Isn’t Sodomy Considered Perversion?
Two articles from the Kuwait Times crime pages, but a daily occurrence:
February 27, 2007
Kuwaiti boy Sodomized
A Kuwaiti living in the Jaber Al-Ali area recently filed a complaint that a man offered his younger brother a lift while he was walking in the Mubarak Al-Kabeer area. He said the man then drove into the desert where he sodomized the boy after threatening him with a knife and also shot nude pictures of him.
February 28, 2007
Bedoons, Kuwaitis scuffle over attempted ‘sodomy’
Kuwait: Two bedoons travelling in a car in Riqqa spotten an eleven-year-old Kuwaiti boy standing in front of his house, and decided to kidnap and sodomize him. One of them alighted and tried to force the boy to get inside the car, but the boy started screaming; alerting other boys in the neighborhood who wrestled with the bedoons and managed to pin them down until the police arrived. However, the boy’s father when informed on the situation along with his relatives rushed to the police station where they encountered the bedoons’ relatives. Both groups were then involved in a scuffle. The boy’s father then stabbed one of the bedoons several times. The victim had to be admitted to the intensive care unit at Adan hospital. Police arrested the boy’s father and referred him to the relevant authorities.
My comment and question: In our holy book, Jesus says that the very worst punishment in the afterlife is for anyone who harms one of the little ones, one of the “innocents,” who damages that innocence in any way. I am betting the Qu’ran says something similar. (I welcome your feedback on this, because I would like to know the sura’a.)
And aren’t Bedoon’s MORE religiously conservative than other Kuwaitis? How does this track?
In western culture, men who ‘bugger’ other men are considered less than manly. Is this not also true in Islam?
Is sodomy not considered a perversion in Islam?
What is the penalty for sodomy in Kuwait, and how is the penalty enforced?
Indian Maid “Falls” from House Roof
This is from yesterday’s Kuwait Times (27 February 2007) and by the way, the Kuwait Times has a new, more attractive and easier to use web-page.
Hanan Al Saadoun, the reporter for this column, does a great job with crime reporting. Even when forced to be oblique, he gets the gist across.
Kuwait: Sabah Hospital investigators recently referred to the police the medical report of a woman who was admitted to the hospital with several injuries on her chin, jaw, lower lip, broken teeth and pelvic bone fractures. The lady was in a coma and was admitted to the intensive care unit of the hospital. They said after a while, the brother of her sponsor (who had reportedly been out of the country) brought in her passport, and informed the hospital that she was an Indian maid and had fallen from the roof of her sponsor’s house. Further investigations have been stalled until after her recovery from the coma.
My comment: Injuries on her chin, jaw, lower lip, broken teeth . . . . and a “fall” from the roof? Too outrageous for words.
Donna Leon: Read and Savor
When I tell you about Donna Leon, I am really introducing you to a friend. I can’t remember when we met, but I can tell you that I seek her out whenever I can. Just listing her books, I realized there were several I hadn’t seen and I ordered them immediately, from the Amazon re-sellers.
“Why the resellers?” you are asking. Donna Leon is not that easy to find, in the United States. Some of the books in her series seem to have been printed only in the UK, which is a pity, because The Donna Leon books really need to be read in order.
While they can be a quick read, they are better read slowly and savored. It’s not that hard. Her humor is subtle, sometimes even sly. Commissario Guido Brunetti, her main character, lives in Venice. He has a family, a sweet wife – Paola, and a daughter and a son. He eats Venetian meals, he lives in an illegal Venetian apartment, he has a glass of wine or two with his lunch. It helps to read the books in order, as his children grow from childhood to teen-agers, and to grow older with him as he solves his cases.
But in Donna Leon’s books, solving the cases is not the goal. As often as not, even while Brunetti solves the case, justice is not served. The books are about the living conditions and social realities of life in Venice, and in Italy. The books are about painful subjects – child prostitution, traffic in women, blood diamonds and African immigrants, and about art fraud and Mafia crime and big business. And the book is about Venetian and Italian interconnections, so that some crimes just disappear, some evidence just disappears, and Brunetti’s dunderhead of a boss tells him to just look the other way.
