Absolute Random Nonsense

On Family guy Stewie felt Persian because he had gotten a white Range Rover. He claimed it came with an anti Israeli manual. I have never seen a car come with one but then again I have never owned a Range Rover.  

Geography, and generally any topic that required memorization, was definitely one of my weaker subjects. The fact that the geography teacher would bring a few students to the board and quiz them on the previous session’s material did not seem to have any effect on me other than trying to hide myself in class in order to not get called upon. As my luck had it this particular day I was the first one called to the board. With the topic being Africa, the teacher asked me a few questions and in response I spewed whatever came to my mind. He finally asked me about the whereabouts of a certain ethnicity in Africa. Dumbfounded I blurted out that they were in northern Africa. “Ok, let’s go,” he said as he began escorting me towards the door to throw me out of class. “But that’s what it said in the book,” I protested. He stopped and grabbed a book and said, “Show me where you read that.” I flipped through the pages, unsure about where I was going with this, until I came to the page with a gian...

He escaped an abusive father, wrote scientific papers by flashlight during power outages, and scored a university scholarship — all before turning 18. But now, Pooya Karami, a once-homeless Iranian teenager with dreams of changing the world, is seeing them shattered by Trump's travel ban. 'We, the Iranian students, are the youth who never had a childhood,' Karami told Daily Mail in an exclusive interview from inside Shiraz, Iran.  After Karami's father—battling severe mental illness—cast his wife and children from their home, they scraped together borrowed money from financially strapped relatives to rent a cramped 40-square-meter basement on Shiraz's outskirts. To get by, Karami's mother and six-year-old sister sold their modest collection of jewelry to fund a single university application fee.  His mother's sacrifice of her precious gold jewelry became a defining moment for Karami, as he realized the profound devotion of his mother sustained him thr...

In the early 80s I reminisced about a soccer tournament that we had participated in and ended up winning. Our prize was a framed soccer picture which was kind of lame as only one of us could keep it at home at any given time. I wonder what happened to it.  

Friends and customers gathered to remember Shilan Shahbazian at her former workplace on Tuesday night. Inside Kim’s Nails and Spa, people recalled stories and interactions from their time spent with the 26-year-old. “She was strikingly beautiful to look at,” Jenifer Ducharme, a Kim’s Nails customer told CTV News. “She was hilarious, she was more beautiful inside than out. She was the whole package.” Originally form Iran, Shahbazian moved to Canada for a better life, where she could work while obtaining an education. In their first interactions, Ducharme said Shahbazian was often quiet due to a language barrier. Over time, the two began using Google Translate or hand gestures to better communicate. “She often talked about her family and friends back home,” Ducharme said. After going missing for more than two months, on March 21, Windsor police announced they had located Shahbazian’s body. Police noted they did not suspect foul play in her death. Following a phone conversation with the ...

During our Norooz break I attempted to try something I had heard about at school. Some classmates had bragged about how they had strengthened their TV antennas and as a result had been able to pick up images from some of the neighboring Persian Gulf Arab countries. The method they suggested was extremely simple. All you had to do was to add more metal to your antenna with something as common as a kitchen pot. I finally decided to put it to the test. Armed with a pot I went on the roof and in spite of numerous assurances from my dad that the antenna had no electricity and that I would not be electrocuted by touching it, it took some time for me to finally build up the courage to place the pot on the antenna. I excitedly ran back inside the home and repeatedly changed the channel to see the results. The only pictures captured on the screen were from the two existing Iranian channels and the end result was a pot that eventually blew off the antenna and into our yard.

Without knowing it, millions of people around the world use Hossein Yassaie’s technology every day. His name, and that of Imagination Technologies, is never emblazoned on the sides of gadgets or across billboards alongside the likes of Apple or Google. Everyone who uses an iPhone, or any of the smartphones available on the market, owes a significant debt of gratitude to the 55-year-old Iranian. ‘We put the “smart” into a lot of these devices,’ he says. ‘Phones weren’t smart until they started using our technology.’ When he joined Imagination – then called VideoLogic – it was a small company with 40 members of staff that built technology used in Microsoft’s DOS system, the forerunner to Windows. Two decades later he employs more than 1,100 people across 12 countries in a company with a market value of £1.7billion and fingers in every technological pie going. Equally impressive is the group’s customer list, which doubles as a Who’s Who of the high-tech world. Google, Appl...

Technically the summer was over although school wouldn’t start for another day. As luck would have it, the first day of autumn was a Friday and so we had the day off. It hadn’t gotten cold yet but it was clearly not as warm as the previous weeks. I walked around our pool wondering when we would be emptying it as I removed leaves and branches from the water. Just in case I need to reach or waddle further in, I had my bathing suit on. The pool finally looked clean enough by my standards. As I pondered hanging out in the backyard a bit more or going inside and having lunch, a thought occurred to me. At first I tried to ignore it but it was too tempting. I realized I could be bragging about it for years. If I were to do it, now at high noon would be the time because as time ticked away it would be more difficult and painful to implement. I contemplated the situation for a bit before finally peeling my shirt off and diving into our pool. I didn’t swim for much, probably just a few laps be...