Tag Archives: Europe

Lebanon Should Participate In Eurovision 2018

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The Eurovision is quite the global thing. More than 200 million people tune in each year to watch the show, not just from the 42 countries which happen to be members of the European Broadcasting Union that have the right to participate, which is why you see countries such as Israel or Australia or even Azerbaijan participating.

The 2017 version of the Eurovision concluded yesterday with Portugal getting crowed the winner after votes from the people in those 42 member countries and their juries allocated points. They succeed Ukraine, which was voted the winner in 2016 in an obvious political jab at Russia.

The Eurovision, apart from being a celebration of (bad?) music, isn’t only about the music but about the politics behind all the ways these countries interact with one another. Regardless, it’s still interesting to watch and pretend to be surprised that Cyprus, for instance, voted for Greece. I’m shocked. Can you even fathom it?

In 2005, Lebanon was supposed to participate through Tele-Liban and Aline Lahoud in that year’s version of the Eurovision. Except, as is always the case, Israel happened. You see, Israel also happens to be a member of the European Broadcasting Union and has been since the 1950s, which means they’ve been participating for over 4 decades in the Eurovision contest and have actually won 3 times.

The problem for us, therefore, becomes in the fact that we pretend they don’t exist and have laws that forbid us from even acknowledging their existence, which was why we had to withdraw in 2005, be banned from participating for 3 years and pay a penalty: Tele-Liban didn’t show Israel on the official poster of the event. When they were confronted about it, they replaced the poster with a generic one about Eurovision. They were then told they’d have to broadcast the Israeli contestant’s song, which they couldn’t legally do, leading them to withdraw.

Israel, however, will not be participating in the 2018 Eurovision, as they announced live on air yesterday as they allocated their points. Their announcer said:

“This is IBA, Channel 1 calling from Jerusalem. For the past 44 years, Israel has participated in the Eurovision Song Contest, winning three times. But tonight, is our final night, shortly IBA will shut down its broadcasting forever, so on behalf of all of us here in IBA, let me say thank you Europe for all the magical moments and the beautiful years. And hopefully we shall meet again in the future.”

For how long Israel won’t be participating in Eurovision remains to be seen, but I believe this gives Lebanon an opportunity to finally participate and avoid all the drama we went through in 2005. And why wouldn’t we? We have good singers, as long as we don’t send Star Academy grads. And we can deliver a good show, if we invest enough.

I believe that private TV stations such as MTV and LBC would and should jump at such an opportunity. They’d get the ratings, the ad money and the international exposure they always crave. It’s also a good medium for the country to have exposure on such a scale, in a setting that doesn’t involve talking about the Syrian crisis or some other issue that plagues the region.

So dear MTV or LBC or some other private media company with similar resources, connect with the organizers of next year’s Eurovision and check what we need to do in order for us to participate. It should be fun.

No, this isn’t a Phoenician attempt at building bridges with European BFFs It’s not a political move, even if the competition can have political undertones, at distancing Lebanon from its Arab history. It’s just a medium for fun, healthy artistic competitions and we need such things in this country.

I vote to send Hiba Tawaji. Who’d your pick be?

Which iPhone 5 to Buy in Lebanon?

I told you about this before (here and here) but minister Sehnaoui confirmed it on twitter yesterday.

Nicolas Sehnaoui iPhone 5 tweets

For the many Lebanese who will benefit from the price reductions (the phone is going for $800 max these days for the 16GB capacity) to buy the iPhone 5 either for themselves or for their loved ones this Christmas, there’s one important thing you need to ask the shop from which you’re buying the phone: which country did you get it from?

If they got their iPhone 5 from the United States or Canada, model being A1428, the LTE that will launch later in 2013 won’t work on it as the chips are incompatible.

If the country of origin is anything in Europe or Australia, then it will work. The model should be A1429.

If you can’t but buy it from the United States, here’s a way you can do it: send the person buying it for you to an Apple Store and get them to buy a no-contract Verizon iPhone 5. It will have the sim card slot fully unlocked and its LTE capabilities are compatible with the frequency that’ll be launched in Lebanon soon.

For those of you who have already bought their iPhone 5 without asking about the country of origin, tough luck. Odds are you won’t be able to benefit from LTE once it’s rolled out.

Lebanon’s Twisted Perception of Beauty

When a journalist wrote an article in the Huffington Post about Lebanon’s babes and botox in its capital, many Lebanese stood against the article in uproar.

