Wonderland or Not

First things first. I’m inc­re­dibly dis­tur­bed at the rude­ness of the peo­ple who repai­red my windshield glass. They were sup­po­sed to be here yes­ter­day. After class I sped to the office to pick up some work, came home, and wai­ted for the fixers. They are mobile and were sup­po­sed to be here bet­ween 1PM and 4PM. I didn’t call them until after 4PM because I’m not that impa­tient. Really I’m not. When I called, after 4PM, I was infor­med they don’t do it in the rain, and it had been rai­ning all day. I men­tio­ned that they could have let me know because I had gone out of my way to be here. They apo­lo­gi­zed and said they’d be here today bet­ween 12PM and 1PM. That was the jest of it. Today I went to work, came home at noon to wait their arri­val. When they hadn’t appea­red by 2PM I called to be sure they were actually coming. Evi­dently it pis­sed someone off because when the guy did show up an hour later he laughed and said, “You can’t be the one they said was going all “Judge Judy” on them, you look like you’re in 11th grade”.

Judge Judy? Just because I asked them if they were going to do what I sat around wai­ting for them to do yes­ter­day? The fixer was a cool though. He fixed my windshield in record time.

On to Iran:

I tend to look at this whole thing, twit­ter thing, a little dif­fe­rently than most peo­ple I sup­pose. I was plea­sed to find this via twit­ter this after­noon. America’s Ira­nian Twit­ter Revo­lu­tion. Some valid points, worth reading.

It was a little anno­ying to see some of the tweets about this poten­tial revo­lu­tion. Why? Because I got the impres­sion, after follo­wing some of the links to the twit’s blogs, that the blog­gers (not all but a majo­rity) appea­red to know little if anything about Iran, except pos­sibly where it is, that we don’t want them to have nuc­lear wea­pons because they were Isla­mic terro­rists out to nuke Israel and us off the face of the earth. It also bog­gles my mind, with health care and edu­ca­tion, not to men­tion the eco­nomy, in such a state, that unless it’s a revo­lu­tion in some far away place, something we really shouldn’t have anything to do with ( except publish as many of the pho­tos and real Ira­nian tweets as pos­si­ble), it’s not twit worthy. Unlike the major media, who don’t cover health care and edu­ca­tion because those that work for major media have both, twitterer’s tend to jump on wha­te­ver comes their way as long as it’s easy and takes only a click of a fin­ger or two, making far off revo­lu­tions enti­cing and anything else unlikely.

Be that as it may I found that some of the blog­gers, those with no pre­vious know­ledge of Iran, it’s his­tory or our policy his­tory with Iran, had over the last week edu­ca­ted them­sel­ves, one going far back into ancient his­tory and then going for­ward, if in a cur­sory man­ner, and that really is not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

For now there is some decent cove­rage from the major media NYT and BBC, and bless Andrew Sullivan’s little heart, he is really in to this.

Doug is waxing poe­tic on this in Spoi­ling the saga .
And my god I think Pia is on twit­ter. I now have to find her.

Shi­rin Ebadi is going to town. Here are a few links, if you haven’t read them already.

An inte­res­ting inter­view with Shi­rin Ebadi in may of 2006

Shi­rin Ebadi agrees with Obama

Iran’s Human Rights Acti­vists Being Arres­ted, Nobel Prize Win­ner Tells NPR

Void the Elec­tions or Risk Violence

We may be inno­va­tive, but they are brave.