Tea Time Word Play

A: “After you have spent an entire Sunday doing home work, every other choice in life seems like a “reject” or a “fail to reject” decision!"


B: “But are you “confident” enough to take those decisions?”

A: “Well, should one make personal decisions based on statistical significance or a 95% confidence interval?”

B: “I think one must consider the T(ea)-value before any decision, especially when it is this cold. If there is no T, then there would be zzzzzzzz”

A: “Yes, the null hypothesis (Ho): [If not “t”, then “z”] shall have no alternative hypothesis (Ha). This is proven with 100% confidence, fully supported by the Ch(a)i square test”

P.S. B: "A word of caution though! Taking the Ch(a)i square test indiscriminately often leads to dangerously high p(ee)-values, which can cause you to fail the null hypothesis."

Graduate school can do a lot to your madness quotient.

The World of Secrets

I don’t understand much of technology, but an innovative idea of art always excites me. I don’t understand why I should trade my normal cell for an iphone when all I need a phone is for talking. That is how techgnorant I am. However I get very excited when I come across a blog that is different,or a particular way something is sketched, or discover a certain book written differently. When I discovered Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, I was amazed at the way the book was conceptualized, although I browsed the e-version. Last week something similar happened. I discovered a website called postsecret.com. Ever since, I have been hooked to it. As I read all of it, I wondered why I did not think of such an idea before. It is so very simple, yet so empowering.


Ever felt you are surrounded with secrets that haunt you? Secrets that you think no one should know, yet you are eager to share? Secrets of a hurtful childhood? Memories of the first kiss? Maybe the first time you did something mean to someone? Broke a flower vase? Harassed the neighbors? Stole something for fun? Did something otherwise considered taboo? Had voices in your head tell you something inappropriate? Wanted to say to your scatterbrained teacher what you thought of him/her? You get the point, right?

The idea is simple. Write down your secret in a postcard. Decorate it the way you want it to. Mail it to an address in Maryland, and it will get published. While you remain anonymous, your secret is out there for the world to read. The idea thrilled me. I made a mental note and came up with so many secrets I would want to share anonymously. Why do I hate this and this. Why do I like such and such thing. What do I think of you. What I don’t think of you. It’s so liberating and empowering, writing down your secret out in the open for you to read, and remain anonymous while the world reads it. It seems they have a couple of books published with people’s secrets in them. I immediately checked the book catalog at the library and got hold of their first book. It was more of a pictorial book with picture postcards and their secrets published. I could not put down the book till I finished it, homework and assignments be darned. I had finished the book in one evening. Ever since, I have been sniffing to get my hand on the other books.

I love that it is something so simple, yet so empowering and healing. I cannot tell about you, but I am definitely going to have fun reading others secrets. And no, I am still not telling you my secrets. But for the fact that I love listening to cheesy double entendre Bhojpuri songs while no one is looking.

If ONLY I could ….

It started when a friend’s friend’s friend posted an album captioned, “Only my baby”. Knowing how the biological processes of reproduction work (unless you are an asexually reproducing amoeba or a hermaphrodite earthworm), I was not sure if babies could be made singlehandedly. Ideally, I should have forgotten about it and moved on, but the junk folder in my brain (which strangely occupies a large disc space) kept playing with the combination of semantics intended. Only my baby? My only baby? My baby only? I realized how the meaning changed each time I repositioned the word “only”. That is when realization struck. Of course using the word “only” out of place is a practice followed by so many of us “Indian English” speaking people who first think in our native language, and then translate it in our heads. This is “only” to emphasize the meaning all the more and hence add only, which, far from emphasizing anything at all, only screws up the meaning left and right. For the next few days, I kept an ear on what I heard from people speaking “Indian English”, and my realization seemed so profound.


“You are leaving now only?” Not only was it a question that uniquely started with “You are” (and not “are you”), the person, in order to intensify the meaning, added an “only” to stress on the urgency. Ekhono I jachcho? Abhi ja rahe ho kya? Obika jauchu? You are leaving now only? Made perfect sense.

The friend, in an attempt to show how much she loved the other friend and how similar they were, ended up saying, “I am like you only”. He called her wondering where they were and she told him urgently, “We are at home only”. They were in a bitchfest, bitching about every random thing when she emphasized her point and said, “Those people are like that only”. The last time someone told me, “I will marry you only”, I had quickly replied saying, “But I will not marry you only”. I don’t know if he thought I intended to marry multiple people, or I was simply turning him down, but you do realize wrong and inappropriate English usage is a big turnoff for me, no matter how noble your intentions of bonding are. The good part is, all the emotions captured in these statements could be suitably delivered without the use of the word “only” after every line. The bad part is, not many of us consciously realize that. What to do, we are like that only. But the great part is, it makes reading random Facebook conversations so hilarious.

