[ Boston, M.A ]

you wander inside her namesake
careful hands, you
land in the corner of
my captured screen, you lean forward
i can see you smiling.
from three lenses away.

i stare at you throughout the performance
you dont look at me
once.

i thought we'd unlearned these things
i was too big to
play on swings
without hitting
my knees on the ground.

how lovely you sound
in and out of the flesh
in memory, in hindsight,
as if the rest
doesn't register.
my telescopic filter
makes you lovely,

a pattern on tiles,
repeated
Cheshire smile,
a fountain
ive never seen, in cities
i've never been to.

(9-6-9)

This one came up, quite unexpectedly, while searching cities. It's funny because I had not actually read the Namesake when this was written; what's funnier is that I spent all of last weekend reading it. More on the Namesake later. Here's more on cities:

Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller. Why don’t people attack each other on the way home? Why do they stay in line at the bank? Why don’t people guffaw at the person with blue hair?

The police may be an obvious answer. But this misses the compact among city dwellers. Since their creation, cities have had to be accepting of strangers — no judgments — and residents learn to be subtly accommodating, outward looking.

Mumford elaborates: “Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”

The marvel of Wikipedia — and cities — is that all the intercourse and spiritual stimulus don’t make living there impossible. Rather, they are exactly what makes living there possible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29cohen.html

[ Every child needs a Giant Peach ]

I woke up with the evening sky surrounding me, which was enormously comforting and serene. The crisp white rigging of the athletics stadium on one end and the bright concrete of the undergraduate dorms on the other. And I looked over to the Sears tower with it tiny blinking electric lights and wondered, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a peach were to get stuck in it?

I could live my life waking up under my coat, in train stations, airports, and big glass cages that look over Chicago. But yes, the peach. I think James and the Giant Peach was one of the best books ever written because it was so utterly believable. I remember exactly how James lost the magic green crystals the strange man gave him, I remember how neatly there was a Spider and a Silkworm who could provide bedding and ropes and all sorts of useful things. And I remember how simple it was to sail and fly away on a giant peach with perfectly benign giant insects, into shark infested waters (the sharks could do nothing, obviously, the peach was too big for them to eat and besides, their pointy noses got in the way of devouring it) and over cities of beautifully haunting cloud people. And how finally the peach powered by the magical, miraculous, ingenious and totally believable flock of a hundred seagulls deposited them neatly on top of the Empire State Building.

I could live like that forever, waking up under the great warm blanket of blue skies and falling in love with the way the sun sets the entire western surface of a tall tower ablaze. Forever being until it’s suddenly dark and cold and our hearts crave small things – familiar smells, warm food and soft brown hands. Forever being until I stumble upon moments of great joy and wish I had the courage to ask you to share them with me without being afraid of you saying “no.”

In large cities, miles and months away from home the sky can be a wonderfully comforting thing.

[ A "Thank You" Note ]

Wislawa Szymborska

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.
I don't wait for them
from window to door.

Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.
They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

Translated from Polish by: Joanna Maria Trzeciak

and for those we love,
Wislawa? rooms of
open books,
gnawing, unfinished poems
no peace
no relief
and endless waiting
by windows.

[ i do not know what it is ]

It's raining in Madison. Poetry is easier to get away with these days, it doesn't require explanations or evoke criticism in the same way that prose does. M read two passages from Kundera last night, I thought of Szymborska and worried about the recurrence of experience and realised that she was alseep.

The Premise.

