Oh, it will be the right ball please; I am too fond of the left one!

I spent most of the day at home reading [Persepolis] -have a look, this is one of the stories it is called The Trip, - a comic book written by Marjane Satrapi. It is too scary how much we have in common, Iraqis and Iranians I mean. The hate campaigns which were directed towards each other seem to have had the same effect on Iranians as on us, and the same methods were used. Religion, the promise of Jenna [Heaven] and the glorification of death after sugar coating it with the word Martyr. It is sub-titled (a story of childhood in Iran) about a young girl going thru the Islamic revolution in Iran and up to the war with Iraq. Some of the things about the start of the Islamic revolution make me think about what is happening now in Iraq.
It was my third attempt to go thru that “comic book”, I tried once right after I bought it but it made me wince, this time I went thru it in one single go. It is a beautiful book.
I had the urge to start translating it and throwing copies of it on the streets of Baghdad. Why can’t we learn from other people’s mistakes?

Riverbend, how can I get a copy to you?

As usual I am living in my headphones most of the time, at the moment I am at [Never, Never, Land], I can’t get Reign out of my head.

Rain rain rain, the whole city looks like a puddle of mud and everything is too slippery because the rain is not strong enough to wash things away, it is just stupid drizzle and everything is wet.
I found G. he sent me an email saying that he is living with the Guardian people (???) in baghdad and that I should give him a "fucken" call.
G. what are you doing with the Guardian when you are supposed to be working with the NYT ?

Diana linked to this article, I don't always read Friedmann but she linked = I read.
God and Man in Baghdad
My favorite line is this

"If things go reasonably well, the result will be an initial Iraqi government that is more religious than Turkey but more democratic than Iran. Not bad."

He makes it sound as if we are going for consolation prizes now: "You didn't get the Democratic Iraq Package, but hey... very soon you will be getting visas to Iran with no trouble at all".

U.S. Rejects Iraqi Plan to Hold Census by Summer
I just read yesterday in the "official Iraqi Newspaper" i.e. the coalition funded Iraqi Media Network thing that they have abudget allocated for the census, funny that they say the americans have rejected it now. I am sure they have someone reading the Iraqi papers so how could they allow this to get to press. A few months ago an american press officer at the Governing Council's office was telling a reporter that they do excercise some "information control" so what happened, their control got leaky or what?
besides what is wrong with a census, we do need to now a rough estimate of how many poeple would vote and what sort of ethnic and religious precentages we have. The Governing Council says that it never saw the porposal by the census bureau

"The Census Bureau said it had delivered the plan to the Governing Council on Nov. 1, but apparently it was lost in the bureaucracy."

hmm very promising, now we find out the government doesn't know what its offices are doing.

This could have changed things," ......... some council members would have argued last month that the vote on self-government should be delayed until September when the voter roll became available.

Come on boys give it try we know it is not going to be very correct but at least an indication.

Nasty surprise today in the morning. The guy who owns the electricity generator came by to tell us that he has just raised the price of electricity from 2000 dinars to 3500 dinars per amp and if you don't like it go spend your days in darkness, oh and he is not turning on the generator after 2am. tough luck insomniacs.
These neighbourhood generators are our main source of electricity since the baghdad grid is really not reliable and has been getting worse, so generator owners are twisting our arms now. and it is not like you can switch from one provider to another, you are lucky if you have someone in your neighborhood who has a really big one and decides to sell electricity. In some areas poeple saw ythais as a business oppertunity, get a huge generator and make lots of money because on average you get more electricity from them than from the national grid.
The reason behind the raise in prices is the price and availabity of fuel, and you can't really argue with him. Everyone who owns a car has to either spend the night in his car queuing up in front of a gas station or buy very expensive gas, which is probably cut with anything from water to diesel, on the black market. The other thing is that kerosene which is the fuel most iraqi homes use for heating is also getting more expensive and harder to get. so these days whenver we hear the dingdingding of the kerosene guy (it is a a barrel tank pulled by a horse thing) we start running out to make sure he stops, and you have to be nice to Mr. Kerosene delivery otherwise he will not come next time.
The extra containers we bought for fuel srorage during the war have been very usefull.

