Irene Delse

Recent Actions

• Commented on Plaices of Death
  Rob sez: "I recently started eating seafood, despite not liking the taste, on the grounds that it's more humane and healthy." Not necessarily, no. Nowadays, seafood is contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals, and the higher in the foodchain...
• Commented on The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin short
  Спасибо :-)...
• Commented on Car thief steals car to drive to court
  Wow. This sound just like something out of a Donald E. Westlake was novel!...
• Commented on French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died
  Er, the publisher of the video, I mean, of course. Very annoying, anyway....
• Commented on French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died
  Damn! The editor of the video had it yanked from YouTube. Bloody copyright absolutists......
• Commented on Freakonomics Sequel Gets Climate Change Wrong
  dbx: "It appears that the book in question came out today. That raises the question, Maggie: did you actually read the offending chapter of the book before posting this?" @ dbx (and that goes for Aaron, too): Do you know...
• Commented on Pakistani Ghazals, Aik Alif
  Beautiful. I don't know which rendition I prefer, but both are simply beautiful. Thanks for sharing....
• Commented on American woman marries auto-rickshaw driver
  @ Mitch #19: Good point. And because of the "daughter deficit" (Google it, people! or there's a good article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23FOB-idealab-t.html ), young Indian men tend to turn more and more to foreign women when it comes to finding a...
• Commented on Scientific study on subliminals
  Wah #5: BTW, for the positive ones to work, you would have to use essentially two words, "god" and "love". Hmm. So, atheists would be immune from half the positive subliminal messages? Nice....
• Commented on Can't Take It With You - A Landmark Muslims in America Photo Exhibit
  The pictures are extraordinary. But what I find even more interesting is the choice of pics by the Mr Bassam Tariq. Once again, whether it is his intent or not, his post serves to reinforce the meme "Muslim woman" =...
• Commented on 1971 French translation of Chester Himes novel shows woman with smart phone
  A cigarette case – or a really big powder compact....
• Commented on Are Muslim Women Oppressed? Ask One
  The reality is that today, the hijab, post-1979 *is* a political tool and symbol, within the Muslim community, something that Aman, and HijabTrendz and "anonymous" don't want to talk about - if they are even willing to recognize it themselves....
• Commented on Are Muslim Women Oppressed? Ask One
  @ Str1cken: Re the jizya (and all other discussion of the dhimmi status): please, not another can of troll bait! If only because it's not specific to islamic law. Did you know that until around the year 1800, Jewish people...
• Commented on Are Muslim Women Oppressed? Ask One
  As several others pointed, this thread suffer from a very confusing title. And Mariam doens't help by conflating burqas and hidjabs in her argument and by quoting *one* interpretation of the Quranic modesty prescriptions among many as *the* unique and...
• Commented on The American Burqini, and modesty throughout the ages.
  (Argh, hyperlinks make MT comments swoon!) Last part: Recently, Tunisian writer and philosopher Abdelwahab Meddeb (whose lucid article "Islam and Enlightenment" of 2006 should be required reading before *any* debate about religion and modernity in the Muslim world http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_5.3/meddeb.htm )...
• Commented on The American Burqini, and modesty throughout the ages.
  Oh, it works on small amounts of text? Let's see. Oh, hum. Burqinis are an invention of a modern Muslim woman living in a Western country (Australia) who saw that other Muslim women in this same country couldn't (or didn't...
• Commented on The American Burqini, and modesty throughout the ages.
  And I was trying to post: As for me, forbidden in my democratic country, thank you. But I want to be able to go on saying that I find the fashion quite ridiculous. And as ugly as the Victorian horrors...
• Commented on The American Burqini, and modesty throughout the ages.
  Can't comment. MT again >...
• Commented on 1917 Beekman Street Subway collapse
  Nice sinister Lovecraftian atmosphere in the picture. No wonder he hated the "Cyclopean" metropolis and even used the underground tunnels as inspiration for the Shoggoth-infested labyrinth below Antarctica ;-)...
• Commented on Pigeons are faster than DSL
  I can't be the first here to think: "IP over Avian Carriers"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers...
• Commented on Al Franken talks an anti-healthcare-reform mob down
  Yep, they are angry, even if they refrain from being actually loud or violent. Thanks for Minnesota politeness! But one can hear the anger and anxiety in the confusion they display. And Al Franken does a good job to listen...
• Commented on Dutch government tries to stop 13-year-old girl from sailing around world solo
  @ Antinous #142: I meant, why not try to *join* a crew when one wants to sail. Or find other young people with the same passion and join forces (and budgets). I was thinking about something like the sports/school programs...
• Commented on Dutch government tries to stop 13-year-old girl from sailing around world solo
  It's amazing all the people who say "the government shouldn't have anything to say" and forget this is about a 13-year-old citizen of a country where school is mendatory for kids under 16. You may yell "nanny state", but it's...
• Commented on Dutch government tries to stop 13-year-old girl from sailing around world solo
  "Why the big rush? Is the trip not reason enough, but she must be the youngest person ever?" Well said, Heydemann3. I blame the parents if they encourage her to do a stunt. Sailing around the world is a challenging...
• Commented on Street-cons on probation in Naples work as free tour-guides
  The Thieves' Guild of Ankh-Morpork is gonna sue for patent infringement. Well, "sue" with a big nailed stick, anyway......
• Commented on Photos of unusual animals
  Additional info on the matamata turtle, courtesy of the Honolulu zoo (the source of the pic featured here): in addition to camouflage, those "flap-like appendages on the sides of the head and neck have been found to be highly sensitive...
• Commented on New Space Opera 2: sf stories with sweep
  @ Traalfaz: It's even worse. I tried to buy the title from Fictionwise, my usual ebook store. With their membership rebate, the price would have dropped to USD 10.87 only. Fine. But when I tried to check out, big problem:...
• Commented on Guards are the worst prison-rapists
  FRESHYLL opined that: Rape by guards and rape by fellow inmates just aren't the same thing. No, indeed. Actually, it's worse if the rapists are guards, because then, there's no authority to complain to. (Not that complaining of rapist inmates...
• Commented on Wails and Murmurs: Eating Couscous at the Chi-Chi's in Walla-Walla
  Now for some songs by Dee Dee Bridgewater......
• Commented on Mandatory censorware comes to Chinese PCs on Jul 1
  No need to bet. The next one is France, as several others said, with the Hadopi and Loppsi 2 laws. Here's Bruce Sterling's take (in English): http://www.laquadrature.net/fr/wired-beyond-the-beyond-just-another-wordpress-weblog-meanwhile-somewhere-in-french-cyberspace And Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/next-up-for-france-police-keyloggers-and-web-censorship.ars Oh, and the projected Loppsi 2 law would put...