Aside

To all you people who said you wanted to go see Youssou N’Dour with me and then cancelled: you suck. I ended up not going, because I didn’t want to go alone.

For all of you who were searching for Bobby Fischer, call off your search party: While incognito, Fischer intermittently gave interviews with a radio station in the Philippines, often digressing into anti-Jewish rants and accusing American officials of hounding him. In the radio interviews, he praised the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, saying America should be “wiped out,” and described Jews as “thieving, lying bastards.” His mother was Jewish. He also announced that he had abandoned chess in 1996 and…

At Rachel’s suggestion, I’ve created PersianNotArab.com (the domain won’t work for a day or so) to document this type of occurance. I’m not going to be a vigilante or anything, seeking out these types of misrepresentations all the time, but if they cross my email inbox or my regular reading materials, then I’ll speak up.

To Pierre Kattar and Ben de la Cruz, I wanted to write to you to tell you how much I enjoyed your video clip “Comedy with an Agenda” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/politics/aacomedians/index.htm?nav=lb) that was posted on your Web site this morning. I found it very intriguing and quite funny. However, in the caption to the video feed you mention Arab American comics. One of the comics that is featured in the video is Maz Jobrani, who you also have featured on the home…

Well, my cousin, Martin is off to Thailand. Now he should be somewhere over the Pacific, en route to Singapore, his first stop. We wish him well. From today’s NYT: Steve Jobs wants to tear down a huge house that he owns in Woodside, CA (west of Palo Alto/Menlo Park)? It’s a gorgeous house. This is the one time where I’ve seen Steve make a design error. Juneau, AK doesn’t have a road? And now they want one? The Palestinians…

Anyone interested?

$300 buys me a round-trip plane ticket across the country. It would also buy me an upgrade to my laptop (assuming I can sell what I have for ~$1000). I’d get something along the lines of a 14″ iBook with a slightly better processor — but twice the battery life (~ 6 hrs, instead of < 3 hrs). Hmmm...now there's a rebate from Amazon.com for $150 off. That makes it a bit more interesting. Very interesting. Update: Ok, so I’d…

Apparently the conservatives among us are getting into the food business. First it was Star-Spangled Ice Cream designed to compete with liberal Ben & Jerry’s, boasting flavors like: “Nutty Environmentalist,” “Donald Rum Raisin,” “Choc & Awe,” and my personal favorite “I Hate the French Vanilla.” Now we’re onto: W Ketchup (The “W” stands for Washington — yeah, right.) From their site: The leading competitor not only has 57 varieties, but has 57 foreign factories as well. W Ketchup comes in…

Offline and Still in Touch With Away Messaging (Washington Post, July 9 2004) Why wouldn’t he leave an away message? That’s how everyone they know communicates these days. Away messaging, a function of instant messaging, is this generation’s automatic way of telling online buddies, when the sender’s not online, where he or she is, or is not, 24-7. It’s no more remarkable to a 20-year-old than the telephone answering machine is to parents. If you can’t imagine letting your 150…

The correction that I asked for appears! An article in Science Times on Tuesday about a project at the University of Southern California that uses artificial intelligence to help soldiers learn Arabic gave an incorrect literary example. Omar Khayyam’s poetry is in Persian, not Arabic. Because of an editing error, the article also misstated the location of Fort Bragg, where Special Forces soldiers are to test a video game this month as part of the project. It is in North…