Did I tell you that I was shocked to hear one of our senior teachers say, “If you boys don’t work hard, you will remain like this only”. I was disappointed. And “only” is not the only word we use wrongly. Remember the last time you were introduced at someone’s party as someone else’s cousin (and not cousin)? Especially remember how the word cousin was enunciated as “kaa-sin”? Remember when someone asked you, “Will you go no?” (Tum jaoge na?). I know I am not supposed to make fun of such people, but I am not making fun of people. I am just making profound observations. What to do, I am like that only.

Sniff

The Suburban screeches to a halt, tyres squealing, black clouds of rubber rising with the dust. Four pairs of spindly, hairy legs emerge, four dirty thobes, four ridiculous sticks, four long straggly beards that have never ever known the scented seductiveness of shampoo, deep inside which are the small dried-up memories of meals long forgotten.


But enough of the niceties. There's men's work to be done. The Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are on a mission. To Promote Virtue. But before that can be done, all Vice must be Prevented. And there's serious Vice on the streets .

What can it be? A Pakistani woman walking along the road with three strands of hair showing? In the mall, a Saudi family lingering in the food court during prayer time? A lonely Barbie Doll, pining for her Ken in the dusty corner of a shop at the tatty end of the Kuwaiti Suuq?


No. The truth is far more Sinful than that. So dark a Sin, it hardly dares speak its name. But that name is.....

Snuff

Yes, snuff!

Snuff, as in "Snuff Movie"? Like those grainy 30-second Afghan and Iraq .mpg's that the Imam University sickos like to watch and email to their friends, some poor soul having his head chopped off by a Muslim crazy with a sword?


No, worse than that!

But what could possibly be worse than that?

Snuff. Dried, powdered tobacco. You sniff it up your nose. Makes you sneeze.

Ah, that snuff! I see the problem!

Officials of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice apprehended several Arab expatriates who reportedly manufactured and sold shemah (a snufflike substance which contains various ingredients) in the Al-Otaibiya district of Makkah.

The officials also seized more than two tons of the contraband from a secret manufacturing center in the city.

Now before you ask me why the Religious Police are going out and confiscating snuff, I haven't a clue. Although in this case, there were.......several schoolboys carrying pouches containing a substance for sniffing....

 ....I don't know what the fundamental problem is. Kids shouldn't be buying it, any more than they should be buying cigarettes. It is a nicotine product, after all. But snuff is widely available for sale to adults throughout the world, especially posh tobacconists in England. And anyway, why the Religious Police?


I have four possible theories.

One. Some Prince has noticed that it's being manufactured in industrial quantities - two tons ready for distribution - and so wants to take over the action for himself.

Two. It's a Muttawa kneejerk. "Sin may be Fun, but Fun is definitely a sin".

Three. Our halitosic friends have just discovered this latest substitute for female company, and have decided to get a stash in to keep at Mutt HQ, alongside all the confiscated booze and porn.

Glug - glug. Uuurrpprr. Hey Ahmed, look at this one! Look at the overhang on her! You don't get many of those in half a kilo! Sniff........Aasschhoooo! Glug.

Four. (And this is the least likely). There is actually a religious prohibition on snuff. Now, the lads in Makkah 1400 years ago weren't exactly a bundle of fun, and once they got going on the polytheists and whores and sinners they turned the Arabian version of Las Vegas into the Arabian version of Amish country. But they didn't manage to prohibit things that had not yet been discovered or invented. So, to my knowledge, there is nothing in the Quran or Hadiths to prevent us sticking powder up our nose, except during Ramadan of course.

In fact, I'm so certain of that, I'll send a tin of the finest Friborg & Treyer Santo Domingo Snuff to anyone who can demonstrate otherwise!

My First Love

We never forget our first love. I was reminded of that, on a day when the Saudi press was relatively quiet. Not a lot was happening. Not even an unctious story about thirty royal hangers-on saying farewell to the King as he was driven all the fifty miles from Makkah to Jeddah with a bag of candy and his favorite comic.


Work attitudes are seemingly shifting in the Kingdom with many companies that previously sought competencies in English and computer literacy preferring nonsmoking workers over smokers, according to a report published by Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. Job seekers need to brace themselves in ticking the nonsmoking boxes in job applications.


