Streaming Video

So its getting close to Tournament time and ND has already played one NIT game, and I'm still running into the same problem I had with the Superbowl: ESPN 360 does not work with IP addresses located outside the United States. Oh well. I guess I'm just going to have to check the scores in the morning before I got to school, just as these games are finishing. Thankfully though, sites illegally streaming Hollywood movies have no such national restrictions.

I had intended to watch American Gangster tonight, which I bought from a booth on AUC's campus no less, but the pirated DVD would not work on my computer. Having been dead-set already on watching a movie tonight, I for the first time turned to the internet to stream one. So for the past 5 hours I've been trying to stream the 70 minute version of Blood Diamond from some Japanese site. It was taking forever to load, so I decided to blog to kill some time.

I will most likely be headed back up to Alexandria on Friday to scuba dive. They have some limited areas you can dive even without certification. I've heard that you can see ruins of the ancient city and a downed WWII airplane, complete with pilots facemask. If you're certified, you can dive on the ruins of the Pharos Lighthouse. Tomorrow is some brand new holiday that was just announced last week having to do with celebrating the liberation of some border town from Israel. I'll most likely spend the day catching up on school work since I will be skipping Wednesday and Thursday next week to take a long weekend in Luxor. Mark has an Egyptologist friend who know heirolglyphics, or however you spell it, and he will be showing us around. In addition to homework, I'm supposed to make our reservations at the Bob Marley hostel. This sounds like a most intersting place.

Two weekends from this one we are taking a relaxing vacation in Sharm el Sheikh. We will be renting a hut on the beach, and hopefully doing a one-day training course on scuba so we can dive some simple local reefs. I've heard the diving in the Red Sea is gorgeous.

Speaking of the liberation and Sinai, I had an intersting conversation with a professor I know at another university in Cairo. He took us out to dinner and then to some quiet suburb for a walk via microbus a couple nights ago, and the conversation turned to Israel. It seems the sentiment here is that, in his analogy, Israel is an elelphant and Egypt is a mouse. Israel can crush Egypt at any time it chooses. This clashes with the Israeli Jewish sentiment of victimhood and vulnerbility, and probably a little bit of paranoia. While the Egyptians, and presumably the rest of the Arab world, sees Israel as capable of inflicting its military will upon anyone, Israel sees itelf as a small vulnerable country in a hositle neighborhood in which any concession of power is a sign of weakness that could be exploited by its enemies. It really is true that perception matters more than reality.

We also turned to solutions to the problem, and I think we all agreed that a two-state solution was best. Israel needs to rescind its settlers, actually build its wall on the green line and not overstep its boudaries as it has been, and the Palestinian territories need to prevent terrorist attacks. What this particular professor could not agree on was Jerusalem. We had suggested placing Jerusalem under international jurisdication as a fair (or at least the fairest possible) solution, but there could be no compromise. Palestine must have Israel. To him it was a Muslim city, too important to give up even to international rule. This is obviously a problem, since Israel feels it has just as much claim to Jerusalen and has much older religious ties to the city. That there could be no comporomise on this issue struck me, for this is a fair, level-headed man, and I would not be surprised if this sentiment was shared throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

What to do? The idealist would want each side to recognize their common humanity, see through perceptions and recognize the reality of the situation and the sources of each sides' feelings of victimhood and vulnerability and come to a mutually agreeable compromise. It will be interesting to see how the new adminstration handles this problem, or even if it can address it at all, considereing the economic state the country.

My movie is almost done downloading. Time to finish it and go to bed. I don't proofread these things so if you see any typos, please call me out on them so I can fix them.