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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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Sunday, November 16, 2008
CHANGE WE CAN CHEW ON
Lebanese supermarkets will sometimes issue chewing gum as change in lieu of two hundred and fifty and five hundred liras (claiming that they're out of them).
A pharmacist once even gave me a strip of generic paracetamol instead of five hundred liras when he didn’t have change.
I wonder whether they’d still give you chewing gum or paracetamol as change if you’d actually bought chewing gum or paracetamol.
What change would they give you if you were actually buying chewing gum of paracetamol?
In that case you wouldn’t have to buy chewing gum or paracetamol because you’d be getting it anyway, so you’d but something else and get chewing gum or paracetamol as change.
It’s a good way of selling chewing gum and paracetamol and shortchanging you at the same time.
Would they accept you paying them in chewing gum or paracetamol? (perhaps you can even save the chewing gum and paracetamol they gave you and pay them with it).
I don’t think so.
6:00 pm
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Happened to catch live transmission of the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on CNN.
Honestly now, who doesn’t watch these things half expecting/waiting for them to blow up? (God forbid).
Or is it just me?
3:00 am
Friday, October 10, 2008
NEW ‘’GAY PLAGUE’'?
According to a study published in the medical journal Cancer, frequent exposure to incense burning appeared to double the risk of developing cancers of the sinuses, nose, mouth, tongue and larynx.
7:30 pm
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
SPEED MOURNING
- more efficient alternative to Borat’s ten minute silence commemorating Tishniek Massacre
‘’First to speak was (Sunni Sheik Hamed) Mousamak, who talked about the religious meaning of iftar and of Ramadan in general. He asked for five seconds of silence for all those who had died in Lebanon…’’
- Today’s Daily Star (‘’Kurds complain of discrimination during annual iftar’’)
9:40 pm
Friday, August 08, 2008
A Maronite living abroad fathers a baby, refuses to baptize the child (out of admirable but misguided “humanism’’) and, in one fell swoop, succeeds in doing what two thousand years of persecution failed to do to the last bastion of Christianity in the land of Christ, the Maronites.
Herod, Pontius Pilate, Mohamed, Salehedin El Ayoubi, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Henry Kissinger*, Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden et al were all going about it the wrong way.
Ironically all they needed to achieve their goals was not persecution, ethnic cleansing, exile etc but forty years of so-called secular Western so-called liberalism.
Note to our current and future persecutors: don’t bother, leave us to our own devices and we’ll take care of it for you.
How long will it be before Maronites in the homeland go the same way?
And I say so-called secular because the West is not secular.
Quite the contrary, they have replaced our one God with a pantheon of false Gods that they worship - so-called democracy, so-called egalitarianism, political correctness, minoritarianism, capitalism, careerism, consumerism, modernity, celebrity, popular culture, Buddhism, so-called spirituality, New Age so-called religion, superficiality, shamanism, paganism , mysticism, animism, decadence, homosexuality, feminism , fetishism ,etc, etc, etc.
And they claim to be secular!
I’ll take monotheism over this so-called secularism any day.
Worshipping one God is a lot more convenient than worshipping all these “secular’’ “gods’’.
And they say that we’re complicated and backwards!
It’s like that email that’s been forwarded a billion times
“The Black Man-
when I’m born, im black
when I grow up, im black
when I get sick, im black
when I go in the sun, im black
when I die, im black...
And you, white man-
when you're born, you're pink
when you grow up, you're white
when you get sick, you're green
when you go in de sun, you turn red
when you get cold, you go blue
when you die, you go purple...
And you call us colored!?’’
You believe in all of these “gods’’ and yet you call us who believe in only one true God religious, fanatical, backward and complicated!
And the so-called liberal and tolerant West will defend these false idols more zealously and violently than the most extreme Muslim fundamentalist.
You tell a Middle Eastern believer that you don’t believe in God and they will peacefully try to change your mind out of concern for you but if you transgress any of these Western idols you will be mocked, humiliated and possibly even prosecuted all under the guise of political correctness (which is this false religion’s version of the now-defunct Holy Office of the Inquisition).
Anyway, such people misdiagnose religion as the problem.
The problem isn’t religion.
The problem with religion, as with any other ideology, is people.
People who misuse, misinterpret, misapply, abuse etc religion.
So when you replace religion with humanism you’re replacing the wrong thing because the problem is not religion but humans.
Humans need replacing not religion.
If one is a good, true, proper and tolerant Christian, Muslim or Jew then one is a good human being.
Also humanism ironically discriminates against humanity because the vast majority of human beings practice some form of religion.
Thus humanism is an elitist cult which counterproductively and inimically discriminates against the very thing it is supposed to favor above religion (the human being).
Humanism is misdiagnoses that actually contributes to and propagates the self same behavior it is meant to eradicate.
Why don’t you believe in something rather than believe against something in a reactionary manner?
Why don’t you stand for something rather than just stand against something?
Believing against a belief is not a belief.
The raison d’être of humanism is not what it stands for but what it is against (religion).
Anyway, parents don’t decide what religion their children are to be or even if they’re to be religious, they initiate their children into religion and teach them religion in custodianship until they’re old enough to decide for themselves just like they send them to school until they’re old enough to decide what they want to do with their lives and if and what they want to continue with it at a tertiary level.
*At the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 the United States offered to send in ships to evacuate and resettle in the US the entire Maronite population as part of their plan to resettle the Palestinians in Lebanon (the Maronites were the only obstacle to this at the time).
The then-US Ambassador told a Lebanese journalist (who told somebody I know) that the entire Maronite population was commensurate in numbers to the number of Americans killed in car accidents every year.
Meaning that they can absorb that number and that we were nothing in the scheme of things in the wider Arab picture and the Americans had to cater to the majority not the minority and we shouldn’t exaggerate our importance as tiny drop in the broader context of the Arab world.
1:40 pm
Thursday, August 07, 2008
POTATOES IN PARADISE
I haven’t seen (or rather heard) the travelling potato salesman for a while.
I’m quite worried about him.
There used to be a bloke pedalling potatoes off the back of a truck around these parts.
How many people buy potatoes on impulse just because a potato peddler happens to be passing?
Funnier than the thought of serendipitous spuds was his spiel which he used to deliver over and over again via a loudspeaker on the roof of his truck : “yallah ahl batata!, yallah ahl batata!…’’ad infinitum.
Although he did his best to rev up potato purchasers, I just can’t imagine people getting as excited about purchasing potatoes as his spiel implored them to do (unless they were Irish), just dropping everything and rushing off excitedly to purchase potatoes.
*"Yallah (meaning hurry in this context) to the potatoes!’’
2:00 pm
Friday, July 18, 2008
THE MAN WHO LISTENS TO WOMEN
- relationship advice from a thirty-seven year old single man
I am not a fan of platonic relationships between men and women.
Gentlemen should associate with gentlemen and womenfolk should associate with womenfolk unless related, courting or a couple.
My opinion is not due to conservativeness (which would probably be the most obvious reason for such an opinion) but pure old-fashioned chauvinism and practicality (I’m glad I clarified that – that makes it sound so much better doesn’t it?).
Quite simply, menfolk are menfolk and womenfolk are womenfolk.
Or to put in the modern parlance, men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
Also, men who associate with women risk becoming feminized and women who associate with men risk becoming masculinised.
This modern phenomenon of cross-gender friendships has gotten us to the stage where men have become women and women have become men.
A visitor from the Victorian era (you work out the physics) would think that most modern Western women were prostitutes not because of any sexual behaviour but because of their aggression, coarseness, vulgarity and masculinity (characteristics mainly of prostitutes in the Victorian-era).
Also, on a purely practical note, the Man Who Listens to Women (a very rare bird indeed but not as rare as the Man Who Talks to Women because there’s no such thing as talking to a woman, you can’t get a word in edgewise) risks becoming a kind of emotional eunuch for woman.
To put it quite simply and bluntly, you don’t want to be the Man Who Listens to Women because she’ll end up talking to you and f***ing somebody else.
A kind of “job-sharing’’ practice that a lot of modern women employ, one man to take care of their emotional needs and another man to take care of their physical needs because they often can’t get their emotional needs fulfilled by the man they’re sleeping with because, quite simply, he’s sleeping with them and so he doesn’t have to listen to them anymore (he’s past the initial phase where you pretend to care about a woman , listen to her etc just so you can get her into bed).
Often the Man Who Listens to Women may have started off as that man trying to bed her by listening to her but took too long about it and ended up stagnating there and becoming indispensable for that very reason – she decided to keep him as the Man Who Listens to Women because the man who listens to her is rarer and more important to her than the man who f*** s her.
She can find a man to f*** her any day but she can’t find a man to listen to her so easily.
That’s why so many modern women like that company of gay men.
It’s a moot point because if you’re the Man Who Listens to Women, you might as well be gay because you certainly ain’t gunna get any.
The Man Who Listens to Women is often a man who mismanaged the initial precoital listening or took too long about it and simply got stuck there.
“Booby’’ trapped into a fruitless frustrating relationship as a non-sexual consort by the very boobies he was trying to snare.
