Category: Rants

There is yet another op-ed in the paper blaming Israel and the US for all of the ills of the middle east. I am willing to listen to those accusations, after all the US has really screwed up in Iraq (but the sectarian stuff is NOT the American’s fault) and Israel is always doing something, which even if justified, pisses people off. This guy went over the line though, he is blaming the Hamas/Fatah mess on both the US and Israel. Please, if the US and Israel had anything to do with it, Hamas wouldn’t be left standing. Let’s face facts shall we? Arabs have been killing each other long before the US started meddling over here and before the state of Israel was created. There is a cultural tendency towards revenge and retribution over here. No one is willing to “bury the hatchet,” it’s too important to exact revenge. What other countries have government ministries and non-profits dedicated to mediating revenge cases? And let’s not drag Islam into this, they were fighting and killing long before Mohammed (PBUH) came around. You don’t see Indonesia suffering from this sort of violence, and they are the largest Muslim country in the world. No, this is an Arab thing, reinforced over the course of centuries. People, governments, and religious sects all follow the same revenge plan. How do you fix something like that?

… and it is effective September 17th, constitution day… No, there’s no irony to that at all… Gah.

OK, so I go down to the US embassy to have some pages added to my passport. They take it and tell be “come back at 2.” So I come back at two (5 minutes past actually) and they say I should have come at 12. Grrr… I started to argue my case, but I realized I was at a security checkpoint at the US embassy in Sana’a. They tend to be a bit uptight there, so I backed off. Still, that’s 800 riyals down the drain in cab fares and I’ll have to cancel class tomorrow to make sure I get there on time. The good news is that it is most likely done and I will have lots of new pages in my passport allowing me to leave and return…

I only wore sandals and shorts while I was back home. It was too hat for anything else. Since it’s pretty rainy here right now, I put on my hiking shoes only to find out that they are now too big for me! These are the ones that I bought because the ones I brought were too small after a couple of months. I’ll try the old ones and see if they fit better now, this is nuts…

Clothes that are actually clean as opposed to just not smelling.
Black Cherry soda
Women in shorts (grin)
intelligent conversations
Real newspaper (thank you Washington Post sunday!)
Driving!
Radio hunting while driving
Real high speed internet

Kelly called yesterday and we chatted a bit. She’s in the home stretch of her pregnancy and sounded great. She sounds upbeat and happy and her excitement was contagious. You go Kelly! Sounds like everything is going well, but she’s not exactly sure when the kid will drop. No worries, she’s enjoying it…

Something rather odd happened while we were talking, twice. I was on the phone downstairs for the conversation. It’s one of those old, rotary dial phones in Ma Bell beige. Rick has an irrational love of that thing, he’s had it forever and swears that he’ll always have it. Anyway, the way those phones work is like this; when you pick up the phone, a voltage is caused to rise on the line. Nowadays, that voltage is converted into digital signals so that the digital networks can use the information. It used to be that the voltage would stay elevated as long as the phone was being used, the same thing would happen when someone called you. The higher voltage caused the phone to ring and kept the line active. Back in the day, if the feds wanted to trace your line, they would cause the voltage to rise on the line until they could identify where the call was coming from. The thing is that with the voltage elevated, you couldn’t hang up! If you took the handset out of the modem (remember those days?) and put it into the handset, the phone wouldn’t hang up, it would ring! Even if you took the phone out of the wall, the line would remain active until they decreased the voltage…

Well, I was talking to Kelly when the “call waiting” signal came on and she was disconnected. There was nothing on the line but the “beep beep” of the call waiting signal. I tapped the handset to see who was calling and it switched over, but all I heard was a staticy “room” sound. No one responded to my “Hello?”, so I went back to what was supposed to be Kelly. There was nothing except the call waiting signal! I hung up and the phone rang! When I picked it up it was the call waiting signal. Hmmm… I hung up again and the phone was quiet for a second, and then it rang again! This time it was Kelly. We resumed our conversation, and when it was over, I hung up, and the phone rang as soon as I put it down in the cradle! There was nothing on the other end of the line and when I hung up it stayed quite.

