Cat Stevens: Public Enemy Number One

I spent Monday feeling generally very sick. I cooked a bunch of cod fritters for International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and apparently the cod wasn't very fresh. Everyone who ate the fritters came to me to tell me that they'd had weird dreams, and to ask if I had mixed a little of the wacky rosemary into the batter. I didn't suffer from weird dreams, though. My stomach just summarily rejected the fritters and refused to let me eat anything the next day. The large amounts of rum I drank probably didn't help the matter at all (what's the old rhyme: Cod fritters before liquor, never sicker; liquor before fritters, never bitter? Something like that.)

My friend Eliza sent me this as a sort of belated Talk Like a Pirate Day present: The Pirate Keyboard. It made me chuckle.

One good thing about my job is that there's plenty of down time, which means I can surf the Web. My friend Bonnie led me to the Brick Testament, which is the Bible illustrated in Leggos. It had me giggling for an hour or two today, particularly the picture of God smiting Judah's son Er. It's the hammer, I think. Anyway, there's plenty of blood, sex, and violence—just like you'd expect from the Bible.

An e-mail appeared in my inbox at work on Monday with the subject line of "Holy Shit! America's Crazy," and it contained a link to this CNN article. To summarize the article: former pop-singer, Cat Stevens, is now Muslim, and apparently as a result of this and antiwar leanings (he is opposed to ALL war, by the way, not just the war in Iraq), he is considered a threat to national security. There was a surreal moment while reading the article when I came across the line, "Federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the individual as Islam," and I thought, "Well, of course they considered him a threat. We've considered Islam a threat to our national security for a long time." Beyond that, I have nothing clever at all to say, except "Holy shit! America's crazy."