Inappropriate Content: February 23d, 2005

[I wrote the post over a day and a half, from the evening of February 23rd until the afternoon of the 24th.]

9:48 p.m.—

Just returned from a nice extended visit to the Library of Congress. The ride back wasn't as interesting as the ride there. Why can't every Metro trip have a magician with live doves? Cleaning costs, maybe. Or safety—doves can actually be quite violent animals.

Have just shaved.

9:57 p.m.—

Reading about Egyptian President Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood, who sound like the villains from a Sherlock Holmes novella. Eating Cheerios®.

10:20 p.m.—

I picked up a copy of East of the River, my neighborhood's local indie newspaper. (Yay for D.C. having local indie newspapers!) In the back page, a report on local crime rates. The job corps center I'm on is in the middle of Police Service Area 706. Last year, we had 520 major thefts or robberies, 190 assaults with a deadly weapon, and 12 homicides. Two of the murder victims were students at this school. Every PSA on this side of the Anacostia River reported at least 200 felonies; 706 had over a thousand.

Well, except for the people in 707, which is just on the other side of the freeway from us; they had no murders and just one burglary.

The next time I hear someone complaining about the housing on Air Force bases, I'm going to accidentally spill my drink down their pants.

10:43—

At least this new paper has a good political gossip column. Of D.C. Councilman Vincent Orange, “The Nose” observes

It is said that the ubiquitous Orange will attend the opening of an envelope.

I don't know if Orange is my councilmember, or if someone else represents my ward. I do know that I'm several blocks south of the ward represented by Marion Barry. The former mayor was scheduled to visit the center Monday, but cancelled at the last minute. Scuttlebutt is, his son was caught with marijuana.

We'll now break for irony.

10:43 p.m.—

Did Peter Kalivas turn Sam down for a date or something?

Peter Kalivas's solo "Shifting" was the low point of the night, proving that narcissism alone can only hold an audience for about three minutes. Even if you have had an amazing career in New York City.

10:57 p.m.—

Joesph Braude makes an interesting, subscription-only point: There is really no such language as Arabic.

Not only are 70 million Arabs unable to read or write; a much larger number of the region's 280 million people do not fully speak or understand the standardized Arabic language (known as "Fus'ha") that is used in broadcast news as well as official discourse and the academy. Fus'ha was introduced in schools across the region beginning about 90 years ago as a component of pan-Arab nationalism. It is a formal construct, gleaned from classical Arabic grammar and wholly consistent with Koranic syntax, designed to unite the 20-odd Arab countries culturally and politically. But nine decades later it unites, in effect, only the region's elites.

Most everybody else prefers to speak a version of their country's vernacular. Ninety percent of Moroccans, for example, can only understand their unique brand of Arabic, which is heavily infused with Berber phonics and French vocabulary--testimony to the country's multiethnic and colonial history. The Moroccan language, in turn, is barely comprehensible to, say, Iraqis, whose unique idioms and usages reflect more ancient Mesopotamian tongues as well as the country's proximity to Turkey, Iran, and the Kurdish mountains. These vernaculars, derided by pan-Arab ideologues "dialects," are in fact the region's major living languages. They are the contemporary Middle Eastern equivalent of Romance languages, which, of course, were all derived from Latin and were also once known as dialects--but now are known as Spanish, Italian, and French.

Could this be part of the reason the governments in the middle east are so autocratic? After all, most of the leaders in Arab countries
are either strongmen like Quadhafi and Musharraf or monarchies like in Saudi Arabia or the UAE. Even sorta-democratic Egypt has degenerated from almost-democratically-elected Sadat to not-really-democratically-elected-at-all Mubarak in the last three decades.

I don't know enough about this to say anything really insightful; and it's far to late in the day for me to make up something that sounds more insightful than it really is like I usually do.

7:52 a.m.—

It's really quite nice out: light flurries of snow have been drifting down all night, and there's about an inch and a half on the ground. It's not sticking to the pavement, so you don't have to worry about your shoes. The trees and buildings are all trimmed in white and the air is crisp. Threw on a sweater and an windbreaker.

And the city of Washington has shut down. Over an inch and a half on the ground.

I always thought people were joking when they talked about this sort of thing.

11:45 a.m.—

It was funny, but now it's just sad. I figure, schools closed, there's less than an inch and a half of snow on the ground, I'm from Utah; I'm gonna walk down to the bus stop and head downtown and do something fun today.

I've spent more than four hours running from one end of center to the other, trying to get a curfew pass. Everyone is stunned—just stunned—by the snow, and doesn't want to give me a pass. When I point out that there's less than two inches on the ground, they immediately pass the buck. I've been to see the heads of three different departments, and every one of them has sent me to another department.

I should have just left this morning. No one would have cared, but now all the security staff know I'm trying to leave and that I'm not likely to get a pass, so they'd stop me. This is incredibly frustrating.

12:13 p.m.—

It has just been pointed out that my windbreaker is bright red, and half the campus now suspects I'm a blood. Lucky I didn't leave; the bus stop is in a heavily Crip neighborhood.

Have changed into a black sweater, making a third round to see the department heads.

3:12 p.m.—

Screw this. People in D.C. are nuts. I'm gonna a video or something.

6:43 p.m.—

Just saw Dark Blue. The same writer as Training Day, but a few years earlier and marginalized because he could only get Ving Rhames and not Denzel. Pity. Dark Blue is modern-day Shakespeare; and while I'm not the biggest fan of the Bard in the world (prefer Voltaire) that's pretty damn good for a Kurt Russell movie. Russell, by the way, chews the scenery as the embodiment of white machismo: a casually racist, terminally sexist, asshole cop, bad father and worse husband with a drinking problem and questionable morals. And he's not even the worst person in the film: Brendan Gleeson is the biggest asshole on film since the James Bond franchise ran out of good bad guys. When I said this was Shakespearian, I wasn't talking Comedy of Errors. I was talking the Scottish Play. Compared to everyone else in the film, Rhames' manipulative, political police chief looks like a saint.

And the timing is just right so that it doesn't seem like grandstanding for the climax to take place just as the Rodney King riots are erupting. Why didn't this get nominated for any Oscars?

Oh, and people in D.C. are still nuts.