Dinosaur Hospital

Poor ol’ Mahmoud, it probably helps with the stress.

CNN continues their coverage of Iran today.

The crowd chanted “Ya Hossein, Mir Hossein,” the first a reference to the revered Shiite imam and the second a reference to Moussavi. Then there were more chants of “Allah wa Akbar,” or God is great.

No. No I don’t think there were. Whoever wrote this would probably benefit from this – specifically point seven.

Arabic letter waw (و) is used as vâv for [v], because Arabic has no [v] but Persian has no [w]

You might say, “well of course they kept the [w] sound, this is takbir afterall!” Not quite. In prayer and other religious phrases the [v] will replace the [w]. Further, the Farsi-accented takbir is normally translated as “Allah-o akbar”. And finally, of course, “Allah wa akbar” pretty much makes no sense.

Perhaps too many of CNN’s staff were pulled for Obama’s Beer Summit.

Today at lunch my visa finally arrived. Hopefully we’ll be on our way by early August.

People persist in commenting on how this is an unwise course of action.

And I realize the skin on the blog is a bit rough but with things finally set in motion with the Iran trip I though it best to start now.