January 16, 2005

• Found that second link worth a second look --"Your child is an illiterate cabbage". Aye, and pity 'tis...but the wee things all start out like that.
• /heads over to Cafepress to make a T-shirt
• Marg-bar Mars-bar! - Death to the Mars Bar!
• Competing demands for white mice. I'm freaking out.
• Marg-bar Marge-hair! - Death to the tall blue-coiffed oppressor!
• Marg-bar baa-baa bar bar! - Death to banning sheep-only bars!
• Does anybody remember the SNL skit (circa 1978-79) in which a CIA analyst is driving towards the US Embassy in Tehran, explaining to somebody how the Iranians are inherently pro-American and all this talk of revolution is nonsense, then noticing a huge crowd chanting "Marg bar Amrika!" and wondering complacently what they're saying?
• My girlfriend says I should not have "al mout li Amreeka" printed in Arabic on a teeshirt because most Arabic-reading immigrants or visitors would be displeased -- "Most came here because they LIKE America." But the reason I probably won't is fear of white "Christian, freedom-loving" Americans who can't read Arabic but know what it looks like, and who could guess what it might say based on it being on a "hippie freak's" teeshirt. (Maybe Japanese....) Oh, LH, I recall Iranian student demonstrations through Berkeley that yelled in English "Down, down, down with Shah!" -- but their Farsi yells used "marg-bar" instead. This was toward the end of the Fall semester of 1978. I gathered too that most of these anti-Shah Iranian students were of the more secular left-liberal variety; if they thought of becoming "extremist" they probably thought "Maoist". To them Khomeini was a unifying icon, not "the Eye of God".
• I just need Languagehat to tell me how to say 'You Sick Fuck' in various languages.