Today G.R. made a disparaging comment about how I hadn't blogged lately, which was nervy of him considering we're lucky to hear from him once a week. Rather than point this out I just said my life's been too boring to blog about lately. But that was before I arrived home to find a package from G.R.'s homeland, containing this awesome t-shirt. It's exciting if you're lazy, and you were a chemistry major, and especially if you only ordered it last week and selected the cheap shipping.
I don't want to sound prejudiced here, but is anyone else a little unsure of how to classify Canadians? They're a strange hybrid of foreigner and not-foreigner, fitting in well here apart from their superior enunciation and flappy heads. You can't teach them new words like "faucet." But once in awhile they say something that reminds you they do in fact hale from a different culture.
For example, today I had a drink after work with a Canadian friend who's lived in the U.S. for six months or so. We were talking about Al Jazeera; a friend of hers just moved here from Toronto to work for the new English version. Apparently all the non-anchor personel at the English Al Jazeera are British or Canadian because Americans don't want Al Jazeera on their resumes. There was an article in the Washington Post today that this friend thought was strangely biased against Al Jazeera, too, which led her to ask me, "Why are Americans so freaked out about Al Jazeera?"
To me Americans' automatic Al Jazeera-disliking reflex is such an obvious fact of life that I probably would never have questioned it. It would be like asking why cats hate vacuum cleaners (although a friend of mine thinks cats' ancestors were terrorized by a prehistoric feline-sucking Hoover, ingraining that aversion in their genes, so maybe that's a bad example). I could have said that post-September 11 Americans fear and despise all phrases that begin with "al," but I went with the less rascist explanation and said that the only time we ever hear about Al Jazeera is when Osama bin Laden releases a video, so of course we think they're the network of terrorists.
Here's my plan for salvaging America (and its reputation): Those of my readers who are not stealing cable should email their providers and ask them to carry Al Jazeera. We'll kill two birds with one stone: America will get more news of foreign lands, and we'll show the world we're not afraid of all things "al."
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7 comments:
what's a faucet again?
I have a feeling that they once banned Al Jazeera in the EU for inciting religious hatred.
No matter how open of a mind I tried to have while reading this blog, al gebra kept coming up over and over and over again as the most terrifying "al" word of them all. Oh God, oh God!!! Oh! The Humanity!! Joey crashes and burns.
I don't think the Post article was biased against Al Jazeera. The story started with the plain fact that Americans *are* freaked out about Al Jazeera. It would have been entirely weirder if they'd ignored that fact.
Nervy - that's me! This whole Al Jazeera is a puppet for terrorist is very interesting - it's like people expect journalism to take a hike during war-time - and certainly, it's inconceivable that some news might not be flattering the the good ol' U.S.A. If you're interested in an inside view of Al Jazeera, check out Control Room - an excellent, excellent movie - far better at exposing the hypocrisy of this Iraq adventure that Fahrenheit 9/11.
I have seen Control Room, but the only thing I really remember from it is that the U.S. is bad at public relations, and that we should work on that.
Who keeps deleting their own comments? Is this a Blogger Beta glitch?
Good luck with that. It seems to me that many Americans have an odd love-hate relationship with "alcohol". Another terrorist invention, that.
That was me with the deleting comments. It was because blogger beta kept insisting on using [mygoogledisplayname].
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