Keeping Appointments

In Surah Al-Maidah, Allah reminds us:يَا أَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ آمَنُواْ أَوْفُواْ بِٱلْعُقُودِ "O you who believe! Fulfill your Promises!" [5:1]In Surah Al-Maryam, Allah praises Prophet Ismail,َ إِنَّهُ كَانَ صَادِقَ ٱلْوَعْدِ وَكَانَ رَسُولاً نَّبِيّا "He was true to his promise, He was a Messenger and a Prophet." [19:54] By being punctual, you will be responding to the call of Allah in Surah

Now We Are Two

Tomorrow is the second birthday of Adventures In Dubai. I'd almost forgotten about it. About this time last year I posted about how I was coming up to 15,000 hits (click here). A year later I'm coming up to 70,000.

Thank you all for reading this drivel, and for all of your mind-expanding comments!

MamaDuck Is Missing!

Blogger seem to have misplaced BetterArf's blog.

So here's a decoy: http://patito-secreto.blogspot.com

Summer Is Over

Summer isn't really over just yet, it's still dang hot. But today was Back To School Day for BetterArf and many other teachers, and the kids start back next Sunday.

And we've just had our first official Friday/Saturday weekend (as has Bahrain). Now if we can just get the idea into the heads of several thousand companies that a two-day weekend is a splendid idea, and that those two days should be Friday and Saturday, we might just see some progress.

Weekends have always been a total mess in the Arabian Gulf. My very first job in the region involved a five-and-a-half day week: the weekend for me was Thursday afternoon and all day Friday. But some multinational companies took Friday and Saturday. About five or six years ago the UAE Government announced that it was reducing the working week for their employees to five days, but to the astonishment of many (especially Westerners) they settled on Thursday and Friday. Now they have come to their senses but they have not made it compulsory for the private sector.

The working day is also a mess - some companies will do a split-shift that can involve their employees doing their commute home twice a day, while more enlightened companies opt for the 'let's get it over with in one hit' approach. Maybe this spreads out the traffic a bit, but those split shifts certainly create an awful lot of unnecessary travel.

None of this makes much difference to me of course - I just work all the time anyway.

Peak of Eloquence

Ali blogs from England and is originally from West Baghdad.

He imparts wisdom through religion...

I came across this account of a saying by the prophet ‘Isa (Jesus) [a] : ‘I saw a stone on which was written, “Turn me over”, so I turned it over. Written on the other side was “Whoever does not act by what he knows will be doomed by seeking what he does not know, and his own knowledge will be turned against him.” '

aramaic carpenter reel

The aim of this blog is about as cryptic as the title. As is Nayj's slogan - POOSHEW B SHLAMMA. What does that mean?? The blog appears to be a collection of links of various acts of activisms, but between the lines are some words of wisdom...

The point, however, is not to just "cut school" so we can "march in a few rallies." We should be marching with some purpose and not just as passive participants who might take some time off of our busy schedule to criticize our government. We need to be engaged in serious work to end this war and to oppose the actions of the Bush administration.

Nayj is, to quote her, "a detroit born Iraqi. my parents and grandparents were born in Telkaif or Telkappa."

Pooshew b shlamma!

What free word order is really all about

Occasionally, I hear Japanese described as free word order because it allows argument scrambling. Then I think of Latin, and go "Hah!" The other day I happened to come across a bit of Virgil that nicely illustrates Latin's horrifying (at least to readers) ability to not only scramble the relative order of noun phrases, but break them up into little bits and scatter them about like confetti:

ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

Which might be approximated as:

last Cumaean's comes already song's season;
great from whole centuries' is-born cycle.

but means:
Already the Cumaean [oracle]'s song's last season comes;
The great cycle of the centuries is born anew ("from whole").

For Chomskyan syntacticians, I suppose you'd have to look at it as a kind of quantifer floating-like phenomenon gone mad. Case marking and agreement do help disambiguate it a bit, but still...

This piece of verse, incidentally, is apparently where the slogan on the US dollar, "Novus Ordo Seclorum" (New Order of the Centuries - aka New World Order:), comes from, though I don't see "Novus" in there. Seeing as medieval Christians used to think this poem predicted the coming of the Messiah, and here it's being used rather blatantly to refer to the founding of the US, this is a pretty amazing piece of boasting if you think about it; I guess the "city on a hill" conception of America has been popular for a long time...