A ‘’booby trap’’ without the boobies!
That type of woman will throw you the occasional bone – flirt with/tease you so you don’t lose all hope and leave her.
Just enough to keep you in her thrall and to make you think that there’s still some possibly of something else.
But the flirting/teasing is only peripheral for this kind of woman, a means to an end and not and end in itself unlike the fulltime flirt/ tease whose primary goal is to flirt with/tease men for mean low perverse fun and fulfilment and/or because they like the attention of men and like to keep a retinue of men hanging of them and for God knows what other reasons (histrionic personality disorder comes to mind).
8:30 pm
Thursday, July 17, 2008
HOLOHOAX
In late 2002 in a doctor’s waiting room in Melbourne I overheard the (Jewish) good doctor telling a (presumably Jewish) thirty-something yuppie couple he was seeing out that their son was undersized ‘’because of the holocaust’’.
He went on to say ‘’they’re only discovering that now’’.
I’m assuming that the kid in question was the grandson of ‘’holocaust’’ survivors.
Personally, I want a second opinion… from Doctor Haniyeh (the Hamas leader).
9:00 pm
Monday, July 07, 2008
ROMPER STOMPER
Earlier on this evening we had some visitors over.
We were sitting out on the balcony when a kid (all of one year and three months old) climbed onto one of the plastic outdoor chairs and sat down.
His mother “predicted’’ that he was going to fall off (“you’re going to fall off’’, a regular Nostradamus - nobody saw that coming) but didn’t stop him or take him off the chair.
Lo and behold, not long afterwards he fell off the chair and hit his head on the floor.
Surprise, surprise.
The poor kid was crying for a few minutes (understandably) so I deployed the secret weapon that Lebanese use to appease kids who’ve had a fall.
Namely “punishing’’ the ground by hitting it (or stomping on it in this case) to distract the child.
It worked – he stopped crying and looked on but would resume crying when I stopped so I did a lot of stomping (“naughty ground, bad ground, don’t do it again, take that’’ etc).
I’ve used it before to similar effect and I’m surprised that parents don’t seem to use it much these days.
I really would recommend it.
I’m curious to know whether it would work for other kids too or if it’s only Arab kids who have such a desire for vengeance.
His sister had a better time.
She insisted on sweeping the floor over and over again with a sweeper.
I suggested to her parents that she use the vacuum cleaner instead (more efficient) and told them that I hoped that she maintained such habits when she got older.
At least these kids didn’t reach my office unlike a serious security breach that occurred the last time we had children over, about two weeks ago, when two kids, visiting with their mother and aunties, got into my office and held me ‘’hostage’’ for over half an hour making me show them pictures and videos of dinosaurs online*.
But they were cute kids and I miss them.
Are there really dinosaurs in Canada?
The boy hostage-taker said that there were dinosaurs in Canada after I told him that they were extinct.
Which got me worried – I thought that he was going to up the stakes and demand a dinosaur shipped in from Canada.
I suspect that this kid is a bit naïve and gullible.
Apart from the dinosaurs in Canada, he fell for the oldest trick in the book.
When Lebanese adults are trying to get a kid to eat, drink or do anything else they don’t want to do they use a form of reverse psychology: “he/she doesn’t know how to eat/drink/ talk/whatever’’ and the kid is supposed to fall for this and say “yes I do’’ and proceed to do it.
But to my knowledge, it’s never actually worked – I’ve been trying it for years on kids and jokingly on adults but its never actually worked.
This boy’s sister was thirsty so I got her a drink and I got him a drink too, he said that he didn’t want a drink, I said “you don’t know how to drink’’, he said “yes I do’’ and drank it.
*I can just imagine some terrorist who’s hijacked a plane screaming “we demand dinosaurs or we will start killing the passengers’’ to the control tower in the quaint old days when terrorists actually had demands.
I’m considering setting up an office-in-exile for when I’m trying to avoid visitors (maybe in my bedroom).
I like my office but it’s in a very vulnerable location – it’s in the (unused for that purpose) entrée of my apartment and is thus landlocked.
I can escape into the ‘’hinterland’’ to my bedroom (on the mountain side) but am exposed to an attack from the ‘’heartland’’, the contiguous salons (on the coast side) or, at the very least, a "naval blockade'' (when there are visitors over and I want to remain incommunicado I’m sometimes cooped up in here for hours).
There’s a kitchen on this side but it’s used as a laundry and a pantry.
I can access the other kitchen by going through the front door of this apartment and opening the front door of the other apartment but that’s still pretty precarious.
I can also escape using that door.
And even when I’m not in my office, I still consider it a security zone, a DMZ, a no man’s land between the salons and my bedroom.
My Pillars of Hercules.
Ne pas ultra!
Quite necessary when you consider that I’ve even had security breaches as far away as my bedroom.
Sometimes kids will try and follow me into the section where the bedrooms are and I’ve had to lock the door that leads to the bedrooms.
But more effective than a lock and key was when a mother once told her little daughter not to follow me into there because I was being sent into the ‘’mice room’’ as a punishment.
Apparently kids here are told that if they misbehave they will be put into a room full of mice.
It sounds cruel but it certainly works for me – she didn’t go anywhere near this side and, as she was leaving later on, she pleaded with my mother that I be released from captivity in the mice room.
1:00 am
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I thought that South Koreans only got excited about political matters but it looks like their excitement also extends to more mundane matters.
I see on the television news that more than two hundred people have been injured in clashes between police and protestors who oppose US beef imports.
The protestors are protesting against the supposed dangers of mad cow disease.
How ironic is that?
They look mad enough to me.
Will mad cow disease make any difference?
Those cats are crazy.
Speaking of cats, these people will eat cats and dogs and all sorts of things but they’re afraid of possibly eccentric cows.
Anyway, how do you tell the mad cows from the not mad cows?
They all look pretty mad to me (especially if you wave a red cloth at them).
5:00 pm
Friday, June 27, 2008
Omar knows his priorities in life and school isn’t one of them (like any normal kid).
At school he just does what he needs to do to get by and this applies to most other things.
Once when he was about seven years old he was over and I was preparing a sandwich for him.
I asked him what he wanted in it.
“Phidadelphia’’ he replied.
“What?’’
“Phidalelphia’’ (granted, it’s not an easy name for a child to pronounce).
“Pronounce it properly or you’re not getting any’’ I bluffed knowing that he could pronounce it properly if he made an effort.
Realizing that I was serious and getting what he wanted depended in it, he then made an effort and pronounced it perfectly correctly.
“Philadelphia’’ and probably would have been able to pronounce it in its original Greek accent (“Φιλαδέλφεια’’) if required.
A writer could probably make a good living writing about Omar’s exploits but as there are laws and ethics about profiting from crime and corruption (I’m sure that proceeds of crime laws also apply to family members too) I’m not that writer.
8:45 pm
Monday, June 23, 2008
A problem ignored, not recognized or acknowledged is a problem solved.
It’s all about perception.
11:30 am
Sunday, June 22, 2008
- "Peasants Brawling Outside a Tavern'' by Pieter Angiliss (1685-1734)
“A QUARELL AMONGST THE PEASANTRY’’
Is how Eli describes the all too frequent fights amongst the plebeian youths over network games (Counter-Strike) at the internet café we used to frequent and other similar incidents.
It’s such a quaint picturesque phrase that sounds to me like it could be the caption of some English painting from the 1700’s depicting peasants dressed in breeches fighting each other with pitchforks and sticks (maybe the predecessors of the yeomen at the internet café fighting over a game of quoits at the quoits café).
‘’A quarrel amongst the peasantry, Hertfordshire England 1789’’
Or like some knowing country squire dismissing (as natural and inevitable) the antics of his subjects to a houseguest from London (who’s “stopping’’ for a month’’ – it’s always a month in the literature classics) as “a quarrel amongst the peasantry’’ when they come across a disturbance whilst travelling in their carriage.
8:00 am
Saturday, June 14, 2008
SLUTZPAH
Just got back from my walk to Jounieh culminating at the supermarket where I replenished my junk food/insomnia food stocks.
The supermarket I went to is a twenty-four-hour a day joint on the highway with seedy looking staff and even seedier looking clientele.
At the register, just as the cashier was about to ring up my purchases, a slutty looking bottle blond, with her hair pulled back in a porn movie style single pony tail (or should that be ‘’pornytail’’?), of indeterminate age (you can never really guess this type of woman’s age) dressed like a prostitute, presumably coming home from ‘’work’’, cut-in in front of me without so much as a word.
My being a gentleman and her being a slut, I would have let her through if she hadn’t have cut-in especially seeing that she only had two items (two bags of nuts) and that I had about twenty.
As she was paying for her nuts (since when do prostitutes pay for ‘’nuts’’, how’s that for a reversal? Not the first ‘’nuts’’ she’s nibbled on no doubt. Talk about a busman’s holiday!) I rhetorically asked her ‘’excuse me but didn’t you see me before you?’’.
She didn’t say a word, just looked at me contemptuously and walked out with her purchases.
‘’How do you like that?’’ I said to the indigenous South American-looking cashier (picture a young Evo Morales) and two other blokes behind the counter.