While each book is deceptively short, and written in clear, simple language, the books are richly complex, weaving a myriad of details into each page.
Thanks to Donna Leon, I know what it is like on a cold, rainy day in Venice, when the water rises and you have to try to walk on raised boards to get where you are going. I know what it is like to have a family emergency and the police vaporetto is in use elsewhere and to try to figure out the fastest way to run home, crossing bridges, grabbing a taxi, complicated by the canal system and tourist infestations in Venice. I know when policement get together for lunch in Venice, you don’t talk business until AFTER you have finished your exquisite pasta with truffles, accompanied by a glass or two of the fabulous house wine. Donna Leon has taken me there.
In Death and Judgement, the book I just finished, Brunetti is called by a police sergeant who has arrested a former police sergeant and wants Brunetti to come to the station. Brunetti’s conversations with the arresting sergeant always require a lot of patience:
(Brunetti) “Did the people in Mestre tell you to make out an arrest report?”
“Well, no, sir,” Alvise said after a particularly long pause. “They told Topa to come back here and make a report about what happened. The only form I saw on the desk was an arrest report, so I thought I should use that.”
“Why didn’t you let him call me, officer?”
“Oh, he’d already called his wife, and I know they’re supposed to get one phone call.”
“That’s on television, officer, on American television,” Brunetti said, straining towards patience.
We’ve all been there. Dealing with those who think they understand, and their understanding is . . . imperfect.
In another part of this book, in which the major issue is the big business of trafficking in women for prostitution, Brunetti is having a conversation with his wife:
Paula pulled gently on his hand. “Why do you use them?”
“Hum?” Brunetti asked, not really paying attention.
“Why do you use whores?” Then, before he could misunderstand, she clarified the question. “Men, that is. Not you. Men.”
He picked up their joined hands and waved them in the air, a vague, aimless gesture. “Guiltless sex, I guess. No strings, no obligations. No need to be polite.”
“Doesn’t sound very appealing,” Paola said, and then added “But I suppose women always want to sentimentalize sex.”
“Yes, you do.” Brunetti said.
Paola freed her hand from his hand and got to her feet. She glanced down at her husband for a moment, then went into the kitchen to begin dinner.
If you are reading that interchange too quickly, too superficially, you will totally miss the significance of the last sentence. If you have been married a long time, you will totally understand that a whole lot happened. This is one of the things I love about Donna Leon.
Death at La Fenice
Death in a Strange Country
Dressed for Death
A Venetian Reckoning
Acqua Alta
The Death of Faith
A Noble Radiance
Fatal Remedies
Friends in High Places
A Sea of Trouble
Willful Behavior
Uniform Justice
Doctored Evidence
Blood From a Stone
Through a Glass Darkly
Giving it Up for Lent
Lent started today, our own holy season of repentance and fasting. When I was a little girl, children would gather and figure out what they were going to give up, like chocolate, or coca cola, or candy. Mostly, in truth, it didn’t last too long. We meant well, we took it seriously, but we didn’t have the capacity for that kind of long term commitment – 40 days (and 40 nights, too; we don’t get time off from sunset to sunrise.)
As adults, we can be equally wacky, but in different ways. We can give up something that is too easy to give up. We can give up something and then obsess about it until it makes up a major focus of our day. If we are very fortunate, with prayer and God’s help, we can truly give up something meaningful and stick to it, offering it up as a spiritual sacrifice to God.
I had a blessing this week. It didn’t feel like such a blessing at the time, but a great deal of the time this week I was driving, and I had riders in the car.
I had no idea my language in the car had deteriorated so far. I’m a pretty good driver, but this is Kuwait. There are things that are out of my control. And I discovered that occasionally, bad words pop out of my mouth.
