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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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Thursday, May 19, 2005
RAGE WITHOUT ALCOHOL* Seventeen protestors were killed as thousand of Afghans rioted earlier this week over Newsweek magazine reports (since retracted**) that interrogators at America’s Gauntanamo Bay prison had desecrated the Koran. When you’re not allowed to drink alcohol and thus can’t get drunk, fights aren’t just going to create themselves as they would if you were drunk (“is you looking at me pint!”) – you have to work on them, you have to nurture them and create them!(is you looking at me prophet!). Imagine what they’d be like if they did drink! I condemn any desecration of any religious text (or any text for that matter - educated people should hold all books "sacred") but how is being killed by your own security forces going to avenge something that happened 12974.0106 kilometers away (the distance between Jalalabad, the center of the riots, and Gauntanamo)?
*A program of alcohol-free rock concerts and other such entertainment organized by the police in Australia for young people ("rage" in colloquial Australian means "a lively party" - OED). **Doesn't "Newsweak" have fact checkers? Don't Afghan rioters have fact checkers?
WHO LET THE FROGS OUT? French people should not be allowed to drink alcohol – they’re the only race I know of who don’t need alcohol to act like dickheads. Alcohol just makes it worse. Once at the pub there were only two groups left in the early hours of the morning: a bunch of French teachers from a technical institute at one table and the group of Brits that I was with at another table. One of the inebriated Frenchmen decided to moon us – “hey English pipull (people), kiss my ass English pipull” he crooned in a singsong tone. That the owner of the pub was also amongst our number did not deter him. Not being "English pipull”, I couldn’t take up his kind offer. Mark twain observed that “a German joke is no laughing matter’’. I agree but would expand that to any Continental European joke. I don’t get it.
4:56 am
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