At about the same time, he had the following experience: He had been meeting a young woman in a room that an old friend put at his disposal every day until midnight. After a month or two, she reminded him of one of their earlier encounters: they had made love on a rug under the window while it was thundering and lightning outside; they had made love for the length of the storm; it had been unforgettably beautiful!
Tomas was appalled. Yes, he remembered making love to her on the rug (his friend slept on a narrow couch that Tomas found uncomfortable), but he had completely forgotten the storm! It was odd. He could recall each of their times together; he had even kept close track of the ways they made love (she refused to be entered from behind); he remembered several of the things she had said during intercourse (she would ask him to squeeze her hips and stop looking at her all the time); he even remembered the cut of her lingerie; but the storm had left no trace.
Of each erotic experience his memory recorded only the steep and narrow of sexual conquest: the first piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first obscenity he said to her and she to him, the minor perversions he could make her acquiesce in and the ones she held out against. All else he excluded (almost pedantically) from his memory. He even forgot where he had first seen one or another woman, if that event occurred before his sexual offensive began.
The young woman smiled dreamily as she went on about the storm, and he looked at her in amazement and something akin to shame: she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.
By the word “non-love” I do not wish to imply that he took a cynical attitude to the young woman, that, as present-day parlance has it, he looked upon her as a sex object; on the contrary, he was quite fond of her, valued her character and intelligence, and was willing to come to her aid if ever she needed him. He was not the one who behaved shamefully towards her; it was him memory, for it was his memory that, unbeknownst to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.
Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women.

Finally,

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a (wo)man enters her first word into our poetic memory.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

..or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Such small hands, in the rain, in thunderstorms, that experience. Of flesh, friendship, idiocy. Those mistake(s), the ones that gnaw deep inside your belly, hound you with shame and regret. And then I emerge from this dream, look at the piles of letters and articles and multiple regressions around me and remark that the rain has frozen, M, shouldn't we...
Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the intense fragile stupidity of love. Of children, lying in bed, tumbling naked and flushed with enough poetry that when he touches her, when her mouth whispers close to his neck she says the voice of your eyes is... of course, wonderful and stupid.

[ Frames ]

If ever you pass by
two oh nine you may hear
Rilke whispering.

Hand on hand
tall man, in
dark clothes mumbling
about birds
and grace
love and death

forsaking a verse
between spanish and
statistics,
one oh one.

Or if you were to walk
through galleries eight,
nine and
seventeen
you will see her lean

on stockinged feet
head aside
listening
for shouts and
sighs
tasting ink
bleed the canvas,
hushed leather
crossing
orators, minotaurs, shiva
and coughing,
slightly.

and if you care to brave
the heavy
cooked air in
hallway twelve,
you might find
german expressionists
pin the room
around their
frames,
great anchors
of human shame holding the building down.

only
the bold
carry Industriebauern like dark, heavy iron
in their heart.
stepping outside, the cold air usually dissolves any residues of guilt.


you and i
go in two fifty,
with the Monet
reprints and that
collection of frescoes donated by the
church,
the paper
only slightly worn
for use. it becomes
easier, every time i look and
these days
our laughter almost always
drowns
in tides of traffic
crashing on Michigan Avenue.

01-03-09

[ the new... face?... of cricket. ]



Making Thursdays more bearable. My Hobby: watching the world go mad.

more proof that the BCCI isn't frakking around with IPL. one day, we might be sitting on Sundays stuffing our faces with Lays chips watching UltraCricket ( 12 overs) .. just to see the advert featuring a botoxed-beyond-the-grave SRK saving Lara Dutta from drowning, naked, in a tank of Coca-Cola.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/18/AR2008041803577.html

[ all that jazz ]

"Working Feminism" became distorted by lipstick lesbianism, got tangled up with sexual liberation, became only a little about the right to vote, educational equality, non-discrimination in the workplace. It became marred by the numbers of women in the western-educated world who didn't choose to become doctors and scientists and engineers and lawyers, so then we had to find a way to make the stay-at-home mum a feminist too, as well as the Page 3 girl, and the High Class Prostitute, and the crack addict on the corner.

The antichrist for feminists by Ruth Fowler

[ amores ]

II

in the rain-
darkness, the sunset
being sheathed i sit and
think of you

the holy
city which is your face
your little cheeks the streets
of smiles

your eyes half-
thrush
half-angel and your drowsy
lips where float flowers of kiss

and
there is the sweet shy pirouette
your hair
and then

your dancesong
soul. rarely-beloved
a single star is
uttered,and i

(days go by and still i)

think
of you

- e.e. cummings

A friend from Mumbai asked me how things were. I groped for a befitting analogy, and off the top of my head said "She meant a lot to people.... sort of like Gandhi."

