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Archive for the ‘Bits & pieces’ Category

Movie Time

In Bits & pieces on July 23, 2008 at 11:35 am

When I started my vacation almost three weeks ago, I bought a bunch of pirated DVDs of the latest movies and watched them in two days. For lack of a better subject today I will talk about these movies:

1- What Happens in Vegas: Crap. Cameron Diaz wears nice dresses in it though. I am envious.

2- Sex and the City: Double crap. This is the quintessential chick-flick type movie which I abhor but enjoy all the same because it really doesn’t demand any thinking on my part. It basically encourages conspicuous consumption and frames it so that it appears to be the omega of every achieved woman’s life. Let’s not forget that it also portrays marriage as the ultimate goal even for the most successful, independent women out there. Bullshit. Even the shoes in the movie are meant to slow us down. Fergie’s song is good though.

3- 27 Dresses: Triple crap. What a sucky movie. Another chick flick but one I did not enjoy at all. Stupid dresses too. Katherine Heigl is not my type.

4- The Incredible Hulk: Good movie! Yay! Cheers for the green giant! I love Edward Norton and Liv Tyler. The movie kinda lost its momentum at the end though. Oh, and it also featured the man-macho woman-fragile theme and shits like that. That was not cool.

5- You Don’t Mess With the Zohan: Hmm. I am a bit puzzled how to review this one. On the one hand, it has a good theme of coexistence between Arabs and Zionists. On the other hand, it has some images of Arabs which I did not like. For example, you have the shouting crazy fanatic armed Arab and then you have the sophisticated and disciplined Zionist who beats the Arab. Also, I think I noticed they claimed Hummus was an Israeli dish. HELL-O? Hummus is very Arab but yeah Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere normally claim Hummus and Falafel are their own. That’s basically stealing cultural heritage, made grave by the conflicts between the two cultures. Unforgivable.

Thus ends my review of these movies. Let’s hope that I will have something better to write about tomorrow.

List of Books

In Bits & pieces on July 20, 2008 at 3:21 pm

The title of this post says it all. This is a post that lists the books I bought today from the Amman Book Fair, a list I had promised Lulu:

1- Aesop’s Fables
2-الجذور العربية للرأسمالية الأوروبية- جين هيك
أعمدة الغبار - إلياس فركوح-3
البحث عن وليد مسعود - جبرا ابراهيم جبرا-4
في نقد الحاجة إلى ماركس - سالم حميش-5
الثلج يأتي من النافذة - حنا مينة-6
رفاعة الطهطاوي رائد التنوير في العصر الحديث - محمد عمارة-7
ذاكرة الجسد - أحلام مستغانمي-8
9- The Voyage of The Beagle - Darwin
10- Rights of Man - Thomas Paine
11- The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rosseau

Now I am broke. Please help me recover financially by clicking on the ads on this site.

The World’s Top Public Intellectuals

In Bits & pieces on July 11, 2008 at 2:57 pm

Full results from Prospect Magazine.

1 Fethullah Gülen

2 Muhammad Yunus

3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi

4 Orhan Pamuk

5 Aitzaz Ahsan

6 Amr Khaled

7 Abdolkarim Soroush

8 Tariq Ramadan

9 Mahmood Mamdani

10 Shirin Ebadi

11 Noam Chomsky

12 Al Gore

13 Bernard Lewis

14 Umberto Eco

15 Ayaan Hirsi Ali

16 Amartya Sen

17 Fareed Zakaria

18 Garry Kasparov

19 Richard Dawkins

20 Mario Vargas Llosa

“When Prospect and Foreign Policy drew up our list of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals a few weeks ago, none of us expected a Turkish Sufi cleric, barely known in the west, to sweep to victory. Nor did we expect every name in the top ten would be from a Muslim background. (Noam Chomsky, who won the last poll in 2005, led the west in 11th place this time.)” More here.

Pretty groovy!

Thursday’s Pickings

In Bits & pieces on July 10, 2008 at 2:52 pm

Here’s a good trio of links which I found to be interesting and relevant today, you might enjoy them too:

1- Can Islam accommodate democracy, and can democracy accommodate Islam? An article by Benjamin Barber.

2- Why Muslim “profiling” by the FBI will disenfranchise Americans and backfire. An article by Juan Cole.

3- Review of Allegra Stratton’s book “Muhajababes,” which is an account of emerging socio-religious trends in the Arab world. A review by Laura Miller, complete with a picture of Haifa Wehbe and a profile of Amr Khaled (who was in Jordan the other day).

لو كنت رباً

In Bits & pieces on May 15, 2008 at 7:18 pm

أنهيت للتو قراءة الغربال لميخائيل نعيمة و فيه قام الأديب بتعريف النقد الأدبي و ممارسته و توضيح أسباب ضعف الرواية و المسرحية العربيتين و لوم “المقلدين” و مدح “المحدثين” و ذلك من جملة ما فعل. لم يستوقفني أي مقطع من هذا الكتاب المتخصص بالنقد و الذي اشتريته بدافع الاستطلاع فقط إلا الأبيات التالية و قد جاءت من ضمن ما كتب نعيمة عن نسيب عريضة و ديوانه الأرواح الحائرة الذي لم يكن قد نشر بعد, حيث وجدتها من أجمل ما قرأت من الشعر معنى و لربما أعجبتني لما فيها من التطاول غير المألوف على الذات الالهية و قلب للموازين فيضحي السيد عبداً و العبد سيداً –جعله الله في ميزان أعمال الشاعر و أبعدنا عن تبعاته الدنيوية و الاخرية. أما و قد استغفرنا الله و لمنا الشاعر على فكره و كفره فلنقرأ الأبيات

لو كنت رباً في السماء عظيما
بجميع أمر الكائنات عليماً

لهبطت من عرشي إلى أرض الشقا
نحو ابن آدم من خلقت قديما

و طرحت نفسي عند موضع رجله
و سجدت ثمَ لوجهه تكريما

و لبثت أغسل بالدموع كلومه
و أزيده بتذللي تعظيما

مستغفراً عن عيشة قسمت له
منذ الخليقة لا تزال جحيما

نسيب عريضة -من ديوان الأرواح الحائرة