Pussycat Dolls

**This entry is not about sickly girl-band whose name alone is enough to make me cringe for some reason.

If you are in the UAE, you will all note that if you click on the link for this page as in the archives, it will be blocked by Etisalat’s proxy. Notice the word ‘Pussy’ in ‘Pussycat Dolls’, and you’ll catch the offender here. There is nothing offensive about the pussycat, but Etisalat blocks some specific words across the board.

**Edited to say:

I just tried this url: http://tainted-in-uae.blogspot.com/2006/09/pussycat-dolls.html and it's not blocked, so I'm assuming Etisalat has had an expansion in it's vocabulary, since I saw a letter about this particular band being blocked, in one of the papers last week or so.

For many of you overseas readers I’m sure this will help explain why a lot of the titles in the UAE blog’s replace common cuss or sexually explicit words like ‘Fuck’ with ‘Fcuk’ or ‘Fooock’ in the title of blog posts.

We’re not all pompous nuts who think we’re beyond the proper spelling of such words. We just don’t want our entries to be blocked from archive listings or search engines to those searching from within the UAE.

This is a lesson I was taught during my month or so of blogging, and a number of people I’m sure are yet to learn. Words like ‘sex’ or ‘bitch’ are yet to be blocked and I’m guessing it’s because of the multiple definitions that apply to them. But the word ‘pussycat’ seems beyond the vocabulary of the powers that be here. Figuring out which words are blocked and which ones are not takes a bit of trail and error on our part, as Keefieboy, a UAE blogger since September 2004 learned the hard way on July 14^th 2006.

Anyway, this the prompt of my next post. I got annoyed while trying to look up something silly and girly up and I can’t help but wonder how many other people in the UAE are looking for the same sorts of thing, so soon enough I’ll be posting a tip-list of sorts for romance addicts because I’m one of them.