Monday, January 22, 2007

The one thing that English lacks, well, one of the many things, is a second person plural seperate from the second person singular. At least, this is the cae in most places. The south, despite how much of the country holds it in contempt, has resolved this pressing linguistic deficiency.

Y'all

Yes, that wonderful contraction. I'd be so apt as to write it without the apostrophe, yall. I mean, tomorrow used to have a hyphen between to and morrow, but we got rid of that superfluous grammatical mark.

So the next time you need to use the second person plural pronoun, just use "Yall."

Goodbye Yall!

Sunday, January 21, 2007

This post is a test of the Arabic posting system.

بيييييييييييييييب



خوبز

If this had been a real post, some of that might have made sense.

Monday, January 08, 2007

I just finished a great little book; or, more of a pamphlet. The Devil's Deception (Talbees Iblees).

Hoo boy, those religious type know how to tear into people. This one is a translation of a twelfth century text that is a attack on Shi'a, specifically, and Sufi beliefs. Man does he talk some smack. It's interesting to read these responses from the time periods about all these things I have read that are so academic. Responses that consistently refer to people being misled by the devil or what ever great evil there is.

This one manages to tie all of its criticism up in the end with the Assassins. Yes those wonderful boogey men of yore. "They did drugs", "They killed wantonly". Pretty much everything bad that could be said about them has been. But really, what do we know?

Well, first off, they didn't smoke hash, at least not in any large way or as some sort of indoctrination. They got their name from being Assassiyun, followers of the assass, the base or foundation. strangely similar to todays al Qaida in nomenclature. Really there are a lot of similarities between the time of the crusades and now. A major one of these is the Sunni-Shi'a internecine warfare.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

The Big Question!! this year is "what are you optimistic about?"

As my great aunt Sis is fond of saying: Well, shit guys (imagine it with a great souther accent.) what can I be optimistic about?

Sure, personally things are going good, but on the global scale, I got nothing. Perhaps I am optimistic that the Dems taking congress will have some positive effect on the environment, or at least slow down the damage. But really, I'm not optimistic. Recently my father had me over for dinner and asked me about the environment, sure that I would be able to explain what it would take for us to get out of the position in which we find ourselves. No such luck I must say. Him and my step-mother had been arguing over whether it was morally okay to create a false crisis to convince people to change their ways. When I explained that the real crisis would put any false crisis to shame, though they would likely not be around to see it, he was a bit taken aback. I always have been rather optimistic. These days, I just try for the best and expect the worst.