Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

I could not take my eyes off the third-floor booth. A family of six, what looks to be a grandmother, a set of parents, and kids, all in matching black T-shirts and dancing together with big smiles to the live performance on the stage they see below. Now, multiply that by some 40 booths, plus 900 seats at the first level, in one of the oldest and continuously operating opera houses on the island of Gozo . It was a sight to behold. From kids to the silver-haired, all gyrating and singing along to the tunes while standing on their feet, one of the most intergenerational concerts I have ever attended.

Twitter (or X, as people are still trying to get used to the new name) is known for its spontaneous outbursts and text-based real-time updates to live events. The fact that it is so short, so easy to type up, and so ingrained into the culture of a community consisting of millions of equally impulsive tweeters ensures that those who have something that they have in their minds would want to record those thoughts and broadcast them into the community. Getting others to agree or denounce your impulses before you forget them yourself has proven to be quite an adrenaline rush for some.

I used to be miffed whenever I heard those who do not come from an English-speaking background get English names. When I worked in an internship years ago in China, I was disgusted that my Chinese colleagues would not call me by my name simply because I did not have an English one. They would address each other by their English names before returning to their Chinese conversations. I found the act highly superficial: having English names did not automatically make them proficient in English, just as their choice of not addressing my Chinese name did not make me less international than they are.

I monitor the viewer stats of this blog from time to time. In recent months, the blog stats have shown some suspicious stats that make me worried about where and how the blog is viewed. Whereas individual blog posts have no more than 20 pageviews each in total in the months after publication, sometimes the blog itself registers more than 500 views in a single day, all coming from Hong Kong, mainland China, Ireland, and Singapore, none of which match my traditional viewership in the past years, the vast majority of which originates in the US, combined with the foreign population in Japan.

The terrorist attacks launched by Hamas against Israel should be a time for soul-searching. The pre-attack Middle East was defined by a cautious embrace of the Jewish state among its Arab neighbors. Despite opposition from their respective populations, the likes of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and others were increasingly willing to see Israel as a permanent political presence in the region, and a useful economic partner to help them diversify away from natural resource extraction. Hamas needed a dramatic measure to remind them, and the world, that the embrace should not come at the expense of the Palestinians.

In his The Bible and Zionism , Dr. Nur Masalha argues over and over that the founding leaders of the State of Israel, despite being a generally irreligious bunch, attempt to leverage religious language to advance the idea that the land of Israel belongs exclusively to the world's Jewish population, while Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, are considered squatters who must be evicted to right a historical wrong. By evoking passages from the Old Testament that discuss how the ancient Israelites defeated the Canaanites and the Philistines, the Zionist leaders somehow managed to form an alliance with Christian evangelicals.

The central bus stop at the little town of Marsalforn was inundated with a sense of impatience. The dozens of people gathering in the little square could not stop staring at the road leading to the bus stop, as if a more intense stare could get the bus to show up faster. On the mobile app of Malta Public Transport, the bus was shown as a mere 4 minutes away, but with one bus coming every 30 minutes or so, everyone was getting visibly jittery as to whether the small bus could fit everyone in the bumpy journey to the central bus terminal in Victoria, the capital of Gozo Island, only some 6km away.