Will they eulogize her to Gandhian proportions? Gandhis dhoti, Benazir's ajrak, her gracefully draped dupatta, her almost deliberately hideous but unmistakeably modern suits. Gandhi's non-violent tactics and the subsequent massacre of Partition, her violent outbursts against the military and simultaneous dealings with them. Will she be Time's person of the year?

"They're trying to sideline her. They always have. These bastard men... they resented her power, her popularity." My mother was never a fan.

She was ruthless, calculating.... delivered a baby in office, witnessed the murder of her father, her brothers. She took advantage of every situation, she played the media, and charmed a superpower.

There will be another Bhutto. But I don't know if there will ever be another Benazir.

times like these, it helps to listen to the voice of clarity.

Whoever did this wants two things: create unrest through violence; and get the elections postponed sine die. The postponement of elections will only increase the possibility of violence.
Honour Bhutto’s sacrifice — Ejaz Haider


‘Tum kitnay Bhutto marogay? Har ghar say Bhutto niklay ga!’

The headlines read "Garhi Khuda Bux awaits another Bhutto," and I think: they're wondering who'll carry the PPP torch. But Garhi Khuda Bux was awaiting the body of another Bhutto. Tum kitney Bhutto maro gey? Tum kitney Bhutto paida karo gey? How many heroes will you create, and how badly will that fuck with the im-personal process that democracy ought to be?

Like all idiots, I have yet to pull myself together. I seem to have forgotten that I once committed myself to a process- whatever the cost.

It is a tribute to the tenacity of Ms Bhutto, the politician par excellence, that she kept her father’s political legacy alive in a male-dominated society. He had championed the popular cause and had given a sense of dignity to the common man in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto had the mettle to do the same.

We'll never know if she would've delivered on her promises. We'll never know if she would have the humility to accept election results that didn't go in her favor. We'll never know if she would've been voted out of office as her own supporters realised that it is them, the people, the human spirit that is sacred, and not a leader, a personality, a politician. There will be another Bhutto.

We've lost sight of the process. To vote or not to vote?

II

"Democracy must be meaningful."

It is some comfort to know that even the country's sharpest analysts prefer silence at this point.
Even journalists, I suppose, were children once.
thank you for that lesson, AN.

[ Generally Speaking ]

And when he said, "Extremists have gone very extreme," it suddenly
occurred to me why his speech pattern seemed so familiar. He was that
uncle that you get stranded with at a family gathering when everybody
else has gone to sleep but there is still some whisky left in the
bottle. And uncle thinks he is about to say something very profound --
if you would only pour him one last one.

by Mohammed Hanif

Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf deserves our sympathy

Not because he has been forced to carry out a coup against his own
regime, not because his troops are being kidnapped en masse by
Pakistani Taliban and then awarded Rs 500 for good behaviour, not
because he himself has become a prisoner in his Army House and can't
even nip out for coffee and Paan as he used to, but because he has
utterly lost his grip over grammar.

In my 15 years in journalism, I have covered three coups. And as I
walked towards my office last Saturday, I had the cynicism of someone
who has seen it all before. As I entered the BBC offices on a chilly
Saturday afternoon in London, a senior Pakistan hand, who like me had
interrupted his cosy weekend to cover the story, wondered aloud why
the general was taking so long before appearing on national television
and explaining his actions.

"His speech writer is too old for all this excitement. He is probably
taking his time," I said. Barrister Sharifuddin Peerzada has midwifed
every single coup in Pakistan and when General Musharraf took over in
1999, we had to wait until 3 am for him to address the nation. The
nation listened to his 10 minutes of neatly turned out verbosity and,
relieved, went to sleep. Peerzada may lack in democratic credentials,
but he cares about his syntax.

Last Saturday as I arrived at my desk, Musharraf had already started
his address. And it was immediately clear to me that he had fallen
into that aging dictator's familiar trap: He had written his own
speech.

I exaggerate because he only occasionally glanced at his notes and
for 40 minutes talked, well, gibberish; the kind of stuff that only
journalists and think-tank-wallahs would take seriously.

I was so unsettled -- not by what he was saying, but by the way he
was saying it -- that I listened to the entire speech again last
night.

I have been accused of punctuation abuse often enough to take these
things in my stride, but for the 40 minutes that General Musharraf
spoke in Urdu, he didn't use one proper sentence.

