Spread The Word: Podcasting!

Click here to get started podcasting!

Rizzn's Podcaster is now at Beta v1.1, and you can find it at http://rizzn.net.

What is Rizzn's Podcaster?  Well, to know what Rizzn's Podcaster is, you need to know what Podcasting is.  If you've listened to my radio shows or talked to me at all within the last month or two, you probably already know, as it's virtually all I've been talking about for a while.

Essentially, Podcasting is a method of audioblogging, which is to say you make entries as you do with your blog, but you do it with your voice or other chosen auditory medium, and it posts to the site.  There are a number of services that help you with this, some are simple php scripts, some are full-blown services with telephone numbers -- but none of them really are a full service solution for podcasting.

What makes podcasting different the audioblogging?  One simple thing -- RSS with enclosures.

Y'see there's this little thing you may have heard of for blogs called RSS, and it essentially makes it easy to check a large number of blogs very quickly by using a feed-reader if you simply subscribe to the RSS feed for your chosen blogs (for instance, http://rizzn.com/axom.xml). Podcasting takes it one step further, and includes a tag in the RSS feed called enclosures.  Enclosures is simply a pointer, an ahref if you will, to a file location, and in terms of podcasting, it's a location of an MP3 file containing the audio update.

There are several podcasting utilties that have been written to take advantage of this (my personal favorite, and the only one I reccoment is iPodder (http://ipodder.sourceforge.net). What this does is take the RSS subscription of your favorite podcasting stream and synchronise it to your personal MP3 player or PC media player.

I strongly suggest you check out podcasting, and more importantly, I strongly suggest you sign up for your own podcast at http://rizzn.net! You'll be glad you did!

By the way, if you want to hear my podcast, tune your podcasting applications to: http://rizzn.net/Scripts/podcast/rss/riz.xml

Click here to get started podcasting!

/rizzn

History of a Word Says It All

Today, I had a great deal of things I wanted to say, but I've got the image of that hot teacher in my mind that had sex with her 14 year old student, and I keep asking myself why we prosecute these ladies for doing things that us men only wish could have happenned to us when we were that age.

Damn she's hot.

Anyways, instead of trying to muddle through the news with that image in my head the whole time, I'm going to talk about the origin of a word that's very pertinent to our time: the word assassin.

Some say that Shakespeare originated the word, and while it is true, he is the first person to use the word in written English, the word is actually much older than that. In fact, we learnt the word from our Arabic friends -- it comes from the Arabic original hashshashin (or hashishiyyin) both meaning "eaters of hashish".  Yes, it was plural.  Foir some unkown reason it was the plural form of the word which took hold in Europe.

The first assassins were followers of a minor Islamic sect called the Ishmaeli.  The Ishmaeli, who had around the time of Marco Polo (circa 1273 C.E.) gained a widely known reputation for their stock and trade, achieved political power by murdering their opponents (although it should be noted that the time of al-Hassan was most likely closer to 1090).  Their leader was a man called Hassan bin Sabbah, who was known to some western travelers as "The Old Man of the Mountains".  The title comes from the unasailable castle in what is now Syria that went by the name Alamut.  Alamut was surrounded by bone dry mountains and desert, and was never taken by either Crusaders or Arabs.

Candidates for admission to his sect, on arrival at the gates of his mountain fortress, were fed quantities of a drug concoction (which probably included hashish) and promptly passed out.  They awoke in a delightful garden where they were regaled with choice foods and exquisite drinks by beautiful young women.  After a while, they were then fed more of the drug and awoke to find themselves outside the fortress once more.  Hassan convinced them that what they had seen was a glimpse of the paradise to which they would go if they died while carrying out his orders.  Naturally they became fearless.

Hassan and his sucessors would send their acolytes to join anonymously the courts of sultans and kings, and once in place enabled the Ishmaeli leader to order an assasination at any time. Legendary for their fanatacism and willingness to martyr themselves for their leader and cause, they were usually killed immediately after an assassination.

Now these guys didn't just murder people straight away, they gave them plenty of warning.  First a stealthy assassin would leave a bag of gold on someone's pillow while they slept.  If the "victim" didn't get that hint, a little later a dagger would be left.  It is said that one mullah in Baghdad was vociferous in his opposition to Hassan and his murderous crew until one day no negative words were spoken against them anymore.  When asked why this was, he said, "They have convinced me with arguments which were both weighty and pointed."  People knew what he meant.

In another incident a thousand years ago, a boat rammed into the barque of the Grand Vizir on the Tigris and a killer successfully leaped aboard, which is noteworthy only because of the similarity to attack on the USS Cole.

The passing of Hassan bin Sabbah did not end the threat of the assassins by any means.  In the following millennium, his heirs claimed the semi-divine status of Imam themselves, and their followers spread to Syria where they fought with the Crusaders and the Knights Templar.  They roamed further afield, to India and even to Afghanistand, and were remarkably transformed in the process.

The word hashish is a concentrated form of Cannabis and in Arabic, the word means "dried herb."

/rizzn