The Raping of one of Ramallah's Main Roads Part II

A few months back, we presented this. After 3 months, the 'finished' road wasn't even coated with a new layer of asphalt or anything. The peeps in charge did heed our plea for wider sidewalks, and they inserted a new lengthy concrete island (what ARE they called anyway?) in the middle of the street with pretty things like flowers and trees growing out of it. A few weeks ago, the machines have been unleashed with full force on the main street of Ramallah, Shari3 Rukab. And eyesore hardly does it any justification. It is pure monstrosity. Tourists, beware. Postpone your Ramallah excursions for a later time, perhaps in another three months?

Now imagine when it rains. That mud will be sticking to your shoes from here until next winter, sure as anything.

More on Farcical Forgiveness Day

Sunday October 10, 2010 was proclaimed to be Forgiveness Day in Palestine, but having to wake up at 8:00am on this cherished day off from the university didn’t seem all that forgiving! Having no idea what our friend signed us up for , we horse-backed to the Manara (in Ramallah) groggy brained and still very much asleep. You see, for this task, we'd get more community hours, and since graduation doesn't seem that far off any more, we figured the smart thing to do was to get a move on.

Having reached the meeting tent, Bedouin style, we found ourselves attacked and bombarded with questions, information, fliers and stickers. “What’s your name?”, “Are you here for community service?”, “Here pass these out…and these”, and “If anyone asks you what this is for say____” and this is the part where we zoned out…I mean can you blame us? We're not exactly early risers. Moving on, we did as we were told and found ourselves finished just in time to head back home into our feathered beds, or so we thought. Our happiness dissolved under a cloud of tragedy…Forgiveness Day had not yet begun. Our next duty was to walk from the Manara to the Legislative Council building where we would stand and wait for the one and only pompous 'man of the people' Salam Fayyad to come out and share with us and the media words of love, care and encouragement.
While trudging, the forgiveness mob howled 1 through 10 in Arabic followed up by English…we would of never guessed we had phenomenal bilinguals in Palestine.
While standing, waiting for his collaborative self to greet us, we were handed white balloons and flowers which were to be flown and thrown in the air once the speech was completed and 1 through 10 counted for the last time.

Finally the idiot arrived, and what can we say about the speech that was given? Well, nothing of interest really. Only that Sir Fayyad made a vow to officially proclaim 10/10 as Forgiveness Day in Palestine the next time he was chillin with his buddies at Stars and Bucks!

We're that melodramatic when working on weekends. Stop the eye rolling!

And no, it has not passed our notice that this idiotic proclamation of Forgiveness Day 'coincided' with Israel's new law of the loyalty oath. Israel is busy making life more difficult for Palestinians, while the quisling regime is actively diverting the Palestinians' attention from important political and apartheid decisions made against them. Forgive your neighbors, and your insolent children for not becoming the famous doctors you wanted them to be. No need to be so exclusive, forgive Israel for occupying your land for 60 plus years. In fact, just forget about them, and the house demolitions, and the evictions, and the settlement building, and the checkpoints, and all the psychological trauma that comes with being gun-controlled, and all of their racist apartheid laws. Salam Fayyad, we eagerly await your promised 2011 Palestinian state. Wait, we mean the 2011 Collaborator state.

Not All About Food :)

What May Have Passed our Radar..

Summer. That word alone is suggestive of an excellent and infallible excuse, pardoning anyone from doing anything. We're in a state of denial; we just cannot accept that adults, no matter how young they are, still have responsibilites year round without savoring a three month summer holiday. Unfortunately, we have fallen into the roles of bums and lazybones and shirked our duties to family, school, this pet, and ourselves.

