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URBANA - On Thursday night, May 30, forty commuinity supporters of Ahmed Bensouda gathered at the Illini Union to demand answers and plan their actions in the wake of Bensouda's arrest by the FBI. The group, Friends of Ahmed, want to ensure that he is safe and that his rights are not being violated, and they want to find out why Bensouda was arrested and where he is being held. The FBI claims to have no knowledge of Bensouda's location or status.
"I think it's incredibly unfair," said Raana Ahmed, a close friend of Bensouda and spokesperson for Friends of Ahmed. "He operated on principles of justice for everyone. He's a humanitarian--I don't see how this is justified."
Ahmed Bensouda, who graduated with a political science degree from the University of Illinois last month, was arrested by men who identified themselves as FBI agents at about 2:30 on Thursday afternoon. The agents gave no explanation for the arrest. Friends said Bensouda was questioned by the INS about a week ago, with the agents asking him questions about September 11. Bensouda is a Moroccan citizen who holds Gambian and Moroccan passports and is in the United States on a student visa, which expires in August 2002. Bensouda was in the process of extending his visa. Bensouda is an activist involved in human rights and anti-racism issues. He's a member of the Democratic Solidarity Committee, a student group at the UIUC that takes action in solidarity with oppressed people. Recently, he's been involved in rallies and protests in solidarity with Palestinian civilians.
Supporters at Thursday's meeting included members of Democratic Solidarity Committee, Champaign-Urbana's ant-war group UIUC, members of Illinois Student Government, Unity and Struggle, and others. They plan to maintain a constant vigil at Bensouda's residence, 205 W. High St., Urbana, until their questions are answered.
For more information, contact:
Raana Ahmed, 217-201-1547 / rahmed@uiuc.edu
Al Kagan, UIUC's "Mutual Aid Pact" coordinator, 217-333-6519
www.ucimc.org/ahmed/
‘We must fight for freedom by stereotyping, exercising racism, and going completely against the constitution!’ is a war cry passing from the assholes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, and other idiots.
And then my dad tells me that local FBI agents across the nation have increased powers; they're making up for performance/inadequacy issues. What was once restricted to a few thousand Arab/Muslim men can now be applied to several thousand more. (Put your ADD aside and read at least the ‘Analysis’ part of my essay if you have no idea what I'm talking aobut.)
So my recent letter to the editor, which was finally published for once, could pique the interest of a few agents. I could be arrested. Who knows. Whatever. This nation thrives on injustice.
My head and eyes feel a bit bleh. I tend to stare at my monitor non-stop while I'm at work, so throwing in contacts the last two days wasn't a smart idea. I rarely wear contacts nowadays, mainly for the latter reason (although I don't have this eye strain problem as frequently on campus). But I thought I'd wear them in case I ran into Dacia (which I did, yay). She's so hot.
Anyway, back to my state of disarray: I burned my eyes out working on my dad's resum� for four hours (yes, for fun; his old resum� also looked crappy, so I had to do something to make the appearance a bit better). I came home tired. I almost didn't run, but I went ahead and did. Two miles is enough to drench me in sweat. My nose becomes quite runny in the process. Lucky for me that you can't notice snot on a sweat drenched shirt. (I could barely run a mile yesterday and I don't know why. But I'm theorizing that since my back was still sore from the raking, my overall energy level wasn't high enough.)
The Food Network is now a summertime favorite. I've watched so many shows in the past few days, mainly Good Eats, Follow that Food, and the many incarnations of Emeril. Lesser shows include Iron Chef, Oliver's Twist (of The Naked Chef fame), A Cook's Tour, and $40 a day (Rachel Ray is cute, but she seems a bit corny and annoying). And I chuckle every time I see the Jos� Ol� Man commercial. It's so goofy.
