last Sunday night, that is. I enjoyed listening to the "Decades" channels on XM, six channels where they play songs from a particular decade. I was thinking I would enjoy the channels even more if they occasionally played national news radio broadcasts from this day in that decade, say September 26, 1988, for example. That got me to thinking that it would be great if there were TV channels that were analogous to the Decades channels on XM, TV channels that showed what was on TV 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, with both entertainment shows and news broadcasts. TV Land is the closest thing to this that I know of. These channels would use the midnight and early hours to sell memorabilia from those eras. So there you have it. I want a TiVo so that I can record shows on channels that haven't been created yet.

Infomercials for collections of "oldies but goodies" are regular visitors to my late-night channel surfing, and I notice that there seems to be at least one film clip of each artist performing their song. But you don't get those film clips when you buy the collections, you just get the songs. I sort of want the songs, but I really want the film clips, which I can't have without going to much greater effort and expense.

See what I mean when I say they're all sort of blurring together for me?

Sarah Palin -- Governor To You!

Rice University, where I earned my undergrad degree, stole the practice of having residential colleges, instead of dormitories and fraternities, from Oxford, and I'm glad they did. A residential college would have space designated for a faculty member to live at the college, known as the Master of the college. In addition, each faculty member was designated an Associate of a college. While the duties of an Associate weren't strictly defined, it had to do with hanging out with students, having lunch at the college on a sort-of-regular basis, occasionally intervening their knowledge and wisdom when requested, and generally modeling the life of a lively, inquiring mind.

During my college career, one of the associates of Sid Richardson College was a professor in the Mathematical Science department named Meera Blattner. I seem to recall that out of about ten faculty members in that department, there were two women in the department. I'm saying to say that women faculty in the sciences were more of a rarity than today. But in the mid 1970's, women had gone to a great deal of effort to be addressed as "Ms.," as opposed to "Miss" or "Mrs." My fellow students and I believed we were being enlightened, egalitarian, etc. when we addressed Meera Blattner as "Ms. Blattner." It didn't even occur to us, to me, until it was pointed out to us, that we were mistreating Meera Blattner by not addressing her as "Dr. Blattner." She had the same academic credentials as any of the other faculty members, whom we routinely addressed as Dr. This or Dr. That. On the other hand, I don't recall an instance of Dr. Blattner being the pointer-outer of said mistreatment. The pointing out seemed to occur through background channels.

Meera Blattner went on to become the first female faculty member in the Department of Applied Science at UC-Davis, and was affiliated with both UC-Davis and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for almost 20 years. She wrote a paper with one of my classmates, Roger Dannenberg, in 1990, but that's another story. The point of this story was that Dr. Blattner somehow managed to accomplish a positive change in the behavior of the people around her without being a confrontive, combative feminist.

I'm recalling this story because it seems that something similar is happening in the 2008 Presidential campaign. We hear references to Senator Obama, Senator Biden, Senator McCain, and Sarah Palin. She is a Governor, you know. Twitterer lagomorph13 informed me that Governor Palin specifically asks to be addressed as Sarah, and cited Kaylene Johnson's biography of Governor Palin as a reference. Fair enough. When Governor Palin is talking to you, you can address her as Sarah. But when you're talking to me, I request that you call her Governor Palin.

The poet Langston Hughes was ditched from Senator John Kerry's Presidential campaign after his engagement with the Communist Party USA was publicized. But Langston's presence is hovering over this campaign. As I think of Governor Palin, I recall another Langston Hughes creation - Alberta K. Johnson, who emerged in the summer of 1943. Alberta K. Johnson is the main character in a suite of poems called Madam To You, and she introduces herself in this poem:

Madam's Past History

My name is Johnson--
Madam Alberta K.
The Madam stands for business.
I'm smart that way.

I had a
HAIR-DRESSING PARLOR
Before
The depression put
The prices lower.

Then I had a
BARBECUE STAND
Till I got mixed up
With a no-good man.

Cause I had a insurance
The WPA
Said, We can't use you
Wealthy that way.

I said,
DON'T WORRY 'BOUT ME!
Just like the song,
You WPA folks take care of yourself--
And I'll get along.

I do cooking,
Day's work, too!
Alberta K. Johnson--
Madam to you.


I would be powerfully amused if Governor Palin were to make reference to that poem sometime between now and the election. It probably won't happen, but I can always dream my beautiful dream.

A Modest Proposal For The Olympics

One of the stories that got lost in the shuffle of much larger Olympic stories, was the presence of older (by Olympic standards) athletes on the US Olympic team, and the success of those older athletes, most notably Dana Torres, winning three silver medals in Beijing, and coming within the smeensiest margin of winning a gold medal.

It's my understanding that the ancient Olympic games were meant to be a celebration of excellence in athletic performance. The modern Olympic games, with its motto of Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) seeks to preserve that spirit. Many people have lamented the hugh gulf between champion athletes who train for peak performance, and regular folk leading ordinary lives. I have a suggestion to close that huge gulf...

I propose that Olympic records should be expanded to include the age of the athletes in two ways. The first way would be by keeping Olympic records for the oldest individual to accomplish a particular task at a particular standard, such as the oldest individual to run 1,500 meters in better than 3:41, which I believe would be Kenyan-born American Bernard Lagat at age 33.

The second way would be to keep Olympic records for the Olympic events for people of a certain age. I would be interested in knowing, for example, the fastest marathon run by a 51-year-old man, and how the time required for that marathon has decreased over the years.

It would be impractical to have people of all ages at each Olympiad, but I'm not really suggesting this from a viewpoint of making the games more entertaining. I'm suggesting it from the viewpoint of the original Olympic spirit of excellence and improvement.

One Man's Troublesome Weed Is Another Man's Anti-Aging Therapy

From time to time, Instapundit links to a story on the subject of resveratrol. Resveratrol is a chemical found in grapes, and it's believed that grapes produce resveratrol to protect themselves from environmental stress and plant pathogens. But what makes so unspeakably nifty is that it offers promise as a solution to a number of age-related health issues.

Is there a way to make people live longer? At this point, the answer is a highly unsatisfying "Yes." Calorie restriction has been shown to increase the lifespan of a number of different species, but who wants to live longer and be hungry, and cranky from being hungry, for a lot of the time? The first link at the top mentioned that resveratrol caused the bodies of mice to act in a similar way as they did when on a calorie restricted diet.

So where does one get this resveratrol? I have good news on this front. You can get resveratrol in grapes. I've heard red grapes recommended as the best grape source of resveratrol.

You can get resveratrol in red wine. I've heard conflicting reports on this. I've heard a doctor recommend wines from cold regions in Europe, such the Burgundy region of France as the best source for resveratrol. On the other hand, employees at my local wine store inform me that wines made from the Cabernet variety of grape are the best. In the course of the conversation at the wine store, a gentleman informed me that the intensity of the flavor of the wine is a function of the amount of stress the grapes are allowed to endure as they grow. That got me speculating that there could be a connection between the flavor intensity of a red wine and its resveratrol content.

Finally, you can get resveratrol in the form of a supplement. For example, the GNC in my neighborhood sells resveratrol in the antioxidants section. Glenn Reynolds considered a some resveratrol supplements for this February 2008 Popular Mechanics podcast. But the supplement makers don't get the resveratrol for the supplements from grapes. They get it from the roots of a plant with the scientific name Polygonum cuspidatum, also known as Japanese knotweed.







One thing I find fascinating about this is that Japanese knotweed is considered an invasive species in the both the UK, and in the United States as well. In many cases of invasive species, there is no upside to the invasion, just a wipeout of what was previously there. But in this case, the invader has benefits of its own. I had a thought that some entrepreneur is going to make a fortune cultivating japanese knotweed for the resveratrol content, as it's a lot easier to grow than grapes. The Grinch said that one man's toxic sludge is another man's pot pourri, and in this case, one man's invasive species is another man's opportunity knocking.

Knotweed reminded me of the names of demons from The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (Screwtape, Wormwood, Triptweeze, etc.) And as I imagined someone cultivating Japanese knotweed, I imagined a farm where this was being cultivated. Somehow, seeing Shirley Temple as Rebecca of Knotweed Farm just didn't work. Knotweed Farm seemed to be a darker, more mysterious, improbable place. As I mused further, I thought that a sentence with Knotweed Farm in it is a perfect Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest candidate...

As the carriage passed the gate and started down the road toward the cottage, Jennifer wondered if it was a morbid, or merely a mordant sense of wit that posessed Dundas Montgomery to christen his agricultural enterprise with the now-dreadfully-unfortunate name of Knotweed Farm.

A Little Late On The Beijing Olympics

In addition to all of the other things I will avoid doing in the improbable event that I become an evil overloard, I am adding "I will not host an Olympiad in my domain."

If you had told someone at the 1936 Berlin Olympics that in nine years, the city of Berlin would be a pile of bombed-out rubble crushed between two armies, you would receive some skepticm. If you had told someone at the 1980 Moscow Olympics that in 11 years and a couple of months, the Soviet Union would cease to exist, you would be accused of having a bit too much Stoli.

