The first ever Santa’s Park is coming to Achrafieh this year and bringing with it a week full of fun-filled activities for kids. The event will take place at the St. Nicolas garden on Charles Malek’s avenue in Achrafieh. Everyone is invited to join and make this Christmas a Merry one!

Here’s the full program as posted on Santa’s Park official Facebook page.

Every day:
Meet Santa in his house, craft workshops, face painting, hair styling, cupcakes decoration, Santa Theater with cartoons, radio-controlled boats, kindergarten with slides and swings, 5D simulator, paintball, tir à l’arc, climbing Christmas tree, scientific show every hour, a parade at 5pm and a kermesse!

Friday 21
Opening Day

Saturday 22:
- Christmas Karaoke
- Cooking workshop
- Marching Band

Sunday 23:
- Elf Dancers (Hip Hop)
- Martial Arts Show

Wednesday 26:
- 10m “Bûche de Noêl” to be cut in pieces and distributed among kids at 6pm

Saturday 29:
- Christmas Karaoke and balloon twisting

Sunday 30:
- Extreme Day: Rappel, Tyrolienne, Climbing Wall
- Story Telling

The event is organized by URBAN ART for FONDATION BACHIR GEMAYEL with the collaboration of Joué Club.

To quit or not to quit Instagram?

Instragram just updated their new terms of service today, and the fine print, while not shocking, certainly is concerning especially if you use the service to show off your work. Instagram has stated that starting on Jan. 16 the service will be able to use and sell your images for advertising without your knowledge and without offering compensation leaving users with the short end of the stick. [Link]

You can read more about it [Here].

Great remix by Jade. Check out the rest of the Who Killed Bruce Lee tracks on [SoundCloud]

Walaw? Is it so damn hard to spell Christmas properly?

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Samah is the guy on the right, next to him is Rana and at the bottom of the picture Toni

When they tell you that Lebanon is like a small village, where everyone knows everyone, sometimes it’s not that far from the truth. Back when I was still in school, I used to spend the summer at Champville playing football/basketball/ping pong with my cousins and friends but as the years passed by and I started working, I stopped seeing most of them.

The reason I am telling this story is because I got an email from Toom Extra few months back asking me if I wanted to take part in a photoshoot for their second book’s casting. I had heard of Toom Extra before but didn’t know much about them, so I decided to go through their Facebook page and blog to see what they do and I really enjoyed reading their posts. However, the surprise was when I found out one of their founding members is Samah, a friend I used to play football with at Champville more than 10 years ago.

Needless to say, I accepted to take part in their book casting, even though I’ve never done this before, as I believe they are doing a great job and are spreading awareness on several important topics in their own artistic, intelligent and humoristic way. There will be plenty of other bloggers featured in Toom Extra’s second book, which you can check out on Wednesday December 19, during the signing of their 2nd book at Radio Beirut in Mar Mikhail.

See you there!

[YouTube]

Onlivery is a new Lebanese app developed by ELIXIR that allows you to order food online from over 55 restaurants. I was a bit skeptical about trying the service at first but it turned out to be real easy and practical. Upon downloading it, you get both an email and an SMS (Since SMSes can take forever to come in Lebanon) with a code to activate your account. Once registered, you have to enter a valid mailing address and a list of restaurants that deliver to this address will automatically show under “Restaurants”. Of course you can enter as many addresses as you want and every time you select one, you are redirected to the corresponding restaurants based on the location.

Upon placing your order, there’s a cool feature that allows you to customize your dish/salad/sandwich/burger or whatever you are having. For example if you don’t like onions or pickles in your sandwiches, you can tick them off. You can also specify before submitting your order if you need cash change. I noticed there’s a delivery charge of 1500LL for most of the restaurants I chose but I am not sure if it applies to all. The only drawback I found was that you can’t place many orders from different restaurants at once but I am sure they’ll work on improving it if the app picks up and the list of restaurants grows bigger.

Onlivery is free of charge and available for iOS and Android devices. [iOS] [Android]

Miss Universe 2012 is taking place on the 19th of December at 8pm at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino and Miss Lebanon Rina Chibani seems to be one of the hot favorites to win the title. The Preliminaries took place two days ago and from what I’ve read on several websites and blogs, Rina should easily make it into the last 15 (The 16th Semi-Finalist will be selected by “Fan Vote”).

I have to say she’s the most beautiful Miss Lebanon we’ve had in years, but she doesn’t look well prepared and is very hesitant in her interviews. I hope she’s preparing herself well for the final round because she’s truly gorgeous.

Here are links to some of the articles I found on Miss Universe 2012 talking about Rina Chibani and/or showing pictures of her.

Beauty Pageant Minute–Miss Universe 2012 Preliminary Competition–Evening Gowns–My Top 15 Best List!