I can make my brother laugh by doing my Lil Wayne impression, pointing out that Mr. Lucci looks like our cousin Tanya, theorizing that Dr. Dre uses elephant drums, or positioning my hands on the sides of my head, palms out and fingers wiggling around mimicking a crustacean hat. I nearly killed him twice this summer by making him choke on food and water, laughter the tool. I have to not do that again.
Tea time. Food Network and tea until 10:30, until I sleep. Sleep is good.
Daddy needs money for a chimichanga!
—excerpt from José Olé commercial
And,
Leptocephalus: lions mate every 15 minutes for up to 4 days at a time during mating season
Timmy Teabags: holy crap
Leptocephalus: i agree
Timmy Teabags: i'd be in pain after 5 times
Timmy Teabags: in a day
Leptocephalus: i know
And even,
Lefse without sugar? That's, like, communism.
—Kevin, a judge on All American Festivals, 29 May 2002.
There's a new family of birds living in the bush by the stairs of our deck. The parents are hardworking, constantly flying in and out of the nest in shifts with various insects. Their drive and inspiration are four babies.
Each one of the babies started naked and with a huge gut on which they laid their thin necks. If we took a peek into the nest, they'd crane their necks up with tiny orange beaks in the air, their vocal chords sounding off and competing against each other – the only thing they were expecting to come into the nest was their parents with a crunchy little bug. But they've grown so much in just a week. Now they're twice their original size and have a nice covering of feathers. Still, the babies are a cute cluster of life in the nest, too adorable to describe in words.
The parents know this: they have a surveillance network setup in the local surroundings. A few days ago my brother walked out onto the deck and was being barked at by one of the parents perched on our apple tree. On Sunday I was raking up the clumps of grass left over from the mowing of a lawn two weeks long when bird mom and bird dad were on the defensive. They'd watch me from our roof or the neighbor's roof or the deck railing, barking and opening their wings threateningly. I'd have to hide on the side of the house until they felt it was safe to feed their kids.
Today my mom and I wanted to take a peek at the babies. Within a minute one of the parents flew right above us and onto the roof. We ran back inside; it flew down to the railing and glared at us through the windows, barking and flapping its wing again, angrier than we've ever seen.
So, this new family provides an endless amount of amusement and fascination for us. Hopefully they'll get used to our presence, but I don't know what gifts I could offer to build their confidence.
More than anything, I just wish the babies would stay babies forever.
Ahahahahaha!!!!! I hope you don't want an investigation just to save your shady ass, right-wing muthaf*cka!
Damn, I really need that Red Guymelef…
Sorry.
I need a more hip hairstyle.
I'm in a class with AD and the professor is asking me to answer a few questions. The last and bonus question is something related to calculus. I get it right and something neat happens, something academically equivalent to confetti and balloons dropping from the ceiling. Brian starts laughing loud.
There's a large ziplock bag filled with cake or brownie mix in my hand, and after preparing it in some way (by baking, or leaving out all night) it will turn into a puppy. And it does. My puppy is cute. I think it runs around super fast and crazy and all around if it's not on a leash. One evening I step out onto the deck and see my puppy ‘playfully’ attacking the neighbor's puppy, biting it, killing it slowly. And then I watch as it's eaten. My puppy isn't right.
I'm in some residence hall, walking to the bathroom before I go to sleep. There's this hot girl walking by who's an acquaintance. I jokingly pull the top of her dress off as she's walking by; all she does is give me a seductive wink and keeps on walking. I pass her room (which is next to the bathroom) and a few other girls are in there. I stop in to say hi and see someone I know. She walks to me – a bit tipsy – and gives me a hug and starts flirting.
(I wake up and have to pee, then try to pick up where I left off. A movie could be made about the remainder of that dream. It could be called Four Girls and a Guy.)
I'm crossing 5th and Jefferson after work, driving in the middle lane. Traffic is slowing in this lane because the left lane is obstructed by a repair vehicle with red cones around it. Four cars are now in the left lane waiting to merge and I felt like being nice, so I let them in.
