Israeli chemist Dan Shechtman just won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of crazy tenfold symmetry in “quasicrystals” found in aluminum and manganese. Steven woke me up this morning with this article saying, “How much does this look exactly like zellij?!” Zellij being the traditional Moroccan tiling we’ve come to love.

So much! Check it out: (The quasicrystal formation is on the top left.)

So cool to think we might be hardwired to make this kind of stuff… Read the NY Times article about him here.

I love doing a cartoon a day when I travel. Usually Casey and I will find a quiet cafe or a bar. She’ll write away in her journal and then look up to see a view like this:

I did sets while in Southeast Asia and Mali during the time that would become To Timbuktu. (You can see bits of those here.) And another set in Morocco in in 2009. These past 5 weeks in Colombia was no different. I did about 47 in all. (OK, some days I did more than one.) Here are my favorite eleven.

They’re all pretty self-explanatory with the exception of this first one. On our first day in Bogotá we OD-ed on museums going to the Museo Botero (Colombian artist who paints fat people), Museo del Oro (of gold), Museo de la Policía Nacional (come on, you know this one), and then a textile museum housed in the old house of Simón Bolívar’s mistress. Didn’t catch the name of that one.

-Steven

Last year we celebrated this Muslim holiday of sacrifice in Morocco with our friends Amina and Mohammed and their family. Here are two of our less gruesome Before and After shots:

It was delicious! Ok, actually the intestines were disgusting, but we thoroughly enjoyed all the other parts of the holiday. Especially the eerie sensation that we were walking around a horror movie set with all the butchers going house to house, sacrificing rams, walking the streets covered in blood holding big knives.

Our friend Noah is living in Dakar, Senegal now where they also celebrate the holiday and he has sent us this for comparison:

You can see even more shots from Eid in Senegal, and the rest of Noah’s blog about living in Dakar, here.

We love the folks over at Pictory. They have a beautiful design and run photo contests that we’ve won in the past. This most recent one is called Just Like Heaven and is all about people sharing pictures of whatever their happy place is. Naturally, we had to go with the entrance to the old medina in Rabat, Morocco. We were one of the winners! You can see all other fantastic winning entries here.

Yet another reason Rabat rules: folks got together at Cafe Renaissance again for another Shitty Kitty Meet Up WITHOUT US. Sooooooooo wonderfully shitty. And just in time to remind people State-side that there is a Meet Up tomorrow (Thursday the 18th, 6pm) at Shotwell’s Bar out here in San Francisco. We’ll be toasting a round or three to our shitty pals out in Rabat furrrr surrre.

We’re happy our couscous photo made the cut of the Pictory Mag food photo contest but we’re sad we’re not going to have any of Amina’s couscous this Friday. Meshi Mushikil.

Check out all the winners here – http://www.pictorymag.com/showcases/local-flavor/

Last night we had our FIRST EVER Shitty Kitty Moroccan Meet Up. It was sooooooooo shitty thanks to the prolific participation of our attendees. Makes us wish we’d had one sooner. Shitty Kitty wouldn’t be proud of us thinking like that though, as she’s kind of a “tough shit” gal. Perhaps now is instead the time to promise to bring Shitty Kitty ALL OVER THE GLOBE.

Here was the first cartoon of the night:

And our cartoon creators hard at work:

And the rest of the debauchery:

Fatima pours more detergent in the bucket. The powder collects on the sheets like drifts of snow on mountain peaks and in valleys. Some of it slowly disappears in the water or the parts of the bedding that are already wet. From snow to curdled milk and then it’s gone, leaving only a thin film. She watches it happen so slowly, she doesn’t move. She can’t see, feel, or hear anything but the soap that will clean these sheets. Her heartbeat moves her body, a back bent over like an archway after all these years. Of course she looks old than she is. Pain will ravage the body like that.
“Fatima!” she hears and is startled in a way that feels like waking up from a nightmare. “Fatima!” the little boys yells again. She looks up. Youssef is barreling towards her. “Wash this too,” he says and throws a red football jersey into the bucket, covering the snow and curdled milk. When she looks up again he is gone. Through the cloudy din of cotton and wool through which she listens, she hears him fighting with his older brother Driss. Or maybe he’s laughing now. Or crying. It’s hard to tell. He makes noise constantly. Fatima considers her near deafness a blessing in a house like this.
She takes the jersey off the top off the bucket and sets it on the tiles next to her stool. She’s washing sheets right now. Not clothes. She will get to that later.

Come get your Shitty Kitty on in MOROCCO!

As always, we’ll bring the supplies to draw and caption Shitty Kitty comics– you bring yourself and your friends.

Check out other Shitty Kitty comics/videos and pics from previous Meet Ups here:

http://telephoneandsoup.com/shitty-kitty

And not sure where the cafe is? Here is a map!

View Rabat Shitty Kitty @ Cafe Renaissance in a larger map