Hakim Baker's blog

My wife saw this message on a sci-fi short stories group she's in. Any fiction writers out there?

Drat, I'm on someone else's computer and I'm not getting the buttons to do links and all that, and Kid Khalila wants me to go back to playing with Legos (Legos RULE!!) so I'll just paste the URL here.

http://sj-r.com/News/stories/29956.asp

From the daily paper where I live; the small town in question isn't far.

Playing into the stereotype that small-town Midwesterners are themselves bound up in stereotypes .....

And I notice, reader comments on that article are closed. I can only imagine the anti-Muslim flamethrowing we're missing out on!

I just got done reading The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. When I happened to go look at DA's blog, it happened to be his review of this book. I recognized the author's name from here, and with my interest piqued by DA I had to mention this book to my wife, who got it from the library.

I think Jesus was just a baby who never forgot where he came from.

My friend Noor loaned me a copy of Dajjal: the AntiChrist by Ahmad Thompson.  In typical ADD fashion, I haven't read it but I've browsed it and it's fascinating.  I love the critique of the "Dajjal" or "Kafr" system.  Produce-consume; worry about where your food and shelter will come from; buy insurance.  The only thing that I'm a little bit unsure of is that capital-I Islam is the One Right Way (and that's that, fer sher). 

This got my attention:

I didn't realize it had been more than a month since I blogged here.  A while ago I signed up on MySpace, where scantily clad young women are always sending me messages to go to a different site to look at their pics.  Sadly, I didn't quit myspace before I got entangled in the huge ever growing pulsating web of corporate internet, and now I'm connected to various friends real and virtual through myspace.  So I'm not gonna quit that, but I've since started up

Reckoner
Can you take it with you
Disavow the pleasure

You were not to blame for
Bittersweet distractors
Dare not speak his name
Did I cater to all you
All your needs?

Because we separate
it ripples our reflections
Because we separate
it ripples our reflections

Inspirations and Creative Thoughts had these two pieces recently:

The Sufis' Religion and Religionless Religion

It's Saturday night, and the blogs are on fire!

The Prophet saw Hell and there were more women there than men!  Ouch!

Uncertainty Paradox -- a nice poem from the mysticsaint / Inspirations and Creative Thoughts / Sadiq Alam blog.

Relatedly, one of my favorite ideas of late is the "I.O.U." of existence.  Everything--a theory, a map, a self--is either Incomplete Or Uncertain.  The more data you accept, the less coherent you are.  The more internally consistent you are, the more data you have to ignore.