Thanks to hurricane Irene, I’m stuck at home for most of the weekend. So I thought I could use the time to go through the latest dump of US diplomatic cables about Saudi Arabia that was released yesterday. One cable from January 2006 focuses on the cultural and sports programming by the US mission to [...]
Category Archives: Sports
Mas que un equipo
Tuesday, September 7, 2010 – 8:00
At the end of their first month at Columbia J-School, students are expected to produce a short audio slideshow to demonstrate the basic skills they acquired in audio and photo reporting. Below is my slideshow. It is about a football (Americans call it “soccer”) player who immigrated from Ecuador ten years ago. What do you [...]
World Cup broadcast rights, GPYW grilled in Shoura
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 – 22:40
Broadcast rights of major sports events such as the World Cup used to be a hot topic for debate in the Arab World. Not anymore as most people here have grown accustomed to the realities of premium TV in the region. But something in this article from the New York Times caught my attention: “In [...]
Haia Joins the Modern Age
Saturday, May 1, 2010 – 20:38
When did the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Haia) launch their “Precrime Unit,” a la Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report? I must have missed the announcement in the middle of this deafening debate over gender mixing. In a decision that was justified by claiming it was doing the women a favor, the [...]
Watch this
Thursday, April 22, 2010 – 0:40
Okay, so here are three videos that have been making the rounds on the local interwebs lately: This is a commercial for the Saudi teleco giant Mobily. As with most of their ads, it is of high production quality. But that’s not what make it interesting. What makes it interesting is the fact that it [...]
Resign
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 – 10:39
In decent, civilized countries, when officials who come with big promises fail to deliver, they resign (or are forced to resign) out of respect for themselves, the people, and the office. In my country, when officials who come with big promises fail to deliver, they give the middle finger to everyone, silence anyone who dares [...]
Norah and Adela
Friday, June 12, 2009 – 15:59
Norah al-Faiz says she has been misquoted. She does not say she was misquoted on what exactly: her Najdi niqab, introducing sports to girls schools, that she can’t appear on TV without permission, or the news that she started her talk with the reporters by saying “ya mama…” Alas, she said she will no longer [...]
Saudis in Beijing
Friday, August 8, 2008 – 21:00
Saudi Arabia’s Olympic team follow their national flag-bearer Mohammed al-Khuwaildi during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries that does not allow women to take part in the Olympics. Meanwhile, neighboring GCC countries UAE and Bahrain both had female athletes as their flag-bearers in the [...]
Dirty Games
Sunday, June 15, 2008 – 23:19
I never liked the Saudi Arabian Football Federation (SAFF). Not just because of their lame policy of erratically and irrationally sacking one coach after another, but also because the overall performance of our sports teams is simply not comparable to the talent pool we have in this country. I can’t think of any reason for [...]
