Tag Archives: Lebanon

Lebanon To Get Its First HD TV Channel Tonight With LBC

LBC HD Logo

 

I was recently invited to a meeting with LBC officials who discussed with us their future plans for Lebanon’s leading TV station. One of those plans was an ambitious undertaking that involved flipping the switch on one aspect of Lebanese TV that is, as of now, completely obscure to almost all of us: HD TV.

Even though most of our TV sets are now equipped with the ability to handle such standards, none of our TV stations offered them. This will change tonight with LBC offering an HD TV channel for its viewers, which will be accessible through the following frequencies via LBC Blogs:

Digitek HD & SD formats: Frequency 12420 – Symbol rate 28175 – Polarization = vertical.

Econet HD & SD formats: Frequency 12480 – Symbol rate 31250 – Polarization = horizontal.

Perhaps it’s a shame that we’re just getting around to this technology in 2013 when it’s been around for a long time in most countries we look up to. However, I still maintain that when it comes to media, Lebanon is a pioneer in the region. And we have set the bar for our media pretty high so anything less than optimal reporting gets immediately bashed (link). Despite some gaffs here and there, I still believe what many of our outlets have to offer regional offerings in quality, though that’s not saying much since standards around here are pretty low. Hopefully other TV stations – or just the ones I watch when I have time – follow suit soon.

I’d have liked to have such a channel launch happen in a week where LBC didn’t mess up with their most recent Kalam Ennas episode (link) but I can’t be too picky. The channel will launch tonight following the start of Star Academy’s new season. Blast from the past anyone?

Following Up on Beirut’s Soon-To-Be Destroyed Roman Hippodrome and The Best Way To Save It

Lebanon isn’t a place where much changes in a year. Seriously, if you look at where we were last year around this time and where we are today, you’ll see a lot of similarities. The only exception, perhaps, to our Lebanese reality is real estate, especially when it comes to all the contracting taking place in Downtown Beirut.

More than year ago, I wrote about the Roman Hippodrome that was soon to be destroyed in Beirut (link), in Wadi Bou Jmil next to the Jewish Synagogue. A lot has happened in a year. So courtesy of a piece (link) by Habib Battah, an LAU professor, published by the BBC, an update on Beirut’s Roman Hippodrome is in order:

  • The developer who wants to use the land is Marwan Kheireddine. Sounds familiar? He is a minister in Lebanon’s current government. Way to go for transparency.
  • The project that will see the destruction of the hippodrome is a gated community where only “elite” Lebanese will enter. In other words: you and I are off limits. Unless you can afford paying millions for a Downtown Beirut apartment.
  • According to Kheireddine, the site is not worth preserving. How does he know this? He hired an archeologist who said so. Yes, because such matters are most transparently handled by the people you buy into your service.
  • Kheireddine is offering 4000 squared meters of the land to turn into a museum of sorts that people could access. Because a Roman Hippodrome was meant to be contained within the parking lot of a building, right?
  • Plots around the site in question are said to contain other parts of the stadium and need to be properly excavated as well.
  • There is an immense shortage of archeologists in the country. The job of those archeologists is to make sure such transgressions never happen. But the government doesn’t seem to care about such an issue.
  • Beirut is not the only place where Lebanese archeological heritage is being destroyed left and right carelessly. In fact, what’s happening outside of Beirut in lesser known areas might be worse.
  • Concerned activists are trying their best to halt the development. But there will come a time when they won’t be able to do much anymore.

I remember back in 2005-2006 when a local cafe in Batroun was being built. The initial digging site revealed a Phoenician burial site, sarcophagi and all. People flocked to see what the site was all about. The following day, nothing survived to tell the tale. Today, instead of that entire burial site lies a cafe known for its shisha and its July 2012 drug scandal.

The Best Way To Save The Hippodrome:

Earlier in 2013, hell broke loose twice over ancient ruins in Beirut. The first time was because some henchmen at District S assaulted the same person who wrote the aforementioned BBC article over him taking pictures of the ruins they were busy dismantling to open up Beirut into the new Dubai-esque age (link). The second time was due to Lebanon’s possibly oldest Church getting discovered at another site where a Jean Nouvel hotel was to be built (link).