So when I tell you now that the People's Republic of China is going out of business in about 10 years or so, I really don't mind if you look at me funny. Don't get me wrong, they put on a great show. But the singing girl was fake, the fireworks were digitally enhanced, the crowds were enhanced with cheerleader squads, and don't get me started about the ages of the members of the Chinese little girl's women's gymnastics team. Tim Blair asked "Is China even a real place?"

China made it clear to its citizenry that the very act of applying to make a protest, the very act of taking the lip service given to freedom of speech for the benefit of the IOC rubes, was the equivalent of signing one's death warrant. China made it clear to the international media that it had no intention of giving any kind of serious answers to the questions about freedom of speech.

With this post, I can honestly say that I kept the part of the Roger Simon Pledge that I took in August of 2007.

9/11 Reflections

The entrance of the gospel into the city of Ephesus created a bit of a controversy:

About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in no little business for the craftsmen. He called them together, along with the workmen in related trades, and said: "Men, you know we receive a good income from this business. And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that man-made gods are no gods at all. There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited, and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty." When they heard this, they were furious and began shouting: "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" (Acts 19:24-28, NIV)

I can imagine some Ephesian Christians telling Paul how much difficulty Demetrius was causing them, and wishing that somehow Demetrius would go away. I can also imagine Paul responding to that as he wrote this bit in his letter to the Ephesians:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. (Ephesians 6:10-13, NIV)

Many people have despairingly observed both the level of grievance and the popularity of Osama bin Laden in the Muslim world, and thought "Even if we kill/capture/neutralize Osama bin Laden, someone else who subscribes to his ideology will take his place." I make no claim to have any inside information about rulers, authorities, powers of this dark world, or spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms, but I grasp from these words of Paul that the key piece of the struggle we find ourselves in is a competition between ideologies, meme-complexes, self-reinforcing, self-propagating collections of ideas commandeering human beings to serve their purposes, Big Ideas.

For example, in the 60's and 70's, the leaders of the Soviet Union were supremely confident in the superiority and eventual success of their ideology, their Big Idea. Communism was where everything was headed, Indochina was conquered, America was defeated and demoralized. But through a number of events in the 1980's, the Soviet Union was exposed as an unworkable system propped up by totalitarian thuggery.

Austin Bay writes about Osama bin Laden's Big Idea:

Al-Qaeda's dark genius has been to connect the Muslim world's angry, humiliated and isolated young men with a utopian fantasy preaching the virtue of violence. That utopian fantasy seeks to explain and then redress roughly 800 years of Muslim decline. Bin Laden concluded that attacking the United States and the infidel West was the way to energize these young Muslims -- a physical demonstration of "violent virtue" and its history-shaping effects.

Attacking the United States and Europe would be so overwhelmingly popular the West would leave Muslim nations. Al-Qaida would then take control of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Bin Laden provided a sketch but few details. He would rely on anger and fervor -- and his own iconic leadership.


bin Laden counted on a weak, decadent America, based on 30 years of observations of America in Viet Nam, Lebanon and Somalia. So what happened? Well, George Bush happened, but something else has happened along the way. Austin Bay writes:

Seven years later, it appears attacking the West was a huge strategic blunder by al-Qaida -- and that's not a solely "Western" opinion. Al-Qaida's criminal record has wrecked its reputation in Muslim nations. We've had indications. StrategyPage.com noted on Oct. 27, 2005, that "the Muslim media is less and less willing to be an apologist for al-Qaida, at least when it comes to killing Muslim civilians" and that the Iraqi media in particular "really has it in for al-Qaida."

On Oct. 1, 2006, StrategyPage.com argued that "dead Iraqis were killing al-Qaida. ... Westerners, unless they observe Arab media closely, and have contacts inside the Arab world, will not have noted this sharp drop in al-Qaida's fortunes."


Many people have observed that killing people is not a good way to go about endearing people to one's brand. Even if Osama bin Laden hasn't been killed/captured/neutralized, he's gone from being the Great Muslim Hope to being Just Another Thug with a Koran.

At this point, someone will ask, "Ok, Mr. Smarty-Pants, what's your Big Idea?" I have a couple of Big Ideas.

As a Christian, one of my Big Ideas is what's referred to in the Bible as the Great Commission, the command of Jesus to his followers to make disciples of all nations, preach repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name to all nations, preach the good news to all creation.

As an American, one of my Big Ideas is freedom of speech and religion. I believe the world should be more like America, which isn't particularly shocking, given that I'm, you know, an American. But the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the world should be more like America. Consider the following articles:

Article 18

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Sounds like a rewording of the First Amendment. I would like it reworded to say “No one shall have their life, liberty or property taken away on the basis of their theology.”

A related Big Idea that follows from the Big Idea of freedom of religion and speech is dislike, intolerance and hatred of tyranny. Every time you see Thomas Jefferson's face on a nickel, you should do like he did, and swear eternal enmity on the alter of God against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

At this point, someone will ask, "Ok, Mr. Smarty-Pants, what are you going to do in support of your Big Ideas?" I'm going to support, and encourage you to support, Christian ministries in the Muslim world. No, not support as in "tolerate" or "think fondly of," support as in "contribute financially to, put my money where my meme is, etc." Now there are quite a few Christian ministries in the Muslim world that are doing excellent work, so please don't think I think less of a particularly group if I don't mention it, but there are three particular groups that stick out like sore thumbs to me...

* Zakaria Botros has gotten under Al-Qaeda's skin. I've already written about his demands of the Muslim world. Click here, then click on Donations.

* Elam Ministries launched 40 Days of Prayer and Fasting for Iran in May 2006.

* Arab World Ministries has been involved in one way or another for the past 125 years.


Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that you're with me on this idea, but you're a little nervous about how much money I'm going to ask you to contribute. I propose that you contribute 1 penny, 1 cent, $.01, for each of the 2,998 people killed in the 9/11 attacks, which works out to $29.98. Was that so bad?

Muslim Cab Drivers 0 For 2 In Minnesota Courts

Before I go further, I would like to say that I wouldn't have seen this story if I hadn't made the Link Viewer at little green footballs one of my daily reads. It not only enables the larger lgf community to rate/comment various stories, but it ends the whole awkward "Kiss up to the guy with the big deal website" conversation. I've made it a practice of reading the ten most recently submitted, the ten most positively rated by lgf members, the ten most clicked upon, and the ten most commented (at lgf) links of each day. My hat is off to Charles Johnson for multiple clevernesses in the creation of the Link Viewer.

The court decision has been mentioned in both the mainstream media in the blogosphere. Here is the Minnesota Public Radio article.

Muslim cab drivers lose round in court

September 9, 2008

St. Paul, Minn. — (AP) - Muslim cabbies whose religious beliefs go against driving passengers who carry alcohol have lost another round in Minnesota courts.

[I would have preferred "a second" to "another," but it's no big deal. Somehow the lower court decision didn't show up on my radar. The Hennepin County District Court (the lower court mentioned in the article) suit was brought in July 2007.]

The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday against the cabbies' latest attempt to block penalties from being imposed when they refuse to transport passengers because they're carrying alcoholic beverages.

An ordinance adopted by the Metropolitan Airports Commission last year revokes a cabbie's license for 30 days for refusing to pick up a passenger for any reason at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. A second refusal brings a two-year revocation.

[I attended one of the public meetings where this ordinance was discussed in February of 2007, and wrote about it here. Here is a picture from that meeting...]



A large share of the cabbies who serve the airport are Somali Muslims, and many of them believe that Islamic law prohibits them from giving rides to people carrying alcohol.

[It was pointed out at the February 2007 MAC meeting that Minneapolis is the only city in America with this problem. It was determined after the meeting that this is a particularly conservative interpretation of Islamic law.]

Since the commission began keeping track in 2002, there have been over 5,200 recorded instances of cabbies refusing service to passengers at the airport, including a "significant percentage" of passengers carrying alcohol, the appeals court noted.

[The Star-Tribune article on the Appeals Court decision reported "[Metropolitan] Airports Commission spokesman Patrick Hogan said Tuesday that there have been only five refusals of service so far this year. All are in the appeals process, which can take several months to complete, he said. Between 2002 and 2007, there were nearly 5,000 refusals, he said." The fact that there is an appeals process is important, because it means the ordinance does no one irreparable harm.]

The issue had simmered for several years before the commission decided the penalties were needed to ensure that customers would get reliable taxi service at the airport, and that compromises proposed by the drivers were impractical.

[Daniel Pipes wrote about one of the compromise solutions, eventually rejected, here.]

The drivers, who say the airport rules infringe on their religious freedom, appealed a lower court's refusal to grant a temporary injunction blocking those penalties from taking effect.

The appeals court affirmed the lower court's decision. The legal standard for granting a temporary injunction requires that the parties seeking it must show they would suffer irreparable harm if it's not granted.

The appeals court agreed with the lower court that cab drivers who face suspension don't suffer irreparable harm because they can appeal their suspensions to the airports commission and keep working while their administrative appeals are pending.

[So it would seem that the cabbies didn't really have a leg to stand on in their appeal; they just didn't like the result they got in Hennepin County District Court. There's no reason why the cabbies involved in the 5 refusal of service suspensions in 2008 can't keep working while their suspensions are appealed.]

