The Cat de Sejour: Part the First

My, my - where has the year gone? Is it really time for me to reapply (or in the case of Mr. Cat in Rabat to apply) for the right to legally reside in this country? Must we expose ourselves to what was essentially Kafka's living model for the Castle? – just as Cairo's Mugamma Building (a 20-storeyed nightmare replete with winding corridors & unlabelled doors) was Dante's inspiration for all 7 Circles of Hell?

Time – even Arab time – waits for no one.

Alas, yes: it's time to apply for our cartes de sejour. This will be Mr. CinR's first descent into bureaucratic hell; since (CinR says dismissively) this is a mere renewal for me – and to the best of my knowledge there are few changes to last year's Entanglement in Red Tape Follies – I am rather confident that:

1) I know what I'm doing; and
2) I can actually do it.

So cocky am I that I intend to further complicate the issue by attempting to exchange money on the very day that I am applying for my card renewal. You see, the only one of the benefits of having a carte de sejour is the milksop ability to change dirhams into Euros - at a staggering maximum of 15,000 dirhams a year (or €1,500).

If this were a Greek myth, I would have been turned into a three-headed she-goat & banished to Macedonia for my hubris.

In the simplest of terms, the process is two-tiered:

1) the accumulation of authenticated supporting documents at a police station in Agdal; and
2) the completion and submission of the application forms (note my not injudicious usage of the plural) & authenticated supporting documents to the Préfecture de Police downtown; namely:

* 2 copies of the Demande d'Immatriculation form;
* 2 copies of the Fiche d’Immatriculation card (which our employer failed to provide us with);
* 1 authenticated copy or original (original! bwhahahahahahaha!!!) of your Attestation de Travail (work certificate);
* 2 authenticated copies of the main photo page of your passport;
* 2 authenticated copies of the passport page which bears your entry stamp into Morocco;
* 1 authenticated copy of your Contrat de Bail (or rental agreement);
* 9 small recent photos;
* a bulleted c.v. (presumably for use by the secret police);
* 1 60 Dirham stamp;
* the souls of 2 baptised Christian infants.

As I peruse my checklist, a little black cloud appears – any confidence I once had effectively disappears. My rental agreement has on it my name only, nor do I and Mr. CinR share the same surname (not unusual as we are not siblings). To complicate matters, I have no wish to contact my landlord and ask him to rewrite the lease as this will give him a gaping window of opportunity to increase my rent. Nonetheless, Mr. CinR needs to have proof of his domicile. I soon learn that a document from me stating that we are married should be sufficient. As an added bonus, I decide to make a photocopy of our marriage certificate and have it authenticated as well. Confidence, once again, begins to course through my veins.

I would have expected the savvier reader to have arched an eyebrow or two at my liberal use of the word “authenticated”. This is the point where our hydra seemingly simple two-tiered system begins to sprout heads as each is sliced off bifurcate into something decidedly less simple. In order to authenticate your photocopies, you must make a little excursion to the neighbourhood police office where the system of authenticating documents divaricates again:

1) the receipt of photocopied documents, their verification against the originals, and the receipt of 2 dirhams per page by Person A; and
2) the affixation of a pretty green government stamp to each copy by Person B.

Why the individual who verifies the documents and accepts your dirhams cannot then stick a stamp to the copies is a mystery to me but whose answer probably lays buried deep within Morocco’s bureaucratic morass (a French legacy) and chronic unemployment.

Off we go to Place Ibn Yassine authenticate our paperwork!

The Neighbourhood Police Station

What an interesting building! There is no helpful information desk! There are only doors radiating around a central atrium. Also radiating around the central atrium are lots & lots of people. None of these people look particularly happy. There are no helpful signs in French – Arabic, Arabic everywhere! Currently, my acquisition level of Arabic is 12 letters. What is one to do? But wait! – there is a sign in French which says photocopie – no need for a dictionary! Inwardly we rejoice and outwardly we make a beeline for the photocopying room where there are many many people clutching papers and dirhams.

But something is different. I pause. Ahhh – the room has changed somewhat since my last visit: it is now graced with several professional-looking cordons to encourage the orderly queuing of its clients. I am impressed.

