Fragments

Yesterday was Thanksgiving in Canada and so today we had a Bank Holiday.
I find it odd that Britain, which has an established Church, doesn't have a Bank Hol for Harvest Thanksgiving, yet Canada, where Christians aren't supposed to mention their festivals and beliefs whilst everyone else can, has one.
Gordon needs to get working on that.

I can't believe Britain has a PM called Gordon, but oh well, he's a good guy.

So divine to have a three-day weekend, an extra lie-in. But...since we have no car, we have stayed close to home. No biggie, I have enjoyed the pottering, cleaning the ceiling fan blades, chopping back the dead stuff in the patio pots, while working around the massive spider's web.

Since it is vid rental day, we also walked down to the plaza and rented two dvds. One was 'Iraq in Fragments' a trio of film clips following the lives of three different sets of people in Iraq after the war. This was a fascinating film, funded partly by the Sundance Movie Festival, which I believe is on at the moment. A Seattle filmmaker spent time in Baghdad and Kurdistan.

The first clip focussed on a young boy, Mohammed, in Baghdad. When filming started he was working in a café, he said that his boss loved him, looked after him like a father. His real father had disappeared. He had been a policeman under Saddam, but had criticised the dictator and had been put in prison.
Soon, the boss wanted Mohammed to go back to school, which he did, but then he could only work in the café for one hour a day. He wasn't making any progress with his spelling either, so he was soundly insulted by the café owner and sent packing.
There were hardly any women in this clip apart from the schoolteachers, boys and girls didn't seem to be taught together.
The old men in the café sat around doing the philosophising that only men in bars and cafés do. And as uneducated men in bars everywhere, they came up with second-hand thinking.
They decided that the Americans were just after their oil, but who cared, it was never theirs anyway. For 35 years, Saddam had taken everything, so there was no difference to them if the Americans took it.
Of course, it would make a difference to Canadians in Alberta, whose oil the Americans actually buy to supplement their own, but that's another story.

The second clip was a bunch of confused Shia. They were complaining, in between a bit of self-flagellation - that apparently Saddam didn't approve of, presumably he preferred to keep the flagellation of Shia to himself, that the Dawa party had suddenly reappeared after 35 years. Where, they asked, had the Dawa party been for the past 35 years, why had they not bothered to take Saddam out themselves during all that time.
This lot seemed to be generally of the frothing-at-the-mouth variety, narry a woman in sight. They had fat, bespectacled clerics to whip them into a frenzy at the drop of a hijab. Not that there were any in sight, the more psychotic the fundies, the fewer the women.
The only one we saw was begging the Shia militia to return her husband to her, they'd taken him while he was selling scrap metal.
They were against the American occupation, they were against Saddam, they were against the Dawa party. Nobody loved them, everybody hated them, they just refused to go down the garden to eat worms, they just hated everyone right back.
This bunch you just wanted to put in a pit and leave to fight it out amongst themselves until they were all dead.

The third section was in Kurdistan. These people were poor but worked hard and had a sense of humour. And there were women. We saw the elections, a smiling woman on her way in joked that they should make sure they searched her properly, she looked like she was enjoying it.
The focus was on a family of seven. The old man had six children and he was sure he would die soon. One of the sons, strangely light-haired, worked in the brick factory, went to school - where boys and girls were taught side-by-side and looked after the sheep as well.
He liked to eat quickly so that he could spend more time asleep, but he prayed to Mecca before he did so.
The old man wanted his son to go to religious school, but didn't have enough money. He wanted one of his sons to be for God. They must protect their beloved area of Iraq, Kurdistan, that God had given them. God had sent them the Americans who had liberated Iraq. God was good to them.

Later, on Food TV, Alton Brown, our favourite American TV chef, was showing how to make pretzels. Why? Who the frell eats these things? I hope they're a secret weapon, because otherwise they're a waste of ingredients and shelf space.