Just looked at Unqualified Offerings he has linked to lots of charts and numbers about the electricity situation in Iraq.

Yes I know it is a bit confusing now that we have two poeple writing in the same blog, and I *do not* want to be associated with Raed's ramblings. His mind functions in strange ways. So to make things easier I am trying to color code, Firey Orange is me and boring white is Raed.

This is test blog. Test test tesssst.
I bought the scary CD

*this is a [Where is Raed] special announcement*
We are temporarily changing the title of the blog because we have lost G.
If you have seen him please tell Raed or Salam Pax where you saw him and the exact color of his beard on the day of the sighting, thank you.

end of test

Today.. ummm.. I saw a camel in Baghdad :")
Camels look really ugly .. they have big lips .. huge lips .. so when they try to smile (just to say hi to you) they look like someone with the "duhhh" expression on his face

One of the restless questions in my head is about camels, why are camels related to Arabs in the western media? (besides the question of why my italiana girlfriend dumped me, this camel thing is really annoying me)
I mean .. it's just like me having an image in my mind about canadians and penguin .. Hey! are you really Canadian? Cool! Do you have a penguin in your bedroom? Do you eat them?

:")

Media .. media .. it can easily put images and ideas in anyone's head. Its like the endless crisis of searching for the "truth". Isn't everything just relative? you have two people coming back from Samerra, one telling you about the blood shed that happened .. "dozens of civilians were killed there! for god's sake! blah blah" and the other with his version of the story "naah .. nothing happened, it was a usual ambush and soldiers freaked out and shot eight people, two were Iranian tourists" .. go to BBC and CNN and you find the first story, go to AlJazeera and you'll read the second one .. with details! they sound like two parallel universes!
at the time of AlKindi it was a bit easier to speak about truth .. "We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself." Maybe life was better before everyone started listening to NEWS .. brrrr

Can't he at least say hello? HELLO Salaam? where have you been hiding for the last two weeks?
I mean .. how can he just come back like this?
whatever

Electricity is still on strike, we didn't have neither electricity nor matches for yesterday's night, and we kept on calling Abo Husien the guard to lend us his lighter every couple of hours .. poor man.
This problem with services is really strange; even other basic stuff here, like petrol and other oil derivatives, are not easy to find. Cars either wait in a long - long queue for hours to get some liters of petrol, or just buy some from the "black" market. The only difference between Baghdad's black market and other cities markets that you don't really have the option of going to the "white" market here :") or whatever it's called. I mean .. besides the socializing opportunity that everyone standing in the queue gets, it's not worth it to spend hours of your life pushing your car (because no one leaves his car's engine on for all of that time) and waiting for a thief to rob you or something. Or maybe it's just our new government's plan for building bridges between the different ethnic groups of the Iraqi people, yes yes! maybe they'll change the name of all gas stations to "social blenders" .. whatever ..

Ummm .. one last thing ..
What the hell does "Support Democracy in Iraq" mean? you know what I'm talking about .. the small logo on your left hand <<<<<
Who is exactly the one supposed to support the Iraqo-demo-cracy thing?? Surprise me! I mean .. Shoot me!

I think it was 4 months ago when I spent three nights in Sammara because it is the closest place to Tikrit which didn't make your skin crawl and it actually had hotels. It was an empty hotel and me and the manager enede up chatting because we both had nothing better to do, I told him that I thought the city there was very quiet and it seemed very peacful, just a bunch of Iranian tourists visitng the shrine of Imam Sadiq al-Mahdi. he told me that I shouldn't be fooled, lots of the Tikritis and Saddam supporters came down to Sammara to hide.
and last night this happened

46 Iraqis Die in Fierce Fight Between Rebels and G.I.'s

Someone talking on arabic BBC said that probably a couple of Iranian tourists were injured but that was not confirmed. Killing 64 means there was a serious battle going on or they just scorched a street after freaking out.

UPDATE: AP just put up a different number

U.S. Says 54 Iraqis Killed in Samarra

and this one is more interesting to read than the NY Times one.