Islamic Ruling on Smoking

It has become abundantly clear that, sooner or later, smoking, in whichever form and by whichever means, causes extensive health and financial damage to smokers. It is also the cause of a variety of diseases. Consequently, and on this evidence alone, smoking would be forbidden and should in no way be practiced by Muslims. Furthermore, the obligation to preserve one's health and wealth, as well as that of society as a whole, and medical evidence now available on the dangers of smoking, further support this view.

Not snuff, of course, but near enough. And my mind started to drift away, as it can do at the weekend, to a distant time when I was much younger. To a time when, as the Craig Douglas song should have said:

I was only sixteen, only sixteen

I loved her so

But I was too young to fall in love

And she was too old, I know

So who was she, and why was this love forbidden for one of my tender years?


Let us begin with her title. Definitely not Miss, because she had been "round the track a few times", and then some. Not Mrs, because that conjures up notions of domestic responsibility, definitely not her. And Ms always brings to my mind ambitious female accountants in power suits. No, we have to travel abroad. Apologies to all respectably-married Francophones out there, but for the rest of us, this title is synonymous with Gallic naughtiness - Madame. But Madame who?

I was first introduced to Madame Nicotine by a schoolfriend. As I said, she "put herself about". And for a sixteen-year-old in search of excitement and experience, she seemed to be the answer to my adolescent prayers. I remember the first time as though it were only yesterday. It took place in a dark and secluded corner, of course. But I will never forget the excitement as she first brushed my lips, her taste as she entered my mouth....


And then afterwards. The exhilaration. The guilt. The nausea. I decided there and then, that this was a dangerous lady, once was enough, no more.

And so it was for a few weeks. Then we met again, and I succumbed again. "But no problem", I thought to myself, "I can take her or leave her". So I left her. But some weeks later, I took her once more. And so it went on, and each time she grew on me just a little bit more. Less nausea, more excitement, more satisfaction.

Until the day came that I realized we were inseparable. We were meant for each other, and I was her willing slave. I began to spend more and more on her, because she didn't come cheap. Parents would warn me against her, say she was bad for me, but I didn't care, I would flaunt our relationship, deliberately parade her in public. As a student, I would often spend money on her instead of food, because when I was with her, I no longer felt hunger. She became a part of my every waking moment.

I left college and started earning money, which of course I spent on her. We couldn't get enough of each other. We would consummate our relationship twenty times a day. Sometimes it would be eager, greedy, I would snatch gratification from her selfishly. Other times it would be gentle, relaxed, we would luxuriate in the quiet enjoyment of each other. Often, though, I would just take her for granted, my hand reaching out for her unconsciously, taking her while my mind was on other things. But she didn't mind, as long as I kept spoiling her with my money.


When I married, she became part of a ménage à trois. I felt guilty, of course, that she was taking money that should have gone into the marriage, into the home. When our children arrived, I was even more guilty. Suspecting that she might harm them, we confined our meetings to the garage, the garden, furtive once more. Who would want their own children to fall for Mme. Nicotine's charms when they grew up?

Many times I tried to give her up. I told her so. She just laughed in my face. She knew my weaknesses only too well. And of course I couldn't live without her. Before long, I would come crawling back. She always took me back, for sure, but not without making me feel inadequate, humiliated. She always knew how to humiliate me. How many times, discovering late at night that she was no longer there, did I wander the streets searching for a place where I might find her? Or, being somewhere where she was not allowed, how often did she entice me outside, for a quick and sordid liason in the pouring rain?

Finally I decided "Enough is enough". She was bad for my health, bad for my pocket, her scent covered me and told of our shameful relationship to the world at large. I announced to her that we were finished. How did she react? Just like that scene in "Fatal Attraction", where Glenn Close says "That's alright with me, if you want us to split up. We've had our fun, you more than me, but now your wife deserves to have you all the time. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine on my own. It'll be a good chance to learn cross-stitch. Give my love to the rabbits!"

As if. "Hell hath no fury". Cruella de Ville on steroids. "You'll never leave me", she spat out in rage, "you are weak and puny and have no will power at all. You won't believe how much I'll make you suffer!"


She was right. Those first few weeks were a living hell. I don't know what stopped me going back to her. In desperation I flung myself into the arms of Miss Mint. She was a sweet thing, sure enough, and for a few brief moments she could take my mind off Mme Nicotine, but she didn't have the personality, the depth, or the sheer naughtiness of my former lover to make it a lasting relationship. And I think she always knew that, that when she had served my selfish needs, I would throw her away like a candy wrapper into a trash can. Men are like that. But she fulfilled her purpose, and finally I was free. That was a while ago. Time has been hard on Mme Nicotine. Once the companion of royalty and film stars, she is no longer welcome in her former haunts, at the movies or around the dinner table. Time has also altered my memories, and I just remember her as dirty, smelly, her hand forever in my wallet.


