Or .... why I don't use hair dye :)

Photo of the day!

This is for real, I hope, and not a doctored photo

Quote of the day: obesity and starbucks ...

In an otherwise dull and boring essay on obesity and how we are now faced with having to constantly say no to food that is everywhere, this paragraph shows up:

A venture capitalist who knows the business intimately cited Starbucks as a company that has recognised and responded brilliantly to a cultural need. The caffeine and sugar in the coffee, with their energising effects, are certainly part of the equation, but the chain also offers something much more primal. "It's about warm milk and a bottle," he says. "One of my colleagues said, 'If I could put a nipple on it, I'd be a multimillionaire'."

Cool, right?

The real meaning of words at faculty meetings :)

One of the many reasons why I attend very few meetings on campus :)

David Galef writes:

the language in departmental meetings is difficult to read, even for veterans who’ve been teaching at U of All People for decades, and the proceedings really deserve a translation. In return for a modest travel voucher, the psycholinguist Martin Baffle has provided a rough equivalency chart for all future meetings:

Utterance	Implication
Let’s come to order.	This meeting should’ve started 15 minutes ago.
Who’ll take notes?	I’m not doing it two months in a row.
We have five items on the agenda.	We’ll be lucky if we get past two.
You have the documents in front of you.	I see that none of you downloaded what I sent.
With all due respect ...	I’m about to be rude.
I have a question.	I have a comment.
I have issues with --	I can’t tell you how much this pisses me off.
Can you repeat that?	I need to buy some time.
What’s best for our students ...	What works for me ...
I’m a bit puzzled by ...	I hate ...
Do I hear a motion?	Will someone please save me?
Let’s send this back to the committee.	Let’s deep-six this baby.
Can we take this up next time?	I don’t have my minions here right now.
I have to leave early for another meeting.	I’m more important than you.
I’m sorry, but I have to pick up my son.	I have my priorities straight.
Do I see a hand?	Stop interrupting.
As a point of procedure ...	No other way I can stop this.
If I may make a comment ...	Now that everyone else has had a say, I intend to drone on for as long as I like.
Shall we call the question?	Can we for Chrissake get on with this?
Paper ballots, please.	I see we don’t trust each other.
How about just a show of hands?	We’ll smoke ’em out.
Please, this is a private matter.	Back-channel all sniping e-mail.
As I recall, we do have a precedent for that ...	As the longest-standing faculty member in the room, I can make up anything before 1970.
We can decide this next matter in a hurry.	I hope no one’s read beyond page two.
That’s not what I said.	I wish I hadn’t said that.
Correct me if I’m wrong.	I know I’m right on this one.
Here are our recommendations.	Here are our demands.
To speak anecdotally ...	I haven’t a shred of evidence to back this up.
The administration may not agree with us on this one.	The provost wishes we were dead.
I don’t believe Professor Jones has had a chance to speak.	Stop marking papers, Jonesie.
We need to set up a committee.	We don’t want to talk about it now.
I’m just the moderator.	The buck starts here.
Let me remind you ...	I know you know I know you know.
Personally ...	I love talking about myself.
The dean has asked for our opinion.	He wants a rubber-stamp approval.
You have proxies?	But aren’t Professors Winthrop and Leighton dead?
The meeting is now adjourned.	Time for a drinkie.

The Queen from Zanzibar ... a misleading title, I suppose!

Was thinking about Tanzania earlier.  Thoughts took me to the place where we had lunch--Hasty Tasty.  Halfway through the lunch, my lunch-mate spotted a photograph on the wall of a person who seemed to look not quite European nor Indian nor Middle Eastern, and we became curious.

So, I walked up to the counter and asked the person there.

"You don't recognize him?" was her reply. 

I had no idea, though the face in the photo looked familiar. 

"That is the Aga Khan" she said, and various pieces fit together right away.

See, before we sat down for lunch, when we were walking around, I saw a hospital named after the Aga Khan. 