I can only guess that it happens when I am alone, too, but I am not conscious of it. All of a sudden, when some bad word pops out of your mouth and you are NOT alone, you become VERY conscious of it.
I’m giving it up for Lent.
At first, I was going to allow myself non obscene words like “Idiot!” “Imbecile!” and “What are you thinking??????” but after lengthy thought, I think it defeats the purpose. No. I am going cold turkey, no obscenities, no outraged exclamations.
Perhaps an elaborate “I forgive you” from time to time. . . . Pray for me!
“Was That Funny?”
When my son was little, he went through a time when he would make up jokes and tell us, and watch our reaction and ask “was that funny?” He wanted desperately to catch on to humor, but humor is a whole new way of thinking, and he was only four or five years old.
We started with riddles, I think, jokes in which words had more than one meaning, and then we moved on to knock knock jokes. But when he first started making jokes, he started with pure nonsense.
Around eight, we introduced him to Shel Silverstein, a brilliant poet, who writes books for kids that are also a joy for adults.
(photo courtesy of Amazon.com.)
Where The Sidewalk Ends
Light in the Attic
Falling Up
We all loved Shel Silverstein. Our son would read the poems aloud to us as we zipped around the back streets of Europe. We never got tired of him. His poems are funny to both children and adults “One Sister for Sale” “The King Who Loved Peanut Butter” . . . and sometimes poignant, or even sad.
Slowly, slowly, our son built up a huge repetoire of humor. Today, he is one of the funniest men I know, albeit most of his wit is very dry, and sometimes . . . I don’t always get it.
And that doesn’t begin to tackle the problem of “what is funny” crossing national and cultural boundaries! I think you have really arrived in a language when you can tell a joke in another language, and the native speakers find it funny.
Getting Into Heaven
Getting Into Heaven
After a long illness, a woman died and arrived at the Gates of Heaven.
While she was waiting for Saint Peter to greet her, she peeked through the gates. She saw a beautiful banquet table. Sitting all around were her parents and all the other people she had loved and who had died before her.
They saw her and began calling greetings to her. “Hello!” “How are you? We’ve been waiting for you!” “Good to see you!”
When Saint Peter came by, the woman said to him, “This is such a wonderful place! How do I get in?”
“You have to spell a word,” Saint Peter told her.
“Which word?” the woman asked. “Love.”
The woman correctly spelled love, and Saint Peter welcomed her into heaven.
About six months later, Saint Peter came to the woman and asked her to watch the Gates of Heaven for him that day.
While the woman was guarding the Gates of Heaven, her husband arrived.
“I’m surprised to see you,” the woman said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I’ve been doing pretty well since you died,” her husband told her. “I married the beautiful young nurse who took care of you while you were ill. And then I won the lottery. I sold the little house you and I lived in and bought a big mansion. And my wife and I traveled all around the world. We were on vacation and I went water skiing today. I fell, the ski hit my head, and here I am. How do I get in?”
“You have to spell a word,” the woman told him.
“Which word?” her husband asked.
“Czechoslovakia.”
Stephen King and Hearts in Atlantis
You can be talking with serious people and watch their eyes change when they find you read Stephen King. I refuse to back down. Yep, I read Stephen King. I think he is a brilliant author, some books better than others, but when I am reading, sometimes I can feel my blood move faster through my veins as I wait for a life-threatening situation to resolve itself.
I can trust Stephen King. He taps into who we really are. I can also trust that most of the good guys will still be standing at the end, and most of the bad guys will meet a truly horrible and well-deserved death. I can trust that when bad things happen to good people, other good people will gather round, band together and the gestalt of all that willingness to help one another will prevail against the darkness.
The scariest book I ever read by Stephen King didn’t have any monsters, per se. It didn’t have the Walking Man, or any Wolves of Calla or any great evil, other than the evil that lurks in the human heart. The scariest book I have ever read by Stephen King was Hearts in Atlantis.
