Author: Mohamed Marwen Meddah

Mohamed Marwen Meddah is a Tunisian-Canadian, web aficionado, software engineering leader, blogger, and amateur photographer.

Tina Arena’s Greatest Hits 1994-2004

Greatest Hits 1994-2004Tina Arena, my all time favourite female singer and the highest selling Australian female artist ever, will be releasing a Greatest Hits album on October 18th.

It’s packed with all her hits throughout the past ten years, from “Chains” to “Sorrento Moon” to “Burn” to “If I Was A River” to “I Want To Spend My Lifetime Loving You” to “Symphony of Life”.
It also includes two new songs: “Italian Love Song” and “Take Me Apart”.

It actually will be a double cd with the second CD containing the songs she recorded in in French and Italian.

I also hear a Greatest Hits DVD is on the way with it, so that’s so cool.

Anyone who calls themself a music fan should get this album as soon as it’s out because Tina Arena simply rocks big time!

If anyone is interested in more Tina Arena news, you can always check out my Tina Arena website.

U.S. wrongly rejects Muslim scholars

Evidently, even those who seek peace and condemn terror are not fit to enter the United States.

“How can America encourage the voices of moderation and tolerance and pluralism within the Muslim world when, because of fearful ignorance, we insult and exclude them ?..”
— Diana Eck, director of the Harvard University Pluralism Project

The rejection of prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and peace activist Yusuf Islam (a.k.a Cat Stevens) from entering the country has only furthered the view that the Bush administration

The True Mowgli

A Mowgli-like wild boy who appears to have been raised by a dog since he was three months old has been discovered living in a remote part of Siberia seven years after he was abandoned by his parents.

Andrei Tolstyk was discovered three weeks ago by social workers who wondered why the seven-year-old had not enrolled at his local school in the beautiful Siberian region of Altai.

Deprived of human contact for so long, Andrei could not talk and had adopted many dog-like traits, including walking on all fours, biting people, sniffing his food before he ate it and general feral behaviour.

In an extraordinary case of life imitating art, Andrei, like Rudyard Kipling’s fictional Mowgli in ‘The Jungle Book’, had spent almost his entire youth in the company of animals.

According to the local press, his existence had been forgotten.

[Via: Sabbah]
[Source: New Zealand Herald]

WOW.
This is amazing.
I’d never believe something like this could happen!

Virgin Galactic

British entrepreneur Richard Branson has announced his company “Virgin” has signed a deal to offer the world’s first commercial flights to space under the branding “Virgin Galactic.”

Branson, head of the Virgin Atlantic airline, said Monday that passengers in groups of five could be sent into orbit by 2008 at around $200,000 a trip.

Branson said the money raised in the early part of the business would be ploughed back to bring the cost of seats in space down.

Branson’s licensing deal is with Mojave Aerospace Ventures (MAV), owned by U.S. entrepreneur Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder). Allen funded the SpaceShipOne project, designed by Rutan and built by Rutan’s company Scaled Composites.

[More: CNN]

Wow.
Now, if that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.

I hope the prices go down quickly so that I maybe get to travel on board one of these flights. That would be so out of this world! (literally :P).

The Butterfly Effect

We watched “The Butterfly Effect” on Saturday. A movie I read about online with mixed reviews, so I didn’t really know what to expect, but still wanted to see anyways.
I knew the main idea behind the movie but didn’t know how they’d build on to it.

So, the movie is a take on the chaos theory and the concept of time travel mixed together.
The chaos theory mainly says that as much as a little change in the initial conditions can result in a big difference later, and well time travel is time travel, basically going back and forward in time.

I liked how they put the ideas together and how they came up with the time travel possibility, I thought it was rather creative.

It’s quite a good movie although it was lacking a certain something I can’t quite put my finger on. But it was still fun to watch.
The end was sort of funny and unexpected (for me that is, as other people could see it otherwise) and I liked it ending that way.

If I had to rate this movie, I’d give it 7/10 maybe.

Imagining Faces

The human imagination is such a powerful and great tool. A simple thought or a piece of text will trigger our imagination to create a whole new world for us to see and enjoy.

