RouseWorld | Main -- April 2002 Archives

Gateway

As those of you who know do, I'm not much into PC vendors — but Gateway's
new digital music advocacy campaign is pretty cool.
Hey, better the cow than Steven, if you are going to swing that way.

And remember, modern copyright privileges are a social convention,
not a moral imperative — yo.

Movies

If you start typing the url for the
Internet Movie Data Base and think 'Film'
instead of 'Movie,' then this is what you get.
Well ... now you know — and that's what RouseWorld is all about, after all.

And hey, can I go on a random tangent here? Of course I can. Why, why, why are trailers
so good and movies so bad? Is the whole good trailer, bad movie
... syncretism
(I was going to say dichotomy here, but of course it isn't a dichotomy (it
might not even be a syncretism, but hey.)) a small way of saying something big about life itself, or how we live it? Eh,
probably not.

I was going to have more links, but the whole movie trailer issue distracted me terribly.

Ismailism

I've begun to notice a trickle of strange emails. It started in November of 2001 with an email entitled
"AGA KHAN CLAIMS INCARNATION" and contained nothing but this image.
At the time I attached no significance to the picture or email. We get lots of odd emails, after all.
But who is this Aga Khan supposed to be, and what is he an incarnation of?

Then in January, we received another email with an all-caps subject line: "AGA KHAN AS A 'HOST' IS SEEN SITTING
BESIDES HIS LEFT WITH ACTOR PETER SELLERS" — this email contained this image.
The email was not from the same person that sent the first message. Now we know that Aga Khan is an actual person
(as long as we can accept the existence of Peter Sellers). But the subject (which is longer than I've quoted here)
seems hostile to Khan somehow, just who is this guy?

A look on google for Aga Khan and Karim (from the Sellers picture) turns up these
two sites in particular. Aga Khan then is a title, it seems, for the
principal religious leader of sub-branch of Islam known as Ismailism. From an
introduction to Ismailism by Dr. Sheikh Khodr Hamawi:

Ismailism paid more attention to philosophy of religion starting from the theory of one
unified unity of the universe, the unity of religions, aiming at a united humanity.

But I can't really find any photographs that look like the guy in the middle of the Sellers photograph. Most of the people
pictured as serving as Aga Khan look older than the guy in that picture. I'm assuming that it is an old photograph
of the 49th Aga Khan. So are the messages I'm getting an attempt to
discredit the Aga Khan? Certainly we don't expect someone associated with a peaceful religion to be associated with a
publication like
The Weekly Jihad Times.

In April we got this message with the subject: "UNIQUE MESSAGE OF AGA KHANI RELIGIOUS WORSHIPS". This message contained
this text.

Now what?