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Serious satire
"Humor is a funny way of being serious"
-Thomas Edison
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Copyright© 2001-2010, Renato Obeid
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"Top blog/Renato Obeid's World/Today's pick: This rambling weblog is worth reading not so much for its satirical posts but more for its insight into the minutiae of life in Lebanon, including the etiquette of road accidents and how to hire a taxi.”
-Jane Perrone, The Guardian
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
2 AM WEDNESDAY 14TH JANUARY 2004
An international humanitarian delegation (composed of myself) is on standby in Harisa to visit the political prisoner Sandy (renatoobeidsworld passim).
I spoke to her persecutor today and, amongst other things, he told me that she was okay and that I could rest assured about that – the subtext of that being that there was no need for me to actually visit her.
I told him I wanted to actually visit her myself and rest assured that way.
He said that he'll find out where they took her within a day or two and mentioned something about a restaurant on Nahr el Kalb (Dog River*) – the ancient river and gully (some fifteen kilometers north of Beirut) whose storiated cliffs bear the inscriptions of all the invading armies who surmounted what in antiquity was a strategic barrier to occupying this land..
That cliff, where the river feeds into the Mediterranean, is the ancient equivalent of a bus stop shelter; full of graffiti - from the initial "Ramsess Two woz here" (1290BC) right thru to the final "Allies rule!" (World War One).
Historians believe that Dog River was thus named because legend has it that a fearsome dog whose bark could be heard as far away as Cyprus dwelt there.
I think that Dog River now has two dog myths – the myth of the fearsome dog and the myth that Sandy was taken there.
Sandy being taken to Dog River is as much a myth as the fearsome dog.
Tally sheet – no fearsome dog, no Sandy.
I have my doubts about whether Sandy was actually taken there or to any other specific place rather than actually just dumped which is what I suspect is what happened to her but lets hope that she is there and that this dog is as easy to find as that dog of legend would have been.
*Dog River my eye!
What's a bet that he just said the first and matching name that came into his mind when I put him on the spot by asking him where she was and telling him I wanted to visit her – i.e. "where's the dog?", "um…um…Dog River!".
This also contradicts an earlier location he had given – Sin el Fil.
2:00 am
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