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Today is the last day of the Zain TV commercial shoot. It’s also my tenth night here in Lebanon but also my last, tomorrow I am finally coming back to Kuwait. This commercial is turning out great. (Posted from my Nokia e61i)

The good stuff:
– It’s pretty
– Excellent browser
– Everyone wants to touch your iphone
– It has an iPod built in
– Touch screen is amazing
– Decent camera
– It’s cheap, KD95 for 4GB and KD130 for 8GB (with shipping to Kuwait) prices the iPhone very competitively to other regular phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson

The bad stuff:
– Once you have an iPhone you realize its just a phone
– If you have a lot of numbers its a real pain finding a contact
– Everyone wants to touch your iphone
– Typing on the iPhone is a joke
– Battery life is a bigger joke, barely lasts a day with below average use
– Adding a ringtone is a hassle
– Majority of headphones won’t work with it
– Not as useful or fun without a wireless internet or GPRS connection
– You have a lot of basic phone features missing like forwarding an SMS, turning off the predictive dictionary, different phone profiles, searching for contacts etc.. etc.. etc..

Would I recommend it?
If you aren’t a heavy phone user yes.
If you don’t send a lot of messages also yes.
For everyone else, no.

Final score, 3.5 out of 5. Nat loves it although she has issues with it. I personally could never have an iPhone as my primary phone.

Update: I now use the iPhone as my primary phone and can’t imagine life without it. The software 2.0 brought with it the app store which has made the iphone a lot more interesting for me.

Remember the Dove ad of the woman morphing from something not very pretty to something very hot? Well this is the follow-up campaign. [YouTube]

I don’t have any paintings or pictures on my walls back home in Kuwait but when I get back I will have my first one. I got the picture above enlarged and will frame it and hang it up on my wall once I get back. Its a beautiful photo taken in the 80’s during the war in Lebanon. The picture was taken by Roger Moukarzel who also signed the photo for me. I love war photos and this one is probably as good as they come. if I wasn’t working in advertising I would most probably be a war photographer. Its something I’ve always wanted to do.

A few weeks ago a new shawerma place opened up called Mr Subs. I got emails from readers of the blog telling me about it and some friends also recommended it to me. What made this shawerma place special is that it was owned by Samir Saeed, the owner of Mr Baker.

The place is located in Jabriya, over looking the 4th Ring Road near where Mr Baker is. I passed by last week for dinner and it wasn’t that hard to find, you take the first right after Hardees, then another right so that you are driving in the direction of the 4th Ring Road and at the end of the street take a left to find Mr Subs on your left hand side.

Mr Subs serve a variety of stuff other than shawerma but I wasn’t interested in them. I ordered two chicken shawermas and was told I had a choice of 3 different bread to choose from. I chose the regular Arabic bread, the other two choices were a burger bun like bread and a bread that had olives in it or something. First thing that struck me about the place is how clean it was. It’s probably the cleanest shawerma place I have ever seen, the area around the shawerma grills were spotless which really impressed me. Sadly that was the most impressive thing about the place.

After picking up my two shawermas I went back to the car and started munching on them. I wasn’t very impressed. The shawermas reminded me a lot of the Kurdo shawermas which I am not a fan of. Its what I call commercial shawerma and its mostly because of the sauce they use. Notice I said sauce not garlic because thats basically what both Mr Subs and Kurdo use. Its a consumer friendly replacement to regular garlic most shawerma places use. The sauce which probably does use a bit of garlic doesn’t taste like garlic, instead it tastes more like mayonnaise which I can’t stand. Its also very liquidi which makes the shawerma feel greasy.

Another problem I had with the shawermas were the price, starting from 600 fils per shawerma its not cheap. The cheapest shawerma they have is the one that comes in Arabic bread, the other two choices of bread add 100 or 200 fils more to the price. At 600 fils a shawerma is also puts it really close in the price range of the Villa Fayrouz Express shawerma which tastes a lot better and is of much better quality. Oh and while I was waiting for my shawermas at Mr Subs I saw them pre grilling their burgers. They were grilling their burgers and then placing them in a container so that if someone ordered a burger they could just place it on the grill and heat it up. Although the place is really clean I didn’t like the idea they were pre-grilling their burgers. Anyway for the final score I decided to give their shawermas a 3 out of 5.

