pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUAPALOOZA AND HUDOOD LAW Heard a new term used in my software demo this morning and am taking a stab at its meaning based on context (although I guess I could just look it up instead). But, first, here is Bird's phrase of the day, which I said often to a disembodied man named Larry who was on the other end of the line during a work e-seminar: No, Larry. Nothing is integrated. Sigh.
KITTING: the act of assembling multiple items from various locations (possibly only in a content-management system) into a single order. Also stumbled upon this phrase in today's NYT: NETIZENS: citizens who use the Internet for political protest (think AlterNet). Came across these clever terms recently too: PEDESTALIZE: to put someone up on a pedestal. After today's meeting, I thought maybe I should change my personal ad byline to read "QUERY CREATION. Let's create a query upon a query...." That's obscure I know, but I bet some programmer is out there laughing right now. So is anyone besides me keeping up with these rape cases in Pakistan? I wrote earlier about the woman whose village council actually ordered that she be gang-raped as punishment for her brother's alleged affair. She protested when the rapists weren't imprisoned or had their sentences overturned, so now she is under house arrest with a gag order. On average, a woman is raped in Pakistan every two hours, and two women in Pakistan die every day in a so-called honor killing. Nicholas Kristof wrote about this incident in yesterday's New York Times: Dr. Mukhtaran Bibi's husband's grandfather says that she should be killed because she brought disgrace to her family by being gang-raped at a government-owned gas plant. When she reported the rape, instead of treating her medically, officials drugged her for three days to keep her quiet and then shipped her to a psychiatric hospital. And, when she persisted in trying to report the rape, she was held under house arrest in Karachi. The police suggested that, since she had cash, she must have been working as a prostitute. Hudood laws are used in Pakistan to imprison thousands of women when they report rape. Basically, if they cannot provide four male witnesses to the crime—as if!—then they will likely be whipped for adultery (since they are acknowledging illicit sex) should they seek justice. Oh and this is ripe: A Pakistani village council punished a man for having an affair by ordering that his two-year-old niece be given in marriage to a forty-year-old man. You know, my friend Shakespeare once said that, if you ever doubt for a moment that we live in a misogynistic world, just read the paper for two weeks. And she's right. Not many days go by without some story about an estranged husband showing up at work and killing his wife because she is not acting like his so-called property anymore, or about women who are beaten by a husband who is believes that, if she woman doesn't behave in a way acceptable to him, then they he can attack her. Okay. It is 7 p.m. and I am going home to read my freelance manuscript now. 7:07 p.m. - 2005-06-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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