You know Ryan Seacrest ? You know the American Idol's host. Well apparently, at least according to this article, he was recently bitten by a shark while on vacation in Mexico.In his own words "It swam up to me, and it took a bite, and then he left." ............................................. can you blame it, the poor thing :)) ................. ok that was the punch line you were supposed to laugh :D.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
I really didn't want to post anything controversial, I wanted you lot to have a laugh at the picture in the post below; but if this is true ( Libyan government arbitrarily arresting some Swiss citizens ) then its really bad ...really really bad and wrong ...... and we can certainly do without it. Actually it better be undone quickly before things escalate and backing down becomes harder.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Sunday, July 6, 2008
The Arab man's burden
I can understand the Jews demanding, after their experience at Nazi hands, that they should be given some piece of territory somewhere in the world, where they would be masters in their own house and where there would be an asylum for any Jews who, in future might be threatened with a repetition of what the Nazis did.
But, if the Jews had a claim to be given a piece of territory, this should have been done at the expense of the Western nation that had done its worst to exterminate the Jews..
If the creation of a new state of Israel was judged to be a legitimate form of compensation to the surviving Jews, the territory for this state should have been taken from the Europeans, not from the Arabs.
The new Israel should not have been carved out of Arab Palestine; it should have been carved out of Central Europe.
This point seems to me to be simple and obvious. But, once, when I made it in a lecture in a Western country, (not Germany, not Britain), it was received with shouts of laughter.
The people who laughed were not Jews; they were non-Jewish Westerners, and the country was one that has been traditionally opposed to colonialism.
Yet, they laughed because it seemed to them preposterous that a Western nation should be made to pay for its own crimes with its own territory, when the West's moral debt to the Jews could, so it seemed to these Westerners, be settled by giving the Jews the territory of a non-Western people that committed no crime at all against the Jews.
This laughter shocked me because it revealed to me what seems to me a shocking persistence of the colonialist attitude of mind. A guilty Western people's territory was to be sacrosanct, because, though guilty, they were Westerners.
An innocent non-Western people's territory could, it was held, legitimately be given away to the Jews by the victorious Western powers.This amounts to the declaration of the inequality of the Western and the non-Western sections of the human race.
It is a claim that Westerners are privileged, however guilty they may be. It is a denial of those universal human rights that, in truth, are possessed by every man, woman, and child in the world, irrespective of differences in civilization; religion, nationality and race.
-- Arnold Toynbee, Two Aspects of the Palestine Question, in Arnold Toynbee, Importance of the Arab World (1962).
via Lawrence of Cyberia.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Shahat and Soussa quick snapshots
A while back I was traveling through the green mountians, in Libya, with a friend and I managed to grab some photo's of two sites in Shahhat and Soussa ( here's a Google map link of their location, Soussa is directly North of Shahat ). The first set of pictures are from Soussa port and it depicts some of the ruins of the ancient greek city of Apollonia, large parts of which was destroyed and submerged under the sea by an earthquake in 365 AD. The main attraction is this old house in the picture below, which was carved either into a huge rock or into some, now non-existing, cliff side; but from the pictures its obvious there were no bricks. You can notice behind it some guys in an almost totally submerged building that hosts a number of underground rooms the doors of which you can notice if you click on the picture and zoom in. You might get a better view from the second picture.
Here I started to wade in with my jeans pulled up to my knee's, so you could get a view of the front door :P.
This is from inside the house looking towards the sea
This is me looking out through the front door, not much privacy eh ?
Here I climbed the roof and you can see the hole in the ceiling used to climb up. I also discovered that I'm not so young and fit as I used to be :P.
I took the following two from the top of the house, the first one is facing the sea and shows the walls surrounding the house's garden and the gateway/door .
The second one shows the left side of the port and place where I was standing when I took the first two pictures. ( just so you get an idea of the layout :P )
These two pictures are from the left side of the port from where the cars are above, and it looks like a submerged room that is used for swimming and diving, they refer to it as the 'Cleopatra pool' don't ask me why though .
After I finished up with my photo's in Soussa we went up the mountains to Shahhat to what is called the " Shahahat tourist resort" . Its basically a bunch of small house's at the top of a cliff with a park for children and a restraunt and coffee shop but it's close to all the archeological sites so its a good place to stay in. What really makes it special though is that both its restraunt and coffee shop are built into a set of caves in the side of the cliff. When we arrived there lunch was being served so I couldn't grab pictures of the restaurant; but I got pictures of the coffee shop which was empty at the time.
This is the parking lot with a traditional Libyan tent on the right side
This is the front door to the coffee shop.
The following two are of the reception area of the coffee shop ............
and this is the lounge ..... couldn't get a clear set of the TV area as there was a guy watching football ......... but you probably get the idea .
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