Google Revolutionizes Cheating In High School Spanish Class

Holy crap. Google, please me merciful to me when you take over the world- just remember, I was an early supporter.

Today, unwilling to spend the time in an internet cafe it would take to translate an Arabic article I was interested in, I lazily ran that article through Google Translate, expecting to at least get a good chortle out of the pitiful attempt at making sense of Arabic that was to follow. Two minutes later, I began preparing myself for the human race's imminent demise. 

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday that peace talks with Israel stalled because Israel is not interested in achieving peace.

He said Assad, who was speaking at a joint news conference after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus that Israel's demand for negotiations without preconditions means that they want to "destroy" the peace process.

"What we discussed today is how to get the peace process impasse it has reached, which we believe to be caused by the main ... the absence of serious Israeli partner who really sought to achieve peace in the Middle East."

Wait... is that... legible? Wasn't it only a year ago when I would try to do something similar with a much simpler language, Spanish, and the program would pull up something that looked less like a professionally written article and more like a Facebook post sprawled on your wall by Eric Dreir at 5:00 in the morning after an especially "thirsty" Thursday?

Truthfully, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where a free-online-translation tool can translate any article in any language, as well or better than a translator, whilst completely avoiding the butchery of the English tongue. (Although on the upside, whoever bears responsibility for the prose of the Twilight books officially just ran out of excuses.) In particular, this new development puts a nail in the coffin of my plan to try to get a job in translation when I return to the States, whenever that fateful day might be. Now that I see what I'm up against, I can only concede defeat. The golden age of humanity is over; the dawn of the machines is on.

(Sorry, Jose, but that means we don't need you anymore.)

Finally, as a reference and a desperate comfort-seeking measure, I tried the same thing with the only other online translation tool I could find that would translate Arabic to English for free. The results eased my mind:

Damascus (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday that peace talks with Israel deadlocked since Israel is interested in peace. He added al-Assad, who was speaking at a joint press conference after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus that Israel's demand for negotiations without conditions mean that it wanted \ "هدم\" of the peace process. He said \ "Today we discussed how to get the peace process of the impasse in which we believe to be caused by statute... The absence of the Israeli partner serious, which seeks to achieve peace in the Middle East."

Is there anything quite like a visit from an old friend?

---

In another tidbit, which I'm not even going to pretend is even tangentially related to the above, I feel I should warn anyone who plans on ever using a Syrian treadmill: don't ever use a Syrian treadmill. Or at the very least, don't turn it on while standing on it, in the expectation that it will be like it's Western counterpart and start at 0 mph, allowing you to increase the pace at your own rate. You see, apparantly, Syrian manufacturers saw fit to save us treadmill users that time and effort by simply starting the mph meter at full blast, the instant you press that little red button. What's a few hundred treadmill-related deaths a day in the name of efficiency?

And the West thinks it has a stranglehold on ingenuity... Fools.

Calling On All Minnesotans

26-7. Three weeks before the playoffs. Uggh...

Minnesota, we have a problem. A hideously bearded one, in fact:

The bad news: if the above man remains the leader of the Minnesota Vikings into the playoffs, we're doomed to watch our favorite team's season end in the worst possible way- almost certainly to a second round loss to the Green Bay Packers.

The good news: we have the ability to do something about it.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that if you happen to spot Brad Childress, Minnesota Vikings head football coach, crossing the road whilst cruising the cities, you should plow into him like a hooker on Grand Theft Auto. I'm also not necessarily saying that were you to do such a thing you would find a lofty check in the mail from yours truly the next morning.

Just take note that I'm not not necessarily saying both of those things either.

Yes, it's true that from my isolated perch in Damascus where I've been unable to actually see any Viking games (despite the fat, Syrian, barely-English-speaking dude I saw not long ago wearing a Minnesota sweater, Minnesota sports teams aren't exactly in vogue here) I'm hardly qualified to make football judgements. I am, however, qualified to say this: Brad Childress is a soul-devouring, lollipop-stealing, fetus-eating succubus, only pretending to be an almost overwhelmingly unattractive, balding, incompetent football coach.