Hearts in Atlantis wasn’t even a novel, it was several shorter stories combined in one book. But the title story, Hearts in Atlantis, was about addiction. Not just any old addiction, either, but an addiction I had experienced.
It was my sophomore year in university. I had sailed through the trauma of freshman year with grace, great grades, I felt very confident. That summer, back home, I had taken bridge lessons, and holy smokes – I loved the game. It all made sense to me, and I loved figuring the probabilities and the possibilities, who had what card, how I could finesse that card, how I could WIN. I loved winning.
During the summer after my freshman year, I played a lot of bridge. So it was no wonder, when I got back to school, that I discovered a whole world of bridge players. Early in the morning, before my first class, I would head for the student union and pick up a coffee – and often a game.
The problem was, if I had a particularly good hand, the little devil on my shoulder would whisper “if you skip your class, you can win this hand!” and the bigger problem was – I would listen. I could afford to skip a class here and there, I did the homework. But through the year, I spent more and more time playing bridge and less and less time in the library. At the end of my sophomore year, my grade point average had fallen one full point.
That got my attention. I really wanted academic success. I spent my junior and senior years desperately working to get my grade point average back up to an acceptable level. Once the GPA falls, however, it only inches back up incrementally. It took almost straight A’s to undo the damage I had done to myself the year of bridge playing.
After graduation, I fell back into bridge playing on the duplicate level. But after a while, I noticed that while I travelled from place to place, it was the same smoke-filled room in every new city where we ended up, surrounded by a vampire-like culture that slept a lot of the day and only came alive at night. I also noticed that most of the conversations were about “the one that got away” – how such and such a hand might have been played best. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn. So one day, I just walked away, and never looked back.
Like all addictions, from time to time I hear bridge calling. From time to time I will enter a friendly game – party bridge, but it is no longer irresistable, no longer so seductive, so attractive. Thank God. Reading Stephen King brings back the terror of addiction.
Personal Debt and Blogging
Came across this article this morning in the New York Times. Overcoming debt is not unlike overcoming other addictions – and getting support online can help. Interesting article with international application.
Debtors Search for Discipline via Blogs
When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered last week that she owed $22,302 on her credit cards, she could not wait to spread the news. Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or friends about her finances, and says she is ashamed of her personal debt.
Theo Rigby for The New York Times.
Leigh Ann Fraley, a financial educator, writes a blog about how she overcame $19,947 in credit card debt. “I teach people how to get out of debt for a living,” she said, “but I couldn’t do it myself until I started the blog.”
The King and Queen of Debt Tell All
Yet from the laundry room of her home in northern Michigan, Tricia does something that would have been unthinkable — and impossible — a generation ago: she goes online and posts intimate details of her financial life, including her net worth (now negative $38,691), the balance and finance charges on her credit cards, and the amount of debt she has paid down since starting a blog about her debt last year ($15,312).
Her journal, bloggingawaydebt .com, is one of dozens that have sprung up in recent years taking advantage of Internet anonymity to reveal to strangers fiscal intimacies the authors might not tell their closest friends.
Like other debt bloggers, Tricia believes the exposure gives her the discipline to reduce her debt. “I think about this blog every time I’m in the store and something that I don’t need catches my eye,” she told readers last week. “Look what you all have done to me!”
A decade after the Internet became a public stage for revelations from the bedroom, it is now peering into the really private stuff: personal finance.
The blogs open a homey and sometimes shockingly candid window on the day-to-day finances of American households in a time of rising debt, failing mortgages and financial uncertainty. In 2006, the average American household carried about $7,200 in revolving debt (mostly on credit cards) and $21,000 in total debt.
A blog called “Poorer Than You” (kgazette.blogspot.com) describes the financial doings of a 20-year-old film-school dropout. (Typical post: “Yesterday we ate lunch at Subway for a total of $8.00, and went grocery shopping … with a list! And didn’t buy anything that wasn’t on it!”) On saveleighann.blogspot.com, Leigh Ann Fraley, 37, provides daily accounts of her escape from $19,947 in credit card debt.
