Over dinner with friends this weekend we debated the Danish cartoons and the corresponding backlash. I’m particularly interested in the issue, having parents of mixed religion — a Nigerian Muslim father and a Danish Christian mother — and a childhood spent in Nigeria and Canada. At the core of it I think most non-Muslims, especially the ardent free-speech advocates, either don’t understand or refuse to acknowledge the real motivations behind the reaction. Abbas Raza has an inkling: he posted an essay today on 3 Quarks Daily that provides insight and great food for thought. In my humble opinion, he is right on target. Continue reading →

Katrin, Grace and I watched this movie last night, and we all really enjoyed it. We spent 30 minutes afterwards analyzing and failing to reach concensus on what it’s about. Themes: the ephemeral nature of life; isolation; trouble-free superficiality versus painful profundity; and the desperate human need for affection, belongingness, acceptance. The movie conveys an eery sensation of barely but gently skirting disaster. The story and characters are quirky, fragile, real, and darkly funny throughout.

I love films that leave you with that tip-of-the-tongue feeling: you know you’ve just learned something about life, but you can’t quite articulate the newly gained knowledge. I was left wanting more, and definitely want to track the writer, Miranda July. I’ve added this movie to my list of really good stuff.

Links:
The official movie website
Miranda July’s website
IMDB coverage

P.S. Caveat Emptor. Difficult subject matter. And I’m told I have quirky taste in movies.

For those of you who browse the web site directly rather than reading my RSS feed, I spent some time mucking around with site design over the past two days. You should see a new theme, a “most popular items” widget, and a “recent activity” widget that displays recent comments on posts. You should also be seeing images in many posts now; I’ll try to do this more from now on. Lastly, most long posts are truncated on the main page so that you can easily scan all the articles without too much scrolling. I did some testing in Firefox and IE. Please comment here if any of this doesn’t work.

Kudos to Richard and Emma Boakes — I took design inspiration from their elegant site and I’m using Richard’s MostWanted WordPress plugin .