I went and watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry tonight at the movies and I really wasn’t expecting it to be good. All the recent Adam Sandler movies have sucked, sucked in comparison to his best two movies, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmor. Still, I decided to watch this movie because of Kevin James from The King of Queens and I am glad I ended up watching this movie because its easily the funniest movie I’ve watched this year. This is actually the funniest Adam Sandler movie since Happy Gilmor.

First lets get something out of the way, you get to see Jessica Biel in her underwear in this movie and she is hot!

Now back to the guys in this movie and there are a ton of them. First you have the two main stars which are Adam Sandler and Kevin James. Then you have a few main supporting actors including Dan Aykroyd, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Nicholas Turturro and Nick Swardson. There are also kameo cameo appearances by David Spade, Rob Schnider and Rob Corddry from the TV show The Winner. The movie is just packed to the brim with all these comedians so its really non stop laughter from the beginning till the end. It’s easily the funniest movie I have watched in a really really long time and it’s going to get a full five out of five from me. I was going to give it a 4.5 because I would have loved to have seen more of David Spade and Rob Corddry and maybe even a kameo by Ricky Gervais but I guess nothing can be perfect.

[YouTube]

A friend of mine is directing this new show on Bahry TV called Bhar w Bahar. It’s a cool Kuwaiti cooking show thats really fun to watch. The video above is of the promo while the second video below is of the pilot episode. The show is aired every Saturday at 4PM then re-run at 10PM and on Tuesdays at 9PM and Thursdays at 4PM. You can get the Kuwaiti station Bahry TV on NILESAT 10892H.

[YouTube]

I just checked out Amazon’s MP3 store and it turns out it works with Macs, iTunes and my iPod! The prices of the songs are cheaper than the iTunes store plus they are DRM free. You can try it out by visiting amazonmp3.com

Update: Ok now I am pissed, just tried buying a song and I got the following message:

We are sorry…

We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Update 2: Ok I just tried it again and it worked. I had my primary address my UK mailbox for some reason so I changed it to my US address and it worked. I just purchased my first song and I am currently downloading it! You do not need a American credit card, I used my NBK one.

Update 3: Finished downloading. The tiny Amazon software automatically added it to my iTunes and the song included a high resolution album art cover. Purchasing this song was just tooo easy so I am kinda worried now that this is going to be addictive.

Pearl, a fellow blogger sent an email to Jazeera Airways complaining about some problems she had with one of her flights. The response she got back from them was just unbelievable. The Jazeera Airways guy basically calls her a liar twice, accusing her of exaggerating and and making up facts.

I hope Pearl can post his email address and full name so someone at Jazeera can put some sense into him. [Link]

Update: Turns out I misread, someone left a comment on her blog on behalf of the airlines, it wasn’t a reply to her email which means there is no proof its from an actual Jazeera Airways employee. My mistake! [Link]

I was browsing Safat when I found a post by CyberRowdy on this local website where you can purchase fish online and have it delivered to your house. It’s pretty strange but cool, they have pictures and everything check it out. [Link]

Source CyberRowdy

A quick mashup of my friday morning [YouTube]
Marzouq posted pictures and some information on his blog [Link]
Also make sure you check out the Gulf Run website [Link]

A while back Villa Fayrouz Express opened up on Baghdad Street in Salmiya. It’s a take-out version of their popular Lebanese restaurant of the same name minus the express. Since the place is in my neighborhood I had to try their chicken shawermas and I have to say I was surprised.

I was surprised because each chicken shawerma cost 750 fils! That officially makes it the most expensive shawerma I have ever reviewed and it also makes it the most expensive shawerma I know of in Kuwait. 750 fils, thats three times the price of a shawerma at Badar Al Badoor and more than double that of Dodo. So is it worth it?

