Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including www.optiopia.com, www.squid-labs.com, www.instructables.com, www.potenco.com, and www.makanipower.com.

You might have just driven home. When you filled your car with gasoline, most likely you didn't even see the fluid as it was pumped into your gas tank. Once home, you probably turned on some lights, some music, your computer, and maybe even heat, so you could read this web page. You can't see the power running through the electrical lines that lead to your light bulb, and you don't feel it, but you do enjoy the results. Our society has made energy invisible. This invisibility makes energy convenient to use -- and the modern age is arguably wonderful as a result -- but it also makes it easy to take it for granted. Here we try to make our appetite for energy visible.

Climate change is a phenomenon we now recognize as one of the most important challenges to ever confront humanity. Like energy use, it is also mostly invisible to us, and in two important ways.  Firstly, the enormous volumes of green-house gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, CFC's etc, are quite literally invisible to our naked eyes. Secondly, the changes in climate progress so slowly that they seem invisible amidst the hustle and bustle of our daily lives. Because these consequences accumulate over decades, generations, and centuries, it is easy to not see them as pressing and urgent. Here we try to make visible these complicated and largely invisible things.

The global energy and climate conversation is about choices, both individual choices and collective choices. By choosing the amount and type of energy we consume, we are choosing the look and feel of our future. Everyone is involved in that choice. Don't be fooled: individual choices collectively have enormous effects.   A large coal power plant has a power output of 1GW (GigaWatt) which is 1 billion (1 000 000 000) Watts.  If 1 billion people reduced their power needs by just 1 watt ( About what is required to keep a compact fluorescent burning for just 1 hour a day), that's a coal fired power plant you don't need to build.  

I'm very happy to introduce our new guest blogger, Saul Griffith. He's a friend and a long time contributor to MAKE, where his Making Trouble column and Howtoons comics are reader favorites. A visit to Saul's workshop is a mind-boggling treat -- home-made bikes, giant kites, modded dune buggies, cheap eyeglass making machines, hand-held human-powered generators, and other wondrous prototype devices are all over the place. He comes closer to being a real-life Professor from Gilligan's Island than anyone I know. Saul was named a McArthur Fellow in 2007.

I'm looking forward to what Saul writes for Boing Boing over the next two weeks. I promise it will be very interesting. -- Mark

I'm guest blogging at Boing Boing! I'm excited, not only because I've long been a fan, but also because you, as readers here, are out there at the edge thinking about the future and how to build it and participate in it.

I'm failing at finishing a book (with my colleague Jim McBride who will hopefully join me in the postings) that we've been writing on climate and energy issues for what seems like forever.  As we are approaching the Copenhagen UN Climate Change conference (http://en.cop15.dk/) on December 7th, I thought I may as well summarize the contents of my book in a 12(ish)-part series here at Boing Boing.  Sadly it already appears the world has given up hope on reaching any sort of agreement on targets at Copenhagen, which is unfortunate, but lucky for me, because the entire book is about how you might choose such a target, and how you would plan appropriate responses, personally, locally, nationally, and globally. It also will help you call bull$#!+ on people at dinner parties who espouse some fantastic new perpetual motion machine.

If you want to just read it in a book you can wait for us to get our act together, squint at pieces at www.energyliteracy.com, or simply read David J.C. MacKay's wonderful "Sustainability without the hot air" instead, as he is more highly functional than myself, and already got his book covering similar material for the UK out there and published.

Before the climate change deniers and skeptics run to their keyboards to write long-winded diatribes in the comments section, I'll try to ward you off by saying that you can just consider the posts as a thought experiment.  "If this climate stuff were actually true in some parallel universe, what could we do to address the problem, and what might the resultant world look like?"

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

No, not really. But when I was a freshman in college in 1975, the Poli Sci 101 course that I took was Straussian and neo-conservative to its core. Kenyon College's political science department was (and still is--or at least it was three years ago, as this story in the far right wing journal Human Events confirms) an "oasis" of Straussian and conservative theory. The first text we read, as I recall, was Socrates "Apology." Most of us assumed that Socrates' persecutors were the bad guys, that freedom of thought was strictly good and the suppression of free speech categorically bad. But using Socrates' own mode of questioning, our teachers challenged our blandly liberal presuppositions. Precisely what's good about Democracy? Why shouldn't the state protect itself? Are we sure we understand what the Founders of our own country really meant when they wrote about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Pesco requested that I write about some of the books that inspired me as I was writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES. I'll need to ask for your indulgence, because I'm going to flash back to my boyhood. When I was in the sixth grade, I came across a mass market paperback called IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED, which, I just learned from the magic of the Internet, was written by R. Dewitt Miller in 1947. It was a prime exemplar of what is sometimes called Forteana, after Charles Fort (1874-1932), a failed novelist, close friend of Theodore Dreiser, and avid collector of news clippings about the eerie and the unexplained--he also gave his name to the magazine The Fortean Times (its cover story this month is about Masonic symbols in Washington, DC). Miller's yarns about spontaneous human combustion, ghosts, premonitory dreams, ESP, apparitions of air-born crucifixes in the smoke-filled skies over World War I battlefields, a fortyeight hour-long midnight that enveloped Colonial New England and I don't know what else, scared the living daylights out of me--but at the same time, I couldn't stop reading it, especially at night, by flashlight. It was an addiction and I eventually had the wisdom to go cold turkey, by giving the book away.