He replaced his verbs with hand gestures, nouns slipped off his
shrugged shoulders, adjectives quivered under his desk.

And when he said, "Extremists have gone very extreme," it suddenly
occurred to me why his speech pattern seemed so familiar. He was that
uncle that you get stranded with at a family gathering when everybody
else has gone to sleep but there is still some whisky left in the
bottle. And uncle thinks he is about to say something very profound --
if you would only pour him one last one.

Consider this; in the middle of his speech when everyone was silently
urging him to get to the point, losing the thread of his diatribe
about how judicial activism was responsible for the rise of jihadis in
Pakistan, he abruptly said, "I have imposed emergency," then looked
into the camera, waved his hand in a dismissive gesture and said, "You
must have seen it on TV."

He forgot to mention that he had pulled the plug on all television
channels except the State-run television. It might sound like
old-school dictator talk, but just imagine if somebody took away your
television and then told you, 'Oh, did you see that thing on TV?'

For those who haven't suffered General Musharraf's regime directly,
he can come across as a rakish figure, a daredevil who easily switches
between his camouflage commando uniform and designer suits and then
half sleeved shirts for attending fashion shows -- his favourite
cultural activity before he was forced to abandon it because of
security concerns.

His CV is impressive: Here is a man who can manage the frontline on
America's war and terror, get rid of three prime ministers and scores
of generals and still find time to write an autobiography and then get
George W Bush to endorse it in front of the world media.

I visited Delhi soon after Musharraf's failed Agra summit and he
seemed to have earned the grudging respect of the Delhi elite. My
Indian colleagues looked at stone-faced Vajpayee and wondered, why
can't the new shining India have a handsome leader like Musharraf. One
south Delhi resident claimed his wife had started watching Pakistani
channels obsessively just to get a glimpse of our commando President.

I reminded my Indian friend of Musharraf's Kargil adventure. "How
come you have forgotten your Kargil widows so soon?" I said. "Well
come off it, he is a bit of a matinee idol from the fifties," I was
told. I am not a big fan of period Bollywood, so I kept quiet.

As I watched the speech this Saturday, I wondered if my Indian
friend's wife saw the same Musharraf that I saw on my screen. He was
like that uncle that I mentioned earlier, who after a couple of drinks
not only wants to explain the meaning of life, but also why he is the
most misunderstood man in the world, how your aunt never valued him,
why the world is run by a cabal of Jewish gays and why Japanese
technology is a disgrace.

You want to take the bottle away and tell him to get some sleep. He
wants to tell you he loves you more than his own son and now can you
pour him another drink.

I am not even remotely suggesting that Musharraf was drunk when he
addressed the nation. No, it was something far more sinister. He
seemed to be having an out of body experience, there he sat in his
sherwani reading an order written by his uniformed alter ego, wagging
a finger at himself, accusing his own government of spreading
terrorism.

And let's not forget that when I say Pakistani government, I mean
General Pervez Musharraf.

Here are some random things he said. And trust me, these things were
said quite randomly:

Yes, he did say, "Extremism bahut extreme ho gaya hai (extremism has
become too extreme)."

"Hum se koi darta hi nahin (nobody is scared of us anymore)."

"Islamabad mein extremist bharay houay hain (Islamabad is full of extremists)."

"Hakumat ke andar hakumat bana rakhi hai (there is a government
within government)."

"Har waqt bas court ke chakkar lagatey rehtay hain (officials are
being asked to go to the courts every other day)."

"Officials ki beizzati kartay hain (officials are being insulted by
the judiciary)."

At one point he appeared wistful when reminiscing about his first
three years in power -- "mera total control thha (I had total
control)." You were almost tempted to ask: What happened then, uncle?

But obviously, uncle didn't need any prompting. He launched into his
routine about three stages of democracy. He claimed he was about to
launch the third and final phase of democracy (the way he said it, he
managed to make it sound like the Final Solution). And just when you
thought he was about to make his point, he took an abrupt turn and
plunged into a deep pool of self pity.

This involved a long-winded anecdote about how the Supreme Court
judges would rather attend a colleagues' daughter's wedding rather
than just get it over with and decide that he is a constitutional
President.