Now, the curious conversationalist in me took over. It turned out that she (I think the "mum" in that place that travel books refer to) was born in Zanzibar--yes, that island/archipelago which merged with Tanganyika to form the country Tanzania.  Marriage brought her over to the mainland.  Most of her relatives, near and far, have immigrated to the UK or Canada, or the US.

We were on a schedule, and had to get going.  I had hoped to chat with again another time, but when I returned there about ten days later, she was not to be found--perhaps that was her day off.  I was looking forward to resuming the conversation because I wanted to ask her about Freddie Mercury, the lead guy for Queen.

Mercury was born in Zanzibar to Parsi parents.  His schooling was in India, but the entire family had to flee from Zanzibar when the Sultan was thrown out in the aftermath of the British exiting .... So, Mercury ended up in the UK.

Aha, you see how I ended up thinking that somebody ought to make a movie out of Freddie Mercury's life.  It has all the drama that you would ever need--from his childhood in Zanzibar and India, the political uncertainties in the background along with their minority status, then the UK, his HIV/AIDS (which he did not publicly acknowledge for the longest time).... the music scene/Queen, an astrophysicist lead-guitarist!  I tell you, this will be an Oscar-winning movie. 

Here is one of my favorite Queen songs:

On Karl Rove's new book

The best review line:
"It is like Pride and Prejudice, but even more prejudiced" :)
Watch it; will do you good

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Karl Rove's New Book
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

Who is Obama?

David Brooks has a good column; he writes:

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

Yep, we are far from being a sensible country.  The hysteria about the president, and the politics, says more about us voters than anything else ....

Cartoon of the day: Rahm Emanuel :)

If you are wondering what the joke is, well, read this about the "chief of staff" :)

The worrisome Israel-Palestinian tension ... and the US' role

The following map is from Professor Juan Cole's blog, Informed Comment

In a related post on Biden's visit to Israel, Cole writes:

Obama is in real danger of seeing his allies lose respect for the United States once they see that Israel can treat him in this humiliating way with impunity. The security implications for the US are enormous. Many European allies feel strongly that Israel is an aggressor state in the region, and when Obama asks them for help in the fight against al-Qaeda, they may feel that Washington's coddling of Israeli colonialism produced much of the radicalism that they are now asked to spend blood and treasure combating. Moreover, many leaders may be emboldened to treat Obama and Biden just as Netanyahu did, if the latter faces no consequences for his impudence.

and provides this news clip:

Where the "just say No" Republicans were trained :)

At the Monty Python School of Argument. No, Monty Python School of Contradiction ...

Toyota recall: much ado about nothing?

The deaths and various levels of unfortunate experiences are horrible, indeed.  There is no denying that.

But, are we over, over emphasizing the risks associated with this?  Robert Wright, always the sober and rational person, writes:

it worries me that this Toyota thing worries us so much. We live in a world where responding irrationally to risk (say, the risk of a terrorist attack) can lead us to make mistakes (say, invading Iraq). So the Toyota story is a kind of test of our terrorism-fighting capacity — our ability to keep our wits about us when things seem spooky.
Passing the test depends on lots of things. It depends on politicians resisting the temptation to score cheap points via the exploitation of irrational fear. It depends on journalists doing the same. And it depends on Americans in general keeping cool, notwithstanding the likely failure of many politicians and journalists to do their part.

Wright correctly points out that the odds of dying from a car-related accident are much, much higher:

your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million — 2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.

So driving one of these suspect Toyotas raises your chances of dying in a car crash over the next two years from .01907 percent (that’s 19 one-thousandths of 1 percent, when rounded off) to .01935 percent (also 19 one-thousandths of one percent)

One of the best comments to Wright's piece is this:

Nobody understands risk. Smokers will complain about the dangers of Toyota software.

