If anybody is interested in the daily going ons in Iraq you should check out the numerous Iraqi blogs out there. Here's one. This one links to a lot of other ones so you can check them all out. Their English isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn good. There are actually a lot of Iraqis who speak English. I ran into this one guy once who was an English major and we started talking about literature and stuff. Turns out he was toting around my favorite Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice. Pretty impressive, it has the English on the right side of the page and the Arabic translation on the left. I was thinking about paying him for it to bring it back, but I thought it might've been insulting. It was still pretty neat though.

Anyway, I bring up these Iraqi bloggers so people can have an idea of what Iraqis really think about the occupation. You really can't get a good idea of the Iraqi sentiment from the American media. Reading through these blogs, I've found that they express a lot of the same types of views that I saw when I was over there too. Give it a look-see, you might learn a thing or two.
posted by Ray at 6:48 PM

So have you heard about Andrew Gilligan? He's the BBC reporter who reported that the British government 'sexed up' the Iraq WMD dossier for the war. Here's more on the story: WMD claim reporter quits BBC. So why am I posting this? Because this is the reporter who was embedded with Task Force Tarawa during the war. Here's a picture I took of him when we gave him a lift. He seemed like a pretty nice guy. I think he was pretty honest in his reporting when I listened to his reports on the BBC with my shortwave radio. Anyway, just mentioning another quick footnote in history. :)
posted by Ray at 3:02 AM

Happy New Year! Woohoo! 2004 baby!

Ok, yeah, I know I've been lagging on the updates. There just isn't much going on to write about though. Plus, I doubt anyone even reads this part of the website anyway, so what difference does it make right? People come here from search engines and see the Iraq pictures and just leave. Oh well.

Not much to report on the job front. I thought I might be getting a job somewhere, but something happened recently that is making that unlikely. I really wish I could talk about it, but until it is completely resolved, I don't think it would be prudent. All I can say is that I felt very insulted and am pretty upset over it right now. More to follow... maybe...

There is one other job prospect besides the one I mentioned, but even that one is uncertain. It is an emergency management type job, but it is contigent on the company getting a contract. So there are a lot of 'ifs' involved. I'm not holding my breath.

Anyone else have as hard of a time finding a job as me?
posted by Ray at 12:03 AM