>Notes from the underbelly of a weekend

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Friday:

Let the truth be told, this has been one of the most unproductive weeks in the history of studious slacking. My desk is a necropolis, every scrap of paper, a tombstone at the grave of time lost. And here I sit, it’s Friday, not thanking God in a gracious TGIF, but throttled in a relentless juggernaut, jarred between the week that was and the weekend that may be.

It’s Friday and I’m sitting at my desk, dividing my attention between my journal and the blog, both of them exercises in self-aggrandisement.

Saturday:

It’s a sad state of affairs that has me browsing online news on a Saturday night. Best I don’t expound on the confluence of near-tragedies leading to the fact but instead share with you a snippet from an article très intéressant. An exposition on population related problems from The Independent, takes off from a recent study into global warming that warned Britons to cease procreating as a measure to curb dwindling resources, whereas, conversely, birth rates in Europe are alarmingly low. A worthy read, but I took exception to this:

The world’s highest fertility rates are to be found in the most religious countries. People there seem to adhere to traditional views of how the world works. “Food, sex and procreation are core elements of humanity and changes to them are often met with fierce hostility,” says Cleland.

That is true of Christians in the US, Hindus in India and Muslims in many states. The more fundamentalist the leadership, the higher the fertility rate, says Kenneth W Wachter, the Professor of Demography and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Is this because Muslim countries are by and large poor? “In my view the evidence is that there is something intrinsic to the culture. It’s there in the rich Muslim states in the Gulf, in Saudi Arabia and in the Muslim provinces of the former Soviet Union. It is perhaps bound up with the status of women .” (my italics)

(Paul Vallely in The Independent)

Sê weer? So all the Muslims of the world gather around at their annual conference of otherliness and year after year consistently reach accord that women are mere objects of procreation?

Sunday:

Where’s the weekend gone then?

PS. I’m finally done with Weldon, all the head banging about happiness ultimately had me pouting. Deciding to channel my reading habits to more scholarly pursuits this week, Discourse and Identity.