Why a salad costs more than a Big Mac

provides billions of dollars in subsidies, much of which goes to huge agribusinesses producing feed crops, such as corn and soy, which are then fed to animals. By funding these crops, the government supports the production of meat and dairy products—the same products that contribute to our growing rates of obesity and chronic disease. Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies.
The government also purchases surplus foods like cheese, milk, pork, and beef for distribution to food assistance programs—including school lunches. The government is not required to purchase nutritious foods. 

 Source, and ht
A note on the source, which is the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine:

Founded in 1985, PCRM is a nonprofit organization supported by physicians and laypersons who receive Good Medicine each quarter. PCRM programs combine the efforts of medical experts and grassroots individuals.
Leadership
PCRM Board of Directors: Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President; Mark Sklar, M.D., Director; Russell Bunai, M.D., Treasurer and Secretary.

Nutcase, er, Ahmadinejad in Afghanistan!

Ahmadinejad, who arrived as Gates was wrapping up a three-day visit, told a news conference alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai that U.S. and Western troops would never defeat terrorism by waging war in Afghanistan.

Gates said earlier in the week Iran was playing a "double game" in Afghanistan by being friendly to the government while trying to undermine the United States. He said on Wednesday he had passed those concerns on to Karzai.

Geopolitics!

Reuters report adds:

Shortly before the news conference started, Afghan security guards anxiously collected half-empty bottles of mineral water from reporters. One said it was in order to prevent anyone from throwing the bottles at Ahmadinejad.

Ah, turns out that for Ahmadinejad, water bottles are weapons of mass destruction!

Another anti-gay Republican .... is gay

I lived in Bakersfield (CA) for almost a decade.  A highly socially and politically conservative place that was. Here is an example: the local college invited to campus a well known poet, Frank Bidart, for, well, poetry reading and Q/A.  There was a great deal of protest because ...he was gay!  And the icing on this crazy cake?  He was a local guy--was born and brought up in town before he moved to the East Coast, and he still had family in town.  Yet the protests ....

One of the local politicians was Roy Ashburn, who systematically contested and won election after election.  At one time there was even speculation that he might head to the Congress.  The guy was typical of the local pols who were highly successful--ultra conservative Republican talk.  (Not "Conservative" but Republican.)  Ashburn was also, as one can then imagine, anti-gay.

So, there I was checking with the newspaper from Bakersfield and I almost fell off the chair when I read a series of reports on Ashburn and his homosexuality:

“I am gay. Those are the words that have been difficult for me for so long,” a sometimes emotional Ashburn told local talk radio show host Inga Barks 

So, why was he vehemently anti-gay, and why did he support anti-gay policies?

Ashburn has taken heat in the last week for having been both closeted and a consistent voter against gay-rights related legislation. In the interview, Ashburn repeatedly argued he voted the will of his constituents in his conservative 18th Senate District, which includes much of Bakersfield.

“I took a position based on what I believed was the will of my constituents, not mine, necessarily,” Ashburn said. “We have a representative form of government ... where citizens select people to cast votes on their behalf.”

Bah!  It was strictly a game he played in order to win re-elections?  How awful! The Fresno Bee editorial has the best line on this:

For Ashburn, being part of the club of elected officials apparently was more important than voting his conscience. That's disturbing. It's also extremely hypocritical, no matter how Ashburn tries to spin it.

But times are changing. Most younger voters don't care about sexual orientation. Ashburn could have shown leadership by trying to change the minds of others. He never gave his constituents the chance.

I wish Ashburn well .... but, I also hope he will understand how much his anti-gay politics caused pain and hardship to gays. I look forward to reading his apology in a future issue of the Bakersfield Californian.

Photo of the day: more on women's work

The photo's description at the source is:

ANYTHING FOR WATER: A group of tribal women fetching water from an agricultural well at Govind Tanda Karepalli Mandal in Khammam Distrcit. Photo: G.N.Rao

Yet again, I am blown away by the physically demanding labor that most poorer women have to do day in and day out, and almost always they seem to do that with a smile on their faces.
In Tanzania, too, it was women carrying water from the community hand-pump to their homes.  There were lots of young and older men alike cycling around, playing football, .... No, I did not take photos--neither of the women carrying water, nor of the men biking or chatting.