The nine-page opinion by Judge Jill Flaskamp Halbrooks was designated as unpublished, which means it doesn't set a precedent for future cases.

[I don't understand why that should be the case. This is a relatively uncontroversial ruling in my opinion, saying "Hennepin County District Court followed the rules, dotted the i's and crossed the t's when it denied the request for an injunction, something it does a hundred times a day."]

Staycation - Should It Stay Or Should It Go?

The word "staycation," meaning "a vacation that is spent at one's home enjoying all that home and one's home environs have to offer," has made significant progress on the road to full-fledged wordhood. Rummaging through Google showed 944 distinct instances of the word, but the first page of search results referenced:

1. The Urban Dictionary
2. A March 12, 2008 MSNBC article
3. A May 29, 2008 MSNBC article
4. A Consumer Reports blog
5. A page on honeymoons at about.com
6. A June 12, 2008 CNN article
7. Wikipedia
8. A May 23, 2008 story on Good Morning America by ABC News
9. A page on stress relief at about.com
10. A May 24, 2008 USA Today article

But what got me started on this line of inquiry was the aggravation of Debra Hamel and Lucas Newcomer regarding this word. Debra tweeted...

I AM SICK AND TIRED OF THE WORD STAYCATION! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT! IT'S A STUPID WORD! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lucas tweeted, "stop calling it a 'staycation.'"

Staycation is in that in-between zone of words that are used and understood, but haven't received accreditation as words by the dictionary makers. There are some people who would like it to become a full-fledged word, while Debra and Lucas would like the word to not only not become a fully-accredited word, but to banished from the vocabularies of all right-thinking people. I conducted an informal survey of a number of people in my world to see if they had heard the word staycation, and how they felt about the word.

On the plus side...

It conveys a significant amount of information in a small number of syllables. It was pointed out to me that if someone says "We went on a vacation," a common response is "Where did you go?" But if someone says "We took a staycation," the answer to the common response is already there in the statement.

The stay in staycation rhymes with syllable va in vacation, raising new poetic possibilities.


On the hard-to-say side...

Maybe you would really rather not talk about the knock-down-drag-out you had with your spouse about going to visit your despicable in-laws. Maybe you would really rather not talk about not being able to afford a full-blown vacation when the price of gas is a tiny speck in the distance. Maybe you would rather not talk about how you are so not taking the kids to Wally World after how awful they acted all summer long. It's quite possible that saying "We took a staycation," delivered with the proper tone, will deflect all but the nosiest busybodies among your acquaintances.


On the minus side...

The word is internally inconsistent. To vacate some place means to leave that place, so to replace the va with stay doesn't make sense. On the other hand, I pointed this out to someone, and they said "But I like words that are funny like that sometimes."

Debra had an aesthetic consideration, considering the word to be grating, in addition to being a stupidhead word.


Many of the people with whom I spoke had an appreciation for the brevity with which the word communicated its meaning, and none of the people with whom I spoke had anywhere near the intensity of hatred that Debra and Lucas have. So I'm here to tell Debra and Lucas that if they want staycation to be banished as a word, they're going to have to mount a vigorous opposition.

Barack Obama's Top Ten Tunes

I've mentioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's favorite pieces of music in this space, and Senator Hillary Clinton's iPod playlist. Blender Magazine recently published the ten favorite songs of both Barack Obama and John McCain (h/t Guido Fawkes). After looking at Senator McCain's list and choking back the reflexive "We're doomed" thought, I started looking at Senator Obama's list. There were five songs on Senator Obama's list I had never heard (#1, 5, 6, 7 and 9), so I had some listening to do.

1. Ready or Not by The Fugees.



Lauryn Hill raps in this song...

I play my enemies like a game of chess, where I rest,
No stress
If you don't smoke sess, lest.
I must confess, my destiny's manifest

2. What's Goin' On by Marvin Gaye.



An indisputably great piece of music, tainted by the hideous lyric

You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate

But no one mocked Marvin Gaye to scorn when that song came out.

3. I'm On Fire by Bruce Springsteen. This is a curious song, a song of swagger in the first verse and confession in the second verse.

4. Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones



5. Sinnerman by Nina Simone



This is a great exercise song, and reminds me of the spiritual "Dere's No Hidin' Place Down Dere." Apparently this music was part of the movie "The Thomas Crown Affair" (the remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo). The album version rocks even harder.

6. Touch The Sky by Kanye West



"Top o' the world, baby, top o' the world"

7. You'd Be So Easy To Love by Frank Sinatra



The Chairman didn't have any time for rock-and-rollers, but quite a few rock-and-rollers were mightly impressed by Sinatra's swagger and self-confidence.

8. Think by Aretha Franklin



9. City of Blinding Lights by U2



Oh you look so beautiful tonight
In the city of blinding lights
...
I've seen you walk unafraid
I've seen you in the clothes you made
Can you see the beauty inside of me?

10. Yes We Can by will.i.am



Not very many politicians list remixes of their own speeches as one of their favorite tunes. Even the cynical Guido was shocked by this selection, writing...

The One's #10 choice of will.i.am is a bit mastubatory - it consists of excerpts from his speeches set to music.


As I listened to the songs on this list I hadn't heard before, I decided to use this list to become the 38,762nd person to point out that Senator Obama has hubris issues; overweening pride, self-confidence, superciliousness, and arrogance. If I were Senator Obama, I would challenge my critics to come up with artistic variations on the theme, just like Cyrano de Bergerac challenged his enemies to come up with more interesting ways of mocking his oversized schnozz. But it occurred to me that if you wanted to be outrageously positive and pumped up about yourself, this would be a great playlist to listen to on a regular basis.

I wonder whether this hubris has been there all of Senator Obama's life, or whether the fawning adulation of the media is the cause. As I listened to City of Blinding Lights, the thought crossed my mind "This is what happens when you make it an unwritten law that every American schoolchild has to read the poem 'I, Too, Sing America' by Langston Hughes."

I, Too, Sing America was written in 1945, and it was a snappy comeback to Walt Whitman's poem, "I Hear America Singing:"

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.


I don't know if this ever happened, but I have a picture in my mind's eye of a younger Barack Obama looking in the mirror and reciting that poem. It's certainly not implausible. Rosa Brooks said that Senator Obama channeled Langston Hughes in his "More Perfect Union" speech. In my mind's eye, I can see a younger Barack Obama wondering when the tomorrow Hughes prophesied in 1945 would come. You may agree or disagree, but Senator Obama is saying ready or not, it's coming true right here, right now.

Chickpea To Cook by Rumi

When I read this poem in The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy, it was called "A chickpea leaps," but I like this title better, as it describes a conversation. This poem is translated by Coleman Barks.

A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it's being boiled.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

The cook knocks him down with the ladle.

"Don't you try to jump out.
You think I'm torturing you.
I'm giving you flavor,
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.

"Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this."

Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.

Eventually the chickpea
will say to the cook,
"Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can't do this by myself.

"I'm like an elephant that dreams of gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn't pay attention
to his driver. You're my cook, my driver,
my way into existence. I love your cooking."

The cook says,
"I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time,
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.

"My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices,
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher."


Robert Bly ended the poem after the line "and the Friend has something good to eat." I suppose he has poetic license.

I recall a number of Bible passages as I read this poem. I think of Jeremiah at the potter's house. I think of Paul writing about how we rejoice in our tribulations, for they produce patience, character and hope. I think about how discipline produces the peaceful fruit of righteousness for those who are trained by it. I think of the marriage supper of the Lamb, and contrary to this poem, we're on the guest list, not the menu...

8/24/2008 UPDATE: As I reflect on this poem, I noticed that the cook refers to the boiling as what gives the chickpea flavor, not the spices.

In my mind, the line "Remember when you drank rain in the garden" could have either a period or a question mark at the end. The contact form at Coleman Barks's website mentions that he is spending the rest of his days (he's currently 71) on translating the rest of Rumi's poetry , and thus doesn't respond to email questions. So I'm going to let him continue translating, and not bug him about whether that line could have had a question mark at the end.

I've written in this space about the Star Trek TOS novel Best Destiny by Diane Carey. In that novel, a small Federation vessel is attacked by pirates. The pirates have managed to acquire some advanced shielding technology which allows them to hide in places they're not expected. The pirates are not particularly clever, but the teenage/young-adult son of one of the pirates realizes that this technology is something amazing. There's a scene in the book where he gets the shields working and says "Oh, my shields..." His father sees him and says something to the effect of "You don't know how weird it looks when you talk to the scrap." I remembered that scene as I read this poem, and I had a picture in my mind's eye of the restaurant owner observing the cook and saying "You don't know how weird it looks when you talk to the food."

I don't know about you, but if I were the cook, I would think to myself "This chickpea knows not of which he speaks" when the chickpea started talking about elephants in Hindustan. Did Rumi put that little bit in on purpose, knowing I would think that, or is that a Coleman Barks thing?

Click here to hear me read this poem

Clip of the Day - The Child by Alex Gopher

I've had this on my to-make-Clip-of-the-Day list for a while...this gets to be Clip of the Day because of the sampling and remixing of "God Bless The Child" by Billie Holiday. Would Lady Day approve? I'd like to think so...



