Raif Badawi, Week 3

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For the third week in a row, Raif Badawi, a writer in Saudi Arabia, was not whipped fifty times yesterday as part of his public punishment for insulting his nation’s official religion in his blog. No one is breathing a sigh of relief that this counts as sparing him, or that he is about to be freed.

Last week, when I wrote about this ongoing story (“An Update about Raif Badawi“), I quoted one speaker from an article in the Guardian and gave the partial identification given in the article as the complete identification of the speaker. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein is indeed a Jordanian prince in the Hashemite dynasty, the same family that the current King of Jordan is the head of. Perhaps more importantly, Prince Zeid is the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and has been since September. It is not the Guardian’s mistake that I did not do all of my reading. It is my error.
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Fly Away Home

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Fairy tales and superstitions come down to us from the past like hearsay. “They say Mother Goose used to sing this to her grandchildren: ‘Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home …'”

Who the heck is this Mother Goose? And why are her stories and rhymes so apocalyptic? “Your house is on fire and your children … .” Sheesh.
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Bring Back the ABCs, Part Two

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There was no contest, so you can breathe easy. No contest, no winners, no competitors, no losers, no forfeitures. Almost a little over a month ago, in “Bring Back the ABCs,” the writer of this website discussed a writing form called an “abecedarian.” An abecedarian is a twenty-six word prose-poem, in which the first word begins with A and the twenty-sixth and final word begins with Z.

An example:

About Butch Cassidy Don English found good heightened information: Just knowing lies makes not one person quite really sated. Try under “Violence,” William Xavier. Yours, Zara

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