Jonathan Coulton is playing in Pittsburgh June 7 and I am, fantastically, going to be in town. Anyone want to join me?

7 p.m. at the Club Cafe; 21+; $18. Tickets here.

"English please so we all could join the convo!" That was just posted to a Facebook group, after a Chilean girl commented in Spanish. Posted by an ugly American, or a neocolonialist Brit? No, by a Bengali.

I've notice lately that, while I almost never hear native English speakers criticizing others for not knowing English, I hear non-native speakers doing this all the time. The friend lamenting Japan's lack of English signage, the person I heard dissing a guest speaker for his poor English -- neither of these, nor the issuer of the Facebook reprimand, speaks English as a native language. All three live in Qatar. Yet all three expect English to be used as the default language, and become irritated when it is not.

I often don't know how to feel about English as a lingua franca. It's awesome to see people from all over the planet being able to communicate through a shared medium. Without a shared language, Education City couldn't happen. Without a shared language, low-skilled laborers couldn't tell me about the human rights problems they face. Without a shared language, my dinner party on Saturday would have been pretty awkward, as the eight of us would have been speaking in five different languages!

On the other hand, the more English fluency becomes a sine qua non of participation in the global community, the more non-English-speakers are pushed to the margins. The laborers who don't speak English or Arabic can't talk to me about human rights abuses; more importantly, they can't file an official complaint. They simply can't participate in full society like those who speak one of the "important" languages.

Not only that, but as other languages are lost or demoted, the world loses some of its richness. What does it mean for Arabic that Qatari schools are shifting to English as the medium of instruction? Our students are confident Arabic will never be lost, because it is so tied to religion. (Should I tell them about Avestan or Pali?) The switch to English means that fewer of our students will struggle in their first year because they've never been taught in English before. On the other hand, it also means that future Qataris will only be able to talk about math and science in a language that is foreign to them. Surely that has its own costs.

In a strange way, I think it's also unfortunate for us English speakers that our language has become the default one. Of course, it gives us advantages: how many people can live 8,000 miles from their place of birth and still use their native language almost exclusively, I do? But it also means that English speakers can get by without ever learning a second language, which is by no means good for us. Realizing that your language and culture come with embedded assumptions that aren't shared by other peoples is important, and it's something that most people in the world learn early on. It's a shame more of us don't have the opportunity to do the same.

There I was, all excited about being in the Qatar Tribune, when my dad had to go one-up me by getting in today's LA Times.

In California, people who go to work for the state (including for state universities) still have to sign a McCarthyist loyalty oath, pledging their "true faith and allegiance" to the state and promising to defend it against all enemies. Today's L.A. Times article is on people -- mostly Quakers and other pacifists -- who have lost their jobs due to their refusal to sign. For example...

In 1995, Methodist minister Bud Tillinghast was teaching a course on comparative religion at Humboldt State University, when he was pulled out of class by campus police and fired because he had not signed the oath.

Tillinghast said he believed that swearing an oath to the state helped establish the government as a religion.

"I was teaching world religions and I ran up against a state religion," the retired minister recalled. "My concern was that this was breaking down the separation of church and state and making the state a religion you swear allegiance to."

He filed suit against Cal State for reinstatement arguing that the oath violated the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. But after a court found that law unconstitutional, his suit was thrown out.

In all, Tillinghast said, he went up against the loyalty oath three times. Before being fired by Humboldt, he taught a religion class at a community college for nearly a decade. For that job, the school allowed him to sign an alternate oath.

Last year, he was named to the Humbolt County Human Rights Commission. A potential problem was averted when officials decided he didn't need to sign the oath.

A woman was just sentenced to death in Qatar for murdering her maid last year. I don't remember if I reported on the death at the time, but it was a gruesome one: one of the maid's fingernails had been removed, and then she was beaten to death with a hot iron.

I do not support the death penalty under any circumstances, but I have to confess that a small part of me is glad to see the Qatari courts taking maid abuse seriously for a change.

1) I ran our end-of-year stats yesterday, and discovered that during the 2007-2008 academic year, the ARC held 1337 tutoring sessions. We are officially leet.

2) Yesterday, a student asked me the most amazing question about citing sources. When citing the online version of a print source, you cite it as you'd cite the print source, but then add the URL at the end. Thus,

If I read it on paper:

Krug, M. (2008, April 30). CMU-Q students studying migrant workers' woes. Qatar Tribune, p. 15.

