March 30, 2008

Up, Up and Away...


I haven't had much time to blog this past week due to work and an outside project I've been doing at home. Plus, Milady and I went to the beach with her family for a few hours yesterday where I got a bunch of pictures of guys doing some kitesurfing and turned somewhat red from a mild sunburn.

This particular picture was taken two weeks ago, when Milady and I were driving to the National Museum of Singapore. The DHL Balloon is located on Rochor Road, next to the New 7th Storey Hotel, where I lived for three months or so when I moved back to Singapore just before our marriage. I haven't been on this balloon ride just yet (and don't really plan to get aboard; I'd rather check out the Singapore Flyer), but I do go by this balloon all the time as it's on my way to work. If you look closely, you'll see at least nine people on board the gondola and possibly a tenth person.

Update: When Milady and I drove by the DHL Balloon this morning (April 1st), we noticed that the yellow color of the balloon was a lot brighter, so they've either given the balloon a good cleaning (much needed as you can see from the picture) or they've replaced the balloon altogether with a new one. Either way, the balloon looks much nicer now than it has in recent weeks.

March 29, 2008

Leon on Geert Wilders' "Fitna"

Leon in Amsterdam cuts Geert Wilders down to size over Fitna (which, by all reviews I've read so far, rates between "quite boring" and "a yawn"). Be sure to read the remainder of the post; it's fairly short.

Geert Wilders has managed to do what few people thought would be possible: to make himself look even more ridiculous.

I do wonder though, if the targeted community's reaction was something like 'lame', what would the few (yet very vocal) supporters of Geert Wilders feel?
Disappointed?
Silly?
Irrelevant?

March 21, 2008

I am a Muslim!

Alhamdulillah! This video is actually one of six nominee videos for the "Inspirational" category for Youtube's 2007 Video Awards. Unfortunately, it didn't win; still, good job, guys!

March 19, 2008

Surrounding David


So Milady and I entered the National Museum of Singapore on Sunday afternoon and was greeted by the above colossus. A fiberglass replica of Michelangelo's "David," except that this one is covered in cloth, the creation of Indonesian artist Titarubi.

Inspired by one of the most famous Western art icons, this fiberglass statue of David towers at 8.5 meters high. It has been placed in the center of the Museum's historical rotunda, mimicking the typical European piazza and its anchor-statue. Another layer of textile ornament in the form of handmade brocade, usually produced for the kebaya or traditional Indonesian women's blouse, covers the whole surface of the statue, thus obliterating the centrality of the David figure or image.

The work investigates various dialectical relations between the imaginary perfect circular space of the Museum's rotunda and the sculptural object through the figure of David - a dialectic of the autonomous phallic object and the interior womb-space. And the emerging object and the "un-seen" context, of the figural and spatial context of European import and a craft associated with Asian women (i.e., textile making), of the modern figurative art and the other ornament/craft. The artist also considers Freudian phallic fixation and imagines a reaction in an alienated economy of desire where male pleasure is paramount.

Born in 1968 in Bandung, Titarubi graduated from Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Faculty of Art and Design in ceramic studio (Fine Art). She has exhibited extensively in major events such as the CP International Biennale 2005 (Jakarta), Singapore Biennale 2006, and has held several solo shows.

March 18, 2008

Self Portraits (Sort Of)


Milady and I visited the National Museum of Singapore on Sunday, which was the last day of the "Greek Masterpieces from the Louvre" exhibit. That, of course, was great and because the Museum allows photographers to take pictures inside (without flash), I took well over 300 pictures that day (filled up my SD chip). Before we actually got to the exhibit, though, there's this huge black-and-white TV display that will show intermittent pictures of whatever happens to be underneath the TV camera at the time. The above photo is of yours truly (taking the photo) and Milady (wearing a white shirt and tudung, which is why her upper-half is somewhat difficult to see). And the bottom photo is of her trying to goof off behind my back although, obviously, I knew she was doing it at the time.


Insha'allah, I'll have more photos from our Museum trip up later.

