December 2010
13 posts
6 tags
Did you hear the one about the Black-, Cuban-,...
Mazz Jobrani’s comedic reflection on his experience at border control in Kuwait reminds me of my experience at the airport leaving Morocco last year. I’d been in Morocco for a couple days and quickly became accustomed to greeting people with “As-salamou ʿaleykum”. As I approached the border control agent, I greeted him customarily. He responded with instructions in...
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zadakat and tzedakah - giving in Islam and...
Heard great interview on NPR with Ted Gup, author of ”A Secret Gift: How One Man’s Kindness—and a Trove of Letters—Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression”, and grandson of the figure who inspired the book. He mentioned that his grandfather, who anonymously gave $5 ($100 today) to a hundred needy Canton families one christmas in 1953, was an Orthodox Jew...
1 tag
“I pity those who dream the probable, the reasonable and the accessible more than...”
– Fernando Pessoa, from ‘Text 143’, The Book of Disquiet. (via wine-loving-vagabond)
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The Captive Arab Mind →
This piece in the NYT today left me uneasy. I don’t dispute Cohen’s claims that there is a lot of paranoia in the Middle-East, and that theories of conspiracy that wouldn’t seem plausible anywhere else seem valid in the minds of some Arabs. And further, that this paranoia seems inevitably to place Americans and Jews as the agents of conspiracy.
I do object, however, to how he...
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All That We Share: What, Really, Is the Commons? →
Maybe there is a new sort of ‘commons’ emerging though? This video speaks to the new phenomenon:
Welcome to the commons. The term may be unfamiliar, but the idea has been around for centuries. The commons is a new use of an old word, meaning “what we share”—and it offers fresh hope for a saner, safer, more enjoyable future. The commons refers to a wealth of valuable assets that...
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“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it...”
– Jack Gilbert, The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart (reminds me of a thought I had the other day)
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Neg-ocio
I’ve decided to borrow words from other languages that help me live more richly in English, words like “negocio”, which is usually translated as “business” but might be better stated as ‘not-leisure’, expressing a certain cultural disposition under which work is not a primary mode of being but rather an activity auxiliary to leisure.
Suggestions for other...
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Barefoot
I’ll never forget how you standing barefoot in the kitchen, made that lonely beige apartment home for a while. We didn’t have the ingredients for guacamole, but you made do with lime and Indian spices.
6 tags
“Just so you know—
My weird mind wanders and my brave heart breaks....”
– Rives, Kite
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Pursuit of a Quixotic Ideal →
Some thoughts on the paradoxes of modern travel.
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“Now I’m not a highly metaphysical man
But I know when the stars are...”
– Michael Franti