If I read it online:

Krug, M. (2008, April 30). CMU-Q students studying migrant workers' woes. Qatar Tribune, p. 15. Retrieved May 2, 2008 from http://qatar.livejournal.com/287452.html.

The student's question is this: if you are citing a movie that you (illegally) downloaded, do you cite the torrent file?

I cannot find this issue addressed in any citation guidelines.

CMU-Q students studying migrant workers' woes
Matthias Krug, Qatar Tribune, 30 April 2008

DOHA - A group of three Carnegie Mellon-Qatar (CMU-Q) students from Education City and three faculty members are carrying out surveys to ascertain the challenges facing the migrant labourers. These surveys are being conducted as part of the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF)-backed 'Migrant worker survey' research project. The groundbreaking project, which altogether involves six students from CMU-Q, is one of 47 innovative research projects which have been allocated a total of $25million fund by the QNRF, a member of Qatar Foundation.

"There are a lot of stories in the newspapers about issues related with migrant labourers but there are no real quantitative data to support them. This project is aimed at doing exactly that," CMU-Q faculty member Marjorie Carlson told Qatar Tribune before embarking on the Friday trip to Electricity Street in the Souq area. "Out of the total 250-300 surveys envisaged by the team, 50 have been conducted. The questionnaire of the extensive survey has 126 posers and 15-30 minutes are needed to complete it," he added.

At the Electricity Street, a large number of curious onlookers gathered around those who were answering the questions of students and faculty members. "We do not usually have visitors from outside our community," one of the workers said citing reason for the crowd. Another said, "If they are trying to know about us and the way we live it is good. We are happy to talk to them."

Sometimes language barrier does come up while conducting the survey, as the questionnaire is only in English. It is likely that it will be translated into Arabic, Hindi and Nepali during the next stages of the project. "Sometimes it is difficult to communicate with the workers because many don't know how to speak English," one of the students involved in the project said. "But we have methods of finding out workers who can communicate with us. It is difficult to conduct the survey in the Souq area on working days, but on Fridays we are able to talk to the migrant labourers who come here to spend their weekend," he added.

"When the workers are unable to communicate in English, we take the help of their friends who know English," said Dr. Silvia Pessoa. "Our experience has been really good. Once we approached a group of workers who first refused to talk to us. But when we explained the purpose of the survey they became so eager that they almost mobbed us. One man kept bringing more and more people to talk to us even though he himself was unable to answer our questions," he added.

The questionnaire has been split into eight sections containing posers on issues ranging from personal and family information to employment in Qatar and housing facilities. The students ask questions on the workers' academic qualification and the number of years they had taken to complete it. They also seek information regarding the contract and salary from the workers, besides their emotional state.

"It took a long time for the survey to get off. The final version is our tenth draft and we consulted several people to make sure that it was right," Pessoa said. "Since we did not want the questions to be suggestive we had to put in a lot of effort. Now we just have to go out with the students and complete the 300 questionnaires. Hopefully when we complete the work we will be in a position to inform the community about the challenges being faced by the workers in Qatar. We are also looking forward to publishing our research work in an international journal," he added.

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I count five errors, several of them hilarious. Oh, and yes I am in the picture; I'm just to the right of Erik (the tall guy with a ponytail), wearing a blue polo shirt with a white stripe on the collar.

A coworker just shared with me the Facebook group WTF Only in Doha, where people post pictures of things that, well, you'd only see in Doha. If you have lived in Qatar, or are a connoisseur of bad Engrish, you WILL find them hilarious.

Yasmien Mills snagged a picture of my favorite menu in Doha, at the Opera at Landmark:	And this, from a Mustafa Omar, must be the world's best "under construction" sign:

I've finally uploaded our pictures of Turkey.

I've also added some relevant photos to the blog posts I made from Turkey, and added additional blog posts with transcriptions of my paper journals. The new posts are backdated, so depending on how you access my blog, they may or may not show up as new.

Turkey posts:

• La Sainte Sophie, it is very fine (now with pictures)
  
• Istanbul: Topkapı, Archaeological Museum (now with pictures)
  
• Hagia Sophia; Adrasan (entirely new)
  
• Adrasan (now with pictures)
  
• Geladonya Point (entirely new)

Quote of the day, from Justin: "You don't look a day over 29! Well, maybe a day."