Then I stop laughing and join the throng. Not knowing which employee to approach (again, the signs are only in Arabic), Mr. CinR and I take our cue from Julius Caesar and divide and conquer – we each push towards opposite ends of the high L-shaped desk with our own papers and dirhams in hand. As I am fairly petite and, on a very good day, sort of cute, I am fully confident that one of the Nice Male Employees hoping for my phone number will take pity on me and allow me to jump the pulsing horde of people.

At this point I note that there is an electronic numbering system, its LED display affixed before each employee. Presumably, numbers are called and clients are dealt it priority sequence. The displays are neither turned on, nor is the ticket issuing machine at the front door.

Then I stop laughing and in less than 3 minutes, I am waved to the front by a Nice Male Employee. Mr. CinR passes his share of our paperwork over the mob as surreptitiously as circumstances will allow and retreats to the atrium. I am concerned that his presence might hinder my thus far excellent customer service. A moment later and my dirhams are exchanged for a chit which will be redeemable for the authenticated documents. Because we are dangerously nearing the time for the afternoon siesta, I am concerned that we will have to leave and return. I ask my Nice Male Employee how long I have to wait. In French, he answers,

“The room next door.”

Experience tells me where I have to retrieve my documents but I’m pretty certain that I had initiated my request with the “when” word not the “where” word. Unlike English, in French they bear little resemblance to each other. Bravely, I try again.

“The room next door.”

Hmmm, this is getting a little tiresome. As I prepare for a third attempt (wondering how more pronounced I can make the q in quand), a young girl behind me taps my shoulder and says, “15 minutes”. I thank her, and still somewhat confused at my inability to properly articulate quand, I rejoin Mr. CinR. We join the assembly of people in the atrium; absurdly optimistic, we repair to the pick-up area fifteen minutes later. We sit. We wait. Another 5 minutes go by, then 10. I begin to recognize the faces of those behind me in the photocopying room - they pick up their documents and leave. I approach the Frazzled Woman at the desk - making her my friend will be a challenge. I gently push my chit towards her. She looks it and asks how long I've been waiting. I tell her –truthfully – 25 minutes. She then asks what I am waiting for, and I rhyme off a litany of documents. She looks under her shelf and says that they are not yet ready. Duh. Five minutes later, I re-approach the desk. She looks under her shelf and says that they are not yet ready. Five minutes later, on my third approach, she calls for assistance. A man appears and after a mildly heated exchange, he rummages through a wire basket overflowing with notarized documents. To be fair, he digs about 2 inches into the vesuvian stack of papers and announces, “They’re not there”.

“Could you look through all of them?” I suggest. With a withering stare, he returns the basket to the shelf.

At this point, I should mention that the pick-up room is attached to the drop-off room by an adjoining door; the likelihood of them actually going astray seems, in my mind, not very likely.

Again, I approach the woman. With a huff she disappears and drags my original Nice Male Employee from the other room. It is her belief that he will recognize the documents (as my description and the presence of our names on the documents clearly failed on that score). Nice Male Employee cannot find the documents but he remembers me. He smiles. He returns to his room. Frazzled Woman begins to scream but we think, not at us. Various employees begin to look under piles of paper and scurry from one room to the next. Moments later, Nice Male Employee returns bearing a sheepish expression and our documents, and slips behind a partition. Stamp stamp, stamp – voila! Our documents are ready!

Mr. CinR and I return to the atrium and double-check our folder. In it (along with our documents) is a rather important looking document that does not belong to us. Stupidly, instead of trying to find its owner in the atrium and selling it back to him for a substantial profit, I return it to the Frazzled Woman. She does not thank me. I have failed in making her my friend.

We wonder if that morning's experience would have been any different if I hadn't known what we were doing. We choose not to spend too much time considering this but come to appreciate the merits of not applying for a carte de sejour at all, but rather exiting & re-entering the country every 90 days as a tourist. So, authenticated documents in hand, we briefly consider taking a taxi downtown to submit our applications. But we have had enough for one day; instread, we go in search for refreshments, distilled or brewed.

