Cyrus Farivar

Today I woke up uncertain, and you know that gives me the fits, so I left this land of fungible convictions, because it seemed like the pits And when I say, “conviction”, I mean it’s something to abjure and when I say “uncertain”, I mean to doubt I’ll not turn out a caricature. So I set off in search of my forbears, ‘coz my forebearance was in need. — Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, “Ballad of the Sin Eater” So…

You have Thanksgiving dinner with rice and “khoresht.” (STEW) Yep, at our Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of my LA-based Persian extended family, we had baghali polo and grilled fish alongside our turkey, potatoes and stuffing.

BBC: “We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats,” said Veselin Gatalo of the youth group Urban Movement Mostar. “But one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.”

Wanderlustgeek.com ! First episode includes a chat about spending Thanksgiving abroad with Bhu and Lane.

NYT: “Unless you get a critical mass of bishops and religious superiors who say, Now we can’t admit any gay men, I don’t think it’s going to have any discernible effect,” Father Bretzke said. “There are lots of excellent gay priests and seminarians, and we have a priest shortage. We’re not exactly in a buyer’s market here. If you’re not going to ordain gay men, and not going to ordain married men, and not going to ordain women, well then…

On their new online redesign! Now with RSS feeds! NEWS SPORTS REVIEW SCITECH

CHUD.com (courtesy Fred Badlisi) : Q: My impression – and a lot of people share this – is that the CIA is a dangerous and possibly evil organization. At least that’s the emotional reaction. Baer: That’s because you watch too many movies. Q: Yeah, I was going to say, is there anything you can say to dissuade me from that? Baer: It’s a bureaucracy. But the movie is looking at the evil side, which is that they’ve taken bad information…

It’s none other than one of my favorite journalism buddies, Mr. Paul Boutin. (Hey Paul, nice mug. Really. 🙂 ) BusinessWeek: Today marks the official end of the PC era and the start of the X era. Not X as in Xbox, but X as in X factor, the unknown. Even if you’ve never played a videogame and never will, a look under the hood of an Xbox 360 is a peek into your future.

Rolling Stone: John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information — overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized “to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS” — an extraordinarily…

Clive Thompson (of Slate and Wired News fame) : The October issue of Vanity Fair included a profile of Paris Hilton, and at one point in the article the reporter spoke to Paris’ younger sister Nicky. Nicky asked the following question: “I just want to say to these writers, ‘I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?’ I feel very accomplished…