Alex Gopher is a French producer, DJ and musician. I had never heard of him before hearing this song. He has a grand total of 7 tracks available at Napster, from 4 different discs. What makes him different than many other club/dance practitioners is his mining of jazz and blues for raw material.

Word of the Day - Asperity

“Asperity” (as-PARE-uh-tee) - from the Latin for “rough” - means harsh or severe.

Example (as used by Lord Berners in A Distant Prospect): “Many years later, when I was sketching in Rome, a grim-looking Englishwoman came up to me and said with some asperity, ‘I see you are painting MY view.’”

I first noticed this word in the mid-80's, while playing the character Dick Deadeye in Gilbert & Sullivan's H. M. S. Pinafore. The slow-on-the-uptake Captain Corcoran, commenting on the love between his daughter and Ralph Rackstraw, one of the sailors on his vessel, has just shocked a mixed company by the utterance of the vile exclamation "Damme!" Sir Joseph Porter, K. C. B., the First Lord of the Admiralty, is rebuking the Captain when he sings...

I will hear of no defence,
Attempt none if you're sensible.
That word of evil sense,
Is wholly indefensible.
Go, ribald, get you hence
To your cabin with celerity.
This is the consequence
Of ill-advised asperity!

You might be wondering, as I was wondering, if asperity and aspersion have the same root. The answer, alas, is no. Aspersion was, once upon a time, a word for baptism by sprinkling, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the modern meaning of a disparaging remark. But I like it that asperity and aspersion have similar connotations.

Asperity also has nothing whatsoever to do with the word aspiration. But this word has more going for it than against it in my universe, and thus gets to be a Word of the Day.

Flying Imams - Don't Make Us, Your Honor, Make Them!

There was a hearing yesterday in the Flying Imams lawsuit. The discovery process started in April is now underway in earnest. This hearing was on motions to compel to answer to discovery, which is what a party in a lawsuit brings when the other party is not supplying the information requested in discovery.

I briefly chatted with Dane Jacques, attorney for US Airways, before the hearing started, who pointed out that there were quite a few items on the motions to compel to answer, and he wasn't able to mention them all off the top of his head. He said I'd have to go back to the court documents to see them. He said "That's where you're going to have to go if you're looking for drama." I thought about saying "We'll, we all know that's what I'm here for!" but thought better of it.

There have been a number of documents submitted to the court between April and now, and I hereby confess that I haven't read them yet, but they're on my to-read and to-blog-about list. But the hearing was helpful for giving the upshot of the recently submitted documents.

An encouraging development is that the media was present at the hearing. Bob McNaney from Channel 5, Jim Walsh of the Star-Tribune, and David Hanners of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press were present.

Omar Mohammedi, attorney for the imams, and President of the Board of Directors for the New York Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, went first. His motion was for the judge, Arthur Boylan, to compel US Airways to divulge its training manuals, and information on its security procedures, so that they could show that the security procedures were not followed down to the last jot and tittle when the imams were removed from US Airways Flight 300 on November 20, 2006.

Those of you who are following this case closely might be thinking "Arthur Boylan? What happened to Ann Montgomery?" The PACER database reports that Ann Montgomery is the presiding judge, and Arthur Boylan is a referral judge. Ann Montgomery will still be the judge at the trial in 2009.

When I realized what Mohammedi was asking for, I was briefly dazed, as I heard the sound in my mind's ear of a thousand bloggers screaming something to the effect of "Ok, let me get this straight. A group of imams led by a fundraiser for a Muslim charity (the Holy Land Foundation) which was shut down by the Treasury Department for its connections to Hamas, is asking a judge to compel an airline to divulge its security procedures. And everyone's OK with that?!?"

This reveals yet another purpose of the Flying Imams attack, to extract information regarding airline security in a way that's much faster and cheaper than traditional espionage or a series of probing attacks.

Dane Jacques mentioned that the TSA has regulatory authority over the security procedure documents, and consider granting the release of these documents on a document-by-document basis. Judge Boylan looked at Jacques with a slightly quizzical look and a raised eyebrow and said "So, what happens if I order you to release a certain document?" A discussion of the relationship between law, regulatory authority, and court orders ensued.

There wasn't much discussion about what US Airways wanted the judge to compel the imams to divulge, but it became clear as Omar Mohammedi was answering questions from David Hanners, Jim Walsh and myself after the hearing ended. US Airways is asking questions about the exact extent of the involvement of Saudi-funded radical Islamic front group CAIR in the bringing and support of the lawsuit, something I consider to be a highly encouraging development.

Omar Mohammedi was clearly not interested in answering questions about CAIR's involvement in the lawsuit. He mentioned that CAIR is a client of his law firm, and thus communications between him, the imams, and CAIR are protected under attorney-client privilege, but he was much more interested in changing the subject. His final remark to the three of us was "As far as we're concerned, this a racial profiling case," as if to say that CAIR's involvement wasn't really relevant to the proceedings.

Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR informed me that I should talk to Omar Mohammedi regarding the involvement of CAIR in the lawsuit, so I was pleased that the opportunity presented itself. I walked and talked with Mohammedi for about a block. He went to great length to emphasize that the national CAIR and the New York Chapter of CAIR were entirely different organizations, and that he didn't speak for the national CAIR at all, not even a little bit. I thought about snidely asking "Well, you can see how people might get the impression that the two organizations are related, seeing as how they have the same name?" but thought better of it. I asked if he spoke for CAIR-NY, which he admitted he did, but he wanted to know my point in asking. I asked if CAIR-NY is supporting the lawsuit. He asked "What do you mean?" I asked if there is financial support, whether there is a legal fund established on behalf of the imams. His answer was a curt, blunt, "No!" I thought about saying "You know you're not fooling anyone, don't you?" but thought better of it.

As I was walking away, I saw in my mind's eye the scene from the movie El Cid, where Charlton Heston makes the wicked king Alfonso swear on the Bible that he had nothing to do with his brother Sancho's death, when everybody and their dog knew that it was his idea in the first place.

Questions From Clare Dudman

Clare Dudman has written some nice questions that would be great things for aspiring writers to contemplate. The comments have some very nice responses to these questions. Here are the questions and my answers...

Q: What can I fit in the space between the stars?
A: What can't fit in the space between the stars?
Comment: Man fits his stories in the space between the stars...On further review, that would have been a much better answer.

Q: What is the first thing you know that you saw?
A: A large green, sort of wooded, parklike area in Columbus, Ohio, in 1960. I was riding in a car my mother was driving, and I saw it on the left hand side of the road.

Q: Can I really smell the rain?
A: Yes. The rain has things you can smell besides water, so while it's a trick question, yes.
Comment: When people say they smell the rain, they usually really mean they smell something the rain touched, or the air after the rain. So that's why it's a trick question.

Q: When does white noise become dark?
A: When it becomes an unwitting reminder of a long lonely emptiness.
Comment: Actually there's such things as brown noise and pink noise. In his book The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis described hell as "The Kingdom of Noise," where there is neither music nor silence.

Q: Where did you leave your favourite dream?
A: I left it in the same place as all my other disappointed ideals.
Comment: I actually don't have a favorite dream. I haven't had my recurring nightmare of being enrolled in a school for some course, and facing the end of the semester having made no effort whatsoever, in some time. I'm never going to be a missionary, I'm never going to be a Jedi Knight, I'm never going to be the wildly successful scholar my father was. Perhaps now we can get to business...

Q: How can I stop feeling the lashing of a tongue?
A: By using the criticism to become a better person.
Comment: It also helps to recognize what part of the lashing was a cheap shot.

Q: Why do some words stain with an indelible ink; while others leave no mark at all?
A: Some words are truer than others...
Comment: I recalled Proverbs 26:2 when thinking about both this question and the previous one: "Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow, an undeserved curse does not come to rest." (Proverbs 26:2, NIV)

Do drop by Clare's blog and offer your own answers...

Twitter's Discontents, identi.ca's Opportunities

I have waxed lyrical in this space about Twitter, and you can see that I've made quite a few updates there in the past year or so. Twitter has progressed from a curious innovation to having its own niche in the world of beautiful and useful things. It is now facing multiple challenges to its utility and beauty.

Challenge #1 is how to address Twitter spam. On Twitter, spam takes the form of Twitter accounts where the account follows the updates of thousands of accounts, yet is followed by almost no one. Furthermore, the account has only a handful of updates, which are usually links to ads for the usual suspects. While Twitter gives you the capability of blocking a follower, getting a Twitter account is as easy as getting an email address, so spam Twitter accounts have proliferated. On further review, this is a predictable development in the world of beautiful and useful things: after the creation, the ugly and selfish people who had nothing to do with the creation show up and coopt it for their self-centered, ugly purposes.

Challenge #2 is that however Twitter was designed or implemented, it is now experiencing scalability issues. It could be a direct consequence of Challenge #1. It could also be because of the public recognition of Twitter as a beautiful and useful thing.



What do I mean by scalability issues? I mean that on numerous occasions, I type in an update, click on Update, and the update disappears without being entered. I mean that there is copious amounts of loud, bitter complaining as to disappearing updates. I mean that on numerous occasions, the Twitter Fail Whale will appear when trying to enter an update, or merely hitting the refresh button to see more recent updates.



