Stardate 200902.15 - "If you would just love me ..."

It's been an interesting weekend. First off, my wife Beverly got sent this rather nasty piece of forwarded e-mail (linked here from snopes.com). This e-mail claims to show pictures of a young boy in Iran, who is apparently having his arm ran over and crushed by a heavy truck, as punishment for stealing a loaf of bread. My wife found these photos upsetting, but decided to check snopes.com out to make sure the claim was accurate.

Turns out, it wasn't! The photos are actually of street performers, the boy was doing a stunt by allowing a truck to run over his arm. How these stunts work, is that these performers will hustle money from onlookers before the stunt happens. One important picture that was left out of the e-mail was one of the boy after the stunt, his arm apparently okay. Turns out this vicious e-mail has been making the rounds since 2005, falsely implying that this poor boy was being punished under Islamic Sharia law.

When my wife saw this, she was very upset, and quickly wrote a very eloquent response to this e-mail. I won't go into any details here, except that she pretty much said, we ALL need to be careful what we forward on. This is an inflammatory e-mail with gross misinformation, and the wrong person could see it, snap, and act out violently on an innocent group of people, in much the same way that happened during a shooting at my Unitarian Universalist church the past summer. She really wrote quite well, and I hope it did some good. There is too much misinformation out there, and all too often it leads to tragic results.

My UU church holds a sci-fi gathering every month where we watch science fiction movies and TV shows. The offering this past Saturday (on Valentine's Day no less) was "Wall:E", a quite charming and romantic sci-fi computer animation about a poor lonely little trash robot left on our planet to clean up the mess after humanity has abandoned the Earth, and who falls in love with a probe robot from space named Eve who has been sent back to see if the planet is habitable again. The movie was enjoyable, but it glitched a couple of times, due to some smudges and scratches on the disk, prompting some people in the audience to remark: "FOREIGN CONTAMINANT!" (a phrase uttered by a cleaning robot on board a space liner who constantly follows Wall:E around, cleaning up in his tracks). It was very enjoyable!

I would also like to add, that musically work is progressing on my contributions to the Ninthwave Records remix compilation, but in the meantime, a new project has landed in my lap! My music friend davidmahr from San Francisco (specifically, the famous gay Castro disctrict) is releasing a music single and video called "Relentless" to protest the passage of Proposition 8 (the same sex marriage ban) in California. He has asked me to provide a remix for release along with the single, and I am only too happy to oblige, as this is a cause I feel strongly about as well. I know that I am certainly not gay (my wife will be soooooo relieved to read this!) but I feel nevertheless what has been done to GLBT people in the passage of this amendment is wrong, and needs to be stood up to. If two people genuinely love each other, and want to live within the bonds of a marriage relationship, it's not anyone's right to judge them or to interfere with their rights. In any event, this should be fun, and I hope my efforts will help out!