From the World Site Atlas (http://www.sitesatlas.com/)
Astute readers may have been wondering about Rashid the Slinger. If he’s really from Persia, as I stated in Episode 3, what was he doing spending his childhood in the marshes of the Euphrates, as I claimed in Episode 7? A quick look at a map shows that these two places are in entirely different countries, with a Big Mountain Range between them. Cynics might suspect that Rashid started out as a minor secondary character from Iraq in some initial draft of the story, and that I changed his country of origin in the final draft when I realized his importance, but missed that reference in Episode 7. Naw… couldn’t be… 
Still, one of the neat things about online serialized dramas is that one gets to go back and correct one’s mistakes, and that bit about ‘the marshes of the Euphrates’ has gone the way of Ninevah and Tyre. Why is Rashid so important, you may ask? This must remain a mystery, for now, but the short answer is that 1) with a crew this small, everyone is important and 2) slings are cool.
On a related note, I urge those of you interested in the history and practice of this most elemental of projectile weapons to check out the vast compendium of useful information on http://slinging.org. With a bit of work, and about 30 years of practice, I’m sure any one of us could give that Persian fellow a run for his money.
Those of us with a rudimentary study in classical history remember vaguely that Babylon was in what is now Iraq, and the Medes and the Persians conquered it. Even now, with both countries in the nightly news, it’s all kind of vaguely Over There, next to Afghanistan and Kubekistan or something. Kind of like for Southern Californians, we aren’t sure where anything is east of the Colorado River or north of the San Fernando Valley. So for most of us, the “Persian” reference went right by without a second glance.
Folks up here are very much the same. I have friends in San Francisco who think that ‘east’ means Oakland, and who lump San Jose in with Sacramento… Denver… Chicago… New York… London… Prague… Tokyo… the moons of Neptune… the outer reaches of the galactic halo…
I’m sure you’ve run into the reverse phenomenon while traveling out of state — i.e. “Gosh, if you’re from California, you must know my friend D_?” “Why should I? California is an enormous state, ten percent bigger than Japan, with a hundreds of cities, thousands of towns, and a population of more than 36 million.” “It is? Gosh, it doesn’t look that big in the movies.”
ROTFLMAO! You nailed it Paul. I haven’t traveled out of state for years, but when I did, that happened a few times. I was like
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