Guido Núñez-Mujica, a 26-year-old Boing Boing reader in Venezuela who is an avid gamer, writes in with this extensive personal observation piece about a new law that widely criminalizes video games in the South American country. As you read the piece, please also bear in mind that publishing this sort of thing under one's full name is not done without personal risk.

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I'm always broke, the hard work I've done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn't I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother's chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

After the jump, Núñez-Mujica's essay in full.

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Some of you might remember a story about a little boy and a runaway balloon that erupted in the news a few weeks back. Like Edgar Allan Poe's 1844 scoop about Monck Mason, an English balloonist who was blown off course en route to France and made landfall near Charleston, South Carolina (illustration above), the story turned out to be false in most of its particulars. There really was an aeronautist named Monck Mason, but he hadn't crossed the ocean. There really was a little boy and a UFO-shaped balloon, but... well, you know the rest.

A few days after Balloon Boy's non-event The Yes Men, professional hoaxers with a genuine political agenda, pulled off a coup when they impersonated officials from the US Chamber of Commerce and announced to the press that the Chamber had reversed its policies on global warming. I wrote about the Yes Men in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies in the context of the bizarre nineteenth century hoaxer Leo Taxil. Taxil was the pen name of Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages (1854-1907), an ex-free thinker and a highly public convert to Catholicism who, in a series of sensational books, claimed to have discovered Palladism, a devil-worshipping Masonic sect associated with Albert Pike and the Scottish Rite. In 1897, he called a press conference in Paris and admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Not just Palladism, everything-starting with his conversion. For more than a decade, he had been telling the Catholic Church exactly what it wanted to hear, setting it up for a stupendous fall when "the most colossal hoax of modern times" was exposed. Already a prankster as a teenager, Taxil had created a panic about fictitious shark attacks in the waters off Marseilles (shark attacks remain a staple of the sensationalistic media to this day); a few years later he fed Swiss newspapers a bogus story about a sunken city beneath Lake Geneva.

Are there wider lessons to be gleaned from any of this, besides not believing everything you read in the newspaper (or hear on the radio, watch on TV, or read on the Web)?

Author Jasmina Tešanović writes this guest-essay on the work of 63-year old Serbian artist Marina Abramovic (above), the "grandmother of performance art" whose work will be honored in 2010 in a MOMA retrospective:

All her work is centered on body, her body which went through severe trials all these years: cutting, beating starving, public exposure... the dividing line between spirituality and trials is almost invisible, the path of living leads to death. An artist should be prepared to die and prepare her own funeral, that the last performance of her life.

Read Jasmina's entire essay, after the jump.

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

I will be adding "Guest blogged for Boing Boing" to my personal list of Scary and Surprising Things Accomplished in the New Millennium, right under "Gave birth to daughter sans epidural after 46-hour labor" and "Attended county fair." It has indeed been terrifying to produce content for such smart, sassy readers (Yeah, I called you sassy. What of it?). But aside from the whole terrifying aspect, it's been heaps of fun writing here (and reading all your comments), and I'm grateful to have had the chance to contribute to a blog that I love so dearly.

Bugs & Fishes,
Connie

Twitter & Facebook

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Hello everybody. I'm excited to be guest-blogging for Boing Boing for the next two weeks and I look forward to meeting some of you--many of you, I hope--through your comments. As you know, I am the author of the book "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies", which Vintage published last summer. Around the time the book came out, I started my own blog, where I have been posting fairly regularly, sometimes about other things, but mostly on the issues of the day as they pertain to cults, conspiracies and secret societies. In this season of birtherism, 9/11 Truth, death panels, sweat lodge homicides, C-Street Christians, The Lost Symbol, rogue balloons and Northwest Airline jets, I've had no lack of fodder.

I make no effort to disguise my predispositions and biases--I am respectfully agnostic on most religious issues, lean leftwards politically, and am resolutely skeptical when it comes to the paranormal or the outlandish. I hope I am not dogmatic or snide or gratuitously ad hominem, but please don't hesitate to call me out if I am. Today's entry features conspiracy theorist Orly Taitz, DDS Esq., the Moldovian-born emigrant (via Israel) to Orange County, California who has become instantly recognizable to Cable TV news viewers as "the wide-eyed queen of the so-called birther movement--that subset of individuals who still, despite all evidence, don't believe Obama was born a citizen of the United States" (Time magazine -- click here for their "2-minute bio").

Several months ago, I posted about a fascinating and fun new book titled "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more," by Arthur Goldwag. It led to a fun discussion, both in the comments thread and offline, so I was delighted when Arthur accepted my invitation to guestblog for two weeks! Welcome to the asylum, Arthur! And remember folks, just because you're paranoid, don't think They're not after you. From Arthur's bio:

After attending Kenyon College and Brown University, Arthur Goldwag worked in book publishing for more than twenty years, including stints at Random House, The New York Review of Books, and Book-of-the-Month Club. He now freelances full time.

The author of The Beliefnet Guide to Kaballah (Doubleday, 2005), Isms & Ologies (Vintage, 2007), and Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), Arthur Goldwag is also a contributing editor at Scholastic's Storyworks magazine, where he writes stories, plays, and essays for children. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two sons.

