Bad taste???

[Eric Siegerman]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 12:26:58AM +0000, Chris wrote:
> Black September

Two of them, now.

So, has anyone else noticed that "Al Qaeda" has the exact same
meter[*]?  Plugs right in there -- well, no *worse* a fit than
the original :-/  I had that modified version stuck in my head
all through the last fall's HW tour, rewriting the lyric even as
Ali was singing it.

[*] When pronounced as it is in the UK, with the "ae" as two
    syllables -- that being closer to the Arabic, I suspect, than
    is the U.S. one-syllable pronunciation.

Speaking of which, we've all read that the name translates as
"The Base".  There's a theory going around that bin Laden was
inspired by Asimov's Foundation novels -- it's claimed that when
the first one was translated into Arabic, the title they gave it
was, you guessed it, "Al Qaeda".  (I guess I'll have to finally
read the series, to see if any of this actually makes sense.)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
[...] despite reports to the contrary, it is the rare programmer who
permanently loses his sanity while coding ("permanently" being the
operative word).
        - Eric E. Allen