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Ah, the wonderful direction our country is headed...after reading this article...

Imam held on visa charge nears release

Basically, a Muslim religious leader who doesn't speak much English came from Senegal to visit people in America. And because they thought he seemed suspicious, they took him in for questioning. And partly because they couldn't find a good translator who knew his language (although the St. Louis Post-Dispatch apparently found one...), they threw him in jail for 6 weeks, and now he had to admit to fundaising illegally in the US, which he didn't do, just to get out and go home. And this despite the fact that apparently, the Senegalese embassy knew of this guy, and knew that he is a major religious scholar and that he's extremely well-respected (and definitely NOT a terrorist).

But apparently, even though the St. Louis Post-Dispatch can find that out, our justice system can't, when they're the ones holding him in jail for 6 weeks. That's really nice to know...

Parrish ballroom

Oh, and one other thing I forgot to post about--I actually saw the Parrish ballroom earlier this week. The door was left wide open and that area hadn't been sealed off yet, so I wandered up... (I was looking at some stuff in the pre-med office, and after I finished, I decided to see what was goign on with the construction upstairs. And I had thought to check the door to the ballroom a couple other times since they started the construction, thinking it might be open since they were goign to be working in there, but it was always locked. But apparently they forgot to lock it this time, figuring that nobody would actually be on the 4th floor of Parrish in the middle of the summer...)

So that was kind of exciting. It basically looked like the pictures that I've seen in the Phoenix here, except with a lot more plaster and stuff on the floor because they're already tearing out some of the interior walls (since that's goign to be the machine room for the elevators when they finish). So between that, the fact that I thought the motion detectors might still be turned on (although I'm guessing that they weren't, if there have been workers up there), and the fact that I know the floor really ISN'T completely stable (which was why it was locked in the first place), I was afraid to walk around too much. ( More musings about why I didn't explore more than I did )

But it was still really cool to have been in there, and I did look out one of the windows (since I know from the pictures that I've seen that the view is really great). Oddly enough, from the one in front of the building, I could just see a lawn chair on the ground and that was about it. But from one of the other windows, I could see out the side of the dome over the 4th floor roof, which was nice. And if anyone's interested, I'd be interested in going again with someone else to see if they left the door open again, since I'd be more comfortable exploring there if someone else is with me, and I'm sure there's some of you who would want to see it too...