2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

If you’ve watched 24 past season 5 click on continue.

Watch the video, its crazy! [Link]

Thats what I said, Fillet-O-Fish [YouTube]

Last night I passed by the French restaurant Fauchon in Laila Gallery for dinner. Laila Gallery isn’t one of the best malls on that street so having a lush restaurant like Fauchon in it is kind of strange. From what I heard though is that the owner of Laila Gallery is the same owner as Fauchon so thats why he opened it there.

I will start by giving a quick rundown of all the food we ordered. For starters we had two two dishes, one involved salmon while the other involved lobster. I then had a wild mushroom soup while Nat visited the salad bar. For the main course I had the beef fondue while Nat had the hamour and lobster dish. Finally for desert we chose 2 pieces of cake from their desert tray.

First the negatives. The starters were really forgettable, I would not order them the next time I visit. They tasted fine but fine wasn’t what I was expecting at a place like Fauchon. The soup was ok but I’ve had better versions at Nino’s and Lorenzo. Nat also ordered a mango juice but it tasted like water had been diluted with it which made it really nasty.

So after a disappointing start to dinner I was worried our main courses would also turn out to be flops but luckily that didn’t happen. My dish, the beef fondue was mouthwatering. The presentation of my plate looked very neat, it came with one large bowl filled with cubed beef and potatoes alongside three smaller bowls filled with different sauces for me to dip the beef into. The flavor was very strong and the quantity was very filling, I definitely made the right choice with my main course which by the way was difficult to choose because so many things on the menu looked good. Nat enjoyed her lobster but found the hamour pretty bland but in the end it kind of balanced out. Finally when done our desert arrived, I had the chocolate mousse cake while Nat had the same except with a raspberry mix. As expected since chocolate and cakes are their specialty, desert was delightful.

The interior of place was very stylish with silver curtains and pink lighting. Our waiter was very friendly and helpful and later in the evening the manager even came and spoke to us to make sure everything was going fine. The whole evening would have been perfect if it wasn’t for the disastrous start. The prices of the dishes varied from overpriced to decent. The lobster dish we had for starters was around KD5 which I think wasn’t worth it but on the other hand my main course cost around KD6 which I think was very acceptable. The bill in the end came out to KD32 but this is the maximum I think it could reach. Now that I know what to order I can easily bring the bill down to under KD20 the next time. For the final score I am going to give them a 3.5 out of 5. If the starters were good or if I hadn’t had the starters at all the score would have been a 4.

They look really sweet… [Link]

[YouTube]

And while I am at it.. here is Flona [YouTube]

2008 seems really far away… [Link]

Remember I posted about the vintage Matchbox car that was selling for $300 on eBay? Well I checked the status of the auction today and it turns out the car ended up selling for $1,385! [Link]

I love reading Jeremy Clarkson’s reviews because I think he’s hilarious and his review on the crappy tiny G-Wiz car has to be the funniest one yet. Start reading from the 16th paragraph, where it says “And now let us move on to what happens…” [Link]

Although there are a ton of shawerma places near my house Dodo is the place I frequent the most. The staff are friendly and quick and they also have a wide range of sandwiches to choose from. Personally my favorite sandwich at Dodo is their chicken shawerma.

I don’t know how accurate this story is but I remember being told that the owner of Dodo was also the owner of Barakat, my favorite shawerma place back in the day when they were open in the old Salmiya near Fay (opposite Hardees). I think its true because one of the employees of Barakat now works at Dodo but it could be just a big coincidence. Dodo is a Lebanese restaurant that serves Lebanese style of food ranging from falafel to burgers to shawermas. One of the advantages of having shawerma at a Lebanese place is the garlic, and the garlic at Dodo is pretty damn good. As I’ve said before, there are only three things in a shawerma, the bread, the chicken and the garlic. The bread is easy to get right so no worries there. The chicken although the taste of it is important, even if you mess up you can cover up your tracks with good garlic since the garlic can cover the taste of the chicken. Now I am not saying there is a problem with the chicken at Dodo, on the contrary, the chicken is really good but the garlic is where its all at.

