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Serious satire
"Humor is a funny way of being serious"
-Thomas Edison
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To have your emails deleted please write to me at renatoobeid@hotmail.com
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Copyright© 2001-2010, Renato Obeid
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"Top blog/Renato Obeid's World/Today's pick: This rambling weblog is worth reading not so much for its satirical posts but more for its insight into the minutiae of life in Lebanon, including the etiquette of road accidents and how to hire a taxi.”
-Jane Perrone, The Guardian
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Thursday, January 25, 2007
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
-donor nations pledge eight billion dollars in aid to Lebanon at Paris III conference
‘’The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’’
- Russian proverb
8:00 pm
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Somebody I know saw a man getting Arabic letters engraved onto his laptop keyboard at an engravers recently.
Hasn’t he heard of stickers?
The original English letters on his keyboard are stickers anyway.
Talk about overdoing it.
9:00 pm
Friday, January 12, 2007
Bought a pair of runners in Beirut today.
Not a big deal in itself but it is for me – just like I scoured the whole of Sydney for one pair of runners, I scoured the whole of Beirut for this one pair of runners.
Even then, like with almost everything I do, I was in two minds about it – the fit in this case.
The salesman clinched it – ‘’trust me, they’re the right fit, my name’s Mustafa and if they don’t fit well, when you’re wearing them invoke curses upon me’’.
Who needs a consumer protection agency when you can ‘’invoke curses upon'' people who sell you the wrong thing?
Although I had looked forward to walking around in ill-fitting shoes muttering curses under my breath cartoon -style (‘’coises, coises!’’), curses weren’t necessary because they turned out to be a perfect fit and subsequently I invoke blessings upon Mustafa when I wear them.
Mustafa (like most workers in Lebanon) might get paid peanuts but he has my blessings.
8:00 pm
Thursday, January 11, 2007
HAGGLE BUSTER
- don’t haggle with a Hajj
Bought a state of the art ‘’brick game’’ (Tetris knockoff) from a street vendor in Beirut this afternoon for all of 3000 Lebanese Lira.
Even then I tried to haggle, after all the only ‘’overheads’’ he has are the sky, clouds and the sun, but the vendor cut me short with ‘’I’m a Hajj’’ (i.e. he’s not going to rip me off).
Everything’s Not A Dollar* (just down the road from ‘’Everything’s A Rip-off, around the corner from Everything’s Crap and across the road from Everything’s A Dollar…NOT! ) in Jounieh sells them for 2500 Lira but I was quite happy to pay a 500 Lira Hajj premium at Honest Hajj’s.
I also bought two books while I was in Beirut – one was fiction presented as fact (The Beirut Spring** –a coffee table book about the so-called Cedar Revolution) and the other was fact presented as fiction (Upton Sinclair’s brilliant but disturbing novel The Jungle, incidentally also for 2500 Lira – pity the nation where el cheapo knockoff electronic games are the same price as literary classics).
Although a century and a continent apart, these two books have a lot in common – The Beirut Spring is about the movement that canonized and mythologized Rafic Hariri and The Jungle is closer to the reality of life for workers in Lebanon under the Hariri Dynasty (1992-Forever).
*The name has been changed to protect the guilty - the last place you’ll’ find stuff for a dollar is at so-called dollar shops
**A souvenir from Lebanon for my brother Guy and his lovely fiancée Jenn who are getting married in Kuching Malaysia next week.
8:00 pm
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