• Family: We have mastered the act of zoning out around our kin. And we feel terrible not telling our begetters we love them twice a day. We may also have lost our patience and gone on a tirade our early teenage selves would have been proud of.
• School: Summer semester is over and done with, and we feel entitled to dedicating the few days left doing the most unindustrious acts ever. We have serious issues with starting the fall semester barely two weeks after the end of the summer one. Boo hoo we won't mature and accept the order of life. Birzeit Uni is the only university to start August 17th. The rest of the schools and universities are starting September 15th, after Ramadan and Eid. As a show of our defiance, we will stubbornly remain homebound for a week. Such model students we are.
• Blog: No comment. It pains us to neglect our pet. We will strive to become better people, pinky promise.
• Ourselves: Something to do with showering infrequently and not brushing our teeth and revelling in excess body hair. We've resembled Mole.

With that out of the way, here are a few points of notice we feel compelled to bring to attention.


رمضان كريم / Ramadan kareem! A week and a day has passed of the holy month and now we feel like it is the time to properly pay um..salutations to it. We are not late in this matter at all. No, we won't hide behind the old "it's the Shiites' fault!" because they celebrate the beginning of Ramadan a day before or a day after the Sunnis, not eight days after. Instead, this year we chose to follow a new authority. Stand up, renowed crackhead, Muammer Gaddafi. The King of African Kings is used to doing things his own way, and nothing, not even religious laws and enforcements is gonna stop him. So yeah, to the world he announced Ramadan to be Wednesday, the 11th of August, but since that day Libya has been in media and geographical lock-down, meaning no one can get in and no one can get out. Our previous positions as Lady Chiefs of the Royal Female Guard makes us an exception and filtered intelligence has confirmed that Gaddafi has started fasting today. Or payed someone to fast for him. Gaddafi, yeah!




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POP IV. That is, poetry of Palestine. We have attended the previous three POP nights as our archives will tell you, but this month we missed out due to amnesia combined with reasons stated above. August, Friday the 6th was the date and the venue was at the ever quaint Cafe La Vie, whose owner, Saleh Totah, is a real sweetheart for agreeing to host this event three times now, free of charge. Fellow students performed their poetry, which was the main reason behind this event--building a community of poets and writers who are not afraid to share their work. Emile Saba, one of the performers

HEAT WAVE. Never, in our remarkably semi-normal lives have we ever felt like helpless bald dying mortal phoenixes coughing up heat and struggling feebly against the heavy hot atmosphere. Temperatures have reached a soaring 45 degrees Celcius. Unlike the gulf countries, air conditioning systems are not a prerequisite for survival because summers here are what the season ideally is all about: bearable weather, ice cream, and sweating once a day and not on a 24 hour basis. However, this period saw summer as a prepatory course for spending time in hellfire> "Thou shalt suffereth the yellow star's wrath" (Apocalypse 6:22). People are going crazy-we've seen one too many person molting in the street. Word going around the sweltering coffee shops (one business that never goes out) and verandas is that some sort of explosion in the sun is the reason for this heat wave. Our favorite brain-fried explanation is that there was a tsunami in an area of the sun. If that were so (whatever a sun explosion/tsunami means) then shouldn't the whole world right now be burned to a toasty brown? Or has some world power perfected its space technological funk gadgets to specifically target the Middle East? If only we had England's fine rule of excusing, nay forbidding everyone from work and school at the slightest abnormal increase in temperatures.

BEAUTY QUEEN. Warning: Picture below not suitable for those yet to hit puberty. Remember Rima Hot Stuff Fakih, the Lebanese American who became the first Arab to win the Miss USA pageant? There was a big fuss from Arabs with one crazy half ass-kissing and praising her for finally portraying Arabs in an American positive outlook (hey, turns out we don't all own gas stations and have in-bred children) while the other crazy side denounced her as a skank, a slut, and a shameless Americanized hussy with no ties to Islam, despite Rima asserting herself as a Muslim. The rational few correctly dismissed both views because, for gawd's sake yall, she's just a beauty queen! As a candidate for Miss Universe, Rima decided to pose backless for a racy photoshoot instead of baring her breasts to the world. Her reason: "For me, I didn't want to do the front for many reasons and one of them being respect. I'm Arab, I'm Muslim, and I didn't want to disappoint too many people."

In a world where political correctness and thoughtlessness are found in every angle of life, we are to say the least, deeply and profoundly affected. Rima, we are in awe and in envy of your deep consideration.