As I said, I have heard some dictator speeches in my life, but nobody
has gone so far as to mention someone's daughter's wedding for
imposing martial law in the country.

When for the last few minutes of his speech he addressed his audience
in the West in English, I suddenly felt a deep sense of humiliation.
This part of his speech was scripted. Sentences began and ended. I
felt humiliated that my President not only thinks that we are not
evolved enough for things like democracy and human rights, but because
we can't even handle concepts like proper syntax and grammar.

Abraham Lincoln was quoted. The slow and painful evolution of Western
democracy was evoked. Idealists were told to manage their expectations
and then there was the obligatory poetic flourish: "I would not let
this country commit suicide."

Sure, a colleague chipped in, I would rather strangle it with my own hands.

As he closed his speech with a rather poetic "forever Pakistan,
forever," and the national anthem started to play, it occurred to me
that our whole nation is probably feeling like a Kargil widow by now.

With no cable television to console her sorrows.

Mohammed Hanif is the head of BBC's Urdu Service. His novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes will be published by Random House India next year.
http://us.rediff.com/news/2007/nov/06guest.htm

we're in business!!

here are two. more to come.

I drive home late these days. In a car full of people I don’t know. It beats taking the bus back. Or having to drive myself. The headlights pick out a dog’s arse trotting down the road, grey balls jiggling. A kid stands in front of Bhutto’s gaping face, his dirty clothes hidden next to the billboard’s bright colours. I feel bad, now. The glossy teeth, the lifted hand, the hansom face of her father with pigeon shit on it seem strangely out of place now, like poster advertising a carnival long after it’s over. All over Clifton, watching the tired cars sullenly wait for traffic lights to turn green, shadows picking through rubbish heaps, waiters shifting feet, arms crossed behind them on this quiet Friday night. The radio prattles on, some genius of a housewife earnestly wishing all those poor people hadn’t, all these horrid politicians wouldn’t, and our wretched government didn’t and I feel my brain gently glide off the side of the brick its been slammed against. Thank you, I’m barely alive, just tingling at the edges. You may now take your pound of flesh, condemn the senseless violence, bark on about the evils of corruption and the malignancy of democracy and the goddamn shame, the pity of it all.

KH said, last night, just before I went to sleep “Saima I wish you could be here, this… words fail me. The atmosphere her is electric, it’s absolutely amazing.”

You’ve won, you were right, I hope you’re happy. I was happier last night.

[ blackwater ]

Law of Difference: set up english language channel in predominantly Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pushto etc country and it's only a matter of time before it bites you in the ass. That's the price you pay for being different.

If there's one channel you should be watching this week, its Aaj TV. They've done a mind-blowingly funny spoof of Dawn TV... everything you've been bitching about for ages but never had the time to put on paper. The wardrobes! the accents! the graphics! the irritating music! aaanddd.... the anchors!

Or rather. the Anchor. the Superman of Dawn TV. his wit is faster than a ghadda gari, he can leap boring bulletin items in a single bound and lift eyebrows ten times his own body weight.

still trying to get a youtube link... i know that everyone here is going to be glued to the show.

[ today, ]

General Musharraf is going to be re-elected as the President of this country for the next five years. Here's how.

The Provincial Assemblies currently consist of 728 seats.
As far as the Presidential Electoral College goes, that amounts to 260 votes- that is, 65 votes for each province. This is done to give every province equal weight in voting.

There are 65 seats in the Balochistan Assembly…. With 38 percent going to the PML-Q.
The PML-Q also has an overwhelming majority in the Punjab, with nearly 60% of the 371 seats.
Sindh is the greatest power struggle: the Pakistan People’s Party Parliamentarians have one-third of the seats. But the pro-government coalition of the PML-Q and the MQM combine to dominate the province with 49% of the assembly.

Finally, there are 124 seats in NWFP Assembly, where the Muttahaida Majlis e Amal coalition ruled with 56% of the seats.
Yesterday, 36 of their members resigned, bringing the party hold over the assembly down to 27%.

