Rafsanjani, greying septuagenarian, positions himself as the 'new voice of Iranian youth

I hadn't intended to post anything today. We still won't know who the new leader of Iran is until after next Friday as there will be run-off between Akbar Hashemi "Let's Work Together" Rafsanjani and the hardliner anti-Westerner. However, this article was too good to pass up. It should serve as a reminder that beneath the various races, sexes, religions, ethnicities and biases that seperate us, we are all human underneath and thus subjected to the whims of our most fanciful desires. In more than just the internet/ICMB/airplane kind of way, we are all living in one small global neighborhood:

The upmarket district of Fereshteh is the only place in Teheran where the traffic jams are welcome. Every evening, the young and well-to-do of Iran, driving their smartest cars and wearing their best clothes, crawl around a mile-long circuit in the narrow side streets hoping to meet members of the opposite sex.

Given that there are no nightclubs or bars, and rendezvous in public parks are often broken up by the ever-vigilant morality police, drive-by dating is the best chance young Iranian men have of meeting a girl.

Pull up alongside a girl in your imported Mazda, tell her your dad is rich - a pistachio baron, perhaps - and she might just hand over her mobile number.

The latest suitor to have gone a-wooing round Fereshteh, however, is not a love-lorn twentysomething but a grey-haired, septuagenarian cleric by the name of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was on the hunt for votes.

In one of the most audacious bids ever to capture a "youth" vote, the conservative Islamic revolutionary rebranded himself for Iran's bitterly-fought presidential election last Friday as a champion of the young, using a Western-style marketing campaign that owed more to Nike than the Koran. Read More