The discrepancy between the fate of sites one and two is striking. The former is still operation. The latter has been halted. Churches can do miracles? Believe, people.

Arguments about how priceless a monument is, how irreplaceable it is, how silly it is to replace it with a building, how rare it is to find such a thing in Lebanon, how economically profitable it would be to keep it and turn it into an attraction are all useless simply because most people don’t connect to them on a primal level, enough to get them rallied up.

The only way, apparently, to get to a result, force government to get involved and save such sites in Lebanon is to infuse a dose of religion in the stones. The more religious those stones, the more people get rallied up, the less our government can stand quiet as bulldozers raze through the field. Unfortunately for the hippodrome, there doesn’t seem to be an ancient church in its ruins as of now. Let’s hope that changes soon.

The following pictures are all courtesy of the BBC:

A Lebanese Man Won’t Have Sex With Ania Lisewska

Ania Lisewska - Lebanon

It seems that the hopes of Lebanese men everywhere have been crushed by our Security officials deciding not to grant Ania Lisewska entry into Lebanon.

For those who don’t know, Ania Lisewska is a 21 year old Polish woman who is on a world tour to sleep with 100,000 men from different cities across the world. Lebanon was on her list and, until very recently, it seemed she would get to pick a random Lebanese man to sleep with: Hezbollah and Future Movement MPs saw her as an indecent glorification of prostitution. It seems sex is something they agree upon. Elie Marouni, the Kataeb MP, had no problem in granting her entry and was wondering if she’d survive her quest. The words he used: “betdall taybé?”

No pun, Mr. Marouni?

Two recent reports (here and here), however, indicate that she won’t, even though Polish people don’t require a visa to enter Lebanon. Her name will be blacklisted on our airport borders. Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco have all refused her as well. She has been granted entry to Iraq and Egypt.

Her Facebook page posting about entry to Egypt is littered with comments from Egyptian men bragging about their package, awaiting her entry. I suggest you take a look for your dose of daily comedy (link). I daresay many Lebanese men would have done worse to get in her pants had she been allowed entry here.

The question though is why ban her? Is what she’s doing considered prostitution? I don’t think so – not that prostitution is illegal in Lebanon to begin with. Odds are the man she decides to sleep with here will remain anonymous unless, which is probably the case, he decides to make his identity public. He won’t be paying her and she won’t be engaging in any form of public indecency.

Are we supposed to be up in a fit because what she’s doing doesn’t fit with our higher order morale code? I can think of way too many things taking place in Lebanon on daily basis that are allowed, that do not fit any form of morality and that many of us still accept. Except talking about sex – about women having sex and discussing their sex life openly – will always be a taboo around here and a mark of shame. Public order rests on a vagina with an intact hymen, preferably.

Ania Lisewska – her name is a mouthful, no pun – won’t be coming here – no pun. Our country’s morales are saved.

 

Help Out Lebanese Band “Adonis” in Pepsi’s Band Slam

Lebanese band Adonis is participating in a competition held by Pepsi that’s bringing together bands from the region and getting them to compete in order to become the band that would open up Pepsi Night, which will conclude the Dubai Music festival.

Adonis are late for the competition – they’ve already missed one day out of the 4-day competition, because, as I’m sure you have guessed by now, they faced visa issues in traveling to the UAE.

Adonis Lebanese band Pepsi Band Slam

 

In order to vote, go to the following website (link), click on Rate The Band and vote for Adonis.

Let’s Talk About How Nabil Habib & Kalam Ennas Blew A Cancer “Cure”

I am furious.

There’s nothing I’d love more than to have my field discussed openly among people. There’s nothing more I’d love than to make people more aware about cancer, about the different treatment modalities. I’d even teach people all the pharmacology I know about cancer drugs if I were able to.

