Well this doesn’t happen very often, so listen up kiddies. I, Chlamydia, agree with the Pope. No, I’m not talking about “The Pope” who’s a Hasher from Singapore, I mean the Pope, his holiness, queen of the silly hats and king of the Catholics.

Don’t worry, I’m still a good little atheist --but I do have to give the Pope his props, if only for publicly quoting Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus --a man who, in my opinion, knew a thing or two about Islam.

No big deal, right? All he did was to quote someone else who had a dim view of Islam. Let’s put this into context though, on the stage of world leaders not even GW is willing to stick his neck out far enough to risk pissing off the Muzzies. The Pope, Nazi youth thug though he may be, at least had the balls to repeat someone who was willing to “tell it like it is.” It doesn’t seem like much until you look at what’s happened to other people who have done the same.

In case you’re wondering what it was that Manuel II said that was so offensive to Muslims; it was only this: everything the Prophet Mohammed brought was evil "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Well, in my opinion that’s not a bad start, but it falls a little short of the truth.

A few weeks ago I finished up a little project of mine which was to read the Koran (or Qur’an if you prefer) and because Muslims are often heard proclaiming that one cannot read an interpretation of the Koran and understand it, and since I have no desire to learn Arabic, along with the Koran I read a few different commentaries.

I re-read (ok, I didn’t really get through very much of it the first time around) a painfully boring little tome called Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (which, to be clear, is not an historical text nor is it non-fiction but it’s significance will become clear in a minute) Additionally, I read another book called Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources by Martin Lings.

Besides those two books (and the Koran itself) I read what is perhaps most informative book I’ve read in years: What the Koran Really Says; Language, Text and Commentary by Ibn Warraq.

If you have any desire to understand Islam, I highly recommend Warraq’s book. It’s a book on the Koran that cuts through the PC bullshit and tells you how the Muslim world is interpreting their holy book. To be clear here, the Koran doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for interpretation. Besides all the silly bullshit it borrowed from the Torah and the Bible it makes one other thing abundantly clear: It is the duty of all Muslims to kill all infidels. It goes on to identify infidels as pretty much everyone who isn’t a Muslim as well as all Muslims who aren’t fanatical enough. An example of a non-fanatical Muslim would be, for instance, a Muslim that has the chance to kill some infidels and doesn’t do it.

Now what I just wrote is a paraphrase, and it probably sounds pretty extreme –and it is, but it’s also true. Don’t believe me? Pick up a copy of the Koran and read it for yourself. It’s all there in black and white.

A lot of Islam’s defenders would be quick to point out something along the lines of “to really grasp the beauty and kindness of the Koran, one must be able to read it in it’s original Arabic…” Right you are, and that’s where Messrs. Rushdie and Warraq come in. They’re both former Muslims, both from the Middle East, and both scholars of Arabic, having studied it in an historical context and both having a far greater understanding of the language than the vast majority of so-called “Clerics.” In both of their books that I read, they were clear, the Koran calls for the destruction of all non-Muslims.

“Not true!” Say the proponents of Islam. Then, why, I ask, have fatwas been issued on both of these men? This isn’t some bullshit ex-communication; this is murdering people for speaking freely (and the truth). The leader of Islam in Iran clearly stated that it was the duty of all Muslims everywhere in the world to kill Salmon Rushdie and everyone associated with the printing of his book. And they’re still trying.

To date they have killed the man who translated the book into Japanese, as well as having seriously injured the Italian translator and the Norwegian translator. Salmon Rushdie has spent the last nearly twenty years in hiding. For his part Ibn Warraq knew what he was getting himself into and was careful to conseal his identity from the outset. Although there is a fatwa on Warraq, to date no one has been killed over his book.

That brings us back to the Pope. Considering the muslim communities predilection for issuing fatwas against anyone and everyone who has the slightest negative comment on their religion, I think it took a lot of balls to stand up there and (IMHO) tell the truth. Already there are Muslim “clerics” who have publicly stated that they are of the mind that the pope should be put to death for his having repeated these negative words regarding Islam. Take a second to consider this, the pope quoted someone who said negative things about Islam and they think he should surrender his life for it –it will be interesting to see how this all shakes out in the end.

B.G.S.F.H.

Aah the Bastard Operator from Hell, highly recommended reading. The man I would have been if only I had had more recourses at my disposal. But where does a boy go to get a bulk disk eraser or a mains plug that patches into Ethernet (ok I could have made one of those) in Fairfield Iowa?

Instead I hacked. The vernacular has changed since then, now it's called "cracking" but back then I was called a hacker. I tortured the school system's limited resources. I phreaked the local phone company in my little po-dunk town so hard that to this day I'm fairly certain that the resulting anomalies mandated their complete system overhaul in 1983. That poor old switch was just never made to handle 30 calls a minute coming from a residential branch… those, as they say, were the good old days.

I saw what happened to KM and I'm not stupid enough to report on line (or elsewhere) any of my little escapades but here's an interesting little story about other kinds of fun than can be had with a war dialer and a couple of sophomore punks.

