Just thought you should know that. ;-) I just finally enabled another keyboard layout on this computer… Yippee. Now I can type instead of copying and pasting from Character Map.

You can do it, too! http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP030…

Tomorrow, I’m off to spend a long weekend with the family… and continually munch on Chex mix! Comments will all be moderated (slowly) by me.

Hubs and I finally saw the latest Harry Potter (Goblet of Fire) … in an IMAX theatre. It was quite an exhilarating experience. The movie was awesome. Even though I think it has been playing for a month, the whole theatre was full! YAY, HARRY!!!

[Sorry, pics of my apartment were removed, because some “Salafi” is coming to kill me and my family. Damn.]

A Tale of Two Countries - A California teen returns to his Afghan homeland. Interesting interview!

Just some funny and/or amusing things:

Recently, I moved in a way that I had previously mocked for being unrealistic. If any of you has ever played a video game (first person, usually) you may have heard about a move called a “strafe” — basically a quick side-step. I thought there was never a person in the world who really ever “strafed”… but I did.

I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth and I stepped out the door to tell hubby something and when I was finished, instead of walking back into the bathroom normally, I “strafed” in… At that moment I realized what I had done and had to blog about it. Because there is really nothing more important in the world than this!

I also heard this line on television: “He’s as busy as a cat with tape on his tail.” Hilarious.

And finally, hubby and I were sharing memories of childhood stories, his Urdu and mine English. We told each other the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Hubby mentioned to me that he always found it strange that the bears had left their porridge sitting out on the table and left the house. And that’s true, WHY DID THEY DO THAT?! Now that I think about it, didn’t they all sleep in the same room, too? This is worse than the lullaby where the baby falls out of the tree.

Depeche Mode…
Madison Square Garden…
New York City…

See the pictures from my New York trip. I didn’t take my camera to the concert, however… so just NYC pics. :-)

From Newsweek: Women of Al-Qaeda…

Jihad used to have a gender: male. The men who dominated the movement exploited traditional attitudes about sex and the sexes to build their ranks. They still do that, but with a difference: even Al Qaeda is using female killers now, and goading the men.

The pressures of sexual frustration in this life and the lure of sexual as well as spiritual rewards in the next are exploited as part of a cynical spiel by jihadist recruiters looking for boys and men to be suicide bombers. Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad among the Palestinians, and the various incarnations of Al Qaeda have all played on Muslim teachings that promise 72 houris—virginal beings with black eyes and alabaster skin—to attend the martyr’s desires in paradise.

Suicide bombing is changing the rules of deference and subservience that have dominated the traditional society—a strange path to liberation for women hidden behind veils and burqas.

And also see: Reform: Not Ignorant, Not Helpless:

The West is focused on the extreme cases of oppression against Muslim women. But there’s another world out there.

Emily vanished from her home in late September. She apparently wandered into a nearby paper company’s distribution center and crawled into a container of paper bales.

The container went by truck to Chicago and by ship to Belgium before the cat was found Oct. 24 at Raflatac, a laminating company in Nancy, France. Emily, who turned 1 year old that very day, was thin and thirsty but still alive.

Emily’s escort, Newark-based Continental employee George Chiladze, said he was thrilled to be taking Emily back across the Atlantic.

“I will make somebody really happy to deliver this poor traveler back home,” he said.