Tempers Clash in the Middle East!!!! OH NO!!!

Ok, with all this fasting going on, blood sugar levels around Cairo are dangerously low right now. To paraphrase Beyonce, “all this fasting has got me so crazy right now.”

Case in point, I was looking at some new apartments yesterday (because I can’t live with Sinbad anymore – he’s turning me into a slob) and these two skinny Arab dudes started pushing and shoving each other. I thought they were joking around (guys are really touchy feely here) until one of the dudes picked up a squeegee and fucken’ slammed the other guy in the head with it.

Not wanting the situation to slide into chaos or become an imbroglio (or worse – a quagmire), I grabbed the dude with the squeegee and tried to break up the fight, until this other guy came into it and gave the other cat a knuckle sandwich.

Long story short, I went to break up that other fight, leaving the squeegee guy alone. Two seconds later and squeegee man was now wielding a much deadlier weapon: an iron bar, which he started swinging around like he was at batting practice. I managed to grab onto it and subdue him until their mom showed up and shut the fight down.

I’m going for Iftar tonight at a fancy resto and plan on dropping LE 100 on some regional dishes like fatool…I’m also going to sip on a crisp pint of olive oil and smoke three packs of cigarettes.

In a related story, I met with the UN drug people here in Cairo and quickly found out that this outdated bureaucracy’s ineffectuality extends throughout the entire administrative apparatus – from peacekeeping all the way down to monitoring drug use.

I want to do a story on Bedouin drug traders and the lucrative Bango market in Cairo, and this is the best quote I got from THREE fucken UN workers over an hour-long interview: “Well, um, how does the drug trade actually work? It’s really a touchy issue and we can only speculate.”

Speaking of nomads, I've been doing a lot of traveling lately and I've got a Shit List of music that I'm sick of hearing in hostels and traveler gatherings:

1. Jack "Jack" Johnson -- Seriously, this dude needs to chill the fuck out a little bit. Geez. Take a vacation or something.
2. Pearl Jam -- It’s not the fans I hate, it’s the band.
3. G. Love and Special Sauce – More like G. Love and Lamesauce
4. Sublime -- To quote Charlie Brown: "Aughhhhh"
5. Manu Chao -- That's probably spelt incorrectly -- don't care. The musical equivalent of a Che t-shirt. (Sorry Chad.)

And here’s a list of music I need to hear more of:

1. TI
2. Mike Jones
3. Kavinsky
4. Nickleback (I'm not kidding)
5. Daddy Yankee
6. Ame
7. The Rice Twins