Stay tuned for next installment of "the Cat de Sejour".

Sorbonne, Shmorbonne

I'm a sucker for a hunger strike. Anyone who is willing to systematically starve themselves to death for anything other than a (sub) zero dress size always gains my respect. Growing up, it never occurred to me that anyone would want to - or even could - just stop eating & die. I guess I thought that it was like holding your breath: eventually you'd just give up or pass out. All that changed for me 25 years ago (I so love dating myself) with Bobby Sand's successful hunger strike while incarcerated in HM Prison Maze.

His demands were rather simple but didn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of being adopted; namely the right
1) not to wear a prison uniform;
2) not to engage in prison work;
3) to freely associate with other prisoners;
4) to organise their own educational & recreational facilities;
5) to one weekly visit, letter and parcel.

Although Sands was able to successfully run for public office during the course of his strike, he ultimately died 66 days after he began fasting. Or starving himself. Whatever.

Now as it turns out, there is a group of university instructors in Morocco who are also waging a hunger strike against the government & their own gastrointestinal systems. Their beef? - for the past 2 decades, the Moroccan government has refused to recognize their French doctorates. It would seem that their PhD's aren't worth the parchment that they're printed on. If I were a sheep, I'd be pissed.

"The French doctorate is the intermediary between the diploma of higher education and the state doctorate", said Jalil Bouabid, director of human resources and budgeting at the Higher Education Ministry. "Its scientific value is less than the state diploma," he added.

Interestingly, Morocco recognizes the doctorates of other nations, but as a potential elevator-rider in this country, I would take greater comfort knowing that the engineer who separated me from a 50 meter drop to certain death was educated in Paris rather than in, say, Togo. God almighty, go ahead and exhume Abelard if you must - I don't give a rat's ass that his field was Aristotelian logic - I'd still rather have him build my elevator.

The corollary to this is that Moroccans in possession of these spurious degrees - undoubtedly created on Photoshop by an expat for a litre of argan oil or a jar of preserved lemons - can neither supervise doctoral candidates nor rise above the rank of assistant professor. The government has countered with a "compromise" which will allow these black sheep pedants to engage in competitive examinations to prove their mettle. The government is fully confident that these poseurs will fail since they were probably eating runny cheese, poking a tentative fork at snails, and quaffing bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau when they should have been attending lectures in Data Structures and Numerical Methods. The response has been to sod off. Nor can I blame them.

"The ministry should immediately have converted those concerned to the grade of professor without any other condition, save that of having four years' experience as associate professor, in accordance with the law of 1975."

Ya think?

Fourteen of the strikers have already been hospitalised, while another two have had the unhappy fate of seeing the inside of a Moroccan Emergency Room. Coincidentally (literally, not figuratively) professors in Morocco staged a walk-out on Thursday to demand, among other things, a solution to their lack of scientific equipment. Perhaps our hunger-strikers should rethink their position. Perhaps they don't want to be teaching here. Perhaps they should take their cue from Bobby Sands and run for government while they still can. That way they can change the system from the inside-out: get themselves accredited and buy a few semiconductor optical amplifiers & a pad of Postie notes while they're at it.

Whatever the case, until their situation is resolved, I'll be taking the stairs.

Negative Thoughts

There is a not insignificant segment of the planet who, by virtue of having once held a pen in their hands, has fancied themselves a writer in the rough - a cosmically thwarted individual struggling to reveal their inner bestseller. In the same vein, there are those who have picked up a camera and are instantly metamorphosized into a burgeoning Henri Cartier-Bresson. Without being accused of lobbing sharp little stones from the safety of my glass house, I admit to having no pretentions that anything that I might ever produce will grace the New York Times Best Sellers List, sending anything that Salman Rushdie writes into paroxyms of envy, or spawn a series of calendars, notecards and mousepads with photos from my "Goats of Morocco" series.

