Dubai, the Good Old Days and Sundry Confessions

Okay, it's a fair cop, I'll come quietly. It was me. I done the blag.

We had a bit of a clearout yesterday - chucking out bags of that cruft that seems to assemble around life: old user manuals, bits of laptops that had long been consigned to the inexplicably green 'general waste' Bee'ah dumpster outside our villa. The blue one is meant for recyclable waste, which is a novel idea to implement in a place where there is absolutely zero awareness of recycling, let alone which materials are recyclable (actually depressingly few plastics are actually recyclable) and which are not.

I digress.

We found, as usual when you do this sort of thing, some old treasures. My pair of 1995 'Emirates Internet' 3.5" floppy disks, for instance. Eudora and Netscape Navigator, anyone? The edition of Paris Match featuring an interview with British Expat Alexander McNabb hanging out at the luxurious boutique Park Hyatt hotel, which got me into trouble with France Telecom, with whom I was working in Jordan at the time. "We are paying you too much!", their outraged CEO bellowed at me when we met. He'd read the magazine on the plane over. Oops.

But I digress.

The Internet in just two disks! Marvellous!

One of the things we unearthed was a tatty manila file. And inside it was evidence of My Great Crime, perpetuated the very year those two disks were first clutched in my sweaty hand as I danced out of Etisalat's Sharjah HQ with my Emirates Internet subscription confirmed.

You see, I am - was - TE Chapman.

Not unnaturally, you will be puzzled. That is likely because you won't recall the Emirates in pre-Internet days, when the Gulf News letters page was the nearest thing to a forum or chat room, Facebook or Twitter, you could get. It was all very charming. You'd fax (fax, eh?) your letter in and the next day it would be printed. Then the day after, you'd get a reaction to it. Quaint, no?

The pastime of writing stupid letters to Gulf News was popular before we had electrons to play with. The trick was to write something so blindingly stupid that only a drooling idiot would fail to realise that nipples were being tweaked and toes pulled. But to pitch it just right, so that the letters page editor would let it pass. It was a skill I was to hone over the weeks and months.

I recall one particularly mad thread developed around the issue of plant pots on apartment balconies. One prominent expat got away for weeks with a correspondence based on his keen interest in scatology and wondering if there were any other like minded scatologists interested in grouping together to found a society. It was a common thing to find, expats writing in to say they were interested in Scottish history from 1814-1826 and wondered if there were etc etc. It was, literally, weeks before the GN letters editor was apprised that scatology is the study of faeces and the correspondence abruptly closed.

We had more time back then, alright?

Anyway, I digress.

Many of the contributors to the GN Letters Page back in the day were (arguably) unduly concerned with British imperialism, colonialism and any other ism you care to name. It seemed to be the work of just a few seconds to conceive a character who would be a rabid colonialist and set about baiting various hapless victims who had otherwise been passionate about exposing the evils of orientalism and the like.

TE Chapman was actually one of the various names adopted by arch colonialist, hero figure and shortarse Thomas Edward 'TE' Lawrence (Ronald Storrs, the British governor of Mandate Palestine, referred to him as 'Little Lawrence') AKA Lawrence of Arabia. See what I did there?

For quite a while, the GN letters page lit up with fiery denunciation and towering polemic. Chapman incited controversy and thundered away, enraging his audience with joyful consistency until, one day, a foolish young colleague 'outed' him as a nom de plume and Chapman's career was brought to an abrupt end.

They're all in that file. Yellowed, stuck to the daily faxes that went off to GN, a record of my undoubted glee at being quite so successful in being a right royal pain in the butt to so many people.

I was younger, back then, m'lud. That's me only defence.

But yes, it was me alright...

Shaheen The Camel. A New Gulf News High.

Gulf News is breathlessly presenting the World Cup match winner choices of 'Shaheen', a camel apparently blessed with octopus-like powers of footbally prescience. Or as GN puts it, 'our resident hump-backed football genius."

Shaheen is placed next to two signs, each representing a team about to play. Just in case we forget this is about football, the speculative ungulate has a football tied around its neck. Shaheen then picks a team by attacking one of the two signs, which appears to have been festooned with a sock dipped in the camel equivalent of catnip. Camelnip?

This is the top local story on Gulf News' website today. It confirmed something I have long held dear as a belief. I'll let you guess quite what that is...

Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns

I've gone and done it again. I couldn't help myself. I've published another collection of 'best of' posts from years passim of this marginal, silly little blog. At the time I did the first volume as a test file for a self-publishing workshop, I joked that if I sold more than ten copies I'd do a second volume. And the first volume has, amazingly, sold significantly more than ten copies. It might even run into the twenties.

The cover image of Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns is taken, as the blog's header and the cover shot of the first volume are, in the Aleppo souk. If you ever doubted Jarvis Cocker's wisdom - everybody hates a tourist - you can see it reflected in the faces of these gentlemen, interrupted in their centuries-old ritual of making fatayer by me and my trusty EOS. I wondered, working on the cover file, what had happened to them and whether they had survived the destruction of that glorious old souk. If you want to get a taste of the timeless alleyways of the C14th Ottoman labyrinth, you have to go no further than buying a copy of that most excellent Middle Eastern spy thriller, Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy.