From Riverbend's blog on the 29th

The most amusing thing about his visit was watching Chalabi and Talabani jumping up and down at the airport, cheering and clapping as Bush made the rounds. Muwafaq Al-Rubai'i, also a member of the Governing Council, was just embarrassing- he was standing on tiptoe and clapping like a 5-year-old watching a circus clown.

That was such an embaressing sight, I couldn't believe it, and the way Bush gave them a sideway glance........ I mean they are supposed to be heads of state. Maybe next time we give them cheerleaders uniforms and make them do a little dance.
It is good to know that I wasn't alone cringing as I watched that

I feel like a scary taxi driver magnet. Why do I always get the weirdest ones.
Today's taxi driver had a tape with songs praising the work of "the brothers" in Falluja. I sat there stiff wondering if I should just open the door and jump, in the end I did get myself together to ask him what that was and he was happy to tell me who it was and where to get a copy of anti-american pop songs.
Well, they are not really pop songs they were sung like Thikir, which is supposed to be this sung poetry parising Allah and stuff, but listening to stuff praising the people in Falluja for their bravery in defending the faith and praying for each dead Fallujan to be replaced by 2000 is a bit too much.
The dilemma now ofcourse is should I go buy a copy of that tape or not? anyway if I made the decision to buy one the "highlights" of that tasteless thing will be translated and posted here.

How do you like that for a new developemnet? look at the Iraqi top ten music chart to get a feel for the sentiments in Iraq. Is it going to be Justin Timberlake? or Scary Sabbah with his greatest anti-coalition hits?
I know. It is not funny.

If you have a better internet connection than my lousy dial-up you might want be interested in taking a look at this.

Fun Fact: Hillary Clinton was here too! why dont anyone tell us before these people come! .. however ..

Finally I found Salam, he came back two days ago. The good news that he's going to start writing "seriously" again :)
welcome back Salooma

I discovered that Jo was writing some stuff about our visit to the south and the work of Emaar;the Iraqi organization I founded some months ago .. and she discribed the car accident we had with the american truck too.

whatever .. today was such a boring day, I spent the morning and the after noon with Salam and Hamsa going in circles trying to find any road to take us to the other side of Baghdad, no one can even imagine the traffic jam in Baghdad's streets.
Yalla Salam write anything .. let's start the ping pong game :")

I FEEL BLESSED!! BUSH WAS HERE!! He just stayed for three hours, what a shame. Or was it thirteen? .... Whatever .... :) I just came back from the south. This time Tara and Jo came with me, we went to Nasryya through Hilla, Najaf, Diwanyya and Samawa, and an American truck was that near > < to kill us all. It feels strange to be stopped by smiling soldiers coming from Spain (hola hola), Holland (I don’t know what), U.S.A (hello), Italy (ciao), Poland (No Engleeeezi), and another people with strange faces (peep peep prprpr): all of them in one country!! I'm proud of my country :) When the American truck nearly crushed my car no one agreed to stop to see what happened .. I was waving to all the other trucks in the convoy but without any response, so Tara (she's from Canada) thought it's a good idea to inform the Holland check point about what happened, they where very nice and polite to the point that I was surprised! That guy wanted to cry when I told him about the accident! :) then they took pictures for the car and gave me their contact addresses .. I'll call them later to see what can they do........... (new paragraph) ...................... Tara is arrogant a bit, but I can understand why (everyone falls apart after she smiles) :) you should have been there when we were discussing stuff about god and nature and bla bla bla .. "In the west .. man use god to understand the nature. In the east .. man use the nature to understand god" :) don’t you like that? ........................ (another new paragraph) ........................ Ok .. Salam .. I will call your family today to ask about you .. this is getting serious! what happened? are you still alive or not? you were supposed to come back two weeks ago!! Where is Salam!

