Category Archives: Life

Dear Egyptian Woman

Yes, that’s it… sit down on this chair.

Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you. After all, this is a necessary check-up because this is how low I have decided to sink.

Don’t be nervous. I know it’s not the most normal thing for someone in my position – no pun intended – to do, but after all that happened, this is a must.

Don’t be shy. It’s not like I haven’t seen one before.

Now, here’s what you should do. Spread them. Yes, your legs, spread them. It’s my duty to check if you’re still pure.

Why so? Because I am simply perverted. I don’t want you to accuse me of raping you and somehow in my twisted mind, you not being pure means you were not raped.

Will you be uptight if I try to touch it? Like right there? Does it feel good?

Don’t cry. I don’t want you to cry. This is just a formal procedure.

But damn it, this is seriously turning me on… do you think I could probe in some more?

It won’t be counted as rape, even if you said no. After all, you are not pure – for that is the only measure I can think of.

So what do you say? are you in or out?

Out? Don’t be so rude now. I need this. I need you. I want you. You don’t want me too?

No? Are you serious? Do you really want me to take you on this table like the slut you really are? Yes? You’d like that?

It’s not rape after all.

Sincerely,

Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in Egypt.

Justin Bieber’s Perfume… For Her

Not only is it horrifying to see Twitter constantly filled with teenagers who call themselves “Beliebers” (Yes, how atrocious can that get?) but they’re literally everywhere. I thought we didn’t have those in Lebanon until I was linked to pictures of the premiere of Justin Bieber’s movie and let’s just say, the country has another kind of infestation going on as well.

Well, Justin Bieber is doing what most singers do when they reach mass hysteria level of fandom: release a perfume. It’s just that it didn’t click in his head that since he’s supposedly male, the perfume should be addressed to his own gender (not that I’d buy). So he made a perfume designed especially for his fanbase, which I’m assuming is mostly screaming girls.

So dear little girls everywhere attempting (or already done so) to throw things at your computer screen for me dissing the husband-to-be that you will never have, come this June, you will be able to smell the way Justin Bieber wants you to.

And if you take the perfume ad he filmed to the letter, whenever you put on this awesome perfume, Justin Bieber will magically appear in your room, smell you, and take you on a journey you will never forget and then depart. Don’t let your head wander, little girl reading this. Your mom won’t be too happy to know you have such thoughts (or it might just be me, in which case, my apologies).

The perfume is named Someday. I have no idea if that’s supposed to be a lyric of a Bieber song but it might as well be the key to give false hope (see above paragraph) to the millions of girls who will rush to buy this, hoping that someday, they will become the “Kate Middleton” of women, except by the time Justin Bieber feels like getting married, he’d hopefully be long gone into the realms of forgetfulness.

This is Someday’s ad on YouTube, where it already has over one million hits so far:

The ad also has its own YouTube page where Justin Bieber “gives fans a personal invitation and intimate access to his heart” through the fragrance. The girl in the ad is apparently named Dree Hemingway and she is the great granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway.

I don’t know about you but I will be very happy when this phase in human history ends.

Arab Porn?

I was linked to this YouTube video by a friend:

After watching it, I was like: Ok, this is funny and the girl is hot but that’s pretty much it. Then I looked at the view and it had 160K.

Then I glanced at the comments and saw ones that went like this:

–  i just got a boner :O – by alyehab

– omg this video causes two things:

1- hard work to the right hand.

2- I have to wash my p>. – by abufaisal1980

– the more appropriate title would be ” how to make a lebanese girl give you a BJ extremely fast” – by lifesnojoke333

There are far more comments of this nature on the video. The thing in common between the users? they’re from the Arab Gulf and they are so sexually deprived, it’s getting ridiculous.

According to my friend Paul Gadallah, Arabs would “find a bar in Beirut to be porn” – and I never thought I would agree to that until I saw the comments on this video. Fine, the girl has shown cleavage – big deal. Why don’t they ask for change in their countries so seeing cleavage doesn’t become this “OMG, I JUST SAW A PART OF A BREAST” moment.

Until then, it’s our sad fate, dear Lebanese, that whenever one of our women wear something even slightly revealing, it would automatically become the jerk off material for some (yes, I’m aware this doesn’t apply to everyone so spare me the comments of you not being like this) Arabs across the Middle East.

Arabs often stereotype Lebanese women as “easy” merely because they show some skin.  Is it their fault for such a stereotype? Absolutely not.  Although Lebanon still has a long way to go in terms of gender equality, regionally speaking it is much more open and is one of the few countries in the region where women can dress up, go party, and in have a regular boyfriend.  Lebanon even hosts the region’s first sexuality magazine, Jassad, owned by the famous Joumana Haddad.  In many Arab countries, especially the Gulf, women are seen as docile creatures and in Saudi Arabia, they still cannot even drive.  To them women going out showing some skin, could only mean that they are sinners; wanting sex bad and are akin to whores, but men going out and partying is perfectly fine, cementing the prevailing hypocrisy and justifying the ever prevalent sexual harassment in the region.

