toscano
Refugee
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2005
- Messages
- 2,032
"If you mock Islam with a drawing or a novel, you get riots and dead people. News of mishandled holy books yields riots and dead people. Insufficiently reverent short films by a Dutchman yields a dead person, specifically the Dutchman.
Now we add this detail: Quoting medieval religious colloquies is a reasonable justification for burning churches, shooting a nun and holding up signs demanding that the pope convert to Islam or saw off his own head. (There have been reports of carpal tunnel syndrome among radical Islam's enforcers, and they have requested we all help out.)
This is a new twist: Now history itself cannot be discussed. Since it's difficult to predict what else will enflame the devout, Islam has to be treated with unusual deference, like a 3-year-old child with anger management problems."
Full article here
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks092006.html
Now we add this detail: Quoting medieval religious colloquies is a reasonable justification for burning churches, shooting a nun and holding up signs demanding that the pope convert to Islam or saw off his own head. (There have been reports of carpal tunnel syndrome among radical Islam's enforcers, and they have requested we all help out.)
This is a new twist: Now history itself cannot be discussed. Since it's difficult to predict what else will enflame the devout, Islam has to be treated with unusual deference, like a 3-year-old child with anger management problems."
Full article here
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks092006.html
out of me.
Now if I could just afford a tandoor and find a source for those skinny little black seeds that go by an infuriating number of names and for which I always wind up getting the wrong thing when I try mail ordering them, maybe I could actually replicate some of them at home. 
Well, yes, that is what the bag of them I bought in Amritsar were called--I stupidly didn't write down what the non-English-speaking seller called them (s------ jeera something, I *think*) but another shopper smiled at me and authoritatively said, "Black cumin seeds!" so I wrote that down and taped it to the bag. But when I ran out and tried ordering "black cumin seeds" from a store in New York (not an Indian one) what I got were, well, some blackish variety of ordinary cumin seeds, which like ordinary cumin were plumper than the "black cumin seeds" I'd been using, as well as too strong, so the flavors were off when I tried them in the same recipes. Then I saw the right thing again awhile later at the house of a friend from UP in New Jersey, and his wife, whose English admittedly wasn't that great, said puzzledly, "Black cumin? No--kala jeera," which cracked me up because so far as I know that literally means black cumin, but anyhow I then tried ordering "kala jeera" from an Indian store in Chicago, which got me these truly tiny black seeds that weren't right either. My Bengali friend here nodded and said, "Yes! Those are kala jeera!", but my Kashmiri student shook his head and said, "No, no--those are kalonji not kala jeera!" (which was what I'd been thinking). Then I recounted all this to an Iranian-American colleague who said, "Ah yes! black cumin! Try ordering it from a Middle Eastern store," which I did, and that got me a bag of caraway seeds labeled "black cumin." 
I don't know, am I just ordering from the wrong places or something? I know different spices sometimes have confusingly overlapping regional names. What did you call them in Urdu?
