Before going on I must point out that what I am about to say it pure speculation. Despite having an Arabic name I was born and raised in the United States (as were both my parents and three of my four grandparents). I don’t speak or write any language other than English and the few bits and pieces of French I remember from high school. To the best of my knowledge I have never been questioned by the FBI. And despite certain hostile feeling towards my ninth grade algebra teacher, I have never been accused of trying to incite a Jihad.

Having said that, consider the following.

Staying completely ignorant of the current “War on Terrorism” is almost impossible with the daily five page special in the newspapers. The round the clock CNN coverage comes complete with constant headlines crawling across the bottom of the screen with helpful bits of information such as “Fighting continues in Afghanistan,” “FBI searching for source of Anthrax,” and “CNN headline crawler graphics still up and running.” While I don’t spend every waking moment obsessed about how things are going to turn out, I did have a rather disturbing random thought today: What if Bin Laden is not in Afghanistan as the moment?

The world is a very big place, and Afghan caves are only one of many places where someone could hide. It’s quite possible that Bin Laden made alternate living arrangements before the September attacks. It would serve his cause to be living somewhere else once the military campaign begins. It seems reasonable that a country like Iraq would be willing to quietly take him in just to make the United States look bad. Here is how the conversation between the two leaders might have gone, with the exception that they probably wouldn’t be speaking in English.

Saddam: Hello, Saddam Hussein speaking.

Bin Laden: Mr. Hussein, it’s Osama here. How are things going over there in Iraq?

Saddam: Osama Bin Laden? THE Osama Bin Laden? Boy, I’ve heard a lot about you. Seems like you have built up quite an impressive terrorist operation over the past couple of years. So, I just HAVE to know– were you the one who bombed those US embassies in Africa? And the attack on the U.S.S. Cole? I have to admit that was pretty damn cool.

Bin Laden: Well, I don’t like to brag….

Saddam: Come on, it’s me, Sadam—I just have to hear it from you first hand. I promise, I won’t tell anyone else.

Bin Laden: OK, yes, that was me. You are making me blush here Sadam. Listen, I have a favor to ask you. I was wondering if I could crash at your place for a while.

Saddam: What’s the matter—is Afghanistan not cool enough for you anymore?

Bin Laden: It’s not that. I am going to play a little trick on the United States, and I need to lay low for a few months.

Saddam: Sure, come on over—stay as long as you want. I’m all for making those guys look bad. I’m getting pretty sick of them bombing Iraq. Okay, maybe in retrospect we shouldn’t have invaded Kuwait, but for Allah’s sake, that was 10 years ago. They really need to get over it and go home—the party is over.

Bin Laden: Thank you so much Saddam. This really means a lot to me. But I do have to warn you—if everything goes as planned, the US will so want to rip me a new a-hole. Possibly two or three. When they find out where I am it could get ugly.

Saddam: Ah, don’t sweat it my friend. They have been trying to kick my ass out of the country for the past decade. It always reminds me of that old Elton John song.

Bin Laden: Crocodile Rock? I never understood that one. Why does he want to dance with this animal? It’s not cute like a puppy or kitten.

Saddam: No, silly. The song “I’m Still Standing.”

Bin Laden: Ah, I understand you now. I’m going to pack up a few things and slip on over tomorrow night. But, remember, my plan will only work if everyone thinks I’m still living in my cave over here. So if anyone asks just pretend you don’t know anything.

Saddam: No problem. I’ll set up the guest bedroom and if anyone asks you are my cousin Mohammed who is visiting from out of town. Nobody will think twice about it.

Bin Laden: You are the best. I’ll see you tomorrow. We can sit down with a nice cup of tea and I’ll explain my plan of mass destruction and global religious warfare.

Saddam: Sounds like a plan. See you then Osama.

