#12- Land of the Late

I pride myself on my punctuality. Time is valuable, you either use it or lose it, and I usually prefer using it...  But hold on there common sense and logic! Lebanon's got something else in mind! If you're Lebanese you'll know what I mean, but if you're not I'll just be blunt about it: the people of Lebanon just don't get time. They don't! It is a bizarre and unusual enigma that baffles them to this day.

If I had a penny for every gig I've been to where they couldn't start till an hour after the planned time because nobody's shown up yet, I would design an air pressure-based gun that fires pennies and just run amok. I've always said that if I myself had an event, I'd just let it happen according to schedule, regardless of who shows up on time, but then again, you'd be the one at loss here. You're at the mercy of the public, so all you can do is wait... and reload your Penny Pistol 9000.

#11- Food

"Aywa!" is Arabic for "Yeah!"...

Picasso's "La Bouteille de Vin"... Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans"... for decades, art and food have gone hand in hand, and the tradition lives on!

Speaking of food for the mind: I dished some of it out last week for regional tech and geek culture website The Tech-Ticker. Check out their interview with me right HERE.

#10- Same Thing We Do Every Night

Sin el Fil is this area in Beirut with two (that I know of) exhibition spaces that are always hosting fine events: Beirut Art Center and Art Lounge. No, my family has no relation to the area...

Cartoons are awesome, and I love them. No need for me to say more!

#9- Grandkids

"Teta" is what we call our grannies in Lebanon.

What would Lebanon be without its slow internet? A shithole with unlimited bandwidth, that's what. But I digress... You know the thing about piracy is, it's sort of your only resort when the thing you want isn't available for purchase where you are, in this case Lebanon.

Here we see Tanya (and her grandkids) downloading  an anime, as many otakus here do. For me it's actually music, not comics as you'd assume, though I do download my fair share of those every now and then. I'm a MAJOR audiophile (have you gone to the "Theme Jingle" page yet? You probably should).

I used to buy originals and some bootlegs for 5,000 L.L., until I learned how to use torrents and realized that the bootleg guy was basically just downloading the stuff from the very place I have open access to and go to fool around on for hours on end: the internet! In addition to that realization, my tastes just kept getting more diverse and more obscure, and I knew there was no choice left but to take matters into my own cyber-hands.

I think teaching people to be more web-savvy could potentially help them see beyond the commercial crap on the shelves and find what they like out there, whether it's music, TV series, films, whatever. I did go back to physical purchases a while back when I got into vinyl, because some of that stuff has not even been digitized, but that was a phase...

I've doomed any potential "Joura" book sales, but it's for the greater good... yup, just doin' my duty as a... oh goddammit.

#8- Beast

Ah video games... I used to be a gamer myself back in the day. I mainly stuck to some fun platformers, anything in the Tony Hawk series, and an assortment of more interesting titles *cough* "DESTROY ALL HUMANS" FOR THE PS2 *cough*.

But I grew out of that a couple years back, just as online gaming was becoming the norm with the Xbox Live being a thing and all... I do however hear fascinating tales from friends, family, and people online about how online gaming is basically young kids calling you "noobfag" and endless trolling.

But there's this thing you might be familiar with if you yourself are an online gamer (or a LoL player particularly): Brazilians suck at video games. I didn't come up with that! Just type in "brazilians video games" in Google and tell me what the suggested searches are. Why? How? Do I even need to know? People just seem to have a hard time playing with Brazilians for whatever reason.

Sadly I can't go too deep into this issue, because I'm not that big a gamer after all, but if you ever hook up the ol' PS2, I will show you what a real combo looks like son, and I'm not just talking kickflips here...