Vote for your favourite in the Miss Universe Swimsuit Competition

Miss Lebanon at Miss Universe 2012 Pictures

Analyzing Ms. Universe with Alvin Sebetero

Miss Universe 2012 Hot Top Favorites

Lebanese Beach Soccer player Haitham Fattal

Lebanon is the first team from the Middle East to take part in the Copa Lagos cup and has already made his presence felt by defeating 6-times Beach Soccer European Champions Portugal 5-4. Lebanon had lost its opening game to hosts Nigeria 7-6.

As stated in Copa Lagos’ website, Lebanon is an emerging force in Beach Soccer as they finished 4th at the Asian games in June 2012 and topped the qualifying group by winning all 3 games, including an impressive 8-3 victory over the UAE.

For those of you who don’t know about Copa Lagos, here’s a brief overview:

Copa Lagos Beach Soccer, is the first ever international beach soccer event to take place in Nigeria and in all Sub-Saharan Africa.

Founded in 2011, Copa Lagos is organised under the scope of Beach Soccer Worldwide (BSWW) World Tour and will take place every year in December, in Lagos, Nigeria. The competition is played in a Round-Robin format (League Format), allowing in this way the opportunity for each team to prove themselves against all participants during three days of competition.

Copa Lagos is broadcasted in 21 international channels (Eurosport, Al-Jazeera, Globo, ESPN, Sky Sport, Canal Plus, FOX Sports, Supersport, among others) and in one national partner channel AIT (African Independent Television). Copa Lagos also aims to have a strategic role in development of beach soccer in Nigeria. In this context each edition of the competition will offer Beach Soccer Clinics and certified Refereeing and Coaching workshops.

You can check out more pictures of both games [Here] and [Here].

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Slippery road all all the way to San Antonio’s church.

According to Al Jadeed’s article, Minister of Interior Marwan Charbel dived himself to light up the tree in the Jounieh bay. I don’t really see the point behind this as no one will be able to see the tree except those who dive but it’s still a fun idea.

One of the coolest features that I’ve been wanting to try on the LG Cinema 3D TV is the Dual Play. I’ve been playing PS3 games for years on a split screen against my two brothers and it really sucks even if you have a 60 inch TV. As much as you try not to cheat, there’s always someone eyeballing your part of the screen to check your location, specially in shooting games like Call of Duty.

Well all of that has changed with LG’s 3D Dual Play where each player sees a full-screen image simply by wearing the Special Dual Play glasses. I thought at first that the 3D glasses you get with the TV are the same ones you use for the Dual Play but as it turns out, there are different ones. I asked LG if they could provide me with the glasses and they were kind enough to do so. In order to understand why they are different and how LG’s passive Dual Play mode works, I did some research and posted below an excerpt from a website that explained it best in my opinion.

3D is achieved by tricking your brain into seeing “depth”. In order to see depth from a 3D TV, each eye has to have a slightly different image. Just like if you were to alternate closing one eye at a time, the image you see with your right eye, will be slightly different that what you saw with your left eye. This is the basis of how your brain is “tricked” into see “depth”. LG achieves this with their polarized TV panel and 3D glasses. Each lens of the polarized glasses has built-in filters that block lines of resolution; normally the left will block the even and the right the odd lines. When Dual Play is activated you’ll see two full screen images on one screen with the naked eye. While viewing through the special glasses made by LG for Dual Play (essentially two left lens in one pair and two right lens in the other pair). One of the images shown will use all even lines of resolution and the other will use all odd lines of resolution. Yielding full screen game play for everyone. All LG Cinema 3D LED with Smart TV have this feature built-in. Each player can see the full game from their own perspective. [Source] [Video]

Dual Play is very easy to set up as you can turn it on and off from the TV’s remote control. There’s one thing I noticed though is that you need to be sitting on the same level as the TV to get an optimal picture. If you are looking up or down at the screen, you might see a bit from the other player’s screen but they are not visible enough to annoy you. I uploaded a small video while playing Black Ops II to show you the different image each Dual Play glass is showing.

Last but not least, the great thing about Dual Play is that it works on any passive 3D TV, which means that you can use it with any console game that supports a split-screen mode, not just a few selected games. I think that’s pretty cool as more people will be able to enjoy this feature.

I know many of you are waiting for the competition to kick off to see who’s gonna win this awesome TV. I will be announcing it on Monday when I post the full review. Until then, I will be enjoying Dual Play Gaming and testing other features.

[High-Res] [Source: Executive Magazine]

Nothing to be proud of.

via Gino

I went up to Faraya today to check out few chalets for New Year’s eve and see if we can ski or not yet. There’s snow everywhere but not enough to open the slopes. I guess we should wait for another storm to come.

Syrian national Fathi Jaber al-Salatin, who was accused of killing Myriam al-Ashqar in November 2011, was sentenced to death on Friday. Al-Ashqar, 28, was found dead and soaked in blood in the outskirts of Sahel Alma on November 22, 2011. [Link]

I understand that what he did to Myriam is terrible, and I cannot imagine what her family and friends must have felt, but like I’ve said on several occasions, I would never opt for the death penalty as a punishment.

May she R.I.P.