So yes, I too enjoy writing from time to time (blogging doesn't count) and I often find myself lurking about with a rather beat-up camera in hand. Possibly because my 3 photog-mentors are my brother (knarf in the city), my father (Heaven), and Mr. Cat in Rabat (currently in the kitchen) - all purists - my expertise hasn't evolved much past their camera of choice, the single reflex lens camera, although their technical skill never seemed to permeate my thick head. If I shoot a decent photo, I consider myself lucky. I eschew digital cameras (and please don't inundate me with comments about their convenience et al.) undoubtedly because of some conceit passed on to me from this triumvirate of men in my life. To further distance myself from the Great Unwashed photo-takers of the world, I also prefer shooting slide film over print because it allows me to manipulate the slides into Polaroid image transfers (see right), and also because, in my mind, nothing compares to the vibrancy in colour that a slide produces. In evolutionary terms, if I were a finch, Darwin would be holding out little hope for me.

So who cares, right? Well no one much except me & Mr. Cat in Rabat. The thing is, you can take the most breathtaking photographs in the world but if you can't find a decent developer, then you're pretty much screwed (again, please withhold comments about shooting digitally). When I moved here last year, I was rather keen to pick the brains of my predecessors and through their collective experience and mine, I learned that:

a) If you deposit black & white film (Mr. CinR's favourite medium) for processing, your prints (assuming that the developer can produce anything on paper) will be the visual equivalent of jibberish and, oft-times, the negatives will be sliced to bits - putting an adolescent cutter to shame. Pay no mind to their claims that they can process black & white. They can't.

b) If you deposit colour film and ask for it on a cd-rom (which is more economical than prints) and in high resolution (which the few publisers of my photos have requested), you will get prints and a disc, or just prints, or just a disc - but the photos will never be in high resolution. I have since purchased a scanner.

c) One hour service is really one Arab hour service which means 'whenever'. Or more likely, 'service while you wait' on your 3rd return visit. The fact that pick-up tickets are not time-stamped, nor are names & phone numbers recorded on the processing envelopes should have been my first clue.

d) Never become too attached to any print that is processed because you may never again be able to replicate it ... which brings us to:

Negatives ...

I confess that I am one of those reviled individuals who stacks loose cd's in Babel-like towers, effectively driving Mr. CinR to distraction. I may also have done the same with vinyl records as a teenager; I really can't recall. But even loathesome creatures such as I have limits, and I do take great care in handling film negatives (but admittedly not prints). Even I know enough not to leave my pawprints on my negs. Apparently this little nugget of film-developing arcana has not yet achieved "tools of the trade" status in Morocco. How so, you ask?

a) Usually, negative strips will not be cocooned lovingly into plastic sheaths but crammed mercilessly into the main photo envelope, free to explore the inner delights of said paper envelope and mingle with other like-minded negatives.

b) If (and that's a pretty big if) the developer decides that day to use negative holders, all of the strips will be shoved into one slot - you can almost hear the negatives scratching against each other as you walk home; or lastly,

c) Surprise! You will receive neither strips nor plastic sheaths but one long coil of negatives creating an excruciatingly nerve wracking fun-for-the-whole-family activity called Cut Your Own Negatives. Or you can just set them aside and use them to decorate your Christmas tree next year along with strings of popcorn and cranberries.

Is there a moral to this rather long-winded harangue tale of photographic woe? Only that I'm sending Mr. Cat in Rabat off to a local art college where he can learn to develop photos himself and build his own dark room. Oh, except there isn't one. Damn.

And you wonder why I've stopped shooting slide film.

This Week in Iran

I know that I upset the apple cart a bit last month by discussing something mind-shatteringly positive (but as it turned out, reassuringly ephermeral) about the Islamic Republic of Iran so I hope to rectify this error by bringing you:

This Week In Iran.

• Mohammad Askani, a political prisoner, was publicly hanged in Iran-Shahr;

• Amir E. and Ali H., 2 Iranian men, were hanged in a prison in Ahwaz for theft & murder;

• Mohebali Gholamian Moqaddam & A. N. (alias Amir) were hanged in public in northern and south-eastern Iran;

• More than half a dozen people ("trouble-makers") were hanged in the province of Sistan-va-Baluchestan;

• Parviz Minaki was hanged in the southern province of Hormozgan.
  