Lisa Lynnette Clark Gonzalez Speaks

Two days ago, I received a comment on my blog from "lisa," who claims to be Lisa Lynnette Clark Gonzalez. I don't have any reason to believe nor disbelieve her but I thought that, in the interest of fairness, I would republish her comment as its own blog post:

I am Lisa Lynnette "Clark" Gonzalez. I want to correct a few things. Adrian and I were married on 11/08/05. We were arrested on 11/09/05. I was released on bond on 11/18/05. He was released on Thanksgiving Eve 2005 to his aunt Pat who later betrayed him. Adrian escaped from the state group home on 01/27/06. The group home assistant (Mr. Lowry) gave him a 15 minute head start before calling authorities. I did not help Adrian escape. I begged him not to run because I knew he would make me a "sitting duck" with the authorities. I did not send any money through the mail. I have never sent money through the mail. The cellphone was in the name of Kareem Jackson or Demetrius Sanders. Douglas County lied and said the phone was in my name. The people in Ohio were quite aware of who Adrian was as were all of the people involved in his escape (8 people). I was the only one out of 8 charged, and I intentionally had less to do with it than anyone. We were both arrested on 02/08/06, not 02/01/06. On 02/11/06 at 03:05 p.m., Skye Cobain Gonzalez was born, not Saturday night. It was the longest and hardest labor of all of my four children. It was a VERY LONG AND EXCRUTIATINGLY PAINFUL labor and delivery. Also, my Lynnette is spelled with two n's, not one. My name is legally Lisa Lynnette Gonzalez, not clark. Thank you.

Two brief comments to Lisa: First, I've changed the spelling of your middle name, Lynnette, in all previous blog posts of mine to have the two n's, with the exception of those sections that are quotations from other sources. Second, I'll continue to use your "Clark" surname in all of the five previous blog posts, as I have here, because this is how people know you and search for your story. However, as I hope you've noted, I added the Gonzalez surname to the above title.

Posts of mine on Lisa Lynnette Clark:
  • Lisa Lynnette Clark Gonzalez Speaks
  • Lisa Lynnette Clark to be Released from prison
  • What Ever Happened To... Lisa Lynnette Clark
  • Lisa Lynnette Clark Timeline
  • Lisa Lynnette Clark gives Birth
  • Desperate American Women?
  • What's Needed to Minimize Islamic Extremism?

    A couple weeks ago, I was asked the following question on another blog:

    Do you feel a reformation of Islam that tempered the more extreme versions of that faith would be a good thing or not?

    And I wrote back:

    Let's put it this way: I don't think Islam needs any reformation. None. Islam is perfect; Muslims are not.

    What needs to be done? More education, more jobs, more political transparency, more government freedoms, more fair elections (and not having election results overturned because people in Country B didn't like how the election in Country A turned out), more social justice, less torture, less pain and suffering, less occupation of foreign lands, less meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries, less murder. The issue isn't religion; the issue is people, politics, war, poverty, social injustice.

    March 15, 2008

    Crude Oil Prices, Dollars vs. Euros: Is There a Difference?

    I had heard that there was an argument over the price of crude oil: Was the price of crude oil going up due to the fall of the US Dollar (meaning, the price of oil was remaining stable in other currencies) or was the price of crude oil prices just going up, regardless of the currency?

    I did a quick-and-dirty analysis and found that the answer is a little bit of both. For my analysis, spot oil prices came from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistics division for the U.S. Dept. of Energy; historical exchange rate data I got from Exchange-Rates.org. From there it was a simple matter of taking the EIA data and converting it from U.S. Dollars into Euros. To make matters simpler, I have used data from a very limited length of time, from January 1 through March 11, 2008, a little over two months.

    As you can see in the two graphs below (both of which I created on Excel), the spot prices for both West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent Oil in US Dollars and Euros are very tightly bound from January 1st through February 26th (point 38 on both graphs). Up through this point, the correlation coefficient is 0.986 and 0.982, respectively. (A correlation coefficient of 1 means a perfect positive correlation; this is an extremely strong correlation we're talking here.) Then on February 27th, there's a break between the two currencies. The price of oil in Dollars goes down slightly, but the price of oil in Euros goes down much more (for both WTI and Brent). Even though the correlation coefficients get even tighter during this period (February 27 through March 11) - 0.994 and 0.992, respectively - you can see there's an obvious gap between the spot prices for both markets in the two currencies. The price of WTI oil in Dollars has grown by 9.12% since January 1, whereas it's only grown by 4.92% in Euros. (For Brent Oil, the growth rates are 10.1% and 5.8% in Dollars and Euros, respectively.) But this difference only really started back on February 27th.