Believe it or not, I'm not basing that statement on the fact that I've watched this man slowly prey on the hope of Minnesotan fans for 3 years and counting now. Rather, I'm basing it on a very different experience. I never told anyone but Luke and Chris Beddor this, but the night before we left for our travels I had a dream in which I stumbled into a man in an airport- a man who apparantly knew all about my crew's plans to travel Asia over the next year. That man then went on to predict that, not only would the four of us make it all the way to China as planned, but we would make it by relying on each other. Foolishly, I believed that man.

One month later, the four of us found ourselves scattered across continents, the trip a resolute failure. Do I even need to give you the name of this this sage purveyor of predictions, the man at the center of the implosion of a trip that on paper looked like it couldn't possibly fail?

I doubt you need it, but here's a hint: he's also the man who drafted Tarvaris Jackson. And his name is Brad.

Of course the idea that Brad Childress cursed our trip is ridiculous and I fully expect you to want to mock me for saying so. But before you do, I implore you to take a look at these two pictures I took in Turkey, only weeks after Brad Childress infested that dream and made that fatal prediction:

This first picture I already posted, with the caption, "no way that black sheep could be anything but the physical manifestation of pure evil ". I stand by that statement, though I'll admit that this picture alone isn't enough to prove that we were cursed. It's definitely a little creepy though, to see an obvious minion of satan leading an army of unknowing followers to, no doubt, destroy some small Turkish village and feast on the blood of every women or child in it's path. A little too reminiscent of Brad Childress' tyrannic rule as the leader of a team of violent, testesterone-driven, probably steroid-consuming giants if you ask me.

And then there's this shot I took in Istanbul, where things go beyond mere creepy. I swear that when I took this picture, I was just snapping a shot of a single cat frolicking on a dumpster. There was no other cat in the frame. I repeat: there was no other cat in the frame, let alone not one that existed only in shadow form and with the freakiest eyes I've ever seen. If ever there were unnassailable evidence that evil is afoot around us, besides Brad Childress apparant ability to convince otherwise intelligent, discerning people, like Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, that he deserves to get paid millions of dollars to make Minnesotans want to throw themselves off of small-to-medium sized buildings, than this picture is it.

Now, of course you can argue that, while some evil force might have indeed derailed our plans and in the process sunk the trip of a lifetime, there's no reason that we should attribute that evil to a Minnesota football coach and his messed up facial hair. But do you really want to take that risk? Just remember, everytime a child sheds a tear, Brad Childress' beard grows a little bit thicker, and everytime a bank collapses or a nation is invaded or Tiger Woods bangs another stripper, Brad Childress grows a little bit closer to his dream of seeing the world collapse into complete anarchy.


So with that in mind, let's return to the scenario we started with: next time you're driving down the road and suddenly see this dude...

...ambling through your headlights, all I'm suggesting is that you take a second to think about it, collect yourself, and do what you gotta do. For the dignity of the great state of Minnesota, if nothing else.

Ask yourself, WWJD?

Answer: He would run over Brad Childress.

(Or at least wrestle him to the ground and shave that unholy thing he calls a beard.)

Luke's Apologia... and Mine

Yesterday, Luke's blog finally saw an update, one that I've been bugging him about for two months now: his mia culpa (in a way) for his surprise return to the states. Go ahead and read his post now, because it both informs and reinforces everything I'm about to say. That and it's a pretty rock-solid piece of insight in it's own right.

Read it? Good. Moving on then...

I draw attention to Luke's post on my blog, not only because it ties up the final loose end of our crew's four way split months ago, but also for another important reason: as I read this paragraph in particular... 

Well, since coming home I've realized why I left. After graduation, the crossroad of crossroads in one's life, I found myself with a distinct need for some direction in my life. I hadn't taken the last two years of my life seriously, traveling Europe and planning our next trip, so that by the time I was actually on the trip, I was burnt out. I realized that I had lost all sense of purpose. I know that travel can be a justifiable purpose, but for this trip, it was not for me. Upon coming home, I begin studying intensely for the LSAT and am in the process of applications.

...I couldn't help but think, I should have written that.

Even back when I still wanted to castrate Luke (a fairly harsh reaction, admittedly), I had to admit that there were a lot of parallels between Luke's decision to fly home and my own to settle down, however long, in Damascus. Even my first E-mail to Beddor after making up my mind began with a warning that I was about to pull a Luke on him. On the other hand, I figured our motives in leaving the homeboys behind were probably far different: in spirit, I told myself, my decision to stay in Syria meshed perfectly with the greater goals of the trip- to experience the world from an entirely different perspective, to meet a whole lot of fascinating people, and to learn quite a bit about life along the way. Luke was just running away.

