June 2008 Archives
Groceries by bike!
Then They Came for the Bahai
In this opinion piece in the New York-area Jewish newspaper The Forward, an Iranian Jew writes about the relative treatment of Jews and Bahá'ís in Iran. Despite the harsh rhetoric against Israel, the Iranian regime actually protects the rights of Jewish minorities. At one and the same time, the Bahá'ís are treated as infidels and apostates, denied rights of education, inheritance, assembly, and so forth.
The Holy Qur'an says of the followers of the Israelite prophets and of Christ: "Say, 'We believe in God and what has been sent down to us and what was sent down to Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and what Moses and Jesus and all the prophets were given by their Lord. We do not differentiate between any of them. We are Muslims submitted to Him.' (Qur'an, 3:84)
Share Some Gris Tea With Me
When I first heard Morrissey's Every Day Is Like Sunday sometime in 1991 (after moving to Dallas and being exposed to "alternative" for the first time), I was terribly confused about one of the last lines of the song: "share some gris tea with me". Of course, I originally thought it was "grease tea," which equally made no sense. When I learned to play the song on guitar, I found the lyrics and stood corrected. But not enlightened. Well, thank you French class! Now I know that gris means "grey" =).
Review: Wisdom Sits in Places
Wisdom Sits in Places is the name of a remarkable little book of linguistic ethnography about "landscape and language among the Western Apache." Written by rancher and professor Keith H. Basso, who had spent decades working with this group of Apache before composing this opus, the book is easy to overlook: file under boring academic anthropology. For anyone interested in gaining a greater appreciation for the diverse ways we humans think and act, both in and about this world, doing so is a certain mistake.