Chris Pirillo recently pointed out that the Twitter Fail Whale appears all too frequently...



The dreadful significance of this picture, recorded by the Quicksilver web accelerator, is that from a strictly technical aspect of displaying the most recent updates of users, Twitter is failing more than it is succeeding. Furthermore, it is a current problem, as this picture was taken today.

The word failwhale is now in standard usage among Twitter users, both as a noun and an intransitive verb. As a noun, it means "evidence of scalability issues" or "evidence of being victimized by one's fantastic success." As a intransitive verb, it means "to demonstrate evidence of scalability issues" or "to demonstrate difficulty keeping up with the demand for such a useful and beautiful thing."

Challenge #3 is in the form of competition. Many Twitter users also have accounts at FriendFeed and Plurk, but I haven't gotten around to having accounts there yet. I grasp that FriendFeed is more explicitly designed to be a social network aggregator than Twitter. I've heard people on Twitter say that Plurk has the benefit of threaded conversations as opposed to individual utterances. But the would-be Twitter-killer that has gotten my attention is identi.ca. When it launched this month someone dismissively sniffed that it was merely a Twitter with a Canadian domain name and Eastern Bloc graphics. So how do I love identi.ca? Let me count the ways.

I love identi.ca because it is not just a website, it's a website powered by a software package called Laconica.

I love identi.ca because Laconica, based on the word laconic is an unspeakably brilliant name for software managing short utterances.

I love identi.ca because it has opened the possibility of many websites having their own instances of Laconica, such as this one and this one. So just as blogging platforms made self-publication much easier, Laconica is making the operation of a social media site much easier.

I love identi.ca because Laconica is open source, available under the GNU Affero General Public License, and an enthusiastic developer/implementer community is rapidly evolving. I believe that some of the things that are currently done by work-arounds in Twitter (such as #hashtags) and other sites (like TweetScan) will be done by more explicit design in future iterations of Laconica.

I love identi.ca because unless otherwise specified, contents of this site are copyright by the contributors and available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 . Contributors should be attributed by full name or nickname. I realize that this may not seem loveworthy, but this is something by design and not by accident. An article on identi.ca in The Industry Standard reports...

[identi.ca creator Evan] Prodromou crafted an open source platform called Laconi.ca and a hub site, Identi.ca, to combat the "walled garden" situation of the Web 2.0 world where users can put content in, but they can't take it out. (Case in point: Robert Scoble being kicked off Facebook for running code to port out his many contacts.) "There's something not really Web-y about it," said Prodromou. "We want a Web that is open, that crosses boundaries, and that uses open standards."

And last, but certainly not least, I love identi.ca because even though it at this point, it's a Twitter with a Canadian domain name and Eastern Bloc graphics, it's a Twitter with a Canadian domain name and Eastern Bloc graphics that stays up.

And I'm not the only one who loves identi.ca by a long shot. I follow a lot of the cool kids on Twitter, and a lot of them were visiting identi.ca and tweeting about it.

What's to not like about identi.ca? You may be lonely for some of your Twitter friends on identi.ca, and there is currently a high emphasis on code, servers, web hosting, technology and other geekeries. I could be wrong, but I think people on identi.ca looked at me funny when I did an identi.cation of a recent Zippy the Pinhead comic. I don't know how many people are on identi.ca now. I have read that it gets people when Twitter is Twitterpated, and declines in activity when Twitter is chirping merrily.

And a question that remains is whether identi.ca is scalable. My Zippy the Pinhead messages, entered two days ago, had message numbers in the 60,000's. In Star Wars Episode VI, the aged Yoda says to Luke "When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not. Hmm?" In my mind's ear, I can hear Twitter saying to identi.ca "When 1.8 million users you reach, look as good you will not. Hmm?"

Word of the Day - Propitiate

To "propitiate" (pro-PISH-ee-ate) - from the Latin for "favorable" - is to appease.

Example (as used by Helen Gibson in Time Europe): "Yet the Fairy Bridge [on the Isle of Man]... didn't get its name for nothing. Here the locals lift a hand ever so slightly and mutter 'Hello, little people,' to propitiate the fairies underneath."

Propitiate is a good word to use to describe action taken to keep an offended power from doing something unpleasant. This word got my attention when Early To Rise made it their Word of the Day, because it's a word that used to be in Bible. By "used to be," I mean that it was in translations of the 1970's such as the New American Standard Version. It's in four different places in the New Testament

"But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." (Romans 3:21-26, NASV)

Therefore, He [Jesus] had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. (Hebrews 2:17, NASV)

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2, NASV)


The New International Version has replaced the word propitiation with the phrase "sacrifice of atonment," the word "atonement" and the phrase "atoning sacrifice" in the above three passages, respectively.

The example that Early To Rise used shed some light on why propitiate was replaced with atonement. As far as I can tell, propitiate doesn't connote anything as to the justice of the offended power's offense. The Greek gods took out there squabbles on humans from time to time, just as the vanity of the fairies needed to be propitiated. Perhaps the translators wished to keep from muddling together the wrath of the God of the Bible, a wrath required by His just character, with the angers of gods in other stories, which are less consistent and have less noble reasons.

Word of the Day - Apposite

There were actually two words I had never seen before in Chapter 11 of The Children of Men by P. D. James. One of them was retroussé, which is an adjective describing a nose turned up at the tip. The other word was apposite (AP-uh-zit), which means highly appropriate, pertinent, apt and/or relevant. James used it to describe the character Martin Woolvington, a member of the five-member Council which is ruling England in the year 2021:

He says little in Council but his contributions are invariably apposite and sensible.

Dictionary.com made apposite its Word of the Day in April of 2002, and gave the following examples...

As we survey Jewish history as a whole from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, Judah Halevi's phrase "prisoner of hope" seems entirely apposite. The prisoner of hope is sustained and encouraged by his hope, even as he is confined by it.
-- Jane S. Gerber (Editor), The Illustrated History of the Jewish People

Suppose, for example, that in a theoretical physics seminar we were to explain a very technical concept in quantum field theory by comparing it to the concept of aporia in Derridean literary theory. Our audience of physicists would wonder, quite reasonably, what is the goal of such a metaphor--whether or not it is apposite--apart from displaying our own erudition.
-- Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

Given that relevant isn't as relevant as it used to be, apposite is a pretty good word. When I see it and say it, I think of applicable and positive, which are good things. So it's a good thing that apposite, which is a good thing for something or someone to be, reminds me of other things which are good things for someone or something to be. Got that?

I See Strange Cars

I saw this car in the same parking lot as the picture a few months ago, but I didn't have a camera. I made a mental note to myself, "I'd like to meet the person who drives this car." I got that opportunity this month...


There are three different things written on this side of the car. The window has the message "By the blood of Jesus we are saved." Below the window is "Zipadeedooda, zipadeeya, my oh my what a wonderful day." That got me. It filled my heart with joy, that the person who owned this car was thinking about God being happy and wanting our happiness. At the bottom is "The Great I Am," a reference to the burning bush encounter between God and Moses in the book of Exodus.

The gentleman driving the car informed me that the automotive decoration was his wife's idea, and that he decided to go along with it. He confessed that he was not a sign painter by trade, but had the decoration done by a sign painter.



The back of the car reminded me of the song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin. It's curious that the word happiness doesn't occur at all in the King James Version, and only occurs six times in the New International Version. The word joy, on the other hand, appears over 150 times in the King James Version, and over 200 times in the New International Version.

I had a nice chat with the driver of the car, who was waiting for his wife to finish purchasing something in the grocery store. He considered the automotive decoration as just a small thing he could do to possibly start some conversations about the Jesus he loved so dearly.

Word of the Day - Hieratic

Something that's heiratic \ˌhī-(ə-)ˈra-tik\ is something that is related to priests or a priesthood.

I'm making this the Word of the Day because P. D. James used it in The Children of Men. She is describing a woman named Miriam, one of the members of a tiny band of would-be revolutionaries with whom the main character, Theodore Faron, is having a clandestine meeting:

The woman was the only one to come forward and grasp Theo's hand. She was black, probably Jamaican, and the oldest of the group, older than himself, Theo guessed, perhaps in her mid- or late fifties. Her high bush of short, tightly curled hair was dusted with white. The contrast between the black and white was so stark that the head looked powdered, giving her a look both hieratic and decorative.

Hieratic also describes a kind of Egyptian cursive writing simpler than hieroglyphics, and could also be an adjective meaning highly stylized or formal. But since it comes from the Greek word for sacred, I prefer for it to be used to suggest priestly.

Another reason I'm making this the Word of the Day is that P. D. James is using a couple of words that have been Words of the Day in the past. In the next paragraph, describing Luke, another one of the conspirators, she writes of his etiolated body. The mass murder of the infirm elderly is the given the euphemism of the Quietus.

Word-To-Be of the Day - Parvanimous

When thinking about quasigram as a prospective word, I remembered submitting micronanimous as a potential word. Latin teacher Kyle French pointed out a potential difficulty in such a word:

The problem is that magnanimous is a combination of 2 Latin words, but “micro” is a Greek word. “Parva” is the Latin antonym for “Magna,” so you might want to try “parvanimous.”