“I teach people how to get out of debt for a living, but I couldn’t do it myself until I started the blog,” said Ms. Fraley, who conducts seminars in personal finance for a bank in Northern California. “I started to write everything down, like, ‘I saved 20 cents today by parking at a meter that still had time on it.’ I tell things I wouldn’t tell my family.” When she got out of debt in December, she said, “The blog was the first people I told.”
A Boston couple who call themselves the King and Queen of Debt started their his-and-hers blog, “We’re in Debt” (wereindebt.com), last March as a way to talk to each other about their debt. They owed $34,155.70 on their credit cards at the time, and an additional $120,000, mostly in student loans.
“My wife and I have good communication skills in every avenue of life except finances,” said the King of Debt, insisting on anonymity because, he said, “We don’t want our parents to find out and kill us.”
Starting the blog, he said, “was a way to communicate.”
Tricia started her blog after reading the online account of another woman, thedebtdefier.blogspot.com, who said she had paid off her credit card debt of $19,794.23 in a little more than a year.
Like other bloggers interviewed for this article, Tricia said she and her husband had arrived at their debt gradually, not by big financial crises but by regularly spending more money than they made, using credit that was offered freely by credit card companies.
“It was nothing over the top,” said a Georgia blogger who calls himself N.C.N., for No Credit Needed, describing how his credit card balance reached $11,510.22.
“Just pretty much what everyone I know does and continues to do,” N.C.N. said. “Every month I’d say, ‘We’re going to pay off this credit card completely.’ Then I’d say, ‘O.K., just this month we’ll let it slide.’ Then you wake up and you have $5,000 on your credit card.” He says on his blogs (ncnblog.com and ncnnetwork.com) that he has no debt now and no credit cards. Like other blogs, his sites run advertisements for debt-reduction services, and N.C.N. says he makes a small profit.
Tricia said her credit problems began in her freshman year at Michigan Technological University, when she opened a Visa account in return for the campus signup premium, a large candy bar. Since then, she said, she has rarely made more than minimum payments. As credit card companies offered her more cards and deeper credit lines, she said she kept her balance close to the maximum, eventually topping $37,000. Even as her credit card debt surpassed her annual income, she assumed that someday she would make more money and pay it off.
She said she never discussed her debt with family or friends. “You don’t want them to know,” she said. “Our parents hope for the best for us, and it’s hard to let them know we’re struggling. And with friends, you don’t want them to think less of you. And when you go out with friends you don’t want to say, ‘Oh, I can’t do that, I don’t have the money.’ ”
Keeping the blog, she said, has made her conscious of her spending. Though most of her readers are strangers, she worries about letting them down.
“I know that if I use my credit card, I’ll have to go on there and say I used it. I’ll have to fess up. I’ve been wanting one of those L.C.D. TVs for quite a while now, but every time I see them, I think about having to come on the blog and say I bought it. Because we don’t need it, we have a TV, but it’s still a temptation that’s there. And I’m sure if I wasn’t blogging we’d already have it.”
For the engaged couple who say they are behind a blog called “Make Love, Not Debt” (makelovenotdebt.com; net worth: negative $70,787.94), the feedback from readers has not always been gentle. “People have very strong feelings about debt,” said the blog’s female half, who calls herself Her. “People were appalled by my spending, like buying a $500 pair of shoes.”
“Just having the amount of debt we have is offensive to a lot of people,” said Him, the blog’s other half. “People will levy personal attacks for mistakes we acknowledge. We don’t think that’s quite necessary.”
When they discussed wanting a $25,000 wedding, one reader scolded them: “Grow up, a wedding isn’t about how much debt you put yourself or your parents into. If you are worried about that, in my opinion, you are not ready for marriage.”
