The Pope's visit to Africa

Since i check the news basically every hour wherever i am (thank you GPRS) i tend to look at the headlines quickly and see what catches my attention.
The first time my eye hits "Pope reaffirms ban on condoms" and i thought, ok, valid, expected, known, nothing especially noteworthy about that.
The second time i read it well, and that's when i decided to read the article. Apparently, on his first trip to Africa which took place earlier this week, he took the opportunity to reaffirm where the Catholic Church stands on condoms. He does that in a continent that has lost 1.5 million people to HIV/AIDS just this past year alone. This left me a little troubled.

From a religious perspective, i understand, you can't promote sex outside of wedlock and the use of  condoms - let's face it - lies at the heart of that. But from a humanitarian perspective, this condom will save more than one life possibly. I don't expect him to stand up and root for durex but toning down the messages might be an idea. But then again, if people decide to disobey the church by having sex outside of wedlock, i doubt they'll care much for how it feels about the use of condoms.

So i guess we could be talking about married couples then? As i read on the Pope also set a committee to see whether the church could allow the use of condoms by a couple where one of which is HIV positive. My first reaction was, and you really need a committee to decide? Isn't it obvious? Is the church expecting married couple to abstain? Or to infect one another and bing yet another HIV infected child into this world?

While i could see a round table argument about the first point (the ban) with arguments both for and against, it's the second one i struggle with a lot....
It's things like that, that turn so many people off organized religion, and religion all together, and that's a sad thing. 
What is interesting is that the Pope's position on all of this is not unique to the Catholic Church, i can see it happening in other religions too which explains why the world gets less and less religious.
Now i know that it's not a popularity contest, and religion doesn't aim to please, but when you fail to appeal to people's common sense then you're left with blind followers, and is that really what God wants? Blind - not enlightened - followers? I think not

a startling discovery

It was only after talking about Aliza's plan to visit Israel for Passover (oh wait,the censorship panel that banned Prince of Egypt says i'm supposed to deny that ever happened) that i realized that direct flights to Israel were kept tightly on the down-low here.
So here's the entertaining story.
EgyptAir wants to fly to Telaviv, but for some reason has no balls to announce that. So it creates this other airline - that technically still belongs to Egypt Air - and calls it Air Sinai. Air Sinai has only one plane in its fleet, and only one route. You guessed it: Cairo-Telaviv-Cairo!
On top of all of this, Air Sinai has no website, cannot be booked online from any website (trust me, i just spent the last hour trying) and is not mentioned in any official EgyptAir anything. So to book it you need to get in contact with your Egyptian, or Israeli travel agent and book it the old fashioned way.

Now there's a pathetic side and a somewhat amusing social observation to this whole story.
Let's start with the pathetic side: It's been 20 years and Egypt is still worried about showing open ties with Israel? They have an embassy here for god's sake. So yes, we think they're doing evil evil things but last time i checked there was this thing called Darfur in Sudan that is also quite evil too...
i can't really tell whether the gov is afraid of the reaction of your average mohameds in Egypt or the reaction of the Arab world. Either way it's a clear case of lack of balls on our behalf!
And seriously, it's just a flight, it's not like we're starting NileTV Hebrew! (Funnily enough the egyo radio has a Hebrew channel)

But alas, i will always be baffled by our double standards and our love of that grey area...

So now i turn to the somewhat amusing social observation side. The "kalaam el naas" syndrome that is actually quintessentially Egyptian!
The cleaning lady who tells her neighborhood she works in a factory, because they will think it's "improper" for her to clean houses - even though it pays 3 times as much. The girls who put a full on veil when leaving or entering their house all the while they go wait tables at the Hard Rock. The parents who when abroad or out of town let their kids party out till dawn, but at home give them a curfew of 10:30. The guy who acts all jealous and possessive over his girl even if he doesn't want to coz otherwise everyone will call him a wuss.

I don't know why the force that pushes everyone to conform is so strong it forces people to hide things that they are really convinced of for the fear of being judged by those who aren't convinced.

Jimmy gets his 15 minutes of fame on CNN

But is is going to be his only 15 minutes or just the beginning?