I’m under no illusions that all text messages that I send to the US are screened. I’m also assuming that my emails are as well. That’s part of the cost of living in Yemen I suppose. I wouldn’t be surprised if the boys from the NSA were listing to me while I’m at home. They must be bored to tears… Anyway, I do wish that they’d be a little more subtle about it if they were behind my phone issues, that was really annoying!:-)

I watched the fireworks on TV, DC is one hell of a backdrop for fireworks and patriotism stuff. There was, as usual, a concert on the mall with the National Symphony Orchestra and Tony Danza(!?). He’s been the MC for the last couple of years for some reason. Anyway, it’s seems like a good time, but I was a little confused with the choice of music. As the foreworks started, they were doing “Cabaret” from the musical of the same name. As soon as they finished that up, they went right into “The 1812 Overture”. Ah yes, nothing says America like evoking the Weimar Republic and then some Russian anti-Napoleanic bombast. Listen, give me Sousa (Stars and Stripes Forever is the best music for the 4th), Battle Hymn of the Republic, even Neil Diamond (Coming to America), but the first two things I mentioned I really don’t understand. The most inappropriate song I heard, and I heard it twice, was Dixie. It is, at least from the northern perspective, closely associated with the rebellious south in the Civil war, why play that on the day we celebrate the birth of the nation? Anyway, as I get older, I appreciate this holiday more and more. As I watched the fireworks, I was inspired to read some of Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’ works. Unfortunately, I think they will have to wait until after I’m done with Yemen…

A couple of jokes without comment from me on how good/tasteless they are…

President Bush has a press conference and announces, “Tomorrow we will kill 5 million arabs and 1 Israeli.”
“Umm, Mr. President, why will you kill one Israeli?”
The president shrugs and turns to one of his aides. “See, I told you… no one cares about arabs at all…”

This one is imported from France where they have their own “special” problems with Muslims integrating into the culture…

A little boy from Algeria goes to school in France for the first time.

teacher: What’s your name?
kid: Abdul Rahman bin Suliman Adel Muha…
teacher: No, no that will never do, you’re in France now, you should have a French name. From now on you will be called Jean Paul.
kid: OK.

The kid then goes home after school and his father meets him at the door.
Father: Abdul Rahman, how was your first day of school?
kid: I’m not Abdul Rahman anymore, my new name is Jean Paul.
Father: WHAT!? How dare you refuse your heritage, how dare you turn your back on your family?
POW! The father punches the kid in the face.
The next day the kid goes to school with a black eye.
Teacher: Jean paul, what happened?
kid: I wasn’t French for more than 2 hours before some fucking arab punched me!

I was walking through the souk on the way to lunch today and heard an awful racket, but a vaguely familiar one. Turns out that it was a “Viper” alarm that I used to sell when I worked at Sound Approach. God, those things (like most car alarms) raise an awful racket. A kid had rigged one up on his bike and was biking around with it going full blast. It was obvious that he thought it was great, most people didn’t pay much attention. I wanted to kill him… The appreciation these people have for being incredibly loud has to be experienced to be believed…

My stomach felt a little bleah yesterday, so I decided not to go to class. I felt fine last night an anticipated going back today. Well, my alarm went off at 8:30 and there was no freaking way I was getting out of bed. It went off again at 10:00 and again I felt that I needed more sleep. I woke up around 11:00 and decided that this was silly, I had to get ready for class. I was still tired, and it turns out pretty weak as well. I had a hard time standing on one leg putting on pants and opening a new water bottle. I said screw it, called my teacher, and went back to bed. I slept for a couple of hours but had to get up to get something to eat. I ate for the first time today around 3pm and feel quite a bit better, but I’m still really lethargic and sleepy. I’ll get some good sleep tonight, that’s for sure, but I don’t like missing so many classes…