flickering pictures

So I got back to Montreal last Sunday and I’ve been a little delinquent in the posting department — both re: the posts from Lebanon that you’ve come to expect when I’m travelling, and re: the regular neat-o news and whatnot that you’ve come to expect when I’m home. I expect that next week […]

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June 26
We meet up again with Hafsa and Zainab, who are dressed even more liberally than before — who cross the road with us to an another touristy shop, and through a mixture of browbeating and flirtation, haggle the poor confused shopkeeper down to about a fifth of his asking price for our faux-bijoux […]

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June 24
As no taxi driver wanted to take us the apparently tiny distance from our hotel to the Tunis bus station, we set out on foot in more or less the right direction. As it turns out, what should have been a 30-minute stroll turned into a sweltering 90-minute hike with our big packs […]

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June 22
So we landed in Tunis around 10am, surrounded by French, German and Italian vacationers. The very few clothes they were wearing were all Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, and I got the distinct feeling they were headed straight for one of Tunisia’s many coastal resort towns, which was just fine with us.
We’re just […]

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It’s only sleeping.
A few days ago, B sent me a link to an excellent article by Stephanie Nolen, a Canadian Globe and Mail reporter who — in my opinion at least — does some of the finest journalism out there, and has for years. She opened the Globe’s South Africa bureau back in 2003, […]

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Language is a clumsy inadequate tool, which is all the more reason to celebrate those who wield it well. In The Workings of the Subtle Heart — the “second greatest book ever written” according to Kurt Vonnegut — William Widmer riffs on a Japanese word that seems to have no English equivalent.

I am told […]

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They’re not good at all.
I’m not terribly good at math, but I really like numbers. I like their finality, and although they’re often misused, it’s not their fault — numbers don’t mislead people; people mislead people. If the town of Boulder, Colorado has 91,685 residents, then you can say what you like, but […]

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Could the most dangerous weapon in the world be charisma?
From the Los Angeles Times:

Next week the academic journal Language & Communication will publish the poetry of Osama bin Laden, as part of an article by UC Davis Professor Flagg Miller. “Bin Laden is a skilled poet with clever rhymes and meters,” Miller told the Times […]

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As I write this, I’m sitting in one of Pusan’s Internet cafes — or “pishi bangs” — surrounded by twenty-something guys laughing and smoking and blasting the hell out of each other online. We got in this afternoon on the KTX, a blazing fast train something like France’s TGV that can hit 350 km/h. […]

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So it’s been a couple of days since my last post — sorry for that — but all is well and we’re gearing up to head to the port city of Pusan tomorrow morning.
I live in a pretty cosmopolitan city, and as such there are large ethnic and linguistic communities there, but it was pretty […]

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