In the basement of the house I lived in in grad school (the first time) lived three 19-year-old "dudes." They were all right kids; I actually kind of liked them but they were young and stupid and full of energy. A lethal combination.

One Thursday night, while I was trying to grade papers, they decided to have a party. Not a real party but a couple of girls over, play the music real loud, order pizza and mooch beer (because they're underage) from upstairs neighbor (me) party.

That's cool, I'm generally a live-and-let-live kind of guy, to a point, so I went off to my favorite pub to grade my papers. When I returned close to 2 am, however, they still had the tunes cranked. I was too tired to go and make them stop so the noise went on for a couple more hours before they decided to pipe down for the night. Needless to say I was tired and cranky a few hours after that when I had to get up at 8 to go to class.

I had a half an hour to kill before class and decided that a little reciprocation was in order. I thought about playing the stereo loud but had to consider the other people in the house so I settled onto a slightly more subversive plan. I logged on to the university phone directory and pulled up their phone number -bonus, they had two lines. Then I set my computer to call their numbers at random time intervals from 5 to 45 minutes (meaning that there would never be more than an hour and a half between calls), I set it for bad line quality so it would screech like hell double-checking for a modem at the other end. Sweet dreams punks. Ring, ring, ring… ", I got it, hello? aah! Damn computers!"

After enjoying the first couple of minutes of my little plan I took off for class in a decidedly better mood. By lunchtime I'd already forgotten all about my little revenge tactic so when I went back to my apartment for a few minutes at three and threw some things in a bag and headed out the door for a weekend in Chicago I never thought to turn off my computer which was still happily dialing away.

On Sunday I returned to find two of my young neighbors sitting outside on my steps. "What's up guys?" I sat down and joined them for a few minutes before heading inside. "Nothin' much, dude. Just hanging out."

Just then I heard their phone ring and in a split second I realized why they weren't inside, one of them winced when he heard the sound and I had to bite my tongue to keep from smiling. "Aren't you going to get that?" I asked. "Nah, someone's crank calling us - been going on all weekend." Clueless.

I looked into their faces, there were bags under their eyes. My plan had worked much better than I thought. But how?

"You could just unplug your phone." I offered. "We unplugged ours," they simpered, "but it's Jason's phone too, he's been out of town since Thursday afternoon. He locked his room and we can't get to it…"

I excused myself and went inside to keep from laughing my ass off. I let the computer continue to dial them a few more hours so they wouldn't associate my return with the end of the calls. Then at around 9 I pulled the plug on my little game, checked my email and went to bed early. Things were amazingly quiet around the house that night

Don't mess with the Bastard Grad Student from Hell, (L)users.

Some people just shouldn’t procreate.

Last night Rebecca and I went out to try a new Asian restaurant here in town. The menu was good and the food excellent but our meal was practically ruined by a family sitting in the next booth.

Here’s what happened: A mom and dad are talking across the table. The mom and the little boy are in the seat that shares a back with my seat. The booths aren’t huge; the little boy is at most about two feet from his mother.

About one minute after we sat down the little boy sticks his hand through the small space between the back of the booth and the seat and taps me on the side. Some people might have found that annoying, others would have found it cute; I guess it all depends on your disposition towards kids. As for me, I’m thinking its kind of cute and he’s a playful kid but I’m here to have dinner with my wife and I really don’t want to play --so I just ignored him and I scooted over about a foot so he couldn’t reach me.

His little hand came through the back of the booth a few more times over the next five or ten minutes and then he quit. I want to stress here that he really wasn’t being annoying, he was just six or seven and bored and since his parents weren’t paying any attention to him he decided to play with the people at the next booth.

Unfortunately, he was also persistent and since I moved out of range of his hand he turned around and blew on the back of my head over the seat. Ok, that’s a little more annoying. He did it a second time and I turned around and asked him not to do it. He did it again and I asked him a second time not to do it. The fourth time I went back to his parents’ table and told him in front of them that I was serious that he needed to stop it. His mother started to lay into him and I told her that she bore some of the responsibility as well since this was all happening just two feet from her head and that the dad, if he had looked at his son for even a second should have seen that he was turned around in the seat blowing on the head of the guy in the next booth.

Well that really did it. They lectured him what a rotten kid he was for always embarrassing them that way for the next half hour, maybe forty-five minutes. My dinner, although the food was excellent, was pretty grim. The thing is the kid wasn’t doing anything that bad; it’s just that his parents weren’t paying any attention to him at all. He was bored and wanted attention.

I thought about going back and telling the parents that they were the real culprits but I knew that would have only made matters worse for the little guy. They would have blamed him for that too.

As we got up to leave they made him come and apologize to me. I wanted to tell him to run for the door, run, I’ll keep your parents from getting you. Instead I told him it was ok. “Don’t tell him it’s ok!” Squawked his mom, “he does this every time we go somewhere.” I was kneeling when I was talking to him so I stood up, and looked her square in the face, and as menacingly as I could told her “he was apologizing to me, I can accept it if I want to.” I hope I scared the shit out of her.

I guess the best I can do is to hope they don’t fuck that little boy up too much over the next ten years and that someday he’ll marry a wonderful person and have a happy life.