Well, I guess I owe Luke an apology, though it would go against my very DNA as a male to actually give it. In the end, his reasoning makes perfect sense and meshes almost eerily well with my own for our respective abandonments. In fact, replace LSAT with Arabic, home with Syria, and 2 years with as long as I can remember, in the paragraph above and you have nearly my exact reasons for staying in Syria at the expense of everything else.

As Luke says, traveling isn't exhausting for all the reasons that people think that it should be exhausting; the constant uprooting from one location only to begin anew somewhere else, the burden of lugging one's home- stuffed neatly into a single backpack- across countries and continents, the vulnerability that comes with placing yourself in unknown situation after unknown situation on a near daily basis, the occassional flirtation with genuine danger, and, as Luke says, even the squatter and the many hours spent in mediation between it and a furious bladder, are all part of the excitement and the novelty and the richness of experience that lead us to travel in the first place. They definitely aren't what breaks you; at least not in my case and apparantly not in Luke's either.

Instead, it's the late nights and even later mornings; it's the one shot of raki too many; it's the confused look on the little old man in traditional Kurdish clothing's face as you ask him to pose so you can take his picture and commemorate such a novelty; it's the $2 haircut that you obstinately haggle down to $1.25, and then pat yourself on the back when you decide, as a symbol of Western generosity, to pay the original price anyways; it's the $10 tourist T-shirt that you purchase in a moment of weakness, only to find yourself wearing it in a country two weeks later where that $10 could have fed a family for a week; it's the conversation with an Italian girl who moved to Kenya on her own when she was 17 to do what little she could to change things; it's the Lonely Planet you cradle in your hand and thumb through as she tells you this.

(Disclaimer: I'm starting to really, really hate Lonely Planet.)

Meanwhile, it's the cold breath of the past on the back of your neck, as you realize the kind of person you could have been over the years, and weren't, and the contributions you could have made, and didn't. And it's the moment when you look into the mirror, ready for eyes to burn back at you defiantly and scars and creases and folds to attest to a life lived for something... and all you see is a reflection.

For me, the most telling moment was when I watched a Syrian kid, maybe twelve years old, tumble two-thirds of the way down the side of the massive mound propping up Aleppo's citadel, only to lay limp like a fish that's been out of water a moment too long, and... I instinctively pulled out my camera and started snapping pictures.

So while I can't speak for Luke, I do find myself nodding my head when he says that it wasn't hardships of the road that wore him down. For me, it was the guilt. Travel is an education that money can't buy, but it's also an indulgence. Some people, of course, have unquestionably earned the right to indulge themselves a little.

I just don't count myself among their number just yet.

Yassir, the (Probably) Rapist Kurd

Everyday, a little, old 5-foot Kurdish man walks up and down Old Damascus' main artery, Straight Street, in search of tourist blood. Upon sight of a white face, he hones onto his target and goes into a salesman-like spiel, desperately attempting to get them to come back to his place so he can, ostensibly, "play them some music". Why this man is so desperate for tourists to come back to his place so he can "play them some music", no one knows. They only know that the locals advise not to take him up on his strange offer. And that his Brad-Childress-like-mustache makes him look like a rapist.

For most people, that's where the curiosity ends. But not me. Thus, today, I had the distinct pleasure of spending an hour with the man my roommate and I had come to affectionately know as "Yassir, the rapist Kurd".

In the past month, I've been greeted by Yassir about ten times. Each time, his greeting was the same: "Hello, where are you from?" Because I quickly realized that Yassir had the memory of a drunken 85 year old and seemed to be incapable of remembering that we had this conversation about twice a week, my nationality changed everytime. What didn't change was my answer to his proposition.

No, I'd prefer to not get anally violated today, thanks. Though I worded it differently.

Finally today, knowing that my time in Syria is waning and having been slowly and systematically warn down by Yassir, Andy from The Office style, I took the persistent little man up on his offer. What can I say? I kinda did want to hear some Kurdish music. And more importantly, I wanted to see firsthand what kind of villainy was lurking behind that stache'.

And oh yeah, did I mention that Yassir is 5 feet tall? That may have played into my willingness to go along too.

