Sovereign Liege

Breathing this back to life

But this decrepit interface will shortly be moving to another platform.

MORE INTEREST IN ABNER DEAN

...at this site. And the Bed and Breakfast looks lovely.

ABNER DEAN FASCINATES ME

As well as some other people. I'm reposting these examples as of now, along with some very interesting comments I got on the pre-crash Sovereign Liege a few months ago. You can read them in the extended entry section.

(Click the thumbnails for larger images.)

I wrote then that he deserved to be back in print, in editions that didn't mar his work by splitting many of the drawings across two pages.

CTFS

Stands for Check The Source, the way RTFM is the acronym for Read The Manual. I just got an email with this citation:

"Koran (9:11) - 'For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah; and there was peace.'"

If any Qu'ranic verse had been even remotely close to that we wouldn't be hearing the end of it. There's no such verse at 9:11, 11:9, or anywhere else, and it's doubtful that the Meccan air was thick with eagles. At least there aren't any in the text, according to a keyword search at one of the online versions.
The lesson is clear. Khalil Gibran never died. He went into international politics, serving the Secret Masters.

BACK, FINALLY

Because of a server crash I've been offline for the last couple of months, and all the content got wiped as well. So I'll be rebuilding the site from saved HTML (yes, I know there's a better way to do it), meaning that entries from '03 and '04 will be miraculously popping back up. Comments are disabled until I have the spam protection loaded. The ones from before are gone forever into the cyberdark.

IS "JUDEO-CHRISTIAN" GOING THE WAY OF "VENEREAL"?

During the "great heterosexual AIDS explosion", when one-fifth of all Americans were going to be dead by 1990, "STD" replaced "VD" in the language itself. Why?

Because HIV infection is not a venereal disease. Intravenous gonorrhea transmission is uncommon, and so a new term had to be invented which would support the broadly true, but nonspecific and very misleading, "AIDS is spread through sex". Throughout the whole "education" campaign, in the Congressional hearings, in the pronouncements of Surgeon General Koop, one question never got asked much: what is the extent of third party infection? But that was the one that would have given the game away, and there would have been no way to talk around it had "VD" still been the term. First things first. So now we have "Sexually Transmitted Diseases", a category which includes both blood-borne and mucosal contact infections. I'm no doctor, but I doubt if confusing the two would earn an A in Epidemology class. Of course, when the public has to be--helped--to make the right decisions, those who catch on are tacitly supposed to understand the reason for the deception and keep their traps shut. To do otherwise plays into the wrong hands.

And now "Judeo-Christian" is coming under the gun so that Islam won't be left out. "Abrahamic Religions" is now with us to prepare the way to a properly defined discussion, just as "Sexually Transmitted Diseases" did, and "Psychological Addiction" before that, and it's just as politically motivated and intellectually dishonest.

MEMORIES OF SAUDIS

Since the inner roilings of Saudi Arabia have been so much in the news lately, I thought I'd add my little bit.

In the mid-eighties I got a pickup job at a language school to one-on-one tutor a Saudi diplomat four hours a day, four days a week. The consulate was in the same highrise. I was the third one hired to try it, and the first man. The head of the school, a woman, thought that maybe the total lack of result heretofore was the--student's--alternatively cultured attitude towards females, which was a perfectly reasonable assumption. My two predecessors had quit.

If you've spent any kind of time in front of a classroom you understand the distinction between "unteachable" and "cretinous." There aren't many people who can't learn something, even if it's way under the minimum standard. To be truly unteachable takes a grit which Mr...let's call him, oh, Mr. Al-Bugr...had, big time. It was obvious after five minutes that cousin Achmed had gotten him the job so he wouldn't embarrass the family at home. I'm not exaggerating to be amusing. He was one of the most unspeakably stupid people I've ever even met, let alone had to be cooped up with. He had no idea that it was any part of his job as a member of the consular staff to get to know anybody local, join something, go anywhere, socialize, play soccer, do any damn thing at all except stamp visas. (The consulate no longer exists.)

Anyway, the actual "teaching" part was like having flaming bamboo shoots hammered under my fingernails.