I have noticed that several blogs have removed their previous links to mine, which only makes sense I suppose but which now poses this question to me: what now? Where do I go from here? What will be the fate of Tololy’s Box, this place that has been a part of me for so long?

They have the coolest wrapping paper and Japanese kites, hair clips and cute boxes, and they even have calligraphy brushes and wooden toys! Their prices make you pile one useless, but super kawaii, thing upon another — just because you can! Everything has anime-like characters drawn on it with a lot of Japanese everywhere, and the Arabic translations are sure to make you laugh.

The store is in Istiklal Mall, and you should definitely pay it a visit. It’s pretty awesome.

I also have issues with the name Facebook. A face book? What is that? A book where you keep faces as mementos? Do you skin people out of habit? You like faces? Chubby? Long? What?

That, right there, makes my skin crawl. For this reason, I will test this phenomena for a while and then decide if I like it enough to keep using it. We’ll see.

Bustani is a personal friend of mine and a talented writer, as well as a prominent activist. If you’re interested in meeting a ton of lively, eccentric, and engaging characters, come to the book signing tonight and get your copy of Bustani’s book signed by the author himself!

Georgia’s proximity to where my ancestors came from, and indeed the similarities between the situation it finds itself in these days and what they faced, and their being united by the same aggressor, Russia, make me uncomfortable.

This is the same Russia which waged wars against Circassians and forced most of them out of their homeland and on to wander south with their cow- and ox-driven wooden carriages, men, women, and children, who were unable to speak the language of their hosts and who faced difficult times adapting to their new cultures and warding off native hostility. Russia then was Czarist, and now it is a Republic, but little else has changed in its logic of power.

It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have settled there over the past 2,000 years.

Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of which a handful are established literary languages and several others have only a precarious recent literary status, are spoken. Worse for anyone trying to present a coherent narrative, these disparate peoples have very different histories, and only two, the Georgians and Armenians (some would add the Azeris), have a history of statehood consistent enough to be retold as one would retell the history of a West European country.

Source

On why I always bring up my Circassian roots, it is because people always marginalize maternal ancestry in favor of paternal lineage. I find that not only profoundly ignorant, but also an act of grave ingratitude. I may not carry my mother’s name for now, but I carry her genes and her history, and even if Circassians on this side and Arabs on the other don’t like my saying so: I am as much of her as I am of my father. Nay, even more.

1- Typically Twisted: An article in Psychology Today about aberrant individuals and how they perceive their deviations, and how they’re actually not so unusual. By Kathleen McGowan.
2- BitTorrent Speed Tips: The title says it all. By Ernesto.
3- Daniel Dennett’s Autobiography (Part I): The man in his own words. Taken from Richard Dawkins’ website.
4- A nightmare of shattered lives: An artist’s account of The Nakbah Project and her interaction with Palestinians and their sufferings. By Jane Frere.
5- Voices of Victims: A review of the book My Guantanamo Diary; an accidental quest of truth in Guantanamo Bay by a student translator called Mahvish Rukhsana Khan. By Jeffrey Rosen.
6- Let’s get clear about materialism: An eloquent argument about materialism. By Edward Slingerland.

Read all of the above and you will be instantly enlightened.

1- What Happens in Vegas: Crap. Cameron Diaz wears nice dresses in it though. I am envious.

2- Sex and the City: Double crap. This is the quintessential chick-flick type movie which I abhor but enjoy all the same because it really doesn’t demand any thinking on my part. It basically encourages conspicuous consumption and frames it so that it appears to be the omega of every achieved woman’s life. Let’s not forget that it also portrays marriage as the ultimate goal even for the most successful, independent women out there. Bullshit. Even the shoes in the movie are meant to slow us down. Fergie’s song is good though.

3- 27 Dresses: Triple crap. What a sucky movie. Another chick flick but one I did not enjoy at all. Stupid dresses too. Katherine Heigl is not my type.

4- The Incredible Hulk: Good movie! Yay! Cheers for the green giant! I love Edward Norton and Liv Tyler. The movie kinda lost its momentum at the end though. Oh, and it also featured the man-macho woman-fragile theme and shits like that. That was not cool.

5- You Don’t Mess With the Zohan: Hmm. I am a bit puzzled how to review this one. On the one hand, it has a good theme of coexistence between Arabs and Zionists. On the other hand, it has some images of Arabs which I did not like. For example, you have the shouting crazy fanatic armed Arab and then you have the sophisticated and disciplined Zionist who beats the Arab. Also, I think I noticed they claimed Hummus was an Israeli dish. HELL-O? Hummus is very Arab but yeah Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere normally claim Hummus and Falafel are their own. That’s basically stealing cultural heritage, made grave by the conflicts between the two cultures. Unforgivable.

Thus ends my review of these movies. Let’s hope that I will have something better to write about tomorrow.