    West Texas Intermediate Spot Prices

    Brent Oil Spot Prices

    So, now that I've gone all technical on ya, how can I explain this in simpler terms? It's as if two ice skaters were skating together very tightly. From January 1st through February 26th, they're dancing more or less cheek-to-cheek every day. Then on February 27th, the two skaters decide to let go of each other. They're both doing the same moves (even better than before), but now they're moving further and further apart. In that regard, the answer is both: crude oil prices are moving up and it doesn't really matter what currency the price is in. However, that one day, February 27th, the change in the exchange rates has caused the price of crude oil in Dollars to go up by about twice the amount in Euros.

    Update: Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

    Trainspotting - The Filthiest Toilet in Scotland

    For some reason, a week or so ago, I got into a discussion that involved the movie Trainspotting (I'm not sure how; don't ask). Anyway, the people whom I had this conversation with hadn't seen the movie yet and, thus, were not familiar with "the filthiest toilet in Scotland"). This clip, then, is for them. (Note: Profanity.)

    March 13, 2008

    Chris Hedges on Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and Islam

    I came across an interview tonight with Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and author of the recently published book, I Don't Believe in Atheists. Chris made two points that I thought were worth repeating:

    You say at one point in the book that the New Atheists, "like Christian fundamentalists, are stunted products of a self-satisfied, materialistic middle class." But I wonder what you would say to someone like Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, a victim of genital cutting who fled her faith-based homeland for the secular West, when she says that the secularism of Western society is better than the religiosity of her native Somalia?

    It was better, for her.

    She doesn't qualify that. She says it's better.

    Well, she's speaking out of her personal experience, and it was better for her. I mean, look, I covered conflicts in Africa, in the Middle East, and in Central America, where Western society rained nothing but death and destruction on tens of thousands of people, which is of course what we're doing in Iraq. So, is Western society -- American society -- better for Iraqis? And I think part of the problem is people who create a morality based on their own experience, which is what of course the New Atheists and the Christian fundamentalists have done.

    Chris makes an excellent point here. One of the biggest problems with Islamophobes is that they rely heavily upon the hasty generalization (the fallacy of the insufficient sample, leaping to a conclusion, what have you). "If Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, who hates Islam, says that Islam must be such-and-such, then it must be true." They base their "morality," such as it is, upon the sandy soil of one person's experience.

    I want to go back to what you see as the ultimate threat of the New Atheists and the Christian right. You voice concern in the book that these two groups of fundamentalists are going to gang up, "to call for a horrific bloodletting and apocalyptic acts of terror..."

    It's a possibility. I mean, I covered al-Qaida for the New York Times. There wasn't an intelligence chief who I interviewed who didn't talk about another catastrophic attack on American soil as inevitable. They never used the word "if." They just used the word "when," and if this kind of rhetoric, which is racist, is allowed to infect the civil discourse -- whether it comes from the Christian right or the New Atheists -- toward Muslims, who are one-fifth of the world population, most of whom are not Arabs, then what I worry about is that in a moment of collective humiliation and fear, these two strands come together and call for an assault on Muslims, both outside our gates and on the 6 million Muslims who live within our borders. And that frightens me, that demonization of a people -- turning human beings into abstractions, so that they're not human anymore. They don't have hopes, dreams, aspirations, pains, sufferings. They represent an unmitigated evil that must be vanquished. That's very scary, and that is at the bedrock of the ideology of the New Atheists as it is with the Christian fundamentalists.

    All I can ask my fellow Muslims is, "Are you not surprised?"

