Search: “cop”

What losers! [Link]

So you see the above Think Pink advert and you don’t think much but then you see the below Think Fruit advert and it’s like wait a second!

The funny part is they are both located next to each other. The Think Fruit is for Masafi while the Think Pink is for Sweet’N Low.

Thanks Anas!

I was surfing the web last week at work when I fell upon a visual that looked familiar. I was sure that I had seen it before and only when I got home I realized where. The cover on the left is from Bazaar’s 2006 dining guide. The artwork on the right was originally designed and illustrated by a designer called Bo Lundberg.

I emailed Bo Lundberg to find out if he had given Bazaar permission to use his design for their cover and according to him he didn’t, the visual was copied from him and Bazaar never contacted him.

Check out Bo Lundberg’s work by visiting his website. [Link]

I was at Gulf Bank today morning cashing a cheque when I noticed Gulf Bank’s Freedom Account logo. Its nearly a duplicate of MTC’s older distributors logo.

Someone just sent me this link which shows a Kuwaiti cop dancing with a bottle of whisky in his hand. Notice how many topics involving alcohol this week? It must be a sign. [Video]

update: here is a link to another older video of a girl dressed in a copy uniform and dancing. [Link]

update 2: it seems Iraqi police can do it better (thanks moayad) [Video]

Found this cool video of Neo (from the Matrix) fighting against Robocop. [Video] It kinda reminds me of Batman: Dead End which is Batman fighting against Alien and Predator. [Video]

I am looking for “The Copy Book”. If by any chance someone has a copy they want to sell then please leave a comment below. ISBN: 2880465931

I always wanted to know how David Copperfield did his trick and I just found a site that shows you how. Watch this video first of his famous flying trick [Video] then check out this site for details on how he did it. [Link]

[source digg]

This is a cool video showing a cop getting attacked by a dog (looks like a Rottweiler) and then his partner uses a taser to get the dog to back off. I am surprised the taser didn’t kill it. [Link]

This is just a preview of what might end up being on Miskan tonight. On my way back from a meeting with a client I witnessed a police SUV run a car off the road. They seemed very pissed at the driver. Ofcourse I had my camera with me and I took pictures. If nothing better comes along I will use one of those pictures for my picture of the day.

Tonight Kuwait will get to witness a lunar eclipse, that’s when the moon passes into the earth’s shadow. During the deepest part of the eclipse the moon turns a reddish color, and that’s exactly what we’ll be able to catch tonight.

You can catch the lunar eclipse from anywhere in Kuwait, but if you’d rather watch it with a crowd, there are a couple of viewing events happening tonight that I know of.

Kuwait University
The Kuwait University Faculty of Sciences Physics Club is hosting a viewing on campus (North Park). They’ll have activities lined up and 45 telescopes for the public to use. If you’ve got your own telescope, there’s also a private observation area where you can set up. @physcku @ikarustechnolog

Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Centre
If you don’t feel like heading to Kuwait University, ASCC is also hosting a viewing tonight. They’ll have an outdoor setup by the Space Museum with telescopes also available for everyone to use. @ascckw

The Kuwait University event is free, while the ASCC one needs a museum entry ticket. The eclipse will take place from 6:28PM until 11:55PM tonight.

Bas Ya Bahar (or The Cruel Sea in English) is a Kuwaiti film directed by pioneering filmmaker Khalid Al Siddiq and released in 1971. It’s considered to be the first feature-length motion picture made in Kuwait, and also one of the first from the Gulf region.

I recently got my hands on what I think are two important pieces tied to the movie, the original film poster and the international film brochure, so I figured it was the right time to do a post about it again (previous post here).

The film is set in Kuwait before the discovery of oil, when people lived in poverty, surviving on small-scale farming and fishing. Their only hope of changing fate came from the sea, where pearl divers risked everything for the chance of finding a life-changing pearl. The story follows a young man ashamed of his family’s poverty and his inability to win over the family of the girl he loves. Determined to change that, he becomes a pearl diver, returning to the same sea that left his father crippled and half-blind.

Bas Ya Bahar starred the then-young, now legendary actors Hayat Al Fahad, Mohammed Al Mansour, and Saad Al Faraj. The film was selected as the Kuwaiti entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 45th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.

I purchased the poster from a guy who watched the movie at a film festival in Algeria back in 1975. He got the poster from Khalid after the show and kept it stored away until I bought it from him. What struck me most about the poster were the colors. Everything I’d seen related to the film was always in black and white, so the neon green and pink instantly caught my attention. The Brochure is also in great quality and is in three languages, English, Arabic and French.

I took a few photos of the poster and scanned the brochure since I don’t think many copies are still around today and so I wanted to share them. I also reached out to @badshaiji to see if he had any photos in his collection, and he did. The black and white shots are from him and were taken at the film premiere at Cinema Al Andalus on 03/27/71.

