Category Archives: Digressions

So here is my first Recycled Post of the Week: “Time to Meander“. I wrote the post in November 2006 and then followed it up with “Meandering” about how I had searched for the proper Spanish translation of the word.

Previously, I used to have smaller thumbnail images that went with each post and if you clicked them, you’d land on a page where I’d put a quote that went along with the image and the post. The “Time to Meander” post’s image had the following quote from Michael Ondaatje:

The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.

Recently, many of my posts have been rather too politically-centric and simply less “fun”. Last night I decided to run through some of my older Digressions and found that I used to write funny and interesting stuff that some of my more recent readers (both of them) probably have never gotten to.

Next, I got to thinking about the environment and what I could do to help. So I put two and two together and thought that it would be nice to start recycling and move towards a more sustainable world of blog posts. With all of this in mind, I have decided to run a weekly sustainable “Recycled” post series — kind of a “Do you remember” / “Nostalgia” thing for the Grave Error Tree Huggers out there. Yes, I know what you are all thinking, Continue reading →

One thing that is continuously becoming more and more disturbing to me is how the West has become increasingly anti-Islam and anti-Arab based on the stereotype that all Arabs and Muslims are potential suicide bombers, national security threats, and/or backwards. Similar stereotypes of other classes of people would not pass the hyper-sensitive PC culture in the United States and would be considered offensive. Nevertheless, this does not stop popular culture and politics in the U.S. and the West from classifying everything Arab and Muslim as threatening and immune from cultural senstivity.

Now, I am not arguing that certain religious or societal practices can never be criticized. They can and should be. My concern simply deals with blind and broad generalizations that do not coincide with reality, and I believe this is the case with the new anti-Arab fascism prevailing in the media and culture today.

My question here is whether this image is offensive or funny. Does it make a difference that it was sent to me by Arab friends?

Every country has its own regional reputation. And there is certainly one for Lebanese bzazel!

A-S-S-H-O-L-E. Dennis Leary’s classic song from the 90s, and one of ReWrite’s favorites.

Este video is muy pero muy funny. It is a love song with words learned after just one semester of Spanish.

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 →

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.