One of the blokes behind the counter, who wasn’t as seedy looking as the rest, told me, in English, that she was a ‘’Syrian ‘bitch’’’ (‘’bitch’’ is often used here to refer to a prostitute).
I don’t know whether this was typical Maronite blame the Syrians for everything including queue-jumping and sluttiness (or whether she was even an actual prostitute) and seeing that she didn’t even say a single word to me I could hardly verify her origin by an accent.
What surprised me is that she wasn’t even particularly attractive and this wasn’t the arrogance of an attractive woman but seemed to me the arrogance of a slut who often got her way and ‘’respect’’ from a certain type of man simply because she was a slut.
In a society where not all woman put out men (usually single young men myself included sometimes)often have a kind of perverse ‘’respect’’ for a woman who’s willing or looks like she’s willing to put out if it will help them score her (or at least ‘’respect’’ her until she turns them down and then she becomes a slut).
Like the old joke about what the definition of a slut is: ‘’a slut is someone who sleeps with everyone except you’’.
I suppose a girl who puts out will often seem more attractive in any culture.
Noel Me Mate says a ‘’poem’’ in his stand-up comedy routine that goes something to the extent of ‘’I think my girlfriend’s beautiful. My parent’s also think she’s beautiful. Are they f***ing her too?’’
As my uncle says ‘’there are no attractive women or unattractive women – there are women who ‘let us’ and there are women who don’t ‘let us’’’.
The best articulation of a slut’s philosophy I’ve ever heard was from some slut in an internet chat room who said “why make one man miserable (by getting married) when you can make many men happy (by being a single slut)?’’
7:00 am
Friday, June 13, 2008
I was recently remonstrating with a non-Sunni sympathizer of the Future Movement (the mob that Asad AbuKhalil, aka Angry Arab, rightly calls the first sectarian Sunni Arab political party in history).
‘’The Hajji has to support them, she’s a Sunni, but you?’’
I likened it to the old joke about the man who comes home and finds his best friend in bed with his wife and says, ‘'Lenny, I have to, she's my wife, but you?"
5:30 pm
Saturday, May 31, 2008
I don’t want to break ranks (Maronites need to be united now more than ever) so I won’t mention names.
But I used to think that a certain Maronite political party represented a majority of Maronites but I now realize that they are a minority who stand out because they are a loud minority of unrepresentative hoodlums who are very active and prevalent at a grass roots level among lower-class and less-educated Maronites but do not represent wider Maronite opinion.
The silent majority of Maronites are the ones who don’t chant slogans and wave party flags, we just don’t hear much from them because they’re…silent.
Practically the only time we do hear from them is at election time when the drawing of the electoral booth curtain unveils real Maronite opinion.
The church panders to the unrepresentative group because it is the squeaky wheel that gets the oil and because religion is the opiate of the people and thus must pander to the lowest common denominator – the grass roots where both faith and fascism have their most vociferous supporters and where the two meet (just like the alliance between the church and the mafia in Italy) i.e. where the cross meets the dagger and the two combine.
This alliance of the two pillars of obscurantism (faith and fascism) holds up the very low ceiling of the house of ignorance.
7:30 pm
Friday, May 30, 2008
Just got back from my walk to Jounieh.
There was no electricity but the silver lining in the cloud was that I couldn’t see all the posters of the new president aka the traditional Maronite greeting of a new president.
Maronites will greet their new president with fireworks, posters and praise (especially if he’s a military man) and will see him off with boos and insults at the end of his term (if he lasts that long).
This is despite the fact that in Lebanon it is illegal to insult the president.
I hope this doesn’t count as an insult* and I certainly don’t mean it as one but I thought that the tie he wore to his swearing-in (light grey) was a bit ‘weak’’.
A stronger color (red or dark blue) would have made a stronger statement.
*Technically, I thought of it before he was actually sworn-in.
11:15 pm
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Finally found an Arabic to English English learning program for the taxi driver.
‘’Learn English in one week!’’ it promises on the cover.
I believe them – in one week’s time students will have literally learnt the word ‘’English’’.
8:00 pm
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Still waiting for the internet bloke to come up and install a wireless internet connection for me.
I fell out with the last bloke I’d engaged to do the same thing because he kept me waiting for three hours* and it looks like I’m headed the same way with this bloke.
I called him last Friday to confirm my interest and have him go ahead with it and he told me that he would ‘’get back to me on Tuesday or Wednesday’’.
This is insane.
I’ve been laughing at it ever since.
Since when do tradesmen ‘’get back to’’ people?
Tradesmen are summoned and they attend.
Common people have run amok in this egalitarian era.
In ye olden times his predecessor, the TSP (telegraph service provider) guy or, even earlier, the CPSP (carrier pigeon service provider) guy, would have been summoned and would have attended immediately, cap in hand, mumbling ‘’good day me lord’’.
Nowadays, you have to chase him and he will ‘’get back to you’’.
Common people can do whatever they like nowadays, it’s gentlefolk who are burdened by propriety, protocol, manners etc.
I want to live like common people!
I put all this change down to the fact that the aristocracy don’t oppress people anymore.
Not that I’m in favour of oppressing people but in the old days plebeians were kept polite because they were kept under the thumb of the ruling class.
Now the ruling class don’t care about the manners or mien of the people anymore as long as they work for them, pay taxes to them and vote for them.
A little bit of oppression goes a long way towards keeping people polite and in their place.
And I must stress that I am not a snob, I’m every taxi driver’s best mate after all, I just insist that people treat me the same way I treat them.
No, not write nasty things about me (my writing is done by my evil alter ego – I’m not this mean and obnoxious in real life although I can be worse at times) but treat me with decency and respect.
I’m for egalitarianism but this is not egalitarianism this is just a reversal – commoners now oppress gentlefolk.
People here will give you that old chestnut about this being Lebanon so you have to be patient and put up with these things.
That’s no excuse.
The taxi driver was recently telling me that he was punctual because he has a ‘’Western mentality’’.
I told him that I don’t have a so-called Western mentality but a civilized Lebanese mentality.
There’s no such thing as a ‘’Lebanese mentality’’ and a ‘’Western mentality’’, there are civilized Lebanese and there are uncivilized Lebanese just as there are civilized and uncivilized Westerners etc.
*He wanted me to wait outside for him (because of the police checkpoint)!
The nerve!
The arrogance of ignorance is astounding!
Anyway, he didn’t need to ask me to wait outside for him because I had to be outside anyway to review security, see to it that the red carpet was unrolled and placed properly, to check the honour guard, to make sure that the brass band was in tune so that I could receive him properly. This guy kept me waiting for three hours (albeit indoors although he would have kept me waiting outdoors if he had had his way) and would have kept me waiting longer if I hadn’t have called him and cancelled.
7:30 pm
Sunday, May 25, 2008
LEBANON DOESN’T DECIDE 2007/2008
All eyes are on this afternoon’s presidential ‘’election’’ and inauguration.
The Lebanese parliament will vote in as president Lebanese Armed Forces Commander, General Michel Sleiman, who will be literally waiting in the wings, and then bring him in soon after for the inauguration.
It reminds me of those cookery programs on television where the host has already prepared the dish beforehand – ‘’here’s something I prepared earlier’’.
Christians need not fear Michel Aoun’s alliance with Hezbollah.
It’s ironic that the Shiite ‘’party of God’’ has evolved into the least sectarian party in Lebanon.
When Hezbollah took effective control of the South after Israel withdrew on this day in 2000 (the only significance of May 25th in Lebanese history despite today’s events) not a single Christian was as much as tickled.
Compare this with the massacre of Christian civilians by Walid Jumblat’s Druze militiamen after the 1982 withdrawal of Israeli troops from Mount Lebanon.
My most enduring memory of the events of eight years ago were television images of the last Israeli soldier to leave Lebanon closing and locking the border gate after him.
It was very nice of him – we don’t want the chickens to escape.
This seemingly leisurely withdrawal (how many retreating armies get to shut the gate and leave a cancellation note for the milkman?) belied the fact that they were harried out by a twenty-two-year war of attrition.
3:15 pm
Saturday, May 24, 2008
LEBANON DOESN'T DECIDE 2007/2008
‘’People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’’
- Adam Smith
Preparations are underway across the country for Sunday’s election (by parliament) and inauguration of Lebanese Armed Forces Commander General Michel Sleiman as the twelfth president of the Republic of Lebanon and the accompanying celebrations.
I suggest that they shred the Lebanese constitution and use that as confetti.
This is the forth consecutive presidential ‘’election’’ that has been in violation of the constitution.
The first three times the Lebanese parliament voted to amend the constitution ‘’once and once only’’ - the 1995 extension of then-President Elias Hrawi’s term despite the constitutional prohibition of a serving president being re-elected or having his term extended; the 1998 election of then-army commander Emile Lahoud despite the constitution barring serving first-grade civil servants from running and the 2004 extension of Lahoud’s term.
They've gotten so used to it that this time they’re not even bothering to amend the constitution anymore – they’ve concocted some sort of loophole that does away with even the need to do that.
