Month: December 2005

Pet Trees

Pet treesPet Trees are the latest craze from Japan, and, like most innovations from the Land of the Rising Sun, they’re incredibly small. Basically each Pet Tree is a real tree (well, mini-plant) inside a tiny plastic bell jar with a keyring attachment. A bit like a mini-me bonsai encased within a Lilliputian bio-dome.

Apart from a little TLC (Tender Loving Care) all you have to do to keep your pipsqueak of a plant healthy is water it every couple of weeks by placing the container in a saucer of water for a few minutes. As you nurture your Pet Tree it will grow inside its durable little container until it becomes big enough to be removed and planted.

Each Pet Tree symbolises a different strength and characteristic, so you can choose one to suit your mood.
For example, from the photo above: Victo is a cactus for luck and victory; and Rance, a cactus that symbolises unchanging love and courage.

More info on pet trees and how to buy them here.

Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism

“Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason for state-sponsored violence — our violence — which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously…

Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.

It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale.

— Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilization

[Via: Lawrence of Cyberia, Salon]

How Magazines Lie To Us

CoverThese days whenever you look at a newstand, you find yourself in front of heaps of magazines with these gorgeous bombshells on the cover, and you wonder how come there are so many beautiful and perfect girls in the world, yet you never come across any that perfect in the real world. Well it’s because they actually don’t exist.

Ok, this isn’t like that movie Simone; Of course, those models exist in real life, but not in the form or perfection you see on those magazine covers.

Yes people, mainstream media is lying to us by creating this false version of reality that does not exist, a beautiful one, but fake. Just like advertising.

And then they ask why our trust in mainstream media keeps on declining.
Hello!

For example, check out the pictures below for a before and after of a photo of a model that was retouched to be magazine cover material.

BeforeAfter

For the whole modification process to get from the before to the after, go here.

This reminds me of when a magazine retouched photos of Kate Winslet to make her look slimmer and better, and how she ended up suing them for it.

[Via: Loic Le Meur]

New Year Resolutions 2006

Two days to go before this year is over and we embark on a new voyage through a new year, that we usually wish will be a lot better than the one we’re currently in.

As usual, most people are thinking of another set of new year resolutions, that they won’t be able to accomplish again, just like the ones from last year and the year before.

I guess I’m no different from all those people; I barely got any of my 2004 or 2005 resolutions done, but still I’m thinking of some resolutions for 2006.

In the end, the theme of the year 2006 for me, I guess, will be “Planning for the future”, in a sense that I’ll be doing my best to define where I want to be in the future in every certain area of my life, and taking the necessary initial steps to get there.

I won’t bother to list a set of resolutions this year because I’m starting to think that whenever I do that, those goals become sort of unreachable because of the unreachable nature of new year resolutions in general.

So, this new year, I want it to be less talk, more action. And good luck to us all.

7 Things to do with your Blog when you are on vacation

What should I do with my Blog when I go take a vacation?

That is a question I always find myself asking whenever I’m about to leave on a break, and up to now, the only way I’ve answered it is by telling myself I’d do my best to get online as often as possible to post on it. But that doesn’t always work out like I want it to. My last trip to London being a good example, with only 2 or 3 posts in that whole week.

Darren asks the same question over at problogger and comes up with the following 7 interesting options, some of which I’ll be considering the next time I’m about to go on a break.

1. Give your Blog and Readers a Vacation
2. Advance Posts
3. Retrospective Series (Run some older posts)
4. Guest Blogger(s)
5. Guest Posts/Series
6. Blog from the Road
7. Open Mike posts (Readers invited to post about certain topic)

The ones I think I’d be more interested in exploring are having a guest blogger take over for a while and programming some advance posts.

For more detail about the pros and cons of each one of these options, check out the original post at problogger here.

New Modern Islam

Every now and then, I come across an article, a blog or someone talking about how there should be a new modernized version of Islam.
Some go as far as taking out verses from the Koran that talk about war, while on the other side of the spectrum some seem to limit it to making things like the hijab optional, and of course there are many thoughts in between those two.

