Songs of the Sea Bride

Siren of Araby
...still in Kathmandu, Nepal

Reem, at the Your Name In Arabic blog, was kind enough to not only translate Sirensongs into Arabic, but to create these beautiful graphics. Evidently "Sirensongs" doesn't make sense as a compound noun in Arabic. But, you can say "Songs Sea-Bride," and it looks like this:

...and is pronounced something like "aghaani ʕaroos lbaHr." ...Except, the "gh" is a sort of R, and the letter that looks like a backwards question-mark does not exist in English.

Here is the phonetic spelling for the word "Siren."

Sometimes people ask me the significance of the name, Sirensongs. I used to have a thing for mermaids, and "song of the siren," the title of my favourite song, at Yahoo was taken. So was "sirensong" singular. Voila, a recognizable nomme de nette is born.

My old mermaid art gallery is nearly 10 years old now, maybe even 11. Those were the gothy pagan old days, when I listened to Dead Can Dance all day and mooned over Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Kathman-Don't
As you have probably guessed by now, I am procrastinating leaving Kathmandu for Delhi (yuck, too hot; the rains are soooo nice here now) and the 14-hour bus ride back to Dharamsala, which will shortly be followed by another 14-hour bus ride to Manali and yet another double-digit hours bus ride to Leh, Ladakh, elevation around 10,000 feet.

But it's been fun watching Kathmandu continue to disintegrate. There is no way an election is going to be held here by November. The Maobadis are doing everything they can to disrupt things so that security-wise, it will be impossible. But I think the fall of this hill-and-vale Saigon is still a few years away. Who knows, it could even be averted completely, if (among other things) they just pay attention to history. (When, in history, have Maoists ever been interested in being a part of a multi-party democracy? There's clue number one.)