No respectable polity changes it’s constitution without the people’s consent.
Not that the people know any better than their leaders – they don’t- but such major decisions should not be in the hands of the few in order to prevent conspiracies by cliques and because we should all bear responsibility for them.
Unlike the Bible or the Koran, the constitution isn’t a sacred text that can’t be changed but, if it needs to be changed, let the people do it.
And to think that the Syrian diktat to unconstitutionally amend Lahoud’s term in 2004 prompted United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 which was the catalyst for the upheaval that we are still experiencing in Lebanon to this day.
So what was all the fuss about then when the constitution is now being violated again?
Is it okay for the West to dictate a constitutional violation to us but not okay for the Syrians?
So all the fuss back in 2004 was not about the constitution being violated but about who was doing the violation.
Is not a ruse a ruse by any other name?
I suggest that soon-to-be President Sleiman’s first task on assuming office should be to restore the legitimacy that he and other politicians have so undermined through his election.
And make no mistake about it, army commanders have always been politicians.
When has the commander of the Lebanese army not been a politician and when has that position not been used as a stepping stone to the presidency (parliament’s election of army commander, aka president in waiting, is the closest thing we have to a presidential primary)?
They talk about the army being neutral as if they were above politics but it’s the exact opposite – the army is neutral because it's leadership wants to appeal to all the political factions.
But I don’t blame the military brass (or anyone else) for taking what they can get, I blame Maronite politicians for being so greedy and covetous of the presidency that they can’t agree on a president from within their ranks and have to resort to the army as they’ve done three times now (which means that a quarter of our presidents have been from the military).
It must be noted I have the utmost respect for the Lebanese army.
The Lebanese army remains the only army in the world to beat and totally obliterate an Al Qaeda cell as they did in the Nahr el bared conflict last year.
That’s the very reason why I don’t like to see them tarnished by politics.
WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS MEDDLESOME PRIEST?
At the end of the day Lebanon Doesn’t Decide 2007/2008 isn’t so much about electing Michel Sleiman but about not electing Michel Aoun.
The March 14th Movement and their ally the Maronite church wants as president any Michel except Michel Aoun who, ironically, is favoured by a majority of Lebanese in general and Lebanese Maronites specifically (Aoun had proposed direct presidential elections but, knowing what the outcome would be, the powers that be opposed this).
The list of preferred candidates that the Patriarch drew up last summer included two other Michels namely Michel Edde and Michel Khoury.
Michel Sleiman, Michel Khoury, Michel Edde, Michael Jackson, Michael Shumacher, Mickey Mouse, Michele my belle… any Michel (or any other variation thereof) but Michel Aoun!
Why?
Because this honest but mad* general is the person who keeps the Establishment awake at night.
They’re obsessed to the point of nympholepsy about the one major Christian politician in Lebanon that they can’t co-opt.
The man who doesn’t play by the rules of the old colluding cartel.
The seventy-three-year-old with a mainly youth following who’s the freshest thing to ever happen to Lebanese politics.
*There’s plenty to be mad about in this country and it’s enough to drive you mad!
Besides, you have to be crazy to deal with these people.
As Seal sings ‘’we’re never gonna survive unless we get a little bit crazy’’.
1:40 am
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Day one of the latest round of dialogue between Lebanese politicians…in Doha Qatar.
As soon as they had left for Doha yesterday afternoon the simplistic clichés began
‘’Let them stay there’’, ‘’don’t come back until you agree’’ etc, etc, etc ad nauseam.
The latest in a similar vein – ‘’they all ought to be shot, thrown away, put in the fire’’ and any other form of disposal you can think of.
Apart from it being a simplistic cliché, it’s also denial because the problem in Lebanon is not the politicians but the people and the system.
The politicians are the tip of the iceberg, just the manifestation of this and the representatives of the people (warts and all) so it’s a good way of shifting blame.
Who was actually doing the physical fighting last week (and in previous wars)?
Was it the politicians?
No, it was the people.
Disclaimer: I’m just as guilty as anybody else of using this sort of simplification but, in my defence, I do it knowingly in a phatic way when I’m talking to taxi drivers and other simple folk when I want to get down to their level and to draw them out as a gambit to get them talking.
Actually most of what I say to them is purely phatic, I don’t mean a single word of it!
11:00 pm
Friday, May 16, 2008
Just got back from my second night walk through my ‘’private forest’’.
I’m beginning to warm to the concept.
At least it’s close and I save time too (I don’t have to catch a taxi back home) and it takes twenty minutes, which is the recommended time you should walk daily, so it’s shorter than my walks down to Jounieh but still kosher.
It’s psychologically easier too – at the end of a long day, the thought of having to walk all the way down the mountain is a bit daunting so it’s much easier to contemplate just going for a walk ‘’around the block’’ so to speak.
LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN
On the political front, the war that raged for a couple of days has subsided (for now).
An Arab League delegation visiting Beirut yesterday secured an agreement from the warring parties that ‘’things would return to the state they were in prior to the events that occurred after May 5, 2008’’
Far enough, that’s understandable because the state we ‘’were in prior to the events that occurred after May 5th 2008’’ (i.e. eleven days ago) were so f***ing great that we all have to hop into a time machine to take us back to that golden era, that Camelot.
Weren’t those the very same conditions that lead to the actual fighting?
What a waste of a time machine.
If I had a time machine I’d go back in time to Victorian London but the Arab league wants me to go back in time to last Monday week.
As if that would make any difference anyway.
People say that I repeat myself (especially when I talk) but I maintain that I’m just ‘’on message’’.
12:30 am
Thursday, May 15, 2008
MR. SENSITIVITY
A girl I know was recently telling me that she was depressed.
I told her that that suited me fine because I’d just read an article about a study that found that depressed woman put out more.
I feel your pain, now put out.
She must be within the margin of era.
Ripped-off!
Serves me right for believing everything I read.
5:30 pm
Just got back from my first night walk along ye olde abandoned forest road (although I used to walk there at night years ago whilst the road was still in use).
I think I broke a world speed record.
A fearful walk is a fast walk.
It was quite scary but having to walk all the way down to Jounieh whether you’re up to it or not and then having to pay ten thousand lira for a taxi back up is just as scary.
3:00 am
As you may have gathered from my exposés of Lebanese animists, Lebanon is quite a windy place which is, despite what the animists might think, a good thing.
There’s almost always a cool breeze in summer.
Lebanon is a very good place for drying laundry.
I’ll often put up my washing, go and have lunch and come back to find the washing dry.
Lebanon has great capacity for wind farming although I don’t know whether this animism would extend to being afraid to use electricity generated by wind.
Lebanon’s other great natural resource is water.
Lebanon has a water surplus in a water deficit region so if we were to utilize this asset properly we could probably live of it.
Water is more precious and less abundant than oil in this part of the world.
They say that before the civil war the Saudis proposed that they build an oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon and send us oil in exchange for a pipeline going the other way supplying them with water.
I don’t know why it never happened but I imagine that the oil companies may have had something to do with it.
Even nowadays, drivers of Saudi road tankers delivering petrol to Lebanon will often fill their tankers up with water after they’ve delivered their load and drive back to Saudi Arabia with it.
There was recent talk about Lebanon importing water to Cyprus, which is experiencing a drought, but the Lebanese government nixed it after public outcry here – despite having all this water our infrastructure is very bad and most Lebanese will often suffer from water shortages (‘’water water everywhere but not a drop to drink’’.
In the meantime most of our water is ‘’exported’’ straight to the Mediterranean and it’s a terrible waste.
12:00 am
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
I’ve been reassessing my view of ye olde abandoned road and have been occasionally taking my walks there (most recently yesterday morning).
It takes twenty minutes to do the loop so it’s good for a ‘’half marathon’’ when you‘re not up for the ‘’full marathon’’ (all the way down the mountain which takes about double that time).
And because it’s blocked off at both ends it’s like having your own park with a quaint little road winding through it.
It’s secure too.
One of the cops was telling me that they literally swept it (of rocks etc) because their boss exercises there “so he won’t trip over’’.
Somehow I can’t imagine the head of the Lebanese police rapid intervention force tripping over so easily (i.e. strolling through the forest).
With the exception of Gerald Ford, survival of the fittest ensures that people with a tendency to trip over don’t usually reach the upper echelons.
The cops, like their boss, are very civic and community-minded, keeping their prefabricated base and its environs spotless (even beautifying it with a small garden) and undertaking various projects around the buildings*.
Because it’s no longer in use it’s not as polluted and hectic as the main road.
You can actually smell the pine trees.
I’m just scared of snakes because years ago I nearly stepped on a snake there and hyenas because someone told me that they once encountered a hyena thereabouts.
Hyenas are no laughing matter as far as I’m concerned.
But I can’t imagine that they'd be any worse than the taxi drivers I’d have to encounter if I walked to Jounieh instead.
Maybe if I encounter an actual hyena on my forest walk, I can give it ten thousand lira (the usual night time taxi fare) and it will leave me alone.
It works with the taxi drivers.
The road might be secure as far as dangerous humans go because of the nearby police presence but I’m sure that the wildlife hasn’t received the memo yet.