And there we have it. Forgive my indelicacy, but the number of Iranians executed last week exceeded my bowel movements.

Now, in today's news it was revealed that a convicted sex offender from the States has been ordered to wear a t-shirt that reads, "I am a registered sex offender". The individual will have to wear his scarlet letter(s) for 22 months after he is released from prison. I think that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's Oppressor President, should be forced to wear a similar t-shirt whenever he addresses the UN, or travels to enlightened pockets of civilization abroad. Perhaps one that reads, "I kill my own citizens" or, "I have effectively returned my country to the Dark Ages" or "I hate women (although their reproductive organs are nice)". You choose.

BirthWrite

or, Let Them Eat Cake

The month of October marks the beginning of the Cat in Rabat Birthday Corridor (the CRBC): a consecutive string of birthdays (with Christmas tossed in for good measure) wherein I celebrate birthday after birthday, send card after card, purchase gift after gift, contemplate my impending penury, and ask myself why I didn't go into law school or, at the very least, learn how to macramé plant-holders or create stained glass ornaments. This festive little slalom finally comes to an end in mid-February, just one greeting card shy of debtor's prison. I have always been intrigued by the fact that from childhood into adulthood (and undoubtedly into dotage), the birthdays of all of my friends (and my nuclear family) fall between October and mid-February. It is not willful (unless the stars have something to do with it) but it is nonetheless so. I simply don't associate with anyone who is not a Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn or Aquarius* - or, more precisely, born between February 13th and October 6th. I'm sure the rest of you are all terribly nice people but it's just not going to happen for us. Especially you Virgos. Quite frankly, you frighten me.

When the Corridor approached last year, I went in search of a card shop. Silly Cat in Rabat, you think because you all know the answer, there are no card shops. Well of course you're right but every once in a while I get duped into thinking that, as a capital city, I might find things like greeting cards here. I can buy frilly thongs, soya milk, and web cams (no correlation intended) so why not birthday cards?

Truth be told, there are a couple of stationary shops that sell cards: they are yellowed, faded, dank things with non-adhesive envelopes 3 times too large, and look like they've been mouldering in their drawers for half a century, which is probably fairly accurate. These cards are likely the residual stock from the days when the French were still in power. Invariably embellished with moribund roses and lusterless gardenias, with a sappy French greeting as a finishing touch, they are eerily reminiscent of cards that your great-grandmother might have sent you when you were six (except for the French). Some of them - horror of horrors - are scented (probably fetid lavender) and are an affront to the sinuses and to good taste. Not a terribly cheery lot these - they make our in sympathy cards back home look positively whimsical.

But birthdays aren't a huge affair in Morocco. They are less than huge, barely fair-to-middling. The vast majority of Moroccans have never blown out the candles on a birthday cake let alone celebrated their birthday - with the truly alarming exception of the children's birthday party at McDonald's. If ever there was a reason to quash the upwardly mobile, it's the McAwful birthday party replete with inappropriate adult music played at ear-splitting decibels while screaming brats play musical chairs. Why has no fatwa been issued against that particular offense against decency?

But I digress. No birthdays, you ask? Well, let's ask the Imam ....

"It is not necessary that everything the West does is according to logic. The biggest proof that it is the invention of the west are the song words without which this function is not complete viz. 'Happy birthday to you.' No one says, 'Happy birthday celebration' or 'Happy Blessed birthday' or any other words of this kind."

Hmmm, I never thought of that before; however, I would prefer to defer to any logician or philosopher who might be glancing through this posting. Is this true? Is singing "Happy Birthday" irrefutable proof of our degenerate illogical western society? What about "Jingle Bells"? Any thoughts on "The Wheels on the Bus Go 'Round & 'Round?"

This disease of celebrating birthdays was never prevalent among Muslims before, but since Muslims started living alongside the non-Muslims, they have been influenced by them.

True ... but one might add wiping one's bum with toilet paper and using utensils to that list.

Birthdays are celebrated usually at the end of a year and not at the beginning of the year. For example, if one's birth date is on the 1st of January, then the birthday will be celebrated on the 1st of January and not the 2nd of January.