After becoming reacquainted for the 11th time, we eventually got to Yassir's pad, a tiny little hole in the wall. I would have felt sorry for him, if I hadn't been living in an even tinier hole in the wall for the last few months. And then, Yassir pulled out his instrument.

(Cue misleading dramatic pause...)

(Hold on, I want to draw this out a little bit longer...)

(Okay, that's good...)

Yassir's instrument, fortunately, was a small, handmade Kurdish guitar-like contraption with six strings. He called it a bizzuka. I pointed out to him that, in Arabic, bizzuka translates as your boobs, a little nugget of wisdom taught me by my sometimes Arabic teacher (who by the way hasn't been seen in weeks and could very well be dead). Yassir, and his mustache, stared at me vacantly. Apparantly, I thought, Kurdish rapists don't exactly have the best sense of humor.

For the next 30 minutes, he and I jammed out on the bizzuka and two other instruments, an old Arabic flute-thingy and a one-stringed Arabic violin-majig that was called, if I remember correctly, an urab. They weren't exactly the most complex, technically difficult instruments to play- even when he played the six-stringed bizzuka, he only moved his left hand on one string the entire time, leaving the rest open- but the music coming out of them definitely had it's own appeal. I would compare music created with traditional Arabic and Kurdish instruments to movies shot in grainy old-fashioned black and white; yeah, the quality is infinitely worse than what you can get out of more typically modern instrumentation, but the end result very capably conjures a particular time and place. In the right hands, that effect alone can produce something powerful.

(Admittedly, those hands weren't my own; when I attempted to play the one-stringer, it sounded like a combination between nails on a chalk board and the sound of something slowly and painfully dying.)

Finally, he pulled out two cups of chai, something I had been waiting for him to do. I grew apprehensive; if ever there were a tried-and-true technique that could work for a 5-foot rapist, it would be the "slip a lil' sumthin'-sumthin' in the chai, wait two minutes, then go to town"; the classic of classics. I debated switching cups with him as he turned his back, but ultimately decided instead that if I felt even a little bit dizzy, I would grab his little Kurd-guitar and use it to go "tee-ball" on his face.

A couple minutes later, happily, I was still standing, with a renewed trust in little, old Kurdish men with suspicious motives and even more suspicious facial hair. I told Yassir I had to go, offering him a dollar with the explanation "Here, for the chai". Meanwhile, in my head I thought "Here, for not date-raping me."

But perhaps I had changed my mind about Yassir too soon. As I walked out the door, he called after me, requesting that I bring him my "young female European friends". I asked him if "old, fat, balding non-European dudes" would do. I can't say he seemed particularly interested.

The lesson, as always: the rapist stache' never lies.

"Habeeeeeeeebiiiiiiiiii!"

Everyday I become more and more impressed with the Islamic community as a whole. That said, I have to admit that two of the greatest travesties of this century and the last fall squarely at the feet of señor Muhammad and the religion he founded:

Modern Islamic extremist terrorism and traditional Islamic vocal warbling.

If you don't what I'm talking about when I say Islamic vocal warbling, just spend a single day anywhere in the Middle East and you will. Oh, you will.

For those of you who have, sing it with me:

"Allaa-aa-aaa-aaa-aaah akbaaa-aa-aaa-aaaaaaaaaar..."

To be honest, I'm not sure which of the two above Qu'ran-inspired evils is worst. Granted, Islamic terrorism leads to kidnapping and torturing of innocents, which is no doubt a horrible, horrible, horrible thing; it's just that the torture being inflicted on my ears by The Warble might be worse. Honestly, given the choice between curing cancer and ridding the world of the Arabic warble, I'd probably cure cancer- but it'd be close.

So with that in mind, I fully expected that 112% of Arabic music would be irredeemable poop.  What I didn't expect was that I would became an Arabic pop fiend.

I don't really know how it happened. At first I couldn't stand the stuff- it was like someone had taken Akon, taught him The Warble, and then forced him to sign a legal contract stating that if he were ever to go three words without wailing the word "Habee-eee-eee-bii-iiiii!" (my love), he would be killed on sight.