Arthur Goldwag's blog

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

Whenever I'm hanging out on a chairlift I like to shout that I'm going to go die a cold, snowy death. Mostly so that if I were to actually perish on the ride down I could say, "I told you so." But also because I am genuinely (and in my case, irrationally) afraid that something terrible like this will happen. The guy in the video is an experienced backcountry skier named Chris Cardello. In his words:

When the slide propagated, I tried to remain as composed as possible and make sure my AvaLung was in. As I was getting buried and the slide slowed, I threw one hand up and with my other hand I grasped the AvaLung, which had been ripped out of my mouth during the turbulent ride. While I was buried, I tried to be as calm as possible; I knew my hand was exposed so my crew would be digging me out shortly. I was able to breathe through the AvaLung, but it was difficult due to the snow jammed down my throat.

(via freeskier.com)

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

Thumbnail images can be deceiving. Whilst perusing squirrel photographs on Flickr last night, I came across a thumbnail of this image. "Aww, teeny baby squirrels," I thought to myself, foolishly clicking to get a better look. Wrong. So, so wrong.

After picking myself up off the floor, I confess that I found myself admiring how fit these little suckers are/were. Besides the feet and head (which are no longer an issue), they look like they were pure muscle. These must have been dashing-through-the-wilderness type squirrels. Or perhaps, hit-the-gym-7-days-a-week type squirrels. Not like the mangy little booger (fueled by Cheetos and Mountain Dew, no doubt) that tore a hole in my backpack years ago while trying to pilfer a candy bar.

Even with 8000+ cuddly faced squirrel photos coo over, this is the one picture that I can't stop staring at. It is called "Squirrel for Dinner." Enjoy.

I'm pleased to welcome our new guest blogger to Boing Boing: Connie Choe! I met Connie last month at Machine Project's krautfest 2009, where Connie and her mother, Granny Choe, showed everyone how to make kimchi. Take it away, Connie!

Good people of Boing Boing, I hope you appreciate the fact that this picture has been censored for your sake. I'm not flashing the camera or anything... In fact, I'd probably be the last person on the interweb to let the girls go out for a public swim. Yes, there's a good chance that I'm the most annoyingly squeaky clean, law-abiding citizen you will ever virtually meet, and if I were half as smart as I used to be, I would take advantage of this by starting a career in politics. Unfortunately, politics makes me sleepy and large crowds of people make me hyperventilate. It's a shame, really. The censorship is due to the fact that I'm wearing a big company logo and I didn't want to offend you with shameless self-promotion. 

I'm a health and culture writer whose work has appeared in Shape magazine and on LA.com. I'm also co-founder of a burgeoning kimchi empire: the award-winning Granny Choe's Kimchi Co.

For the next two weeks I'll be sharing about the little things that amuse me personally including health/psych news, the cleverness of Asians, and squirrels. 

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

Friends, It has been a pleasure to be a part of the Boing Boing nation as a guest blogger these past two weeks. I hope to stay in contact online and to meet some of you at various gigs around the country, including at the Esalen Institute, where Erik Davis and I will be delivering a weekend workshop on February 19-21 titled "The Occult in America: An Adventure in Arcane History." You can also see me next Friday at 9 p.m. EST on a Dateline NBC special about Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

While I was writing Occult America, the figure I came to most admire was Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965), Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture and second vice president. Wallace was not only a successful businessman (founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred) and an innovative politician (his policies saved thousands of family farms during the Great Depression), but he was also a genuine searcher into cosmic realms, freely exploring Theosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, astrology, Native American shamanism, and various strands of mysticism. His name may be largely forgotten, but he was a model of how to live with purpose.

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

One of the oddest and most enduring occult books of modern times is called The Kybalion. Dan Brown mentions it twice in The Lost Symbol. The book exists in a multitude of editions and claims to be an ancient work of practical occult wisdom. Its pages brim with canny advice on how to get what you want from life. The "author" of The Kybalion is a hidden entity called Three Initiates. Speculation rages online that one of these Three Initiates was a twentieth-century magician, occultist, and writer named Paul Foster Case. Case, so the theory goes, co-conceived the popular book in early twentieth-century Chicago, a city bustling with occult impresarios. I consider the Case connection and The Kybalion in Occult America:

Chicago was a great city for a budding occultist in the early twentieth century. It was home to the influential New Thought teacher Emma Curtis Hopkins and hosted bustling subcultures in "mental science" and metaphysical publishing. A Chicago lawyer named William Walker Atkinson produced an imaginative array of occult books from his Yogi Publication Society based in the twenty-two-story Masonic Temple Building, once a jewel of the city's skyline and later demolished. Atkinson himself wrote many books, under the pseudonyms Yogi Ramacharaka, Magus Incognito, and, most famously, Three Initiates. The Chicagoan used the last of these aliases in 1908 to publish his most successful book, one of the occult classics of the twentieth century: The Kybalion.

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

Okay, so New York is supposed to be the city of big commerce, literary culture, and high art - no room here for woo-woo spirituality, the odor of patchouli, or anyone who capitalizes words like Light or Truth. Well, actually not. This Sunday, October 11th I'll be conducting a walking tour of occult New York -- and hopefully giving participants a new way of seeing the city: As a once-upon-a-time laboratory for alternative spiritual ideas, which it helped to export to the rest of the world back before there was a New Age. Here are a few of the historic sights - familiar and obscure - we'll be viewing...

