What did you do with the one magically extra hour that we had this weekend?

Personally, I spent it online :) I can’t believe that it was pitch black today by 5:00 PM. With the constant rain, it feels like it’s been a few months since last Friday.

Just think about processed crab. Yummy, delicious processed crab.

Arabs have an uncanny ability to consider anything verbally-transmitted during card gatherings, family dinners, and coffee visits as scientifically correct.

How many times have you heard this phrase?

الملوخية عشبة خضراء لا تضر ولا تنفع

Personally, I’ve heard it many times, and again today, when someone mentioned that saying as scientific proof that not all that’s green is good.

I agree, of course, that not everything that’s green is good. Many green-colored vegetables are absolutely disgusting, such as cucumbers.  I usually avoid green-colored food because I do not find in them any culinary value for my sugar-obsessed taste buds.

But come on, taste-buds aside, an urban saying that regards leafy green plants as not even slightly beneficial in terms of nutrition is a saying I’m not likely to take with a grain of salt (for the smart asses: antinutrient levels are usually balanced when leaves are cooked).

So I did a little internet burrowing, and came across a research paper published in the Asian Journal of Plant Sciences called “Nutritional Analysis of the South African Wild Vegetable Corchorus olitorius L.”

Corchorus olitorius is also known as jute, mallow, and of course, mlookheyeh. According to research, the article claims no significant nutritional differences between C. olitorius and spinach leaves.

They even have a cute little chart and all that compares nutritional values between Mlookhyeh, cabbage (malfoof), and spinach (sabanekh):

Okay. Point is, we really shouldn’t listen to Arab urban legends/sayings/myth when it comes to the nutritional value of food. Not only doesn’t apply with Mlookhyeh, it also applies to how what they tell you is really good for you is really just perfume (case in point: Mazaher, read rant here).

I’m not sure why I got so flustered about this :)

Here.

Click link. Give it a second. Enjoy.

:)

Today, at any moment, ten massive terabytes of internet history will be deleted. Whoosh. Deleted. Just like that.

I wonder who will pull the plug. An intern at Yahoo not familiar with all the memories Geocities holds for people like myself? A 70-year old janitor performing a routine procedure? A person whose hand shakes as the deed is done?

Yeah. Whatever.

Some of my first digital memories were created on Geocities: the first time I ever saw animated GIFs, my first online community (a Christopher Pike fan site), my very first website (long since lost), my very second website (also long since lost), my solution to lack of imagery when I started blogging. Geocities represented the net in all its unsophisticated glory.

Quoting from a post written a couple years ago:

“And before there was Flickr… there was Geocities :)

When I first started blogging, Flickr did not yet exist and YouTube was not even something I could have imagined. Blogger did not yet have the photo upload option and no online photosharing services were out yet.

Being the person I am, I could not imagine words without images, and so I googled until I figured out what HTML is, what an HTML tag is, and how to embed an image via HTML. Then I got a Geocities account, uploaded the images to my Geocities homepage, and hotlinked them to my Blogger blog.

Today while cleaning out my email, I found a link I had sent to myself four years ago with my Geocities homepage, and I just couldn’t believe how much change there has been since then. Not just in terms of the death of web safe colors and the rise of Web 2.0 content-sharing websites, but also in regards to the person I am today.”

Alas. Good-bye Geocities. You will always be my first.

Moment of silence.

Roba: Captain Majed is my all-time favorite cartoon, when I was a kid I wanted to marry him.

Moose: I wanted to marry Remi Bandali.

Roba: Whoa, look at how that turned out for us.

Moose: What do you mean?! I’m very much like Captain Majed. Shu, ’cause he has bigger eyes than mine?

:)

Any childhood cartoon crushes?