i couldn't do it. it even took me a while to make sense of it after he told me it was english. it took real effort to force myself to see an "s" and not a kaf in the middle of the first word. eventually i got it. and now that i've figured it out, i can't see it as anything but english. as i look at it now, the words seem so obvious that i'm half convinced the jpeg is not nearly as hard to read as the print edition is.
a few years ago, i saw a sign over a small shop that was written in a weird stylistic font. even though it was in english, my brain classified it as possibly arabic, but it wasn't sure either way. so my eyes darted back and forth across the sign, as my brain tried to sort out whether to read it from left to right, or from right to left. the darting was completely involuntary, and actually a bit annoying. from my perspective the sign seemed to blink back and forth like some kind of freaky light-show or optical illusion. mrs. noz, of course, had no trouble reading it. once she told me what it said the light show stopped and i had a hard time seeing what the big deal was.