On one hand, the vast majority of words I've looked at are usually only from one language. My oldest daughter suggested trying the Greek word for soul, but ''micropsychic" could mean about seven different things, and is thus infelicitous as a new word. On the other hand, there are instances of words which have both Latin and Greek roots. Debra Hamel said she had encountered mixed words from time to time. She did a little searching for words of mixed lineage and found the ultimate counterexample: television, with hilarious quote from C. P. Snow thrown in for good measure:

Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.

So while it is true that the vast majority of words only come from one language, there certainly isn't any rule that says new words can only come from one language. One might as well decide to ban designer breeds such as labradoodles.

So while I object to Kyle's objection, I appreciate him offering an alternative of parvanimous. I wasn't enthused about it at first, because not very many people are aware that parva is the Latin antonym for magna, and if a word is going to be a new word, it's meaning should be self-evident. On the other hand, parva is also the root for parvovirus, which afflicts many different mammalian species. I like it that parvanimity and parvovirus have the same root, as they are both sicknesses. I also like it that the end of parvanimous sounds a lot like venomous, and they both describe bad things.

Debra wasn't crazy about parvanimous, but Susan Barr preferred it over micronanimous.

Word of the Day - Phalanx

In ancient Greece, a "phalanx" (FAY-langks) was a tight formation of heavily armed soldiers, with their shields joined and their spears overlapping. Today, we use the word to refer to any close-knit or compact group.

I don't use this word in everyday conversation, but I like this word because when I see it, I recall the bravery of King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermoplyae. I used the word when I reviewed the movie 300 a while back.

What were the messages of the movie? If you want to be free and stay free, it’s not enough to be good. You have to be strong and vigilant. Americans have been told to go to the mall while our military fights in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and other places, but a Spartan would find such a decree to be ludicrous and decadent. You have to be vigilant against internal subversion. Numbers aren’t everything. Keep the phalanx together. Resisting the slavery your loved ones will experience if you fail is a good reason for valor. Freedom is worth fighting for, or as VDH put it…


Another reason I'm making this the Word of the Day is that Andrew Coyne used it recently in his liveblogging of the show trial of Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine before the British Columbia Star Chamber Kangaroo Court Human Rights Tribunal:

Maclean’s legal team is out in force, a phalanx of half a dozen suits. The opposing counsel, by contrast, is one suit and two or three badly-dressed juniors. If I didn’t know the stakes, I’d be rooting for them. Actually I am rooting for them, in a strange sort of way. Don’t tell my employers, but I’m sort of hoping we lose this case. If we win—that is, if the tribunal finds we did not, by publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book, expose Muslims to hatred and contempt, or whatever the legalese is—then the whole clanking business rolls on, the stronger for having shown how “reasonable” it can be. Whereas if we lose, and fight on appeal, and challenge the whole legal basis for these inquisitions, then something important will be achieved.

Word of the Day - Ineluctable

Something that's ineluctable \in-ih-LUCK-tuh-buhl\, is something that's impossible to avoid or evade; inevitable.

I'm making ineluctable the Word of the Day because P. D. James used it at the end of one of the chapters of her book The Children of Men. I seem to be the only person on the planet who wasn't aware that P. D. James rocks as a writer. I started reading The Children of Men because Mark Steyn used a quote from it at the beginning of one of the chapters of America Alone. P. D. James will set something up in the course of a chapter, and then give something near the end of the chapter that knocks it down, makes you wonder about what was set up. The Children of Men is a book set in the year 2021, where humanity became infertile in 1995, and is staring its extinction in the face. An Oxford history professor is keeping a journal, and reflecting on the response to the message of evangelist Rosie McClure:

During the mid-1990's the recognized churches, particularly the Church of England, moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism. Rosie has gone further and has virtually abolished the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross, substituting a golden orb of the sun in glory, like a garish Victorian pub sign. The change was immediately popular. Even to unbelievers like myself, the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man's ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.

Ineluctable is from Latin ineluctabilis, from in-, "not" + eluctari, "to struggle out of, to get free from," from ex-, e-, "out of" + luctari, "to struggle."

It doesn't really have anything to do with the word elude, but ineluctable means someone you can't get out of.

I am also making ineluctable the Word of the Day because it is oh-so-close to being an anagram for unelectable.



I would like to say that ineluctable is a quasigram, a quasi-anagram, an almost anagram, for unelectable. There doesn't seem to be much traction for quasigram as a word yet, but I like it.

Clip of the Day - Five Guys Named Moe by Louis Jordan

I've never played anything by Louis Jordan at Crossword Bebop, and that in itself is a lowdown dirty shame. I'm playing this song because Mark Steyn made an indirect reference to it in America Alone, that a lot of people might not have gotten. He writes:

Not long after September 11 [2001], I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves someone named Mohammed.


Steyn then mentioned over a dozen people named Mohammed involved in some form of terror or terrible violence. After writing about Merle Ricklefs, editor of the sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Islam mocking Steyn for that remark, Steyn wrote:

For those of us who aren't professors of Islamic studies, the obvious course is to step back and try to work from first principles: What's happening? Who's doing it? The five-thousand-guys-named-Mo routine meets the "reasonable man" test: it's the first thing an averagely well-informed person who's not a multiculti apologist notices--here's the evening news and here comes another Mohammed.


Steyn using the phrase "five-thousand-guys-named-Mo" is referring to this song.



I gotta tell you a story from way back
Truck on down and dig me Jack
There's Big Moe, Little Moe, Four-eyed Moe, No Moe,
Look at brother, look at brother, look at brother Eat Moe
Moe, Moe, Moe, Moe, Moe, Moe, Moe

Who's the greatest band around?
Makes the cats jump up and down
Who's the talk of rhythm town?
Five guys named Moe!

When they start to beat it out
Everybody jump and shout
Tell me who do the critics rave about?
Five guys named Moe!

They came out of nowhere,
But that don't mean a thing!
They rate high and you'll know why
When you hear them swing!

High brow, low brow, all agree,
They're the best in harmony!
I'm telling you folks you really ought to see
Five guys named Moe!

One guy... Big Moe
Two guys... Little bitty Moe
Three guys... Four-eyed Moe
Four guys... No Moe
Five guys... Eat Moe
Five little guys named Moe!


That's one of the downsides of Mark Steyn. America Alone is full of references to songs and characters of American musicals. I got this one, but there are probably quite a few that went over my head.

This song was released by Louis Jordan in 1943, but it's been recorded by a number of other musicians, most notably Joe Jackson. A number of songs by Louis Jordan were gathered into the musical Five Guys Named Moe, which was performed on Broadway in 1992, and is performed in various places around America today.

I give you Five Guys Named Moe by Louis Jordan.

America Alone - The Globalization of Wahhabi Islam

Chapter 4 of America Alone by Mark Steyn begins a new section of the book. He believes that he's written enough for the moment about how the social-democratic state corrodes individual character of citizens, causes the population to age, and leads to economic and demographic collapse.

There was a book written a while back called Jihad vs. McWorld by political scientist Benjamin Barber. The subtitle of the book is "How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World." But that book gives the impression that global capitalism and the global advance of Islam are two essentially different movements. They're both about the advancement of certain "brands" in the marketplace of allegiances. What's different between the two are the players, with individuals and corporations being the main players in global capitalism, and individuals, religious groups and nations being the main players in the global advance of Islam.

By "nations," I most specifically mean Saudi Arabia. Steyn writes:

...the Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to Jakarta [Indonesia] and Singapore and Alma-Ata [now called Almaty in Kazakhstan] and Grozny [Chechnya] and Sarajevo [Bosnia] and Lyons [France] and Bergen [Norway] and Manchester [United Kingdom] and Ottawa [Canada] and Dearborn [Michigan] and Falls Church [Virginia].

Steyn doesn't write about exactly when this started, but Freedom House says it started in 1979, after the ascention to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and the takeover by extremists of the Mosque in Mecca in November of 1979. Steyn doesn't discuss why this took place, but Freedom House writes...

A major part of the reason for this [changes to a more restrictive version of Islam] and other important changes in the Kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] was the Saudi royal family’s reaction to the tumultuous year of 1979. We are still feeling the after-shocks today. The Saudis chose after the twin shocks of that year to strike a Faustian bargain with the Wahhabi sect and not only to accommodate their views about propriety, pious behavior, and Islamic law, but effectively to turn over education in the Kingdom to them and later to fund the expansion into Pakistan and elsewhere of their extreme, hostile, anti-modern, and anti-infidel form of Islam. The other side of the bargain was that if the Wahhabis would concentrate their attacks on, essentially, the U.S. and Israel, the Saudi elite would get a more-or-less free ride from the Wahhabis and the corruption within the Kingdom would be overlooked.

Steyn then goes into further detail as to how Saudi money is funding mosques like the Islamic Society of Boston, Muslim schools such as the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, where would-be Presidential assassin Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was valedictorian, Departments of Middle East Studies at universities, and lobbying organizations such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations.

