daily prompt

Be It Ever so Humble

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The word “humblebrag” has been around long enough that even I have heard of it. (Is that a humblebrag?) A collection of examples has been collected in a book that I have not yet read, entitled, “Humblebrag.” The word is common enough that it is even in the Oxford Dictionary, at least in the online edition.

For some reason, I only recently learned the term and, egomaniac that I am, I thought that I had come up with the concept years ago. I certainly had not.
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‘Who Killed the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown?’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a couple of hours, we will be pumpkin hunting, my girlfriend and I. They call it “pumpkin picking” for some reason, but the only “picking” that will be happening will be me pointing at a nominee and my girlfriend either shaking her head no or collecting it for us.

Like many other activities, I have not gone pumpkin collecting since childhood, a period of my life that I mostly wasted in an 18-year-long wish for it to be over. (Instead, I lingered in it and that all ended in 2010.)

My girlfriend discovered last year that she has a talent for carving the jacks o’lantern. In a remarkable coincidence, I re-established at around the same hour that I possess no such talents, that the pumpkins and I have no rapport. My sole attempt last year, my one try at even producing a traditional (in America, in the 1970s) triangle-eyed and two-toothed smile (three teeth if ambitious; see above), was hindered by my lack of patience. I would have had more of what we like to call success if I’d set out from the beginning to carve the sucker with my two thumbnails and my deep need to weep at panic boredom.
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#FreeShawkan

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

So far in 2015, we have seen journalists beheaded with machetes, a blogger whipped with a cane as an official judicial punishment for his writing, editorial cartoonists gunned down in their office, bloggers hacked to death in Bangladesh, more than 20 journalists detained and even convicted and jailed in Egypt, and journalists detained in America for covering the racism prevalent in almost every official part of our system. Not a great year.

In August, a judge reaffirmed a guilty verdict against three al-Jazeera English journalists. Last month, President al-Sisi pardoned the journalists as a part of the annual Eid holiday tradition of leaders granting pardons. The current regime in Egypt does not much like journalists, and it is estimated that some two dozen writers and photographers are in prison in that country, having been arrested for doing their jobs. Usually, they are charged with “spying,” but more often than not they are detained for months or even years before they even hear why they were arrested or what charges they face.

Mahmoud Abu Zeid is a photojournalist whose work you may very well have seen, as his photographs have appeared in Time magazine and some of them were syndicated by Corbis. (One appears below the fold.) He covered the protests in Tahrir Square and the trial of former president Hosni Mubarak. His professional name is Shawkan. As of today, November 30, 2015, he has spent 838 days in pre-trial detention. His first court session is due to take place on December 12, but his lawyer reports to Amnesty International that he has yet to see Shawkan’s case file. Under Egyptian law, there is a two-year cap on pre-trial detention; 794 days is longer than two years.
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