Category: Here & There

I heard of Mecca-Cola a while back and today I stumbled upon their website where I got to learn more about them.

Mecca-Cola is a charity business created to use it’s profit to help relieve human suffering where action is still possible.

10% of the profit it makes goes to the children of Palestine and another 10% goes to local charity acts in the countries of distribution.

Mecca-Cola last donated 111,000 US$ to needy Palestinian students.

I think this is great. And I wish more and more people would actually start businesses like this in which the aim is not to suck as much money as possible out of people but to give back to the community and help the needy and the suffering.

This is a very touching Palestinian poem addressing the American people written by Gihad Ali. I just found it and just had to share it with you guys here.

Eye to Eye
by: Gihad Ali

Look into my eyes
And tell me what you see.
You don’t see a damn thing,
’cause you can’t possibly relate to me.

You’re blinded by our differences.
My life makes no sense to you.
I’m the persecuted Palestinian.
You’re the American red, white and blue.

Each day you wake in tranquility,
No fears to cross your eyes.
Each day I wake in gratitude,
Thanking God He let me rise.

Continue reading Eye to Eye, A Palestinian Poem

The ball that David Beckham blasted into the stands when he missed a penalty in England’s Euro 2004 quarter final shootout defeat by Portugal has attracted a 10 million euro bid (Approximately US $12,384,000) on ebay and it still has 7 days to go so the price could go even higher.

Pablo Carral, a 25-year-old Spanish football fan who claimed the trophy when it landed in his arms in Row Q of the Luz stadium in Lisbon decided to put the ball up for sale on the Spanish site of Internet auctioneers eBay after a British newspaper offered to buy it for 18,000 euros.

This is one hell of an example of a fat lucky chance dropping into someone’s lap from the sky (literally).
Why doesn’t something like that ever happen to me?

Update: After running checks on the bids, eBay’s Spanish site decided to reduce the top offer for the ball from 10 million to a mere 23,650 euros ($29,270) after concluding that pranksters were behind hiking the price to astronomical levels.

I’ve been wanting to start a Linklog for a long time to take the place of the occasional Link Dumps that I post and enable me to share links with you guys.

And well, today I finally got around to creating one. It’s somewhere on the left column.

The solution I opted for is a combination I put together using del.icio.us and feedroll.

I use del.icio.us to bookmark and comment interesting links I find when surfing and then feedroll to access my del.icio.us bookmarks rss and display them here.

It’s a simple clean solution which I think is very effective and cool.

I hope you enjoy the links I’ll be posting there 🙂

… given the way things are in the popular media, people are bound to think that way. What the Glasgow group has found is that a great majority of people think that the Palestinians are the occupiers of Israeli land, and some even think that they – the Palestinians – are refugees from Afghanistan…

Jalan Jalan

Suheir Hammad performing Beyond Words at the 21st National ADC Convention, 12 June 2004.
[Via Je Blog]

Palestinian-American poet and political activist Suheir Hammad has published a book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, and a memoir,…

Recipient of the Audre Lourde Writing Award from Hunter College, the Morris Center for Healing Poetry Award, and a New York Mills Artist Residency in Minnesota, Suheir is a frequent reader at New York reading venues,…

Continue reading Beyond Words

SpaceShipOne, the first private space craft was launched today and reached an altitude above 62.5 miles (100 km) during its brief flight, making it the first privately built craft to fly in space.

The space plane was carried aloft to about 50,000 feet by the jet White Knight.
From there SpaceShipOne launched into space.
Shortly after, the space vehicle landed safely at the same place from which it took off.

SpaceShipOne was financed by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen and designed by Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites.

Now, this is really cool…

Continue reading SpaceShipOne, A Success

So, here comes another junk reality tv show. This time it’s Next Action Star by NBC.

NBC and producer Joel Silver are looking for the Next Action Star!
14 hopefuls are plucked from obscurity, sent to Los Angeles to compete to become Hollywood’s next “big thing”. They will be trained in everything from acting to stunts by the best in the business. Two winners (1 man, 1 woman) will star in Joel Silver’s first network television film, also airing this summer on NBC.

This whole reality tv thingie is getting way out of hand. Everything is becoming a reality tv show now.

The whole concept is pointless, useless, boring and stupid.
It builds on the voyeur sleeping inside us humans, and on the fact that it’s in human nature to want to watch other people and see what happens in their lives.
But it’s so fake and stupid, it makes me sick.

What next?
Maybe they should turn elections to a political reality tv show. Now that would be interesting for a change. Don’t you think?

Plans have been announced in the Irish Republic to translate the Koran.

The ambitious project aims to bring Ireland’s Gaelic-speakers and Muslim communities closer together.

The Islamic community is the fastest growing religious minority in Ireland, which is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

It is estimated around 18,000 Muslims live there, out of a total population of nearly four million.

[Source: BBC]
[Via Je Blog]