2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

Sultan Center are selling AstroBoy toy robots. The one in the picture above has a hand scanner that reads these special trading cards and in return they change the lights and noise he makes. And its cheap for only KD5!

Lift your car up with new springs and then add 26inch rims and you will end up with a “Hi Riser”. [Link]

Every 108 minutes, the button must be pushed. From the moment the alarm sounds, you will have four minutes to enter the code into the microcomputer processor. [Link]

(you won’t get this unless you watch the tv show Lost)

We usually hear a lot of fire engine sirens outside my office since there is a fire-station 3 buildings away. Today though the sirens sounded really close so I looked outside the window and there were 3 fire trucks outside our office building and a little white smoke coming out of the building across the street. Everyone in my office gathered around the windows excited that they were going to watch the firemen put out the fire live in front of us. 15 minutes later (no bullshit) the firefighters were still downstairs not doing anything. Actually thats not true, there were 2 guys putting on their firemen overalls and boots.. shouldn’t they do that before they get to the fire?

Finally a larger ladder truck arrives and parks in front of the building. 10 minutes later the firemen are still running hoses and setting things up, the little white smoke coming out of the window by now had turned into thick black smoke coming out of many windows and the roof. Many of the employees who had gathered around the windows hoping to see some firefighting action had left out of boredom, it had been 25 minutes since the firemen arrived and not one drop of water had been sprayed onto the fire. 30 minutes after they arrived two firefighters got on the ladder and started spraying through the window. 10 minutes later the fire was put out and they left.

I don’t know if this is normal or what they did was right or wrong but I just find the fact that it took them 30 minutes to start spraying water on a fire that is 2 buildings away from their fire-station a bit too long. Yeah the fire was put out very quickly but after how much damage was done?

Doesn’t look like much… until you realize its made entirley out of Lego! [Link]

Here is a link to three videos of three Lost stars before they were famous. Kate and Sawyer’s videos are funny until you watch Sayid’s video then you are just rolling on the floor laughing! [Link]

Seems there is a Lebanese guy on the show The Apprentice this season. Tarek Saab, a 27-year-old Maronite Catholic and the son of a Lebanese father and an American mother, lived in war-torn Lebanon as a child before he and his family came to the U.S. and moved into public housing projects in New Bedford, Mass. [Link]

Celebrating 8 years of Duke Nukem Forever as ‘vaporware’ [Link]

[source digg]

Come and view the thrill of The Flying Bulls and their air show here in Kuwait on the 23rd in Al-Kout Mall and 24th of March in Marina Mall Crescent at 4pm. Brought to you by Red Bull Energy Drink – It gives you wings!

Here are two slightly graphic car videos. The first one is similar to the one I posted a while back about a stunt gone wrong in Saudi. The second looks like something out of a movie..

Big Hit [RealVideo 748kb]
Intersection [MPG 1.4MB]

Right click and save-as

I guess I could break my diet to give this burger a shot. Check out more pictures after the jump. [Link]

Thanks to Arabesque for pointing it out in the Forum, Marina FM have just relaunched their online website and you can now listen to them online and also check out whats going on in their studio using their live webcam. There is also a section on the site called “Blog” which should turn out to be interesting once they start posting. [Link]

[original source of info grafika]

I am trying to figure out what this Disney poster reminds me of, can someone help me out?

I love hating Wataniya. Have you watched the Wataniya TV commercial where there is a guy walking on a red carpet that keeps rolling open in front of him? Well Kuwaitism found an ad from Taiwan by a company called Mio with the exact same concept. Check it out. [WMV 2.3MB] (right click and save as)

Update: Just uploaded a much higher quality video.

Update 2: Ok, sadly it seems Mio might have copied the ad from Wataniya. I just did a bit of research and I found out the Mio A700 which is the phone advertised in this commercial was released last month but was first announced in October. Wataniya on the other hand released their ad in October, but they must have worked on it atleast a month before. This means that Mio copied the ad from Wataniya.. and managed to do a better production job.

Update 3: Here is the video of the Wataniya TV ad. [WMV 1.14MB]

A couple of days ago I was contacted by Bazaar magazine and was offered a chance to have my own “B-Sides” page in the magazine every month where I could post mini reviews on anything related to Kuwait. At first the idea sounded really interesting, combining blog with print sounded like an excellent opportunity. But the more I thought about it the more I realized.. excellent opportunity for what? What could I gain with this?

Increased Readership
Bazaar prints around 25,000 copies a month while 248AM gets more then 3 times that amount of visitors every month and we are still growing. Bazaar readers would only read around 4 mini reviews by me every month while my blog readers would read at least 4 mini posts by me a day. My sites url would be advertised in that Bazaar page but from those 25,000 readers how many would actually think about checking out my site? When was the last time anyone saw a url in a magazine and then checked it out online.. it happens but just not that often.

Digital to Print
At first this sounded interesting, but then I realized isn’t that a step backward? Isn’t print trying to get online? Shouldn’t Bazaar start thinking about getting online instead? WIRED magazine have a small 2 page section where they print interesting posts from the web but I never liked that section but thats besides the point, WIRED can do whatever they want since their whole Magazine is published for free online anyway.

The Money
The first offer I got was KD20 (yes two and one zero) a month. I calculated the amount of time and effort I would have to put extra every month to have at least 4 mini reviews of something interesting to do with Kuwait and I realized KD20 wouldn’t be worth my trouble at all. Bazaar were nice to say they would consider another amount I had in mind but if they had KD20 in their mind to begin with I doubt they would go that much higher.

The Magazine
Do I even like Bazaar? Not really. I do think its the best locally published magazine but thats because their competition is really crap. I pick up Bazaar once a month so I can skim through it quickly and see if there is anything interesting. I mostly don’t find anything worth reading and the magazine ends up in the trash or left on a food court table. I enjoy reading local blogs a lot more then I enjoy reading Bazaar thats for sure.

Who’s the boss?
When someone suggested to Zaydoun that he should hook up with one of the newspapers as a syndicated writer, Zaydoun replied saying “I am my own editor… I can’t imagine being subjected to deadlines and editorial controls!”.

So taking everything above into consideration, I sent an email back to Bazaar today morning thanking them for their kind offer but that I wasn’t interested. I think I made the right decision.