The book starts off well, with the story of an Irish building worker whose mobile falls into the hands of police. Trouble was, he'd forgotten taking some spoof shots of him and his mates hooning around with a replica AK47. So plod had him followed around Europe for two weeks as they waged war on terror and our hero just went on an adventurous and boozy holiday. It's a true story, too!

2009-2011 sees us finally realising there's a crisis and the British press ganging up to sling mud at Dubai while it's good and down. Shiny posts crop up as everyone starts to realise the difference between usufruct and freehold, while various inane pronunciations are made then inevitably clarified. I share more of my love for banks and call centres, including a most amusing spoof of 'ten tips for call centres' which the bloke I was parodying was kind enough to not only acknowledge but link to! There's quite a lot of Gulf News slappery, more than I remembered doling out, including the results of deploying my rather fetching Dhs19 weighing scales bought from Lals when I realised GN was looking decidedly Kate Moss these days.

All in all I found it a great deal more amusing than I can remember it being at the time - certainly funnier than the rot I'm posting these days. If you fancy a trip down memory lane and the odd laugh, you can part with £0.77 at this handy link here and have it on your Kindle or your Kindle for iPad app within seconds. If you're in the US and would rather spend $0.99, it's linked here.

If you're in love with paperbacks, that's coming but it takes a few days to populate the Amazon paperback story. Similarly B&N, Kobo and iBooks.

And, yes, if this does over ten copies (making me a princely £3.50) I'll do volume three...

Just A Thought...

Cover of Kate Bush

So I've been thinking about this blog thing for a while. I've enjoyed myself over the years (I've been feeding this little fire for over SIX years now and likely written more words for it than I have for my books!), generally amused myself greatly and anecdotally have gathered I have occasionally provided amusement (and irritation) to others.

Nothing like the amusement provoked by the wicked and scurrilous Pan Arabia Enquirer, for instance, with its gigantic, tottering piles of 400,000 page views a month, but I have managed some mild jollity among a small, selective band of discerning blog readers and a much larger troupe of disappointed searchers for more sensible things hornswoggled by Google into emerging here rather than somewhere more useful.

I never had an objective in it all, as such. For someone whose day job revolves around defining communications objectives and the like, it's been refreshing. A little like GeekFest, I suppose it has been an anti-PR activity that has come by sheer error to have some sort of reputational value, although any reputational plus has been balanced by the alarm and calumny of being quite as frank as I have on occasion been in here. What makes it special, as Kate Bush tells us, makes it dangerous.

I don't mean to alarm you, by the way. I'm not jacking it in or anything like that. But I am perhaps going to destroy any vestigial traffic by spending more time on what has become the most intense focus in my life - books. Or more accurately, narrative.

I'm going to start posting book reviews, for instance. I've wasted them over at GoodReads in the same way a TripAdvisor review is wasted - just another voice in the thousands of contributions. I'd rather have 'em here in my own archive, tell the truth. We'll see where that takes us, but if you want to submit your book for review, I wouldn't expect much sugar-coating from around here.

Oh, I'm going to go on slapping Gulf News for being drooling morons and playing with things that pass by on life's conveyor belt and make you wonder quite what it's all about. How could I not? But I'm doing more and more book stuff in my life and I think that's going to be represented here more.

Sorry if that's not good news - I know book posts and the like kill blog traffic more effectively than the Car Eating Carrion Crow of Cephalon Cinque - but it's sort of where I'm headed and I've become quite fond of my blog, so where I'm headed, I guess the blog'll come too - peeing on the lamp posts and sniffing other blog's bums...

That's all folks...

PS: I found an excuse to put a picture of Kate Bush on the blog. My life is complete...

UAE Petrol Retailers Are Breaking The Law It Seems

(Photo credit: 401(K) 2013)

A report in today's Gulf News quotes Omar Bu Shahab, CEO of the Commercial Compliance and Consumer Protection Division (CCCP) in the Department of Economic Development in Dubai as saying that charging 2% fees on credit and debit card transactions is a violation of consumer protection law.

While he was commenting on an attempt by a GEMS school to levy a 2% processing fee on credit and debit card transactions, his clarification also applies to Emarat and EPPCO/ENOC service stations, which charge the fee on credit card transactions for fuel. This surcharge appears to have been the resolution of a spat between the credit card companies and the fuel distributors dating back to 2007 - and the early days of this here very blog. The story from way back then is suitably linked 'ere. Basically, the retailers (not ADNOC, you'll note) have always charged extra for credit card purchases, in violation of the card issuers' agreements and when the card companies kicked off, the retailers just stopped taking credit cards. They've recently started again, but with a Dhs2 'service fee' on any transaction for fuel up to Dhs100. In short, 2%...

“Retailers who are charging extra fees on the credit card or debt card payments are violating the consumer protection law and will be subject to penalties,” Mr Bu Shahab told the newspaper that tells it like it is.*

So it'll be interesting to hear what the petrol companies say when the media come calling, won't it?

*Well, sometimes.

More Sharjah News! The 'Water Tank Cooling Device' Announcement!

It's amazing what you can find living in water tanks. 

Actually this is a lie as this is a fish in Sharjah Aquarium. 

Which is, incidentally, a great day out with the kids.

Oh, the excitement! It's all happening in Sharjah these days - following hot on the heels of this weekend's crackdown on pesky prayer-time parkers, Sharjah Municipality has announced that all property owners in the emirate will be required to install a 'water cooling device' in their water tanks.

