Limits on the Prime Minister's power to prorogue parliament have been passed.

A few days ago, on a Hamilton TV channel a news presenter mentioned that he saw a robin.

Today, I saw one here in Waterloo. The first one this season.

Spring is near ...

The sea gulls have been back for a couple of days. Circling high and making their distinctive calls.

Today, another spring visitor was in our backyard: the colorful house finch with its long and distinctive song ...

The following are some proverbs أمثال. You can tell by the content that they are either recent in origin (from 1960s and some in 1990s), or adapting old sayings with modern metaphors (e.g. Rabso and Omo detergents, or mobile phone balance).

قليل الاصل لا تعاتبه ولا تلومه ، ده زى البقعه لا يطلع برابسو ولا بأومو

العيلة اللى مفيهاش صايع ... حقها ضايع

اضحك والضحك رخيص قبل مايغلى و يبقى فى قراطيس

طلعت فوق السطوح هز الهوا كمى .. كل العيال اتجوزوا و انا لسة جنب امى

الحياه من غير نسوان زى المسقعه من غير بتنجان

اللى يسكت و مايقولش لمراته ليه ؟ رحمة الله عليه

How low can criminals go? Kidnapping for ransom is repulsive, since it preys on the fears of the victim and the victim's family who are forced to give money to the kidnappers in order to get their loved one back.

How how low can someone go, ransoming the remains of a dead person? Here is a case where the ex-president of Cyprus remain were held for ransom!

Over the past few weeks, I reconnected with people I have not seen in many decades from EGC. I had a chat with Patrizia Amante (Grand Kayman), Karim Abdel Hadi (Alexandria), Gianpiero Gelato (Italy), Samar Mamoun (Germany), Nayera Mokhless (Kuwait), Zeinab (Yeldez) Murad (Alexandria), and Mohamed Tawfik Elgayar (New York).

This is the part that impressed me when I was chatting with Gianpiero:

Khalid: Do you still speak Arabic, or forgot it?

Over the last week the weather has been pleasant, with above zero temperature in midday, but still goes below zero over night.

Today it is March 8th, 2010, and the temperature outside is 9 degrees Celsius above zero in Kitchener/Waterloo.

What is better is that the next 3 days we are expecting double digit temperatures with tomorrow a high of 11C, and 10C on the 2 days after that.

Sure, it will go back to seasonal temperatures eventually, around 1 or 2 above zero midday. And perhaps we will get a snow storm or two.

This is the weather in Ontario, Canada ...

"Work smarter, not harder" is something that sounds good, but in reality it is often a hollow sentence with no substance in it. In the corporate world, when a manager informs his team of staff cuts, while the workload is the same or more, "smarter" does not mean anything other than "do more with less". If this "working smarter" was tangible and doable, then why was it not employed before the staff cuts? Huh?

Here is a Dilbert comic lampooning this misused non-wisdom ...

Massimo Marcone is a food science professor at the nearby University of Guelph. A few years ago, he released a book titled: In Bad Taste?: The Adventures And Science Behind Food Delicacies which lists many foods around the world that are considered repulsive. That book is now renamed to "In Bad Taste? A Quest for the World's Most Exotic Foods".

The Biblical Archeology Review has an article on how the alphabet was born from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The article focuses on the Serabit El Khadem site in Sinai, and the inscriptions found in the temple of Hathor there.