The size of the shawerma is pretty small and I usually have 3 to fill me up sometimes with a side order of their fries. The price of each shawerma is 300 fils which is cheap and I think with the quality of their shawerma they could easily price it at 350 fils and no one would complain especially when their most recent competitor, Vila Fayrouz Express charges 750 fils for theirs. All is not perfect though, Dodo suffers from lack of consistency which pisses me off. Sometimes I feel the chicken is undercooked and I hate it when that happens but luckily it doesn’t happen often. Final score is 4 out of 5. Dodo is located near La Baguette on Baghdad Street.

This is a documentary that was uploaded to YouTube by NiceQ8i on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The documentary has tons and tons of footage taken after the war showing all the devastation that took place. Even if you don’t have time to view it all at least try to skim through it.

Documentary part 1
Documentary part 2
Documentary part 3
Documentary part 4
Documentary part 5

Image taken from GulfWar

I don’t know what they’re called, I just call it the egg chair. Gallery Vanlian opened up (finally) at The Avenues and they are selling the egg chair for KD450. It’s not really comfortable to sit in but looks pretty cool. They have some pretty random stuff there my favorite being the Bodum kitchenware.

I just finished watching two seasons of the TV show Carnivàle and it turned out to be really weird.. but in a good way. I love HBO they have the coolest shows. I started watching this show not knowing what to expect, all I knew was that it was based in the early 1930’s during the great depression and follows a traveling carnival. The show turned out to be a lot more then that and features some of the strangest characters you are bound to see in a show. I heard that the show is currently playing on Orbit but if you haven’t watched it from the first episode I would get it on DVD instead. Not one of my top 5 favorite shows ever but easily fits into my top 10. [Link]

Last month I posted about how Bazaar used an illustration for the cover of their dining guide without crediting the illustrator, without paying for the image and without permission from the artist. They replied thanking me for finding the artist and that they contacted him and were going to reimburse him.

Well they did contact him but the amount they offered to pay the artist was just $200. Considering that rights managed images start at a $1000 and upwards then you could imagine how low $200 is. Anyway the original artist had this to say about the whole incident:

I have been invited to comment the case with Bazaar copying an image that once was created by me. The image was used without my permission. I was therefore never compensated financially and for good reasons I assume that I was never mentioned in the credit line. I was made aware of the unauthorized usage before Bazaar contacted me.

When they contacted me they offered to compensate me financially. I am sure they found that the compensation was fair but I have a different opinion. In fact we are in a position where we don’t seem to be able to reach an agreement. I have therefore decided that it is not worth to take this any further due to the cost and time that I would have to spend on this.

I have also decided that I will not accept money that Bazaar offers me since that would be accepting the terms of how they have used my image. So case is closed.

I think it is vital to defend the copyright law for many different reasons. In most countries it is seen as self-evident that you shouldn’t use an image without paying for the copyright, but from what I can tell by following the debate on this website I understand that Q8 might not be one of those countries. The sad thing is that in countries where the copyright law is not taken seriously the originator has little or no chance at all to protect his work.

I am a freelance illustrator and my only source of income is the images I create. I have a family to support and bills to pay. If I manufactured, let’s say bikes and someone took one of my bikes form the warehouse and used it without telling me, how would you characterize that? Should the unauthorized use of images be treated differently?

I have been featured on design blogs all over the world. I take it that most of the people who are publishing my work there are very young. But they all have something in common – they contact me before or shortly after publishing my images and very often they write “Copyright Bo Lundberg” . What is it that they understand and that some publishers don’t?

Another aspect is that when I create an image it is commissioned by a client. They are paying for the usage of the images. To illustrate what can happen when people copy my images I would like to give an example. Once I had a call from a publisher in the US that I had done more than 80 illustrations for. They were extremely upset with me since they had found all my illustrations in another book printed in Asia and now they were contemplating on suing me. What had happened was that someone just ripped my images from the original book and created a whole new book, obviously without informing me. I managed to reason with the original client but as you might understand it was quite a situation to have been copied and then facing a possible trial.

I wish all the designers in Q8 good luck in your efforts. And to those who commission work I would just like to ask you to think twice before using an image without authorization. In the long run – who wants to work as an illustrator or photographer if you are not compensated and protected by copyright law?

Bo Lundberg

The reason I think we have a big problem here is because Bazaar is one of the biggest and most respected magazines in Kuwait. If they aren’t going to abide by copyright laws and set an example to the smaller publishers who will? They might as well do what Campus Cruise did and just take pictures off flickr and put them on the cover.

[via]