But happen it did, largely because I study in a cafe nearly every day where the employees have great taste in music and are happy to let me know the artists behind the captivating tunes being played (and by happy to let me know, I mean that they visibly roll their eyes everytime I approach them- oh well, the results are the same). In particular, I've found myself lovin' Egyptian-born crooner extraordinaire Tamar Hosni (طمر حسني)'s new CD, featuring a song or two where I'd go so far as to say he manages to out-Legend John Legend himself, making the latter look in comparison likeJustin Timberlake- that is to say, like a pre-pubescent girl pretending to be a popstar.

And then there's a few other songs, where Tamer Hosni sounds a lot more like the Juanes of the Mid East. But hey, I'll take it; afterall, finding endurable Warble-free music in Syria is like finding an oasis in, well, Syria.

If nothing else, the dude's better at looking cool on CD covers than, say, this guy:

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, this disk did not turn out to be the prize of my Middle Eastern collection.

The Warble isn't the only thing afflicting Arabic culture, however. Possibly even worse, if you can imagine such a thing, is the fact that this adorable lil' feller here...

...is the star of every single Egyptian comedy movie ever made. I'd tell you that his movies are terrible, but after posting the above picture I feel like that would probably be redundant. He's like the Shia-LaBeauf-meets-Nickelback-meets-Adam-Sandler of the Arabic world; only uglier.

Choice cuts off Hosni's new CD are forthcoming. It's okay to druel.

5 Days In Iraq and 67 in Syria Later...

...and ya boy back with a fresh blog post.

First of all, let me apologize for that last sentance; I blame black people. Secondly, let me apologize for that last sentance; I actually love black people. Thirdly, and most importantly, let me see if I can't come up with an adequate explanation for why it took me over 2 months to update this blog with an actual original post (the kind that doesn't just rot on my iPod for months before I get around to finishing and putting it up):

Umm... I'm lazy and crapping out solid blog posts is hard work?

So what's new? Well, for one thing, it appears that the trip, in some mutilated form at least, is back on. A few days ago I found out that Alex has randomly- and shockingly I might add- surfaced in Cambodia, with Beddor trailing shortly behind. I'm probably not gonna get a chance to meet up with him before he heads back home, but I'm inspired by his dedication all the same. And even more so by his mustache:

I shall never again doubt that 'stache.

Meanwhile, I've been working my ass off attempting to scale the mount everest* of tough languages- Arabic. And man, let me tell you, does it suck. Not long ago I was flipping through TV channels at a hotel when I stumbled across a French news broadcast and mistook a few of the news headings at the bottom of the screen for English. Then I realized that I could be learning that language instead of Arabic. Then I fired the remote, which is lucky I throw like a girl, across the room.

(*No offense, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. I'm sure you all suck too.)

I've also made the mistake of attempting to read the Koran in Arabic multiple times. Let me put it this way- if I had been forced to sacrifice a virgin to Allah every time I completely butchered the meaning of a Koran verse, Syria would be a land inhabited only by wives and whores by now.

But- and this is one gigantic butt- it's also been unbelivably rewarding- and enlightening- to take on a behemoth of a task and to give it everything I've got. I can honestly say that I've spent more hours studying some weeks here in Damascus than I did some whole semesters at Marquette. Which is, admittedly, incredibly, incredibly sad.

And then there are the fleeting moments where all that sweat and toil pays off, even if the peaks that I dream of reaching are still months, even years, away. Three weeks ago I bought an Arabic edition of Newsweek and attempted to read an article by Fareed Zakaria, translated into Arabic. I say attempted, because I would have placed my comprehension of the article somewhere between 1 and 3%.

Impressive, I know; it's like I was born speaking Arabic.

I finally revisited that article a few days ago, however, and somewhere in inbetween that first attempted reading and this latest, I apparantly learned a lot- I knew about 75% of the words in the article; I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that that's not bad after a month and a half of study.

The only way I can think of to describe the utter elation I felt upon reaching the end of that article is to say that it must have been a lot like what the guy dancing in this music video with Shakira felt when he found out that he was the guy who got to dance in that music video with Shakira.

Of course, immediately afterwards, I turned the page to a different article and felt like I was staring at a brick wall. But I'll take "hit and miss" over "miss, miss, and more miss" any day of the week.

Oh yeah, and I can finally read the first two words on the book cover I posted in my first Iraq post!

The first is "Saddam". The second (I'm pretty sure) is "biography"*. Exhilirating stuff.

*EDIT: Nope, it's "life".