Bird Fight!
In the garden earlier today – I love the shot!
Have a lovely weekend my friends.
Code Quotes
With only two days remaining to the big day, August 31st, on which we will be opening the book to receive signatures and pledges not to engage in hate speech in our websites and encourage others not to do so as well, we have received the full support of all the political societies, MPs and the government for the Code, all of whom promised to lend us the support in order to ensure that this effort becomes successful, for a better Bahrain.
The launch will take place at the Gulf Hotel’s Conference Centre from 7.30pm to 11pm on August 31st. Please come and lend your support.
We will also be announcing the winning Code logo design and present the winner with the top prize and everyone who participated in this competition with an appreciation certificate. The designs submitted were top class and I will proudly show it on my websites.
Here is a snippet of some leaders in the society offering their unstinting support for the Code.
Shame – 20% of Bahrainis are under the poverty line
High Costs Aid benefiting 98,000 Bahrainis press announcement
In a country that is awash with multi-billion dollar projects and where these kinds of projects are announced almost on a daily basis, we get a front page snippet advising us that 98,000 individuals in Bahrain – most of them probably representing a family each – will be receiving a monthly stipend of BD50 (US$132) from the government as an aid to allay the effects of sky-rocketing prices of basic goods and services in this country.
Can you believe this? What is this country coming to? Isn’t the government responsible to every one of its citizens to provide them with adequate housing and jobs as is enshrined in the constitution? What does it mean when we are faced with pictures such as this in the national papers?
Bahraini woman looking through the trash in the mid-day heat
Is this picture not a resounding notice of the abject failure of the government in its various duties? And are these alms they are giving fully one fifth of our Bahraini population – most of them indigenous I should think – enough to raise their standard of living and allow them to surmount the poverty line they have been living under?
Things like this and the various “makramahs” or Royal Gifts, although very welcome I am sure, should never be the modus operandi of a government. It surely should enshrine and inculcate basic rights to its citizens and be prepared to be held responsible for failures such as this. Giving out a stipend such as this should not absolve it of its basic responsibilities.
Smell the music!
Pink Floyd Animals album cover
To me, one thing that is very special about their music which makes it very personal to me is that I even associated smells to their various songs! I don’t know if certain music or songs engender the same response in you too, but I can tell you with many of their songs I get transported back to the college dorm and to my room in my dad’s house through a visual and an olfactory journey too!
The famous Pink Floyd balloon pig
I must also confess that when I get the house to myself – which is very very rare – I blast out Money or Comfortably Numb or especially Shine on Your Crazy Diamond through the stereo or the computer, recline, close my eyes, and get transported back to distant memories, locales and odours.
Do you have the same experiences? Or am I the only weird one in these here parts?
Shain
I am about this close to ditching the crap they call Zain – which I have now only started calling Shain – and throwing my lot with the devil.
What the bloody hell is happening with this company? Since they changed their “brand identity” they’ve gone almost completely down the toilet, at least as far as their wireless Internet service is concerned. It keeps dropping out and has become really unreliable. Their support is no great shakes either, there is no one on support after 10pm and before 8am, the speed crawls rather than walks and the whole of yesterday and this morning I couldn’t get connected at home.
It is almost daily that I call their tech support and tell them to reset my equipment from their end because they just go belly up and I could not get connected. This is stupid, absolutely diabolical and the service is a hell of a lot worse than I anticipated.
Because of the constant frustration with their service, it is really not worth staying with them.
If they think that “rebranding” just means changing their logo and colours and ignoring quality of service, then they might as well call themselves “Shain”, in this case, it is actually much more appropriate.
“shain” is Arabic for bad – against “zain” which means good.