25 November, 2006

The Honeymoon is Over

Another cigarette in the balcony gave birth to yet another brilliant insight, honeymoon. I don't know who invented it but to me going on a honeymoon right after marriage is a completely flawed concept. Imagine for a second that you just got married and successfully constrained yourself to having one vagina for the rest of your life -a timeless saying of wisdom from the movie "Old School"-, What is the reason why you should travel to exotic places filled with beautiful -usually half-naked- girls in an overwhelmingly romantic atmosphere? Its simply torture to remind yourself constantly of how many women are now out of your reach! If anybody has to go out on a honeymoon it has to be before getting married not after!

Am I right or what?

Today's Quote

I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.
-- W.C. Fields

23 November, 2006

Today's Quote

Today's quote is dedicated to Rami Siyam (Ayoub). For more information please click here.

"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

22 November, 2006

Today's Quote

"You know that look women get when they want sex? Me neither!"
-- Drew Carey

21 November, 2006

Mubarak Denies My Suggestion on Niqab

Apparently, Mr. Osama Shaltout, a shoura council member has raised my suggestion of banning niqab in Egypt to president Hosni Mubarak! Check it out here.

Today's Quote

"If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones." - Julia (George Orwell's 1984)

20 November, 2006

زرع.. درس.. شرب.. هرب

Another great story by Anis Mansour, one of my favorite writers.

Bloody Mad

I was watching this documentary on TV about an English guy, Donald Campbell, who was determined to break the 300 mph -yes, thats 480 kph if you're wondering- in a jet-engine powered boat and managed to get himself killed in the process. And it made me wonder, what the hell did he accomplish?

I understand the need for setting land speed records or air speed records, these have resulted in a lot of development in the designs of cars and airplanes and trains and a lot of useful stuff, but have you ever heard of a person wanting to be on a boat going 300 mph? Thats just insane... and what bugged me the most is that he was treated like a hero, hey, the guy is crazy! Whatever...

Pink is not a color

I was taking my usual cigarette in the balcony, enjoying the fresh cold air that I missed so much when it suddenly hit me. Pink is not a color!

We have learned in the arts class in school that you have your basic three colors, red, yellow and blue. Mixed in different proportions you get any color in the world, but pink? Pink is what you get when you add "white" to red! Its not actually a color! Pink is simply the "lack" of red!!! Its not even a natural color, its "artificial" and now remember this cause its going to be important later on. Thinking about it, pink doesnt' even occur naturally, there's not a single fruit or vegetable I know thats pink! Even pink roses, I bet its only a phase before getting a real color, RED! Apparently, omwhere in our history, a guy ran out of red while painting so he decided to add some white to it and he came up with, pink! And apparently this dude was highly recognized that nobody dared to object when he decided that he discovered a new color and even got at its own name, pink!

Now, I know this might sound rediculous to most of you, but here's the catch. Pink destroyed women's lives.

Ever wondered about these girls who adore the color pink and put it in everything they have? Well, here's my theory: Pink is a color that was specifically invented to oppress women and to lock them in the box of being "cute little things" and, and this is quite clever now, they used to promote another illusion, romance.

"Romance" is artificial. Or at least the kind of romane that you see on TV, but all the girls some how got in their minds the whole "romantic love" thing and the "hero of their dreams" and all that impossible stuff about finding the one and blah blah. Immagine the statistical improbability of finding the "one" from among 6 billion inhabitants of our planets! And girls got so fixated on this idea that for most of them it has become the aim of their lives to find the one and get married and have children, your typical Hallmark family, a fictional family by the way. And when their boyfriends, fiances etc. don't act like the complete romantic heros they're supposed to be they're frowned upon and treates as cold-hearted insensitive beings when in fact we are only being "realistic".

Anyways, so the marketers of this new romance idea decided to associate it with a color -for marketing purposes of course- and what better color to describe an artificial feeling than an "artificial" color, Pink!

19 November, 2006

I'm Moving to WordPress

As I'm still new to the blogging world, there are still a lot of things about it that I don't know. But one thing I know now, word press kicks blogger ass.

