Dear America,
Your complete and utter lack of cultural sensitivity is appalling. If you missed it, six Muslim imams were booted from a flight Monday after passengers complained about them reciting evening prayers in the boarding area and changing seats once on board. The irony is that the six clerics were returning home after a conference on religious tolerance.

Please file this away for future reference: Islam is the largest religion in the world, with well over 1 billion adherents. One of the five pillars of Islam is to pray five times a day. While not all Muslims pray at all specified times, many pray at least once or twice each day. This ritual can be conducted anywhere and involves kneeling on a small rug (or piece of cardboard or whatever is handy) facing Mecca. This public display of religion is not unlike Catholics receiving an ashen cross on Ash Wednesday, Jews wearing the yam aka, or Hindus wearing a turban. It appears that the First Amendment doesn’t apply in airports anymore, especially if it involves speaking in another language or practicing a religion that doesn’t fall neatly within Judeo-Christian tradition (that’s a whole other can of worms I’ll save for later).

Your protestations are completely unacceptable. If you haven’t noticed, people who are traveling together often talk to each other, pass phones, books, magazines and bags back and forth between one another, and change seats so they can sit next to each other. So if someone does that and he or she is speaking English, that’s completely fine, and you might not even notice it, right? But suddenly, if those people are speaking some other language, they have broached some unwritten rule about how to be an airplane passenger, right?

I’m sorry if globalization is too much for you to handle. Go stick your head in the sand. And if I ever run into you on some flight, believe you me when I say you’ll get an earful from me. Maybe it will be in English, but maybe it will be in Arameah. Mainly just because I want to see how you’ll react to a white guy with a beard speaking Arabic.

There are many ways in which graduate students deal with stress. Some turn to food, changing their diet in many healthy (or not-so-healthy) ways. Some procrastinate, choosing to avoid work as long as possible until it kicks them in the rear. And some exercise.

I’m among the latter variety of graduate student. During the stressful “buildup to finals” time, I run. Due to various and sundry injuries, I have to run on an elliptical trainer. Over the past few weeks, I’ve gradually increased my time, and am now running 40 minutes a day, 4-5 times a week. Depending on how fast I am, I cover anywhere between 4.2 and 4.4 miles.

These aren’t usually philosophical runs. I pick up whatever trashy magazine is lying around the Y, and read it while listening to music. This is how I become aware of things like the breakup of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe (about which I could really care less), or that Britney Spears finally dumped her loser husband.

Today, while engrossed in an article about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, a little thought popped into the back of my mind. Why am I running? I say it’s to alleviate stress, but there are so many other ways that I could do that.

And am I running away from something, or running towards it?

I’m convinced that every twentysomething with a brain goes through the “holy crap, what am I doing” phase. I think I have a direction, but sometimes I don’t know what that direction is. I know what I’m expected to do. I’m expected to become a productive little capitalist, but that’s so tough when there’s so much inequality in our society that our government doesn’t seem to give a damn about. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the movie “Garden State,” standing on top of a bulldozer and screaming my heart out into the bottomless abyss. It’s an abyss of student loan debt, tax breaks for the wealthy, and increasing numbers of men and women my own age dying in a desert country thousands of miles away.

This is often how I felt during the heyday of the Republican control of Congress, screaming and screaming, without anybody really hearing what I was saying. And now that the country is riding the big blue wave, why can’t I stop screaming? Will the Democrats really change anything, or am I going to lose my voice?

So am I running away from something, or running towards it? I don’t know. I’ve come to the conclusion that I run because the run itself is really the only thing I can control. I run because I don’t know what else I can do.

Maybe I’ll write in Jon Stewart for president in 2008. If history is any indicator, the other choices won’t be any good, anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2WXKzDrcZc (Full video of the incident)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD10h2MRieM (Short clip with subtitles)

In a word, the video is horrifying. Off camera, we hear a voice saying “I will not tolerate this,” and a police officer responding with “Get up, stand up.” The student responds again with “I was just leaving.” And then we hear screams of pain, followed by “I have a medical condition!”

They do not stop. In total, Iranian-American UCLA student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, was tasered five times by UCLA campus police. His crime? Refusing to show his UCLA ID card in the library. UCLA students who witnessed the event reported that Tabatabainejad was tasered after police already had handcuffs on him.

He probably should have just showed his ID card to the librarian. However, according to students who witnessed the event, Tabatabainejad was the first person in the library asked to do this. He refused because he thought he was being racially profiled. When the police showed up, Tabatabainejad was leaving. According to a local news organization (http://www.nbc4.tv/news/10344519/detail.html), Tabatabainejad fell to the floor when police put their hands on him, to avoid being part of an incident of racial profiling.

What happened next has quickly circled the globe, spread by student groups and Youtube. The police demanded that Tabatabainejad stand up, not giving him any time to recover from the taser shot. He may have been unable to stand up, as it can take anywhere from five to fifteen minutes to recover from a taser shot. The police taser him again. Other students begin gathering, demanding that the police give their badge numbers, and pleading with them to stop hurting Tabatabainejad. In response to a request for his badge number, a member of the campus police says “If you don’t back off, you’ll be tasered too.”

Was this racial profiling? With the incident that started all of this, I’m not sure. It could have been — before the police showed up, everything that happened took place off camera. However, I believe that the police responded with excessive force to both Tabatabainejad and the other UCLA students. It is ethically irresponsible to taser a student for something so small as refusing to show his ID card in the campus library. Mostafa was leaving — students reported that he had his backpack on and he was walking towards the library door. Do I believe that Tabatabainejad was targeted by the police on account of his race? Yes, I do.