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog celebrating the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

Dear boingers,

These past two weeks have been nothing short of amazing. Thanks for letting me share my stories and experiences with all of you. I will be contacting those who won the haiku competition via private message to coordinate the giveaway. I would like to stay in touch with everyone, so please feel free to follow me on Twitter or even add me on Facebook if that's not weird.

Next up for me? I will be leaving to Pakistan shortly to start filming a documentary on Abdul-Sattar Edhi. For those who do not know his work, here's a decent article on his work. In the 1950's he bought an old blue van and began transporting the sick and dead to their fated destinations. This small van called The Poor Man's Van was the first ambulance in the history of Pakistan. Though Edhi single-handedly created one of the most successful health and welfare network in Asia, he never lost his simplicity. He owns only two tunics to his name, sleeps on the floor of his foundations office in Karachi, and eats only a piece of stale bread every morning.

I met Edhi in August when he was on his yearly visit to New York. He shared with us the plight of the Internally Displaced People in Pakistan and said he never saw a situation so bleak before in his life. Edhi has been with Pakistan since its inception and has seen many leaders and governments come and go. There is not very much written about him in English, but you can find a translated copy of his autobiography at Desi-store.com. I remember asking him if he could sign a copy of his autobiography for me. Edhi doesn't speak or write much English, but he took his pen and wrote in English, "love human beings." As I read aloud what he wrote on the flap he looked to me, smiled, and said in Urdu, "it's really that simple."

Thanks again everyone.

(Picture of me taken by Omar Mullick.)

Edhi Foundation Website

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog celebrating the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



Above, is a video piece Musa Syeed and I produced for TIME.com a couple of months back on Domestic Crusaders.

The Domestic Crusaders is a two-act play in its last week at the Nuyorican Poet's Café in New York City. I strongly recommend anyone in New York City that has a chance to see the play to catch it. Though it's not perfect, I can't think of a better glimpse into the Pakistani Muslim American life. I caught the play opening night on September 11th and enjoyed every minute of it. Every character in the play falls into a certain Muslim archetype, from the mildly racist yet caring mother to the head-wrap wearing over zealous daughter. And all these archetypes are awfully close to reality. Without a doubt, I am Ghaffur, the slightly naïve, college-aged Muslim poster boy.

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

One of the most interesting aspects of folk religion in America is the enduring figure of Saint Expedite - a youthful, Roman-garbed saint barely tolerated or acknowledged within the upper echelons of the Catholic Church but the subject of loving circles of worship throughout Latin America and many parts of the United States. (I've encountered his statue in a Catholic Church in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.) Simply put, Saint Expedite is the patron of those who need help in a hurry: with jobs, relationships, money, etc. In Brazil, he is the venerated helper of people looking for work; in America, so says Wired magazine, he is the "patron saint of the nerds," i.e., a figure who can help untangle internet connections and the keep communications networks flowing; to church authorities he is merely an icon of "popular religiosity" who never historically existed.

The story of Saint Expedite's existence dates back to logs of martyrs kept in the Roman Empire, where the surname appears. Some speculate that the Saint Expedite cult got started when a box containing the statue of an unnamed Roman sentry got labeled "expedite" for shipping purposes and fell into the hands (and hearts) of a Paris convent. Whatever the case, church authorities step carefully around Saint Expedite, not wanting to alienate his devoted following among many Latin American Catholics; Saint Expedite is also a focus of devotion among practitioners of the African-American magical tradition called hoodoo, among some New Agers, and followers of Santeria.

For the story of Saint Expedite, check out LuckyMojo.com and Wired magazine. I also write about him in Occult America.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog celebrating the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

For those who aren't familiar with The Books, check out my post from Friday where I shared some clips from their music.

I was lucky enough to have a quick phone chat with Nick Zammuto, one-half of The Books. The other half, Paul de Jong, was at the doctor's office at the time. Paul, as Nick puts it, is the "consummate collector" of the samples the band uses. In fact, all the archaic audio and video footage The Books have been collecting are archived and cataloged. "There's a lot of research that goes into what we do," Nick remarks as I try to quickly scribble his words down. At this point, my voice recorder died and my handy notepad dictated the rest of the conversation, albeit selectively.

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

Parade magazine publishes a new poll tomorrow - with a piece on CBS Sunday Morning that I'm part of - which reveals the fluid and expanding meaning of spirituality in America. Fifty-nine percent Americans polled agree that "all religions have validity" and only twelve percent agree that "mine is the only true religion." To an extent, this reflects an attitude introduced into America by Enlightenment philosophy, Freemasonry, Transcendentalism, and, most recently, Theosophy in the late 19th century. Theosophy emphasized the principle that all religions emerge from a universal source. Likewise, the survey reflects the inroads of what might be considered occult or New Age outlooks in America: Seven percent of Americans believe in reincarnation (a concept that few Americans had heard of a generation ago); seventeen percent report having contact with the dead; forty-nine percent read horoscopes "for fun," whereas twelve percent are believers. The poll reveals many other wrinkles, which readers will find cause for cheer or depression, depending upon their outlook. But consider: Gandhi, whose 140th birthday fell yesterday, was making what was considered a radical statement when he declared that "all religions are true" (to which he also added, "all have some error in them"). Today, a majority of Americans agree.

