Thought Clouds
The Digital Bender

I was having a conversation tonight during the sahrah at a friend's house about the validity of the position that the Government of Jordan has taken regarding the War on Lebanon. A comment was made during that conversation that sparked a thought. Who is to blame? My friend said that the Jordanian people don't follow rules and get politically carried away easily and as a result should not be allowed to demonstrate and should be controlled *these words are me putting politely*. When I look around, the people of Jordan do behave rather impolitely towards each other and do not obey the rules. And the question here is who is to blame? We are certainly not stupid by evidence of the academic achievements and intuitive solutions made by Jordanian companies and Jordanian students ...etc. So IQ is not really it. I blame both the people and the government. I blame the government because the law doesn't seem to apply to everyone, and not all of the law is applied. To explain this, here...

I am new to the blogging communities like toot and Jordan planet. I need you all to tell me if that's "normal". I traveled to Amman about 10 days ago and as I am staying in temp places, I couldn't find a steady net connection and was out of touch for a while. I was completely convinced that everyone was like me and the people around me. Meaning, tuned-in to news channels all day, watching the news and discussing it with friends and exploring potential events and outcomes. I was also completely convinced that everyone in Jordan Planet and iToot and the few select bloggers -- of whom I have RSS feeds placed in my favorites, would be blogging almost exclusively about the war. Very few are, and some are still writing about stuff that is too trivial to be mentioned in even the most boring days, when watching grass grow may be considered viable entertainment. What is glaringly obvious (especially with Jordanian bloggers) is the near total absence of any mention of the shame...

Probably driving too fast , originally uploaded by LotusGem . Returning to Jordan after a whole year in Doha. This was take while I was driving my car on the long long open roads of Saudi. I drove at around the 200Km/h mark for a while, and was probably doing 160Km/h when I took this. It is stupid to both drive this fast, and at the same time look through an SLR camera to take a photo. In my defence, I was excited about my car since it was the first time I get to drive it this fast, and I was excited about my Camera since I only had it for two months and it was brilliant. So there.

As I was driving back home from a long day at work and running around town, I was hoping for a peaceful drive home and a peaceful and quiet night, but I knew I was not very lucky that day. In the cross roads near my home, a car accident was slowing traffic. It was a white Lancer with a damaged front that didn't look like it was going anywhere. Now you are assuming that the traffic jam and the disgust induced by watching a fine piece of engineering-hardwork destroyed, you would assume that this bothered me, but you would be wrong. The driver was standing outside the car cleaning his son's bloody face with a piece of tissue, who was seated on the backside of the car. The son's face was smeared in blood and seems to have injured some part of his face. This is a horrible sight, especially if you have children. There was no car seat! But it wasn't that which saddened me and made me unable to swallow the lump in my throat. It was what the kid was doing. He wasn't screami...