Jindo Chronicles: Burning Qurans, Drug Driving and Tweeting

The Original

Salam my Jindos,

Another crazy week busy with work, kept me under, but it’s a good thing the news don’t stop. First thing first, Eid Mubarak to all my Muslims out there, Bonne Fete de Korite, may your fast and your good deeds during this Holy Month be accepted. It was not easy, specially here on the East Coast with the sun setting late, it really messed with my work and home routine, but in the end, I come out feeling spiritually refreshed, just a few pounds lighter and ready to face another year or so before the next one. It will probably be Mid August 2011 so the next two years as far as Ramadan goes are going to be real tests. But as I always say, my Armada practices Ramadan, and it’s a Marathon.

Now back to what a gwaan in today’s world. It was all over the news this week you could not escape it. Pastor Jones was trying to burn the Quran on September 11th…It created an international outrage, he was denounced by everybody and in the end, tried to save face by pretending that a Florida imam who he has been talking with agreed that the Cordoba Islamic Center would be moved in return for him not holding his event. Agreement that was promptly denied by the said Imam who correctly pointed out that he has had not contact with the Center’s management and thus could not order a relocation and merely agreed to accompany the pastor to New York to meet with the Center’s founders. This morning he has been doing the talk show rounds and the more I hear about this guy, the less I want to. I think this event, and the person behind it has been severely blown out of proportion. If he wants to hold a Quran burning day, by all means let him go ahead and do it. Simple, it shows what kind of person he is.

It angers me off course that somebody would do such a hateful and ignorant act, but it is provocation, and responding to every provocation is not a way

The Copy

to carry on through life. It was heartening though to hear the worldwide condemnation of the proposed event coming from all side, and I think that as Muslims, it’s a good example to follow in creating that necessary distances between extremists within our fold, and our mainstream. In these past months of growing Islamophobia, it was a refreshing development. Let’s wish that the common sense and good measure displayed is carried in the discussion concerning the Cordoba Islamic center. Already you have the usual suspects trying to create a link between this event and the construction of the Center, as if the two issues were related, do not fall for this fallacy.

In other worldly news that came within my sphere of influence and reflection this week was TI’s arrest while drug driving: nuff said! That was disheartening. Point blank in stoopid we’re-our-own-vampires type of way. A french proverb roughly translated states that there is no worst deaf that he who does not want to listen so I won’t waste time in trying to explain or rationalize what happened, what i know is that consequences will be severe. What else stayed with me this week? Mainly, i’ve finally opened an account with Twitter (~Dramatic Music~)! Yaaaay! After years of reluctance, i decided to jump on the bandwagon and make it happen. Of course i won’t make it a personal I am taking a good dump while blasting some Wu Tang type of stream, but what I’ve come to discover is that as with everything in the social InterWeb and with every tool in general, it is only as good as how you use it. The pluses that instantly were made clear to me is that it removes a lot of layers of communications between celebrities and the public. It gives you a straight out of the horse’s mouth perspective which when the celebrity is actually the person doing the actual tweeting, gives you a more accurate take of his or her actual personality.

I was not the only one making the jump though, 50Cent did and unlike me, everybody noticed :0. This is one celebrity whose personality really comes through the tweets and he’s kept the web entertained with mainly anecdotes about his sex life (Suprised?). For the most part, what you hear on a 50cent album is what you get on the tweets. Kanye West also went off on a long tirade that made the news as well about the Taylor Swift incident. It was an interesting read, but the highlight for me came from Gizmodo, one of the sites that i haunt, where as usual, the comments are actually funnier than the story in itself. There is a passage in Kanye’s tweets where he asserts that if you googled *sshole (or JackButt as my wife would say), his picture would probably come up in the first two pages. One reader actually googled it I guess and commented something to the effect of “F You Kanye, I googled *sshole and now I am scarred for life”. That got a good laugh out of me.

Gunshot Inna Yuh Bomboclot Award Presenter

Gunshot Inna Yuh BomboClot Award of the Week: This weekly award goes to a celebrity or person who really acted a fool and deserves a (virtual) gunshot to the face.

This week’s as you might have guessed, competing for the awards were:

• TI
• Pastor Jones
• Tony Blair

And the winner is TONNNYYYY BLAAAIIRRRR, this fool made the rounds this week promoting his “memoirs” and keeps making the link between Saddam and 9/11. Mr Blair, at least Bush had the excuse not to be the sharpest knife inna di bunch, but you? Is it outta pride? So for that, Mr Blair, you win our Gunshot Inna Yuh Face awards of the week.

So this was my week in Jindo land, looking forward to hitting back the gym next week, and hopefully, the fool-motion of the world will continue full swing and I will be back to comment on it.

Until such time…