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr .. I am angry now .. I AM angry .. and "THEY" come and ask you "why don't you like us?" ... I will tell you why .. >>>> I was just stopped by an American check point .. they let me stand under the rain .. in the mud .. for more than 15 minutes .. a soldier pushed me in a very strong way that I nearly fell down, and the other was investigating me: Why do you have a camera in your car? haaa? !!!!!! What the hell !!! I mean !! duh ?? I have a camera? why not? then came the other americano with a smile asking me: do you film porn? !!! I heard that but I asked him: what sir? and he replied: PORN pee ooo are enn ,, ha ha ha .. (is that funny?) .. Soldiers stopping people in the EID (these are the Muslims' festival days) asking them whether they film porn and pushing them in mud .. I DON'T LIKE "THEM" .. Soldiers are not the best representatives of any culture .. Grrrh ///////////// (new paragraph) SALAAAAM?! where the peep are you? I'll change the title to WHERE IS SALAM.. call me for god's sake .. stronso

G. came yesterday to my place, with two red wine bottles, Jo was there too. We were discussing the same issue "why don't me and G. have a direct relation?" .. when you are not here we never see each other! ,, we are ""friends in law"" :) where are you now? when are you coming back? yalla .. come to enjoy having electricity for three hours a day. Yes >> THREE<< warm nice hours. 6ayyeb in the summer time "THEY" said we'll have electricity 24 hours a day after the "peak time of summer" ! Zeen what the hell is the new excuse? I'm sure it's because of the peak time of winter .. blah ,,

i hate english.. i hate writing in english.. whatever.. salam you cannot imagine the scene at AnNasryya, i mean .. It's not just about the italians' building .. It's about the entire neighborhood! Houses in the circle of 1000 meter are living without windows, without doors, and with cracks in their walls. The explosion was so huge that it blow off the doors and fences and trees of all the neighbours .. do u like more details? ok :) two people crossed the bridge with that very old water tanker (made in 1950s), and the man "with beard" sitting on the left went out from the window and started shooting on the italian guards and killed them, and the car went directly into the main door of the building killing everyone in the street and most of the italians, italian soldiers heads were found hundreds of meters away from he explosion! brrrrooohhh .. and some iraqi's were burned in their cars in the middle of the street. The "funny" thing that looting started five minutes later, all the machine guns and pistols disappeared in minutes and you can get a cool italiano pistol for $250 now in the gun markets of Nasryya. Abbas (u know him, the restaurant owner..) saw some people steeling a ring from the finger of a dead italian body with no head! brrrrroooohhh .. and looting contenued the next days for the rest of the furnature and air conditioning units ,, the strange thing that everyone at Nasryya was expecting the attack two days before it happens! EVERYONE! policemen and people from the political parties (controlling the city) were going aroung the steets searching for THE bommbed car, thats why when the explosion happened people started demonstrating against the police and parties accusing them of not doing the right job "you just spend our money on stupid meetings and check pionts" .. mmm .. that's it i believe. (how can i start a new paragraph here?) .. (ok .. conceder this as new paragraph) .. I want shoes (like the black ones with hole in the bottom u used to have) and another couple of horny shirts .. mmm .. I broke up with Simona .. mmm .. I bought a new Mercedes car (ML 430) .. Mmmm .. call me .. bye

G in Baghdad wouldn't write on his blog but he just sent me a wickedly funny email, sorry G this is what happens when you have blogger friends. Here is what he wrote:

tell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam.
And if you could ask them when will be the next demonstration to support the people of north Korea, the democratic republic of Congo and Iran?

yup, that's him alright. G so full of surprises.
back to baghdad on monday, G you better have beer in your fridge.

so raed still remembers his password to this blog

Raed would you please write in english, they don't have any arabic OS 'puters here in london. I can't read what you are saying.
you would not believe what happened to me, my wallet got stolen. I am so happy i don't have any credit cards, don't ask where and how, let us just say allah was trying to tell me something and I wasn't listening.

Bush will be in London on tuesday and there will be a huge demo. the anti-war gang changed their signs from stop war to stop bush which i find funny. really need suggestions for my banner, at the moment i am considering dressing up as one of the spice girls and singing "who do you think you are?" while waving a pink feather boa, that would attract some attention i guess.
do you have G's new number, please text it to me and keep your fucking phone on.
so do you want another "horny devil" t-shirt? and tell me about nassiriyah, did any of the guys talk to you about what happened.

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