My dear mother’s new nightmare has arrived

The Helsinki Complaints Choir

ars et scientia substantia vitae sunt

Today I got a Master’s Degree in psychology and a Stratocaster. Life’s good.

The inability to decide what’s worse

Reading Zeyad’s blog gets increasingly painful day after day. It is because it gives you a painfully detailed view of the war in Iraq:

Later in the day, Tuesday, one of the released hostages posted on an Iraqi message board and said that he was asked by the gunmen whether he was Sunni or Shia because they were not quite sure about his surname. “I’m a Muslim,” he replied. “La tit’aiqal,” they told him, meaning ‘don’t be a smart aleck.’ He then told them he is Shia, so they tested him with certain religious questions that supposedly only a Shi’ite can answer. He passed the test and was hurled on the Army Canal highway, just before Sadr City. (source)

On European television, all you get to see and hear are debries on bombed streets and the mounting number of dead people. However, there is a difference between knowing that things down there are really bad and experiencing how bad they really are. Zeyad keeps track of events on maps. He translates propaganda leaflets into English. He posts pictures that are hardly as gory as anything you see on western television, but since he also provides the context they are more shocking than any horror movie. In other words, he draws an identity for those strangers unknown to us. When he writes about the “rabbit“, a former physics teacher nicknamed for his hair, being hit by a mortar shell, the abstract images on television suddenly turn into human beings one can relate to.

I for my part don’t know what’s worst in this conflict, be it mortar fire, drillholes in peoples heads, being torn out of a taxi and shot, being asked about one’s religion or simply having to stay at home all day. It just all blends into the same mess. And it reminds me of ugly pictures in European history, both in the distant and the rather recent past.

I don’t have a solution, but I do share the pain. That’s the point where propaganda fails.

How to sing the Blues

Pretty much everyone of us is a little blue every once in a while. However, if you’re truly qualified to sing the Blues can be found in this Blues Howto. Thanks to Newton for pointing me to this site.