We’ve moved!

This blog has moved to http://unitedbloggersofarabia.com

See you there!

Quick note

Commenting and posting has been disabled temporarily. We’re working on moving the blog to its own domain/servers and we don’t want anything to get lost during the transfer. It shouldn’t take a long time so stay tuned!

Something to look forward to

Art -photography in particular- has always been a great passion of mine. Over the past 2 years, being a member of the great art community Deviant Art, I’ve come across some great Arab artists who have found a way to say what’s on their mind in the most beautiful way. Most of them you’ve never heard of, or seen their work but they sure deserve as much exposure as they can get.
So, as an honor to our artists, and as the aim of this blog is to share the thoughts of Arabs with the world and art is one way to do that, I’ll be featuring artwork of Arab artists on a regular basis.

That’s something looking forward to. It’s something I’m definitely looking forward to doing!

“Any A-Hole Can Open Up A Museum”

What’s up with people exporting culture? This city confuses me. Actually, not this city, but it’s a small country – so it’s all kind of the same. I just don’t understand how can culture be bought. I know, the world is a “small village”, and that we cannot run away from this crazy melting pot – but you cannot buy culture. You cannot build a branch of a museum in your town to guarantee a spot on the hot cities list – or compete with your neighbours who are having it really, really good with their plastic architecture, and false hopes of having the city of the future.

Malls. And shopping festivals. And pop stars. And Guinness book records. And artificial islands don’t make great civilizations. Nor does buying your legacy. Or maybe that’s what the new age dictates.

Fake + Lots and lots of money + Severe lack of taste + Extreme fascination with extravagance = The way to go.

I know it is old news that the Louvre is coming to Abu Dhabi, for $520 million – makes think how far can this go?

Hmm, maybe Egypt will start selling “authentic” copies of the Sphinx! Or maybe we’ll have mini-Great Walls of China distributed to selected cities.

A tale of two blogs. (intro)

I’ve tried handling two blogs at the same time but one of them always gets lost. Doesn’t sound like much but throw in a full time job, a wife and couple of kids and you got your self a handful. This is different, I’m not actually running both blogs. I have my personal blog, and I also contribute to this one here.

I’m not quite sure what United Bloggers of Arabia actually is yet but I do know that a bunch of talented, interesting people are behind it. You can’t compete with a team and why not be a part of this success? So I thought to myself, what the heck. If you can’t beat em, join em

On a serious note, I’ve always believed in “there is no I in team” and the power of working as a team. Blogging’s key ingredient is people. People have different taste, culture and backgrounds. Having multi authors means we can’t go wrong.

I’m M.Y.K from mykblog.com and I’m in!

Ignorance is damn funny!

I stumbled across this podcast from a great site called Mideast Youth. In this podcast, Esra’a asks a number of students in an American university to help her out by signing some petitions. For example:

A petition to make Bahrain part of North Korea again, after it was stolen and relocated by the Saudi Arabians. One girl’s reaction was: “Is Bahrain a new country?” Esraa’s reply was: “Yeah, it was founded 3 years ago.. by the north Koreans!”

Other petitions were signed to try to set Bahraini people from the Japanese occupation in Saudi Arabia, or to end the Irish occupation of Iran. Or to help people of Bahrain get the right to pick their passport colors, since Bahrain is an island located in south of Hawaii and is currently under Swedish administration. An activist in a human rights group in campus has agreed to let Esra’a give a presentation on the Iraqi invasion of Canada, since a lot of Canadians are dying, it isn’t FAIR! The girl’s response was: ” It’s an issue that we’ve been concerned about lately “

They were surprisingly helpful!

They were also nice enough to extend their congratulations to the Arab nation because just last night – of the date the podcast was recorded- we just got computers and Internet in th middle east for the first time. Which means we’ve had Internet for 8 months now… we better get ready for our first anniversary celebration!

Ignorance IS funny!

Most of you would think that the podcast was totally rude, I agree. But you can’t deny that it was funny, sad but damn funny!

Ignorance isn’t restricted to Americans, I’m pretty sure if I walked around in my college campus asking students about current events in the Middle East, less than half of them would answer right. And that kind of ignorance is even worse.

I understand how someone can be politically ignorant, I am a political ignorant , but I chose to be that way. But if I ever find myself signing a petition to free Canada from the Iraqi invasion, I’ll know I have a serious problem.

‘Ello World!

I’m Rasha, and I tend to be angry at things. XD – I hope my ranting won’t get on your nerves. (Plus, I think I’m probably surrounded by many many angry Arab bloggers…just in my element, thank you very much!)

Talk soon!

Traveling Back in Time

Yesterday I was thinking of how the Internet is practically ruling my life now a days – and I’m sure I’m not the only one – a big portion of my day is spent online, whether I’m looking for the latest news, researching for school work, or simply wasting my time, it all happens online. Another question was, when did the Internet start ruling my life and how did it happen? Being a product of the 80s, it might be a natural thing since the all of us “kids of today” are naturally techy, nosy and impatient, so the Internet is just the perfect solution.

Back in 1999, I was 14 at the time, the Internet wasn’t a huge part of my life. My online presence consisted of one Hotmail account that my dad created for me: Duaa77@hotmail.com. Of course I never got any emails, since none of my friends used email. Yahoo was my favorite search engine and I used it mainly to dig up photos of my favorite bands back then, which I will not even mention because it’s too embarrassing (let’s just say… I’ve come a long way just like the Internet did). Other than that, I didn’t know that there was a lot more to the Internet, I didn’t even that Google existed!

I felt like I wanted to travel back in time, to see how my favorite websites back then developed to be what they are today. With the Internet being this magical place and all, it isn’t impossible to go back in time. Thanks to The Wayback Machine, you can go back in time and look at snapshots of what websites used to look like at a certain time. So, here’s what my most-used sites looked like in 1999:

Things sure how come a long way since 1999, don’t you think!?

tick tock tick tock

Yeah ok, am supposed to be writing something very interesting, am sorry but am not coz am a boring person lol ;p A friend asked me for advice on a certain issue and here’s what I got as a response: ……when you have an argument with someone, and you just decide not to talk together believing that time will do all the healing, well YOU’RE WRONG! Time won’t kill the problem…all you’re doing is killing the whole relationship! With time clouded by the silence of both sides, (according to me) the person who had looked with hope towards fixing the problem between you and them, will grow unforgiving coz they got patience, and patience runs out quick (can you hear that?! tick tock tick tock…!) CLEAN UP YOUR MESS before it’s just too late to do anything about it!

Declare Your Holy War!

As I was browsing the net, I came across this new website called Jihad on you where people vent their frustrations and declare their “holy war” on them. When you declare your war on the infidel (whoever or whatever you’re declaring your war on), people can rate and comment on the jihads and the infidels can even be notified by email that there’s a holy war declared against them.

How FREAKING ridiculous is that?!

The site was built as a challenge to build a website over a weekend, so I suppose the guys who built it didn’t have a chance to think things through? I understand that they don’t mean to offend anyone and they’re trying to be funny… but this isn’t funny. It’s just a tacky way to be controversial and spread the word about your site.

I’m glad to see that a lot of people around the blogosphere seem to agree that the concept of the site is pretty tasteless.

Jihad on you.. I declare a jihad on you!

not really.