In this photo, it appears that one small slip could easily mean a fall into the well and, perhaps, crashing one's head against the rocks.  I am getting a tad dizzy just looking at this photo ... 

Beware: some bullshit happening somewhere :)

Not in my classroom :)

Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

Yemen, women, and ... students in my class?

So, a couple of weeks ago, when we were discussing demographics in my intro class, I remarked that countries like Yemen have high fertility rates, and high fertility rates--at levels way higher than a 2 or 3--are typically in societies, like Yemen, where women don't have rights, or have limited rights.

Naturally, I asked them if they knew where Yemen was and, slowly, through a little bit of critical thinking a couple of students figured out that it was in the Middle East, in the Arabian peninsula.

Coincidentally, this came at the same time that Jon Stewart had fun with the underwear bomber and how we come to know about a country only when somebody from there attacks us.  Yes, of course, I played his video in the classroom :)

Now we are in the final instructional week, and a student "S" was excited about something she came across about Yemen, women, and women's rights .... in the People magazine.  She gave me the piece that she had torn out before rushing to class--that is the scanned image on the left.

It was a coincidence that "S" brought this to class on March 8th, which is International Women's Day!  I wonder if People had also featured this story as a part of the Women's Day issue--you think?

Click on the scanned image or here to purchase the book from Amazon.

Nicholas Kristof wrote about this remarkable Yemeni girl and her ordeal:

For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.
He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.
Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.

Speaking of Kristof, click here for a video from him on the "Congo workout plan"--the hard physical work that women do, while men sit around and drink beer.  Kristof then attempts to carry that load and gives up!  As I noted once before, at least, we men--sometimes--are good for nothing and only create hassles for women :(  It is simply awful that such conditions exist in the world today. 
More than anything, this being the second time a student has linked something in the world outside to the discussions we had inside the classroom, I am ready to call this term a success.  Was worth all the trouble of preparing the syllabus, lecturing and leading discussions, waking up students in the class (!), grading and grading and grading .... a good term all in all ...

Remember the "Lambada"? :)

I don't have money ...

At least, "never on Sunday" :)

Questions I would rather not see as headlines ...

... but, here they are at Slate.com:
Can California Declare Bankruptcy? What about Greece?
Isn't that exciting!  How the heck did we reach such a juncture?

California passed a gas tax last week to help make up for its nearly $20 billion budget gap, the latest in a series of measures to right the state's teetering economy. The country of Greece is in even worse shape, with accumulated debt higher than 110 percent of GDP, set to reach 125 percent this year. Can a state declare bankruptcy? Can a country?

You are thinking, hey, declare bankruptcy and start all over!  Gold Rush, Part II.  Of course, California cannot declare bankruptcy. 

Greece is in a slightly different situation. There's no international bankruptcy court for countries that can't pay their debts. Instead, other EU countries that depend on Greece's solvency, such as Germany or France, would have to agree to bail it out. (When the economy of one member of the Eurozone sinks, it drags the euro down across the continent.)

Anne Applebaum writes that Germany is sick and tired of bailing out ailing Euro economies.  Further more, the deficit countries seem to be partying away, while Germany is working hard to save:

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany's deeply serious paper of record, has pointed out that while the Greeks are out protesting the raising of the pension age from 61 to 63, Germany recently raised its pension age from 65 to 67: "Does that mean that the Germans should in future extend the working age from 67 to 69, so that Greeks can enjoy their retirement?'

But, there is more to this Greek Tragedy than that meets the eye, according to Applebaum:

Germany is now run by a generation with no personal memories of the war. Germany's historical debate is now focused on the fate of Germans who suffered from wartime bombing and postwar deportation, not with the fate of Germany's victims—in Greece or anywhere else. Sooner or later, the Germans will collectively decide that enough sacrifices have been made and that the debt to Europe has been paid. Thanks to the ungrateful Greeks with their island villas and large pensions, that day may arrive more quickly that we thought it would.