Muslims take umbrage at their religion being considered as one monolithic entity. There are Sunni, Shia and Sufi branches, and different schools of thought within those branches. One reason Islam is considered as a monolithic entity is that one school within one branch, the Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam, is being promoted on a global basis far more vigorously than any other school. Another reason is that whenever our educational system needs a go-to guy on Islam to satisfy a multicultual urge, the go-to guy is a guy like Abdurahman Alamoudi.

America Alone - Pretentiousness, Avarice and Indolence

In Chapter 3 of America Alone, Mark Steyn contemplates a big idea that is worthy of further consideration in other, more scholarly, less snarky books to be written in the future: the social-democratic state, the welfare state, the cradle-to-grave nanny state, is hazardous to the character of its citizens.

How is this so? It focuses the minds of citizens on secondary issues of enjoyment and pleasure, as opposed to primary issues of survival and reproduction. It tends to make the citizens focus on getting their benefits now, and not thinking about the sustainability of the system. It inculcates a sense of entitlement. "I paid my taxes, I want my benefits." It tends to discourage charitable contribution and volunteer activity because the government is already doing what you would have done with your money and time. And to top it all off, living in a social-democratic state makes you a smug, sanctimonious so-and-so like Will Hutton, sneering that America should get with the program and be more like Europe.

And what would Americans be like if they took Will Hutton's invitation to join in Europe's latest bad idea? They would be like Oscar van den Boogaard. Steyn wrote about him in the Introduction:

Oscar van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay "humanist" (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), and in 2006 he gave an interview to the Belgian paper De Standaard. Reflecting on the accelerating Islamization of the Continent, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."

The name Boogaard rang a bell for me, as Derek Boogaard plays for the Minnesota Wild hockey team...

Sunday New York Times Crossword - Q & A Session

This puzzle, composed by Will Nediger, contains two-word themed answers where the first word starts with a q, and the second word starts with an a. I'm really happy to be writing a blog post about a crossword puzzle for a change, instead of the end of the world as we know it.

The leaves of a quaking aspen do indeed tremble in the slightest breeze. They look like they're spinning around, but they really aren't.

The Quebec Act of 1774 was an attempt by the British Parliament to keep French Canadians, who had just become British subjects under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, from rebelling and/or supporting the American Revolution. When you think of the American Revolution, do you fondly recall any French Canadians who devoted either time, talent or treasure to the American cause? Me neither. It must have worked.

The Quarternary Age is the last two million years. It's broken up into the Pleistocene epoch (two million years ago to ten thousand years ago) and the Holocene epoch (ten thousand years ago to now)

Recoiling from is quailing at. I recall Mabel's line in The Pirates of Penzance: "Could it be that the lionheart quails at the coming conflict?" The fact that burgles crosses quailing at reminds me of Gilbert and Sullivan all the more, as later in the second act, the Sergeant sings "When the enterprising burglar's not a-burgling, when the cutthroat isn't occupied in crime, He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and listen to the merry village chime."

Is Queen Anne the Queen Anne for whom Queen Anne's Lace is named?

I've read The Power and the Glory, but I haven't read The Quiet American by Graham Greene.

Alabaster is mentioned in each of the Synoptic Gospels:

6 While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, 7 a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table. 8 When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. "Why this waste?" they asked. 9 "This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor." 10 Aware of this, Jesus said to them, "Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 11 The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. 12 When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. 13 I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her." (Matthew 26:6-13, NIV)

Somehow if Matthew had written "a woman came with a jar made from a variety of gypsum, of very expensive perfume," it just wouldn't have had the same ring.

America Alone - A Few Case Studies Of Aging Nations

In Chapter 2 of America Alone, Mark Steyn goes into further detail of the ideas in Chapter 1, and examines some of the nations he mentioned as experiencing aging populations.

I remember that in the 1980's, Japan was prophecied as being the new world leader, outsaving, outcreating, outinnovating the United States and everybody else. So why are we not speaking Japanese? Why do not tell our children "If you work hard and apply yourself, and if you're lucky, you can live and work in Japan?" This is why...



You don't have to be particularly clever to observe that older populations tend to be more risk-averse than younger populations.

I can remember when Russia was advancing as a candidate as the new world leader, taking advantage of the feckless Jimmy Carter. Russia conquered Afghanistan, but we really fixed their little red wagon! We boycotted the Olympics! Guess we showed them! So what happened to Russia? Well, Ronald Reagan happened, but what happened since then? This happened...



That's Russia's population over the past 15 years. If it wasn't so sad, Steyn's line about Russian women voting with their fetus (terminating 70 percent of pregnancies) would be hilarious.

Why did only four of the forty witnesses come forward when Guido Demoor was beaten to death in Antwerp, Belgium by "youths" in 2006? Because "they're keeping their head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind their newspaper and hoping to be left alone." Why did Spain capitulate to the terrorists by getting rid of Jose Maria Aznar in March of 2004? Steyn writes:

Why would the Spanish do what they did? Well, why wouldn't they? Who needs to show resolve when you're a country with a fertility rate of 1.1 percent? [I think he means 1.1 babies per woman, but the point remains] Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment. To fight for king and country is to fight for the future. But a barren society has no future, and so what's to fight for?

This chapter contains the quote that the complainants to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal are so exercised over, the quote from Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar. It's the tagline for this chapter:

"We're the ones who will change you," Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up, "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."

RIP Amina Said, Sarah Said

The story of the murders of 18-year-old Amina Said and 17-year-old Sarah Said in Lewisville, Texas is ancient history by now, having occurred at the beginning of this year. So why am I writing about it now? I'm writing about it for a couple of reasons.



Mark Steyn mentioned it in passing on the second page of the Introduction of America Alone:

The real struggle is being waged not over dusty patches of the Sunni Triangle or a few caves in the Hindu Kush, but over far more central terrain - which is to say most of the "Western world," including /europe, Britain, Australia, Canada, and, ultimately, America, too: the United States will find this a far lonelier planet if it can't find new allies to replace old ones. Unlike Iraq, with its bloody market and mosque bombings by "insurgents," the western front appears more placid, although there are occasional explosions - the tanning salon blown up in Copenhagen at the end of February 2008-and there are, with little publicity, horrible fatalities: "honor killings" in Toronto and Dallas; the curious Swedish phenomenon in which young Muslim girls "accidentally" plunge to their deaths from apartment balconies.

The honor killing in Toronto to which Steyn is referring is the murder of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez, strangled by her father in December 2007 in a dispute over the wearing of the hijab.

I am writing about this because I predicted it in a post of predictions for 2008:

In 2008, there will be another honor killing like the one in Mississauga, Ontario. Only this time, the honor killing will be in America. Irrelevant feminists will say nothing, thus remaining irrelevant.

I was more right than I wanted to be, as the murders took place on January 1, 2008. I was more right than I wanted to be, as irrelevant feminists said nothing, thus remaining irrelevant.

While Minnesota Muslim Tamim Saidi didn't mention Amina and Sarah by name, his post on Islam versus culture addressed the subject of the honor killings, saying "Well, you shouldn't condemn Islam because of the unIslamic practice of honor killings." This is all well and good, as far as the article goes. But it doesn't address the issue of why these unIslamic practices have persisted in the Muslim world. In writing about the murders of Amina and Sarah Said, Robert Spencer writes:

But these dismissals [dismissals of the murder of Aqsa Parvez as just another instance of domestic violence] are too easy, principally because they fail to take into account important evidence. In some areas, honor killing is assumed to be an Islamic practice. There is evidence that Islamic culture inculcates attitudes that could lead directly to the murders of these two girls in Texas. In 2003, the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. In a sadly typical consequence of this early last year, a Jordanian man who murdered his sister because he thought she had a lover was given a three-month sentence, which was suspended for time served, allowing him to walk free. The Yemen Times just last week published an article insisting that violence against women is necessary for the stability of the family and the society, and invoking Islam to support this view.

Since Islam is used as the justification for such barbarities, it becomes incumbent upon Muslim spokesmen to confront this directly, and to work for positive change, rather than simply to consign it all to culture, as if that absolves Islam from all responsibility. For this is the culture that apparently gave Yaser Said and Muhammad Parvez the idea that they had to kill their daughters. It is a culture suffused with its religion, thoroughly dominated by it -- such that a clear distinction between the two is not so easy to find.

Amina Said and Sarah Said were honor students and athletes at Lewisville High School. I believe they would have made great contributions had they lived.

I was greatly disappointed by the weasely attempt by Shahina Siddiqui and Sheikh Alaa El-Sayyed, Muslim leaders in Ontario, at characterizing the murder of Aqsa Parvez as an instance of domestic violence. "Nothing to see here folks, move along." I don't know anyone who believes that.

I hereby confess that I do not understand why Tamim Saidi was unwilling to mention Yaser Said, the murderer of Amina and Sarah Said, by name. I also do not understand why Tanim Saidi was unwilling to condemn Yaser Said for his evil deeds.

America Alone - What A Drag It Is Getting Old

The Rolling Stones were singing about an individual getting old in their song Mother's Little Helper, but Mark Steyn is contemplating societies getting old in the first chapter of America Alone. And while individuals age one day every 24 hours, societies can age quite a bit faster than that, if they aren't replacing themselves. And that's exactly what's happening to every developed nation in the world except America.

