I kinda messed up the sidebar of my blog just now. I am working on fixing it, so in the meantime, please bear with me as I offend your eyes with WP default theme.

Moral of the story: Never, ever, touch your blog design files when you’re half asleep.

Thanks!

Funny how people are willing to protest against certain sentences said in a TV show, but they won’t be moved by the blatant gender discrimination in Jordanian law and legal proceedings:

Woman handed death sentence for killing her husband

By Rana Husseini

AMMAN - The Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced a 30-year-old woman to death after convicting her of stabbing her husband to death on April 20, 2007.

The tribunal declared the woman, a mother of four, guilty of the premeditated murder of her husband at their home in Irbid and handed her the maximum punishment.

Court papers said the defendant was involved in extramarital affairs and her husband of 11 years discovered them and threatened to tell her family.

Fearing a scandal, the defendant decided to kill her husband and secured a knife for this purpose, according to the court verdict.

On the day of the murder, the woman wore gloves and stabbed her husband several times in the neck while he slept, the court said, adding that she then called the police and her brother-in-law, claiming that a burglar killed her husband while attempting to rob their house.

The court did not mention how investigators determined she was the main suspect in the case.

A government autopsy indicated the victim was fatally stabbed three times in the neck and pathologists also detected defence marks on his arms, according to the court verdict.

Shortly after the murder was committed, officials had told The Jordan Times that the defendant told investigators she murdered her husband because she heard he was planning to take a second wife.

But on Tuesday, a judicial source told The Jordan Times that the woman “confessed in front of the criminal prosecutor under oath to murdering her husband to prevent him from exposing her illegitimate affairs”.

The tribunal comprised judges Omar Khleifat, Mohammad Abu Dalbouh and Hayel Amr.

The verdict will automatically be reviewed by the Court of Cassation within the next 30 days.

I say fine, if the woman is guilty then she should be punished accordingly. But I say it is NOT fine that the Jordanian law looks so superficially interested in achieving justice when the contradictions in its folds are so manifest. The men who kill their wives or female relatives when they SUSPECT them of having ‘inappropriate’ relationships are ALWAYS semi-pardoned to the extent of serving a meager three months in jail.

How many men in Jordan are involved in ‘inappropriate’ relationships? And do we really trust that the infamous article 98 will treat women killers of unfaithful men with the same leniency it treats the men? Like I argued before, it seems that Jordanians’ understanding of the word ‘honor’ is synonymous with a woman’s vagina, which is why a man does not have much honor to speak of, per se, unless he controls his female relatives ‘vaginal honors.’

Think about it. What would a woman who kills her husband upon catching him in an adulterous situation say in her self defense? ‘I killed him to protect my honor and my family’s honor’? The fact remains that the discrepancies between the theoretical and the practical in Jordan, both legally and socially, are so vast as to prevent justice from setting in this country.

I am currently under tremendous pressure to be original and abnormally patriotic, it’s Blog About Jordan day. With all what the other bloggers will creatively write, it’s so darn hard to maneuver this unspoken peer pressure from people I have never even met.

My mother was born in Amman to parents who did not speak Arabic, my dad in a poor village in Karak to a woman who had a tattooed chin and a man who spoke Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic. My paternal aunt got married at 12, my maternal uncle was killed in a car accident, I have an uncle who was a tailor then became a professional boxer, and another who was captured by the Israelis in the 1967 war. My family was Christian, and some say Jewish, in a time not so far away.

Despite its shortcomings, Jordan is my history, and as such, it is irreplaceable.

A Polish man in the UK was caught in a compromising situation with a vacuum cleaner:

A Polish worker has come up with an unusual excuse after being caught in the act with a vacuum cleaner.

The building contractor claimed he was cleaning his underpants with Henry Hoover when he was found naked and on his knees in a hospital’s staff canteen.

A stunned security guard stumbled onto the man in the middle of a compromising act with the cleaner, which has a large smiley face painted on its front and a hose protruding from its “nose”.

