Alert readers (and we all know you're alert, right? RIGHT? Hey, wake up!) will note we've added two new sites to our blogroll:

Mahmood's Den is written by a Bahraini, a family guy who runs his own A/V business. He writes about everything, with a wry sense of humor that, according to western stereotypes, should've gotten him arrested years ago. Let's be grateful it's just a stereotype

Consider this [about Saudi Arabia]: the north of the country habitually gets snow, there are forests in the south-west, green and temperate climate in Ta'if, immense palm groves in the eastern province as well as in Qasim, beautiful and bountiful beaches on the the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, huge sand-dunes and desert just about everywhere else, and you marvel at such a vast country which I think is as big as the eastern sea-board of the United States up to the Mississippi river. It is huge.

Speaking of, Instapundit lead us to The Religious Policeman, an honest-to-God (Allah?) Saudi weblog. He has the same sense of humor as Mahmood, as evidenced by this prediction of what it'll really take to have a revolution in The Great Kingdom:

When the Saudi people finally rise up in revolt and throw out the House of Saud, it won't be for democratic reform, and it won't be for an islamic republic. It'll be about mobile phones.
...
So will the muttawa try and ban all phones in Saudi Arabia? It'd be like trying to take an American's gun, or an Englishman's dog. Arabs in general, and Saudis in particular, live for their mobile phones, in a way that other parts of the world would not understand. And we are physically incapable of ignoring our phone when it rings.

Sounds a lot like someone I know.