Friday

So recently I came across a list of YouTubes Top 10 Videos of 2011. Though never saw 3 of these videos and only discovered 2 of them 2012, I'm guilty of watching the other 5 a couple of times myself. They're the videos that made up our 2011.

10. Cat mom hugs baby kitten - 37million Views

Cutest animal video. EVER! and today was the first time I saw this.

9. The Force: Volkswagen Commercial - 45million Views

Another video I hadn't seen. Typical car ad. Love it!

8. Maria Aragon - Born This way (Cover) by Lady Gaga - 45million Views

Such a talented young girl! Lady Gaga even got her to sing in one of her concerts! This is what YouTube is for: finding talents like these! If it weren't for YouTube no one would know her! People like Clinton Paul and Charlene Mula should be banned!

7. The Creep (Feat. Nicki Minaj and John Waters) - 48million Views!

You gotta love The Lonely Island! Music comedy at its best! Its not my favourite of their songs, actually I don't like it! But anyway...

6. Look At Me Now - Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne, Busta Rhymes (Cover by @KarminMusic) - 49million Views

I love Karmin! They're really talented and real! This video shot them into stardom! They were on Ellen and even got a recording contract and a new album!

Shut Up and Drive

I have to start off by saying sorry for not posting in 2 weeks; I've been really busy with lectures and University stuff.


So this morning was one of the rare occasions when I drove to Uni and didn't catch the bus. Now last week I was super lucky with parking all week and found a spot within 5 minutes, 4 days in a row, and today looked like the same thing was going to happen. I drove into the parking area and BAM I see someone getting into the car to leave, so I moved to the side, switched on my indicator and waited for him to drive off. As soon as he did, another girl just drove up in front of me and into the parking space! (Please note I'm holding back a bucket full of bad language here) She was lucky I found another place close by - I was already contemplating casually walking very close to her car door with my key conveniently sticking out of my hand, if you get my drift...

le me driving. special thanks to Kelly

My Girl

I want to start this post off by saying that I'm NOT a photographer and neither do I consider myself to be one. So don’t go thinking I’m one of those wannabes who use their 5 mega pixel camera, take bad photos, add a watermark to them and edit them on Picnik. I simply like photography and every now and again I like to grab my camera and try to take some good photos. Rhea, has been asking me to take some photos of her for a few months so today we took a quick trip to the Rabat area to take a few photos. The weather was nice though we froze, but I managed to take a few good pictures. These are my favourite few.

Ed. 

Born this Way

In the past few weeks two cases of discrimination and abuse based on the victim’s sexual orientation have caused a stir in Malta and are encouraging lawmakers to look into laws prohibiting such acts and protecting persons within the LGBT community. In the first case two teenage girls were attacked by two brothers while sitting on a bench in Hamrun, while in the second case which happened in the last few days, two females were asked to not sit together on the bus and later assaulted by an off duty bus driver. More info here and here. 

Local research shows that eight percent of gay people in Malta have been attacked because of their sexuality. Unfortunately under our law, the only protection gay people have refers to discrimination in terms of harassment but this protection is available to everyone, not just gay people.

I find this very worrying, especially since we’re living in 2012, not 1912. This shows how far behind the Maltese community is, especially since our laws provide no protection for homosexuals. I can’t understand how someone can be fuelled with such hate towards someone, simply because they have a different sexual orientation. It’s shameful of such persons to abuse others because of who they love. I can understand a feeling of awkwardness towards a gay person or not accepting homosexual romanticism in public because as a community, we’re not used to such things being so public. Up till a few years ago, not many gay people came clean about their sexual orientations due to beliefs and taboos in the Maltese culture so it will take some time for gay people to be fully accepted by everyone in Malta; however a lack of acceptance is very different from abuse and harassment.

It’s about high time that the people are educated about these things and the laws of our country reflect the reality we live in. Children should be taught from a young age that there is nothing wrong in being gay. This will have a twofold positive effect. On one hand it will affect the community in general with gay people being accepted and such acts of abuse being lessened, and on the other hand it will have a positive effect on teenagers who are discovering their sexuality and realising they are gay. Today many teenagers experience fear, rejection and self-doubt when it comes to accepting themselves as they are. They fear their parent’s reaction; that they won’t be loved or that they will be abandoned by friends, and incidents such as the two mentioned do not help the situation. If children are taught about these things from a young age, they will find it easier to accept themselves and come out to their friends and families.

Also, the laws of our country need to be amended to protect the LGBT community. I’m not saying that same sex marriage should be introduced in Malta as, even though I agree with it, I don’t think we’re ready for it as a community. Divorce was one very big step for us so we need time to adjust before introducing same sex marriage. What I’m talking about is protection from attacks and discrimination. Thankfully these two incidents have influenced legislators to take action and the Ministers in charge of such areas have already started meeting Gay Right Activists and discussing possible amendments to the laws regarding hate crimes.

It’s sad that for action to be taken, four females had to be hurt but hopefully these actions will encourage both the Maltese community in general, as well as the Maltese legislators , to be more aware of such a large section of our community and accept such persons as they are. Gay persons are human and their sexuality should not cause them any harm. Its 2012 and we live in a democratic country... time to stop living in caves people!

Ed.

Tomorrow...

Just another quick post, this time regarding my blog in general and tomorrow’s post.

I’ve decided to name my posts with the name of a song, book, film or anything in that area. Obviously the name has to make sense with the post. If I can’t find a name I’ll twist a name to fit in the topic.

Also, tomorrow's post is a more serious one relating to something happening right now in Malta and that has been on the news almost every day for the last few weeks.