Tricia said the comments she had gotten had been overwhelmingly supportive. But she acknowledges that the fear of censure can be useful as well.
“I feel embarrassed about it,” she said of her debt. “I try not to, though. I try to put a spin on it when I start to get too down. I think to myself if we didn’t get in this mess and get out of it, we would’ve just kept going the way we were. But now we have health insurance, we’re saving for retirement. We could’ve just been living on the edge, but not underneath.”
Anne Rice and Christ the Lord out of Egypt: A Novel
Remember Interview with a Vampire? Remember the feeling, as you read it, that you were probably treading very close to the essence of evil, and that evil was seductive and incredibly attractive? Anne Rice created a world of believable vampires, vampires you could identify with, vampires who created a cult following, and a legion of goth vampire wannabe’s, her prose was that seductive, that inviting, that . . . . irresistable.
Like a siren song, the voice pulled you from book to book, leading you along. With each book, a twist, and suddenly all the assumptions from the previous book were turned upside down, no longer valid when seen from another perspective. Rice lured you down the garden path step by step, and it’s hard to tell at what point you give up your will to resist the siren call.
Recently Anne Rice experienced a re-conversion to Christianity, and is now devoting her writing talents to serving God. This newest book, Christ the Lord out of Egypt, is as thoroughly researched as all the earlier books, and speculates on the early years of the Christ. The book opens in Egypt, with a seven year old Jesus, wise beyond his years but still a child. He sees things he doesn’t understand, he hears things he knows to be significant but doesn’t know why, and when he asks questions, like what happened in Bethleham around the time of his birth, Joseph and Mary, his parents, won’t answer. In fact, they don’t want him to bring up the subject at all, and they tell him they will give him the answers when he gets a little older.
Meanwhile, he hears things, and ponders them. He asks older relatives, and wise teachers. Little by little, he gathers pieces of a puzzle, the puzzle of his background and his identity. He accidently kills a playmate, and brings him back to life. He prays for snow, and it snows. He learns self control through the exercise of powers he doesn’t know he has, he learns to limit himself, and to hide himself.
With his family, they leave Alexandria and return to Jerusalem and then Nazareth, building a new life with their extended family. He grows, he ponders, and he is given a few more pieces of information.
You would think that with Anne Rice’s talent and with her research skills, this would be a fascinating book, but sadly, it is flat, and dull. I wonder why it is easy to make evil so seductively alluring, but it is so hard to bring goodness to life in a believable way? I read the book all the way through, hoping it would get better, but it never did.
There are people – Jan Karon comes to mind – who write about goodness and good people in a vibrant way, making goodness vital and attractive. Wish Anne Rich could find that vein.
Winter Cold Punch
We’re so romantic. Valentine’s Day found us sniffing and snorting, and coughing great big (highly unattractive) coughs. We did manage a great Valentine’s Dinner at a nearby restaurant. As we dined, we saw at least four young couples with tiny babies enjoying a romantic, candlelit dinner – it warmed our hearts. But we skipped date night, watched a movie and this morning I fixed up some hot punch to give us a psychological boost.
This is very much the same as the Christmas Rum Punch, but no rum, and lighter on the spices. It is full of vitamin C, goes down easy, and permeated even the stuffiest nose with the sweet smells of cinnamon and clove.
1 jar Cranberry Juice (Can be Cran-Rasberry, or Cran Grape, or what the Sultan Center has!)
1 quart/litre Pineapple Juice (Sultan Center has FRESH pineapple juice!)
1/4 cup brown sugar
12 inches cinnamon stick (4 sticks of the small Ceylon cinnamon sticks)
1 Tablespoons whole cloves
1 orange peel
Bring to a simmer, and quickly scoop out the cinnamon and clove pieces, or it will get too spicy. When cool, if there is any left, pour back into empty cranberry juice jar, refrigerate until the next time, and microwave until hot. It’s the combination of heat and Vitamin C that knocks out the cold/flu going around, and even better, it smells yummy.
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