Every country has its own regional reputation. And there is certainly one for Lebanese bzazel!
Monthly Archives: October 2007
The All American Asshole
A-S-S-H-O-L-E. Dennis Leary’s classic song from the 90s, and one of ReWrite’s favorites.
Filed under Digressions
One Semester of Spanish Love Song
Este video is muy pero muy funny. It is a love song with words learned after just one semester of Spanish.
Filed under Digressions
Al-‘Ain az-zarga jana b-kul khir
Last night, I finished reading Fatema Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood about a girl growing up in a conservative 1940’s Fessi family at the time of the Moroccan nationalist movement and social change.
In one of the latter chapters, entitled “American Cigarrettes”, the girl describes the arrival of American troops with fascination. For the young Moroccan girl, it was hard to fully comprehend why Christians of different nations were at each others’ throats. Why did the Allemanes hate people with dark hair, and who were their Christian cousins that arrived by sea from the west? “The French and the Spanish were rather small and had black mustaches, while Americans were very tall with devilish blue eyes.”
The Americans arrived with Operation Torch handing out chewing gum, cigarrettes, and chasing all of the women. And so it was that the American occupation was much friendlier than that of the French and Spanish. As a matter of fact, there was a local folk singer, Hussein Slaoui, who sang “Al-‘Ain az-zarga jana b-kul khir”, meaning “the blue-eyed guys brought all kinds of blessing”. Continue reading
Filed under Essays
Before the PC Age: When We Were Truly Tasteless
At work, I happen to sit next to one of the funniest people on the WiFi Planet, a guy I sometimes refer to as Hysidro. Hysidro takes no prisoners and, for some reason, none of us can help from laughing even though we know we’re going to hell for it. A few weeks back, he was going through his directory of “Mommy Mommy/Daddy Daddy Jokes” (i.e., “Mommy Mommy, I don’t want to meet grandpa / Shut up and keep digging”). This all reminded me of the old “Truly Tasteless” days before political correctness. Continue reading
Filed under Digressions
Berga encontrado en Casablanca
Las noticias han confirmado que no fue Maddie sino nuestro ex-compañero RastaFonero, Berga, quien se perdía por tierras magrebíes (aunque con la ayuda del photoshop de Hysidro, seguro que veríamos a ella también escondida en la foto). Pues, sí, definitivamente hemos encontrado a Berga en Casablanca.
Pero una pregunta ¿a quién se le ocurre una escapada a Marruecos en pleno Ramadán? Bueno, tampoco parece que esté sufriendo demasiado el ayuno colectivo; pero claro es una Coca-Cola que le acompaña en su siesta “bérber”.
Filed under FON, Friends / Family
Underpants
When I was a kid and whenever we’d see someone’s underpants, say Jane’s, sticking out of her pants, we’d sing,
I see London,
I see France,
I see Jane’s underpants.
And when someone sang that song to you, you were pretty embarrassed. I sometimes wonder what all of that fascination with underpants was all about. Or with butts in general. Butts are for sitting on and for defecating, and yet they have always drawn such great interest by out society at large (no pun intended). It’s probably not that suprising then that “underpants” is, to this day, one of my favorite words in the English language.
In any event, I thought of this as I read about upcoming “cultural” activities for this weekend in Madrid. One included a photo-exhibition called Ocultos at the Fundación Canal de Madrid, with the rear-end as the main attraction.
Filed under Digressions
NPR Jazz Profiles
I have significantly slowed down my leisure reading and substituted it with podcasts. I haven’t given up reading altogether, but I generally go through a period each year where I take a little break from books. Now one of my favorite podcasts for listening to while falling asleep or traveling is NPR’s Jazz Profiles.
Even if you’re not much of Jazz fan, I think that listening to Jazz Profiles is still fairly entertaining at least for anyone who is interested in 20th Century U.S. history. Jazz is such a unique American experience and art form, and the stories of its musicians are very much a part of that experience. Continue reading
Filed under Jazz
Shifting Targets
I would really love to shy away from my politically motivated posts and get back to the sillier Digressions. I also have laundry to do, a flu to supervise, and plenty of work related to work. But I find myself feeling like Michael Correlone in Godfather Part III: everytime I am almost out, they pull me right back in.
And so it is. Just as we all saw it coming for more than a year now, Seymour Hersh has just published an article in the New Yorker entitled “Shifting Targets: The Administration’s Plan for Iran“. In August 2006, Mr. Hersh published an article, also in the New Yorker, revealing how the Bush Administration had supported Israel’s attack on Hezbollah last summer as a pre-cursor/trial-run for its own eventual attack on Iran. Sounds like the surge conveniently got a lot of troops into Iraq and real close to Iran.
Enough said.
Filed under Digressions, Essays
FON: A Quick Corporate Promo
Sorry to interrupt you all with a little shameless corporate promo, but I have to get this out of the way.
On Tuesday, we announced that we were launching the Neuf WiFi FON service in France with some 600,000 Neuf boxes flashed with FON’s software. We celebrated in Paris and were hosted by Jean-Paul Huchon who represents about 11 million Parisians as their regional president.
And today, we have announced the creation, together with British Telecom, of the BT FON Community. BT has flashed some 1.7 million of their routers with FON’s software and has also become a shareholder in FON.
So this is pretty big news for those of us slaving over here in Madrid. We have gone from some 280K FON WiFi routers out there to potentially having 2.8 million routers with FON inside.
Filed under FON
Grave Error 