If you're not a resident of the UAE, you might not appreciate we all have water tanks (many of us have two to be sure to be sure) on the roofs of our villas and on our apartment blocks. Water is pumped twice daily through the public network, filling these holding tanks from which we then derive our daily supply of water. Although some are plastic, many - especially older - tanks are fibre-glass. Over time, some interesting species of fresh water slugs and other things can be found in tanks which should, ideally, be occasionally flushed just to keep 'em clean.

But this is the first I've ever heard of a 'water cooling device'. Never mind, Gulf News is a real newspaper and will have asked the first question that came to my mind - 'what device?'

Oh.

So whatever the device is to be, we know not. Apparently there'll be a degree of choice, in that water tanks can either have a water cooling device or be shielded from the sun 'especially during the warmer summer months'. The move is to 'address the problem of high temperature of water faced by many residents in Sharjah.'

What problem? It's long been accepted fact that you know summer's arrived when either a) hot water comes out of your cold tap (and you can turn off the immersion to get cold water from your hot tap) or b) Gulf News publishes a photo of a pigeon drinking from a standpipe. When both happen, you know it's gonna be a hot one.

So we don't know what device, when it will be implemented, how it will be implemented, who will be affected, what the application process is or who is going to pay for all this. Whatever all this is.

So much for Rudyard Kipling's 'six honest serving men'.

Gulf News does point out residents can call 993 for more information. I tried just for fun and so you wouldn't have to. I am none the wiser, but have spoken to a number of puzzled-sounding people and been transferred to many, many phone lines that ring out and cut you off.

Meanwhile, we can all enjoy the cooler weather that is upon us and the consequential cool water coming from our water tanks...

Dubai Is Bouncing Back

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chatting with pal +Ashish Panjabi on Twitter... hang on a second. I just typed Ashish's twitter handle - @apanjabi - into the blogger CMS and it suggested his Google+ handle instead and replaced the text for me. That's getting way too spooky, Google - and surely in your bid to MAKE us love Google+ and adopt it over all other religions you're now crossing the 'do no evil' rubicon. When you use Gmail and write 'I've attached a photo of your bottom' and forget to attach anything, Goog comes back and asks you if you're sure you want to do that. It's part cutesy, part useful and part scary. But linking everyone I know's social profiles to Google+? That's just plain scary.

Anyway, back to the point. Ashish was complaining about the traffic on floating bridge on Twitter this morning and used a memorable phrase as we chatted about the situation: 'Dubai is bouncing back'. It's not really news as such, the signs are there for all to see. But in black and white, the text sort of hit me.

On the one hand, bouncing back is no bad thing. There's little doubt the UAE has been the best place in the world to be over the past few years - sure, it's been quieter around here, but there has still been opportunity and trade goes on. Modern Dubai was founded on trade and once we'd got rid of the estate agents, it was trade that saw the city through. You forget these things, but compiling blog posts for Fake Plastic Souks The Glory Years took me right back there to 2008 and the overheated Dubai that preceded the GFC.

You couldn't get a school for your kids. You couldn't move in the city, the roads were a constant jam of snarling, honking traffic. The sewage plants were so over-capacity they were digging holes in the desert to store the stuff and tanker drivers were pumping it into storm drains so the sea off Jumeirah was fouled with human sewage and people were getting sick. The power network was straining. You couldn't get into a hospital and the machine that goes ping had a waiting list. Rents were sky-high, Gulf News weighed 1.4Kg - most of which was adverts charging us to dare to dream and live to love - and the city was filled with pop-eyed yahoos getting drunk and boasting how much money they had. Anything that didn't move had a billboard tacked on it. Hotels made up insane lists of demands before taking a booking - including minimum stays and cash up front for event facilities - if you could get one beyond six months in advance. Taxis wouldn't stop for you or wouldn't take the fare if it didn't suit them. If you could find one. There was a constant miasma over the city, a yellow, sulphurous dust cloud you could see as you approached from inland, a great smudge across the horizon. This had become a really unpleasant place to live.

Now there's no doubt that Dubai's in better shape today, having continued to invest in infrastructure during the lean years. The Al Khail Road's been quietly finished, the new road network around Trade Centre Roundabout's well on the way, Defence Roundabout is an interchange, the metro's up and running and so on. Presumably (hopefully) similar investments in other key infrastructure have been taking place, allowing the city to expand once again but do so in a more prepared and planned way - a more sustainable, manageable growth. Because we've learned the lessons from the boom and bust - particularly from the bust - haven't we? If so, then all well and good. We can Bounce Back all we like.

But if we're talking a return to the excess and insanity of 2008, I fear. I fear for this little city I have come to call home - although it's not home and doesn't mind reminding me of the fact now and then. And the reappearance of daft real estate ads, the talk of 22% price rises and jams on Floating Bridge make me very skittish indeed.

Of course, Gulf News will never be 1.4Kg again. The Internet's seeing to that. So there's no point in using its weight to chart the economy's rise as was possible to chart its fall...

New Zealand Bacteria Scare. What New Zealand Bacteria Scare?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Whenever the role of journalism in the social age is questioned, you get the snap answer that breaking news on Twitter is all very well, but 'proper' journalism gives us context and analysis. It has long been my contention that this is one of those qualitative arguments that points to the inevitability of disintermediation.