Car 1 merrily goes its way; car 2 is about to merge while car 3 is acting like a dipshit, trying to overtake car 2 with only a few feet of space betwen 2 and the truck, but gains sense and slows down. Car 4 tries to mimic car 3 but gains a bit of sense and slows down too (3 & 4 aren't the source of my vengefulness). Now I can proceed to move forward.
As I'm approaching the truck, with maybe 5–10 ft between us, I glance into the side mirror and see a green Jeep darting down the left lane at around 40 MPH with absolutely no signs of slowing down. I stopped the van and watched this stupid piece of shit dumbfuck barrel through, knocking over a few cones in the process.
I wasn't happy. Had I not looked in the mirror, I could've been smashed. All I could do was honk, though. Honk and hope that destiny would deal this dumbfuck a slow and painful death where he collides with some building and flies out the window and has his body hit the corner of a brick wall and then falls and lie on the ground bleeding with blood forming into thick pools while his organs are crushed and no one is around to help him.
Err, um, I just don't like these stupidfuck drivers. I want to start a superhero group (which Ryan terms a ‘vigilante gang’) that protects non-wreckless drivers from these foes.
Yes, I need a diaper change and nap.
I came into work Monday morning and found a surprise: the empty office next to me from last week had an occupant after all, somone I was familiar with. I've referred to her as ‘evil bitch’ but I shall call her Twilight (a bending of her real name).
Why do I think she's an evil bitch? Well, my supervisors have butted heads with her on things she wants implemented (they disagree for legitimate reasons, of course). They can never win, because her boss can make them do it if that's what it comes down to. She once wrote up a guideline for naming conventions on our DB2 servers – one of the provisions was that ‘_tbl’ or some other identifier be appended to the end of the table name, which is stupid because: 1) we read left to right; 2) it's inconvenient to read a bunch of crap just to identify what is is; 3) if someone wanted to sort items based on what they are, it couldn't be done so easily. Simply put, she broke all logic and standard practice.
And then there was the look of apathy/annoyance when I had to ask her something a couple of days ago. Further details aside, she's pushy and not known to compromise.
Now, I like to listen to music while I work. And I'm mindful of not distracting others. So I keep the volume low – I can barely hear music if I'm a foot outside the doorway. Twilight apparently hears it quite well. She sent Pat an e-mail asking if he could ask me to turn the music down. (Why she didn't just ask me, I don't know. I suppose it's the bureacracy and chain-of-command, or she just couldn't get off her ass and face me.)
This morning I realized just how thin the walls are.
A man seemed to storm past my door and into her office, closing her door immediately. Then he started yelling at her. I only remember fragments of what he said, things like ‘Who told you this?’ and ‘I don't need this bullshit’. I was necessarily scared and I tried my best to ignore the conversation. It only lasted a couple of minutes before he stormed out.
I only hope she doesn't have sex in there.
Well, that's not entirely true. It's always interesting to listen in on those things – they can often be funny, awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, or any combination of the three. And besides, I'm not responsible for the private sounds of others that propagate into public airspace.
Winamp is set on shuffle play with 316 songs to choose from. And there are five At the Drive-In songs in a row, two of which are ‘Rolodex Propaganda’ and ‘Coating of Arms’.
To paraphrase Paige: Explosive.
If you have shaving dilemmas such as myself, you're always excited about the next breakthrough in razor technology.
Now, I've been a faithful user of the Gillette Mach3 – along with their gel shaving cream and aftershave – so I was hyped when I saw the new Turbo commercials: works well against the grain? Fantastic! (Sidenote: I always shave against the grain to get the closest shave possible which, sadly, is not as close as it once was.)
Now, my last regular blade has dulled out and my dad came to the rescue with a pack of 8 Turbo blades. I gave the thing a shot on my stubbley-haven't-shaved-for-two-days face. To be gentle, I made my first pass normally – which I always do if I've gone more than a day without shaving – then against the grain. First pass didn't prove to be exceptionally closer; the second pass, however, I'm slightly satisfied. It does feel smoother than normal, but that's most likely due to a brand new blade.
