Travels with Grumpus

Mickey: Hey check out the birthday gift I’m sending Chino from Amazon!

Maya: Hey, the Batman handbook, coooooool!

Mickey (starts chuckling): Check out the card! (laughs harder)

Maya (reads aloud): “Happy birthday, Jennifer… paminsan-minsan maghugas ka naman ng pekpek mo”. Hey, that’s hilarious!
(pause)
But you know what’s even funnier? You guys used to call him Jessica. Jennifer’s his girlfriend!

Mickey (chokes): Oooooooooh shit. Oooooooh shit.

Don’t hate him ’cause he’s beautiful. Or a Republican who isn’t even American. You gotta love a man who loves South Park — and not just for the jokes. “Yeah I know about that book,” he said. “And your Islam comment? The blogs have been talking about that forever.” Whatever.

Mickey said.

“Really? What name did he take?”

“Benedict the 16th”

“What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Well at least it’s better than Pogi the First!”

After the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe the late 80s, Francis Fukuyama came out with a book called “The End of History” where he argued that liberal democracy and free market capitalism are “the most fundamentally satisfying form of government and method of organising the economy” and thus the final stage of human government. Subsequent events reopened the question of whether unfettered capitalism is in fact a Good Thing, and as we move towards an acceptance that maybe some regulation and some intervention are good too, few people still claim that we’ve reached the final stages of any aspect of human history.

On our trip to Spain last year, there was a similar triumphant note in any retelling of the Reconquista: Granada was the last bastion of Islam in Spain, and with Boabdil’s surrender of the Alhambra in 1492, Catholicism became the dominant religion. So it was for the next 500 years, and so, it seemed, would it be forever. The cathedral in Cordoba was the most striking example of dominant Catholicism: a mosque that had been converted into a Catholic church.

It should have been obvious to me that it ain’t over yet. This article talks about how Islam is literally retaking the ground it lost to Catholicism 500 years ago.

Here’s what they’re saying.

Africa? Spend two weeks in the “Dark Continent” tramping around the countryside after marrying the man of my dreams (that’s in case he actually reads this)? My husband-to-be had sprung this one me a few months before the wedding, after we had run into a college friend of his, Binky Dizon, who had been bitten by the Africa bug a few years before. Binky now co-managed Asia to Africa Safaris which organizes safari tours to Southern Africa. Considering that (a) the husband-to-be promised to organize everything (meaning delegating everything to Binky’s company) and (b) I was too busy with the wedding preparations (which he had “delegated” to me), I really didn’t have much of a choice. Africa it was; six days in Cape Town, South Africa, followed by eight days in Botswana. So I have to admit, as we hunkered down for the 13-hour flight from Hong Kong to Johannesburg, with my new husband cursing the morons who had the gall to deprive him of legroom in economy class, I had my doubts.

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