This was certainly the first thing that went through what passes for my mind as I read in Gulf News over the weekend that 'New Zealand Products Safe To Consume'. This headline inevitably means there is an issue of some kind with New Zealand products, but in the name of 'context and analysis' we're certainly not going to be told what the issue is, just that it's not an issue.

If I read a headline in Gulf News 'Big Gnarly Sabre Toothed Banjax Not About To Eat You', for instance, I know not to turn around. I'd rather not have to confront my impending messy end.

The scare in question is actually quite old by today's standards, dating back to May of last year in fact, when a dirty pipe in one of Fonterra's plants contaminated a batch of whey protein concentrate used in 'Nutricia Karicare', an infant formula product, as well as other drinks including sports drinks, protein drinks and other beverages. 90% of New Zealand's dairy produce comes from Fonterra, a massive agro-business which accounts for something like 7% of New Zealand's GDP. Imagine the lobbying power!.

For some reason the contamination didn't come to light until March of this year, finally causing China to announce a ban of certain products in early August of New Zealand dairy products. The Chinese are, understandably, somewhat nervous about contaminated dairy products and import something like 80% of their infant formula from New Zealand. Recall products are known to have been shipped to China, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia.

Fonterra's news release on the 'quality issue' makes interesting reading. Eight Fonterra customers had been affected by the 'issue' which 'surfaced' in March but didn't require any action other than 'intensive testing' over the subsequent months until finally, on Wednesday 31st July, a sample tested positive for Clostridium botulinum.

The recall affects some 38 tonnes of whey protein but would appear to have impacted over 2,000 metric tonnes of nutritional products that use the protein product - Fonterra has been pretty cagey about the identities of its customers - and presumably has been depending on the considerable clout it must have in New Zealand to minimise the coverage of a food contamination scare that begs questions about who knew what and when - and how thousands of tonnes of contaminated products can be put on the market but the identities of the companies producing those products be protected.

It all reads a little like the horse meat scare in Europe - one producer's product can contaminate thousands of tonnes of downstream products. There are other whiffs of sulphur around the story, too - scientists questioning how a 'dirty pipe' could have been involved, the timescale of the testing and recall, why expensive tests for Clostridium, not normally required for whey protein products, were being carried out and so on. Fonterra's head of milk products has subsequently resigned.

In any case, New Zealand Government laboratories have now confirmed that the samples tested were not actually contaminated with botulism causing clostridium botulinum but with the just as worrying-sounding but relatively benign Clostridium sporogenes. So that's all okay, then.

All of which has been brilliantly boiled down by Gulf News to a reassuring blue 'don't panic' - in fact there's no problem to the point you don't even need to know what the problem there isn't is.

The Emirati Indian Road Rage Assault Video

So Twitter was all a-twitter on Monday night with chat about a video posted to YouTube. The clip, taken from a car adjacent to the incident, clearly shows an Emirati man beating a cowering Indian man with his aghal (the black ropey headdress thing worn as part of the traditional Arabian costume) and punching him. The Emirati appears to be driving a Lexus Land Cruiser with a three-figure plate (a status symbol here), the Indian a stationery distribution company van.

By Tuesday, the YouTube video had been taken down but these things, once done, are hard to undo and it was soon back up thanks to LiveLeaks. Why would the video be taken down? Well, because it's illegal to photograph or film someone in the UAE without their permission - and this was certainly a case of a video taken without permission. The taker obviously gave in to wiser counsel, although his act in sharing the video was a brave one, presumably motivated by sheer indignation.

Dubai Police acted quickly after a large number of people brought the incident - and video - to their attention, particularly over Twitter. The Emirati - a government official as it turns out - is currently 'in custody' and faces a charge, according to 7Days, of minor assault. This carries a maximum jail term of one year and a maximum fine of Dhs10,000.

The Indian gentleman who took the video and posted it to YouTube was arrested after the official's son lodged a defamation case against him with police and is apparently 'being questioned' after his computer was seized by police on Tuesday and now potentially faces a charge of recording without permission and defaming a person, which carries a TWO year sentence and Dhs20,000 fine. Abusing someone's privacy and putting private material on the Internet can result in a six month jail term, the newspaper tells us.

Can we be quite clear. Defamation applies here in the UAE as a criminal case and includes publicly sharing evidence of a thing that would lead to punishment for the person so defamed - regardless of whether the alleged act took place or not. The UAE cyber-crime law makes this clear. You can, in fact, defame someone in the UAE with the truth.

Dubai Police have told press the man should have shared the video with them rather than post it up publicly, where hundreds of thousands have now seen the incident. The son told media the video had damaged the reputation of his father and family. You'd be forgiven for thinking that beating cowering men who know full well that if they raise a hand in defence they'll be for the high jump and likely end up being deported for it was what damaged anyone's reputation, but who am I to judge?

At one rather poignant moment in the video, the poor man appears to hand the dropped aghal back to the official who continues to beat him with it.

I thought there was a telling paragraph in Gulf News' story about the arrest today. Here, have a go at seeing where YOU would put the bold text emphasis in this paragraph quoted from that story:

"Major General Al Mazeina said the case will be transferred to the public prosecutor. He said the Emirati official has been arrested over beating up an Indian man in the middle of the road in clear view of other road users."

My mum said I should always tell the truth, but she never told me you should go to prison for telling it. 'spose it just goes to show what my mum knows...