Although it seems quite safe, I wouldn’t fancy walking there at night especially now that it’s no longer lit up.
*
-5.45 am Tuesday 3rd June 2008
UPDATE:
And pray for insomniacs!
Just got back from my walk ‘’around the block’’.
I’ve been trying to sleep since 10.30 last night and this was the mandatory walk that I have to take after my second failed attempt at sleep.
My insomnia’s getting so bad that I’ve sought police ‘’assistance’’.
At the end of my walk I was talking to one of the cops, mainly about my insomnia, and when we parted company he said ‘’God willing you’ll sleep now’’.
‘’Pray for me’’ I replied jocularly.
He took it seriously and said that he would indeed pray for me.
That’s very nice and I appreciate it a lot but I think it would be better if he just shot me – that would cure it for ever.
Eternal sleep.
After all Omar Khayyam, the medieval Persian philosopher, did promise ‘’awaken, you have eternity for sleeping’’ although I think his emphasis was more on the first part of that not the latter which I’m looking forward to.
Who died and made you an alarm clock?
I bet that he never had insomnia.
Still, it’s reassuring to know that the cops are on the case.
As often happens, my telling people about my insomnia illicit their own so-called ‘’insomnia’’ complaints.
The cop was telling me that he’d been having ‘’insomnia’’ lately.
It’s been taking him an hour or two to get to sleep lately.
My heart bleeds for him.
-4.00 am Friday 6th June 2008
UPDATE:
And kill snakes!
Was just talking to one of the cops after my walk and he told me that he’d just killed a snake (the seventh snake they’d killed).
He showed me his kill – a tiny baby snake that looked more like a worm than a snake except for the distinctive head - and waved it around a bit for me and then draped it over his gun barrel like a cannibal warrior wearing the skulls of his victims around his neck.
That’ll scare of Al Qaeda!
He also told me that there are no hyenas around here so close to civilization and that they’re mainly found in remote mountain valleys.
Still, I’m not taking any chances.
What if a hyena gets lost or goes’s on holiday or something?
This is a tourist area after all and there is a hotel under construction next door.
1.00pm Friday 23rd May 2008
UPDATE: I did some ‘’research’’ (Wikipedia) on hyenas and they’re a lot more dangerous than I thought.
I’d never taken them seriously because they look so funny and because the cartoon cartel conspires to present them as benign amusing creatures (that’s so irresponsible!).
I urge people to take hyenas more seriously!
I even asked my neighbour about their prevalence in the area and he told me that the good folks up in the village had recently shot and killed one.
When I asked him whether they were deadly he replied ‘’I haven’t tried them’’ in his dry laconic style.
So hyenas, coupled with reports of ‘’Patriarch police’’ (army intelligence officers at the nearby Patriarchate which we overlook) pouncing on walkers, have put me off walking on my ‘’private road’’ at night.
My ‘’hyena research’’ also included chancing upon a documentary on television that showed hyenas getting all smart-alecky with tigers (encircling them, nipping at them and then running off etc)!
Whilst my estimation and fear of hyenas has increased, my estimation and fear of tigers has greatly decreased.
Tigers are wusses.
I reckon I can take them on.
Why can’t we have tigers around here instead of hyenas?
Life is so unfair.
Bring back tigers I say.
Misleading: hyenas as depicted by Big Cartoon
Finding pictures of Hardy Har Har isn’t as easy as it sounds (there aren’t the many suitable pictures of him on the internet).
I need a research assistant.
‘’I need pictures of cartoon hyenas and I need them yesterday!’’ I would demand of my assistant.
8:45 pm
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Worrying about long-term problems is a distant luxury for this insomniac.
It’s the short-term problems that keep me awake and they’re mainly to do with the insomnia itself.
Insomnia feeds on and perpetuates itself until it supplants the original problems that may have caused it and it becomes the problem itself.
During the day we busy ourselves and don’t have much time to worry about our problems.
It’s at night when we’re trying to sleep that those problems that have been hiding under the bed all day ambush us.
Tomorrow is a long way away when you’re trying to sleep.
“Tomorrow’’ for me begins when I wake up whenever that is.
Everything is magnified when you can’t sleep.
You really think that you’re going to die sometimes and you don’t really care as long as it’s not painful and protracted.
Last night I had a dream that there was a coffin in a hearse outside my building.
Quiet unsettling but I didn’t give it much thought during the day but, now that the insomnia demons are back, I know who it was for – it was for me.
It never occurred to me to think that it was for me until now.
It’s always somebody else.
‘’Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’’
Maybe I’m already dead and in hell (I certainly feel like a like a zombie and this certainly feels like hell) and maybe you’re dead too (God forbid) and reading this is your hell.
As for the cause of death, no need for an autopsy, the cause of my death will be nearly every person I’ve dealt with substantially throughout my entire life.
Everybody murders everybody else they just don’t know it.
See you all in hell - I’ll introduce you to the devil even though I suspect we’re already there and that you don’t need introducing.
8:00 pm
IT’S A WAR ALL RIGHT
-If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it probably is a duck
Day seven of the new Lebanese civil war.
Speaking of which, I’ve noticed a strange reluctance in both the local and foreign media to call it a war.
How many euphemisms for war can you come up with?
‘’Unrest’’ my a***!
Denial is not just a river in Africa, it also runs through Lebanon.
I’ll leave the causes, details, blame game etc to the media (which I call ‘’the list’’ because they’re just a temporal list of events) but let’s just get one thing straight – this is a war.
Are people not shooting guns and stuff at each other (that’s a good enough definition of a war to me)?
Yes they are.
Thus this is a war.
They say that admitting a problem (‘’hi, my name’s Lebanon and I’m a waraholic’’) means that you're halfway towards solving it so, according to my calculations, we’re now (that I've declared that we're at war) halfway towards solving our problem and have another halfway to go.
Although I must admit that there’s no hard-and-fast definition of war or exact amount of time that has to elapse before a fight becomes a bona fide war but if we look back through history we can find examples of shorter wars that were nevertheless still wars.
This is day seven so, according to my calculations, it’s already lasted one day longer than the Six Day War (which lasted for six days).
A war doesn’t have to last for fifteen years (like our last civil war did) to be a war.
So the details and the duration are immaterial to the actual fact that we’re at war, we’ve already established that.
Just like this anecdote about Winston Churchill.
Churchill (to irritating socialite): Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.
So we’ve already established that it’s a war but we just don’t know how long it will last for and what the ‘’price’’ will be.
Hopefully it won’t last for much longer.
Admittedly, it can’t be a genuine dyed-in-the wool civil war without the Maronites who have so far uncharacteristically sat this one out (their invitation’s in the mail) although the Druze (Lebanon’s other warrior tribe) are involved.
There’s a saying in the Arab world ‘’no war without Egypt, no peace without Syria’’.
There’s also no Lebanese civil war without the Maronites.
With a key Maronite faction (the mob that started the last civil war) just chomping at the bit to get involved, this Maronite pacifism could be short-lived.
God help us if the Maronites join in the fray.
That’s when the real fun starts.
As for the impact of the war on my neck of the woods (the Mount Lebanon Maronite ethnarchy), there is none yet although there is a palpable sense of fear and foreboding that permeates throughout the entire country.
Lebanon is curiously compartmentalized.
In Lebanon it’s not uncommon to have war raging in one part of the country or even one part of the city and yet have life going on as usual in other parts.
This I’m told happened during the last civil war.
Even during my time here, I recall partying in East Beirut while West Beirut, Southern Lebanon, Northern Lebanon and Eastern Lebanon (and all other points of the compass) were being attacked by the Israelis during the 1996 onslaught.
Abraham Rabinovich wrote in the Jerusalem Post (02/18/08) about a similar reaction to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp massacres just 500 metres away from the camp outside the Kuwaiti Embassy.
‘’A dark-skinned custodian chatted outside with a Lebanese army sergeant. They spoke with us about the massacre in a detached manner, as if passing on gossip about unruly neighbors down the street.’’
All this denial and all these euphemisms are not surprising considering that Lebanese refer to the last civil war as ‘’ the events’’.
It’s like the Northern Irish referring to their civil war ‘’the troubles’ but even that is more accurate.
There has been rightful across-the-board condemnation of the attacks on and occupation of the Future Movement's media outlets that silenced them for a few blissful days.
The editor of the pro-Hezbollah Al Akhbar newspaper even said that he would buy a copy of the Future newspaper and force himself to read it when it was published again.
Poor bastard – now there’s a media martyr!
But, while we’re at it, one should also condemn the attacks on opposition property over the past months which these attacks were allegedly in retaliation for, the alleged use of these outlets as militia bases and also the sectarian rabble rousing that they engaged in.
7:30 am
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Ironically the worst thing that can sometimes happen to an insomniac is that they actually get to sleep only to wake up to the next day and the causes of their insomnia and an ‘’insomnia hangover’’.
9:00 pm
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Was just having a discussion with my brother, who’s visiting from Australia, about whether one would like to know the exact date and time they were going to die.
My reply was in the affirmative because I can’t wait and that it would give me something to live for.