So the water has made our once nice basement carpet smell like freshly slaughtered cows. I know this because I've witnessed and smelled the slaughtering of cows. It's not gross, but it is kinda weird.
What was I doing in the basement? Moping and dancing around between sets [of dumbbell presses, tricep extensions, crunches, and shoulder dumbbell raise thingies]. During the moping and dancing, I found my troll. He's a policeman and has yellow hair. And I bought him in 5th grade, I think, back when they were the trend.
Back when I went to Goodwill, I found a troll in the toy bin and Molly asked why they were so popular. Aside from the rubbing of its hair for good luck, I didn't know. But trolls are cute. They look like Moe Syzlack.
I'm gonna run across the street and grab a $.99 fatty frosty instead of eating a healthy banana for my afternoon snack. Why do I always feel like a little kid when I mention having an afternoon snack?
Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Let's rewind a bit: pouring something into a glass necessarily means filling, while pouring something out of a glass means emptying. So if things were poured into a glass until it was at half-capacity, it'd be ‘half-full’ and if things were poured out of a glass until it was half-full, it'd be ‘half-empty’. But if you just stumbled onto a half-occupied glass, what is it?
Half-occupied. If you can complete it, complete it, otherwise go away. It's at its equilibrium.
And I don't like how some people are grossly inconsistent with enclosing HTML tag values in single or double quotes. I always thought a good practice was to enclose any and all values within quotes? It irks me. And now I have to add quotes to a million quoteless values. (Python is also an annoying scripting language.)
Work is going surprisingly well this morning. I haven't had an attack of boredom anxiety, nor have I started falling asleep. It was the pancakes I made this morning.
A bit of a lie. I'm bored as I write this.
I wasn't at all thrilled about the ‘bigger’ truth that Moulder was holding back on. The last episode was a bit anti-climactic, and it didn't end the way I was expecting, I guess. Ah well. It was a decent ending. I still have Boston Public, 24, and Felicity to look forward to. Why I'm hooked on the latter, I don't know – I've seen maybe half a season's worth of episodes, and that was just this season.
Today has been slow in a pleasant sort of way. I did much of nothing: went to Barnes & Noble for a brief visit, fixed several MP3s that were long overdue for fixing, baked a cake, and stood out on the deck breathing in the sunny and cool and pleasantly autumn day.
I did not, however, finish (or even start) unpacking the remainder of my crap. Like last summer, it'll all remain in the boxes and patiently await its new home this coming August.
I'll spend the rest of this night planning what I need to finish in the next nine weeks. I've started the whole exercise thingy: ran some 30 minutes at a slow pace (so it'd be considered jogging maybe?). Afterwards, I had a compelling need to eat constantly even though I wasn't hungry: bowls of noodles, soda, miscellaneous chocolate items all found a home in my stomach.
But yes, I plan on being a bit ambitious. If I even get one thing accomplished, that's good enough for me. There hasn't been a truly accomplished summer in anything yet (unless one is to count the work that went into building the framework for this site).
Work blows. I don't know how I can survive nine more weeks. It is always the most boring time I ever experience. Nothing comes close. There's money in the end, though. That's a welcome for someone who can't pay next month's rent at the moment.
To the races.
A convertible with its top down; several CDs in plain view; occupant(s) of vehicle nowhere to be found.
…it's nice to catch a few glimpses of Winona Ryder in a bikini. In motion.
Yum yum yum.
(Why haven't I taken notice of her before?)
