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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, April 23, 2008
WASTE NOT WANT NOT - thus spoke the Hajji Um Ali The Hajji just picked up and ate a tiny piece of bread that she’d dropped on the kitchen floor. It was well within the five-second rule* and well within the way she was brought up. The Hajji Um Ali (her nanny when she was a girl) used to tell her that you’d be picking up with your eyelashes in the after life any dropped bread that you didn’t pick up now. This only applies to bread because it is the staff of life so pumpkin-wasters (for example) won’t have to pick up pumpkins off the floor with their eyelashes in the after life. The poor Hajji (all of five years old at the time) apparently wasn’t taking any chances – she’d pick up and eat dropped bread but she’d also try to practice lifting stuff of the table with her eyelashes just in case (obviously to no avail). And to think that I thought that the pick-up-sticks game of my childhood was difficult. Picking up straws with straws is nothing compared to picking up stuff with your eyelashes! Strange – you can’t eat pigs but you can (and HAVE TO!) eat stuff that’s been picked up off the floor.
*’’A popular polite fiction regarding the eating of food that has fallen to the floor or ground…The substance of the rule is that if food falls on the ground, it may be safely eaten as long as it is picked up within 5 seconds.’’ (Wikipedia)
6:30 pm
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