How Do You Spell the Name of Libya's Leader?

I've been asking myself this question a lot since the start of recent risings in Libya. I've grown up thinking the crazyman's name was "Muammar Qaddafi" and got confused when I first saw "Gaddafi." Had I been wrong this whole time?

According to the Washington Post, I'm not the only one who was confused. ABC News put together a list of the 112 different spellings of the leader's name. Arabic transliteration is a difficult thing but I would think journalists would choose one source, say the AP or CIA World Factbook, and just go with it. Not so easy. According to the ABC piece, "the Library of Congress lists 72 alternate spellings, and the New York Times, Associated Press and Xinhua news sources used 40 additional spellings between 1998 and 2008."

This is worse than the crisis over how to pronounce "Ahmadinejad."

I've also noticed that this guy rivals Michael Jackson in the number of unfortunate portraits that exist of him on the internet.

Waiting for Mubarak

According to AlJazeera, the revolution is here! I've already been waiting for Mubarak to speak for 35 minutes. Is this yet another false start? The suspense is unbearable.

Egypt: Tragedy or Revolution?

I am struck by how much Americans' opinions on the current unrest in Egypt differ according to what new outlets they follow. Some folks say "Oh, it's so sad, all the killing..." and others, perhaps those who watch Al Jazeera, see current events as a mark of exciting things to come for the Middle East and North Africa. Others are worried about what all this means for Israel. Me, I'm sad about the bloodshed but I'm more excited than anything else.

I hope this means an end to the era of presidents-for-life and the beginning of true democracy in the region. Of course, it will take time. I think it was Rami Khouri who, in a panel discussion at Harvard Kennedy School Thursday night, pointed out that it took America more than a hundred years after the birth of its democracy to grant women and blacks the right to vote. Even if Presidents Mubarak (Egypt), Bouteflika (Algeria) and Salih (Yemen) follow in Ben Ali's (Tunisia) footsteps, and step down or go into exile tomorrow, we cannot expect freedom, jobs, cupcakes and rainbows to materialize immediately. Egypt, for example, has been struggling with high unemployment and a host of other issues for a long time. Additionally, in the case of Mubarak, as stated by Harvard Kennedy School professor Tarek Masoud in the New York Times, it might not actually be a good idea for him to step down tomorrow as the protesters suggest. The Egyptian constitution states that only an elected president can dissolve the parliament and call for new elections. This means that if Mubarak leaves without electing a new parliament, an essential part of the "orderly transition" that Secretary Clinton has called for, an interim president will be stuck with a largely useless, Mubarak-era parliament. I just hope that Clinton and Obama can convince Mubarak, and the Egyptian people, that a little more time in office is a good thing.

For a good collection of news and resources related to what's happening in Egypt and Tunisia, check out this site made by Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

You can also follow The Middle East Initiative Twitter feed, maintained by myself and an awesome intern from Emmanuel College.

Vortexes, Radicles and the Healing Powers of Water

The temperature in Boston is currently in the low teens and we're expected to get more snow tonight. It saddens me that while we're getting bombarded with all this snow, and even people in Atlanta are getting hit by blizzards, residents of the arctic city of Iqaluit, Canada had to cancel their New Year's snow mobile parade because of unseasonably warm conditions. Apparently, the crazy weather of last two years cannot yet be attributed to global warming but might be a result of a weakening polar vortex. I wish there was something I could do, like send that vortex a care package full of Campbell's Chunky Soup and EmergenC. "Beef up vortex! You can do it! Hold that cold air up there!"

As huddle in my sweaters, cursing the vortex and awaiting New England Snowmageddon: Part 6, there are some things I am thankful for. On Saturday I attended the first session of the Boston Natural Areas Network's (BNAN) Master Urban Gardener (MUG) program. In eight weeks, I'll be a super volunteer for BNAN, equipped with new knowledge on pest management, composting, starting community gardens and other fun things. This means I'll be helping out in community gardens across the city. I'm hoping I can also use my new skills and new network to both start a community garden in the empty lot on my street and launch an annual Jamaica Plain Garden Tour. If fancy neighborhoods like Beacon Hill can have garden tours, why can't we? There are plenty of amazing private and public gardens in the neighborhood, as well as people who like plants.