Occasionally I see her again, in the distance, in a cafe or bar, and she gives me a look of sad reproach. For a very brief moment, I remember our good times together, that first time she brushed my lips.

I sometimes agree with Mme Nicotine's fellow-countryman, Marcel Proust, when he said:, "There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory".

But then, if we expunge the memory of our first love, what else is worth remembering?

Saudi women use 'breastfeed the driver' fatwa in driving bid

"Do the women have to breastfeed the driver in the presence of their husbands or can they do this alone?"


"Who will protect the wife if the husband entered the house unexpectedly and found his wife breastfeeding the driver?" she asked.

Saudi women plan to turn a controversial fatwa (religious ruling) to their advantage and launch a campaign to achieve their long-standing demand to drive in this conservative kingdom.


If the demand is not met, the women threatened to follow through the fatwa which allows them to breastfeed their drivers and turn them into their sons.

The campaign will be launched under the slogan: "We either be allowed to drive or breastfeed foreigners," a journalist told Gulf News.

Amal Zahid said that their decision follows a fatwa issued by a renowned scholar which said that Saudi women can breastfeed their foreign drivers for them to become their sons.

"As every Saudi family needs a driver, our campaign will focus on women's right to drive," she said.

The controversial fatwa, which was regarded as both funny and weird, issued recently by Shaikh Abdul Mohsin Bin Nasser Al Obaikan, member of Saudi Council of Senior Scholars and adviser to the king, has sparked a debate in society.

The renowned scholar said Saudi women can breastfeed their foreign drivers for them to be become their sons and brothers to their daughters.

Under this relationship, foreign drivers can mix freely with all members of the family without breaking the Islamic rule which does not allow mixing of genders.

Breast milk kinship is considered to be as good as a blood relationship in Islam.

"A woman can breastfeed a mature man so that he becomes her son. In this way, he can mix with her and her daughters without violating the teachings of Islam," the scholar said.

Al Obaikan based his fatwa on a Hadith (saying) of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) which was narrated by Salim, the servant of Abu Huzaifa.

Later, Al Obaikan clarified that his fatwa was being distorted by the local media which ignored the condition that the milk should be drawn out of the woman and given to the man in a cup to drink.

Speaking to Gulf News, a number of Saudi women condemned the fatwa. Fatima Al Shammary was quoted by the local Arabic daily Al Watan as saying the fatwa was "ridiculous and weird".

"This fatwa has become a hot topic of debate among women. Is this is all that is left to us to do: to give our breasts to the foreign drivers?" she said.

Another Saudi woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, questioned: "Does Islam allow me to breastfeed a foreign man and prevent me from driving my own car?

"I have not breastfed my own children. How do you expect me to do this with a foreign man? What is this nonsense?" she said.

Another woman said "The fatwa should also apply to the husbands who should be breastfed by housemaids. By doing so, all will be brothers and sisters," she said.

Hamid Al Ali, a journalist for an electronic newspaper, recalled that an Egyptian driver who had a crush on a female teacher he drives to school asked her to breastfeed him. When she retorted angrily, he said: "I want to be your son."

Saudi writer Suzan Al Mashhadi sarcastically asked Al Obaikan: "Do the women have to breastfeed the driver in the presence of their husbands or can they do this alone?"

"Who will protect the wife if the husband entered the house unexpectedly and found his wife breastfeeding the driver?" she asked.

War Porn

“The Qana Massacre Hoax.”
The first hint of this meme that I noticed was a Powerline post about the Condoleeza Rice banner, the one with text referring to the Qana incident, the one that appeared with such suspicious rapidity on the streets of Beirut.


The banner was certainly very timely — it was hung on the morning after the “massacre”, just a couple of hours after the death of the victims in Qana.

And then it turned out that the Israeli airstrike that damaged the building had actually occurred some seven or eight hours prior to the building’s collapse. Curiouser and curiouser.

[Warning: some of the images in posts linked below are graphic.]
 
Israel Matzav, EU Referendum, and Confederate Yankee have followed up with analyses of the timing of the banner and the sequencing of the Qana photographs. EU Referendum has focused on the suspicious and mysterious “Green Helmet” and “T-shirt”, the two supposed rescue workers who changed clothes and positions so many times carrying the same two miraculously clean and un-bloody bodies to the waiting ambulance.


The “massacre” at Qana may well have been staged. This is not to say that Lebanese children did not die in Israeli airstrikes; they certainly did. This is not to say that the parents of these children do not mourn; I believe that they do.

