Kamangir (Archer)

They want to execute us
Effective tomorrow, anyone who wears stripped pyjamas will be executed for acting against public and private safety*.
p.s. From now on, this blog will be dedicated to apiary in alpine heights, the positive effects of cucumbers in getting rid of stomach gas,  modern sewing methods, making flowers with flour, the importance of [...]

The date on the last post in this blog used to read “June the 13th” for almost a month. This was quite a change for this blog, which used to be updated more than once on almost every day for over two years. Things had changed, but better, less tense, days are ahead.
First, there was [...]

(direct link to video)
This fantastic video has been created by members of the Middle East Youth. Do watch it, knowing the chance of it coming to existence by those shown in this video is almost as probable as you winning the lottery right now, without having bought a ticket.

The Kurd activist Farhad Hadj Mirzaei has been under arrest since last winter.
The Student Committee of Human Rights Reporters reports that the interrogators have applied harsh methods of torture, including electrical shocks and sleep deprivation, on the inmate, in order to take a forced confession out of him [Persian].
A week ago, his father wrote [...]

Chris De Burgh, who happens to be one my most favorites, recently went to Tehran to do a joint song with the Iranian group Arian. In his website, the work is described as,
This is an exciting project as it is the first collaboration between Western and Iranian artists.
It also so happens that Arian was for [...]

I had a presentation today in the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 Conference, on a panel titled “Breaking the Silence: Iranians Find a Voice on the Internet“, about some of the results of the work I do on analyzing the Persian blogosphere (Project Didish).
My main argument in the talk was that the Persian blogosphere is [...]

 Persian Blogosphere: On the Verge of Adolescence: Download

The anniversary of Operation Liberation of Khoramshahr is approaching. Independent of all the arguments against the war and how the Islamic Republic to many people’s understanding prolonged the war to establish itself and silence the opposition, the brevity and sincerity of those who fought and fell for their country should be honored. They fought an [...]

A satirical post by “35 degree“,
Do you carry condoms?
It is a lot fun to buy a condom in Iran! Of course, I agree with you that not only it is a hard thing to do, but also it could cause trouble for you. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s look at it differently. [...]

source: Unknown

In her newest book, Seven Valleys of Love, Sheema Kalbasi looks at the works of Iranian female poets from Middle Ages Persia to present day Iran. Sheema is fluent in both Persian and English, to the extent that she does fine writing in both languages. When asked by the Persian Radio Farda why she focused [...]

Although, recently I have been quiet about my blogging projects, including Didish and Feed Counter, I have been steadily working on the twins.
The aggregation module in Didish is now a local tool, as opposed to the previously-used web-based Gregarius which was strangling Kamangir’s host as the number of links grew bigger. The project’s interface [...]

On September 2005, Azadeh and I boarded a plane at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and traveled all around the globe before we landed in Winnipeg. It is fair to say that the land we started rebuilding our life on belongs to the people now politely referred to as the “aboriginals”. There is no need to look [...]

It was in the news that,
A council employee in Japan has been punished after officials discovered he had logged more than 780,000 hits on porn websites at work in nine months (BBC).
BBC also adds that, “At his peak, the worker was looking at almost 10,000 pages a day” and Reuters reports that he has [...]

Hamid Reza Moghadam-Far, the head of the state-run Fars News, when asked, “As the head of a major media outlet, do you already have a blog or plan to start one? “, stated [Persian],
I am not for what has become a trend for journalists to be active in the media and write their [...]

If this is not the first time you are visiting this page, during the last couple of days, you have probably noticed that this page was down for about 48 hours. This is an answer to “what had happened” and “what will happen now”.
In short, Persian Kamangir just celeberated its first birthday and now I [...]

“Are you sure the Islamic Republic/Ahmadinejad have asked for Israel to be wiped off the map?” This is the question I have been asked by so many people over the course of the last few years. While I became more and more concerned why so many people kept asking the same question, I kept [...]

Three years ago, around these days, Masih Alinejad was banned from entering the Parliament [Persian]. At the time, Alinejad worked as the parliamentary correspondent for ILNA, a media source close to the reformists. When she published reports that indicated that contrary to their claims of “living an ordinary life”, the MPs do enjoy a [...]

Akram Mahdavi is another victim of unjust and unequal laws in a country where, for the most part, the legal system considers females only half human, and where women’s rights, as well as their cries for help are routinely and systematically ignored, trampled upon, and even ridiculed. The now 32 year old mother of [...]

After I published the post “Why bombing Iran is a Must” in Persian, I received a lot of angry responses. The outrage was to the extent that I deleted the Persian post and apologized from the readers. The same day, later in the evening, a group of us gathered in our apartment to talk about [...]

 

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Let’s accept that “word has been out in the Islamic community worldwide for some time (specially Indonesia and Malaysia) to begin overt support for Obama”. Let’s also accept that “[there are] rumors of the Islamic Republic of Iran also passing the word to their American agents and clerics to support Obama”. Let’s go further and [...]

A major source of legitimacy for the Islamic Republic is through its claims of being the connecting period between the time of the Prophet and Imams and the end of time, when the Islamic Messiah overthrows all earthly governments. To make this acceptable, Ayatollah Khameneii is commonly claimed to be a descendant of the Imams, [...]

If you have not guessed how the case of a woman on the death row could have anything to do with “discount” a hosting company offers to its customers, well, that’s what I call the “Iranian Connection”.

Camels do not run on nukes. That, alone, is sufficient to prove that the Iranian theology is pursuing nuclear bombs.

This is the article I wrote for the joke version of The Manitoban, the University of Manitoba students’ newspaper.

What would Ahmadinejad look like if he was not born in Iran? I used this online tool to see the Chinese Ahmadinejad, as well as the White Ahmadinejad. There is also the Ape Ahmadinejad, in case you are interested to see. Find all the pictures at this address, or watch this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhoD0q4NMk

(direct link to video)

The sign reads, “No service to people with loose veil, not even to our old customers”. This sign I wish was rare in Iran, but it isn’t. The fact is, there are stickers which carry the same message and are printed by the Police. These stickers are widely used all over Iran and their use [...]