1,000 Things You Can Do With A Masafi Bottle. Number 82...

E(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This piece in today's Gulf News had me chuckling - not because it is inherently funny, but because it reminded me of an event almost twenty years ago.

I should add that the piece relates to Dubai Municipality's latest - and highly laudable - scheme, an eco-friendly insect trap. We've seen a spate of recent stories in the UAE after illegal pest control companies' activities have led to a number of poisonings and Dubai  Municipality's got a point - a Masafi bottle with the top cut off and inverted then filled with some sugary water would, indeed, create an effective, simple and inexpensive insect trap.

But my chucklesome thought was back to the days of yore, when colleague Matt and I first arrived with our respective partners to set up a publishing business in the wilds of Ajman. We spent the first six months living in temporary accommodation, then found ourselves nice spanking new apartments just on the Ajman, Sharjah border in the Al Hamrani Building - at the time, the tallest building in Ajman (at five storeys!).

If there was one fly in the ointment of our contentment, it was that there was no plumbing for a washing machine in our apartments. I elected to pay the plumber who had worked on the building to install such plumbing in our apartment. Matt refused to pay the man's usurious price.

Quite apart from unerringly drilling a hole into one of his own pipes (a truly comic jet of water in eye moment) and running a plastic pipe across the wall at 45 degrees then across the kitchen floor to the overflow, the result of the plumbers labour was at least functional. We hadn't yet learned to shrug and move on when it came to aesthetics, being freshly out of the UK.

Matt's solution was infinitely more ingenious. He merely ran the outflow pipe from the washing machine to the overflow. Perfect. Except that pipe actually has to go above the level of the drum in order for the pump to work. Never daunted, inspired by Heath Robinson, Matt tied the outflow pipe to his iron, perched on top of the machine. Now the pipe was raised above the drum and the pump worked. Except now the pipe was too short to reach the drainage hole in the floor.

Channeling Mr Robinson, his teeth grinding and a wild look in his eye, Matt cut the base off a Masafi bottle, then cut little splines around it, pushing the bottle into the drainage hold in the floor. This allowed the outflow pipe to be jammed in the neck of the Masafi bottle (they were vinyl in those days, none of yer posh PET).

The perfect solution. We went out for a drink to celebrate Matt's undoubted genius. On returning, he discovered that hot water melts vinyl bottles and his apartment was consequently full of warm, soapy water, the only drainage hole being blocked by a melted vinyl bottle.

Which is why that insect trap had me chuckling...

A Matter Of Form

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So I was talking the other day about Sharjah announcing online tenancy contract renewal, the dream yet to be realised. There's a slew of announcements doing the rounds these days following Sheikh Mohammad's clarion call for e-government to take to mobile and everyone's busily trying to show they're working on m-government. Today, for instance, the Emirates ID Authority is to be seen in Gulf News demonstrating near field technology and pre-announcing ID card renewal via mobile apps by the end of the year.

Let's revisit that one just before Christmas for some reality checking, hey?

It's a major cultural change for the Emirates, all this online documentation stuff. It's counter-cultural to a huge degree. We're used to the good old ways and they are very analogue ways indeed. The generally accepted procedure is to require huge amounts of documentation to be produced in order to complete the simplest transaction and to insist on that transaction being carried out in person. It is mandatory to neglect to tell the applicant (or, more properly, supplicant) which documentation is required. When the applicant arrives hefting a huge wodge of paperwork, the concerned employee of the given department will unpick any staples attaching these documents together and re-staple the documents in a different order. He will then sigh and point out that the applicant has not remembered to bring the copy of an attested marriage certificate, birth certificate of his spouse and a copy of the frontispiece to the Faber 1932 edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

If, frustratingly, the applicant has all required papers and clearly has a copy of a wombat owner's license from the Saskatchewan state licensing authority, the employee of the concerned department will press the clear window worn in an otherwise grubby touchscreen and a small printed slip with an impossibly high number will be handed to the supplicant applicant. The applicant will be referred to at all times as a customer, including on the slip with the number.

The supplicant applicant customer can now wait in comfort as the impossibly low numbers on the screen count up towards the lofty heights of the number clutched in his hand. I've taken to bringing my Kindle with me, which does rather help.

In the good old days you had to take everything to a typing centre for them to type an application form for you, but in these days of e-government, we have the option of filling in the form online before printing it out and bringing it with us to make our application supplication customer service experience. The concept that scans of the required documents could be included in the online process, perhaps also payment of the releavant tax fee made is not really up for consideration - much less that the documentation could be digital from the get-go and available by cross-linking databases. Oh no, couldn't have that, could we?

And so I went to have our renewed tenancy contract attested today, carrying with me every possible document under the sun. I kid you not. I have long experience with this process - I've been doing it for something like twenty years now and can never once remember managing to have everything they've asked for first time around. I had tenancy contracts, passport copies, attested marriage certificates, copy of the landlord's ownership document, copy of the landlord's passport. I was equipped for an all-out war of attrition and I was going to win this one, baby.

Do you have this letter? Sighed the employee of the concerned department. What letter? This one. You have to have your landlord sign it and then you sign it. It says you won't build extra rooms in your villa and house more families. No, of course I don't, I've never heard of that letter until now. Regretful shrug (which I swear is a government employee's grin of triumph). You have to have it before I'll give you a number.

