Eighty One: Year Roman Emperor Titus dies
Eighty One: Number of provinces in Turkey
Eighty One: Number of stanzas in the Tao te Ching
Eighty One: The number of days Saudi blogger Fouad Farhan has been stuck in jail as of today. He is yet to be charged.
- Forty
- Fifty
- Sixty One
- Sixty Two
- Sixty Three
- Sixty […]

A colleague of mine caught my curiosity when she told me of an article she read about a material that has been created which is blacker than black. So I went digging for it. Now before you judge this as just some tech-geek sciencey stuff you’d rather pass on reading, give me a moment to […]

Once in awhile a movie comes along that can be truly aspiring. In the pool of big budget Hollywood musicals that have come out in the past few years, whether its Chicago or Dreamgirls or even the better odds of last year’s Todd Sweeney and August Rush, it’s almost difficult to imagine a musical without […]

There is a social trait in this country to shower people with flattery; it’s known as mujamalat. Most of it is insincere but then again, those being showered are well aware of that and participate in the masquerade. Having not grown up in Jordan, the concept of flattery for flattery’s sake is foreign to me […]

Foreign Policy’s Editor-in-chief, Moisés Naím, wrote an interesting article in The Times the other day about Fidel Castro’s blog. While the article delves into the political and economic future of Cuba, which interested me as a writer and student, there is perhaps a different angle to the story that interested me as a blogger. It […]

At a cost of $816 million, it will take four years to complete at 1,600 meters long and an arch 205 meters high and 667 meters long. At 64 meters wide, the bridge will accommodate 12 lanes of traffic - per hour, in each direction - and a metro line running down its center. The […]

AMMAN (JT) - Around 21 local daily and weekly newspapers on Sunday said they decided to publish a unified statement in protest against the reprinting of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammad in 17 Danish newspapers. In a statement issued yesterday, the newspapers said their response will be professional and objective and constitutes the first […]

In the past few days, trade and professional unions have been doing a great deal of work. First, they denounced the reprinting of the cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) in a Danish newspaper, which is an act that conjures an overwhelming sense of deja vu, calling on the government to sever economic ties with Denmark […]

“The organizers of suicide attacks don’t want to jeopardize their missions by recruiting unreliable people. It may be that some psychologically unstable people want to become suicide bombers, but insurgent organizations strongly prefer their cannons fixed.” - Political Sociologist Robert Brym of the University of Toronto, in a paper published in Social Forces. Brym concluded […]

I’ve been following this story since early February and waiting to see if and when Mourtada would be charged by the Moroccan government for creating a Facebook profile of Morocco’s Crown Prince. I had initially thought he would eventually be let go for such a silly thing, since it wasn’t like he was blogging about […]

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Every honor crime story has something unique about it…
The suspect, who was not identified by officials, reportedly stabbed his 26-year-old sister seven times in the stomach on Tuesday, shortly after signing a guarantee that he would not harm his sibling who was in protective custody, the source said. Immediately after the incident, he went to […]

This officially makes it the longest running blog on Queen Zein Al-Sharaf Street. So to celebrate, I will spare people any required reading or lengthy speeches this time around. Suffice to say, my third year of blogging was by far the coolest, as it was the first year spent on blogging about Jordan while IN […]

I.
Tala, the Black Iris reader who sits across from me at work, was telling me about an interesting social observation she noted a while back. People in Jordan like to notice and know other people, so they can say they saw so-and-so the other day, or that they know so-and-so. For example. People seem to […]

With his latest album, Sleep Through The Static, Jack Johnson proves he can still make solid zen-like, beach-side, laid-back tunes that can either put you to sleep or have you sing along. It is certainly not as great as the milestone of In Between Dreams, and some of the best songs on Sleep actually sound […]

Seventy: Number of souls that went down to Egypt to begin the Hebrew’s Egyptian exile (Genesis 46:27)
Seventy: Approximate year the building of Rome’s Colosseum began.
Seventy: Years of marriage representing the platinum wedding anniversary.
Seventy: The number of days Saudi blogger Fouad Farhan has been stuck in jail as of today. He is yet to be charged.
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