Some countries are taking steps forward with some of these ideas, with some of them taking out certain Koranic verses from school curriculums, some others trying to make the hijab unfavorable, …etc.

But, in my opinion, I think the whole approach is very wrong.
What we need is not a new and modernized Islam, what we need is a new and modernized understanding of Islam.
We have to understand that our time is very different from the time in which Islam came, the rules are different, the society is different, the circumstances are different, everything is different; And so the understanding and the application of Islam’s laws and teachings should be different too.

We have to understand why a certain Koranic verse came, in what situation, under what circumstances, and to solve which problems, then draw realistic parallels with our life today and see if that verse’s teachings apply to our new situation, circumstances and problems.

Islam, through the Koran and the teachings of Prophet Mohamed (PBUH), came with a set of general laws and teachings that will apply for all ages, but it also came with some specific laws and teachings for specific situations. It’s wrong to generalize those for all ages too, because they don’t necessarily apply. It’s up to us to understand their reason and then draw the lessons that could help us in our new reality.

We should not allow ourselves to be like the people who pick a verse out of the Koran, take it out of context, without understanding it, and then say that Islam is a religion of this or that. Everything has a reason and a lesson behind it for a certain time, place and situation. We have to understand that and our children have to understand that too.

So what I guess I’m trying to say is that it’s not Islam that needs modernizing, it’s us and our way of understanding, analyzing and drawing lessons from it.

Macho Ego & Sudoku

On my flight home from London, a Tunisian man and woman were seated next to me.

The woman was going through a magazine when she came across a game of sudoku. She obviously didn’t know the game, read how to solve it, seemed to like it and started working on it.

She started using a pen, which made me want to tell her that she’d be better off with a pencil because she’d be erasing and trying numbers all over the grid before getting it right, but well I didn’t want to seem nosy.

A while later, she realized how fun yet complicated it could be, and told the man about it.
Like a typical man, or even worse a typical Tunisian man, the guy just mocked her, acting like a macho Mr. know-it-all, degrading the game and telling her that it was very easy and that he didn’t see what was so interesting and complicated about it.

She told him to try it, and so he did, he started over-confidently and stupidly filling up the grid, only to find himself blocked in a few moves. He started to cross out numbers and re-write others, with it only getting worse. Finally he gave up.
That’s when I really felt like saying: “UP YOUR ASS, BUDDY!!”, but well I held back.

He gave her the magazine back, trying to do some damage control and not come out as a total loser.

Now, the moral of the story is that men in general and Tunisian men in particular should stop underestimating and degrading things, thinking that everything is easy and that nothing can stand a chance in front of their big macho ego.
They’re just setting themselves up to show how big a fool they are.

Extra Second in 2005

It seems like we will have to wait an extra second to ring in the new year 2006, and that’s because a “leap second” is being added to the last minute of the last hour of 2005.

Leap seconds are used to synchronize precise atomic clocks with the more variable rotation of the Earth.

Although the Earth’s rotation with respect to the sun has been used since ancient times to know the time of day, it is not like clockwork, and can speed up or slow down by a few thousandths of a second a day. This means that every day is not precisely 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds.
Without leap seconds, Coordinated Universal Time would slowly get out of sync with the time it feels like on Earth.

Leap seconds were first added in 1972, and a body called the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, in Paris, decides when one is needed.
The last leap second was added in 1998. This will be the 23rd one.

[Source: The Globe and Mail]

After the 9th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

Last night we had the 9th Tunisian blogger meetup, which was a lot of fun, as usual.

We had 4 new faces with us last night, one blogger, two bloggers-to-be and a TV presenter who has a show about the uses of the internet on national TV.

So, who were the bloggers there last night?
Toon-C, Adib, Mouse Hunter, Infinity, Evil Drako, Blogeuse, Tom, Troubadour, Mraihi and Subzero Blue.

The meetup started at 4PM at Caf