I approached the latest – currently airing – Kalam Ennas episode with caution. I had a faint clue who Nabil Habib was. They were discussing one of the most funded, most controversial, most challenging aspects of medicine lately. I figured I’d tune in.

Yes, I’m furious.

I’m not a chemist nor do I aim to be. But when it comes to protocol – when it comes to every single facet of what makes medicine works, what makes this branch of our lives that has cured so many people all around the world functional, he has blown to bits. And he’s condescending about it.

I have no idea who figured it was a scientifically sound idea to get a chemist who has a proposal for a cancer drug on air to discuss his work, have almost no opposite scientific opinion to what he was saying save for the few questions the show’s host got spoon-fed moments before going on air. But do you want to know what’s the great idea? It’s quoting the bible left and right for some scientific credibility.

First, an accomplished scientist wouldn’t need to go on media to discuss his work in order to convince people about it. Regular viewers are not those who need to be convinced about any scientist’s work – other scientists need to be. Getting a one-sided opinion on a talk-show is not having a scientific discussion. Getting people who have been “cured” by your methods is not science. You know what’s science? It’s having data that supports what you’re presenting without any shred of doubt. And then people will follow.

Second, the thing about scientific data is that there are ways for it to be amassed. And those rules exist for a reason: because science takes time, because such “cures” have to be so thorough as not to give people false hope, because arguments such as “this disease is ripping our societies” are not valid scientifically. Each step of the development of the drug from the lab to the clinic has to be monitored and submitted to the FDA. Nabil Habib has not done that. These are the steps to be followed for a drug development (link – you need to create an account to read it). Nabil Habib has blown these steps to pieces. But fear not, he has patented it – never mind that he used it on people as a “secret recipe” prior to the patent process.

Drug development

Third, the drug development procedure is a process that costs at least half a billion dollars. I’m sure Dr. Habib doesn’t have such means under his disposal. If his drug had been as wondrous as he’s making it out to be, then he would have definitely sold it to a major pharmacological company by now. He would have been a billionaire already and the drug would have been much further along development. And he’d have had the chance to cure much people than the 600 he claims he’s currently treating, an odd claim since I didn’t know chemists usually have patients who are people that suffer from a disease where any glimpse of hope is enough to get them going.

Such a TV show is not the platform to host a scientific discussion. I have no idea if the molecule in question is as beautiful as it has been portrayed to be simply because there has been no opposite opinion to its merits. I have no idea if the claim that this molecule has no side effects is valid: a molecule that can affect so many different types of cancers, affect different types of tissues cannot not have absolutely no side effects worth mentioning. I have no idea if what this man is claiming, even when it pertains to all the different kinds of cancers, is correct or not. But fear not, I have no right to know whether what he’s saying is a fact or not.

Such a TV show, aiming to capitalize on the interest of people, doesn’t get to screw over physicians who either refused or are not allowed to be hosted on it just because it’s what gets viewers. Dr. Georges Chahine will face hell tomorrow because the segment he gave prior to the Lebanese syndicate of physicians issued its decision on the episode was not amended to reflect that decision. The excuse? “It’s not our property anymore.” Excuse me? Whose property is it?

Such a TV show doesn’t serve to educate people. It doesn’t serve to expose a facet of Lebanese society that’s troubling us all. It doesn’t even better things for any of us. What it does is serve as a marketing ploy, nothing more and nothing less, to this chemist and his molecule while ridiculing every single physician who has taken more than a decade of his life to know how to do his job and get guests to tell everyone that those physicians are nothing but ignorants trying to ride people’s backs.

Lebanese TV doesn’t discuss science. Lebanese TV only deals with trash. There are Lebanese scientists who are working tirelessly on ways to deal with cancer (link). But we get this instead. My mother, a current cancer patient, felt this show ridiculed her struggles with her disease. But let’s just keep on making shortcuts, bypassing regulations and proclaiming persecution in order to emerge as messiahs. We’re Lebanese and we just roll like that. There are absolutely no standards whatsoever that can faze us.