A couple of years ago some so-called clairvoyant gave me the exact date and time that I was going to die.
I won’t disclose it because I don’t want to create public panic and unrest and I also don’t want to give people ideas (wouldn’t it be funny if some smartalec psycho, in collusion with the clairvoyant, went around killing people on the same date their death was prophesized to prove the prophecy).
Suffice to say that it’s when I’m in my f***ing eighties!
That sucks – I think I’ll get a second opinion.
She claims that the ghost of her dead husband (who she calls her ‘’guide’’) appeared to her soon after he died and that she’d been channelling these prophecies, on demand, through him ever since
That’s when I knew she was bullshitting or delusional.
It’s inconceivable to me that a man released from the bonds of matrimony (via the handy ‘’until death do us part’’ clause) would choose to reacquaint himself with his wife from the afterlife.
If I was a ghost I’d want to appear in J Lo’s shower or somewhere like that.
She claims that her husband’s ghost is a Hindu but that he was a Catholic when he was alive (as she is).
Becoming a Hindu and haunting your wife!
The poor bastard’s in hell!
11:30 am
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Our freelance Sri Lankan maid is a bit too free if you ask me.
She’ll often not turn up as agreed and when the Hajji will ask her about it the next time she’ll just laugh.
I tell the Hajji that she’s too lenient with her and that even the President of the United States has to turn up to his appointments.
The Hajji was just telling me how dad had to go looking for her yesterday.
My reply to that was that you shouldn’t have to go hunting for your maid unless you’re armed with a rifle and feel like a bit of sport.
1:15 am
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Just got back from my walk to Jounieh.
Because it was late I didn’t call my usual nighttime taxi driver even though he’s very reliable and is on-call twenty four hours a day.
I don’t usually call Lebanese taxi drivers because they’re notoriously unreliable and unpunctual but I discovered the only reliable taxi driver in Lebanon about two months ago.
So I decided to try another taxi driver I encounter on my late-night walks who, like every other taxi driver, is always shoving his phone number at me and urging me call him at any time because he’s so reliable blah-blah-blah.
I called him and came to the conclusion that this barbarian shouldn’t even have a phone let alone use it for business purposes – it took him quite some time to realize that instead of shouting into the phone like a savage he should just put down the f***ing volume of the music that was blaring in the background, if he was in the car, or step out of the strip club he was probably in if he wasn’t in the car.
He finally told me that he couldn’t pick me up because he was in Beirut.
‘’Tomorrow’’ he said.
Yeah, that’s great – I’ll just stand around on the street for twenty four hours waiting for him until tomorrow.
I told him that I wouldn’t be calling him tomorrow or any other day for that matter and that the country was full of taxis.
Next up I called a taxi company that a relative had recently recommended to me.
After haggling over the price with the philistine who answered the phone (even though their brochure clearly listed the price) I told him that I wished to be picked up at such and such a place in forty minutes time.
It takes me about thirty five minutes to get to the bottom of the hill but I usually factor in five minutes of extras, sundries.
Not good enough for this bloke – he asked me for an actual time that I wanted to be picked up at even though I’d clearly stated that I wanted to be picked up in forty minutes time.
So I did the maths for him.
‘’Okay’’ I said ‘’ what’s the time now?’’
Even though I knew what the time was, I wanted to make sure that this philistine did because I had my doubts that he could even tell the time.
Justifiably so – ‘’what’s the time guys’’ I heard him yelling out.
Obviously time is important to him but not so important that he’d do something drastic…like wear a watch!
After his extensive consultations (with guys not just one single solitary measly guy), he reported back to me ‘’it’s three o’clock’’.
‘’No it isn’t I replied, it’s 3.15’’ (or maybe Big Ben and my watch are fifteen minutes fast because I set my time by the BBC World Service).
If time is so important to him shouldn’t he actually know the correct time?
‘’So please have a taxi waiting for me at 3.50’’ (when the big hand is at three and the small hand is at fifty…).
Like clockwork, I was at the bottom of the hill at 3.50 and, as I suspected, the taxi wasn’t.
Surprise, surprise!
Even though I gave up waiting for Lebanese a long time ago, I waited fifteen minutes just to be correct.
I also couldn’t be bothered walking an extra ten minutes or so into Jounieh or possibly even further.
I can understand why the operator wanted an exact time from me – Lebanese are getting more ‘’punctual’’.
He wanted an exact time at which to stand me up and keep me waiting at.
Not for him is standing up or keeping a person waiting at an approximate time like most Lebanese, say fourish in this instance.
No, he wanted the exact time at which to stand me up.
He wanted to stand me up ‘’punctually’’.
So I walked into Jounieh proper and got a taxi from there.
4:45 am
Friday, April 25, 2008
Q-TIPS
Joking with a friend in an online conversation about my tendency to spout quotes for every situation, it dawned upon me that what the world really needs now is a quoting superhero.
Quoteman would run around in a shirt emblazoned with a Q saving the world with a well-chosen apt quote for every situation.
‘’’We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are’ – Anais Nin.’’
‘’Thanks Quoteman – you saved the day, if it wasn’t for you and your quote there would never have been peace in the Middle East!’’
My friend asked me if I had actual quote books but I don’t because that would be cheating.
Quotes should be acquired naturally during the course of one’s normal reading not lifted from a quote farm although I must admit that those books are pretty interesting.
2:00 am
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
WASTE NOT WANT NOT
- thus spoke the Hajji Um Ali
The Hajji just picked up and ate a tiny piece of bread that she’d dropped on the kitchen floor.
It was well within the five-second rule* and well within the way she was brought up.
The Hajji Um Ali (her nanny when she was a girl) used to tell her that you’d be picking up with your eyelashes in the after life any dropped bread that you didn’t pick up now.
This only applies to bread because it is the staff of life so pumpkin-wasters (for example) won’t have to pick up pumpkins off the floor with their eyelashes in the after life.
The poor Hajji (all of five years old at the time) apparently wasn’t taking any chances – she’d pick up and eat dropped bread but she’d also try to practice lifting stuff of the table with her eyelashes just in case (obviously to no avail).
And to think that I thought that the pick-up-sticks game of my childhood was difficult.
Picking up straws with straws is nothing compared to picking up stuff with your eyelashes!
Strange – you can’t eat pigs but you can (and HAVE TO!) eat stuff that’s been picked up off the floor.
*’’A popular polite fiction regarding the eating of food that has fallen to the floor or ground…The substance of the rule is that if food falls on the ground, it may be safely eaten as long as it is picked up within 5 seconds.’’ (Wikipedia)
6:30 pm
The taxi driver recently asked me about learning English.
But he doesn’t want to go to classes like normal people but wants a computer program that’s translated from Arabic to English to teach him English.
Even that must be too strenuous – surely there must be a pill that you can take to learn English!
I imagine that such programs exist but I can’t imagine how useful they would be.
Maybe for a genius but I find it very presumptuous that a taxi driver can assume that he can learn English (or any language for that matter) from a CD!
The arrogance of ignorance is outstanding.
Anyway it’s not like he wants to learn English for noble purposes but so that he can rip-off people in another language.
And I don’t buy this Continental European propaganda that English is an easy language to learn.
English is the language of Shakespeare, the language of the Bible (well my Bible’s in English) and was the language of the empire that the sun never set on.
I can’t believe that there are some bourgeois Lebanese who still spout that highly offensive old chestnut about French being the language of culture and English being the language of business.
Anyway, it’s not the language but what you do with it and it’s parochial to think that one’s language (whatever it is) is superior or special.
Some retard once told me that she was ‘’in love with Arabic’’.
How can you be in love with a language?
It’s like being in love with a computer program.
A language is just an enabler, a medium, a means to an end.
5:20 pm
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Another week and another stand-off between polygamist cultists and the Feds in the United States.
My legal reading of this is that the US Constitution forbids polygamist marriages (and even monogamist marriages for that matter) when it forbids ‘’cruel and unusual punishment’’ in the Eighth Amendment.
Also the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution forbids double jeopardy.
11:00 pm
I had to interrupt my start of the day reading of the newspapers online because the Hajji needed to make an ‘’important’’ phone call to Tripoli to deal with the crisis du jour.
Someone’s daughter had left her husband.
‘’If you’re going to call every Muslim commoner who’s left her husband today, I might as well get you the Tripoli phonebook’’ I protested to the Hajji.
‘’You might as well call a cat who’s just left her ‘husband’ because even that is rarer’’ I pleaded to no avail.
Aware that no man can stand in the way of the Hajji one a mission, I reluctantly surrendered the phone line.
Although divorce is famously easy in Islam, it’s generally the lower classes that practice it with such frequency and relish.
If these people read as many books as they ‘’wrote’’ (the marriage contract in Islam is called ‘’writing the book’’) they’d be geniuses!
And before they get married and divorced they seem to get engaged to different people on a daily basis.
I’m no sociologist but it seems to me that the Muslim lower classes – like the lower classes everywhere (just watch the Jerry Springer Show for confirmation) - are always squabbling.
These daily doses of drama are like a sport to them.