CBS Sunday Morning runs its piece tomorrow at 9 a.m. EST in which I will discuss "the history of the occult in the United States."

What We Believe (CBS Sunday Morning)

Spirituality Poll results (Parade magazine)

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog celebrating the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



For your Friday, here is a nice video of a spoon box making music. How does the spoon box you work you ask? Well, since it's made by The Books, we'll let them answer it:

This will take a little bit of explaining. I built this prototype of the Spoonbox out of wood, plexiglass, zinc plates, measuring spoons, and closeout radioshack parts. It hooks up to a CD player and small amplifier which cause the spoons to dance. There are small speakers behind the spoons that move in response to the sounds on the CD which I carefully composed using low frequency sine waves and kitchen sounds. The speakers, in turn, blow small puffs of air into the spoons which cause them to bounce/vibrate in rhythmic patterns. It really must be seen to be understood, but this video might give you some sense of what it does.

I just got off the phone with Nick Zammuto, 1/2 of The Books, and will be sharing with you our discussion this weekend. The Books are one of the most important bands of this decade and come this weekend, I will try my best to convince you why.

Until then, here are two tracks from their LPs. Tokyo and That Right Aint Shit both can be found on The Lemon of Pink, released in 2003. Happy Listening and Happy Friday.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

The McSweeney folks were going to give us five signed copies, but then Dave Eggers himself loved this Haiku idea so much he's giving us another five. So, we're giving out a total of ten signed copies of Zeitoun. How great is that?

We  had a blast reading all the entries. We went through them three times to make sure none of the 380 entries were missed. A big thank you to Lisa Katayama who also chimed in at the last minute and helped select some of the winning entries.

 It was really hard choosing ten, so in no particular order here are the winners!

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



Many of you may remember my post on Can't Take It With You, a landmark photo exhibit showcasing Muslims in America that's opening next week in New York. Omar Mullick, the photographer of the exhibit, invited me to the gallery space yesterday and we had a little chat.

Bassam: How are you feeling?

Omar: A little tired, a little happy. We've been working around the clock.

Bassam: So, first things first, where did the title for the show come from?

Omar: It's the opening lines of a Radiohead song called Reckoner. It had a pretty strong impact on me when I heard it. I realized that I was as capable of going to Radiohead or The Brian Jonestown Massacre as I was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for the same notes of transcendence....

Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month.

I'll spare you guys the annoyance of raving about how good the TV show Mad Men is. But now apparently Sesame Street has gotten Mad Men fever. My friend's 3-year-old son saw the clip and said he wants to grow up and be like Don Draper. I said "You and me both kid, you and me both."

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

(Mitch will be speaking in Los Angeles at the Philosophical Research Society this coming Saturday, October 3 and Sunday, October 4, at 2 p.m. daily on the history of the occult in America. Details here.)

Below is a rundown of books that were unique sources of inspiration to me as I was working on Occult America. Some of these authors are not esotericists at all; others cover topics that I fleetingly reference. But each work represents a carefully researched, keenly reasoned, and pioneering effort at comprehending occult topics and personas without lapsing into the kind of excessive credulity or a knee-jerk nay-saying that often clouds our ability to evaluate fringe movements. Each is a triumph of that rarest of traits: clear thought.

Al-Kemi by Andre VandenBroeck
A window into the intellectual and spiritual world of esoteric Egyptologist RA Schwaller de Lubicz, with an appreciative foreword by Saul Bellow. Posits intriguing ideas about the connections between Ancient Egyptian philosophy and the modern West - and also exposes the ethical failings of this brilliant intellect.

Hidden Wisdom by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney
A 360-degree survey of modern esoteric beliefs by the editors of the legendary Gnosis magazine (the most fondly missed journal on the planet). Their tone is unfailingly judicious, thoughtful, and shrewd.

The Tarot by Robert M. Place
Perhaps the sole guide to Tarot that synthesizes a scholarly exploration of Tarot's roots in the Middle Ages with an understanding of the mystical allegory of its images.

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances A. Yates
Probably the most authoritative works ever written on the occult mood of Europe in the late Renaissance period. Yates was a world-class historian, a tireless scholar, and a uniquely empathic observer of religious/philosophical movements.

The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall
The occult classic published in 1928 by the twenty-seven-year old auteur. This encyclopedia esoterica stands up remarkably well - its passages on Pythagorean mathematics, alchemical symbolism, and the competing histories of Rosicrucianism are especially sturdy.

Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month.

It sounds like an infomercial. I can already imagine the voice of Billy Mays (RIP) booming through my television set.

"Sick of fighting terrorists the old fashioned way with asymmetrical warfare? Hi, Billy Mays here, to talk to you about the one and only, Mullah Remover!"

I just got done reading Howard Clark's new book "How You Can Kill Al-Qaeda (in Three Easy Steps). He's an ex-Marine and former Homeland Security adviser who says the way to win the war on terrorism is to help empower the mainstream Muslim community, who in recent years has been overshadowed in the public spotlight by fringe Al-Qaeda extremists.

The whole idea of fighting terrorism with ideas and not weapons is definitely nothing new, but Clark's populist tone and foreign policy street cred was a refreshing perspective to have in the discussion.

"Click on the link below in the next 30 minutes and I'll throw in this egg slicer absolutely free! Here's how to order!"

