(no subject)

Hamas says belly dance will cause Palestinians to kill people and turn into the Taliban.  Yeah, it's the belly dancers' fault, how about just not turning into the Taliban?

Though on another discussion board I frequent, a woman married into a large Palestinian family says there is no belly dancing in Palestine these days, because there are no venues and furthermore no money to be made, compared to the surrounding countries (including Israel, where belly dance is very popular among Israeli Jews and Arabs alike).  So I'm not entirely sure why belly dancing would be singled out, unless the Hamas fellow actually means strippers or ladies of ill repute in general but doesn't want to say so in so many words.

Sigh.  The beauty of the human body in movement is evil, but loading yourself up with explosives and killing busloads of innocent people is divine.  It makes me feel all the more that by pursuing this dance form I am in some small way providing moral support to the sane people of the Middle East...

birthdate meme

1. Type in your birthday (minus the year) in the search bar at http://wikipedia.org/

2. List three interesting events, two births, and one death that happened on your birthday.

Events:

1187 - Saladin begins the Seige of Jerusalem
1519 - Ferdinand Magellan sets sail from Sanlucar de barrameda with about 270 men on his expedition to circumnavigate the globe.
1973 - Billie Jean King beats Bobby Riggs in battle-of-sexes tennis match

Births:

1934, Sophia Lauren, Italian actress
1973, Asia Argento, Italian actress
(clearly I was born in the wrong country and have pursued the wrong profession)

Death:

1863 - Jacob Grimm, German folklorist (b. 1785)

(no subject)

A sentence that somehow makes me think of fusion_waste :

"To my eyes, anyway, this book has everything: adventure, romance, magic, an interesting setting and, most importantly, zeppelins."

That was Australian author Sean Williams speaking about his own book The Blood Debt.

We miss you!

(no subject)

omg this day will never frakking end.