The security guard, suitably horrified, told the man to “clean himself and the hoover” before asking him to leave and informing his bosses.

When later questioned by his employers, the man said he was vacuuming his underpants, which was “a common practice in Poland”. He has since been fired.

The funniest bit? The ad for the Henry Hoover says it is a “powerful, reliable vacuum cleaner ready to go time and time again.” Time and time again indeed!

Vacuum cleaning will never be the same again.

Thanks to Hani, I have now installed a plugin that will let you post comments without having to wait for me to approve them. All you have to do is answer an easy math problem before submitting your comments, et voila! — they will be published as simple as that. Take care not to swear though, because I will get you. Grrrr.

I am excited that I won’t have to delay approving comments anymore, and I think this will help whatever discussions we have going on. If you’re interested, the plugin is called Peter’s Math Anti-Spam for WordPress and you can download it by clicking here. It’s extra kewl because it can also TALK! Wohoo!

Other than spending my free time plotting to casually meet Craig Ferguson and enchant him so that we would get married the very next month, I read his book (Between the Bridge and the River), google his pictures, and watch him on YouTube.

No, really, I am not that desperate. I don’t spend ALL of my free time thinking about Ferguson, but I do find him very intelligent, funny, and prime eyecandy. Now some will argue that he is 45 and I am 23, but love knows no boundaries…and the man has a tattoo for crying out loud! (It reads: Dulcius ex aspirus, or “sweeter after difficulty.” = Yum!)

The reason for this post is that yesterday I officially joined Glaswegian - The Craig Ferguson Fanlisting, to which I had applied months ago. I am happy I am now an official, certified fan minus the crazy antics that fans normally do. For all we know, I am probably the most sane of all Ferguson’s fans and what I just said in the previous passages confirms this.

Ferguson’s book, Between the Bridge and the River, was to me an exciting existential read that paralleled my own attitudes towards life. It was when I read his book that I was certain Ferguson’s witty intellect on his show was in fact no show, and I enjoyed connecting to his ideas because they were similar to mine.

I like him because he’s quirky and spontaneous and simply funny, and now I will go and celebrate my official ‘fan’ status and that I am the ONLY official Ferguson fan in Jordan. I leave you with this interview he did with Gerard Butler from 300 (aka The 6-Pack Movie):

Rania Kudsi started blogging recently. I read her blog when I get the chance because she often writes about women in Jordan and in the Arab region and makes a lot of sense. Today, she wrote the following:

Tomorrow you may get a working woman, but you should marry her with these facts as well.

Here is a girl, who is as much educated as you are;
Who is earning almost as much as you do;

One, who has dreams and aspirations just as
you have because she is as human as you are;

One, who has never entered the kitchen in her life just like you or your Sister haven’t, as she was busy in studies and competing in a system that gives no special concession to girls for their culinary achievements;

One, who has lived and loved her parents & brothers & sisters, almost as much as you do for 20-25 years of her life;

One, who has bravely agreed to leave behind all that, her home, people who love her, to adopt your home, your family, your ways and even your family name;

One, who is somehow expected to be a master-chef from day #1, while you sleep oblivious to her predicament in her new circumstances, environment and that kitchen;

One, who is expected to make the tea, first thing in the morning and cook food at the end of the day, even if she is as tired as you are, maybe more, and yet never ever expected to complain; to be a servant, a cook, a mother, a wife, even if she doesn’t want to; and is learning just like you are as to what you want from her; and is clumsy and sloppy at times and knows that you won’t like it if she is too demanding, or if she learns faster than you;

One, who has her own set of friends, and that includes boys and even men at her workplace too, those, who she knows from school days and yet is willing to put all that on the back-burners to avoid your irrational jealousy, unnecessary competition and your inherent insecurities;

Yes, she can drink and dance just as well as you can, but won’t, simply
Because you won’t like it, even though you say otherwise

One, who can be late from work once in a while when deadlines, just like yours, are to be met;

One, who is doing her level best and wants to make this most important, relationship in her entire life a grand success, if you just help her some and trust her;

One, who just wants one thing from you, as you are the only one she knows in your entire house - your unstilted support, your sensitivities and most importantly - your understanding, or love, if you may call it.