People who read the stories on my web site often times ask if I tell the truth when I write. What seems like a simple and fair question on the surface can easily turn into a nebulous concept where the notions of right and wrong become more intertwined than the drunken bodies at the local Fraternities Saturday night “Beer and Twister” celebration. Questions such as “Is one the atomic weight of Hydrogen?”, “Does a box of Hamburger Helper come with one of those cartoon gloves with the face on the palm?” and “Honey, did you go out drinking last night only to wake up naked in the back seat of a Mexican crossdresser’s car AGAIN?” can quite easily answered with the responses of “Yes,” “No,” or “HELLO! Isn’t it perfectly obvious that I’m still wearing my left sock?”

Unfortunately, the very nature of the Cosmos doesn’t always provide clear cut answers. Take for example the value of Pi. Defined to be the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, this simple mathematical concept has puzzled mankind since the beginning of time. Even with all of the world’s fancy computers and glamorous mathematicians working on the case, we will never know its exact value. No matter how accurately the value of Pi is calculated, there will always more digits at the end that have not been taken into consideration. It’s one of the most simple and elegant concepts of Euclidean Geometry, and yet we are forced to spend the rest of our lives agonizing over the beauty of their round supple perfection that teases us– forever out of reach.

Which brings me to my next topic: Britney Spears. As I write this I’m watching her televised concert on HBO. At the moment she is performing “I Love Rock and Roll” (originally recorded by Joan Jett and the Black Hearts) while seductively dancing around with a half dozen young dancers wearing revealing shiny spandex outfits on a small platform suspended thirty feet in the air off the main stage. There are so many ways to end this paragraph that I’ll let you, the reader, make up your own punch line or pick one of the following.

A) Of course that whole setup was stolen from Cher’s act in the mid 1980’s.
B) I heard they had to edit out the post show interview when Joan Jett drove to the arena and kicked Britney’s ass.
C) If her boobs really are fake, they sure stood up to the intense heat generated by the stage lights quite nicely.

So while a lot of people categorize Miss Spears as a fake, the truth is that she has some musical talent, a moderate amount of skill in moving her body in synch with the music, and an amazing ability to draw attention away from her deficiencies and focus the spotlight on her assets. Writing stories is remarkably similar– except in all honesty I generally forgo the silver sequin covered sports bra in favor of a baggy drab colored T-shirt. I’m not going to deny it brings out the curves of my upper body, but when I’m sitting at my desk for hours at a time it chafes me like there is no tomorrow.

To explain this concept using a different analogy, people realize that working in a cubical in an office isn’t a whole lot of fun most of the time. At my last job I worked in a cubical and gave customers highly specialized technical advice. Which, by any objective measurement is less interesting than watching paint dry. Given this information, I tend to stay away from the mundane aspects of what I did and focus on the relatively sparse but unusual events that I experienced. I’ve included two “real” things that happened at work to illustrate this point.

Example 1:

I was talking to a customer on the phone today at work. He seems like a nice enough fellow, but after conversing with him for a few minutes I realized that he was trying to pass an uninitialized character pointer object to a function. And he wonders why the compilier was producing a memory stack overflow error. I mean, really—he might as well have been trying to create a multithreading process without any shared memory mutex mechanisms.

Example 2:

I’m not sure how, but one of the customers I was helping had this uncanny ability to call me exactly one minute after I left my desk to go to the bathroom or stop by the kitchen to get another beverage. To make matters worse, he didn’t have the ability to receive incoming phone calls. Finally, the situation got to the point where my manager came into my cubical with a solution. She grabbed a roll of duct tape and quickly wrapped it around my chest and the back of the chair three or four times to ensure I would not leave the vicinity of my telephone until the customer called back. While her plan did work, I think she went a little too far with the idea when she came back to my desk an hour later with a catheter tube.

The first example isn’t funny at all because memory management in C++ programming IS NO LAUGHING MATTER! The second example is funny because it actually happened. Of course so did the first one—which is the whole point. It’s pretty easy to take ordinary events and make them look more exciting than they actually are. Just ask Britney.