Would the UCLA police have done that to a white student? How have they responded in the past to similar incidents? This is what we as a concerned public must ask. These videos show an egregious abuse of power, and UCLA students have every right to be outraged about it. What’s horrible is how concerned students who requested the badge numbers of the policemen were threatened with tasering themselves. That is beyond unacceptable.

Police across the country take a vow to serve and protect. Using the badge to threaten the pubilc is not part of this vow. Overstepping your authority and cruelly tasering a student for refusing to leave a campus library is also not part of this vow.

It’s time we rise up and demand that our public servants — our police — truly serve and protect us.

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, and this seemed like as good a time as any. As most bloggers know, one of the most rewarding parts of this enterprise is seeing where your visitors come from, and how they got to you. Based on several months of careful study, here are some of the most illuminating and interesting search queries that brought people to the Weekday Hump.

Fruit flies. Variations of this term have been huge lately. Apparently a lot of people have problems with them. My favorite, surely written by someone on the brink of death: “fruit flies everywhere”.

The McArabia. One of McDonald’s specialized meal options for Middle Eastern countries, there is apparently precious little information out there about it, since people are flocking to the Weekday Hump in McFlurries to learn about them. This is actually quite a McCoup, because the Hump comes up in the top 10 for a variety of searches for this fine product, and sometimes even above McDonald’s own site. So since you’re here wondering about it, here’s the skinny. The chicken is good, though both versions (there is kofta, or ground lamb, available in Egypt too) suffer from too much mayo/sauce. The pita is much thicker and more dense than any aiish I’ve gotten in a bakery, so that also means it will be more carby. Basically, they took perfectly fine Egyptian food and Americanized it, then shipped it back to Egypt.

Oregon towns. Remember the Tiny Oregon Towns series? It’s still pretty popular, as such things go. And if you google “cool oregon towns,” this is the third result. We should diversify into tourism promotion.

Ear stapling. Really people, please stop searching for this. I know it’s supposed to be a homeopathic remedy, but whenever I see “ear stapling alabama” or “misisippi ear stapling,” I cringe, and not just because you can’t spell Mississippi.

“getting condoms in egypt” is a victory in my book. Then there are a few that I just can’t figure out. Lots of searches for AP Daybooks, all pointing to one post in which I mentioned it. They aren’t here folks. You need a subscription to read them. Then there was, “killing accidentally someone is deviant behavior”. Right. And more disturbingly, someone in Japan went on the prowl for “Sexual Harrassment, ice breaker games”. I can only hope they didn’t find what they were looking for here.

That’s my dramatic recreation of some conversation had at NBC recently. Their nightly news last night finally launched a podcast version of their show, which is mostly good. Props to them for including the whole show, not just highlights like ABC did when they started with the podcasts earlier this year. Also, props for no ads. But alas, they aren’t releasing the podcasts until 10 p.m. EST each night, 3.5 hours after the live newscast ends on the East Coast and half an hour after it ends on the West Coast. Time zones are nothing new, and I’m not sure that holding the podcast that long will make people on the West Coast watch the real version (with ads) instead of the podcast. But at least it’s there, and at 80-odd MB, it’s pretty light too. Now I just need to get me one of them video-playing iPod thingers. Or maybe a Zune. Maybe not.

More posts coming this weekend, rumor has it.

He said incredulously. American taxpayers have spent millions of dollars on electronic voting machines made by Diebold and a handful of other companies. Their shortcomings and the ease with which they can be hacked have been well-documented. But from today’s Washington Post article on the Webb-Allen race in Virginia, we learn this:

Seated at four rows of desks, the canvassers examined piles of paper strips that looked like last week’s grocery receipts — printouts of vote totals from each machine.

That’s an interesting way to describe what the canvassing looks like. I imagine a scene something like this:

Source: Associated Press
All told, I must say I have a lot of confidence in how things are functioning six years later. All of the shortcomings aside, you’d think that computerized touchscreen voting would have at least let the human race move beyond staring at crumpled little slips of paper.

It has come to my attention that I haven’t blogged in a while. My team of crack risk-management analysts are reviewing the situation and a full report is expected… later. In the mean time, some thoughts.

Remember the heinous clattering from upstairs that kept us awake at night and made us fear for our lives? The apartment clearly was being rearranged, since there is a variety of as-yet-unknown heavy machinery at work. We think it’s either dry cleaning equipment or a mechanical loom. Needless to say, particularly with the dull thuds and humming going all day and starting about 5 a.m., I’m getting close to going up there and doing something about it. I’m practicing the Arabic conversation in my head. So far I’ve figured out, “Hi, I’m Peter. I live in the apartment below you.”

You can only get hot water out of our shower reliably before 9 a.m. After 6:30 p.m., you can get about 90 seconds of hot water before it goes cold. At all other times, you are equally likely to be scalded or left frozen. For the first time in my life, I fell down in the shower last week during just such an incident. It was an incredible thud, clatter, and smash as shampoo bottles careened across the bathroom and the weird wooden-beaded curtain thing on the wall next to the shower came cascading down, taking the fake foliage with it.

The guys at the grocery store take great delight whenever we come by. They expect us to get a box of water every time, though we usually don’t need it. Nonetheless, they get great entertainment from watching me huff it on my shoulder (I’m sure if I asked, they’d deliver) while Danica takes the small bag filled with milk or whatever.

Finally, I figured out where the $2 billion in annual foreign aid that the U.S. sends to Egypt actually goes: reflective striping on traffic cop uniforms. They are amazingly bright all of a sudden, and this is the only logical explanation I could come up with. Garbage collection, improved health care, education, and social services be damned.