We, Lebanese, are proud of our women – as corny as it may be – just the way they are. Whether they choose to show skin or not, it’s not anyone’s business. And it certainly shouldn’t turn into a repressed Arab’s material for some good time.

The Allure Of Free

There’s a response that is, I believe, inherent to human nature, transcending boundaries – almost unanimous. And it is the response to something that is free.

If I tell you I’m willing to give you something for free, what would be the first thing that comes to your head? Yes, there it is… “What’s the catch?” And what do you do? You don’t take the thing.

My cousin was telling me earlier today about her dilemma in Australia. She works at a leading TV station and is often given tickets to movie premieres. We’re talking about the star-studded events, involving red carpets and bling, not the excitement we feel when we watch the first screening of a movie on its release day. And more often than not, she can’t go to those premieres so she usually asks around if someone wants those tickets, only discovering that giving this tickets away for nothing is harder than her actual job.

And it happened to me when I was at AUB outdoors. There was some guy offering free hugs and the moment I saw him, the second idea the crossed my mind (the first one being how weird it was) was that there was definitely a catch somehow in those hugs.

But why do we have such a response to free stuff? Why is it that most people would take the premiere tickets from my cousin if she had asked for an insignificant amount of money but refrain from doing so if she was handing them for nothing in return?

Our mentality is apparently wired to go away from things that are too good to be true. Even for things that are not totally free. If you find a bargain online, you are as skeptical.
But in the world of today, do not underestimate the power of “free.” I am most definitely not an economy expert but with most things getting cheaper and cheaper because of competition, offering things for free has become a way for some companies to topple others. Offering things for free is also a way for those companies to introduce services.

When I started buying stuff off amazon, I was offered a free trial of “amazon prime” in their attempt to hook me on speedier deliveries. And if I had been living in the US, I would have totally gone for it. Amazon redid a similar thing with Lady Gaga’s latest album: they sold the mp3 version for $0.99 along with a free trial of their newly introduced “cloud” service, as a way to get ahead of Apple before they introduce their own version of cloud services, probably later this year.

According to Chris Anderson, “free” is the future of prices. He wrote his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price on a $250 netbook, running a free version of Linux, free Google Docs, which offer him free backup and on-the-go access and then he offered the work for free on iTunes. He argues that billion dollar industries are being formed today around the price of “zero dollars and zero cents.” And if you think about it, isn’t Google one of the leading companies in the world today and it gives almost everything for free? So don’t freak out when you’re offered something for free. Odds are, someone, somewhere, is making money off of it somehow – with no catch to you.

The Rapture

It’s already May 22nd in some parts of the world, meaning the day the world should have ended has passed with nothing happening.

So let us recap about what some of us did today: got up, missed breakfast, went online for a bit, met up with friends, had lunch, got bored through afternoon, came up with Saturday night plans, executed those plans, got back home and now you’re on the verge of sleeping. Pretty uneventful end of world day, no?

How many end of world days did/will we have in our lifetime? We’ve had Y2K, May 21st 2011, and the Mayan calendar ending on December 21st, 2012. That’s a lot of world-ending dates, don’t you think?

The main problem with this rapture balderdash is that some people take it way too seriously, making it their job to come up with meaningless dates. I do not like to take scripture literally. I do not believe that God will descend someday and literally “save” everyone. Why? simply because the point of Scripture is not to make you believe in the end of days but rather to give you a way of life until that day comes, be it in your lifetime or some other time.  Therefore, this whole talk about analysis of scripture (regardless of what scripture it is) to come up with a failed date of when that’s supposed to happen is, for lack of better word, stupid.

Honestly, if anyone thinks the world ending will happen in our lifetime, they’re seriously delusional. I hate to break it to you people but in the grander scheme of things, we (and I do mean all of us) are irrelevant. How so? In a hundred years from now, even the brightest people among us, will have their legacy either disproved, or lightly used. Some people’s memories do survive into several generations but those are exceptions. Who of us knows anything about their great grandfather? I barely know anything about my grandfather who passed away a couple of years before I was even born.

The world will end someday. It is a scientific certainty. But the world is still young. There’s plenty of room to grow as well as destroy. You might think the current worldwide political situation (weapons race and whatnot) is bad, but if you look at the whole picture, it’s rather silly. No one will use those weapons of mass destruction against another country because, simply, no one has the guts to do so – even the countries that fake almighty strength.

I’m positive as well that each century has had its series of rapture dates. After all, it has been a constant pursuit for man to reach some sort of conclusion and what better conclusion to be reached than to the most puzzling question of our existence: what lies after?

So until the world ends, which is a time when we, our children, their children, their children’s children (I can keep going here) are dead, I don’t think we should be dancing as Britney Spears would say, but rather, maybe we should lessen focus on the development of weapons and maybe on ways to preserve the planet we call home, at least let us enjoy the natural wealth we have, until it all goes away.