Book's official site.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



Ghazals are traditional Sufi poems that contemplate life, the meaning of our existence and the countenance of God. Some renowned writers of such poetry are Jalal-uddin Rumi, Bulleh Shah, Mirza Ghaleb, etc.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog celebrating the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



It was just another hot day in Jaipur when Harish, an autorickshaw driver, sees Whitney, a University of Chicago student, in the distance and was awestruck. He asks her out for a cup of tea and she says no. He asks again, and she says no again. But Harish's persistence pays off, by the fourth time she comes around and they both grab a cup of tea. He shows her around Jaipur and, at the end of the day, he proposes to her. She accepts.

I'll admit, there is a part of me thinking, "typical colonized South Asian men always chasing after white women. I give it two months." And to that part of my brain I say shut it,let them bask in their happiness. What do you guys think?

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

Competition is now closed. We have about 380 entries to look through. Thank you everyone, will announce winners tomorrow.

UPDATE: We just got word from the Eggers camp that they will be providing us signed copies of Zeitoun! Not sure how many we'll be given for the giveaway, but will tell you all as soon as we know. Also, there's a new deadline - tomorrow, Thursday at 7 AM PST. We'll announce winners this Friday! It'll be hard to top zombie haikus, but let's try!



We've disabled comments here so write your Haiku in the original posting - Zeitoun Book Giveaway Haiku Contest

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

Since the late 1960s a very original and unclassifiable inner-city mystery religion called the Five Percenters has served as an inspiration behind some of the language and imagery of New York's hip hop scene. I recently spoke with All Things Considered host Guy Raz about the strange (and persistent) appearance of occult and esoteric themes in the work of Jay-Z.
"Jay-Z: A Master Of Occult Wisdom?"

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

To be honest, I was indifferent to JR's work in the slums until I saw this video. Thank you, Wooster Collective.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



Pakistan's longest motorcycle, courtesy of All Things Pakistan

I was in high school when 9/11 happened and the next day I was crowned Ambassador Muslim.  From World History to Geometry class I was defending Islam and 1.5 billion of its followers. Thinking that most of the problems with Muslim were cultural, I divorced myself from all dealings with South Asian culture. At the time, it was an easy cop out to say "Oh its the culture, not the religion." It was only in college did I realize that my Muslim and Pakistani Identity weren't mutually exclusive and they both made the other stronger and more vibrant. When I came to this realization, I knew I had a lot of years of cultural education to make up. And what better place to learn about my peeps than the Pakistani blogosphere? I am highlighting two of my favorite Pakistani blogs.

All Things Pakistan - I am culturally illiterate when it comes to Pakistan. All Things Pakistan seems to be on a mission to educate folks like me and share a part of their Pakistani experience. Most of the people that check this site are expats of Pakistan. Here's a link to where they talk about the Pakistani Eid experience - Eid Adventures in Pakistan

CHUP! Changing Up Pakistan is a great blog ran by Kalsoom Lakhani. While All Things Pakistan deals more with the Pakistani experience, CHUP! gives more of an analysis on hard news. Here is a great article on the sideline discussions officials of Pakistan and India had on during the UN General Assembly Meetings. Her coverage on the Swat crisis is phenomenal, or as we say in Pakistan - A 1!

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

UPDATE: We just got word from the Eggers camp that they will be providing us signed copies of Zeitoun! Not sure how many we'll be given for the giveaway, but will tell you all as soon as we know. Also, there's a new deadline - tomorrow, Thursday at 7 AM PST. We'll announce winners this Friday! It'll be hard to top zombie haikus, but let's try!



Zeitoun is a critically acclaimed non-fiction book written by Dave Eggers. Boing Boing has made a post on the book before. I could go on for hours on how great this book is, but have decided instead to giveaway a couple of new copies I have in my apartment. The Boing Boing crowd is an intelligent one, but are they poets?

Write a Haiku in the comments section on why you deserve a copy of Zeitoun. Aman and I will look through them and choose the top ones. We'll package them nicely and mail them out asap.

I'll be the sacrificial lamb to help get this started -

Zeitoun is his name
Rowing a boat is his game
I like arab food. 

Here's another example -

I am a bigot
Who reads Boing Boing everyday
I'm hoping to change

See? It's not that hard. I came up with these in the matter of seconds (and it shows). Let's have some fun!

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

One of the weirdest and most wonderful sites on the map of spiritual Los Angeles is the Philosophical Research Society (PRS). Occult scholar Manly P. Hall (1901-1990) opened this Mayan-Egyptian-art-deco campus in the Griffith Park neighborhood in 1934. Hall was the author of the legendary encyclopedia of occult lore, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (quoted in the epigraph to Dan Brown's latest novel), and he designed the Philosophical Research Society, or PRS, as his sanctum and school. I'm speaking at PRS this coming Saturday, October 3rd and Sunday, October 4th, at 2 p.m. daily on the history of the occult in America. I'll be considering everything from the career of Manly P. Hall to the growth of "mind power" mysticism. From Occult America:

Hall fancifully spoke of modeling his headquarters after the ancient mystery school of Pythagoras. More practically, PRS provided a cloistered setting where Hall spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and assembling a remarkable collection of antique texts and devotional objects. His small campus eventually grew to include a 50,000-volume library with catwalks and floor-to-ceiling shelves; a 300-seat auditorium with a throne-like chair for the master teacher; a bookstore; a warehouse for the many titles he wrote and sold; a wood-paneled office (complete with a walk-in vault for antiquities); and a sunny stucco courtyard. Designed in an unusual pastiche of Mayan, Egyptian, and art-deco motifs, PRS became one of the most popular destinations for L.A.'s spiritually curious, and remains so.