But this is all very reminscent of Mohammed al-Dura, the boy whose “murder by Israeli fire” had been conclusively shown to be a hoax arranged by the Palestinians, with the complicity of the France 2 television network. Mohammed al-Dura may have been accidentally killed by Palestinian fire, or he may have been deliberately killed for propaganda purposes, or even not killed at all, but he was most definitely not killed by the Israelis.

Yet his murder attained an iconic “truth” which had transcended and outlived the mere facts of the situation. He was a visual proof of Israeli (and, by implication, Western) brutality and indifference towards Muslims. He was even been made into a postage stamp in Tunisia.


So the truth doesn’t really matter.

Qana was the latest in a long series of iconic images, an extensive collection of photos and video that might have been entitled The West Always Commits Atrocities Against the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. The first in the series was Eddie Adams’ famous photo of the the summary execution of Nguyen Van Lem during the Tet offensive in February of 1968. The uses to which the photo was put ignored all context — namely, that it was taken in the middle of an enemy offensive in a brutal war, and the victim was identifiably an enemy soldier, and an officer of the Viet Cong. The image was eventually enshrined as the visual symbol of America’s guilt towards the “brown people” of Vietnam, and was soon joined by other familiar icons such as Kent State and My Lai.


Eddie Adams’ photo was very disturbing. The newsreel footage of the same incident — which I saw in British images of the late 1960's, when it was aired by the nascently anti-American BBC — was even more disturbing. But the film was suppressed in this country for many years, because graphic atrocity images were generally not shown in the media.

Times have changed. The mainstream media are nowadays all too ready to show graphic images. Provided, of course, that they illustrate the dominant paradigm: America, Israel, and other Western nations always behave in a barbaric fashion towards the Third World and people of color.

For guilt-ridden liberal Westerners, looking at such images is a form masochistic voyeurism. “Oh, look at that! We’re so bad! We’re so awful! We deserve whatever we get!”


With a ready market like that, the brutal culture of the Arab world has plenty of supply to satisfy the demand. Muslims are the “brown people”, the victims of the moment, and they obligingly supply the forbidden images that we are so hungry to see.

And doing so suits the strategy of the Islamists, so there is a perfect synergy of effort: We want to hang ourselves; they hand us the rope. What could be better?

Staged or real, the prurient images of victimization are a precision-guided missile that strikes the target perfectly.


The dead bodies of children are props; the “rescue workers” are actors and stagehands. And the directors of the drama seem to be the media, who have lately become knowingly complicit.

Take a look at the Qana photo at right (to dampen the voyeuristic aspects, I have cropped out the most disturbing parts). See that guy crouching in the background?

He’s not a rescue worker. He’s another photographer. The photographer who took the this photo was not careful enough to keep his colleague out of the picture. Or maybe it didn’t matter to him — the Potemkin process is so far along that no one really minds if the secret is revealed.


Qana and other similar incidents are, regardless of authenticity, primarily media events. They are managed and delivered as weapons by the enemies of Western Civilization, with the connivance of our own media.

This is War Pornography, delivered to the greedy and guilt-ridden consumers of the West by our ruthless opponents. The couch potatoes of our intelligentsia are sitting here, sweating in a darkened room, with a raincoat over the engorged self-righteousness in their laps.
I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.

Since the aim of Imperialistic Islam is to win the Total War, the sacrifice of any member of the Ummah to further its goal only transforms them into glorious "martyrs", no matter who kills them. (Even if it is their co-"religious" cousins making Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa by comparison.)


Has anyone in the media checked to see whether these might have been Sunni kids, killed by Shiite Hezbollah, as a way to get rid of an internal enemy and use their p.r. deaths injure an external one?

Two birds with one (or a dozen) crippled kid(s)?

"War is deceit" as the pedophile "prophet" put it.

Quote: "It's hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy."


Yes. It is. And that is exactly what they are relying on when piecing these photsessions together.

These same western liberals seem to sleep easy when in fact the civilian human sheilds being killed are being sacrificed for them. For their pity, outrage; these terrorists have no moral right on their side, they can only create false propaganda for the ignorant, guilt-ridden Western liberals, who just want to hate themselves. (Is there a pyschological disorder here?)


If this is all true does a culture that allows itself to indulge in this masochistic effete angst, really deserve to survive?

I know the 'enemy' is grotesque, but if what you say about 'our' culture is even moderately true, frankly we do not seem to be much of an improvement.

A culture this decayed, has no claim upon survival on the merits, and certainly none on the basis of effort.

But that mysterious little voice keeps telling me that you have pretty much summed up the situation.

What a sad state of affairs.