Aisha

            On Sunday morning I heard someone outside the Coffeetime hacking his head off while smoking a cigarette. What a life!

I had planned on doing laundry but the day got away from me because I was arguing with someone in Israel about whether or not displaced Palestinians qualify as refugees and also about the historical evidence surrounding the marriage age of Muhammad’s wife Aisha at the time of marriage. I spent a lot of time researching to find the facts.

            The problem for the Palestinians is that they don’t fit either the 1951 convention on refugees nor the 1967 protocol, which won’t allow refugee status to be passed down through generations. Because of that the UNRWA was created specifically to help the Palestinian refugees. The result is that there are grandchildren of the original 1948 Palestinian refugees that are still living in camps. The only solution is for them to have their own country but …

            Concerning Aisha, despite the fact that there is a hadith stating that Aisha was 6 at the time of marriage to Muhammad, there are a wide variety of opinions within the Muslim community on that topic. There is strong historical evidence to suggest that Aisha was actually in her late teens when she married Muhammad.

            Since I didn’t get my laundry done I washed three pairs of underwear in the sink and hung them up around the apartment to dry.

            I finished off my last three strips of bacon and had them with three eggs. I normally only have two eggs but one of them broke and I always have to have two full yolks. I watched a funny Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay starring Darren McGavin and Telly Savalas. McGavin plays a wealthy man named Sheridan Westcott who drives his black Rolls Royce to the lake. He has left his car at the pier and is plunging a rope and weight into the water, perhaps to check the depth, when a few guys in suits show up and steal the Rolls. When they get the car back to their chop shop, the leader, Philadelphia Harry (played by Savalas) opens the trunk to find the strangled corpse of a woman, tied up with a weight around the ankles. Meanwhile, Westcott has called the police to complain that his wife has been kidnapped and his car stolen. When the cops hear Westcott’s description of a bald man in a suit they say, “It can’t be! It sounds like Philadelphia Harry, but it can’t be!” They say he’s a car thief and the best, but he would never kidnap someone. When Westcott suggests Harry might murder his wife they laugh, “Harry? Murder?” When the cops leave, Westcott is alone with his wife’s niece, Enid. They are lovers and they are the ones that killed Westcott’s wife. They think they’ve pulled off the perfect crime. Philadelphia Harry hears the police report about him being wanted for the kidnapping of Westcott’s wife. He knows that Westcott must have killed her and decides to simply take the Rolls to Westcott’s house and leave it in their garage. When Enid discovers the Rolls, she and Westcott decide to paint the Rolls silver, like Philadelphia Harry’s shop might have done, then they take it and leave it down by the lake. Harry’s crew find the silver Rolls, not realizing that it’s the same car and they steal it again, only to once again be stuck with a dead body. He arranges for the Rolls to be sent across the Mexican border and dumps the corpse in the lake. The next day the cops are going to dredge the lake for a body. The story ends here and I’m not sure how this is supposed to incriminate Westcott, but I guess since he was at the lake when the car was first stolen they might conclude that he had dumped the body in the lake (as he’d originally planned) before the car was stolen.