Mayur's Posterous

gulfnews : Sharjah bans long hair for men.

Sharjah rock musicians get police rap

Sharjah rock musicians get police rap
  • "Long hair is strictly prohibited for men. If we catch any man with long hair, we will have his hair cut," an officer at Sharjah's Criminal Investigation Department

Sharjah : Long hair and ponytails for men are definitely out in Sharjah. And nobody can vouch for this better than a group of four young aspiring rock musicians who had their beloved locks unceremoniously cut after a close shave with Sharjah police last week.

The four Indian friends had stopped to grab a bite from an Emarat convenience store near Tasjeel off the Sharjah Airport highway at around 5pm on August 4. However, just when they were about to drive out, a white Toyota Camry carrying plainclothes Sharjah Police officers intercepted their car.

"We were accosted as soon as we stepped out and severely reprimanded for sporting long hair. They took our identity cards and asked us to report to the Sharjah Police headquarters," recalled M.K., 19, a guitarist with a local band and a resident of Sharjah's Al Taawun area.

At the police headquarters in Maysaloon, the musicians were made to face more music. The hair delinquents were photographed for police mugshot records, holding boards with their names, and were repeatedly warned against sporting long hair.

"The police ordered us to cut it, saying it's indecent for guys to have long hair," said 18-year-old S.S., also a Sharjah resident. "We were also asked to produce our passports so we had to call our parents. It was very embarrassing," said M.K.

Fearing police retribution, the following morning all four boys got their hair cut. "I am a big fan of Metallica [heavy metal rock band] and, following in the footsteps of some of their band members, had grown my hair to shoulder-length. It took quite a while to grow it. I felt really sad losing it," said S.S.

Strictly prohibited

"Long hair is strictly prohibited for men. If we catch any man with long hair, we will have his hair cut," an officer at Sharjah's Criminal Investigation Department who identified himself as Mohammad told XPRESS over the phone.

As part of a decency law, introduced in September 2001, Sharjah Police routinely crack down on ‘objectionable practices'. The law forbids men from wearing bracelets, earrings and necklaces. Those caught are hauled up and the jewellery is confiscated. In April this year, Sharjah Police arrested an Asian man for wearing a lungi, a piece of cloth wrapped around the waist.

Last year, several teenagers in Ras Al Khaimah got their hair inexpertly shorn by the police following a crackdown on youngsters sporting unusual hairstyles.

 

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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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Bayern Munich 0-0 Real Madrid [pen.2-4] Full Highlights 13/08/2010

Iker Casillas stopped two penalties as Real Madrid beat Bayern Munich 4-2 in a shootout to win the Franz Beckenbauer Cup.

The friendly was an official farewell game for Beckenbauer, who never received a proper send-off when he left Bayern for the New York Cosmos 33 years ago.

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New evidence that matter and antimatter may behave differently

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China, the Leading Space Invader - China Real Time Report - WSJ

China is the world’s leading space polluter, according to a report by the Russian space agency.

Reuters
The final pollution frontier?

China accounts for 40% of the debris in orbit around the earth, followed by the U.S. and Russia, who contributed roughly a quarter each, according to the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos.

Most of China’s debris comes from the 2007 deliberate destruction of the Fengyun-1C weather satellite, according to NASA. After China shot the satellite with a missile it burst into 2,841 pieces. Before then, the U.S. and Russia accounted for the bulk of space junk.

Back on planet Earth, the environmental cost of China’s unprecedented economic growth has been well documented. Air, water and land quality have all deteriorated as hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty.

Now, add space to the list.

China is only the third nation after the U.S. and Russia to independently launch a human into space and has ambitious plans to build its own manned space station and explore the moon.

– Shai Oster

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BBC News - Meteor spectacle 'set to dazzle'

Media_httpnewsbbcimgc_qgghi

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Google Unveils Awesomely Fast And Accurate Voice Actions For Android

I HEART EMOTICON my Android

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Article written by Newsweek in 1995 explaining why the internet won't be the next big thing.

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames—but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

This was a fun read :D

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"Infinite USB Drive" Pre-orders Now Open : t-break

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They have a gigantic Forever 21 at Mirdiff City Center. I was waiting outside for an hour :(

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Help :$

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