The Sampler Clips for Carrie Underwood’s Blown Away

Link removed.

A low-quality recording of the samples, just for those who absolutely cannot not listen.

The album sounds EPIC. Epic I tell you.

Blown Away (the song) is unlike anything Carrie has done before. Two Black Cadillacs sound like a great story. I remember when I heard the Play On sampler, I felt the first half of the album was much stronger. I don’t feel that way with Blown Away. There are strong songs on each half.

What do you think?

The album will be available for preview on iTunes on April 24th.

Carrie Underwood’s Album Blown Away Available For Streaming on iTunes April 24th

After Carrie’s fan club announced an online listening party for members at 9 pm CT on Tuesday April 24th, a high ranking spokesperson for Arista Nashville confirmed to me that the album will be available for streaming on iTunes for everyone on April 24th, akin to the streaming option made available for The Fray as well as Coldplay’s latest albums.

My review, as well as the lyrics for all the songs on the album, will be published immediately after I get to listen to the album. You can check out my review of the lead single Good Girl here and the lyrics for Wine After Whiskey here, a song I correctly predicted would be on Blown Away.

Until then, here are the Blown Away-related news that we know for certain.

– The album is darker, evolutionary for Carrie and spans the gamut of styles. You can check out the track descriptions here.

– The second single is the title track Blown Away, as I confirmed here. The first line off Blown Away was also published by yours truly here.

This might be the reason music retailers haven’t released snippets of the album and why they didn’t do a promo singles release schedule (iTunes countdown). The wait has been cut down by one week. April 24th, here we go.

Lebanese Girls: Your Guide To Look Like Sluts, BeirutNightLife’s Newest Masterpiece

No, these are not sluts.

After a horrendous piece on transsexualism in Lebanon, BeirutNightLife is at it again. This time, the article is about Lebanese girls who like to dress like “hoes.” The article’s title: La Wlooo!!!…How to Look like a Lebanese Bimbo.

After being attacked countless times for making fun of Lebanese girls who love looking like hoes, I figured ho-defenders out there are too many to be conquered by merely one loser such as myself — but I’ll keep writing about these divine creatures, who I’m so envious of, because I’m so ugly and miserable. So many of my intelligent ho-loving readers, who love me so much, accuse me of being fat, ugly, unbearable, miserable, bitter and single; they have truly exposed me for who I truly am. After weeping on my bathroom floor for weeks, I decided to emerge from my funk as an enlightened one that has come to terms with one truth: I am ugly, and prostitutes are ravishing; hence, I am jealous of them and want to look exactly like them, which is the only logical reason as to why I make fun of them.

If you’re ugly like me, you’ll need to start looking like a ho asap so you can find a gentleman who will appreciate your personality and want to marry you and have your babies one day.

 This is the article’s introduction. After your outrage at this has subsided, let’s go through it bit by bit.

1) The article’s writer is basically calling every Lebanese girl that shows cleavage a prostitute. There’s no other way around this. And if this wasn’t her intention, then her phrasing was so bad that it can only be interpreted as such.

2) I don’t really care about what people told the article’s writer regarding her previous chef-d’oeuvre. I have been attacked multiple times on various blog posts here and you don’t see me coming off as bitter about it, nor do I go on writing sarcastic pieces about how they are in the wrong and I am in the right. Why? Because when you’re discussing such a topic, you don’t really get the right to be the scorned woman when you’re calling every single woman out there who doesn’t dress like you a slut and those who like such women “ho-lovers.”

3) Defending a woman’s right to dress the way she wants does not make one a ho-lover. It doesn’t make the woman a hoe. In fact, using the words hoe, ho-loving and bimbo is an insult. I’m writing this from class today. The girl sitting in front of me is sporting a mini-skirt. Do I naturally assume she’s a slut and because I like what she’s wearing, I’m a ho-lover? So much wrong.

Let’s proceed with the amazingly detailed and researched article.

The writer wants Lebanese women who are haters of the “hoes” to admit the truth that they are really jealous and that their aim in life should switch from becoming lawyers and doctors and dress up like sluts just to get a man of quality. “Real beauty is looking like a $2 h**ker,” she says.

Furthermore, the writer then gives a guideline for women to dress like hoes: show everything you can, even your private parts, while standing on hooker heels. She also gives them a dress code for daytime where they need to put on copious amounts of perfumes and “stick to scents that will make you smell like a baby wh**e.”