    Six Pieces of Advice Meme, For Boys

    Last month, I was asked by Aaminah (in one of the comments on Izzy Mo's blog) to do the "Six Pieces of Advice" meme, but for boys. I've been rather busy the past few weeks (the end of the current school term finished yesterday), but I hadn't forgotten about doing it. Now, as I've thought through this meme, I came to the conclusion that all of my advice applies not only to boys but to girls as well, so listen up, kids, Uncle JDsg has somethin' to say to you:

    The Rules:
    1. Post these rules before presenting your list.
    2. List 6 actions or achievements you think every person (or in this case, young women/girls) should accomplish before turning 18.
    3. At the end of your blog, choose 6 people to get tagged and list their names.
    4. People who are tagged write their own blog entry with their 6 suggestions.
    5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged.

    Number 1: Learn to touch type. Doesn't sound like much, but it's one of the best pieces of advice I can give any teenager, boy or girl. When you get to college and you've got a dozen or so reports to write each semester, ranging anywhere between two and thirty pages long, you're gonna wish you had taken that typing course your high school offered when you had the chance. "Hunt and peck" takes for freakin' ever, so learn the language of the fingers while you have the chance. And if you have the opportunity to take a longer typing class (my high school offered both a half-year and full-year course), take the class over the full year. Not being the most nimble of fingers at the time, it took me about 3/4 of the school year to get the hang of touch typing. If I had taken the half-year course, I might never have gotten the brain-finger coordination that's needed. One other thing: boys, remember, typing class is where all the girls are! ;) No kidding. In my class there were four boys, including me, and about 26 girls. (A guy I knew when I was a teenager used the same logic when registering for a home ec class, but that's a different story.)

    Number 2: Become fluent in a second language. Considering the number of times I've written on this topic on my blog, it should come as no surprise that I'd bring it up again. But seriously, don't just think, "I'll never leave the U.S." or "I'll never have the chance to use another language." This is not true. Especially if you're an American teenager living in certain states, like California, Arizona, New Mexico or Florida, a second language like Spanish is going to be immensely helpful for you to get a job or expand your career horizons. (American Express in Phoenix was always advertising for Portuguese speakers who could work with their Brazilian offices and customers.) A second language (and even a third) is absolutely vital if you have any interest in living or working overseas. (And, of course, if you're a young Muslim boy or girl, one of those languages should be Arabic.)

    Number 3: Start becoming an expert in three subjects. This is something I picked up from Tom Friedman's book, The World is Flat. I once read that the half-life of a college education is five years. Meaning, in five years, half of what you learned at school will become irrelevant, and in ten years 75% of what you learned will be irrelevant, and so on. The sad fact of the matter is that it's true. If you have any desire for a decent-paying job, you need to accept that you've got to keep learning for the rest of your life. You may not necessarily have to go back to school, but you'll have to learn in one way or another. (I, personally, will buy and read through college textbooks on subjects that I think I should know or should refresh myself on.) Friedman's point was that you always need to keep rotating your areas of expertise. You become an expert in one topic; as that topic starts to fade in terms of importance, you start becoming an expert in a second topic. And then you begin learning about a third topic, one that you think may become important for the future. And then you keep on adding and dropping topics to learn about as you progress through your career. The topic may not necessarily be a full-blown subject like "psychology," but can be something as small as a specific job skill (e.g., knowing how to use a computer program). But you continue to learn new things over your lifetime that will help keep your career and job skills relevant.

    Number 4: Join a band or a chorus. I'd have included this one anyway, coming from a musical family as I do, but another interesting point in Friedman's "The World is Flat" is that people who belong (or belonged) to musical organizations, such as bands, drum corps, choruses, etc., are more rounded individuals and are better able to interact with other people. Friedman discusses how Georgia Tech's retention and graduation rates improved dramatically when the university began emphasizing the admission of musically-gifted students. (Remember, Georgia Tech is known as an engineering university!) So, if you don't sing or play an instrument yet, by all means do so. (Just don't make a fool of yourself auditioning for American Idol. ;) )

