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monkey times blog

A letter to Washington Mutual and their debt collecting agency, IC System

In an economy where everyone is hurting financially, there are record bankruptcies and foreclosures, and city governments are taking financial institutions to court for predatory lending practices, you don't want to be broke. Following an uninsured hospital stay in early 2007, a lost contract, and a subsequent period of illness that resulting in my defaulting on Washington Mutual credit card payments for 4 months, WAMU set their debt collecting dogs on me. In the following letter, I bit back. It is included here as an item of hope to other people suffering from abusive debt collection practices, a model that you can use to get them off your back, and is followed by a series of helpful links.  more

Contact from Suha Arafat

Everyone who has had an e-mail account on the Internet for more than a month has by now experienced and (hopefully) heard of the "Nigerian Scam", a form of advance fee fraud in which the mark is "persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain." One version of the fraud, which is laugh-out-loud funny if you've worked on the Palestinian issue, is the Suha Arafat version. Reproduced here, the text of an e-mail I received today, from "Mrs. Suha Tawil Arafat".  more

Open Letter to Women Considering Using Internet Dating Sites

A couple of my friends use Internet dating sites, which had always instinctively sounded like a bad idea, until one friend met his wife on one and started pumping out children like his sperm was about to expire. Last year, my friend Maysoon wrote a couple of laugh-out-loud funny columns about love and dating, linked at the bottom of this page. As I was updating her website the other day, I came across them and was inspired — particularly with current events in Gaza — to focus on something a little lighter.  more

Little Shop of Horrors

I get the point of the dentist but the reality of the dentist has tended to undermine my vision for it. I don't know if my disillusionment began with the Palestinian dentist who commanded me to "bite" down on a metal tool to have part of one of my teeth fly off. "Tap, tap!" he exclaimed, as if he hadn't just barked "bite" at me. But today's dental experience definitely reached a new nadir.   more

Return of the Monkey King

I lived in the U.S. Midwest for 7 years, from 1998-2005, with a break of 6 months in Tucson, AZ, and 9 months in London. The Midwest is the part of the United States that is primarily recognizable from the frequent ground shadows cast by airplanes flying somewhere interesting. I was back this time for a wedding and to see old friends. Someone had planned a party. It was going to be a long week.  more

Curiosity and the Cat

It was around midnight on May 24th, and I was pottering around my Harlem apartment getting ready for bed when I heard the noise. You get used to levels of street noise in Harlem — revving engines; people using their car horns as doorbells; people yelling at each other in the street; construction by everyone from ConEdison, New York's power company, to the latest yuppie gut rennovation next door. But some noises catch your attention.   more

The Children of the Shoemaker have Sandals

There's an old saying, "the children of the shoemaker go barefoot", meaning that the shoemaker is so busy making shoes for other people that his kids are neglected. So it is with web design. I've been making some cool sites for people recently, see nigelparry.net for more of that, but I've been stewing in a bad place where it comes to nigelparry.com, which still sees 13,000 visitors a month.   more

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• A letter to Washington Mutual and their debt collecting agency, IC System (Thursday, May 15th, 2008)

• Contact from Suha Arafat (Friday, March 21st, 2008)

• Open Letter to Women Considering Using Internet Dating Sites (Sunday, July 9th, 2006)


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