It takes only one bite to realize why the shawerma is priced so expensive. Its the quality of chicken they use, it tastes fresh and healthy. From the chicken to the garlic its all just top notch quality. They also aren’t stingy, I can barely finish two sandwiches at Villa Fayrouz Express while at Dodo for example I could easily have three in addition to a side order of fries. The sandwich isn’t huge mind you, its fat and short but not huge.

So back to the main question, is it worth 750fils? No, I personally don’t think so. I mean I really don’t care where I eat shawerma (except for this one place next to my office) as long as it tastes good. I have now had shawermas ranging from 200 to 750 fils and I can confidently say that I would rather have Badar Al Badoor’s 250 fils shawerma over Villa Fayrouz Express. Not because for the price of one shawerma at Villa Fayrouz Express I can have two shawermas and a kofta sandwich at Badar Al Badoor, but I also felt Badar Al Badoor’s shawerma was more fun. Shawerma isn’t meant to be healthy or made from great quality, its supposed to just taste good and thats it. Still though for people who care about hygene and are looking for a good shawerma Villa Fayrouz Express is highly recommended. My final score is a 4 out of 5.

Although Halo 3 is being released in the US on September 25th its currently available and being sold in Kuwait. Game Center in Rihab complex in Hawalli is selling the regular version for KD25 while the limited edition is selling for KD30.

Disappointed, thats one way to summarize the movie for me. Maybe I was hoping the movie would stay true to the original cartoon or maybe I was hoping more then just a handful of transformers in the movie but whatever the reason is I didn’t like the movie.

Firstly I think there really wasn’t a proper story. To me it looked like the movie was written around the fight scenes. Its as if they went ok, we need to have one big fight here, two big fights there, a small one here and a nice big one in the end, now go write a movie. I know this movie is just an action packed movie with special effects made for the general audience but after Lord of the Rings this is no longer an excuse. You can have amazing special effects, lots of fight scenes, great characters AND a deep intriguing story and still make it mainstream and a box office success. Seriously with a franchise like Transformers how hard could it have been to write a proper script?

My second problem is the actual Transformers, they neither resemble nor act like their cartoon counterpart. I hate the super detailed industrial look of the movie robots, I prefer the sleeker and simpler cartoon version. Another thing, Megatron is supposed to be a gun not a plane, Ratchet is supposed to be white (thats why my MacBook is called Ratchet), Bumblebee is supposed to be a VW Beetle and Starscream is supposed to be annoying as hell! I used to love watching Megatron and Starscream argue with each other in the original cartoon but it doesn’t happen in this movie. I can’t help but feel this movie should have been an epic not a quickly scrambled together movie. Look at Star Wars and Star Trek! Because the story was short but the fight scenes extremely long, we never got a chance to get close to any of the Transformers, maybe Bumblebee since he had the largest role but he also hardly spoke. All of them actually barely had any speaking lines! My favorite part in the movie without ruining it for people who haven’t watched it is when the Transformers went to the guys house to get “the thing”. There were a bit of funny moments there and we got a feel of the different personalities of the robots but that was it, no other scene even got close to that.

Also, whats up with the heavy advertising in the movie? The guy is video conferencing with his wife and there is a huge ass “Cisco Networking” logo on the screen, a Transformer crash lands from space and visits the Pontiac dealership, another a Hummer dealer. Oh and they are ALL American cars! They took Bumblebee, a German VW Beetle and turned him into an American Cheverolet Camaro. Later in the movie you also have the Sprite machine and Xbox 360 transforming into robots which is fine if all these incidents above happened casually but instead they were very obvious which I felt was tacky.

On a positive note I really enjoyed the acting of the main kid in the movie and the visual effects of the robots was just incredible. The movie was fun to watch but I wouldn’t watch it again. My final score is a 3 out of 5.

I am at what used to be the Jeep quick service garage. I say used to be because today I just found out the Jeep quick service garage also started catering to Dodge and Chrysler vehicles. I knew this day would come ever since Mulla and Behbahanni merged. Instead of my quick service taking 15 minutes like it used to take I now have to wait an hour because there are a bunch of soccer mums with their big Durangos getting their cars serviced. (Posted from my Nokia e61i)