Another unexpected advert...

this time, in my most recent copy of The Economist, I found a large, surprising ad. With white text on a black background (and a freaking HUGE logo), is an ad for Al Jazeera in English, as a worldwide media outlet "uniquely positioned to reverse the global information flow, reporting from South to North...". For some reason, I never really thought about Al Jazeera as being a worldwide media source, or particularly mainstream outside of the Middle East, but I am obviously out of the loop. Do any of you with fancy TV service get Al Jazeera? I want to know what it is like. What kind of an accent do the anchors have? How do the politics swing? Does it look like a regular Western media outlet on screen, or more like a SNL spoof set?

Other things I learned since this ad sent me out of bed and onto the internet:

• Doha is in Qatar. Somehow I never put the "Doha round of trade talks" together with "CMU Qatar" as being in the same freaking place.
• Al Jazeera also has a magazine
• I still love the CIA World Factbook.
• You don't get a discount if you order the print version on Amazon.
• My mother wants a rice cooker for Xmas from the Dog
• Qatar is slightly smaller than Connecticut, and strangely has almost twice as many men as women. But not in the under-15 stats. What happens to all the women? Do they die? Emigrate? Become men? Shipped against their will to Bahrain?

New things that I wonder about:

• what is the history of the flags of Qatar and Bahrain that they are so similar?
• Will these bullet points show up as bullets? They used to, and recently I noticed that my template seems to have lost them. I am sad, and my posts look weirdly unformatted.
• Am I a nerd more because I love Ben's photos of rigging cable or because I would be very happy if I had a fresh copy of the World FactBook every year?
• What is a Thessalonian? Where is Thessalonia?

And now, it is time for sleeping, again.