Sure, I can't wait for the process to go online. But I rather suspect it'll be a case of filling in the form online and printing it to make my application supplication customer service experience in person. They won't forego the pleasure of thinking up some new insane requirement to trip me up with. I can only wonder what they'll think up for next year. Meanwhile, I'm on eBay looking up old editions of The Complete Works of Shakespeare...

The UAE Sedition Trial - 94 Accused, 25 Acquitted

(Photo credit: saraab™)

It's in all the papers today, Gulf News in particular devoting an extraordinary amount of extent to its coverage of the verdict against the 94 Emiratis accused of plotting the overthrow of the UAE's government through the activities of an Islamic front organisation accused of having links to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Islah.

I had a finger waved at me the other day, accusing me of being 'craven' in not joining in the chorus of voices questioning the trial, the treatment of the prisoners and so on. I thought it was quite an extraordinary thing for someone to do - demand that I take a stance on an issue because they had a viewpoint. I didn't see them taking to a blog in their own name to denounce it all. But it's okay for them to expect me to.

Truth be told, I know absolutely nothing about the trial beyond what our papers have told us - and much of that coverage has been through the national newswire of the UAE, WAM. I assume it's all been filtered, because there's no 'alternative voice' out there. Not from the UAE's media and certainly not from international media. Investigative journalism has either failed, been utterly indifferent or decided there's little enough here to investigate. I know very little indeed about the detail of the case as, I suspect, do we all.

Knowing so little, I find it hard to have a polarised opinion. The trial was conducted by a court constituted by the rulers of this country, under the law of the country. You might not like the country or its law, but that's the facts. It's as valid as a verdict handed down in the UK, Ecuador, China, Singapore or France. Different countries have different forms of rule, judicial systems and standards of what I suppose we should call probity. Some are aggressively open (hello, Scandinavia!) and some are aggressively secretive and intrusive (hello, America!). All limit opposition to the incumbent system of governance to the constituted organs of governance. Really. Ask Ed Snowden. That's our world.

The verdict of the court has been reached. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is that. Please do remember to use your real name and email when you use the comments to call me craven...

"With inputs from agencies" - More Copy/Paste Gulf News Shenanigans

Gulf News (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News' inside front cover story today (flagged on the front cover) will be familiar to anyone who's been online over the past few days - the gang who ripped off tens of millions of dollars from RAKBank and Bank Muscat and the two alleged gang members who photographed themselves with a pile of cash in their car.

It carries a local byline but signs off with a little tag in italics - with inputs from agencies. So what precisely does that mean? Well, as we've seen before with similar GN stories, it means whole wodges of the report are actually not written by Gulf News at all, but simply copied and pasted from the newswires. I have alluded to this practice before. In the case of this story, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI", Gulf News has used the text of a Bloomberg report verbatim - in fact, the story from the words "the digital currency company" to the end is Bloomberg's report. It represents a little under half the entire extent of the story.

Much of the rest of it is mostly rewritten or just plain copied from an Associated Press file:

On two pre-arranged days — once in December and again in February — criminals loaded with the lucrative debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. In December, they worked for about 2 1/2 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. Two months later, apparently buoyed by their success, they hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Associated Press (running as "Bloodless bank heist impressed cybercrime experts" in The Guardian)

On a pre-arranged day in December, criminals loaded with the debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. They worked for about 2.5 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. In February, the gang hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Gulf News, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI"

So there we go. A story that happened right under Gulf News' nose, covered by cutting and pasting agency reports and the practice justified by 'with inputs from agencies', when in fairness what it really should say is 'with no real input from Gulf News'.

Careful What You Tweet For

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News today carries a roundup of recent cases of bloggers and tweeters in trouble around the Gulf and it's an extensive and growing list.

Flagged as being 'with inputs from AFP', 60% of the story is lifted directly from an AFP file, (the rest being made uo of this report from Habib Touma, which is the only bit available online) but we mustn't cavil, must we?

Tweets aren't a joking matter anymore - imagine facing this one in court: "undermining the values and traditions of Bahrain's society towards the King on Twitter". The six Bahraini 'tweeters' who did have just been sentenced a year in prison for 'misusing the right of free expression'.

It's as neat an illustration of the conundrum posed by social media in the Middle East as you're likely to get. Here we all are in possession of these powerful and far-reaching technologies that support widely sharing information and opinion and when we use them we're suddenly very far above the parapet indeed.

All this freedom of expression stuff suffers from the problem that it is, of course, that it's an absolute. You're either free to express or not, surely? But then we also apply 'filters' to that absolute in the West (whilst being all to ready to be scandalised by the hypocrisy of societies that don't allow total freedom of expression) - incitement, hate speech, holocaust denial and a number of other things our society deems to be unacceptable.

We also saw how fragile our freedoms are when British Prime Minister David Cameron, faced with lawless rioting across the country organised via Facebook and Twitter made it clear he would favour 'switching the Internet off'. That's the kind of thing despots do, isn't it?

The trouble is, of course, that government is government the world over - there's that lovely definition of democracy - "Say what you like, do what you're told." which works well as long as when you say what you like it doesn't have the benefit of a platform open to every man and with enormous power to allow messages to be shared and reach audiences far wider than are possible with 'traditional media'. Let's not forget, there are now over double the number of users of Facebook Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa than there are newspapers sold every day (in English, Arabic and French combined) in the region. That's Arabic alone - most users in the region still prefer the English interface, whatever language they are posting in.