Huh? Should I grab my slide rule for this?

Now just ponder, what intelligence is there in celebrating and showing happiness when a year has decreased in one's life.

Cake? Champagne? Prezzies?

During a birthday celebration, candles are lit on a cake, amounting to the years of the one's life. He extinguishes these candles by blowing them out and all present clap their hands. Hands are clapped at two occasions only, one at the time of joy for some achievement of his. Secondly, when someone acts foolishly, then to mock at him. Here a person is extinguishing the rays of the years of his life by blowing them out himself. Then this is no happiness, nor is it any achievement. So the clapping of hands is only for mocking at this person's stupidity.

Apparently successfully blowing out the candles on your cake (which for all of us becomes slightly more challenging each year) is an invitation to mock the celebrant. Whatever. Clap clap mock mock I get the slice with the icing roses. Oh to be a member of such a humourless joyless dour society.

Ponder that this is a custom and sign of non-believers. When it is someone's birthday, one year of his life has decreased, and not increased ... [the Imam inserts a long & ponderous allegory of a king & his treasure, the rather esoteric moral of which somehow supports the heaving of all birthday cakes against a wall and the general extinguishing of joy & merriment.]

Another object of the birthday parties is show. Islam encourages simplicity. By this attitude of show, the poor feel inferior and deprived and the rich have a superiority complex.

Show? What show? Like the half billion dollars US that Casa's Hassan II mosque cost? That qualifies as "show" doesn't it? Apparently the Imam has never attended one of my birthday parties. Or at least recently. I haven't had the Chippendale dancers perform in years and last year Mr. Cat in Rabat and I decided to stop flying all of our friends to Mykonos for the weekend.

Also, in these gatherings, music, singing, video filming and the taking of photographs and other un-Islamic and forbidden acts take place.

Alright, I'll grant the Imam that. I confess that there have been forbidden acts at my birthday parties. Often - and I hang my head in shame - I have allowed unveiled female and unrelated male guests to mingle and converse unattended. I look forward to a long eternity assembled among other like-minded infidels toasting my heels in Hell-Fire.

So, in a nutshell, the celebrating of birthdays is the custom of the Kuffaar, the non-believers and is prohibited in Islam. Except for the prophet's birthday of course - then it's okay ('Happy Blessed birthday' to him), although I don't think he gets a cake. I can't help but think that a few cards in the mail and a nice chocolate cake might make my Muslim neighbours a happier lot. As it is, I still can't differentiate the sounds they make when they preach, quarrel, or express joy. Just a thought.

---

*With the one exception of Cancer, my love sign.

Uncovered Meat & Other Horror Stories

If you've read my recent posting "9 Weird Things About Me", then you may recall that I have a propensity to wander the streets of Agdal with cat food in my purse in order to feed its strays. Little did I know that by doing so - by feeding the city's neglected and hungry felines - I was propagating an "accepted" metaphor that equates cat food with promiscuous women. So what kind of devious misogynistic byzantine awfully clever mind equates a tin of Friskies with a frisky woman?

None other than Egyptian-born Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric who once said that the 9-11 attacks were "God's work against oppressors". Now, according to the good Sheikh, cat food is pretty much the same things as an unchaste profligate slatternly whorish licentious unveiled woman.

"In a Ramadan sermon in a Sydney mosque, Sheikh al-Hilali suggested that a group of Muslim men recently jailed for many years for gang rapes were not entirely to blame ... If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it..whose fault is it - the cats or the uncovered meat?"

Of course the gang-banging rapists cats aren't to blame. I wonder if the Sheikh knows that we women are given a special manual at birth on how to seduce men, with special appendices on keeping our lipstick fresh, fixing a run in our black fishnet stockings, and casting men into the sulfurous fires of hell for all eternity. My copy is covered in red faux-fur and is much thumbed & extensively annotated. Regrettably, my mother didn't give me the illustrated edition; I believe my brother was her favourite child.

There were women, he said, who 'sway suggestively' and wore make-up and immodest dress "and then you get a judge without mercy and gives you 65 years. But the problem, but the problem all began with who (sic)?" he said, referring to the women victims.