I'm just sad I didn't find that out earlier before I started posting, or even before I made the conversion to beta which was the point of no return since WordPress doesn't support importing -an amazingly useful feature by the way- from the beta version! Stupid me! My only hope now is that as they go on they're going to solve this problem. I should've known this was a scam since they were bought by google, who I don't like very much! I'm more of a Yahoo! person.

I almost immediately fell for WordPress. I love a peice of professional work and WordPress is just that, it looks clean, its loaded with features, stuff that I found out lately to be useful and important but in blogger you have to add all this stuff and I had to do it the old way adding the html code and using trial and error, I took a couple of programming courses but I'm no programmer, thats why I changed to blogger beta since it promised a visual interface for playing with the template and colors and fonts and all that crap. For instance, statistics are built-in the dashboard and it has a lot of neat stuff like referrals, their templates look great although I didn't start playing with them yet. You could also keep track of all the comments you made to other blogs on WordPress and notify you of newer ones! I didn't know they could do that! I have to check on my comments manually and its just Hell!

Anyways, so long blogger, from now on I'm going to post both on blogger and on my WordPress blog until I figure out how to move my old post from here.

Today's Quote

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein

Netherlands, the next big enemy...

Netherlands is banning borqa in public places. So what?

First of all, I don't live there, and don't nobody start on me that the west are attacking Islam and all that shit and that we should unify with our "brothers" in the west, I don't even believe that arab countries, let alone the Islamic countries, are ever going to be unified and I don't even want it to happen, but thats a different issues.

Second of all, if you're living in the Netherlands, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, and you are wearing a borqa, then you obviously don't belong there and you should move out. Wearing a borqa is an extreme measure, even in Islam, and its not even required to cover your face or hands, and if you are this extreme then I don't understand how you are living in a place that contradicts with all your believes?

Third of all, its not even required to wear a borqa! So why make a big deal about it? Why make a fight out of it? If you have to wear it then go somewhere else, but to me at least, its not natural to cover your face, I can't communicate with a person without seeing his face, its like you want to erase your identity! Besides, the Netherlands says that they're banning it for security reasons, of course our conspiracy theorists won't buy this one bit but I for one think that this is a totally legitimate reason for banning the borqa. Here in Saudi Arabia, terrorists go around freely wearing borqa to cover their identity and no police officer dares asking a woman to uncover her face. Even cars with women inside goes through security check-points unchecked! I don't care if you put check-points all over the place you're not going to make me feel safe if you let a car pass unchecked because there's a woman inside! So, I really don't blame the Netherlands for saying they're banning it for security reasons.

What I really think is that we should ban it in Islamic countries too! Borqa is nothing but an out-dated garment forced on women by tradition and has nothing to do with Islam. I read an investigation by a Saudi newspaper about this issue and I was surprised to know that some of these women never take it off -its not actually a borqa in this case but something similar worn on the face beneath it but they still wear a borqa when they go outside- anyways, I was saying that even their kids never saw their faces, and in some cases, their husbands! This is a case where social traditions got intermingled with Islamic teachings and these women need to understand that and stop abusing themselves because it, according to psychiatrists interviewed for this newspaper investigation, has some serious consequences on their psychiatric well being! Let along on their family, imagine if you never saw your mom's face! How could she show affection or love or any other feeling?

AlJazeera International

I just love it. Put aside all the prejudice everybody has on the Arabic Jazeera channel, this is something completely different, I guess. It is so well presented, very professional, I especially love the show . There's simply no better looking channel with this diverse and wide range of programing that are shown -or yet to be shown- broadcasting from an arab country. I love the way it looks too, very clean, very smooth, with thier news band at the bottom much less prominant and annoying -and actually similar to that of the BBC's- than thats of their Arabic version or of Al-Arabiya's for example -don't you just hate it?-. It looks very professional and mature that I don't believe it just started less than a week now.

Having such professional and well-known -to the western audience at least- presenters such as Riz Khan sir David Frost, I just loved his show "Frost around the world" is such and intelligent move on their part, this would give them much more credibelity to a western audience than say, another Al-Qasim talking in English.

I know its still too early to tell, but if you could judge a book by its cover, then I'm willing to put all my money on it. Now we do have a channel specifically made for channelling our point of view to the west, weather al-Jazeera is the best person to do so or not is yet to be seen but at least its a start.

Today's Quote

“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” -Al Capone