with every fruitless search for words to fill the silence where sober tongues once lost in drunken chatter now run dry; like a farmer i wait for spring to bear new fruit

In Jordan there are two noticeable yet subtle dialects, those of us who say “Gal” and those who say “2al”. For the non-Arab reader both words mean the same thing: “said”. The ‘G’ and the ’2′ represent the letter ‘Qaf’ in Arabic but is pronounced differently. The first one: “gal” sounds exactly like it’s read [...]

I’ve been wondering lately about the future of blogging; overloading my mind with questions. What will it look like years from now? Will it fade away like a cyber fad? Will the bubble burst like Dot Coms of the late 90′s? Will everyone online have a blog and will we get sick of it? Will [...]

“[S]hooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren’t ‘collateral damage’ in a war against well-armed communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is [...]

US researchers estimate that 655,000 Iraqis, or around one in 40 of the Iraq population, have died as a result of the 2003 invasion of their country, according to a study to be published Thursday by the British journal The Lancet. [source]

After several years of playing host to QIZ’s (qualified industrial zones) the government is finally catching up on a much needed dose of reality: the QIZs have created thousands of jobs that are virtually useless since a very low number of Jordanians are even employed. So the government has decided to “Jordanise” the workforce by [...]

So one day a Tafeeli and his wife are joking around when suddenly he throws her out the window. He looks out and sees her on the ground, back broken, moaning, and yells “what’s the matter, you can’t take a joke?” Every country has a town, or a city, or a region with a people [...]

I’ve decided to start featuring a poll on my blog mainly because I was inspired by a recent post I published here about the Abu-Mahjoob polls. The poll is obviously not meant to be scientific and its purpose is not to act as the basis of any groundbreaking research. It’s there mainly to amuse me [...]