I saw this notebook designed by Mijn Winkel and I couldn’t help but post it, as it reminds me of Moose, who has an overwhelming obsession with throwing crumpled paper onto any sort of possible targer.

Every single time I see my brother’s shoe collection, I am taken by surprise.

It’s amazing, he only really owns two pairs o f shoes, in various colors:

1) A million pairs of lace-free loafers.

2) Four pairs of canvas shoes.

I understand Gus’ obsession with loafers. Afterall, laces are the stupidest invention ever, and they should be deemed as vintage as typewriters in this functional day and age. The first thing I do when I get shoes with laces is knot them to death, until they turn to slip ons.

Comparatively to my brother’s shoes, here  is how colorful my shoe collection a few years ago was:

Do you have a favorite kind of shoe or shoes that you just can’t stop buying?

Greeting a person in the Arab world might as well be the trickiest thing in our culture. Is it enough to just shake hands? How many cheek kisses is this person expecting anyway? Is it one per cheek or three per cheek? Is he going to embarrass you and put his hand on his chest? Since they’re too far, isn’t a wave just enough? Is it necessary to stand up? What about walking her to the door?

Really. Arab greetings etiquette is just a pain in the ass. There’s afterall always that really high probability of a lip-lock, if your calculations are just a few seconds or centimeters off.

So if you’re as socially inept as I can be, or if you’re planning on visiting Amman, or if you’re a foreigner living in Amman, this little guide might help:

1. The double-kiss on the cheek is mandatory 96% of the time. Yes, some people consider you rude if for not swapping grease and/or slime.

2. When you arrive, you kiss everybody hello, starting with the person nearest to you and going in a circle. When you leave, you kiss everybody goodbye.

3. If you happen to be seated when someone walks in, you stand and wait for the greeting around 30 seconds before the person reaches you.

4. Women kiss women. Women kiss men. Men kiss men. Sorry guys, but you cannot avoid the man kiss.

5. But don’t kiss the other gender unless you are really good friends, really close family, or if you’re totally sure the other person won’t mind.

6. Do not, and I repeat, do not, touch anyone’s cheek with your lips. It’s really just for show, your lips should actually just kiss the air and make the popping sound.

7. Unless you want to get caught in a very uncomfortable lip-lock, kiss the right cheek first.

8. Often, the kissing greeting is compulsory for even people you just met. If you feel reserved about kissing them during the first handshake, you probably should when you’re about to depart.

9. If you want to show that the greeting is particularly heart-felt, lay your palm on the person shoulder as you greet.

It’s not often that one can catch the attention of both auto-maniacs and design-lovers.

Toyota did just that, with the iQ font, typography designed by a car.

Here’s the font:

You can download it if you want from here, though I’m not sure how usuable it will be :)

Here’s the video:

One my favorite things in the world.

Plus, like I already mentioned, although I love, love, love milk products, I do not really like the yellow-colored variety. I would much rather stick to the multitude of ways that white cheese is produced in Palestine, although of course, being completely biased to the gods of cheese, I will always say that good old Nabelsi cheese really will kick any other kind of cheese’s ass.

Ya3ni seriously, can you think of any other cheese that would taste as good with the world’s sweetest dessert as it would would the world’s saltiest and herbliest sandwiches? Think knafeh and man2ooshet za3tar o jobneh. I think not.

But our conversation today is not about jobneh Nabelseyeh, it’s actually about jobneh shelal, a more obscure kind of cheese, for some reason I cannot fathom.

It was one of the few foods that we were allowed to “play” with as kids. But hell, you can’t help but play with it, it comes in a knot, exactly like a young girl’s hair. And then we would undo the knot, and start pulling out string by string, and seeing who gets the longest string. We’d see how far they’d stretch, before dangling each string as far as our hands could reach down to our mouths. Typically, we used to call it jobneh sha3ar, or “Hair cheese”. I only discovered it’s correct name recently.

Jobneh shilal was our finger food, always placed in the center of the living room’s table for us to snack on.

What’s your favorite kind of  cheese?

Here’s an awesome calendar concept. It basically uses the timed pace of the ink spreading on the paper to indicate time. The ink is absorbed slowly, and the numbers in the calendar are “printed” daily.

The colors range from dark blue in December to, three shades of green in spring or oranges, red in the summer.

[Oscar Diaz via Fabrik Project]