Archive | March, 2008

‘Earth Day’ Art Competition

The Rotary Club of Adliya are organising an event the returns of which will benefit the building of a specialised Art Centre for the Mentally Challenged Children of Bahrain. This facility will be under the complete control of the the Ministry of Social Development.

We’re looking for sponsors, if you are a business (or individual) who would like to sponsor a category of the competition, then please review the availalbe categories and dig deep into your pocket!

If you are a blogger, you too can contribute by spreading the word. All you need to do is simply copy and paste some code into your page.

The ‘Earth Day’ Art Competition is going to be the biggest event of the Rotary Club of Adliya calendar for this year. It’s going to be held between 7am – 5pm on Friday 21 March 2008 in the Marina Club. ~~Come on over, it should be a fun day for the whole family.~~ Sorry, I’ve been told that this event will only be open to the sponsors, participants, organisers and their families.

Got Talent?

shameless advertising post coming up!

If you do, then we need you!

At Gulf Broadcast we always need new and daring talented people. We’re looking to immediately build a database of freelancers whom we can use in our production, if you would like to be listed and contacted (and well compensated too) please drop me a line; we’re looking for:

voice-over talent, both male and female in different age-groups and languages and accents. If you think you have a nice voice, send us a recording. The format should be MP3 and if your voice has been used in actual video/radio production, then send us a selection from that program for us to listen to and keep in our database;
on-camera talent, both male and female hosts/presenters/interviewers of different age-groups. The person should be presentable and well turned out. Send us the standard photographs to keep on file as well as a full bio and a clip if you have it;
models, both male and female ready to do business, fashion and other shoots; send us the standard photographs to keep on file as well as a full bio and samples of the work you were featured in;
producers who can research and write scripts, track record is required obviously, but if you think you can do it and work under pressure, show us your stuff;
sound technicians, both on-location recordists and post. If you’re applying for post then you’d better know how to drive a Protools rig, else if you want to do the on-location stuff, you’d better be prepared to be dropped from a very high building if the sound is screwed up when it comes to post!
script writers are always welcome too. Show us what you’ve done before and how creative you can be.

In all of the above, please remember that at Gulf Broadcast we’re interested in the corporate video field at the moment only, we don’t really want to do TVCs, feature films and other stuff, so keep that in mind.

So come on, give me a call and let’s rock this town!

Barack is a TERRORIST!

Barack is a TERRORIST!, originally uploaded by malyousif.

We happened across this woman protesting in front of a Starbucks cafe yesterday morning. Her message is interesting; she contends that:

“Barack Hussein promised “change.”

What type of change?

Black Supremacy.

This is worse than September 11, 2001. Black Panther Islam unite to destroy whites & those who side with whites!

Obama is a TERRORIST.”

I don’t agree with her views, but having the opportunity for a lone protestor not to have to get an approval from a government agency which must be presented with five signatories who reside in the area she wishes to protest and having to do so at least 72 hours before the event and is contingent on many other factors is very refreshing.

Nothing charged me up, ever, like being on this trip to Washington, DC and New York (particularly). I am convinced that the more of us Arabs visit this great country and others like it who espouse the values of democracy, the faster we too will adopt them.

It is very hard to explain democracy to people who never experienced it. They will never appreciate it and will almost always revert back to rhetoric that “our way is better”.

Delivered a lecture at Princeton University

At the invitation of Daoud Kuttab, the visiting Ferris Professor of “New Media and the Arab World” at Princeton University, I gave a lecture to his students this morning about the Middle East Human Rights and Freedom of Expression situations from a blogger’s and political activist’s perspective. This is essentially the same presentation I did at RAND last week, but obviously to a different audience.

The talk was well received and generated many insightful questions by the students.

I’ve uploaded a zipped copy of my presentation (pdf 17MB), click the thumbnail to download it.

We’re having a fantastic time here – very busy actually, but very much worth it. We’re enjoying New York tremendously. I’ve been uploading some pictures on the Flickr album whenever I got a chance, I’ll hopefully upload many more once we get back home.