Oh well ... dance away, Zorba :)

Chart of the day: spending more than our earnings!

Cartoon of the day: how we confuse terrorists and confuse ourselves!

Quote (excerpt) for the day!

Hysterically funny, if only this weren't true!

New Hampshire state Rep. Nancy Elliott, at a recent state Judiciary Committee meeting on a proposal to repeal the state's same-sex marriage bill, described the issue of gay marriage as follows: "taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement." Rep. Elliott continued, irrelevantly, "and you have to think, I'm not sure, would I allow that to be done to me?" (Elliott has since apologized for the portion of her remarks in which she falsely claimed that because gay marriage had been legalized, New Hampshire's fifth-graders were being taught to have anal sex in the public schools.)

This is the best introduction, I have read in a long time, to an essay .... in this case, the essay is by my favorite legal issues commentator, Dahlia Lithwick, writing about Martha Nussbaum's book From Disgust to Humanity

Time and again, Nussbaum argues, societies have been able to move beyond their own politics of disgust to what she calls "the politics of humanity," once they have finally managed to see others as fully human, with human aspirations and desires.

I can relate to one of the examples of disgust cited there--that of untouchables in India.  My grandmothers grew up in a world where they believed that they ought not to even accidentally touch one, or be touched by one .... and, it was fantastic to watch them go through a transformation and they shed that thought.  It was wonderful in fact that the doctor who treated my grandmother--this was back in the late 1970s--when she was in the hospital was not a person whose physical touch would have been appreciated fifty years prior .... this doctor later was elected as a member of the Parliament as well.  With the other grandmother, the moment I knew she had let go of the old ways of thinking was when we were watching on television a movie (can't recall the name!) about the very caste issues--it featured a phenomenal actress, Sharada, who was a Meryl Streep in her own ways.  Somewhere along in the movie, I heard my grandmother comment very sympathetically towards the lower caste character.  That empathy for the lower caste character in a movie meant a lot to me ... I think this is the humanity that Nussbaum refers to ....

We might have our own biases--because of the contexts within which we grew up.  I suppose the key is what happens when we are presented with evidence to the contrary.  It is those folks who refuse to discard their biases who worry me--not any bias by itself. 

Kashmir: the word's most dangerous place

Thus writes Pankaj Mishra, and notes that:

In one sense at least, the faltering dialogue between India and Pakistan resembles the ‘peace process’ in the Middle East: by the time any ways to proceed are agreed upon, usually with much acrimony, peace seems even further away.
Last week’s talks in Delhi most likely came about because of pressure from the United States. The Obama administration seems to have decided that it cannot do without Pakistani assistance in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and that Pakistan has its own strategic interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan has rewarded this overdue acknowledgment of its concerns by arresting senior Taliban leaders who have long been living in its territory. In return, the Obama administration has pressed India to be more conciliatory over Kashmir.

Thanks to honest analysis by a few like Mishra, the world outside (and perhaps within India, too) gets at least a little bit of an understanding of not only issues like Kashmir, but also about the state of democracy in India.  With every visit to India, I grow less confident about the treatment of minorities and the poor there.  Even as a kid I had always wanted to go India's northeast, particularly to Nagaland and Mizoram.  Now, with a foreign passport--and an American one--I understand I will even have to get official clearance before I can go there!

One of my criticisms about Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" presentation is that to the uninformed American it further presents an absolutely misleading portrayal of India.  It is no wonder then that American politicians are stupid enough to think of America having to compete against India.  Such a narrative misses the troubling aspects of India's socioeconomics, including the following that Mishra notes:

There are, as the political scientist Sunil Khilnani recently warned, grounds to fear the emergence in India of a “military-industrial complex”—especially while the Indian state, as Khilnani points out, is at war with its own people in Central India: the Mao-inspired guerillas who have organized India’s traditionally disadvantaged tribal communities and low-caste peasants into a militant movement spanning 20 of India’s 28 states.
The apparent failure of an ambitious counterinsurgency campaign called “Operation Green Hunt” has recently forced the Indian government to propose ceasefire talks with the “Maoists.” As politicians and columnists frequently point out, “they are our own people.”