Khalid Al Siddiq passed away in 2021 at the age of 76. If you want to watch the film, it’s on YouTube and I’ve embedded it below.

I’ve uploaded all the photos in their original resolution to my Flickr account, you can check them all here.

I’m currently still on vacation in LA but trying to get back into the habit of posting so figured I’d write about my experience using Waymo. Waymo for those of you who don’t know is exactly like Uber, except the cars are driverless. It’s really cool in theory and in reality it’s even cooler.

It’s not available yet in all of Los Angeles, but it was available in the downtown area which is where I decided to try it out. I had my rental parked in one area of downtown but needed to go to another part but didn’t want to take my car. So I called a Waymo and it came and picked me up.

When the car first arrives you need to unlock the doors through the app, that’s how the car knows it’s you or you know you got the right Waymo. Once you get in you are required to put your seatbelts on, generally I wouldn’t want to but in this case because its a driverless car and this whole thing is still in testing it makes sense to do so. The car obviously knew where I was going and once I clicked on start driving on the rear screen the car took off. I had my Spotify connected in the Waymo app so once we started moving it started playing my music. I could control the music from the rear screen which also had other commands like if I wanted the car to pull over to drop me off early.

The ride was actually pretty smooth, and the car smelled fresh and was comfortable. They use modified Jaguar electric cars and because there isn’t a driver, both front seats are pushed forward so the rear passengers get a lot of legroom. It’s a very weird and futuristic feeling being in a car without a driver. Like it’s hard to believe we are in that point of time where such a thing is possible.

The only negative thing was the fact I had to wait 20 minutes to get a Waymo. They don’t have a lot of cars yet so it’s understandable. It’s actually because of this 20 minute wait I ended up finding out that Paddy’s Pub from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was near where I was and got to pass by it before the cab came.

The ride fare was cheaper than Uber and the overall experience much better. Not sure if the Waymo car can leave me a rating but if I could rate it I would have given it a 5 star.

LA as a whole I generally find behind in tech compared to Europe, but this trip feels the other way around, I think mostly because of the driverless cars, the fact everyone seems to have a Cyber Truck here and also because of robots that go around delivering food to people (which are super cute btw).

If you’ve come across a photo booth in Kuwait, maybe at an event or mall, it was probably a Calling Marilyn booth. Calling Marilyn was born when popular studio photographer Salma Alessa brought her studio’s signature high-end aesthetic and attention to detail to a wider audience. A luxe photo booth where people can have fun and capture moments with friends turned out to be the perfect way to share her photography style beyond the studio.

Not only do the photos look great, but the booths themselves are just as impressive. Each one has a unique design inspired by its environment and is created locally. No two are alike, and all are built in collaboration with local artisans and creatives. They also like thinking outside the box, literally. Last year they turned a vintage Cadillac convertible into a booth just for fun, and people had a blast with it.

Another cool aspect is that the photo booths don’t store or save digital copies. It brings back the old school magic of physical copies, while also being a privacy feature. The photos you print will be the only copies that exist.

If you want to check out one of their public booths, you can find them in various spots around Kuwait, including 360 Mall, Assima, Al Andalus, Al Thuraya, Khiran Mall, Marina Mall, and more.

Check them out @callingmarilyn

Yesterday, TEC announced that Winter Wonderland is getting the largest indoor roller coaster in the world called the Höllenblitz. Technically it’s not the largest indoor roller coaster in the world, it’s the largest indoor roller coaster in the world that is portable, in the dark, and doesn’t contain any loops. But all of that doesn’t sound as catchy and wouldn’t have fit in my headline anyway.

The Höllenblitz was designed and built by the Renoldi family, who first released the world’s largest transportable indoor roller coaster at a fair in Frankfurt back in 1992. The ride was called Magic Mountain but was redesigned and renamed Star World in 1998, inspired by Star Wars. Years later, Klaus Renoldi Jr. watched Indiana Jones and was so impressed that he decided to transform Star World into an Indiana Jones–themed roller coaster, launching it as the Höllenblitz in 2007.

The roller coaster is an impressive 860 meters long and was inspired by the mine cart scene in Indiana Jones. Its structure resembles a rocky mountain, complete with a 30-meter waterfall, suspension bridges, fog, fire, and rotating gondolas.

Here’s an interesting bit of roller coaster trivia. Did you know that Shaab Park once had an ultra-rare, one-of-a-kind ride called the Spiral Coaster? I’ve posted about it previously here, it was a pipeline coaster, meaning the train rode between the tracks instead of above them like traditional coasters. The concept was meant to be the next big thing in roller coasters and was even featured in a National Geographic special while the concept was being tested.

The Spiral Coaster was marked as standing but not operational from 2005 until 2017 in the online roller coaster database. It had closed for maintenance in 2005 but never reopened. When Shaab Park was demolished in 2017, the coaster disappeared and the online roller coaster community lost track of it. Over the years, there have been numerous posts and even videos investigating its fate, but nobody seems to know what actually happened to it.