I’ve been meaning to steal this from Samaha for months now. It’s a gorgeous song, a lament for the victims of Srebrenica and Potocari, and is performed by Alma Ferovic.
You can read the translation here.
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I’m SO enraged about this, you have no idea. And it happened in Seattle, of all places!
Fundies! Bah! It’s not enough that they try to prevent girls from getting an education, cover women’s faces, and consequently subject Chanel cosmetics to vast overpricing in the finer Gulf department stores.
No.
Now they’ve finally done it. Forcing this gorgeous creature to cover up! Congrats to Archie on finding photographic evidence of this outrageous suppression of natural beauty.
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There, I said it.
So now I’m just going to up and tell you about the time my mother was offered a quarter of a million for me.
Shoot. There goes the punchline.
So…previously on the ol’ raincoaster blog…my mother used to live in Riyadh with a CIA agent. Her job was at the King Fahd Hospital (I think every Saudi city has a King Fahd Hospital) in medical records, and, as one does, she had pictures of her children on and around her desk.
The Saudis, being relatively new to the modern world, had imported vast numbers of support and technical staff from the West, yea even unto Canuckistan, and occasionally ther would be slight episodes of culture shock in one or more directions.
This was one of those times.
The Saudis, being relatively new to the modern world but nobody’s fools, their Gucci tabs notwithstanding, had sent entire generations of young men to be trained in the West, choosing top of the totem pole jobs like doctor, dentist, etc. You won’t find many Saudis abroad studying to be lab technicians: that’s what Americans are for, duh. Support staff is imported, bosses are homegrown but schooled abroad.
And one of these Saudi doctors was in my mother’s office, no doubt complaining, as they all did, that the medical transcriptionist (who hailed from, if memory serves, Tennessee and had, consequently, great difficulties with English) had mistaken his Oxonian vowels, not to mention his Etonian (or at least Harrovian) consonants, and typed that the pregnant woman was dilated to “twenty-five hundred meters” rather than the “twenty-five sontemeters that he’d actually said.
And his glance happened to fall on a portrait of yours truly. And it is a fact universally acknowledged that a young Saudi doctor possessed of a secure job at the King Fahd Hospital must be in want of wife #1.
So he made an offer.
A quarter mil.
I should be honoured: Brooke Shields‘ mother was only offered forty racing camels. I did the exchange at the time and figured out I was worth about fifteen thou more than she was. Obviously the economies of Riyadh and Milan operate on completely different principles, if not planets.
Mother was nobody’s fool, and also possessed of the same demented and twisted DNA as I, myself: the family anything-for-a-story trait surfaced and she decided to bicker with him.
Fifteen minutes passed and she got the price up by forty k and a couple of pedigreed camels, but he wouldn’t go to three hundred thou, for very good reason.
As he pointed out, there’s got to be something wrong with a girl who’s 23 and not married yet. Smart cookie: it took my boyfriend of the time simply months to figure that out.
Yes, I was marked down because I was past my Best Before date.
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I’m kind of disappointed my blogging diploma isn’t from Miskatonic, but that’s nothing a little hacking won’t fix.
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Blogging Degree
From Go-Quiz.com
And this reminds me, it does, of the time my mother wanted to buy me a Doctorate from Harvard.
She was living in Saudi Arabia, as one does, shacked up with a CIA agent whose job it was to teach battlefield communications to the Saudis. As one does.
Islam was the bane of his existence, as five times a day no matter what they’d all pull out their rugs and face mecca and present a nice, juicy target to the Israelis. No indeed, this did not take him to his happy place, for yea, he was a very conscientious battlefield communications instructor. Over and over he lectured them, over and over he proved that the Israelis could wipe them all out at any of those five, widely known and unvarying times of day. And over and over they happily replied “if the Israelis kill us we will go straight to Paradise as martyrs,” and I believe one of them even made a reference to that bugger, I can’t kill him when he’s praying scene in Hamlet, obviously stretching to try to find some common ground with Jerry the Baptist, out in the wild Arabian desert.
