the city of Kabul (and Afghanistan in general) is still pretty high on my list of places i want to visit. Unfortunately, the closest place to Kabul that i got to so far is Delhi. Fortunately, however, there is the fabulous internet where Safi Airways ‘the international airline of Afghanistan’ is publishing PDF versions of [...]

yesterday i raced in the 11th edition of the annual Anniek van Hardeveld memorial race (see my pervious reports here and here). this race is held annually on the 4th of may in remembrance of Annick van Hardeveld, a 21 year old courier for the dutch resistance who was shot dead on the 4th of [...]

so the opening evening of IDFA 2009 was a bit of a disappointment (if you do not count new insights regarding the size of mice living in Tuschinski and the esthetic co-dependancies between skimpy dresses and high heels). For some rather dubious reason (must be the general obsession with the fact that the berlin wall [...]

Al Jazeera has launched the AL Jazeera Creative Commons repository that hosts TV quality Al Jazeera footage from Gaza under a Creative Commons Attribution license. This effectively allows all uses of the footage (even by other TV networks) as long as attribution is given to Al Jazeera. As far as i can tell (and they [...]

during my recent trip to Cairo, in we visited [on suggestion of the my barbarian crew] the 6 october (a.k.a yom kippur) war memorial that is situated in Heliopolis just off the road to the international Airport.
The memorial consists of a large circular building housing a 360 degree rotating cyclorama surrounded an [...]

so the Atlantic has another well written article (‘The Things He Carried‘ by Jeffrey Goldberg) that shows the absurdity of the security theater that we endure at the airports (note: that the situation in europe is a bit different, as they do check your boarding pass against ID at the boarding gate), which among other [...]

for some reason i never managed to write about manifesta7 after having visited 3 of the 4 locations on the opening weekend back in mid july. not sure what to say of the overall exhibition but it included a number of really interesting and beautiful artworks. my favorite among them was Tantalum Memorial – Residue, [...]

had a bit of a bad feeling when i was reading that nat was going back to beirut for some festival and that there would be a general strike in beirut on the 7th of may. turns out that my bad feelings were justified. nat is (or at least was, the last thing i had [...]

since about a year i have been coming across reports of sub-saharan migrants getting shot by egyptian border police when attempting to enter Israel from egypt. So far i have refrained from listing them as part of the noborder.org dead count because Israel is not really Europe (although they participate in the UEFA cup and [...]

just finished watching the BBC documentary (from 2004) ‘the power of nightmares – the rise of the politics of fear‘ by Adam Curtis. This three part mini series compares the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. Curtis argues [...]