The referee forgot his cards in the dressing room so he brandished an invisible card! You don’t get to see that everyday.

Ok so I got part of it right, the video of the dancing at the airport turned out to be a commercial but unlike I had predicted, it’s not a commercial for Plus Brokers but instead a commercial for the Beirut Airport Duty free. Now that the commercial is out, I think I kinda prefer the leaked video instead. [YouTube]

via Demaville

Don’t get your hopes up but whomever is in charge of Lebanon.com obviously doesn’t want to let go of Juicy Burger in his restaurants page. [Link]

Here’s amateur footage of the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Japan today. Tsunami alerts have been issued in more than 10 countries. [Article] [Video]

We’ve been warned about future earthquakes in Lebanon and I can only imagine the devastation a similar strength earthquake would cause in Lebanon. Look at the amount of damage Japan received and their infrastructure and buildings are designed to withstand earthquakes. [Earthquake-Lebanon]

I was recently told that the company behind the park meters in Lebanon is going to upgrade their website to include an e-payment system which would allow you to pay online. [Link]

That would be a great feature as it would save us the time and effort to go to a Libanpost office in case we don’t have a card to pay with, and by card I mean the prepaid park meter card as credit cards don’t work even though their website says it should. [Link]

This however does not solve the problem of scanning and photoshopping the legal parking stubs that we discussed previously.

One would expect a store opening up in the most expensive street in Achrafieh to at least spell check their copy.

Carlos Slim remained the world’s richest person for a second year with estimated assets of $74 billion, according to Forbes magazine’s annual global ranking of billionaires. [Link]

Saad Hariri ranked #595 with 2$ Billion, Najib Mikati ranked #409 with 2.8$ Billion.

You can check out the list of billionaires in Lebanon here. [Link]

It seems an ad agency in Beirut created a commercial similar to the British T-Mobile advert (Lifes For Sharing) in which a group of people suddenly started dancing in a train station except in our case the dancing takes place at the airport. The commercial is for the company Plus Brokers (which you can clearly see their banner through out the video). I personally prefer the T-Mobile version, first because of the fact they came up with the idea first (although they were inspired by Improv Everywhere’s Frozen Grand Central Station) and secondly because the T-Mobile version looked more real. The dancing in the T-Mobile commercial took place at a crowded station and it looked as if people randomly started joining but with the Beirut Airport version the airport is empty and it then just looks like a group of dancers came in and started dancing. Even though it’s still fun to watch. [YouTube]

Below is the original T-Mobile ad for comparison.

[YouTube]

You have to read this story, it’s horrible. A Lebanese couple who were traveling from Istanbul to Beirut via MEA witnessed an act of racism on board the plane. A male Lebanese passenger complained to a MEA flight attendant that he did not want to sit next to a black man. You read right, he did not want to sit next to a black man, I mean wtf? If that wasn’t bad enough what happened next was even worse, instead of the MEA flight attendant asking the Lebanese guy to go back to his seat and shut the fuck up, she instead forced the black man to change his seat (probably sent him to the back of the bus plane).

While the whole world is moving forward around us we’re stuck with dial up speed internet, no electricity, the same politicians bickering over and over and to top it all off we’re racist. According to the pilot who spoke to the couple this incident was nothing compared to the amount of racism they witness on board flights from Dubai and Africa.

I find this very depressing…

Here is the blog that has the post on this incident [Link]
I found out about this story from the Lebanese Anti Racism Movement blog [Here]

BeirutNightLife have posted pictures of my favorite event of the year, actually my second favorite since my first favorite is the K-lynn lingerie fashion show in Faraya. You can visit their site to check out the pictures and read the article [Here]

Or because I am super nice, I’ve put all 217 photos in one 20MB zip file and you can download that from [Here]

“I’m apologizing to the people of Japan for this political uneasiness,” Maehara said at a Tokyo news conference.

Under Japanese law, politicians cannot accept any money from foreigners. The money given to Maehara – 50,000 yen ($600) – came from a lifelong friend. [Source]

Some ministers in Lebanon might think that’s some joke. I mean come on resigning over $600? “Yotro2lo kam malyoun la te7riz”.

Looks like we have a new Jeita Grotto! [Link]

A friend of mine told me today that he read somewhere in the news that Ziad Baroud’s Citroen C2V, or deux chevaux vapeur, (The one in the picture) failed the mecanique test due to its high Carbon rate.

Minister Baroud promised to fix the problem and retest it.

Thanks Houss!

Found this picture on a friends blog and I thought it was pretty cool. [Link]

We apologize for this mistake Mr. Joseph