Heads up for those in Chicago: The up-and-coming soon-to-be-big-in-Europe (hey, it worked for BackStreet Boys) Chicago band magnus will be having their record release party tonight. I intend to go and anyone wanting to join in on the fun would be highly welcome. Their sound is a combination of liverpool, chicago and norman, oklahoma. they [...]
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Gerry wrote on my dry erase board: “The legacy of colonialism includes beer,” and left a huge bottle of Tiger Beer from Singapore. The statement has been staring me in the face and, today, I remembered that old can of Murree Beer that I had found in the Karachi house kitchen. No, not for drinking, [...]
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I thought that mcsweeney’s.net had jumped the shark but, i dare say, this is brilliant: Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Column . Speaking with a local farmer on the last day of my recent visit, I asked him if there was any message that he wanted me to carry back home with me. He pondered [...]
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Douglas Feith recently spoke here on campus. Chicago, home of Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, is an important place for Doug Feith to come and defend the assault on Iraq strategy of the administration – and by extension the neocon world view. Today’s NYT (r.r) has an indepth on the three-member crack team (and yes, [...]
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Britain is rolling out the I.D. cards in London. This is a voluntary trial but by 2012 it will be compulsary. Funnily enough, Muslim women will be exempt from this trial presumably because it fringes on their religious practice to veil. Mind you, Britain is a police state already. There are cameras every 10 feet [...]
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From Wired, comes an article on the adoption of computers in Madrasas in Lahore. A couple of weeks ago, Boston Globe ran an article that also tackled the modernization of syllabus in Deobandi madrasas in India. Both of these articles point towards external and internal reform pressures on the madrasa system. The impression is that [...]
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Saw The Company friday night. It was ok. I was hoping for more back-stabbing, anorexia and mis-shappen toes. The music was good and there were some funny moments. Over all, it was good p.r. for the joffret ballet. And for a movie set in Chitown, it showed us scant of this beautiful city. While in [...]
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On my recent trip to Pakistan, my father loved the simplicity of OS X.3 and asked me to find him an apple powerbook in Pakistan. I went to Hafeez Center – the tech center of Lahore – and inquired around for an Apple reseller. Ha! No one in 4 teeming floors had heard of such [...]
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One of my favorite movies from 2001, Donnie Darko is getting an extended cut in the cinemas. Richard Kelly (writer/director) spilled some beans to the Empire Magazine: It will expand the meaning of the film and offer more clues and more solutions to the puzzle and create an additional layer of mystery for the audience. [...]
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I need to sell my laptop and my desktop G4s. I keep meaning to put them on marketplace but I forget. In the meantime, dust is accumulating in the giga-flopping chipsets. Of course, I am selling them to clear room for the G5 powerbook. Oh yeah. Let me tell you as a registered Apple Developer [...]
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Today, we were discussing the Khilafat Movement (1920) [i do not have a good link here because the stuff on the internet is terrible. I will write up a short thing if interest is shown by anyone remotely interested]. I have read and thought about this mass movement in India and I was hoping that [...]
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Yesterday, we were supposed to go see Russ Meyer’s magnum opus Faster, PussyCat Kill! Kill! at Doc Films – which is having a banner quarter (kudos to the volunteers-check the calendar here). I come home around 4ish and I am not even tired. Yet, when Eduardo called me at 6 to go, I was fast [...]
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What would be an acclaimed blood line in the US? A source of pride and embellishment? Bushes? Kennedys? Rockafellers? There is, at least in the north-east, an interest in tracing one’s lineage back to, say, the Mayflower. The true blue blood bestows a degree of respectability over the individual. Our President’s clan came on the [...]
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I am stunned by this makeover madness on the telly. In my nightly crawl of cable, I see people get makeovers for their cars, their houses, their partners, their careers, their pets, their face, their bodies. On and on and on. Americans have given up. Thrown their hands up in the air, and yelled to [...]
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Grapevine says that in all the hubhub in Fallujah, the US is shipping WMDs into Iraq in trucks with fake Saudi and Jordanian license plates. I would never pay attention to that. I maintain that people are too damn dumb to conceal ANYTHING. When they do try, they come up with the most implausible scenarios [...]
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News today that Diego Maradona is under intensive care after suffering from respitory failure – maybe the result of an overdose. To a generation, such as mine, which never saw Pele play live, Maradona was the greatest ever. World Cup 1986: We dragged the teevee out into the back garden. Amma would go to sleep [...]
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Blasting loud rock (what, no LimpBizkit?) and insults at the Fallujah uprisers is the current state of psyops in Iraq. At night, the psychological operations unit attached to the Marine battalion here sends out messages from a loudspeaker mounted on an armored Humvee. On Thursday night, the crew and its Arabic-language interpreter taunted fighters, saying, [...]
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Details – The Most Irrelevant Magazine Ever – pissed off Asians in their April issue [full disclosure: in 1993, i had a Details subscription that lasted 8 months]. The culprit was a Gay or Asian? style guide featuring a metrosexual (!) oriental and blurbs like “A bonsai ass requires delicate tending”. Indeed. Needless to say, [...]
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Pakistan allowed India to come to their house, eat everything in the fridge, watch their dvds, make long distance phone calls, misplace the mail and then borrow a couple of hundred for just a day or two until the payroll check clears. Then India packed up the open can of whup-ass and boarded the Samjhota [...]
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Take up the White Man’s burden– Ye dare not stoop to less– Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your gods and you. — Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden: The United States and [...]
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