" I want to get married!" Max announced when he was only two years old.
" To whom?" I asked.
" Spiderman!" Max answered with a big smile on his face.
----
"You are our number one!" I told Max who is going to be four in August.
"No. I am not number one. I am number three! You are number one, mummy is number two and I am number three." He insisted.
----
" Were you born in Iran?" Max asked me the other day.
" Yes. I was born in Iran." I replied.
"Why?" He asked.
" Well my parents are from Iran." I explained.
" In Iran people say Salam. It sounds like Salami." He said.
----
" Do you know the capital city of England?" I asked Max.
" No." He replied.
" It is where we live." I hinted.
" London!" He answered correctly.
" Well done. Do you know the capital city of Germany?" I asked him.
" Sch?neb?rg!" He replied.
(Sch?neb?rg is a small village where his grandparents live.)
We all should condemn any forms of intervention by the US and its allies in the affairs of Iran or interference with the territorial integrity of Iran. US could support the self-determination of the people of Iran and their quest for democracy but only Iranian people should choose a regime, which will be representative for its values.
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
-Abraham Lincoln
These are two direct quotes from Donald H. Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense.
A Confession
Once in a while,
I'm standing here, doing something.
And I think,
"What in the world am I doing here?"
It's a big surprise.
—May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
Department of Defense news briefing, Feb 12, 2002
I really enjoyed the last look-alikes post so I came up with another gem!
Has anyone noticed the similarity between Dolly the sheep, who became famous as the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, and Albert Einstein?
Do you think they were related?
I really like Knife & Packer's cartoons which appear in Private Eye and the Guardian. Their characters live in arty farty north London!
I am sure I am not the first person who has noticed the remarkable similarity between Sir Sean Connery and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The last two weeks have been really bad for hay-fever sufferers like me. According to BBC grass pollen levels for June have been the highest since 1976. Achoo!
I can see a lot of similarities between these two images. Both artists live and work in New York. The image on the right is by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat and the one on the left is by the American artist Spencer Tunick.
Latest Chomsky interview
"There is a reason to believe that for a year or two now, efforts have been under way to try dismantle Iran, to break it into internally warring groups. These US dismantling efforts have been based partly in Eastern Turkey, the US bases in Eastern Turkey apparently flying surveillance over Iranian borders."
Click here to see photos of the student protests in Tehran.
The author of the "dullest blog in the world" is a 32-year-old English cartoonist. The site is a satire on the daily trivialities that some bloggers - including myself - see fit to share with the world, he posts regular updates like this:
"I was sitting at the table and realised that I would be more comfortable if my chair was a couple of inches nearer to the table. I moved the chair forward slightly, thus lessening the gap between me and the table. I was then able to continue what I was doing in greater comfort.".
A beautiful blue sky and a glorious sun in London.
Spencer Tunick started "Nude Adrift", a world project, in 2001. His goal is to complete a body of work while travelling to all the continents. The project combined the artist's mass group installations, as well as a series of individual portraits. He has been documenting the live nude figure in public using photography and video since 1992 and has organised over 65 group installations. Last Sunday He beat his own record when 7,000 people posed nude for him in Barcelona.
Blix lashes out at 'bastards' who have tried to undermine him in the three years he held his high-profile post. Click here to read more.
Today we went to British Museum and saw the exhibition " The Museum of the Mind: Art and memory in world cultures". The idea and concept was fine but the exhibition itself was just a mishmash of artefacts. The opening speech to the exhibition by Ben Okri is quite interesting.
We also had the chance to hold a genuine cuneiform clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia, which was great! The cuneiform was used most extensively in the ancient Middle East. It was employed for writing a number of languages from about the end of the 4th millennium BC until about the 1st century BC. The earliest documents in cuneiform were written in Sumerian, the language of the inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia. Cuneiform writing was impressed onto clay tablets with a reed stylus.
We went and saw "Secretary", a black comedy movie directed by Steven Shainberg based on a story by Mary Gaitskill. The fact that the story is written by a woman is quite interesting. James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal play the two main characters (Mr Grey) the lawyer and (Lee Holloway) his secretary.
Plot Outline: After leaving a mental institution, Lee had to find a job. She learnt typing skills and answered Mr Grey's advertisement for a secretary.
"You'll be bored to death," Mr Grey tells Lee.
"I want to be bored," she says.
"It's very dull work," he warns.
"I like dull work," she says.
He circles her typing errors with a red pen and says:
"Miss Holloway, come into the library, immediately!"
He needs to control, perhaps in order to avoid emotional attachment and she discovers sadomasochism!
Weird stuff!!
US is now playing the same dangerous "Weapon of Mass Destruction" and "Al Qaeda" game with Iran. Every newspaper, radio, or television story seems to be about Iran these days. It is very worrying.
The Guardian has now a separate section on Iran.