Yes victims. The women's victims. Oh, the pitfalls of being a man, having to live in a world with oversexed women (such as I) who are nothing more than the devil's agent in his evil quest to accumulate good Muslim (male) souls. In fact, according to the Sheikh, we make up half of his standing army. "Onward Slutty Soldiers, marching off to war ...."

Women, he said, were 'weapons' used by Satan to control men.

My goodness but this makes it difficult to see Islam as a religion of "peace and enlightenment". Especially when you read a translation of his speech in which he also claims that all Christians and Jews will end up" in hell. And not part-time. For eternity. They are the worst in God's creation." As an atheist and a woman (a double damnation whammy), I assume that I'll be relegated to standing at the Hell's door, holding it open for the other "people of the book".

And what happened to the Sheikh? Needless to say, his comments didn't go unheard. Although his followers responded with a hearty round of applause as he concluded his sermon, public outcry was thunderous, and Sydney's mosque association suspended him for a whole whopping 3 months. I think parking in a handicapped spot gets you a higher sentence in most countries. He has also apologized but added that he "had only intended to protect women's honour". His apology has been accepted by the Mosque Association.

Many people - including some Muslim leaders - have called for the cleric to be dismissed from office.

Well, there's a thought. Or better yet, give him the same sentence that backwards heads-up-their-asses fundamentalists would give to a "wanton woman": stone him. No no no, I'm above this, I'm a better person in spite of my full-time tenure in hell - perhaps we could just put him on a diet of cat food for the next 6 months. That'll give him something to chew on.

9 Weird Things About Me

I have been tagged by Liosliath over at Morocco Time with the following challenge: to list 9 weird things about myself. In public. For all to see (and mock). I first balked at the idea because 1) I don't think there's anything particularly weird about me and b) if I racked my brain long enough and actually came up with an oddity or two, would I want to share them with my readers?

So I peeked at the gabillion self-revelatory stroke-fests lists of other bloggers and couldn't help but notice that most of them didn't contain weird things at all, but were rather a list of the writer's 'amusing & interesting' experiences, or included such banal & mundane so-called eccentricities as "I drink milk out of the container". Well who doesn't? Now, I have engaged in my fair share of bizarre activities and had not a few curious incidents in my life, but I don't think that makes me - or contributes to my being - particularly weird. No, I must dig deeper or consult a more objective source.

So I asked Mr. Cat in Rabat, and much to my dismay delight, he spouted a disconcertingly lengthy list in no time at all. In fact, I believe his only regret in assisting me was limiting the entries to nine. So with no further ado ...

9 Weird Things About Me

1. I am incredibly shy. Most people have trouble believing this. I don’t know why.

2. When something really good happens to me, I don't tend to share it with people, except for Mr. Cat in Rabat but only because he had it written into our wedding vows.

3. I can write (indeed I am remarkably dexterous) with my toes. Admittedly my "penmanship" was much better before my foot surgery. Please don't email me with requests for samples of my footnotes.

4. I walk around town with dry cat food in my purse so I can feed the city's strays.

5. I can’t be in a room where there is an open closet door. I have to close it.

6. I liked the movie Ishtar.

7. When I travel, I take a grey flannel stuffed teddy bear named Grey Bear (pictured above) so he might act as a surrogate in photographs. He is accommodating, decidedly unweird & very photogenic. By extension I would mention that while I enjoy taking photographs, I hate having my picture taken. Hence Mr. G. Bear.

8. I can’t brush my teeth in the bathroom; instead, I wander nomadically throughout my home as I brush brush brush. I have no problems being stationary while I floss.

9. I still haven’t figured out what I’m supposed to be in life. My father once told me that I was a late bloomer; I am still awaiting my bloom. My 2 fears are that it has passed me by undetected or that I will not recognize it when it comes. Or that it never will come. So 3 fears.

There. If I have missed anything, I'm sure that my friends and family will supply the missing neuroses without delay. So ridicule away. Have a field day.

I double tag Knarf and Byron in return.