Philosophical Research Society

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

Never before have I seen my community photographed with such dignity and hope . Omar Mullick, an award winning photographer who shoots for National Geographic, NY Times, etc., has traveled all across America for 7 years documenting the elusive Muslim American community.

The photography will be on display at GalleryFCB Thursday, October 8th at 6:00 pm. The gallery runs for the entire month, but please join us at the opening of this historic exhibit. RSVP on the Facebook Event if you can.

Omar has given me the permission to showcase a handful of photos here at Boing Boing.

More images and info after the jump.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

 

Check out Pogo's YouTube Channel for more videos - http://www.youtube.com/user/Fagottron

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



I do a lot of random YouTube video searching at work and somehow found this little commercial. Turns out there's a whole bunch of characters in this "Poo-verse." Dookie-Poo has a best friend, an uncle and a nephew. There is also this grumpy dog, Skooch the Pooch, that moved from NYC to Pooville.  Here's a little bio of Dookie-Poo off the site -

Dookie-Poo is not the smartest of all the Poos in Pooville but he tries real hard and he has good intentions. Dookie never quits because he's just too dumb to do so. He tries way beyond the point of all reasoning. Dookie doesn't think much about anything. In fact he almost never thinks at all.

I am tempted to throw some turd puns, but will resist. For more fecal-toon fun check out: www.dookie-poo.com

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

When discussing the occult, a natural question arises: Just what is the occult? In short, the occult encompasses a wide range of mystical philosophies and mythical lore, particularly the belief in an "unseen world" whose forces act upon us and through us. Here is a piece of my introduction to Occult America that expands on that question....

Occultism describes a tradition--religious, literary, and intellectual--that has existed throughout Western history. The term comes from the Latin occultus, meaning "hidden" or "secret." The word occult entered modern use through the work of Renaissance scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who used it to describe magical practices and veiled spiritual philosophies in his three-volume study, De occulta philosophia, in 1533. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first instance of the word occult twelve years later. Traditionally, occultism deals with the inner aspect of religions: the mystical doorways of realization and secret ways of knowing. Classical occultism regards itself as an initiatory spiritual tradition. Seen from that perspective, the occultist is not necessarily born with unusual abilities, like soothsaying or mind reading, but trains for them.

I'm delighted to welcome Mitch Horowitz as a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Mitch is a fantastic tour guide to the fringes of reason, high weirdness, deep esoterica, secret societies, and mystery religions. Mitch's fantastic new book Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation shares a "sacred space" on my bookshelf with works by Manly Hall, Robert Anton Wilson, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Erik Davis. In fact, Mitch, who is also a book editor/publisher, has revived essential classics by several of those folks. The next two weeks should be quite a trip. Mitch writes:

Hi all,

Glad to be here with you for a couple of weeks. I’m the author of the just-published Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (Bantam) – it tells the long-overdue story of how esoteric movements and personalities have shaped America’s past and present. I’m also the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, where I publish metaphysical books by people like David Lynch, Jacques Vallee, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Jacob Needleman.

In all of my work, I try to convey a sense of how occult and mystery religions (things that are very important in my life) are every bit a part of “normal” religious history and, in fact, are the well-spring for most of today’s self-help philosophies, from mental-healing to meditation to motivational thinking.

I write for a variety of subculture magazines (Science of Mind, Atlantis Rising, Fortean Times, New Dawn), arts and ideas journals (Esopus, Parabola), and appear on mainstream forums (The Montel Williams Show, The History Channel, Air America) to explore arcane ideas in a way that doesn’t seem so…scary, alien, or faraway. It’s not. I’ll expand in the coming days.

Thanks for being aboard.

Mitch * www.mitchhorowitz.com

PS My wife Allison and I raise two young sons in New York City. We sleep at 45-minute intervals.

Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month.

My last post generated an interesting discussion (268 comments and counting) on Muslim women covering their hair. But it seemed kind of silly to talk about the subject, without hearing viewpoints from Muslim women.

My friend Mariam Sobh has graciously agreed to chime in. She is editor in chief of Hijabtrendz, the original fashion beauty and entertainment blog for Muslim women. Here's what she had to say:

It's the age old debate that quite frankly I'm sick and tired of. Muslim women and their "oppression".

Oppression is such a loaded word and it conjures up all sorts of negative images, but what people don't seem to want to understand is that Muslim women are just like any other woman. We come in all shapes and sizes, and all sorts of beliefs. You can't paint us all with the same brush.

I'm as American as anyone else, I watch movies, I read celebrity gossip, I shop at Victoria's Secret, I work outside the home, I'm pursuing my dreams, the only difference is that little piece of fabric I wrap around my head. Big whoop.

I'm not harming anyone by wearing a piece of material on my head so what's the big deal?