    Number 5: Start learning about personal finances and how the money and capital markets work. The simple fact of the matter is, you're going to have to learn this anyway. Earning and spending money is the easy part; trying to save your money and invest it wisely is much more difficult. Start with the basics: learning how to balance a checkbook, putting 10% of every paycheck into a savings account and learning how to live on the remainder, learning how to read the financial section of the newspaper and what all those numbers mean. Then start learning about the different types of investments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc.) and how they're bought and sold. (If you're Muslim, you'll also need to know which investments are halal or not.) This is not the sort of topic that you can read about overnight; most of us take years to fully understand it all (and understanding the financial jargon is half the battle). But plug away at it, try investing in some mutual funds and, above all, remember, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." :)

    Number 6: Become a hafiz. Milady's suggestion was that Muslim teenagers should read through all of the Qur'an, from one end to the other, a minimum of three times. It's a very good suggestion, but I'll go one better, become a hafiz (or hafizah for the girls). It's so much more difficult to remember things as you get older (trust me on this), but when you're younger, it's much easier to remember (and retain knowledge of) whatever it is you're trying to memorize. And what's more important than memorizing the Qur'an? So crack open that Qur'an (after doing wudu, of course) and start memorizing those surahs.

    Now, whom can I make moan and groan this time? ;) How about Abdurrahman Squires at Mere Islam (who doesn't write nearly as often as he should), Abu Sinan~Sayf (welcome back!), Bin Gregory (for his second meme), the inimitable Dr. M, Rob Wagner (who's not Muslim, but should be), and Brother Saifuddin, who helps me spread the word over at Street Prophets (along with a few other Muslims, like Amad, Dervish and Rockinhejabi).

    March 9, 2008

    "Monsters to Destroy" - How America Creates Its Own Blowback

    An interesting interview with Dr. Thomas Woods on a website I've never visited before (for the obvious reason ;) ). The interview, entitled "Monsters to Destroy: Foreign Policy, Then and Now," looks at how American modern foreign policy (say, from WW1 onwards) has created severe problems (i.e., blowback) for itself by intervening in the affairs of others. What makes matters worse for Americans is that, as one blogger put it, "It’s sad when Osama Bin Laden makes more sense than Americans do." A couple of quotes:

    One insight that conservatives have long had is that when you intervene in the domestic market, you always have unintended consequences. Put a price control on milk and make milk less expensive and pretty soon, you'll have shortages, because no one is producing milk anymore and the discounted milk was bought up. That's what happens.

    Foreign affairs are even more likely to have unintended consequences. Woodrow Wilson did not intend to exacerbate every existing problem in Europe by intervening in World War I. But that's what he did, and he helped create the fertile soil for the rise of a hyper nationalistic party like the Nazis.

    ...

    In the 1980s, the Ayatollah Khomeini called for a jihad against America, on the grounds that we were degenerate, had filthy movies, our women didn't know their place -- all the reasons that we've been told are the causes of the current attacks. The result was absolutely nothing. No one blew himself up. No one did anything. Khomeini issued the call and there was no interest. It was a total flop -- no one wanted to sacrifice himself on those grounds.

    Then the 1990s come along, and we have Osama bin Laden. He does not make that fundamental cultural critique -- obviously, he doesn't like those aspects of American culture, but that wasn't his main critique.

    His criticism is actually very specific. He says the U.S. is responsible for propping up police states around the Arab world; exercising undue influence over oil markets; showing undue favoritism toward Israel; supporting countries that oppress their Muslim minorities; basing American troops on the Arabian peninsula, and on and on.

    This is the sort of thing he offers as a rationale. So while there may certainly be the potential for Islam to be violent, what sparks that fire? It's the combination of practical grievances and the Islamist ideology. Some people will do battle on behalf of an abstract philosophy, but most people will only fight and die for a specific grievance. For example, when you look at the Al Qaida recruitment tapes, they don't simply quote from the Koran. They actually show images of people killed by U.S. weapons.

    Why are they making those tapes if there's no connection between U.S. foreign policy and what the terrorists are doing? It just doesn't make sense.

    Some of the comments were also interesting. One man asked, "What about Beirut?" (Meaning, the 1983 bombing of the American and French barracks in Beirut.) One very good response was:

    Heeding the advice of then-national security adviser Robert McFarlane, President Ronald Reagan authorized the USS New Jersey to fire long-distance shells into Muslim villages in the Bekaa Valley, killing civilians and convincing Shiite militants that the United States had joined the conflict.