As a sideline, Jerry ran the local casino and house of ill repute, which brought in several times his salary, and which he was allowed to keep because what his bosses were truly interested in was the blackmail material gathered by the tiny cameras placed strategically around the premises. He also had the local distribution rights for Johnny Walker, which was as the mines of King Solomon in terms of putting out the gelt.
Where was I? Oh yes, about to get to the religious police.
Naturally, Jerry was quite conscious of the activities of the religious police. The main trouble with the religious police was, as you can imagine, that they tended to be quite…well, there’s really no way around this, I’m just going to have to come out and say it… quite religious.
And the whole living-in-sin-with-a-Canadian-and-a-socialist-at-that thing was exactly the sort of thing with which they were Not Cool.
At. All.
Now, Jerry and my mother were by no means originals in their living arrangements, which did tend to give a rather louche reputation to even the primmest Mormon that the Yanks sent over, and so, as always happens where there are problems and lots of money around, a man materialized with a solution.
He materialized at the same time every year, swinging through the Middle East like an olden days tinker would swing through, say, Simcoe County, offering his wares.
He was a Filipino forger, and he was a very busy man.
They took one of the American marriage licenses for $250, which is really cheap for a piece of paper that you show the religious police and they don’t have you stoned, when you think about it, really, and my mother pondered long over the very tempting Harvard Doctorate, but decided that even she was not overpaid enough to spend $500 and besides, what would she get my sister, eh? Answer me that!
That year she got a camel saddle and I got a silver veil. Gee, I guess Mom DID love me best, even if she thought I was ugly.
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Yay! We got a pressie!
Isn’t that great? YouTube gave us all a super-special surprise today, with their newest, bestest feature: an automatic scrolling ticker of possibly-related videos running across the bottom of every one of our own YouTube videos, right there in our blogs! How sweet is that, eh?
It’s just too bad that there is absolutely no screening for/against porn or graphic, real-life violence anywhere in this process.
Imagine my feelings upon discovering over on the WordPress.com technical help forum that a few of my friends had been enjoying the delights of superfatty porn (900+ pounds! I had a horse that weighed that) on my very blog while I was innocently watching nothing more exciting than the admittedly-delightful Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre performing their classic version of the Seventies outcast anthem Bohemian Rhapsody.
So YouTube thinks it can porn me and send a surprise
So they think they can pwn me and I’ll not get wise?
Oh baby – can’t pull shit like that, baby
Just gotta get it out – just gotta get it outta here
YouTube=BoobTube
Snuff films really matter
Your lawyer can see
This shit really matters – to your p/e.
Yes, snuff videos are also featured in the lineup, although not on that particular video; there are many such easter eggs to find if you troll around a bit. These have even more impact when you find them on a child’s blog or a church, mosque or temple blog. How delighted they must be!
YouTube has thoughtfully added a way to shut off this feature, but alas it doesn’t work in WordPress.com blogs at all, so it seems. And it must be shut off video by video, even those in the archives. UPDATE: WordPress itself has figured out a way to circumvent this en masse, and now the feature works on precisely No WordPress.com blogs. Why they thought this “feature” should be the default rather than the option I do not know; or rather, I do: eyeball grabs. Literal versions of this metaphor are visible in the “related videos” to any number of children’s program clips.
How charming: it’s PeeWee’s Playhouse featuring today’s special guest, Willy Pickton!
Update 2.0: and YouTube caves to global outrage. Kinda
YouTube seems to sense disdain towards the new player and decided not to push users to hard (for the time being). So, rather than showing related videos at the bottom of the player (and the two annoying arrows on the two sides that on-click would seamlessly play the next related video) every time users hover over the video, you will see them only if you click on the ‘menu’ button or when the video finishes. In this case, the original video is zoomed out and also displays embedded code and URL of video.
As for the fatty porn: well, they say any more than an SUV-full is wasted…still, I was completely verklempt at the thought that these alleged respectobiggles were scratching their kink porn itches on the ol’ raincoaster blog, for all the world as if it were a sandstone dildo or sumpin. For shame, YouKnowWhoYouAre! And you over two thousand other video watchers today…
And I thought you loved me for my mind.
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raincoaster 