This is officialy a popeism. I think I can safely say that this phrase will henceforth be known as a “popology”
I’m sorry for your reaction to what I said.

The book list on the left has been there for ages. I’m finally reading E.E. Cummings’ Poems and David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”. The latter is a very interesting work, really helpful to get yourself organized. E. E. Cummings’ poems are mindblowing, to say the least.
In between, I read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The […]

An average day, by all means. I just arrived in Berlin, here for a few days, on a quasi-vacation. I know, I’m still in Germany, I know I’ll still be working, but it’s a change of scenery, and that is an absolute necessity in this country of perpetual misery.
My hatred for Hamburg, is only surpassed […]

Democracy isn’t for everyone. I sometimes don’t understand world politics.
On one hand, how could you FORCE a democratic system on some people? Doesn’t that defy the concept? Democratic systems should be a choice. People should believe in democracy, and quest to achieve it. It can’t be imported like a friggin’ foreign sports car.
On the […]

Franz Ferdinand are set to play in the Byblos Music Festival. Personally, I don’t really know the band, but they’re all the rage these days, and I’m happy for my home town. Even more so, because my dad is on the festival’s organizing committee! Yay Byblos. I also happen to know someone who’s going to […]

Read.
I like reading. Anything from cheap detective novels(Hardy Boys??) to existentialist rants(When will I ever finish The Antichrist). It depends on my mood, and energy levels.
Lately, having had lots of work to do, I resorted to the simpler genre. I went through Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes cases, and Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. Although […]

disclaimer: Monday was a very stressful day. This is a long post. The orgasm of several months of intercourse (discourse. Research. Whatever)… Don’t judge me. Actually, please do.
Monday rolled around, warm and sunny. My due date, of sorts. The labor of several months of on-and-off research finally coming to fruition.
I loved the warmth as […]

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe […]

Talk about redemption. After his “Troy” fiasco, Orlando Bloom is back in my “ahhh, ok” list. Ridley Scott has earned my respect. The girl, I’m in love with. And, I’ll get around to learning her name soon enough.
What can I say, I went in with the lowest of expectations. Crusades? Christians fighting Muslims? Jerusalem? I […]

I have a feeling this is going to be a recurring theme.
I hate the fact that, when faced with a problem (studies, technology, work), I immediatly ask for assistance. Only then, do I proceed to actually try and figure out the solution. Most of the time, I end up solving it myself. However, the cry […]

A lot of German youth are anti-fascists. One of their mottos: “death to fascists (or fascism)”. Isn’t that, in itself fascistic?

Apparently, pope Benedict XVI signals the End Of Days. It seems that some 12th century Irish priest, Malachay, had a knack for seeing the future (funny how no one has had that ‘knack’ the past 300-400 years), and he predicted that 112 popes would reign before Judgement Day (no, no T2’s in this story).
He […]

this will be clarified later

Having joined the masses that have to shop for the sustenance (as opposed to: “mum… What’s for lunch?”), I couldn’t help but notice, after a while, that there are certain patterns that identify people, or groups of people.
Let’s start with actual personality traits that can be discerned:

Impulsive: This is the shopper who walks in with […]

What are we gonna do…. With it?”
Nope. Not me.
I watched Hitch this evening. I had a date, but it wasn’t love on second sight. And, as I’m blogging at 2:30 am, you can it wasn’t a romp in the sack either.
The movie was funny. Several decent laughs, rare bouts of slapstick comedy. I would say […]

I must admit, that title (which I didn’t know existed before pope John Paul II’s death) sent mini-shivers down my spine. To me, it spoke of ages gone. Of kings and castles. Dragons and wizards. Powerful protectors of the church. Glorious crusades. Knights in shining armor. Princes riding in on their war mounts, rushing to […]

Is a black man in Europe also an ‘African-American’?
Is a white man in Africa (say, South Africa) an ‘American-African’?
Political-correctness is the first stage of numbness. It, and useless practices that warp simple humanity into neutral, machine-like (but multi-syllabic) monstrosities will be the end of us.

We’re all alike. I guess. Across generations, continents, and cultures, certain traits, habits or experiences don’t change. Others define certain generations, or cultures. Sadly, not all these experiences are nice ones. Nevertheless, we learn as best we can from them, and move on.
A friend of mine in Lebanon sent me a link to this online […]

Constant happiness is an oxymoron. There is no such thing.
Why, you ask? (Well, if you don’t ask, you might as well stop reading here)
It goes against our human nature. Man’s natural state is not happiness. Happiness implies satisfaction, and for that reason, it’s a temporary emotion rather than a continuous one. Constant happiness would […]

“If alcohol is a crutch, Jack Daniel’s is a wheelchair”

Here it is. I have wanted for a while to go with a new design. The basic idea behind it was to create something minimalistic, very plain, very simple, and basically let the content speak for itself (if I can say that without sounding very arrogant). I will be adding links later, but I wanted […]

Two unrelated news items caught my fancy. The first being Google’s announcement that they were increasing their GMail account sizes to 2 GB! That’s right! Just after Yahoo announced their increased storage capacity (10 mb to 250, and recently to 1GB), Google came right back into it.
Google claims it’s just to offer a better service […]

