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Economy
All the dollars you desire
Banks are boasting that customers can come in buy any amount of dollars they need these days, without even showing a plane ticket, as before, and at the official rate. Yesterday that rate was hovering between L4.23-LE4.25 per dollar. Al-Akhbar even reported on its front page that one fellow walked into a bank and bought half a million dollars, no problems, on the spot.
Many banks now have signs posted outside their doors indicating the ready availability of dollars. All this comes after months of a dollar shortage, and just a few weeks after the government brought up the price of the pound vis a vis the dollar to LE4.15. Analysts remain unclear as to whether that 6 per cent devaluation will succeed in keeping the dollar-pound supply-demand ratio stable for little while, or whether the market will experience yet another dollar crunch sooner than expected.
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Movies
Chechnya thanks Heneidi
 At one point in his quest to become a TV presenter in
the film Ga'ana Al-Bayan Al-Tali, currently out in
cinemas, Mohamed Heneidi's character is sent to cover
the events in war-torn Chechnya. As geurilla warfare
takes place around him, announcer Heneidi loses both
his cool and his objectivity, breaking into a fiery
soliloquy about the international community and the
Muslim world remaining silent in the face of the Russian
attack on their Chechyan brothers.
The two-minute scene is also played for laughs, when Heneidi's microphone turns into a torch after a
bomb goes off near where he is reporting from. All the
same, the scene has attracted the attention of a high-level
Chechnyan delegation currently visiting Cairo, reports Al-Ahram. The son
of the Chechnyan president, an assistant foreign
minister and other top diplomats attended a special
screening of the film, after which the comic actor was
honored by the Chechnyans for the way
the film handled the Chechnyan issue.
Heneidi, whose character ends up getting in trouble with the channel head for the Chechnya scene, was
given a Chechnyan flag in real life.
Don't miss cairolive's review of the film here.
Last year Heneidi also got feedback from a foreign
country for remarks he made in a film. But in the case of
Belia wa Damaghoo al-Alya (Belia's Big Head), the Yemeni embassy did
not quite appreciate one of the young comic's remarks during the film,
which seemed to belittle Yemenis.
Ad watch
Lots of new openings
Two hard-core clothing and footwear companies have
appeared on the town's shopping scene -- A Nasr City
Timberland outlet opened up a few weeks ago, and now a
Mohandiseen Caterpillar (apparel, not heavy
equipment, which has been around in Egypt for a while) store has arrived.
The openings were accompanied by much fanfare in the
papers, but only time will tell if the franchises will
succeed in the market.
Improving concepts
Creative ads continue to creep into the tepid world of
print advertising, as the current campaign for the Oriental
Weavers carpet company continues to prove. The
concept is that the carpets are so beautiful that strange
things happen to people who see them. One ad shows a
young man fainting from the beauty of the carpet,
another has a guy so distracted that he doesn't notice
his pants have caught on fire from the fireplace. The latest
ad shows a carpet in a museum, so nice that one of the
characters in a Greek mosaic on the wall is bending
down to take a closer look...
Did you like this article? Send your comments to comments@cairolive.com
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