Hamed Saber has been on a portrait kick on his flickr site and also he’s using it like a blog which is a really genius idea, because of the censorship by the authorities and his cunning workaround flickr plug-in for firefox he is utilising flickr for all it’s worth. He writes in the comments for his photos and of course other people can comment too. He like many have been pissed off at the ‘300′ movie:-
To me, history is just a tool for patriotism and nationalism, the great empire etc!
Yes, we have a honorable history, but what I want to accent is that this film has some hidden agenda behind it, which wants to make visitors believe that Iranians are dumb wilds, who like the war. At least their ancestors were such people!
The problem is cinema was always a tool for colonialism, and best way for justifying war against other nations, or even other religions, or ideas! -
And this road sign looks familiar:-
And he’s down with the foxy ladies.
There is also a big flickr using community of Iranian photographers so I’ll have to mooch around some more and do a Blogapalooza Photo Carnival.
Neda at Above the Wall reckons she is getting a new scooter 
after a friend unwittingly slags off her existing ’scooty’. And I hope she found her passport.
Jadi at Inside Iran as well as helping me with the IB logo also gets into the Persian/Farsi debate and links to another blog which helps explain:-
our language’s name is Persian but because of some reasons during this 3 or 4 decades more and more people are going to call it Frasi instead of Persian and thats wrong, Persian’s local name was Parsi and after Arabs came to Persia (Iran) in the case that they don’t have [p] they call it Farsi and during the time even Iranians themselves call it Farsi as well, but still in western and other languages the original name of Persian or Parsi remains. During these recent 3 or 4 decades and because of massive Iranian immigrants in foreign countries when foreigners asked them “well dude whats your language?” because most of them didn’t know foreign languages very well they simply answered “Farsi” this is one of the reasons you can find more reasons in the links and articles that I will put at the end of the note.It’s like Japanese people who call they homeland “Nippon” or “Nihon” but the international name is “Japan”, just like the same case about Finish people and their “Suomen Tasavalta”, when you say Persian you are talking about a big language family that is spoken in at least 4 countries with some versions such as Dari and Tajik and Persian culture easily comes in the listeners mind. But when you say Farsi its absolutely nonsense: “OK dude, where this Farsi is exactly spoken?” -
There are more links and I think the consensus weighs in on the side of ‘Persian’
The English equivalent of ‘Farsi’ is ‘Persian’ (Like Deutsch and German). The Iranians prefer Persian to Farsi since Persian has a broader meaning and could be used for all Iran-related items (such as Persian language, Persian cat, Persian rug / carpet, Persian literature, Persian Gulf, and so on)-
So amazingly Ten Percent actually has some educational worth (I know I’m as shocked as you). Jadi also linked to a Washington Post article:-
More than 40 major international banks and financial institutions have either cut off or cut back business with the Iranian government or private sector as a result of a quiet campaign launched by the Treasury and State departments last September, according to Treasury and State officials.-
Tightening the screws, he also talks about some free open source software that is censored because of the word ‘free’ possibly and weighs in on the sailor incident and is as unconvinced as the rest of us by the propaganda uses.
Naj is posting like a banshee at Neo Resistance, kept on top of the sailor pulaver and now takes a break to reminisce about the books we read as children.
I have to put a vote in for Willard Price, kind of the Hardy boys (who I enjoyed but they were a bit wanky after a while and thus we enjoyed calling the books the Nancy Boys and Hardly Drew Adventures, it’s funny to a 9 year old) but traveling around seeing loads of natural history.
Of course they were probably just cover for their Dad’s CIA work destabilizing foreign govts. I’d also have to add in- Doctor Who books, loads of film novelizations (Alan Dean Foster got a lot of work), Lord Of The Rings, Bill Badger’s Winter Cruise, Wind In the Willows, Watership Down, Roald Dahl. I hated the Famous Five kind of stuff and enjoyed immensely the Comic Strip’s spoofs of them. Now I must go and give chocolate eggs to my nieces and tell then about a restaurant in Bristol my friend just emailed me about that started doing rabbit stew for Easter, ahh, cute bunnies, in gravy. (I’m a vegetarian so the only bunnies I see are frolicking free across the fields here or are dead after Mogwai catches them to bite the heads off, cats love to eat rabbits heads, go figure.)
