Arab News: “Thursday’s landmark municipal elections in the Eastern Province gave an opportunity to the country’s minority Shiite population to choose their public representatives.”

Shiites won 5 out of 6 seats at the municipal elections of Hassa, and Sunnis are not so happy about it. I think it was fair.

For the first time, I think Google is wrong. The new AutoLink feature in their toolbar is “anti-Web.” Google has no right to modify my content.

I usually prefer to read fiction in Arabic. However, while I was roaming at Jarir Bookstore, the weird title of this book grabbed my attention. I purchased it out of curiosity. When I started reading, the beginning was unimpressive. I thought, “kids detective story,” this is not my idea of the word “interesting.” But little by little, things change and I started enjoying the novel. The NY Time says:

Mark Haddon’s stark, funny and original first novel, ”The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” is presented as a detective story. But it eschews most of the furnishings of high-literary enterprise as well as the conventions of genre, disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.

I think “I will miss more what I haven’t had the ability to experience than what I have,” too.

It’s totally true that some cities in this country are over-filled with empty mosques. For example, in Riyadh, it is so common to see two mosques in the same block with less than 500 m between them. Meanwhile, Shiites in the eastern side of the country are suffering to death to get permission to build a single mosque.

I voted! For the first time in my life, and for the first time in the history of this country. It was clean, easy and painless. I took couple of photos for my papers. More photos from the campaigns to come later.