Two Double-Oh Seven!!!

When you're feeling really giddy

The club is playing Mr. Diddy

Selling ecstacy so sweet.

You can party

You can Cha-Cha

You can stay at home

With Mama

Just make sure you move your feet.

Happy New Year one and all.

Lots of love - Hamza

R.I.P

It's official. Saddam Hussein's reign in Iraq is effectively finito. Kaput. Over. There's no other way to describe my grief except with song. So I sing,

Some people wait a lifetime, for a moment like this,
I can't believe it's happening to me.....

Unless you're a fan of American Idol that will make as much sense to you as Tori Amos's lyrics would to a fourth grader (or an adult for that matter). Not everyone is happy about Saddam's demise though. CNN, Fox and BBC are raking in the Nielsen ratings through commentary choked with emotion while people from Human Rights organizations crawl out of whatever sewer they usually inhabit, blinking their mole-like eyes in the harsh spotlight and making statements which will be forgotten way before New Year's eve.

Personally, I don't think anyone's death should be celebrated. Saddam isn't exactly Adolf Hitler but that's like saying margarine isn't exactly butter. Periodically spread either one on a roasting turkey and the sizzling skin will taste just as good. Mmmm..turkey.

Id Mubarak

It's Eid all around the world. A day when Osama Bin Laden can hang up his explosive coat and spend the day with the wife and kids. Am I implying that all Moslems are terrorists? Certainly not! Although, in my experience, everyone from my grandma-cum-Arabic-instructor to my 10th grade Islam teacher could scare the shit out of Mr. T or the whole A team. I pity the fool who tries to mess with them.

Eid means different things to different people. I speak for everyone at home when I say for us its basically about the chicken. Here's looking at you KFC. You haven't seen real profits until you've opened up an outlet in the Maldives on Eid. Salaam y'all. Hamza - out.

Like A Monkey With A Miniature Cymbal

And now for no apparent reason, as the premier Maldivian with his finger on the pulse of good music, I bring you three songs I'll find hard to let go when this year is over (but probably will).

*p.s - this shit is da bomb (thank you English education).


Hot Chip - Over and Over (Electro funk for funky electricians!)




Nerina Pallot - Sophia (Classical music in the 21st Century)




Snow Patrol With Martha Wainwright - Set Fire To The Third Bar (Like Kate Bush but less annoying)

Miss USA Acts Like Sex Object. Shocks No One.

The funny thing about TV news is that you can't really choose what to watch. Unless you've got TiVO, which I don't. So all I hear about these days is beauty pageant winners going around conducting themselves in less than ladylike fashion (for a less obscure description see this!).

Let me start by saying, what the frack is wrong with Donald Trump (apart from his hair, his way of speaking...ad nauseum ad infinitum) and Rosie O'Donnell (clever examples followed by smart-alecky Latin too many to list in parantheses) for that matter? So a beauty contestant who spends 90% of her life in bikinis or less flashed some skin in a club. So she does drugs in a country where even soccer moms have cabinets full of pills labeled "to sleep", "to do laundry" and "to avoid sex with husband", among others. Big whoop! And don't even get me started on Ms. Nevada and Miss USA's makeout sessions with women. What's the big deal? That's what Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell probably call a Saturday night. Is kissing a member of the same sex up there on the same level as snorting coke now? (Then I know a couple of cheerleaders at my University who should get life without bail).

**Note: More importantly why do all the douchebags with their red caps worn back to front get all the beauty queens (see pictures to get what I'm talking about)? Why don't you answer that Stephen Hawking you paraplegic bastard!?!?

Begging To Differ

I don't usually do stream-of-consciousness crap on my blog. Mainly because I think it's a particularly lame and pretentious cross-section of society who engage in it. But I can't seem to sleep tonight and boring myself to death might actually help me with my insomnia. So here goes.

A certain comment on my sister nisa's blog got me thinking about the ways in which people define themselves and how that's changed over time. Let's take me for example (and I am quite a specimen if I do say so myself). An uber-liberal. Not quite the Nazi of liberals (because I don't believe in forcing my views on other people) but fanatically left-wing to a fault. If I may be so bold as to borrow the phraseology of your average cookie-cutter 'conservative' I and other people like myself might be best described as baby-killers, fag-lovers, mollycoddlers of criminals and junkies, which translates into pro choice, pro gay rights, anti-capital-punishment believers in the freedom to smoke weed. (The last one is pretty much the same but the rest have a certain zing in right-wing-speak you must agree.)

Although I believe the whole black-and-white-ism of the existence of a clear line separating the political left and the right is a false dichotomy, the truth is that people seem to be increasingly liable to espouse ideas which they don't believe just to belong to either camp. There are folks taking part in setting fire to abortion clinics just because they're afraid that by not doing so they allow their entire moral universe to crumble. And it's not always as militant as the example that I chose. The point is that an either/or mentality is beginning to take hold of society.

On the less arsonist side, liberals had the distinction of being 'cool' around the 60s to the 80s because they were a minority acting against a conservative establishment. But now liberals are the establishment because everyone and their grandmother believes in justice, freedom and equality (not to mention the Frankenstein's monster which is political correctness). It's the religious "fundamentalists" and haters in general with their naysaying and constraints who are the persecuted minority now. So they are 'cool'-er by default.

It may be that the mistake liberals made was to try to stifle the right-wingers' voices completely. I guess no point of view should be totally ignored. If someone thinks you're hacking away at the ties that bind people in a community just by getting a tattoo, it's important to stop and ask them why they think so instead of talking down to them from your secularist, individualist, free-thinking pedestal. And I plead guilty to making that mistake several times.

The part about liberals having the bigger army is true about the world at large but where I come from (home sweet home), confused conservative right-wingers are still in control so let's bring on the orgies and smoking crack in public because we've got a status quo to overturn if we want to catch up with the rest of the world.

If nobody wants to hear me go on about stuff like this again please send me some Ambien or even horse-tranquilizer. I really need to sleep.

Going Up In Smoke

What is? My dream of returning to the Maldives and building the biggest and most hedonistic nocturnal hotspot since The Viper Room that's what. Because I will not live anywhere where I can't afford my life-threatening habits in. It's bad enough that bungee jumping and extreme skateboarding isn't available (and I would be just as concerned if I was into them) but raising the price of tobacco? That's the last straw! Thirty fucking Rufiyaa for a twenty-pack of Marlboro reds?!?! Excuse my French but eloquence goes out the window when you know that that's just a tentative price until the market reaches equilibrium. That's still about 7 dollars less than the price of it here in the UK (and I would stick it to the Queen but damn you just can't hate someone who has a matching hat for all her outfits. That's style baby!). But, as god is my witness, the day that a daily dose of nicotine costs more than 50 Rufiyaa a pack, is the day that I join the inevitable bloodbath that follows. ¡Viva el fumar!

So much to say to a certain someone but it's already been said and no one has said it better than Pink. She might have been talking to George W. Bush but I'm sure she meant us to use her message (legally or not) to confront all of our demons. So here goes. Dear Mr. President,....