"There is material for a dozen buccaneering stories to be picked up in the hotels at Circular Quay" Robert Louis Stevenson observed of colonial Sydney.
By the same token, there is material for a dozen soap operas to be picked up in the day’s events in one Tripoli household.
Such squabbling is the characteristic of the lower classes but an important distinction to make here is the short-term nature of such squabbles as these people don’t have the patience to maintain a long-running feud.
Just as soon as a squabble erupts, it is forgotten and replaced by another one.
They’ll forget about it and move on to something else long before you do.
That’s what I’ll often tell the Hajji who takes these things at face value and gets worried.
‘’Call them back in half an hour and you’ll find that they’ll have forgotten about it and moved onto something else’’.
As I said before, squabbling is endemic to the lower classes anywhere, but it seems to me that in Lebanon Christians don’t tend to squabble so much.
Maybe it’s because they’re to busy trying to rip people off and make money.
Maybe commoners fight more because they’re less inhibited and protective of their reputations than gentlefolk or maybe, quite simply, because there’s nothing else to do to like they ‘’dance and drink and screw, because there's nothing else to do’’ according Pulp’s brilliant 1995 hit “Common People’’.
Common people care about appearances in the superficial sense only i.e. their looks and their clothing often dressing “better’’ than gentlefolk because they’re complexed and have the typical demotic misconception that class is about superficial appearances and luxuries whereas class is really about character not cloth.
5:45 pm
Friday, April 18, 2008
‘’When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now all I see are the dregs of the middle class…’’
- Kim Beazely Snr
I used to consider all Australian Labor Party leaders as secular Caliphs of the Australian labor movement and used to regard them with the same reverence that Muslims used to regard their Caliphs but, to further the Caliph analogy, the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs (as Sunni Muslims refer to the four Caliphs who ruled after the Prophet Mohamed and before the schism) ended with Simon Crean.
I don’t recognize any Labor leader after Simon Crean.
I respect Mark Latham’s intellect and think that intellectually he is a worthy successor to the old-style intellectual Labor leaders but politically he is the equivalent of Mustapha Kamel Ataturk who abolished the Caliphate.
Although Paul Keating had certain counterrevolutionary class traitor tastes and policies he was still a Labor man at core and at heart.
Anyone who can cuss and insult (albeit inteligently and creatively) like he does is still a son of the Left and a son of the streets and the people as far as Im concerned.
Vladimir Lenin was (eventually) right when he said ‘’the Australian Labor Party does not even claim to be a Socialist Party. As a matter of fact it is a liberal-bourgeois party’’ but was just a little chronologically off – only now has that come true.
A sad end for one of the oldest political parties in the world and the party that formed the first Labor government in the world in 1899.
4:00 pm
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
A neighbour (of the dry laconic sardonic type endemic to this part of the country) was telling me about a Saudi he knew who wasn’t particularly clean.
‘’He got around to washing his d---* let him wash his face too’’.
*The longer more comprehensive Muslim ritualistic ablutions, which are conducted before major events like Friday prayers, a pilgrimage etc, include washing the private parts.
I can’t actually read or write Arabic but I think that if I wait around a couple of years I won’t need to.
Lebanese Arabic transliterated into Latin letters is fast becoming all the rage here especially amongst the younger internet generation.
In Lebanese internet chat rooms you won’t see a stitch of Arabic script but Lebanese Arabic written in Latin script.
In fact Latin font is the only script allowed in the ICQ Lebanon chat room for example (ostensibly because some computers don't support Arabic font).
My young cousins will chat away for hours in instant message exchanges on the internet with their friends in Arabic written in Latin script.
I’ve even seen advertisements in newspapers and on billboards, television promos and blogs that employ the same technique.
Lebanese Arabic could eventually go the same way as Turkish which abandoned the Arabic script for the Latin script they now use.
2:45 pm
Sunday, April 06, 2008
WINDOWS FOR DUMMIES
Just got back from my walk to Jounieh.
The taxi I caught back up was an old beat-up screwdriver in the window pane type so I asked the driver whether the window opened.
‘’You can’t open it’’ he replied.
‘’So it doesn’t open?’’ I asked.
‘’Oh yes, it opens’’ he replied ‘’but you can’t open it’’.
‘’Why not!’’
‘’Because you’re sweaty* and you’ll get 'struck by the wind'’’
Not wanting to offend his animist sensibilities I replied that he was right but that I was hot so I proposed and negotiated a compromise whereby I would open my window but he would keep his window closed thus warding off deadly crosswinds!
Tricky!
And I thought that Windows Vista was complicated!
*I wasn’t sweaty but they all assume that you’re sweaty because you’ve been walking.
I very rarely sweat when I walk and when I do, when it’s really hot, it’s barely and certainly not apparent or visible.
9:15 pm
Writing is a form of neurosis as the old adage goes.
Sometimes I’ll be away from my Dictaphone (e.g. in the shower) and I’ll think of something that I think is important (but in actual reality is just crap like everything else I write) and I’ll be figuratively gasping for air until I finish what I’m doing, rush to my Dictaphone, grab it as if it was an oxygen mask and gush out what I have to say.
Then I can breathe again.
I write because I ‘’have to’’ (I feel compelled to) and not because I want to.
I don’t think that anybody writes because they want to.
Writing is a compulsion thus arguably more of a mental illness than a job or a hobby.
I would argue that an amateur writer is someone who writes in ‘’cold blood’’ (i.e. without passion) and the difference between an amateur writer and a professional writer is not that a professional writer gets paid, published or praised but that a professional writer is someone to whom writing is a compulsory form of purging.
1:30 pm
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
WHERE HAVE YOU GONE GAMAL ABDEL NASSER?
The Hajji has become quite religious in her old age.
Nasser and the revolution are long dead and the Lebanese Sunni elite have embraced religion and/or Zionism (from Nasser to Netanyahu in just one generation).
Whenever a family member goes any where, the Hajji will stand at the door whispering under her breath and waving her hands around.
This daughter of a secular Sunni feudal family who became revolutionaries du jour during the Nasser era thinks she’s praying but it’s unlike any praying I’ve ever seen but looks more like something someone casting a spell would do.
To the uninitiated it also looks like she’s begging.
Once she chased my brother Guy and me down to the garage and was standing next to the car doing her magic as my brother and I were in the car preparing for our blessed journey.
‘’Give her a thousand lira, that ought to do it’’ I suggested to my brother.
He promptly got out of the car and gave her a thousand lira.
It works at the traffic lights!
5:30 pm
Monday, March 31, 2008
Just got back from my walk to Jounieh.
Is my taxi driver an old veteran or what!
He literally was a service before there were even cars (in the village)!
Not usually the most talkative of people, today he asked me how long it takes me to walk down.
When I replied about half an hour he told me that he used to do it in fifteen minutes when he was young.
‘’I used to do a service (sic) from the village to Jounieh on foot’’.
It’s the first time I ever hear of a service without that actual service (the car) but you learn something new every day.
In the early fifties, when he was a preteen, there were only two cars in the whole village so when people needed something from Jounieh (particularly medicine from the pharmacy) they used to give him one or two piasters to walk down and get it.
He used to do this once or twice a day.
This was on the old now-defunct approximately two meter wide carriage road that cut straight through the forest right down to Jounieh in the days before the switchback road that crisscross the mountain.
Too bad that that old road doesn’t exist anymore, it sounds perfect for walking.
Fifteen minutes is a lot better than half an hour.
I don’t have just one taxi driver – there are different taxi drivers from different places at different times of the day – but they all morph into ‘’the taxi driver’’ when I refer to them individually.
1:00 pm
Thursday, March 27, 2008
I’m quite a talker when I want to be.
I was on the debating team in school, did high school and university theatre and worked as a spruiker and radio broadcaster but my greatest rhetorical feat was out-talking a Mormon proselytizer.
In 2001 I was accosted by a pair of American Mormon missionaries on the street in Liverpool Sydney.
Not long into their spiel I cut there proselytizing short by launching into my own ‘’proselytizing’’.
It wasn’t long before one of them escaped to harass someone else leaving his comrade behind.
This patient soul just stood there listening to my carrying-on (hello karma!) for Joseph Smith knows how long until he couldn’t take it any more.
‘’I won’t keep you any longer sir – I’ll leave you to go about your business’’ he pleaded before taking his leave.
And I was only getting warmed up!
It felt pretty cool to be one of the few people who had ever out-talked a Mormon until I realized that the flip side of that was that I was also one of the few people who had been rejected by a Mormon – even Mormons don’t want to talk to me!
1:45 am
Friday, March 21, 2008
It looks like Lebanon’s so-called ‘’anti-Syrian’’ government will be boycotting the upcoming Arab League Summit in Damascus and that Lebanon will instead be represented at a lower level (ambassadorial) or by someone from the opposition.
Fair enough but if they get lost on the way to Damascus then they have to call someone from the ruling clique for directions because no one knows the road to Damascus better then they do.
They’d know the route blindfolded.
The late Rafic Hariri made over five hundred (publicly announced) visits to Damascus during his five terms as Prime Minister and yet he’s remembered as being ‘’anti-Syrian’’.
