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Missing Mary Road

dumb or dumber

January 31st, 2008 by abbas

Using “favorite books” data from Facebook and the average SAT/ACT scores from the colleges the people in the data set attend, Virgil Griffith plotted a graph of “books that make you dumb”. Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, and Crime and Punishment were the “smartest” books while the Zane erotica books are the “dumbest”.

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hated or hateful?

January 31st, 2008 by abbas
Ottawans who remember August 1999 and Parliament Hill will know the name Shirley Phelps-Roper, and the woman who has been called The Most Hated Woman In America is back in the news again with her anti-homosexuality crusade, this time over the death of actor Heath Ledger, but she has some new shots against Canada as well.Reached on the phone to explain the link God Hates Canada on the website of her Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas — headquarters of her war against the homosexuality she and church members say is destroying the world — Phelps-Roper, 50, lawyer, mother of 11, says: “Canada is like the United States, a filthy, perverted, immoral, nation. America is doomed. The Bible prophesied all of this, the end time. God chose America to show the way, the Christian principles, but it’s over, America is collapsing from within. Canada is doomed, too. I was so thankful to get out of your sick country. It has no hope.”…

Ledger’s sin? He played a homosexual in the movie Brokeback Mountain. Phelps-Roper: “God hates the sordid, tacky, bucket of slime, seasoned with vomit, known as Brokeback Mountain, and He hates all the persons having anything to do with it.” (God watches movies? I wonder if he puts butter on his popcorn

Keep reading.

Posted in People, Religion | No Comments »

the humanity

January 31st, 2008 by abbas

via Huma,

From Dawn:

    US authorities have threatened Pakistan’s most respected citizen Abdul Sattar Edhi with deportation, he said. “I just received a telephone call from someone, telling me that I am being deported,” Mr Edhi, who is now in New York told Dawn.

He said he was stopped at the airport in London when he tried to board a plane for New York on Jan 8. Mr Edhi then contacted the US Embassy in London who gave him a letter which allowed him to proceed to New York. The letter also advised him to see US authorities on Feb 18 to clear whatever misunderstandings they may have about him.

Mr Edhi arrived in New York on Jan 9 and was detained at the airport for eight hours.

“They were questioning me why I look the way I look,” said Mr Edhi who has a long beard and always wears traditional Pakistani dress along with a traditional cap.

“They also wanted to know why I visit the United States so regularly,” he said. “I told them I am a social worker. What else I do? I only do social work,” said Mr Edhi who has branches of his trust in several US cities.

“If they do not let me work here, I will work somewhere else.”

Fact: Edhi has the largest ambulatory volunteer service in the world as per the Guiness Book of World Records and also the man who has gone the longest for having worked without taking a holiday.

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