Shish-Buq

I will try to write this in a Wikipedian style :
Shish Buq (from Tunisian Arabic شيش-بوق) is a game invented during the summer 2005 by a group of friends of mine one night in a coffee shop in Sousse (Tunisia).
The name Shish-Buq is a compound from the Tunisian words Shish-Bish (شيش-بيش) meaning dice and Shalbuq (شلبوق) meaning a slap, so in English this game would be called "Dicelapping". The rules are simple, yet can be awfully painful, two opponents sit facing each other around a table, taking turns at rolling a die (6 faces die) and the player getting the higher roll, slaps the other one. A game is composed by rounds.
A player wins the game when he/she wins 5 rounds (so at most, there are 9 rounds : 4 vs 5) or the other player declares forfeit or is knocked out (KO) and can't play anymore.
There are some technical rules to this game, here are some of them :

• the slapping movement should start within a 40 cm distance from the other player's cheek.
• the player being slapped can't try to dodge or escape the slap, otherwise there is a penalty where the slapping is doubled.
• if the slapping commissioner (judge) doesn't approve of a slap (as in it's being too soft), the slapper player gets slapped by another person appointed by the commissioner.
• a player should approve of all the rules before starting to play. Once a game is started there is no going back.

There is a multi-player of this game, called group shish-buq where players divide into 2 equal groups and every one of them rolls a die, and the overall sum of each group defines who is the winner, then a whole group slaps the other one (pairs are made before the game). it's a more social form of the game.

Thinking about this game makes my cheeks hot and my eyes moist already ... I can still feel those hard slaps, but the point was that after a game, you feel relived, you got to slap someone (with a bit of luck, because it has happened before that a person gets only slapped .. it sucks), you're out of your civilized-self to go into some kind of liberating barbarian state once in a while.

Around the World in 80 Faiths

Around the World in 80 Faiths is a yet another great documentary by the bbc. The 8 episodes series is presented by Peter Owen Jones an Anglican clergyman taking one year off his duties to travel the world and discover about faiths and religions. His journey is most interesting, and as usual BBC documentaries are the best, but the thing is this documentary have set such a high goal of presenting 80 Faiths (10 per episode) that it barely scratches the surface of the religions and beliefs it describes. While rushing through major religions (like Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism) would have been understandable - there are far enough documentaries about them already - but for the less known ones it would have been better to explain more and investigate.
Learning about religions is a very important step toward understanding other cultures and blending in the "Dialogue of Civilizations", for instance, as a Tunisian, I would have learnt that the so called "Magus" (مجوس) in the Islamic civilization, believed to be worshippers of fire are actually Zoroastrians followers of one of the oldest monotheists religions in the world, for whom fire is somehow sacred and they keep it alive in their temples no matter what, which made Arabs believe that they worshiped it. It's the same with Hinduism, in Tunisia it's widely believed that Hindus worship cows, when ut's not true : cows are considered to be sacred and holy, but Hindus worship gods (I still don't know exactly about the gods in Hinuduism, but I know that they reincarnate just like people are believed to do in Hinduism, so a god might be known by many names which are he/she's incarnations names). I could have learnt about these things by watching the documentary, but personally I have heard these things from my Indian and Iranian friends and neighbours (we speak a lot about food, but sometimes religion slips in).
Anyway, the point is, learning about others religions and beliefs helps us overcome our own prejudices about them, and even though this documentary doesn't give in-depth information about each religion it mentions, at least it opens up new horizons for the viewers to look into them and find more informations about them elsewhere.
There is a book by the same title by Peter O. Jones, unfortunately it's out of print in Amazon, I was hoping to find more detailed account of Peter's journey. I hope they will be reprinting it soon.

Cars

I was watching How I met your mother season 02 episode 17 "Arrivederci Fiero" earlier today, and that episode brought back a whole flow of old memories.
The old Fiero .. reminded me of my best friend's 1984's Fiat Uno (the picture to the left), I used to ride it on a  nearly daily basis up to 4 years ago. That car was so old, so wrong, ... so cool !
The car's engine used to sunk and stop whenever it "smelled" rain (we have even followed a little dry spot of sunlight on a rainy day once for some miles). When we were up a slope, we used to open the doors and help the car moving forward with our feet just like the flintstones.. there are so many stories about the good ol' Fiat Uno, that I think it might come back in other posts.
The other event the episode reminded me of was Driving (see the video in the buttom of the post) ! I tried that once with another best friend of mine (lol, I have quite a few "best friends" ..) in a remote place from my city, and that looked exactely like Barney learning to drive with Ted .. I was running the car at like 10 mph, and far ahead there were people crossing the street , so I freaked out and starting shouting to my friend that I was going to kill them, and that I don't know how to brake anymore. I was shivering and sweaty, while my friend was laughing and having the time of his life, I still can't think of it as funny - even though the scene in the series was - eventually I stopped the car, and I don't think I ever tried driving afterwards .. the idea might  have crossed my mind a couple of times, but I can always talk myself out of it.
Next summer I may try for a driver's licence back in Tunisia, cause I think it's essential for work and life in general, I start feeling the need for a car.

Listening to audiobooks in order to sleep. Neurotic ?

I have this habit of listening to audio books in order to sleep. I don't need to carefully listen to them really, I just hit play and sleep.
When someone visits me and stays over for the night, I refrain from doing it then it feels like something is missing and falling asleep becomes much more difficult.
This habit follows specific patterns, it's kind of periodic and divided into cycles, where every cycle I would listen to the exact same audio book for weeks and weeks, then have a pause (nothing planned) where I would go back to some other sleeping rituals (usually reading or watching the same movie (or book) for a while), then start over with another audiobook for another cycle.
Am I neurotic ?
(currently I'm on a Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet cycle hence the title of this blog)

By the way, if you are interested in neurotics, there is a website called I am neurotic full of them. After a tour in there, I figured out that there was no shame in talking about mine.