It was a fun birthday. I had lunch with a good friend I wish I'd spent more time with this semester, and the lunchroom even made mashed potatoes, my favorite! I walked back to my office from the lunchroom to find a group of students gathered outside it. They promptly burst into singing happy birthday, and gave me cake. In the afternoon, I got a really awesome birthday card from my parents (which sorta inspired the self-indulgent montage at the bottom of this post). Then, after work was the annual end-of-year staff party! Yay birthdays!

Also, I now know how to say "I am 30" in Bengali: "Amar boyosh tirish." If I find myself stranded in rural Bangladesh in the next 364 days, I will be able to communicate my age. That's a load off my mind.

Today is my last day spent in my twenties.

I am pretending this doesn't freak me out.

I'll be in Pittsburgh June 5-13, then Hong Kong June 16-21 (why yes, that does mean three days of travel torture). Then Oxfordshire for most of July.

Project Get-the-Hell-Out-of-Doha-for-the-Summer seems to be coming to fruition.

I woke up in the night thinking "Argh, I forgot John Dominic Crossan," so I added him to the list.

A friend asked me for a recommended reading list on religion. That's a daunting task, and I'm sure there are a lot of great books I've forgotten to include -- not to mention all the great ones I've never even read. Some of the religions are woefully underrepresented, too. However, of the books I've read on religious studies and theology, here are my favorites.

(Ones I don't have with me in Doha are grayed out. I also can't find Faith and Belief or Remedial Christianity -- did I lend them to one of you?)

( Cut for extreme length )

So what about you guys -- if you had to recommend a handful of books on religion, what would you recommend?

On the plane on the way home, I read a riveting book called Inside the Jihad. This is the memoir of an anonymous Muslim who, according to the book, was involved with the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé, became an informant for the French secret service, and ultimately trained at Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in the 90s.

The book reads like a spy thriller, and I don't imagine there's any way to verify how true it is, but it was a really worthwhile read. I was fascinated by the author's ambivalence: on the one hand, he is seeking to destroy these jihadist groups because he believes their tactics are un-Islamic and wrong. On the other hand, it's clear that his sympathies are with them, and indeed if Al Qaeda had asked him to go make his jihad in Chechnya, he would have gone. Reading about a European Muslim's love/hate relationship with armed jihad made for fascinating reading.

Equally fascinating was the jihadists' rhetoric. As the introduction points out, none of the mujahidin in the book "hate us for our freedom." Our freedoms pass entirely unmentioned, as do even the moral depravities the Muslim world tends to find most off-putting about the West. Rather, the mujahidin's rationale is entirely that specific foreign policies of the Western countries (US support of Israel, Russian domination of Chechnya, widespread lack of concern about Bosnia, etc.) add up to an outright assault on Islam, thus warranting a defensive jihad. This isn't news, of course, but it's interesting to hear that rhetoric in a first-person account.

Related to this is a sentiment I've heard even here in Doha: a deep-seated sense of humiliation that the Muslim umma, which used to be and ought to be the preeminent civilization on Earth, has fallen into such a state of decay that it can be bullied by infidels. The author's sense of shame that the mujahidin need to use their enemies' weapons (Uzis) is palpable. And this feeds into the rhetoric above: Muslim civilization ought to be the finest on earth, but it has been robbed of its rightful place by enemies without and within. This helped me understand how the mujahidin -- who obviously know the Qur'an well enough to know that an offensive war cannot be Islamic -- can come to believe that they are protecting the Muslim homeland from what amounts to one more in an endless series of crusades to stamp out the true faith.

A final fascinating point is that the author trained under Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whose intelligence (extracted by torture) was what convinced the U.S. government that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda. The author's accounts of al-Libi's views on Saddam and Iraq provide a lot of insight into what might have motivated him to spread that disinformation.

Texas polygamist compound sealed off by troopers. Possible standoff looms at polygamist ranch. Additional children removed at polygamist ranch in Texas. Conflict escalates at polygamist retreat.

Headlines from the LA Times, CNN, the New York Times and the AP, respectively.

Why does every single headline and every news flash on television start by identifying this as a polygamist ranch? It's being investigated for physical and sexual child abuse, not for polygamy. Is there any point in repeatedly calling it polygamist, other than to titillate readers/viewers?