This is not us. These are not our women. This is not our city.

Do they have a point? Sure they do. After all, not all our women boast plastic faces as they strut their heels and behinds on the tables of Beirut’s rooftops. But what people seem to fail to realize is that the side of Lebanon portrayed by the Huffington Post is the one we want to get across to the world.

Check out this video from 2011. I have written about it before (check it here).

I disagree with the content of the video. I dislike the categorization of Lebanese joie de vivre as something only related to partying the night away. But when the only face even your ministry of tourism is giving of your country is that of rooftops, nightclubs and night life, what could you expect from a journalist who’s coming to your country to see the supposed highlights your country has to offer?

When you tell someone to come visit specific places in a country and they judge a country based on the places you recommended, you can’t but blame yourself for that.

Even I am guilty of that. Whenever a French person decides to inform me he thinks my country is full of Islamists where women are forced to wear the veil in order to go out of their homes, I go on and on about our nightlife, among other things. And I’m not even a fan of nightlife to begin with.

What David Constable has noticed is a phenomenon that runs deeper than should be acceptable in Lebanese society. Have you ever seen a woman your grandmother’s age with her face so plasticized that she looks downright disgusting? I have seen way too many of those, the last one of them as I boarded my flight to France. Have you seen girls your age who decide the moment they finish high school to start injecting their lips and cheeks? Well, I know some girls like that.

And the list goes on.

No, I’m not saying everyone does it. I’m not saying all our women are plastic. I’m not saying all our women can be summed up with boobs and botox. What I’m saying is that we have a lot of them and what is “odd” is usually the thing that sticks out the most. Simplest example? We don’t notice the calm days we get throughout the year but when all hell breaks loose for a few days or weeks, we judge the entire year accordingly. And we get judged as an “unsafe” country by everyone else according to those days as well.

It’s the same premise when it comes to boobs, babes, botox and Beirut.

A friend of mine, whom I met abroad, has a Lebanese mother and a non-Lebanese father. She has a typical European face: blond, a little nose and green eyes. When she visited her mother’s homeland a while back, she got interrogated by random people on the streets who wanted to know the surgeon who fixed her nose – because no one can have a nose like that – and the place where she got her contact lenses – because no one can have eyes that green.

We have many people who want those little inconspicuous noses that don’t require them to choose a specific side every time them want to change their Facebook profile picture. We have many people who want bigger breasts and asses. We have many people who want to have chest implants to go off all macho. We have many people who want to change their faces, look younger and have bigger lips in the process.

Are those “many” people the entirety of the Lebanese population? No. Are those “many” also present in other societies? Perhaps. But if you look closely, you will find many even among your close friends who have at least had something done – the fact that we can get loans as well to do so isn’t helping. On the other hand, in a one month stay in Europe, I have failed to see as many botoxed babes here or women who dress up for a wedding every day before going to work.

Many in our societies in Lebanon like to show off. Be it through their phones, cars, clothes or even through plastic surgery. And those are the people we like to show the world because they are the ones who help us change the stereotypes others have of us. But with the baggage of the bling-bling crowds comes something else entirely, which is another stereotype: we are a country of fake people.

Are we fake? Absolutely not. Beirut has much more to offer than just that. Lebanon has way more to offer than rooftops and night clubs. But that idea won’t change anytime soon. Especially when the only thing we want people to see in Lebanon when they come here is Gemmayze, Skybar, Downtown and Zaitunay Bay. Demand of  our ministry of tourism to change tactics and to change the way it promotes the country  and then we get to be in uproar over an article turning our entire society plastic.

Internet Speed At Google

Just to make things worse for us Lebanese who want to get our average speeds up from the ridiculous 256Kbps at which they are today, Google’s internet speed has been revealed.

To put things into perspective, these are 1000 times faster than the 512Kbps speed some of us in Lebanon brag about. And another thing hampering our Lebanese internet connection is an unbelievably slow ping time (depending on ISP, the fastest you can get is 100 ms). With Google, it’s 3 ms.

And since Lebanon is not the benchmark when it comes to internet speeds, the average internet speed in Europe is around 12 Mb/s and that in the US is around 10 Mb/s.

Finally, just to show you how strong a connection this is, look at a download of a 8GB game:

And I was happy about the 1 hour it takes for my 350MB episodes to finish. Let the mourning over our pathetic situation start.