Sexism and the City

Like every thinking person I know, I'm appalled by the French government's big push to ban the wearing of burkas. Imagine how I balked when I read this story about "tournante" - gang rape as punishment for girls in the suburbs who rebel. Of course, I had to repost it:

“In Muslim immigrant families, the sons are treated like kings. They are not just preferred over the girls, they are spoilt and coddled.” The crux is that when these young men encounter resistance beyond the family for the first time - when they don’t get into university or college, for example - they react helplessly and destructively. They compensate for their fury and inferiority complexes with machismo and violence against those who are socially and physically weaker – girls in particular.SEXISM & THE CITY, Jun 2009

You really should read the whole article.

...podcast?

i'm thinking about doing a (bi)weekly podcast, starting this summer. i'm still stitching it together in my head. the thing is, i'm having way too many interesting conversations with friends and strangers. why shouldn't i share these spontaneous chats with the world?

and i suppose i could play some songs, too.

of course if you ask the internet, it will give you all kinds of answers about how to make a podcast. as it turns out, the new iPhone would make podcasting especially easy. i'm not so sure about audioboo (great name!) but it's so easy to use according to some reviews, it's kind of irresistible -- in spite of that social network thing.

i don't want to go on and on for an hour or even a half hour or even 20 minutes. i want snippets of all the strange sonic explosions that keep going off around me every day.

let's see what develops.