I’ve debated whether to write this or not. Then whether to publish it or not. Then I figured, screw it.

I am a proud Lebanese. And it’s because I like my country that I can’t sit aside and pretend that fake accolades mean more than they are, that void accomplishments are fuller than they actually are.

Beirut isn’t a bad city, sure. It’s perhaps the best city that we have given that our centralization policies have put everything only in and around it. But, forgive the bluntness, there’s no freaking way in hell Beirut can find itself on a world’s best cities list. Unless the person doing that list was high on some Bekaai hashish.

Beirut recently found itself to be on a list of the world’s top 25 cities, courtesy of CN Traveler. Those same people, for those who remember, voted Byblos as the #1 city in the region…

Dawn rises

blue fire in your eyes

warmth of spring

brushes against your skin

Sun sets

golden-red burnishing your heart

cooled only by love

the heart to hold within

This week’s Word Press Photography Challenge is Hue and what are the colors that define us. What colors define you? I’m a combination of the sun and the sea so cool blues and warm reds and oranges (a Gemini always two sided)

A colorful and talented bunch of folks here:

1. Weekly Photo Challenge: The Hue of You | Chicomallorca’s Blog
2. Weekly Photo Challenge: The Hue of You | This, that and the other thing
3. Weekly Photo Challenge: The Hue of You | Flickr Comments
4. Weekly photo challenge: The Hue of you | Something more to think about
5. Weekly Photo Challenge: The hue of you | So where’s the snow?
6. Weekly Photo Challenge: The Hue of You | The Ambitious Drifter

After the retailer rolls out an offensive Voudou-themed Halloween display, Shantrelle Lewis offers a lesson in the African spiritual tradition in this article for Ebony. See a link to her blog, which we highly recommend, below. Our thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.

In 2013, at a time when nearly every aspect of Black life and culture can be bought, repackaged, gentrified and re-sold to the highest bidder, it is still both shocking and appalling to see a makeshift Vodou altar adorning the window of a Manhattan American Apparel location. Recently, my friend Rosella Molina, a Yoruba initiate, saw just that: a larger than life vevé for Papa Legba, a spirit respected as the Keeper of the Crossroads and found throughout the Americas, and three mannequins dressed in a hodgepodge of apparel designed by social media icon/artist Kesh, mixed together with an assortment of pieces…

This article by JOHN METCALFE appeared in theatlanticcities.com. Our thanks to Judith Dollenmeyer for bringing it to our attention. [We have included the maps for the populations of Caribbean origin. For all the maps, follow the link below to the original report.]

Where do America’s Latino and Hispanic populations live? Let’s start with where they’re not living: in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and a whopping chunk of the Midwest that probably hears a sí as often as the cry of an Amazonian toucan.

That’s the picture painted by this absorbing visualization from the U.S. Census, showing where people with ties to south-of-the-border countries reside in the United States. Using people’s self-reported “specific origins” from the 2010 census, the nation’s top head-counters have assembled population maps for 22 ethnic groups from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. If you want to chat with someone of Mexican descent, you’d…

Flying Close to the Law:Duke Riley, a Brooklyn artist, trained 50 homing pigeons to fly from Havana, Cuba, to the Florida Keys carrying illicit cigars and cameras to record the journey, MELENA RYZIK writes in this article for The New York Times

Pablo Escobar was loose. He darted across a noisy warehouse, searching for a corner to loom in.

He’s “kind of a bully,” said Duke Riley, the Brooklyn artist who trained him, watching Pablo flit around before landing on a ledge near the ceiling. Pablo Escobar is a homing pigeon, and an accessory — or an accomplice — to the latest exhibition by Mr. Riley, whose work often flouts both laws and common sense.

“Generally, I do things that don’t really seem that feasible,” Mr. Riley explained, “and then they tend to work out.”

But even by his standards, the pigeon project, “Trading With the Enemy,” strained credulity…

(no, not satire – it’s the Tories!)

In about 1987, Tory health minister Edwina Currie ‘advised’ elderly people who couldn’t afford to heat their homes properly that they should avoid hypothermia by wearing woolly hats and long johns.

And now, over 25 years later, the Tories are making exactly the same mistake – this time ‘advising’ elderly people who can’t afford to heat their homes properly that they should avoid hypothermia by wearing jumpers.

This ‘advice’ unsurprisingly isn’t working because Age UK estimate that as many as 200 old people die every day in the UK from cold during the winter. That’s around 24,000 old people dying of cold every year because they don’t have enough money to keep themselves warm.

Which means during the 25 years it’s taken the Tories to go from woolly hats and long johns under the Thatcher government to jumpers under David Cameron’s…