Length – 5:48; listen (6.6 megs)
My final project for music203, arranged in Fruityloops. The driving force behind this was to mix electronic techniques, ecclecticism, and Golden means. The use of electronic techniques should be obvious by the use of panning, echoes, reverb, effects filters, and a few other neat things. Ecclecticism should also be obvious: there are a few tonal parts mixed with atonal parts and soundmassing. Golden means is hidden, more or less: I used the Fibonacci sequence to determine the repetition of different patterns, and in some instances I used the sequence to determine the proportion of notes that pan left to the notes that pan right.
The actual sound of everything was brought about by me playing the onscreen keyboard out of frustration using a snare sample: I liked the texture that came out and began working with it. Then I discovered the fx chnnels in Fruityloops and everything began to fall in place.
It's weird. But you might enjoy it.
Some time ago I mentioned how the 9–11 attacks were a little too convenient for Bush, who then had the green light to plow through damn near anything he wanted to. I half-jokingly said Bush was somehow involved in all this.
And now all these reports about the administration's lack of action despite having prior knowledge of a terrorist attack is lending a bit more sanity to my theory (that some would classify as conspiracy).
Of course, there was also Bush's and Cheney's dealings with the Taliban through a Texas-based energy company called Unocal alongside either Bush's or the FBI's orders to fly any bin Laden family members out of the US soon after the attacks.
Oh, and then there was the Taliban ready to give up Osama but Bush refusing to accept him. (If memory serves me correct, it's because Bush didn't want to prosecute Osama in international court.)
As I've said in my essay, it all comes down to money. Bush & Co. were fiendin' to build and control oil lines through Afghanistan, which the Taliban probably wouldn't have allowed. What better way to get into the region than having an excuse to bomb those people and install a new government?
My poli sci teacher believes that the US won't do much to keep the new Afghani government running. The Taliban could slowly crawl back into power again. All likely; maybe building pipelines doesn't seem so plausible. But Bush already bombed them once. God willing, right-wing fucks won't run the country, but just in case, the Taliban would think twice before trying to sieze control of future pipelines. They were bombed once, so it's all the more likely that they'll be bombed again for pulling such a move.
Sorry. I've been politically dormant for some time. I'll sit here now and wait for Bush and Cheney to die.
Why is the glass surface wider than the scanning beam thing? This makes it impossible to scan the entire photo if it's aligned against any of the edges – parts get chopped off. It would have been smarter to make the glass the same width as the beam thing. Aligning pics against the belt with my eyes and having things come up some .5° off is unacceptable.
I still don't understand how I ended up with a C in history. Add that to the mystery of my missing Irish Creme bottle or the three kegs.
My bladder kicked me awake less than a minute before the alarm went off. Truly amazing, or just a coincedence? I think truly amazing; my body must've been well aware that I'd be in discomfort if I woke up anytime before my four hours were up.
I roughly dreamt of Star Wars prior to this. We were on some sort of playground, either shooting each other with toy guns or running away from these creatures. Or maybe both. And then I saw Derek, Mojo, and Libby talking; Arun and Alka were also around. In the last scene, I was on a boxcar trolley with Ryan and Paige. We were going out to eat (possibly Fat Don's). Ryan had some light white powder on his face and smeared eye shadow; I think Paige did too.
So grades were released today, and it turns out that I didn't fail history. Far from it, relatively speaking: C. One less class to retake. I only wonder how this is even possible. Maybe I did get the grade I deserved on the paper but the class was curved? Or my TA took pity on me, or empathized with my slackerness? Whatever the case, I thank Arun and Alka and Toby for telling me – to the bitter end – to turn in something, even if I didn't think I was going to pass.
Then there were the three As (well, one A- and two As); I don't recall the last time I had even one A, although I could check here theoretically.
I'm a much happier camper. Summer will become more bearable now that my parents won't hurl lightning bolts at me for two flags (Pat's slang for Fs). What's this? My stomach is shrinking too?
Right.
Yoda is still amazing.
He has blessed us with perhaps the best Star Wars fight scene ever. And yes, this was much, much better than the first.
Getting less than five hours of sleep so that I can go to work is not so much better, though.