I myself wear the headscarf and I do so because it's something I believe is mandated in my religion. No one is forcing me and it has no political significance (I have no idea why people keep thinking it does). Believe me if I didn't think it was required I WOULD NOT be wearing it. I hate being bullied all the time by the press or some ignoramus about my scarf. It takes a toll on you emotionally and eventually you have to develop a thick skin. But words will always hurt no matter what.

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Today marks the end of my guest blogging stint here at BoingBoing.

It's been awesome (for me anyway). Thanks to BB readers for letting me share my projects, interests and ideas with you. And thanks for engaging- the comments often taught me more about a subject than I had to impart in the first place.

Thanks also to Cory and Rob and the rest of the BB crew for having me!

Please keep in touch! I'm particularly interested in story ideas and freelance pitches for my podcast.

Email: jesse at jessebrown.ca

Twitter (link)

Podcast/Blog (link)

Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month.

When I first heard of this product a few years ago, I'll admit it made me laugh, even with me being a Muslim. It's a swimsuit called the Burqini that's designed for Muslim women.

Men and women in Islam are both asked to dress modestly but many of the swimsuits designed for women today are too revealing to allow them to do that. As you can see, the Burqini doesn't show any skin but it's not too loose to the point where it's difficult to swim.

No woman should be denied the freedom to have a fun filled day at the pool or beach, which is why this company designed the Burqini. The more I thought about the product, the more I began to realize how awesome it is. It's another way Muslims have been able to adapt to local cultures and customs without compromising their beliefs, an issue many religions face today.

The Burqini has gotten a lot of backlash from governments in Europe. But I don't think any government has a right to tell people how to dress. How come a woman is not allowed to wear a burqini to a pool, but there's no law saying she can't wear a giant panda suit? If she wants to wear either of those outfits, hey go right ahead.

Burqini's official site

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the New York City mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, New York.

 

They gave me the creeps when I was a kid, but damn did their cereals taste good. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but there has been a sudden reemergence of all things Monster Cereal and this site is documenting every step of it. Who would've thought there was such a large cult following for Count Chocula and company?

Who's your favorite of the bunch? Count Chocula may have swag, but Boo Berry's sedated brows kill.

See all the collectibles showcased: http://monstercereal.blogspot.com

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the New York City mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, New York.


If you live in New York City or any other major city, you may have seen a store sign scream "Halal Meat" or "Halal Certified." These signs are nothing but comfort for many Muslims who want meat that's prepared in accordance to the Islamic guidelines. The whole halal-making process is very similar to the kosher-making one. In fact, many Muslims, including myself, limit their meat consumption to only kosher and halal meat since they both fall under a similar rigorous certification.

So when I get tired of tuna sandwiches and want to get my halal grub on, where do I go? Zabihah.com - it's really the authoritative guide to halal dining. It's a wiki-site created by the brilliant Shahed Amanullah back in 1999. Shahed meticulously typed in 200 restaurants himself, and now the site bolsters around 6,000 halal restaurants worldwide. Anyone can add their own restaurant and leave a review or two.

Anyone like to recommend their favorite halal eatery? Please do share!

Visit the site: www.zabihah.com

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Here's the conclusion to 500 Pound Planet, the cartoon I made with Josh Dolgin. I really hope you've enjoyed it, and would love to hear some reviews/criticism/impressions.

Previously:

500 Pound Planet: Prelude

500 Pound Planet: Chapter One

500 Pound Planet: Chapter Two

500 Pound Planet: Chapter Three

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Canadian literature (or CanLit, as some insist) has gradually become a genre of its own- one of books that are bleak, desperate, *meaningful*, and above all, dull.

New DIY publisher The Workhorsery aims to do something about that by releasing You and The Pirates, Jocelyne Allens' superfun debut novel.

The book dares to star you (a snarky prairie-girl expat) in its second-person wackjob tale of terrorists, cats and pirates in modern-day Tokyo. Check it out!

Free chapter (PDF)

Amazon page (link)

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He currently resides in Harlem, New York.

 

A dramatic reading of tweets. The guy reading Lohan is the best. Who do you think should be read next?  (thanks James, No You First)

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He currently resides in Harlem, New York.

Is anyone here following We Love You So? A blog Spike Jonze and Co. set up giving us a  nice glimpse into all the little insights and influences that helped bring Where The Wild Things Are to life. The photo above is from their Where the Wild Things Ought To Be Contest, a cute photoshop competition that has some really clever entries. 

Ch ch check it out- http://weloveyouso.com

Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month. For the month of Ramadan, my friend Bassam and I gave you guys an insight into how Muslims across the United States observe Ramadan with our project 30 Mosques in 30 Days. But Iranian-American Jason Rezaian gives an interesting and critical look at Muslims observing Ramadan in five predominantly Muslim countries. Rezaian talks about how local cultures can sometimes twist Islam's religious practices. Take his Dubai story for example:

Dubai tends toward gluttony every month of the year, but during Ramadan, things are even more over the top, with nearly every eating establishment offering an Iftar fast-breaking gut-buster at sundown. It's Dubai doing what it does best: using its limited resources for its own commercial advantage. Even American fast-food outlets in Dubai offer Ramadan Value Meals, usually adding a dessert to the already calorie-packed meal deal. At the Dubai Mall, McDonald's was the only major international food chain that didn't have a special offer, just a banner that read: "Ramadan Kareem"--"Happy Ramadan."

Slate: My Ramadan World Tour