Yo Mama So Fatwa....

What're the chances of hearing two weird Osama Bin Laden stories an hour or so apart?

Very good, apparently.

NPR carried the first of them as I was driving round this morning: the Osamster's apparently gone Bollywood!

The new Bollywood flick “Tere Bin Laden,” a spoof on the al Qaeda leader, will be released this weekend. But the distributors are taking no chances in Pakistan.

According to the Hindustan Times, producers are opting to call the comedy “Tere Bin” (roughly, “Without You”) - dropping the giveaway Laden - so as not to draw the ire of militant Pakistani Islamists.

The radio piece, along with this article, describe the plot thusly:

Tere Bin Lade is  produced by Pooja Shetty Deora’s Walkwater Media.Set in Pakistan, Tere Bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek comedy centred on a young and ambitious Pakistani news reporter (Zafar) whose attempts to immigrate are thwarted as his visa is always rejected.

When he chances upon an Osama lookalike, he decides to create and plant fake videos of Osama bin Laden threatening to take over the world. His aim? To score airspace at Danka TV, the news channel he works at. That apparently will help him realize his American dream. However, things don’t go according to plan and the White House gets involved, putting a secret agent on the reporter’s trail.

I'm sure there will be those who find any such treatment of tragedy to be out of line. I may eventually become one of them, once I've heard more and (preferably) seen what all the fuss is about. But there's a lot of ground between adulating Hitler and "Springtime for Hitler," and I'd like to see where this effort falls.

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Meanwhile, on the AM dial, we were learning even more horrid things about this Saudi mass murderer:

He's a soccer fan. Arsenal, to be precise:

As the story goes, Bin Laden became a "gooner" during a three-month visit to London in 1994, ostensibly to court financiers for his terrorist operations. In those days he was considerably more incognito then at present, although the Saudis were applying international pressure to get him extradited. While there, Bin Laden attended four European-Cup Winners Cup matches at Highbury and sat in the famous Clock End section of the stadium. Apparently he was awe-struck by the fanaticism of soccer fans and remarked that he had never seen anything like it. He even strolled into the gift shop to buy a replica gunners jersey for his son, Abdullah, after one of the games.

Now, one would expect this news to be met by Arsenal fans with a mixture of repugnance and concern. Certainly the club's public relations "suits" adopted the proper tone, posting the following disclaimer on its web site, Arseweb.com:

"You may shudder at the thought of having rubbed shoulders with the man back then, but Arseweb would like to believe that this makes north London ever so slightly less likely to become a target"

They also had him promptly banned from Highbury.

The fans, however--and several in the media--seized upon this information to promote the team. During the media swirl Arsenal fans reportedly began singing a bizarre chant:

"He's hiding near Kabul
He loves the Arsenal
Osama
Oh oh oh oh!"

Also, in a light-hearted article in the Daily Telegraph, after speculating on whether Bin Laden had also bought some Arsenal brand hair gel, reporter Giles Smith got serious--well sort of. He expressed disappointment that Arsenal hadn't been mentioned in America's official Bin Laden narrative: "It [the Bin Laden-Arsenal connection] hasn't figured in any of then US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's media briefings, and nor had General Tommy Franks, at the time in charge of the American ground operation to capture bin Laden, mentioned Arsenal once," he exclaimed.

No wonder the Americans can't find him. Now if we'd just surrounded the caves of Tora Bora with minivans and set out orange slices and packs of Capri Sun, he'd likely come running right toward the pitch.  We could have even promised a trophy to every terrorist! Probably the capture would be disallowed, though, on account of our soldiers being offside.

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And totally off this track, since I just want to get this one over with:

Day 21 - Favorite ship

Mulder/Scully, okay? There, I've admitted it. I feel like I'm covered in a kind of black oil.