Bangladesh in Eugene: Syeda Rizwana Hasan

With a twist to an old saying about Mohammed and the mountain, Bangladesh came to me right here in Eugene, in the form of Syeda Rizwana Hasan.

My meeting with Rizwana Hasan is a remarkable testament to the global interconnectedness that characterizes our contemporary lives.  Hasan, who is associated with the Eugene-based Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW,) was in town as an invited keynote speaker for the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC).

Rizwana Hasan has a lengthy track record as an activist environmental attorney in Bangladesh, and in 2009, was one of the recipients of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

Hasan focuses on the ship-breaking industry’s impacts on humans and the environment.  Ships are sent to the junkyard after two or three decades of useful service, similar to how we condemn used cars.  There is a lot to salvage and reuse from these retired ships—from engines and compasses to furniture to cranes, and not to forget the steel and wood.  Ship-breaking, as one can therefore imagine, is labor-intensive.

Often, this also means that laborers toil away in conditions that can be quite dangerous and dirty.  The occupational and environmental problems related to ship-breaking arise because of the wide range of materials that are used to build a ship in the first place.

South Korea and Taiwan used to be the global leaders in ship-breaking.  But then they developed and became rich, which then sent the industry towards other low cost locations.

Thus, the labor-intensive nature along with potential for unfavorable impacts on workers and the natural environment logically leads this activity to be situated at the docks of poor countries.  Alang, situated on India’s western coast, and relatively close to Mumbai, is home to one of the largest ship-breaking operations where a bulk freighter is completely dismantled in about a month.  Karachi is Pakistan’s headquarters in this industry, and in Bangladesh it all happens at Chittagong.

This is now boom time for ship-breaking because the Great Recession has idled many ships, and a record number of the older ones are now headed to these maritime graveyards.  According to news reports, in 2009, scrappers “bought 1,014 ships with a combined carrying capacity of 31.5 million deadweight tons” which was twice the 2008 numbers.  

Rizwana Hasan is not opposed to the ship-breaking industry per se.  But, she wants the ships' owners and their countries of origin to properly take care of toxic materials before the vessels reach Bangladesh.  Further, Hasan worries—and she has enough evidence for this—that while Bangladesh and other countries might have laws that address labor conditions and environmental impacts, rare is the case when such laws are actually applied.

Thus, starting in 2003, Hasan has brought these issues to the attention of Bangladesh’s Supreme Court and has been gaining victories for nature and the laborers.  Last year, the court closed down 36 ship-breaking yards that were not in compliance with the environmental laws. A remarkable success, indeed, for Hasan and her team.

During the few minutes I chatted with Hasan, I asked her not about the ship-breaking industry but about the latest legal update from Bangladesh—the death sentence for the assassins of the father of that nation, Mujibur Rahman.  

In 1971 Bangladesh came into existence, after having been East Pakistan since 1947 when the British Raj ended.  I told Hasan about the comic books I had read as a kid that told the story of Mujib—as he is popularly referred to—and his fight for Bangladesh’s freedom.  In a horrific re-telling of Julius Caesar’s death, in 1975, Mujibur Rahman, along with most of his family, was assassinated by his associates.  Two of his daughters survived only because they were away in Germany—one of them is the current prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina.

Rizwana Hasan noted that it took 35 years for the justice system to even try the assassins and, therefore, it should not surprise anybody that environmental justice is not easy to pursue in Bangladesh.  It is simply incredible that Hasan continues to maintain a positive and constructive outlook despite such a bleak and realistic assessment of Bangladesh’s politics and the courts.

And, it is even more incredible that I met with Rizwana Hasan right here in Eugene!