I just looked up Canada's population figures. Canada's population is growing at a rate of 1%, which means its population of 33 million will double in slightly over 70 years. But consider the numbers further. Statistics Canada says the population growth breaks down to a baby every 1:29, a death every 2:14, and a net gain from immigration every 2:29. Here's another way of putting it: out of every 8 new Canadians, 3 are immigrants. That results in an aging population.

National Statistics Online in the UK reports:

The UK has an aging population. This is the result of declines in the mortality rate and in past fertility rates. This has led to a declining proportion of the population aged under 16 and an increasing proportion aged 65 and over.

I could go on, but the raw data is there for anyone to see. There's no conspiracy to try and keep it hidden. But there are conseqences of this demographic trend. Consequence #1 is that the social-democratic state, the welfare state, the cradle-to-grave nanny state, cannot exist when the number of elderly who have to be cared for by each worker goes past a certain number. Consequence #2, Steyn writes, is that "It's hard to have a big influence on the world when there are just a few of you and you're all getting on in years."

So if the developed world other than America is getting older than any functioning societies have ever been, and getting older at a faster rate than any society in history, the Muslim world is getting younger. A society needs 2.1 babies per woman to replace itself. Niger has 7.46. Mali has 7.42. Somalia has 6.46. Even though those countries have much higher infant mortality rates than the developed world, it leads to a growing population. What's even more to the point is that Muslim populations in Europe are growing faster than non-Muslim populations. What is the inevitable consequence?

At the end of this chapter, Steyn considers Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech from the play "As You Like It":

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;

Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.

And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav'd a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.

Steyn considers the Muslim world to be in the fourth age, the U. S. to be in the fifth age, Europe to be in the sixth age, and Russia to be in the seventh age.

America Alone - Why Is This Doommonger Different From All Other Doommongers?

Mark Steyn starts the Prologue of America Alone with some mockery of a doommongering short story from the 80's by Martin Amis about nuclear war, and then uses that to launch into a description/mocking of a whole genre of doommongering media such as The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (slightly before my time, but now the poster child for discredited doommongering books), The Limits To Growth by The Club of Rome (which I read in high school), The Cooling by Lowell Ponte (somehow that one never showed up on my personal radar), the movie The Day After Tomorrow, and the ubiquitous, inescapable An Inconvenient Truth by the ubiquitous, inescapable ecodoommonger who must not be named.

So the point of all that is that there's nothing particularly odd about doommonger media as such. So why is America Alone different from all other doommonger media? First of all, instead of writing about a doom that could possibly happen in the future, Steyn is writing about a doom which is currently underway, and has been underway for about the past 40 years in various ways. The three aspects of this doom, in Steyn's words, are 1) demographic decline, 2) the unsustainability of the Western social-democratic state, and 3) civilizational exhaustion. I've only finished the first two chapters, and Steyn has only addressed doom aspect 1) in detail in those first two chapters. Steyn spends a couple of pages in the Prologue contemplating the question, "What will it mean if the people who share our values are in demographic decline, and the people who oppose our values are in demographic advance?"

So why is America Alone different from all other doommonger media? Because the other doommonger media, from Ehrlich to Gore, have all proposed massive increases in the size, scope, expense and invasiveness of government as solutions to the potential doom being mongered. Steyn, on the other hand, considers this a symptom of the problem; he writes:

the torpor of the West derives in part from the annexation by government of most of the core functions of adulthood.

Lots of other writers have considered the possibility of the unsustainability of the social-democratic state, the welfare state, the nanny state, from the viewpoint of there not being young people around to pay for the benefits promised to an aging population. But most of these writers are of the opinion that if we could have a sustainable social-democratic state, that it would be good thing. Steyn rejects that idea as well, and says the above phrase in a number of different ways in the course of just the first two chapters, and I hope and believe he's going to go into this in much greater detail in later chapters. Steyn writes:

So this is a doomsday book with a twist: an apocalyptic scenario that can best be avoided not by more government but by less--by government returning to the citizenry the primal responsibilities it's taken from them in the modern era.

America Alone - With A New Introduction

I'm one chapter into America Alone by Mark Steyn, and it's a good thing that Steyn gives generous portion of lighthearted humor into his narrative of the oncoming demographic isolation of the United States, and the resurgence of Islam as a global force. But I'm not going to blog about that chapter just yet, I'm going to blog about the new Introduction, which was written when the paperback version came out this year.

America Alone is contemplating the consequences of population trends on the state of the world for say, the next 50 years. The population of Europe, including Russia, is going to decrease significantly, and the demographics is going to change significantly, with many more immigrants from Africa and Asia.

The responses to the book when it came out in hardback in 2006 have either been to dismiss it out of hand, (New York Times, Toronto Globe and Mail) or to consider the book an unduly alarmist document (Johann Hari in the New Statesman, The Economist, The Guardian, Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan in Maclean's). Some people considered the book a racist document for even broaching the subject of demographic change, and Steyn spent a couple of pages considering the aborted 2007 terror plot instigated by German Muslim Fritz Gelowicz, to address that critique.

The rest of the Introduction considers the complaints brought against America Alone and Maclean's magazine by Mohamed Elmasry. Stein writes:

The head of the Canadian Islamic Congress is a man called Mohamed Elmasry. In a TV interview in 2004, Dr. Elmasry said it was legitimate to kill any Israeli civilian, male or female, over the age of eighteen. He is, thus, an objective supporter of terrorism. Yet he's accusing me of "hate speech," and is apparently the new poster boy for "human rights" in Canada.

Steyn ends the Introduction with a quote from Dennis Prager, which has a "You pays your money and you takes your choice" feel to it:

Some of us worry about a resurgent Islam and its attendant complications for a decayed Western civilization; some of us worry about global warming. In twenty years' time, one of us will be proved right and the other will look like an idiot.

There are 10 chapters in the book, as well as an Introduction and a Prologue. Hopefully I'll write a series of 12 posts on this book.

Word Of The Day - Frisson

A frisson [freess-on] is a moment of intense excitement; a shudder; an emotional thrill. It's a French word that has become an English word. When it's used in French, it gets translated as "shiver" or "ripple."

I'm making this the Word of the Day because I wasn't familiar with the word, and because Mark Steyn used it the new Introduction written for the paperback version of his excellent book America Alone:

Not long after America Alone came out, I happened to be in the L Street branch of Borders in Washington, D.C., and was pleased, as authors are, to see my opus on one of the front display tables and a potential customer hovering over it. Alas, on closer inspection, he turned out to be hovering over the adjoining volume, The Playboy Book of Celebrity Nudes. So my anticipatory frisson was misplaced, although presumably the author of the Playboy Book would also have been pleased, it being hard work writing all those captions.

If you are actually using this word in conversation, as opposed to writing it in a blog post, you have a chance for extra points for style by giving it a French pronunciation.

Playlist of the Day - John Hiatt

It's Charles Johnson's fault that I have the chorus from Cry Love by John Hiatt stuck in my head. I'm not that familiar with John Hiatt, so I did a little rummaging on Napster, and made a playlist of John Hiatt's top tracks on Napster.

Have a Little Faith in Me was the top track, and I could see how a lot of people would like it, but it just didn't speak to my condition. On the other hand, the unbeatable beat of Memphis in the Meantime made my ears sit up and take notice. I thought about Van Morrison a little bit when I heard Have a Little Faith in Me, but I thought of Van Morrison more when I heard Feels Like Rain. I recalled the Van Morrison song Someone Like You when I heard Feels Like Rain, they are both songs of hope and happiness even in the midst of difficulty. I somehow knew in the back of my mind that talk show host Laura Ingraham was a John Hiatt fan, but I didn't know that the opening bars of Perfectly Good Guitar was the opening music for her show. Nothing against Slow Turning, Angel Eyes, or Riding with the King, but I pretty much got the idea of what I was going to get from John Hiatt by the end of Cry Love.



I tweeted about these songs a couple of days ago. Today's tweets are tomorrow's blog posts.

Word Of The Day - Ruminate

To "ruminate" (ROO-mih-nate) - from the Latin for "meditate" - means "to ponder," to turn an idea over and over in your mind. The word "ruminant" (an animal that chews its cud) is related.

Example (as used by Scott Eyman in a Palm Beach Post review of Forward From Here by Reeve Lindbergh): "Her style is ruminative, gently feminist, slightly predictable... ."

The Bible commends the man or woman who ruminates on the Bible in Psalm 1 (NIV):

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. (Psalm 1:1-4, NIV)

The word rendered as meditate has multiple possible meanings, but one that most commentators have noticed is the meaning "to mutter" as in "to mutter to one's self on a continual basis."

But I like this word because it rhymes with illuminate, which is something that's likely to happen if you ruminate on the right things. The Genie in the Disney movie Aladdin, just before starting the song "You Ain't Never Had A Friend Like Me," said "Master, I don't think you realize what you've got here. So why don't you just ruminate, whilst I illuminate the possibilities." So ruminate and illuminate are a felicitous association in my matrix of significances.

4/23/2009 UPDATE: Furthermore, it doesn't hurt that the first four letters of ruminate is the name of the poet Rumi. If you ruminate on the right things, chances are good you will be illuminated, like Rumi.