Persiflage & Paroxysm

There is an arms race on today in Lebanon and it has nothing to do with Katyushas, Raad or Zilzal rockets, unless arms manufacturers have started churning out four wheel drive vehicles. The race is on for who can drive the biggest, meanest, widest, tallest, fattest, street-legal bully-wagon on the roads today. The choices out there can be dizzying, American, Japanese, Chinese, German, British, a GMC, a Hummer, a Range Rover, or Land Cruiser; the only thing they have in common is often the buyer’s motives. While the rest of the civilized world is shifting away from driving big-n-tall, gas guzzling ‘Earth killers’, if only because gasoline is so expensive; the Lebanese, whose country is a net importer of fuel, are abandoning their sane sedans in favor of insanely gaudy trucks more suited for Wadi-bashing and the desert sands than Beirut’s narrow streets and alley ways. The four-by-four maniac in Lebanon is an audacious, daring and fool hardy adventurer on the loose on our roads. Like arm...

I found that you can eat out in Lebanon, stick to a budget and still eat healthy and stay relatively safe from food poisoning. Just order a healthy meal from one of the reputable diet centers that deliver. Although they do tend to give themselves an aura of exclusivity they are not as out of reach budget wise as you might think. If you are fat and desperate enough to consider surgery and have actually started thinking of ways to pay for that life altering procedure (been there, considered it, no thank you) stop and think of what you are putting in your mouth. Your food can be healthy, low in calories (relatively) and most importantly tasty. After all, who are we kidding, eating is a pleasure not mere survival and the right combination of food can give us just enough energy to function, release the right set of chemicals in our brains to make us happy and quell those hunger pangs. I have been trying one of these places, its not by far the biggest one , but its not the smallest either, i...

Here’s one of mine I just thought of: “Aim for the stars, shoot at the moon” Below a few examples of mixed metaphors I found on the blog: therussler.tripod.com - You must have ears like an eagle. Sam Gerard in "The Fugitive" - You need more sugar to get your brain circulating. Dave Beck - You have to dance to a different drum. Laura Schlessinger - You can take that to the bank and smoke it. Stephen J. Cannell - You can lead a gift horse to water but you can't look him in the mouth. Gary Nijman - You buttered your bread, now sleep in it! Jiminy Cricket - While we are ingesting the author's valuable insights, we may also be swallowing his blind spots. Robert K. Oglesby - When life throws you curve balls, make lemonade. Earle Dukes Roberts III - We need to have photographic ears. Ken_Blanchard - We need to get a vacuum cleaner and hose him down. David Beck - They'll never buy the cow if they can get the eggs for free. Anonymous - The early bird gathers no moss. Darin...

My country is a strange perplexing place that can prove mentally taxing for the foreigner visiting for the first time. In fact if you don’t mind the smell of diesel fumes up your nostril 24/7 and you think the heat, humidity and filthy language used on the roads as quaint and colorful, then at the very least you would have to be stumped by the very strange way we do things around here. The strange thing about Lebanon is that we never throw anything out. The moment you see an old clattering, gas-guzzling, smoke-emitting, dinosaur Mercedes Benz with a feather attached to the bonnet you instantly know you are in Lebanon, home of the red-robin-Benz-tit a rare and endangered bird brain with a driving license, heaven help us! Another thing we never seem to throw out: laws, not that we ever actually use them. You would think that a law baring women from wearing shorts in public would have been revoked due to global warming at least if for no other reason. A French General decided in 1941 to i...

While one side in Lebanon, it is said, threatens civil peace with its weapons arsenal, the other threatens Lebanon’s new government with international and regional isolation and vows to bring it down. From behind the skirts of the international community, they snipe with bile-and-venom-laden words at the new Prime Minister and his Cabinet. Former PM Fouad Siniora personally delivered what the ‘forteeners’ hoped would be a coup de grace that would finish off Hezbolah, Aoun and Mikati politically in one fell swoop. Instead, the forteeners came off as uncharacteristically aggressive, even violent, while the long awaited government is harshly and unjustly attacked over the form of words. The fact is the Mikati Government's ministerial statement is sane and conciliatory and the forteeners' strong objections to it and the new government makes them look like sore loosers. The fact is the democratic wheels turned and they lost, now they are in opposition. A few tracts from the minister...

First thing worth noting: The Lebanese are so convinced of their own perfection, physical, spiritual, intellectual, of the perfection of their unassailable ideas, or the rightness of their attitudes towards others and life in general and of the accuracy of the knowledge they hold, that they are completely closed of to learning or evolving. They are convinced that no one has anything of value to teach them, mostly because their memories of the learning process is of a hellish gauntlet in which they are assaulted by knowledge rather than flooded by its light. They are for the most part abused by teachers and schools into hating learning. It’s the way we are taught in our schools that is partly to blame. Example: if I learn to read musical notes and can recognize the sound each scribble on a page makes, I can write complex pieces of music that others can in turn read and play on an instrument or sing flawlessly at first glance of the text. If on the other hand I do not know how to read mu...