In addition to being excited about the knowledge I'll gain in this program, I am very pleased with the diversity in my class. I was expecting the crowd to be mostly middle aged white women but we've actually got a great mix of ages, races and backgrounds, and there are a lot of dudes. Some folks know little about gardening and others have been gardening in zone 6 for decades. I feel like I already have 30 + new friends to dork out with and with whom I can make stupid jokes about seedlings being radicle. Most of all, I look forward to being addressed as "Master."

After my first class, Wyatt took me to the famous Cuddles and Bubbles hotel in Hyannis on the Cape. Some might find themed hotels tacky but I found hanging out in a hot tub all night to be particularly satisfying. We had wine, cheese and strawberries in the tub before heading to Main Street for dinner. After dinner, we got back in the water and ate chocolate. I'm not sure I've ever felt so relaxed. I felt like poop on a stick all last week and now, three bubble baths later, I feel like a rock star. Leslie, our AfroFlow Yoga teacher, always reminds us we're more than 60% water and praises the elements' healing properties. Especially now, I feel there is a lot of truth in that and I'm adding baths to my list of healthy habits. On the not-so-healthy habits front, my boss just brought me a box of Arab sweets from Jordan and I feel like the post-holiday diet is never gonna get off the ground. Oh well.

More on Entrepreneurship

Don't keep looking for jobs, make one.

Learning: It's what's for dinner

This week I learned that the internet is far from carbon neutral. The energy necessary to maintain ever growing servers might as well be the mountain top removal of the future, another problem that could go largely unnoticed and unchecked for decades. Ugh.

I'm still on this big entrepreneurship kick and I wonder if someone can create a creative business to alleviate the issue. I've started to think of social entrepreneurship as the answer to all social problems, especially in this time of high-unemployment. For example, what if, instead of fighting with coal companies in West Virginia about the value of environment vs. jobs, we just gave local communities the tools they need to create their own companies and economies? Surely there must be some alternative to the coal economy.

Seeing people speak at Harvard has been neat, although I do it so often now I didn't go to the Obama rally today because I didn't feel like seeing another person talk at me. But - back to the positive - I am learning a lot of new things.


At a recent talk called "Understanding the Yemeni State," I learned that part of the reason the U.S. and Yemen butt heads is that Yemen is unwilling to give up its unusual security arrangement. The official army is only about 60,000 troops and the government relies heavily on tribal reserve units for big conflicts and to keep tabs on the country's hard-to-patrol areas. Additionally, poetry is a huge part of the political process in Yemen and there is a long tradition of using words rather than coercive force to influence actors. Throughout Yemen's history, leaders who were not especially eloquent would hire poets to help push new policies forward.

Thursday, I went to a seminar about the floods in Pakistan, said to be one of the most devastating natural disasters of this decade. Even though not that many people died, the flood wiped out much of the livestock in the poorest region of the country, where people typically don't have titles to their land and assets are held in livestock. It's been estimated that it will take $30 billion to replace what's been destroyed. Only a few billion has been pledged by the international community so far so basically, the situation is really bad.

Rescue efforts in Pakistan have been hindered by poor record keeping and a lack of access to real time data. A lot of villages affected by flooding just simply aren't on the map and neither are the nearest hospitals. Luckily, there is a small group of civilian computer engineers working on the problem. More about that here.

Much of the discussion at the seminar addressed challenges to emergency preparedness and response. Harvard Kennedy School's Dutch Leonard discussed issues with the current trend in actions by the international community: underinvestment in prevention, overinvestment in recovery and the tendency of Western countries to abandon people mid-recovery. I was shocked to hear him say that, while the earthquake in Haiti happened almost a year ago, not a single US dollar has made it to Haiti yet. What!?! Apparently, if we help countries decentralize both emergency preparedness and response efforts, we can expect better results in the future. Bangladesh has done a good job in this category as a poor country that has managed to address natural disaster preparedness, in their case for cyclones. So, that was all kind of neat to learn.