But not many guys understand this……

Please appreciate “HER”

Amen, Rania. Read Rania Kudsi’s blog, it’s that good.

An interesting paradox:

اكد وزير التنمية السياسية الدكتور كمال ناصر ضرورة التفريق بين مفهومي الدولة والحكومة حيث ان مفهوم الدولة ثابت وفوق النقد ولا يجوز المساس بها في حين ان النقد البناء للحكومة امر مباح وهي من المتغيرات مشيرا الى ان المواطنة ليست مجرد حقوق انما هي علاقة مع الوطن والقيادة من خلال معادلة الحقوق والواجبات

At least someone came out and said it bluntly. Progress!

I came across an article in The Washington Post, written by a woman called Charlotte Allen, titled We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?. The article is basically a misinformed and a misspresented pseudo-scientific misogynist interpretation of popular culture to prove that women are dumb. Part of what Allen says in the article:

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

But another woman wrote a brilliant response debunking the myths that Allen treated as universal truths about women, and politely bitchslapped her for thinking so little of her own sex. Bitchslapping can be good, let’s hope it wakes Allen up and stops her likes from giving a feminine voice to misogyny. The great response came from Katha Pollitt, also in the Washington Post, titled Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and Its Editors:

The upshot: we ladies should focus on what we’re really good at — interior decoration and taking care of men and children.

Oh, gag me with a spoon. Sure, girly culture can be silly — but what does that prove? It’s not as though men spend their evenings leafing through the plays of Moliere. Susie whips up doggy treats, Mike surfs porn sites; she curls up with the Friday Night Knitting Club, he watches football. Or maybe the two of them watch “Grey’s Anatomy” together — surprise, surprise, about half the show’s audience is male. If you go by cultural preferences, actually, you could just as well claim that women are obviously smarter than men — look around you at the museum, the theater, the opera house, the ballet, the concert hall. Women read more than men, too, especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that didn’t happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers — while men, if they do pick up a novel, make sure it’s estrogen-free. Who’s really the dim bulb, the woman who doesn’t see the beauty of “Grand Theft Auto,” or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?

For Allen, it’s definitely the woman: her brain is just too puny. She cannot mentally rotate three-dimensional objects in space — and that, as we all know, is the very definition of smarts. Funny how that definition keeps changing, as women conquer field after field that was supposed to be beyond them. In the 19th century, physicians insisted women couldn’t cope with college: studying would send rushing to their brains the blood that was needed for the womb. Back then, nobody credited women with the superior verbal abilities and memories Allen says scientists now find women to possess.

True to form, she dismisses these as minor talents that only helped her “coast” through school and life. But back when the experts were explaining why women couldn’t be lawyers or professors or poets (at least not very good poets), nobody said verbal skills and memory were trivial; they only became trivial when women were found to excel at them. Now the sexists diss women as inferior mental-object-rotators. I have no idea whether this is true, and whether if so it’s unchangeable, but you have to admit this is a very narrow scrap of turf on which to plant the flag of manly superiority.

The two articles are too long for me to post here, but please take the time to read them both before leaving me any comments that have sweeping generalizations or irrelevancies.

I am entirely glad that someone like Pollitt wrote back and spoke up for the millions and millions of women that Allen pretends to represent but in fact fights against. This is exactly what I mean by women pulling women down, some are so infected with myths about women’s inferiority that they dare not believe in themselves as capable of anything comparable to men’s achievements. Allen clearly stated she can’t do much beyond add 2+2 together, called her brain Cream Wheat, and explicitly said that women are ‘dim.’ What’s outrageous is that she used the pronoun ‘we’ as if she was the spokesperson of half of the population of earth.

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Make the world a better place for everyone.