Well, mes amis, I'm still dealing with this frozen shoulder, which makes it difficult for me to spend much time at the keyboard. It is, however, getting better with help from some fairly severe Chinese therapeutic massage and acupuncture. But it's getting better slowly--annoyingly slowly.

So here's what I've been listening to lately (I don't know why it's all breakup songs for me lately; there's no hint of anything like that on my personal horizon):

I'm all out of faith
This is how I feel
I'm cold and I am shamed
Lying naked on the floor
Illusion never changed
Into something real
I'm wide awake and I can see
The perfect sky is torn
You're a little late
I'm already torn

I think maybe these are more my political feelings than my personal ones.

I found and read a new Agatha Christie novel! Well, not exactly. Black Coffee is a play Christie wrote in 1930. She didn't much like the way it turned out and it wasn't a great success unlike The Mousetrap. Some folks apparently decided to novelize it.

It's been a long, long time since I read a new Hercule Poirot story, and I'm only sorry it's a bit lacking in the style Christie displays in her novels. There's frankly a lot wrong with Agatha Christie's writing, no matter how much I love her, and the things that make her worth re-reading are often the little touches of character. Somehow these seem diminished in Black Coffee, perhaps because the author of the novelization doesn't do them as well as Christie.

I found a pretty cool movie called The Physician.

(Am I the only one that finds this movie poster reminiscent of Lord of the Rings? Tom Payne looks pretty much exactly like Frodo.)

It's a historical drama about a young (Christian) Englishman in the 11th century who poses as a Jew to travel to Persia and get a real medical education (he's already trained as a barber, which is the closest thing England has to a medical class). He has to pass as a Jew because Christians are interdicted from traveling in the Middle East. I'm not entirely sure that this is bullshit, but I'm pretty sure it is, and this person (who claims to be a historian) agrees: there was no mass or general exclusion of all Christians from the Middle East, the Arab world, the Islamic world, or Persia specifically at that time:

But he’s been warned that Christians aren’t allowed in Muslim lands. Sigh. Taken as a general statement, this is total bullshit. There was a thriving network of Christian communities across the Islamic world down into the early 21st century, when the Iraq War released forces that devastated Christian communities in Iraq, forcing them to flee.

Maybe they just didn't want European Christians around?

Nah, I bet it's bullshit, because

Unlike Christianity, Islam has fairly precise rules intended to guarantee Jews and Christians a measure of legal toleration as long as they do not challenge Islamic dominance. The basic rules were established by a document known as the Pact of Umar, traditionally ascribed to the second caliph, Umar ibn Khattab (who died in 644), but probably belonging to a slightly later period. According to the Pact, conquered Jewish and Christian communities could receive the status of dhimmis, or ‘protected persons’, provided that they paid a special tax, the jizya, accepted their inferior status, and obeyed a variety of rules that restricted their religious practices in different ways; for example, they could not build new churches, conduct religious rituals in public, and could not try to prevent conversion to Islam or pursue converts from Islam. If they accepted these rules, the dhimmis were permitted to worship according to their religious practices, were generally judged according to their own law, and could do things that were forbidden to Muslims, such as eating pork or drinking alcohol.

Now, I *know* that's true.

dhimmi status was a part of sharia law, and therefore was not subject to the whims of individual rulers most of the time, because medieval Muslim society did not accord individual rulers much control over the legal system.

Huh. They never mention that part of sharia law when they're threatening us with it as a boogeyman. Not that I want to live under sharia law, you understand.

Are we, though, exactly living under any system of law? Really?

Anyway, it's a fun piece of historical fiction if you understand it's based on a lot of nonsense.

How are you guys doing today?