Next, the National Assembly. There are 342 seats in the National Assembly or the Lower House. Of these, nearly 40% belong to the PML Q, 16% belong to the PPPP, nearly 6% are held by the MMA and about 5% belong to PML N. The other significant groups in the National Assembly are the MQM, with nearly 6% of the seats, and the National Alliance, with 4% of the seats.

In the National Assembly, every member counts as one vote. That means 342 seats equal to 342 votes.

85 of these members will not be voting any more.

Members of the MMA and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf were amongst those members of the All Pakistan Democratic Movement who resigned from the National Assembly today, in a bid to block General Musharraf’s re-election. Some members of the PML-Q resigned as well.

Finally, the Senate. The Upper House of Pakistan’s government has 100 seats, of which 39 belong to the PML-Q.

So this is what it looked like last night: 260 votes from the provinces, 257 votes from the National Assembly, and 100 votes from the Senate. The Presidential candidates need a simple majority to win.

If you're still wondering why the APDM quit the government... it's because they're in a minority in either case. Thats the point of a RULING MAJORITY. and that's the entire point of DEMOCRATIC elections... the Assemblies complete their term, a new NA is formed (based on people's evaluation of the previous govt, whether they want to keep it in power or not) and then they choose their President. Musharraf has increased his powers AND his immunity to democratic change.

in the words of a white man: may Pakistan prosper, always.

**ELECTORAL UPDATE AFTER 3**

Hello and welcome to NewsPie

[ Tonight's top story: ]

In a dramatic announcement to international media today, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto said that she is returning to the country Soon. Very Soon.
Ms. Bhutto has been involved in a series of talks with President General Pervez Musharraf. Over the course of several meetings Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Musharraf have agreed to disagree on nearly all of the points between their parties. They hoped that future talks would be equally successful.
Chaudry Shujaat spoke to the press last Friday and said that only 9% of the deal had been settled. On Saturday he updated news media on the PML(Q)’s statement: now, it seems that 10% of the deal had been finalized. At this rate, analysts estimate that PML (Q) and the PPP will come to a rapid power sharing deal some time late next year.
Meanwhile, another member of the General Musharraf’s party, Mushahid Hussain bitterly complained that Ms. Bhutto only spoke to generals. He said that by talking to the leader of his party, Ms. Bhutto has undermined the integrity of politicians. Analysts are still confused about this one.
Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said that nothing would stand in between him and his supporters. He said no force on earth could prevent him from returning to Pakistan and fighting the elections. He was last seen boarding a plane to Jeddah, after the army barricaded the airport, escorted him to a waiting helicopter and put him on the next Boeing out of the country.

That’s all for tonight’s edition of NewsPie. Do stay with us. (Seriously- its Ramazan. There’s nothing else to do.)

the only people who'd actually watch a 24-hour news channel are the producers, senior producers and directors of other 24-hour news channels.

[ if i were a tabloid ]

Song of the Day: Fire in the Disco

He's gone from the frying pan into the degcha!

Sharif in another hairy situation!!

Song of the Hour: Aaj Aaney Ki Zidd Na Karo

Turned back with his toupee between his legs!

Forgot to turn the gas off, Mian Sahab?

[ from Desk to Dawn ]

Hubbin' Birmingistan (kin to Hub Pk, who was with us until a few months ago) is a huge fan of Cristopher Hitchens, with good reason.
"In the 1980s, Pakistan got a blank check from the U.S. to combat the Russians, and spent much of the check in building up the Taliban. Now it is getting another check and a brand-new interest-free mortgage in order to pretend that the Taliban are its enemy. It just doesn't get any better than this."
Read article: >

Does our reputation as smarmy opportunist bastards precede us? Well, it should.

Stephen Levitt has always struck me as a man who pushes that 11th percent of brain matter, unlike most people in the world. Here's two excellent articles that are brilliant because they engage us in the simplest of questions, one which anyone with a grain of sense would have asked themselves already: if i were a terrorist, how would i attack?
also see Terrorism II

"The alternative interpretation is that the terror risk just isn’t that high and we are greatly overspending on fighting it, or at least appearing to fight it. For most government officials, there is much more pressure to look like you are trying to stop terrorism than there is to actually stop it."

Yes, I have a secret weakness for economists.