It doesn't take insulting a leader or inciting religious hatred to get into trouble with the law on Twitter - you can just break any old law that would have applied in the 'analogue world' - for instance, a lady was fined Dhs 1,000 in Dubai earlier this week for calling an Egyptian gentleman 'stupid'. The law in the UAE does take the issue of personal respect very seriously indeed - it's not something limited to the rulers alone. So, logically, calling someone stupid on Twitter could potentially open you up to a Dhs 1,000 fine.

It's a reminder - whether you're going to put your life on the line for something you believe in or whether you're just sounding off. The law is peering over your shoulder - and those little 140 character blipverts are subject to its full might and weight...

Gulf News: Cut And Paste Journalism

English: Close-up image of TN panel display, Dell Mini 9, Magnification - 300 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in October last year, I asked if journalism had perhaps jumped the shark, with a post that compared a Gulf News story on Google's Nexus 7 announcement with some well-known online sources, showing clearly that key elements of the GN story, under a local byline, were cut and paste from web-based sources.

This is not a good thing. The P word, plagiarism, is whispered in decent news rooms because it is considered, quite rightly, to be one of the most egregious forms of deceit in journalism. It's lazy, it misleads readers and it speaks to a lack of professionalism that would, anywhere else in the world, be profoundly unacceptable.

Gulf News' response to the charge was to quietly rewrite the online version of the story to remove the more obvious cut and paste segments and give credit for the quotes the story filched from the New York Times.

This time around, in an article carrying the same byline, they have an even more elegant solution. Don't post the piece ("TVs for every room and budget" - a collection of 'buyer's guide' hints and tips for TV buyers that appears on page E4 of the newspaper's technology supplement) online at all.

It's a compelling lesson on how to write a product buyer's guide feature in the Internet age. Google the topic, pick a few sites that already post buyers' guides, summarise and/or just rephrase what they have to say and there you have it, Robert's your father's brother, one buyers' guide.

Just for good measure, barely even bother rewording some of the more technical stuff. Just slap it into the CMS, bish bash bosh. It's not going online anyway and nobody's going to bother checking to see if you just blagged the copy, are they?


Gulf News
"Since plasma pixels can be almost completely turned off on screen, they are capable of producing really dark blacks which helps improve picture quality."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Since plasma pixels can be almost completely turned off during dark scenes or portions of the image, they are capable of deeper black levels compared to LCD TVs."

Gulf News
"In passive screens, two images are displayed simultaneously; like in a movie theatre, while polarised glasses filter the correct image to each eye to produce a 3D effect."

Digital Trends TV Buyers' Guide
"...passive 3D is very similar to what you would experience in a movie theater: Two images are displayed simultaneously on the screen, while polarized glasses properly filter the correct image to each eye, producing a 3D effect. "

Gulf News
"In active displays, the glasses use battery-powered LCD lenses to alternately block each eye in sync with the television, alternately showing right- and left-eye images, to create the 3D effect."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Active 3D glasses use battery-powered LCD lenses to alternately block each eye in sync with a TV alternately showing right- and left-eye images, creating a 3D effect."

Gulf News
"Plasmas use an emissive display technology (self lighting pixels) which means there's no motion lag or lighting inconsistencies and this results in smoother, more accurate motion and better picture detail."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Plasmas use an emissive display technology (i.e. self-lighting pixels) and color phosphors, which means there’s no motion lag or lighting inconsistencies, unlike their LCD counterparts. The results are smoother, more accurate motion; deeper, more consistent black levels; and better picture detail.

Court Reporting Fun

gavel (Photo credit: SalFalko)

Covering the UAE's law courts must be the most coveted job at all the local papers. It's not only a chance to actually see some action - rather than sit at a desk subbing reports from national news agency WAM - but it also brings a pretty constant slew of oddball cases that range from the delightful to the downright worrying.

One of the many nice things about living in the UAE is that relatively petty crime makes it to the national dailies - whereas in the UK, for instance, anything less than a particularly gruesome and bloody murder would be lucky to make it to the local rag, let alone the nationals. That's not to say crime, including rape and murder, doesn't happen here. It's just that comparatively little of it goes on.

And so in today's paper we have a man jailed for three months for biting another's finger. The act was, apparently, not consensual - the two were involved in a brawl at Dubai's fruit and vegetable market. The biter was ordered to pay Dhs 21,000 compensation and will be deported once he completes his jail sentence.

Another non-consensual act was a man accused of inserting an industrial air line into his colleague's bottom, causing his stomach and face to inflate. Reporting on the story, Gulf News quotes the judge, displaying an admirable grasp of the essentials of the case in front of him, as asking: “Didn’t you put the hosepipe in his backside when the air was puffing out from it?”

Responding, the accused claimed, “I did so but from over his clothes. I did not mean to hurt him because it was supposed to be a joke.”

I'm not sure how it would make your face inflate, but then I lack the required experience of industrial airlines and human physiognomy. The case will come to judgement on January 30th, so I'm sure we'll all find out quite what went on.

But you see my point? These stories aren't relegated to the funny bit just before the sport on the six o'clock news, they're mainstream court reporting - which sort of speaks to the very low crime rate here. It'd be nice to credit the forces of law and order for that, but it's really because we're all on the hog's back - everyone here is better off than they would be at home and so very few are willing to rock the boat. And yes, that even includes the labourers.