Wednesday, we had our second ever Article Club meeting, co-hosted by Wyatt and Kaz. The article was about friendship and we ended up talking a lot about how Facebook impacts friendship and how strong friendships, or lack there of, influence the divorce rate in America. I enjoyed our discussion, but I'm hoping the next article has nothing to do with the internet. I still like to think it does not completely rule my life. We had around 15 people in attendance, lots of chili and lots of chocolate chip cookies. Drew, an Article Club member and recent Portland, OR transplant, has a great little blog of daily poems that incorporate the top Google hits of the day.

GOOD magazine has an interesting blog post about the word "like", and how it is not an "Americanism inflicted on us by the Valley Girls of the eighties" but rather an older habit used by English-speakers all over the world. Les Janka, an avid anti-"like" advocate, will be disappointed to hear that.

It's starting to get chilly again in Boston and already I am fearing the worst. I'm remembering what it's like to feel the draft blow through my living room as I, wrapped in all the clothes I own, hold my nose to keep it warm while trying to read a book. I thanked God every time I walked outside this week and discovered that, although my house was freezing, I did not in fact need to be wearing long underwear. Cory Branan recently tweeted that he was starting a petition to move New York to the South. Can I do the same thing with Boston? I think Boston in North Carolina would be ideal.

If anyone has any tips for baiting mouse traps, please hook a sista up. More than a year into our epic battle against the rodents, they've gotten too smart for us and stopped going in the traps. I recently resorted to buying poison but they appear to be too smart for that too. Little bastards.

As reported Friday, October 9th in the New York Times

It was announced today that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. The first and only word that came to mind in my pre-coffee morning daze was "LAAAME." I mean, really? The New York Times headline said he received it "for his extraordinary efforts to strenghten international diplomacy and cooperations between peoples." Yes, the international community likes him a lot but he HASN'T DONE ANYTHING YET. I feel it's no longer just America that has lost all it's imagination. And, from what I understand, this is one of the widest interpretations of Alfred Nobel's orginal guidelines for choosing the award recipient. I really like this response from Friends of the Earth, which points out that, between Afghanistan and the climate crisis, my boy has A LOT of peacemaking left to do.

My friend James said he'd hoped the headline was a joke, perhaps part of a larger fake news day, after reading in the Space & Cosmos section that NASA bombed the moon. I wish, in this economic crisis, we could put all the NASA folks to work doing something else. I'm sure they'd all hate me for saying that but can't Space wait?

After the Obama story, I gave up on real news for the day and came across this audio piece by actor and ladies man John Keegan. After a bad breakup a few years back, Keegan challenged himself to master the art of charming women, setting personal quotas for phone numbers and dates to be achieved each week. He was so successful, the Manhattanite now coaches single men on how to pick up ladies, for the small price tag of $200 a session.

That's nice and all but I'd like to point out two things:

Number one, Keegan is an actor. He's not bad looking and he was getting paid to charm way people before he started using it to get broads in his bed.

Number two, women can't do this as easily. He didn't say they could, but it is something I think about. I'm frustrated with how easy it is for guys to pick people up. It's not just about social constraints but also physical advantages and disadvantages. I had a short conversation with someone about limitations of sex at our house party over the weekend and he asked me, if I was born a man, would I be a different person. My answer? Absolutely. I would do all kinds of things I am too scared to do as a woman, namely hitch hiking and hitting on random strangers.

People may disagree, some women are fearless, but personally, I feel I can't just pick up any guy I meet. There are considerations, the biggest one being potential for sexual assault. Living in fear sucks, let me tell you. It's so limiting. John Keegan, I salute you and your abilities and am very, very jealous that you can meet a million ladies a week and never worry that one might strangle you in an alley and try to rape you.