Ed.

Kurt

The Malta Eurovision Song Contest just ended and the winner is:


Kurt Calleja - This is the Night!


I'm happy. After today's show I got over Claudia's song and exactly before the voting started I switched to Team Kurt. It was a close race with only 4 points between Kurt and Claudia. Amber came third which I think is really good considering that she didn't get any points from the public's vote! I really liked her song after today's performance. Anyway, a big well done and good luck to Kurt!

Ed.

The Song Choice Chronicles

Its that time of the year again. That time that half the Maltese population loves and the other half hates. Yes its MaltaSong for Europe time, or as they call it today: The Malta Eurovision Song Contest.

So yes, this is a Eurovision post so if you can’t stand Eurovision, this is your time to leave.

To start off, I have a confession to make... I’m an ex-Eurovision addict. The ‘Ex’ plays an important role here. Till a couple of years ago, I used to live Eurovision all year round. I could tell you who won the Eurovision every year since 2000 and on the night of the actual Eurovision, I would already know the lyrics to most of the songs, even the ones in Russian and Polish. Yes it was that bad. This was the pre-Facebook era, so instead of Facebook and Twitter, my Internet entertainment was a couple of Eurovision websites. I sucked.

Now I’m over it; so over it in fact that I have to think hard to remember were this year’s Eurovision Song Contest is going to be held. Azerbaijan.... I think! But still when its Eurovision time, I interest myself and this year with the overload of promotion that the Malta Eurovision Song Contest got on local television, I’m getting quite into it, though still not as much as a few years ago.

Unfortunately over the last few years Malta’s performance has just dropped down and down, and only one thing is to blame... the song choice. Every year the choice of songs at the Malta Eurovision Song Contest gets worse and worse and we end up having to chose a winner from one or 2 good songs. This year I have to say, I was expecting a much higher level of songs than previous year, but I was slightly disappointed. There were a few standout songs, but the rest were pretty average, maybe just a little bit better than last year.

Being Saturday afternoon, we know who the final 16 are, but here is what I thought of the 24 songs in the semi-final and who I think deserved to make it through to tonight’s show. For those of you who didn’t watch last night’s show, click on the names of the songs to hear them. The song titles written within stars are the actual finalists.

Third Time Lucky

Ok, my third attempt at starting a blog. This time I’m serious about it, I really want to try and start this blog and keep it going for a while. I finally decided on a name to replace my first name as the title of my blog. ‘just add water’ (I keep typing just ass water). It’s a bad attempt at being funny, but I like it, and it’s me-related being I’m a swimmer, so water it my element. Also, this is going to be where I express myself, my thoughts, my ideas, my opinions, a lot of which I think of while I’m swimming up and down the pool and I’m ‘alone’ in my own world.

I still haven’t decided on a specific topic for my blog and I think I’m going to leave it like that. Over the last few weeks I was thinking of starting a music blog but I decided I don’t want to be that guy who doesn’t understand a single thing about music and thinks he’s good enough to judge music and put forward critiques for everyone to read. So basically I decided I’ll write about anything current, or maybe not so current, anything that might be interesting me at the time. Music will be the theme of many posts I’m sure because it’s one of the things I cannot live without, but I’ll be talking about many other things too.

Hopefully I’ll manage to keep this up, writing at least one post a week. I think Wednesdays will be my day to definitely post something here, but if I have the time I’ll post more than once a week. Fingers crossed that my ideas won’t run dry after 2 weeks.

It might be a good idea to write some things about myself so people reading have an idea who I am. Well I’m Edward Caruana Dingli, a 19 year old second year law student at the University of Malta and a swimmer with the Maltese National Team. Basically yes, I spend my days swimming and at University. Fun! I’m quite tall for the average Maltese at 197cm. I used to be quiet and socially awkward, but I’ve grown and I feel I’m in a good place right now. I’m still a bit shy and I still think I’m weird but in a good way. I can’t forget to mention my dear girlfriend of 18 months, Rhea, my red-headed, bubbly, freak!

I think that’s it for post number 1 (or 2 if you consider the one I left from May when I failed for the second time at starting this blog). I will DEFINITELY be back soon with the first of many rants about this and that!

Take care everyone!

Ed. 

Take your marks!

Blogging is something that I have wanted to do for years. I gave it a shot a few years ago, but back then my Blog was more like a “What I did today” diary then a Blog, so I deleted it. Today I start afresh with a true, proper blog. I’m not exactly sure what I want to Blog about, what I want to say, who I want to direct my blogging to, all I know is that I want to Blog.

I think this craving I have is coming from my lack of essays. Having studied languages up till last year at Sixth Form I was used to writing essays often, and even if I usually hated it, I think my mind actually enjoyed having somewhere to explode. Yes, my grades were never great at school, though they were relatively good in my actual A Levels, but I’m pretty sure that in some deep, hidden, obscure location inside me, I enjoyed writing. Also, I’ve been following a few of my friend’s blogs, namely Kelly Dent, Christa Boffa, Lara Boffa and Andrew Borg Wirth, and they’re writing skills inspired me to, at least, try to write something half as good. Hopefully as time goes by my writing will get better.

I’m going to use this Blog to express myself mostly. Probably most of my posts will be opinion posts based on current happenings. As for other ideas, they’ll come along as I get going. I might post pictures, things I find online and a bucket load of other things; or I might get bored and give up on this after 2 weeks. Only time will tell. As for frequency of posts, I won’t make promises, especially since I have exams coming up till the end of June.

That’s all for now!

Ed.