
Still don't fancy
trying to finish Midnight's Children, but full marks to the man.
Facebook has upset Salman Rushdie after the company initially refused to let the controversial author use his common name rather than his first name when signing up to the network. The writer, who is a newcomer to the Web2.0 game, explained on Twitter that his full name is Ahmed Salman Rushdie. "Amazing. 2 days ago FB …
but surely all the problems with him initially being declared not-salman-rushdie comes from him being famous in the first place? and his only objection to using his 'real' name after establishing that he was indeed himself, is that he is better known as 'salman rushdie' (as per my post, the name of the article, and the name on the cover of his books?)
Salman is his "real" name. He just happens to have more than one christian/forename. I also use the middle name. Handy, people trying to be matey by using my first name clearly are salesmen or agents and at any rate people not knowing me well enough to use my christian name at all.
We do not all fall into some tidy USA-centric box, thank heavens.
You are obviosly so completely bound by some North American Anglo-Saxon concept of how names work that you are not aware that some parts of the rest of the world have different conventions.
IN Scotland, we used to suffer badly from this: during teh 19th and most of teh 20th centuries the dominant English speakers provideed all the registrars of births, and they refused to record Gaelic names. So the parent's of someone whose name was Seumas Dhomhuill Mac a' Phi would be asked what the hell that meant, and when they replied "it's the Gaelic form of Donald's James Mac a Fee" the name would be registered as "Donald James MacAfee". So the patronymic is first, the personal name is second, and the family name is third (and all three names are completely screwed up, but that's not the point - the point is the re-ordering caused by different for order of nouns in genetive grammatical relationships).
Think of it this way: to many cultures the natural order of the names, when translated to English, is <father's name><my name><family name>; the second term in that string is the only real name, all the rest is just explaining which one of the people who use that real name you are.
I understand this because I suffer from it personally; and I suffer from the lunatic idea of translating names in the first place too: notice how the personal name in the above (which, incidentally, has no connection with me) changed from Seumas (which would be "Sheumais", which you probably know as "Hamish", in the vocative case) to James. If all your friends and family and neighbours call you "Hamish" how do you react when some total stranger starts calling you "Donald" instead, and would "James" be much better? One of my pet complaints about speakers (especially USAian ones) of English is how they don't understand that other cultures have other conventins and certainly don't understand that names are declined by grammatical case in many languages.
Farcebook _is_ run by morons. This kind of pissfight over "real" names is proof.
At any rate... good for you, Mr. Rushdie. Shame you have to be famous to get any action out of Farcebook, and a shame he was forced to show them his passport.
I recently was forced to give up my mobile phone number to have one of my Gmail accounts reactivated after Google suspended it, citing "suspicious activity" (as they have yet to define what the "activity" was, I'll have to assume they're doing it to drag in all the "refuseniks" who aren't giving in to the "let us have your mobile number in case your account is compromised" nag). Technically, it wasn't a phish as I got the message from Google as I was logging in (rather than a scam email), though due to their inability to tell me what the actual "suspicous activity" was, I'll have to assume that Google is phishing for mobile numbers.
Normally, I would've withheld my mobile number and abandoned the account, but it was the account I had to establish to set up a blog on Blogspot. Bastards. Call it a "hissy fit" if you want, but I'm totally behind Rushdie on this one.
According to a friend who worked for the publisher, they actually had an in-office prize of a crate of wine for the first person to actually finish The Satanic Verses. No-one claimed it.
Also, to the angry daily mail reader foaming about Enid Blyton above, I was paid to review it, in fact. The review was not favourable. Unlike you, I am quite comfortable with books that lack pictures.
Go on, downvote me again, and then go back to fapping over the Clarkson voice on your satnav, thereby confirming every redtop stereotype.
Whahahahahahaha hahahah. Hahahah. Hm... snif. Mwahahaha ahhahahhhahhahah.
A reader would not have linked "(possibly) pro-Rushdie and (definitely) anti-Blyton" to the DM. And "angry"? Hm. Possibly I'd expect a reader's vocabulary on emotions to extend beyond those in the books I give to my one year old --- happy/sad/angry, but maybe you didn't review it in the English version.
Try again.
True story - I was at a members bar full of er.... younger individuals. Salman comes in with his very tall girlfriend. When he left (which was a pretty quick drink) a young man comes up and says "You are Salmon Rushdie right?" "Yes" he replies.... the man responds "I'm such a fan - I've got all your records!".
... Quick exit....
A little known fact about Mr Rushdie is that back when he was an advertising drone he wrote and was credited with the lyrics of a promotional record for the Burnley Building Society. You can find it on YouTube, but be quick before he pulls another hissy fit and issues a takedown request...
But,sadly, I'm not surprised - I noticed this trend here, in the US: for some reason it's now a badge of honor to be absolutely stupid, clueless, ignorant and it's not limited to the flag-wavers of right-wing populist idiocy anymore but it's widespread among the rest of the so-called 'educated class'...
The contagion has spread. It's been surreptitiously spreading throughout the UK for a few decades, predominantly in the far right and the socialist left and is now infecting many in the central ground. The Moron Contagion has also been prevalent among those directing education policy in the UK for many a year.
The I'm a member of the worlds smallest minority group. It's been a while since I read it but IIRC the section that resulted in the fatwa was a dream sequence-esque thing whereby the prophet Mohammed was imagined to be human and to have human foibles.
That was pretty much it. It was about 1/2 way through.
Facebook doesn't allow you to compartmentalise your social relationships so I have to have more than 1 account. One for me and another for my evil twin skippy.
I just read the wiki entry for this - never really knew what the actual issues where
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses_controversy#Controversial_elements_of_The_Satanic_Verses
it looks like he went out of his way to cause a storm in every way possible. I suppose it was the only way he was going to sell the book.