Sounds like a technical header, huh?
Nope.
These two ideas have been swimming around my head for long enough, it’s about time to jot them down.
First of all, I have this thing (I think it’s my only thing that qualifies as a ‘thing’). Whatever. I hate letting any piece that could constitute a ‘memory’ at some point […]

More memorable quotes…
This one professor, while I was sitting for THE exam (THE: the one I’ve failed a couple of times, and threatens to ruin my career…)…
“Because ve haf had problems viz zis, zere vill be no sheeting. You are not allowed to sheet during zis exam. Anyone I see sheeting will be disqualified from […]

Back in Hamburg.
I got here last night. Walking to the main station, I could hear the same old music on the PA. Usually, that music would be, well, music to my ears, it would kinda lift my spirits, but Berlin is such a cool city that my spirits didn’t need much uplifting. The music actually […]

You scored as agnosticism. You are an agnostic. Though it is generally taken that agnostics neither believe nor disbelieve in God, it is possible to be a theist or atheist in addition to an agnostic. Agnostics don’t believe it is possible to prove the existence of God (nor lack thereof).
Agnosticism is a philosophy that […]

Bourbon
Congratulations! You’re 118 proof, with specific scores in beer (40) , wine (83), and liquor (86).

Screw all that namby-pamby chick stuff, you’re going straight for the
bottle and a shot glass! It’ll take more than a few shots of Wild
Turkey or 99 Bananas before you start seeing pink elephants. You know
how to handle […]

Or do they?
I read three books the past week. First on was ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. I’d heard of it ages ago, but was never really drawn to read it until a recent conversation with my roommate, and hearing that it was being made into a movie. I must say, the book’s very […]

Hizballah’s protest came and went… we’re still here. At any point of the day, any point of the night, freedom loving Lebanese are there, quiet, loud, cheering, lost in thought, they’re there. We’re there.
To Hizballah, we’re traitors, we want the US/France/(insert any non-Arab nation here and you’re golden) to rule us. Yet, tomorrow, we are […]

It’s funny how those selfsame groups that are armed to the teeth are warning of civil war.
It’s funny how those selfsame groups that are sectarian to the core are warning of sectarian strife.
It’s funny how those that swear loyalty to foreign powers, and are completely dependant on them are calling the rest of the population […]

Context will be the last thing on your mind when you see this photo. We are sick, but also, we are imaginative… who said golf was boring to watch…

Or at least, not to blogger.com! Apparently, the word ‘blog’ and all it’s derivations are not recognized by blogger’s spellcheck tool! I was surprised, having never spellchecked my posts before, to discover this. I guess ‘blog’ is not officialy a word, but one would expect ‘blogger’ to make an exception!

This caught me by surprise. Bill Clinton, former US president and Cigar connoisseur extraordinaire has his own personal blog. Apart from it being truly personal, and not very politically correct, it’s very, very sincere. I made a post on another blog concerning Lebanon. A reader left a comment, mentioning Clinton’s perspective on the Lebanese situation. […]

According to dave Pollard I am an up-and-coming blogger. Apparently, he did some research, some digging around, and came with a summation. Bloggers are divided into A-List, B-List, C-List, up-and-coming, and remaining bloggers.These categories are broken down thus:

A-List Bloggers

numbering: 100
average: 150,000 hits/day per blog
minimum: 15,000 hits/day per blog
total: 1700 hours by all reader/day per blog

B-List […]

I don’t know how I found this link in one of my firefox tabs, anyway I there were four boxes, each with a rolling list of words. Four clicks later, I found out What I Am. I am a muscular penis who loves to sniff balls.
I really don’t know what to do with that.
Let me […]

I found out yesterday that a close friend of Mark’s family, Ahmed, passed away. I have to be honest in saying that I felt a tiny pinch of sadness at first, but nothing more. Today, while meditating over a hot, heavy shot of Espresso, I suddenly felt sad.
I had met Ahmed twice, both brief encounters. […]

Wired 13.03: The Book Stops Here is another very interesting Wired.com article. It discusses Wikipedia, officially the world’s largest encyclopedia (online). Wikipedia depends largely on user contribution and censorship. However, the article itself deals beautifully with an analysis of how people gathered, published and assimilated data over the ages. A must read for any scholar […]

Hamburg has been freezing for a while. Temperatures hit around -8 today, and I was out on the town… One noticeable thing is that even though it has been snowing almost continuously this past month, the snow hasn’t accumulated… It hasn’t been a ‘winter wonderland’ over here, it’s been more muck than white purity, more […]

I recently finished reading “Chainfire”. It’s the ninth book of the “Sword of Truth” series by Terry Goodkind. Luckily, I’d read the last nine in quick succesion, and haven’t had to wait anxiously for each new one over the past decade, as many other fans of this saga have. I guess I can call it […]

Interesting fact. Alan Turing was a very famous computer scientist. He was an early researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He’s known for the Turing test.
The Turing test is basically a test of machine intelligence. The test employs a machine that tries to pass itself as human. I won’t go into the intricacies of […]

it’s 6:18 am. I woke up at 4 am, suprisingly. Very strange feeling, but a good sign that I am finally able of getting out of bed when I wake up!
One small thing. Several people have asked whether the story below was over, or ‘to be continued’. Seriously. Haven’t you ever seen a movie where […]