In books, we often find ourselves imagining the places the writer is talking about and putting faces to the characters he’s created. It all adds to the great fun of reading a story by in fact living it too.

Anyway, now with blogs, other than all that, we also find ourselves trying to imagine how the blog writer looks like in an attempt to associate a face to that person.

We try to pick up certain little details from here and there in their posts to try and make up a better picture of them in our minds, because it’s more comforting to us in a way to know how the person we’re reading from looks like.

Blogs are quite a personal way of communication and expression, sometimes revealing quite a lot about the writer and his life. With time the people reading the blog grow to know this person really well and it kind of bugs them if they can’t even picture that person in their minds, and that’s why they start imagining how they might look like.

I find it funny and very interesting when I try to imagine how someone might look like through their writings, and I find it even funnier and even more interesting when I think about how people would think I look like by reading what I write.

I wonder how I look like in your imaginations.

What Are We Fighting For?

What will I tell my daughter?
What will you tell your son?
Where were all the doves?
That we were nothing but a shadow,
a faceless generation devoid of love?

The crucifix ain’t no baseball bat
Tell me what kind of God is that?
Ain’t nothing more godless than a war
So what are we fightin’ for?

What are we fightin’ for?

[Performed by: Live]

Cat Stevens Not Allowed into US

The British singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, is due to be sent back to London after being refused entry to the United States yesterday.

The US authorities say the decision was made on national security grounds.

Mr Islam was on a flight from London to Washington when officials realised his name was on a “watch list”. The plane was diverted to another US airport.

Muslim groups in Britain and the United States have criticised the decision, saying Mr Islam is a man of peace.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement that the move “sends the disturbing message that even moderate and mainstream Muslims will now be treated like terrorists”.

[More: BBC]

Now this is real bullshit…
This guy has been singing and working for peace for ages even before he became a muslim, and he hasn’t missed a chance without condemning terrorism, and now he’s on a terrorist watch list?
What the hell are these people thinking?!

Home

What is the definition of a home?
And why do we always have to have a clear answer for that which is limited by a certain place for us to build our lives around?

The concept of a home is strongly rooted in us and in so many of our major decisions. A home country, a home city, a home town, a home team, and the list goes on.

But what actually ties us to a certain place to make it our home? What defines a home country?
A home country to most is the place they were born, a place where they spent most of their lives, a set of memories and experiences, a history.
But some others have a home country they’ve never ever been to. They are born somewhere, have great memories and build lives there, but still they regard some other country as the home country they cherish so much.

So, even though being born somewhere and having lots of memories in it makes you love a place, it isn’t the essential element in making it your home country.

So what is it that ties a person to a place and makes him call it his home?
And why does a person actually need a place to call home in the first place?

The second question is easier and more logical to answer. I think a person needs to have somewhere to call home in order to have some sense of belonging, to have a place to look forward to going to, to have a place of their own that they can brag about and say wonderful things about, to have a place that they can identify themselves with.

As for what ties a person to a place and makes him call it home, I think how it’s being decided in many people’s brain is by their origin. Their parents are from that country so they are too. Full stop. It doesn’t need that much thought for most.

But why?
What happened to all the “Home is where the heart is” stuff, to personal choice and to following what’s better for a person?
Why doesn’t a person choose his home based on what he likes, what suits him better, what makes him more comfortable?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m maybe one of the proudest Tunisians alive. My home country is Tunisia, my home city is Bizerte and the list goes on and I’m proud of each thing in it and wouldn’t change it for the world.
But in reality, I’ve spent more of my life outside Tunisia than in it, and when I am in Tunisia I rarely even go to Bizerte, my supposed home city.

What I’m saying is that maybe we should not over-tie ourselves to our so-called home places. It’s great to have them and to use them as a certain source of pride and belonging, but not to over-obsess about them.

We should always be open to choose our home away from home depending on our choices.

Plus sometimes it’s necessary not to live in your home country and only visit it every once in a while to keep loving it, as sometimes living in it can be a nightmare, lol.