Question

Why is it hard to be a better person?

She’s Back!

My favorite character in Grey’s Anatomy is coming back to the show! Addison Montgomery not only has the coolest name in TV, but she is FIERCE and I love her. She left last season to star in a spin off show based on her super cool character but new episodes have not been ordered since the writers’ strike ended. She’s “guest starring” in the next Grey’s Anatomy episode but I seriously hope they keep her for good.

Addison Montgomery. Awesome name.

The World Is Full Of Sick Bastards

Eight-Year-Old Wife Wins Divorce

A YEMENI court has granted a divorce to an eight-year-old girl whose unemployed father forced her into an arranged marriage.

“I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school,” Nojud Mohammed Ali said, after a public hearing in Sanaa’s court of first instance.

Her former husband, 28-year-old Faez Ali Thameur, said he married the child “with her consent and that of her parents” but that he did not object to her divorce petition.

In response to a question from Judge Mohammed al-Qadhi, he acknowledged that the “marriage was consummated, but I did not beat her”.

He did not beat her? WOW! Give the man a medal of honor! I just can’t believe it! HE CONSUMMATED the marriage! Her father justifies himself for forcing her to live with the sick pervert because he was afraid she would get kidnapped like two of his other daughters. You are a father, it is YOUR job to care care of your daughters and your house. She is a CHILD. How can someone in this day and age do this? Is he completely insane? Is his brain made of baked beans? Oh my God, I just want to put him and the pedophile non-beater in a cage of hungry rabid rats. I hope they get their just deserts someday or some place.

The girl’s lawyer, Shadha Nasser, said Nojud’s case was not unique.

“I believe there are thousands of similar cases,” she said. Civil society groups were pressing parliament to set the minimum age for marriage at 18, she said.

If Americans Knew

If Americans Knew is a website I came across a couple of times by chance while reading other Middle Eastern blogs and just watching YouTube. The website is aimed at Americans obviously and hopes to present them with accurate information about the Palestine/Israel issue without any twisting and filtering of the media.

It’s a great website because it doesn’t complicate things. The information is there and is backed up. I think that their best section is the videos page. Apparently they produce and sell short documentaries. What they show on the videos page are the trailers to these documentaries and they are great.

The last video I saw was one called The Easiest Targets. It’s about the treatment women and children get while entering and leaving Israeli territories. The trailer doesn’t show gruesome images or sounds, but they might as well have. Just listening to the women telling their stories and then trying to just slightly pretend to imagine what it must have felt like. By the end of the video, I felt like I had been violated.

This isn’t your usually sobbing woman describing her ordeal, these are strong woman who have found their own way of dealing with that part of their past. I admire them. I’d watch it just for that. Check it out here and view it in whatever format you want.

Also, get a chance to just sit and browse through the website. It’s worth it.

What Is Your Name?

I was thinking about names the other day like many of us do occasionally. What am I going to name my kids? Maybe this or maybe that.. no, no, definitely that. I’m sure.

But I decided I shouldn’t decide! Names are important. It is a huge part of our identity that we cannot change: it is with us even while lying underneath our tombstones. [Unless you had horrible parents who named you 6ag3a (fart), Gafsha (spoon), Zbala (garbage), Goo6i (box), etc.]

I want my kids to be named the name that comes to them, not the name I chose before they even existed! Take my cousin for example. She was going through some rough times in her life around the time she got pregnant. But when the baby finally came, she felt as if all those things didn’t matter. They were very trivial compared to this new life she helped make. That was Salwa, and she was her solace.

My name is Hoda. Although I don’t think the meaning of the name was much of a factor in my naming process, I think my naming story is the funniest I’ve heard. When I was born, my parents had decided on naming me Dalal. However, no one informed my grandmother in Egypt of this so when a phone call confirming my arrival was made, she declared that I would be named after her. Neither of my parents wanted to be the one to tell her that I already had a name so I was renamed to Hoda. That’s a great story and I love telling it.

Notice how my name is spelled in English with an Egyptian pronunciation (letter O). Before I had to do my official government papers and got my high school diploma, I thought about having my name spelled with a U to make it sound Kuwaiti when read in English. But I decided not to. Although it annoyed me a lot at school (and now still) when the teachers would call me ‘HO-DA’ even after telling them it’s actually ‘HOO-DA’ or ‘HU-DA.’ My mom probably spelled it out that way in the hospital and I’m proud my name has a rich flavor of Egyptian essence thanks to the story and the pronunciation in English.

My kids will have a story to their name. I know it.

The Other Species

Almighty God created this Earth and the rest of the eight planets (Pluto is still a planet in my book). He created the Sun and our galaxy. The endless size of the whole universe is so vast that the human mind could not possiblly even come close to even imagining what other galaxies, stars and solar systems lie beyond what our most powerful lenses are capable of seeing.

With all this imense space, why is little planet Earth the only one with a sustained biosphere? Why do many people resist the idea of other intelligent life living in other galaxies? The Human Race is still young. The World Wide Web has just been made available to us just decades and the cure for AIDS has not been discovered yet. We are still far from the technologies of Star Trek and the weaponry of Star Wars.

I believe that there is a great possibility of other civilizations out there. I’m not talking about little green aliens with pasty skin and huge eyes. But maybe even human beings. They could either be advanced or have just come out of an ice age and have not reached our level of development just yet.

I don’t know what the Koran says about this issue but I plan to research this some more when I have free time.

We cannot possibly be alone.

Whatever - On This and That

+ I’m back in the US of A.

+ WTF?! Pluto is not a planet? What is up with that?!

+ I saw a guy on the bus today that could soooo easily be Elijah Wood’s little brother. So, he doesn’t look exactly like him but he has all the features. Big eyes, long lashes, same mouth, same chin, and thick eyebrows. He had brown hair and green eyes. He also was skinny and so childlike. Elijah isn’t that WOW for me but his fake little brother is hot .

+ Has anyone been to Video Al Arqam yet?

+ This website has an article for each La Liga game of the week (in Spanish). But in each article page, there’s a video available for download that shows the highlights of the game (usually, the link is under the image). However, the commentary on the video is also in Spanish. I used that website all of last season. I have yet to try the Norweigan WebTV that I talked about in my previous post because the Real Madrid game was on Sunday and I moved in here on that same day .

+ My History of Rock ‘n’ Roll teacher said “bastard” in his first lecture. Haha