Look familiar?

( Cut for bandwidth )

I spent the afternoon at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art. It was a wonderful afternoon.

Walking through the Dallas Museum of Art, I was overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude for all the experiences I've had over the last four years. After blitzing through the contemporary art exhibit I checked out their Ancient Mediterranean collection, whose sarcophagi couldn't hold a candle up to those I saw two weeks ago in Istanbul, and their Egyptian collection, which is falling over itself in excitement that it will soon be hosting the Tutankhamun exhibit I saw in Cairo.

Then I headed up to the Asian collection, where I was greeted by a very familiar statue of Varuna, a Shivalingam, an Ardhanarishwara and a Shiva Nataraja, Buddhas in various familiar mudras -- even a statue from a temple I've visited in Khajuraho. Last time I visited an Asian art collection in the States, these things all seemed very foreign and inscrutable. Now I know how to tell Hindu gods apart by their weapons and symbols; I know what the different mudras of the Buddha mean; I recognize all the incarnations of Vishnu. The once-exotic felt very familiar and comforting.

Standing in the museum, I suddenly felt that I could keel over dead at that moment and have no regrets. I've been so awesomely fortunate, to be able to travel so much and learn so much about so many different places and cultures. My life is infinitely cooler than I could ever have planned it to be, if life were capable of being planned.

And, lest it sound like I am turning my nose up at the Dallas museums, they were really quite good. At the museum of art I was particularly fond of a stunning Meiji-era bronze sculpture called "Takenouchi no Sukune Meets the Dragon King of the Sea." This picture is better than mine, but really, photos don't get across the magnificent detail of this piece; it's probably one of the most impressive pieces of art I've ever seen. At the Nasher, I loved James Turrell's "Tending (Blue)" and Max Ernst's "King Playing with the Queen," and the Crow Collection had this amazing display of 19th century Chinese snuff bottles, which they painted in intricate detail from inside the bottle. It certainly puts ships in bottles to shame, that's for sure.

Yesterday afternoon I jerked awake with no idea at all where I was. A voice was telling me to turn off electronic devices and return my seat to the upright position, so I did so, and as I did so I surmised that I was on a plane. But I had no idea where I flying from or to, or why, until the voice told me the current weather in Dallas.

I'm in the Qatar Airways Premium Terminal right now, awaiting my flight to DC and then Dallas for a conference. (I've always wanted to fly Dulles-Dallas. How confusing.)

This is, oddly enough, my first time using this terminal. It's a very surreal experience; flying is supposed to be chaotic and noisy, and I'm having difficulty convincing myself I'm about to get on a plane when actually I feel like I've just wandered into a posh hotel for coffee and free WiFi.

When you pull up, bellhops swoop in to take your luggage. (I flummoxed them with my backpack and small gym bag.) Then you walk into what appears to be a large hotel lobby, with check-in desks unobtrusively lining one wall. And they're actual desks, that employees sit behind and you sit in front of, as though you're here to take out a personal loan instead of fly to another country. Passport control and security also exist in strange, calm versions of their normal selves: the lone immigration officer was waiting for me, and the security people had to turn the X-ray machine on when I got there. And then you take an escalator up to where two more employees are standing to greet you and show you to the lounge. The lounge itself is like a normal business class lounge writ large (free food, comfy chairs, fake palm trees, 10-meter-tall waterfall feature), but there's also a very tasteful nursery up here, and a game room with PlayStations and Foosball. I hear there's also a spa and jacuzzi somewhere.

I got here two hours before my flight, because that's just what one does, but apparently that's overkill in this terminal. The entire check-in process, from pulling up at the curb to walking into the lounge, took less than ten minutes. So now I have another hour and a half to fill; perhaps I'll go check out those PlayStations.

Yesterday I spent one hour and ten minutes driving four kilometers. Guess that means I'm back in Doha.

On Thursday we did our longest hike -- 17 kilometers along the coast from Karaöz to Adrasan, past the lighthouse that is emblematic of the Lycian Way. It's an absolutely gorgeous walk, and rather remote: there is no road anywhere nearby, and in over seven hours of hiking, we saw only two other people (at the halfway point, coming the other direction).

Beginning of the walk	First view of the Gelidonya Lighthouse
Marjorie near the Lighthouse	Sample stunning view
The Lycian Way	Back at the hotel after 7.25 hours