I bet that there are Beirut to Damascus service drivers who haven’t made that many trips to Damascus.
If that’s ‘’anti-Syrian’’ then I’d hate to see how many visits pro-Syrian politicians made.
How many visits to Damascus do you have to make before you’re considered pro-Syrian?
A thousand sounds reasonable to me.
We don’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions based on just five hundred visits.
1:00 am
Saturday, March 01, 2008
FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI.
The United States has dispatched the warship USS Cole off Lebanon’s coast as a ‘’show of support’’ for the Siniora government.
This is the literal definition of gunboat diplomacy because it is that very government that is currently ‘’negotiating’’ with the opposition on a raft of issues ranging from the presidency to the makeup of a new cabinet.
The latest round of talks, known as ‘’the four party talks’’, grouping two loyalists, one opposition leader and the Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Moussa, ended unfruitfully earlier this week.
Or should that be ‘the five party talks’’?
Just as some Muslims say that when an unrelated man and woman are alone in a room together, the third party in the room is the devil, it can be said that when you negotiate with American or her allies, the third party in the room is the threat of force.
12:30 pm
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Lebanese society is very formal and hierarchical.
Government ministers in Lebanon are addressed as ‘’your Highness the Minister’’.
It’s a good thing we’re a republic and we don’t have monarchs – what would we call them, what's left?
10:30 am
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Just got back from my walk to Jounieh.
Lebanon has been enduring a patch of particularly cold and stormy weather but the show must go on so it was business as usual with my walks*.
Not business as usual for the taxi drivers though, one shark wanted to charge me fifteen thousand lira because ‘’it’s snowing up there’’.
I told him that I had just walked down from ‘’there’’ and he smiled at me as if to say ‘’respec’’.
The second taxi driver I flagged down (who I eventually agreed with) asked me what the roads were like up there.
I replied that I’d just walked down (my stock answer this evening) i.e. if I can walk down those roads then you can surely drive up them.
The roads weren’t too bad because even though it was snowing** lightly it was raining too so the snow was being washed away although the roads were covered with snow for a while in the late afternoon.
*I didn’t go for walk yesterday because it was particularly stormy as opposed to today where it’s settled down and is just cold.
Walking in fifty kilometres per hour winds is counterproductive.
Even my rain suit wouldn’t do in that sort of weather – I’d need a suit of armour for that.
**The Eskimos might have two hundred words for snow but I’m a sand nigger so I only have one word for it.
Although it wasn’t the kind of snow that you’d get in Alaska, it was still snow albeit light snow (quite rare so close to the coast).
12:30 am
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Just got back from my walk to Jounieh.
Although taxi drivers are the bane of my existence, I’m usually quite patient with them, as I'm patient with other retards, but today I lost my patience a bit.
First of all, I waited half an hour at the bottom of the mountain where I usually catch a taxi during the day and early evening.
None of the regulars were there so I had to put up with other passing taxi drivers.
There it struck me that there are no more taxi drivers in this country, they’re all ‘’gentlemen’’ (or at least they think they’re gentlemen).
They demand obscene prices and treat you as if you’re begging off them.
That is until you agree to their exorbitant price, then they’ll treat you like a king.
I saw one taxi driver who ‘’rejected’’ me (on price) stop at a shop and fetch a drink for his plebeian passenger who was sitting in the front passenger seat eating a sandwich bigger than he was.
I finally had enough of that and walked down to the Jounieh square.
I approached a taxi driver who was parked there and told him my destination.
The usual ‘’how much do you usually pay, how much will you pay?’’ etc questions ensued.
I never answer those questions because they should state their price and then I, as the customer, can accept or reject it.
I told him that but he kept on carrying-on so I finally told him a price that was half what I usually pay.
He rejected my opening gambit and doubled it to the price that I usually pay.
I told him that that was what I usually paid but that I wasn’t going to go with him but was going to find another taxi and pay that exact same price because he had quizzed me for half an hour like I was a contestant on some bloody television game show.
So I went into a nearby fast food place where I usually enquire about a taxi and they phone one of my regulars or one of the ‘’civilian’’ plebes there will drive me up.
One such ‘’civilian’’ plebe who'd driven me before just sat there smiling like a retard repeating ‘’so you want to go up then?’’.
I replied that yes I did and he just kept on smiling like a retard.
So I had enough of that and stormed out.
I flagged down another taxi who then launched into the ‘’how much do you usually pay, how much will you pay?’' rigmarole before I cut him short and told him to state his price which he finally managed to do (wow- wonders will never cease!).
Of course it was too much so I stated my price and he agreed.
When I got in he told me that he’d previously taken me up so I asked him why we had to go through all the negotiations and carrying-on then?
It’s not the first time I’ve had to start from scratch with a taxi driver I’ve already had the pleasure of doing business with.
I finally got home and had a smoke (although I usually don’t so soon after my walk) but I didn’t need to – I was already ‘’smoking’’.
Lebanese public transport unions keep threatening to go on strike (which they finally did last Thursday although I didn’t have any problems getting a service to and from Beirut) and I wish they would because that would give us all a much needed break and at least it would sort out the reasonable ones from the rip-off merchants and leave the one’s who wanted to do an honest trade to do the job (as happened last week).
As far as I’m concerned they have nothing to complain about – the conditions they’re carrying-on about (rising petrol prices, the cost of living etc) affect the rest of the population just as much.
9:15 pm
Thursday, January 17, 2008
VALE TO THE CHIEF
It’s been almost two months since the last president of Lebanon ended his term.
There have been twelve unsuccessful attempts by parliament to elect a successor to Emile Lahoud who vacated the presidential palace at midnight on Friday 23rd November 2007.
Just like the Nepalese parliament recently voted to abolish the monarchy, it appears that the Lebanese parliament has indirectly ‘’voted’’ to abolish the presidency by not voting to elect a president.
The entire international community has been harassing us to elect a president for months (Lebanon is the ‘’biggest’’ small country in the world), most recently harassing the opposition to accept a constitutional amendment to allow the current army chief to become president.
The United States and its lackey the United Nations obviously sees no irony in making the Lebanese parliament amend their constitution through foreign (Western) pressure after they boycotted Emile Lahoud for three years because his term was extended by a constitutional amendment allegedly imposed by foreign (Syrian) pressure.
Despite being on ‘‘iggy’’ for three years, President Lahoud left office with his head held high and was defiant to the very end.
If anyone can sing ‘’My Way’’ at a karaoke bar it is Emile Lahoud, who a supporter claimed was more powerful than Adolf Hitler because he, unlike Hitler, managed to prevail against the whole world.
Although we haven’t had a president for two months, the executive branch of government has not been idle would that it was.
Prime Minister Siniora’s cabinet has been acting as the executive branch in a so-called caretaker capacity since.
Pretty busy caretakers I would say.
Last I heard, they had signed some seven hundred bills that President Lahoud had refused to sign because he did not recognize their government as being legitimate after all the Shiite Ministers (and one Orthodox thrown in for good luck) resigned in November 2006.
I’d hate so see what they’d do if they weren’t acting in a caretaker capacity.
At least half the Lebanese couldn’t wait to see the back of Prime Minister Siniora and now they’re stuck with him as prime minister and president too.
Siniora says that he can’t resign now because there is no president for him to tender his resignation to (as required by the constitution) yet he is the effective president and is usurping the role of the president with such gusto.
Why doesn’t he just pass his resignation from his left hand to his right hand (or vice versa)?
I’m not constitutional lawyer but I reckon that that ought to do it.
Lebanon is the land of irony and the land of ironic firsts.
The Lebanese government is the only government I know of in history to blame the opposition for the countries problems.
This is despite their having been in power since July 2005 or should I say in power in this incarnation since July 2005 because Rafic Hariri, whose son Saad is now parliamentary majority leader, was prime minister for most of the post-war era and Foaud Siniora was his finance minister.
Meanwhile, it’s been a cold yet relatively dry winter.
Annual rainfall to date is two hundred millimetres as compared to three hundred millimetres at the same time last year.
Which gets me to worrying about possible ‘’drought’’.
Water supplies here are dodgy at the best of times even during floods (water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink) so one can only imagine what they’d be like during a drought.
The private water sector isn’t much better.
The tank jockey who fills up our water tanks at an exorbitant rate when we’re out of mains water apparently won’t come if it’s raining but waits for it to stop raining.
Irony!
Water is his job!
If I can go for a walk in the rain in a waterproof suit than surely he can get one too and do his job.
8:30 am
Friday, January 04, 2008
Applying a Band-Aid to a microscopic scrape on my hand I got to wondering whether black people wear black Band-Aids.
I’m not being racist (some of my best friends are Band-Aids) but the Band-Aids that white people wear are the colour of their skin so it stands to reason that black people should wear black Band-Aids that match the colour of their skin.
White Band-aids on a black person must stick out like a…sore thumb.
I’ll google it and if I find that they don’t exist, I’m going to make my first million manufacturing black Band-Aids.
I’m not joking (it’s not like Ali G’s ice cream glove), this will be two-in-one – healing the wounds of the body while, at the same time, healing the wounds of the soul.
8:00 pm
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