    On Oct. 23, 1983, Shiite militants struck back, sending a suicide truck bomber through U.S. security positions and demolishing the high-rise Marine barracks. “When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee’ had taken sides,” Gen. Colin Powell wrote about the incident in his memoirs, My American Journey.

    March 8, 2008

    March 5, 2008

    My Top 20 Science Fiction Novels, Part 1

    I hadn't forgotten about my own version of the "Top 20 Science Fiction Novels," but I did want to think about what novels I would include in such a listing. If you read my last post on this topic, you know that I agree that the following books should be included in the top 20:

    The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien; 1954/55)
    Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card; 1985)
    Dune (Frank Herbert; 1965)
    Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein; 1959)
    Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur Clarke; 1973)
    Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein; 1961)
    Speaker for the Dead (Orson Scott Card; 1986)
    Childhood's End (Arthur Clarke; 1953)

    So that's eight. Now, before we talk about the remaining twelve, let's talk a little more about criteria. Two issues come to mind:

    Because science fiction is so series-oriented, do we count the series as "one" book or do we only look at each book individually?
    My answer: We look at each book individually. Let's be honest. Most SF series are written over a number of years (if not decades) and individual book quality often varies within the overall series. I love Anne McCaffrey's work and while a good number of her books are top-notch, there are a few that are absolute crap. (Especially when she decided to reuse some of her old plots from previous novels.) Likewise, Frank Herbert's Dune series is wonderful, but Children of Dune and Dune Messiah don't come anywhere close to the quality of the other four books in the series.

    Is a "big concept" good enough to ignore bad writing?
    My answer: No. Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven have created wonderful ideas for their novels in the form of "the Foundation" and "Ringworld," respectively. Both men wrote a number of books using those two concepts, and both are great concepts, no question. But Isaac Asimov was a novice writer when he wrote Foundation, and it shows. Likewise, the original novel "Ringworld" reads like a poor man's imitation of Robert Heinlein. ("Louis Wu" in particular has always seemed to me to be a rip-off of Heinlein's cranky yet lovable father-figure, whether that's Jubal Harshaw, Citizen of the Galaxy's Col. Richard Baslim ("Baslim the Cripple") or, to a lesser extent, Lazarus Long.) So, as much as these two books deserve recognition, no; they'll wait until I write a "Top 20 Most Influential SF Novels" post, insha'allah.

    So, to be in the top 20, a novel has to be not just a good read, but a great read. It has to have both, at the very minimum, a good concept and good writing. Ideally, it should be the type of book that you want to read again and again.

    So, the remaining twelve are... (to be continued)

    March 4, 2008

    The Earth and Moon from Mars

    Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

    This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

    At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination.

    ...

    On the day this image was taken, the Japanese Kayuga (Selene) spacecraft was en route from the Earth to the moon, and has since returned spectacular images and movies.

    On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact the red-filter image was almost completely saturated, the blue-green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the infrared image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release. The moon image is unsaturated but brightened relative to Earth for this composite. The lunar images are useful for calibration of the camera.

    Cross-posted at the Ministry of Space Exploration.

    March 2, 2008

    A Note to One of My Students

    It's wrong again... I know.

    Yes, it's wrong again. So? Are you making an effort? Are you trying to learn? Are you trying your hardest? Grades in the long run are meaningless. What I'm really concerned about is effort. You know that I'm a Muslim? You know what the real meaning of the word "Jihad" is? It means "struggle." As long as you commit yourself to a jihad over Accounts (or any other subject, or any other endeavor in your life), I can't ask for anything more.

    Keep up the good work. I wish I had more students like you.

    Ayatul Kursi (The Throne Verse)



    Allah. There is no god but He,-the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who is there can intercede in His presence except as He permitteth? He knoweth what (appeareth to His creatures as) before or after or behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He willeth. His Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feeleth no fatigue in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme (in glory).

    2:255

    March 1, 2008

    Little Ducky

    This is a very sweet, very understated commercial for Huggies' Super Premium Wipes. The reputation for the art of commercial-making would improve tremendously if more commercials were made like this one. By JWT New York.



    HT: Advertising is Good for You