I don't know much about the code of conduct of U.N. Peacekeepers, such as those deployed in the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). But I'm going to assume that it's probably OK for peacekeepers to post photos of people that they meet on their Facebook group even if they are politically sensitive.

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Mocking rulers is a tradition almost as old as rule itself. At times mockery is subtle and allegorical; at others it is blunt, sometimes gauche, but always funny. Some wonderful examples are the fables of Nasreldin Goha, a folkloric character rumored to have lived in thirteenth century Turkey. One of his jokes comes to mind:

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Mubarak's Egypt was one of the CIA's favorite destinations under their "extraordinary rendition"  program: A human rights-free zone where torture at the CIA's hands, hampered by delicate legislation, was supervised by the chief of intelligence and Mubarak-era strongman Omar Suleiman himself.

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It turns out that the Harlem Shake fad has one redeeming quality: It seems to annoy Islamists to no end. 

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There is one tradition that Muslims and Jews in the West agree on: They both like to eat Chinese food on Christmas Eve. It's a way of marking a day that both acknowledge to be special and joyful, but without the big family dinner and all the attendant hoopla. It's a gesture that contains just the right hint of detachment: "I'm happy, but it's not really my day to celebrate."

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"I called people up so they would join the revolution. And they died. I let (Ahmed) Harara walk onto Mohamed Mahmoud Street, and he was blinded. My friends, who weren't into politics but whom I talked into coming to the streets, died... All so you would block porn sites, you sons of bitches?"

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My father recently bought a new copy of an old book. We couldn't buy it earlier because it was virtually impossible to get one when Hosni Mubarak was president. You'll understand why when you hear the title: Dictatorship for Beginners: Bahgatos, President of Greater Bahgatia. (You can see a copy here -- in Arabic, but you don't have to understand the text to enjoy it).

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This week I attended two events in Cairo devoted to Egypt's economic situation, but the setting could easily have been any point in the decade prior to the January 2011 revolution -- for better or for worse.

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Their budgets may be a tad tighter and their delegations smaller, but developing countries are no less excited about the Olympics than their northern counterparts. There are, in fact, a number of transition countries with Olympic stories that are making big waves in their home nations and around the world. (And the clumsy responses of the International Olympic Committee almost always help to make the waves even bigger.) Here's a brief roundup of the Nations in Transition Olympic News (let's call this our NiTON review):

1. The South Sudanese athlete with no flag

The rigid IOC rigid rulebook stipulates that a new country's application to join the organization must take two years. South Sudan, which has declared independence in July 2011, falls short of this criterion. The IOC, with its usual brilliance, suggested that the South Sudanese athletes compete under the Sudanese flag -- not the most sensitive suggestion for the various parties involved, considering that South Sudan recently celebrated the first anniversary of secession from its northern neighbor.

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Since the presidential elections in Egypt a few weeks ago, the new first lady's choice of headdress has been a constant topic of debate. Naglaa Ali Mahmoud, the wife of president-elect Mohamed Morsi, wears a long, conservative hijab that covers her head and torso. This has opened the door to endless commentary. Some have taken this as inspiration to discuss what her official function should be. Others relentlessly mock her dress (seen as conservative and low-class). Still others indulge in purely islamophobic ruminations about whether a hijabi woman is fit to represent Egypt at international affairs.

That most Egyptian women wear hijab doesn't seem to factor into those comments. The mockery flared again last week, as charming photos of Mexico's new young presidential couple, Enrique Peña Nieto and his wife, telenovela star Angélica Rivera, were juxtaposed with those of Egypt's new first family -- and not in favor of the latter.

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This week, the Egyptian military made its boldest attempt yet to regain control over a country that has been slipping from its grip.

The two Thursday rulings from Egypt's Constitutional Court -- which effectively disbanded parliament while allowing Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's last prime minister, to run for president (his image trampelled on, above) -- have thrown the whole political situation into chaos. But there's an even more ominous part of the story that everyone seems to be overlooking.

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The first is denial. And that's what we're experiencing in Egypt right now -- for we've ended up with the worst possible outcome from the first round of our presidential elections. The winners are Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak loyalist whose spent most of his last post as prime minister during the 2011 revolution trying to smother the revolution and kill its children, and who now threatens violence and an "iron fist" at every opportunity; and Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who wasn't even his own party's first choice, and whose lack of charisma and imagination threaten to bore us to death over the next four years while curtailing our social and personal freedoms in accordance to the Muslim Brotherhood's conservative agenda.

Three days after the preliminary results were announced, the High Electoral Commission confirmed them with minor changes. The Commission claimed that it had used this interval to investigate fraud allegations and appeals, all of which it dismissed. Voters used the time to digest the news and find ways to deal with their disappointment.

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Egypt's presidential elections will take place less than four weeks from now and we still don't know who's running. As I've said before in this column (this sentence is fast becoming a fixture of my assessment of Egyptian politics): if it sounds ridiculous, that's because it is.

So far the list of candidates being served up by the Electoral Commission seems as changeable as the menu du jour of a capricious chef. The Commission's website, with no irony whatsoever, is displaying a blank candidate list on its homepage with the date "26 April 2012" in small characters below it, the date the final list is to be announced.

Over the weekend, the electoral commission disqualified 10 of 23 presidential candidates for not fulfilling the conditions to run for election. The commission gave them two days to submit appeals. By law, the decisions of the commission are final.

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Walls. The Egyptian army's answer to protests has, for the past six months, been to build walls. The construction of these walls at a few key points in downtown Cairo, blocking major streets in one of the world's already hardest-to-navigate capitals, is severely damaging the neighborhood, both economically and socially. But that was the least of their concerns. (How very Israeli of them!).

The aesthetics of these walls is, naturally, horrendous. They're little more than cubes of stone piled up across the streets, sometimes several meters high.

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