She then proceeds to tell the women that “when you go out dancing, make sure to rub your butt on every strange man standing nearby. As you do this, touch yourself while chewing gum and sucking your finger simultaneously. Once again, if you’re wearing those feminine h**ker heels, the stranger you’re rubbing up against will marry you within weeks.”

And after various other meaningless paragraphs, she concludes by saying:  “The awkward moment when your sarcasm is so advanced that people actually think you are stupid.”

No, you don’t get to write such an article and then call it sarcasm to escape the anger of those who don’t “understand” it. And for the record, your sarcasm is not advanced. It’s way out of place. How about you dress the way you want and leave your nose out of other people’s business or cleavage for that matter? This is a free country. The only reason the article writer is up in a fit is because of the stereotypes that such women generate towards other Lebanese women. But the fact is that if this writer had been in any other country, she wouldn’t have cared. And the only reason she cares is because repressed arabs look at Lebanon as a sex paradise.

Should we care about what they think? No. Should we really be up in a fit about the way some of our women dress? No. Is it your business to begin with? Absolutely not.

If there’s anything that needs to change in this country is narrow-minded people who can’t but gossip “sarcastically” in order to prove a point. Calling people names is not the way you change things. You need to take a look at the file names for the attachments on the article: Dominique Hourani is called a Lebanese prostitute and Marwa is called a Lebanese whore. Is that sarcastic too?

God Plays With Siri – Or Samuel L Jackson

Preparing for a date night? No problem. Siri is here for you.

Zooey Deschanel has also toyed with the iPhone 4S’ feature.

Months after getting my iPhone 4S, I still find myself using Siri occasionally to text and call people and heavily to play music while on the road and set up alarms.

iPhone 4S users, are you still using Siri?

16 Governmental Websites Hacked in Lebanon: What’s The Point? None.

A Lebanese hacking group calling themselves RYV (Raise Your Voice) has hacked 16 Lebanese governmental websites, in its attempt to show disdain to the situation in the country. Similarly to the international hackers who call themselves Anonymous, the Lebanese group targeted supposedly important websites. They also have their Facebook and Twitter profiles, because being part of social media is what counts these days.

They left a note on the websites they hacked, which until the time of the writing of this post have yet to be fixed:

To our dear “beloved” Lebanese Government,

We are RYV, short for Raise Your Voice, and we are simply a group of people who could not bare sitting in silence, watching all the crimes and injustice going on in Lebanon. We will not be silenced and brainwashed by your media. We will not stop until the Lebanese people mobilize, demand their rights, and earn them. We will not stop until the standards of living are raised to where they should be in Lebanon. We will not stop until this government’s self-made problems are solved, like the power shortage, water shortage, rise in gas prices and rise in food product prices. We are RYV, expect us to break the silence, whether in the streets or on the Internet.Silence is a crime.

For a list of the websites that got hacked, you can go to this link.

And it is here that I have to ask: is there really a point behind this than to make the group that did the attacks known?

I don’t think there is. Here’s why.

1) Governmental websites in Lebanon are rarely visited by people. Their effect on every day life is negligeable. I even doubt the ministers visit their own ministry’s website. As a testament to this, I, a fairly connected person, had no idea 95% of these websites even existed. Significant they are, indeed.

2) I’m fairly certain more people have attempted to visit these websites in the past 16 hours than through the entirety of their existence. Again, attacking websites people don’t care about will raise awareness how?

3) How do RYV hope attacking a meaningless governmental website that’s rarely visited going to change things? For instance, has a statement been made by blacking out the ministry of electricity’s website? Do people don’t know we don’t get electricity? Are we not nagging enough about it? How is pointing out the obvious asking for people to stand up to their rights?

4) The term activism is used so loosely it has become the prostitute of terms in Lebanon. I am not an activist. Most bloggers who think they are activists are not. And neither are RYV. Targeting websites that no one cares about, regardless of how *awesome* it seems, will not change things. It is borderline irrelevant.

Regardless of what you think of this government, or any other government, our problems as a country are way worse than something which can be fixed by a simplistic manifesto on a website asking people to stand up to their rights. Non-existant are those in Lebanon who don’t want cheap gas prices, 24/7 grid connection to water, electricity, super-fast internet, etc. But these things are not fixed by hacking websites to raise awareness, which is already there.

Either way, let them have their fifteen minutes of fame. And let some Lebanese be fascinated by them. What will change tomorrow or next Tuesday or the Tuesday after that? Yes, you guessed it… nothing.