Poor little bastard

Alberto Gonzales is having a hard time finding a new job, according to the NY Times.

Maybe he needs to work on his language skills.

Something for the eighth grader in all of us

This Ars Technica article itself is good (using physical modeling to encode modeled instrumental sound), but the best part comes about halfway through when one of the researchers explains why they limited the sample rate to 20 times a second.

"No one can tongue 30 times a second."

The article does not inform us of how the researcher was able to determine this conclusively.

We are all sausages

Lovely YouTube brings me back to my youth. This, folks, is "Love and Sausages" by the Kids in the Hall.

Ooh! Look at me, embedding!

Tom Gara points us to a YouTube video linked from Arabawy of the strikes earlier this week in Mahalla.

Ooh! Look at me, embedding!


Freedom of expression is a funny thing in Egypt. It doesn't... how do you say?... exist. So when you see something like this — a crowd of unhappy workers and regular citizens venting their anger at a for-life president — it fills your heart with... how do you say?... hope.

In some places in the States until very recently it was illegal to burn the flag. Anyone with their faces visible in this video has probably already been arrested or talked to by security officials by now. State security people get real nervous when the symbols of their power are threatened.

Thank God there are still people who, knowing what kind of trouble they might get into, do not refrain from airing their grievances (in no uncertain terms).

Stop it. Stop it stop it stop it.

A finely crafted LA Times opinion piece on word adoption of Arabic terms, highlighting the complete pointlessness of using the word Allah to mean 'that Muslim god, you know, the one that's not capital-G God.'

"We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity."

Muslims refer to God as Allah because it's the word in Arabic and that's the language of prayer and the language of the Qur'an. When speaking in a language other than Arabic Muslims freely interchange the words because of course they are the same thing. Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians do the same, and may have done so before the advent of Islam.

Why then does every jackass with a blog or major media outlet use the word Allah exclusively for Muslims? Why should Arabic-speaking Coptic Christians be worshipers of God while English-speaking Muslims are worshipers of Allah? A heady mixture of ignorance, exclusion and more ignorance, I imagine.

Now if we can just clarify the word madrassa.

Man vs. Beast

Solving one of the great questions of history — who can drum better, muppets or people — this YouTube video conclusively demonstrates that human determination and skill can beat out sheet animal fury anytime.

Ain't no power like the power to the people…

…although the Egyptian government has done a pretty good job of keeping that power strangled for the last 40 or 50 — oh, what the fuck — 4,500 years.

General strike today in sympathy with the ongoing textile workers strikes. General low wages and recent bread shortages are also sited as reasons for the strike. I'm no great fan of the bread subsidy and I understand the government's in a hard place there w/ grain prices as they are, but without real economic growth at the lowest levels the bread subsidy is the only thing keeping millions of people fed. The whole situation is tricky, and I'm glad I'm not the official needing to sort it out.

BBC reports my old neighbors at the Interior Ministry plan to take "necessary and immediate firm measures" against demonstrators and anyone they see as disrupting public services.

We'll see how the strike turns out. I'd guess around 5-10% of the total working population will participate. I think that's generous, but then I'm kind of a crank when it comes to having tons of faith in Egyptian political activism. I'd also guess thousands will be imprisoned, but most of that will happen in the Delta and it won't get reported in Cairo or elsewhere. A willingness to strike is certainly a good thing, but it takes more than spirit to reform a polity. Demonstrations galvanize a movement, but then you need to do the long, frustrating work of building lasting institutions to maintain positive change.

Or maybe we'll just see the crushing power of the state. Again. And again.

Update:
Despite earlier rumors that it was supporting the strike, The Daily News now says that pillar of society the Muslim Brotherhood will not support the action, which it sees as only relevant to the Mahalla cotton workers who first organized it. Is the Brotherhood timid because they've had dozens of people jailed in the last few weeks? Are they just jackasses who only care about Brotherhood-organized activities?

Uupdate 2:
First arrests. Mahalla worker says 150 have been arrested so far. Security was early for the strike. Egyptian security are the only large section of the workfoce who can reliably show up early for appointments.

Update 3: Oh, look at this — no news from the city, but Mahalla is burning. The police presence is said to have been huge, and now the security people are calling the strike a failure. When in Egypt, always put your money on the soul crushing power of the state. They win every time.