In related news, Gulf News managed to repeat yesterday's 'Star Gazing' astrology column in today's paper, too. You'd have thought columnist Shelley Von Strunckel would have seen that coming, wouldn't you? But then it's always been sort of hard predicting what the Gulf News subs will get up to next...

Let The Chaos Begin!

Hornjoserbsce: A sim card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News today carries a Great Pronouncement Of Doom from UAE telecom provider Etisalat. If you don't register your SIM card on time, you're going to have your line cancelled, they tell us. It's all part of the UAE's Telecom Regulatory Authority slightly obtuse campaign,  'My number, my identity'.

As I predicted earlier, this one has all the usual Ealing Comedy attributes. We are all to trot off to a telephone company office with a passport copy (and original it seems) or a national ID card (copy and original we assume) and re-register our mobile lines by filling a form. The 'campaign' started on the 17th June - now Etisalat has given 1.5 million of its 8.6mn subscribers just three months to register their lines, failing which they will suspend the line. Three months after that, it's cancellation. They've sent out texts to the lucky 1.5 million hapless victims telling them to register or lose all within 90 days.

As I pointed out before, it took five years to issue everyone National ID Cards here - and that's still not a 'done deal'. The constant slew of frequently clashing announcements, pronouncements, threats and exhortations have provided endless amusement. Now we're going there all over again.

Does Etisalat really think they can get 1.5 million lines re-registered in 90 days? Even allowing for a constant and equal throughput across all their 104 offices, that means 160 applicants re-registered per office per day, or (with an eight hour day) 20 per hour. Or a constant rate of one registration every three minutes in each and every office.

Don't make me laugh. Etisalat doesn't process bill payments that fast, let alone re-registering lines (including, presumably, verifying and inputting the registration information as well as scanning documents etc). Can you imagine the long, hopeless, shuffling queues? I can and I'm in no hurry to play, thank you.

In fact, Etisalat's spokesperson told GN "It won't take more than ten minutes to fill the form... everyday we have an average of 10,000 subscribers who approach Etisalat offices to update their personal information.". At that, frankly unbelievable, number, we're still talking only 900,000 registrations in 90 days.

And then they're proposing to text another 1.5 million customers, just to add to the chaos from the preceding 90 days.

Words fail me.

The Joy Of Summer

"Modhesh", Arabic for amazing, is the mascot of Dubai Summer Surprises. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You know it's summer in the Emirates when:

• Hot water comes out of the cold tap. 

• Gulf News runs pictures of pigeons drinking from a standpipe in a public park. Alternatively, people shading themselves from the harsh summer sun or labourers sleeping in the shade.

• You can't seem to get dry when you get out of the shower.

• Everybody you've ever done business with needs to meet face to face for no particularly good reason.

• Your shirt's stuck to you by the time you've made the walk to the car. The car's baking hot when you get to it.  

• The back of your shirt in contact with the car seat never quite dries out.

• By the time the car has finally cooled down you've arrived at the next meeting.

• The walk from the car to meeting sticks your shirt to you. 

• By the end of the meeting you've cooled down just in time to walk to the baking hot car with your shirt stuck to you. The first blast of air from the AC through the hot dashboard makes it worse. You're better off opening the windows initially to bring the car down to ambient temperature.

• When you forget to put up the sunshade you have to hold tissues in your hands to protect from the super-heated steering wheel.

• Your electricity meter starts to defy the rules of physics and proves the theory E=M$2.
  

• You see strange, yellow sprung maggots with evil, leering grins start to appear. You know this is not a hallucination, but a strange annual manifestation of that cargo cult known as Dubai Summer Surprises. 

• Somehow, you're not surprised.

Speed - Emirati Style

Image via Wikipedia

Gulf News today reports on the story of an Emirati motorist who was rescued by Abu Dhabi police after the cruise control on his Japanese 4WD jammed on the Al Ain Highway. He'd set the control at 160kph and called emergency after realising that it had not only jammed but also jammed the brakes. Three patrol cars from Abu Dhabi police surrounded him, one in front to clear the road and one either side of him in case he lost control. Meanwhile police operations tried to keep him calm and talk him around to a solution which was, eventually, to apply the handbrake to bring the speeding car to a halt.

Apparently one piece of help the police were able to give him was to tell him to secure his seatbelt. I'd have fined him for that one, for starters...

It took 45 minutes in all to bring the situation under control.

The GN report is all very breathless, but as usual fails to answer the one BIG question that any mildy questing reader would surely ask.

Why didn't he just turn the ignition off and coast to a stop under manual steering and braking?

Gulf News - See No Evil

Image via WikipediaGulf News ran an Associated Press story on the front page of its business section today on the report issued by Transparency International on bribery. That report's findings are linked here.

GN tagged the piece, a highly edited version of the AP file (the AP piece is linked here for your listening pleasure), 'The Power of Money'. The piece is not available on the GN website, but does point out that China and Russia are the countries most prone to bribery in TI's report.

What it fails to point out is that the UAE ranks fifth most likely to bribe in the report, which surveyed 3,000 businessmen on how often firms from the various countries they deal with resort to bribery. The report lists 28 countries - the UAE ranking fifth worst (joint fifth, to be fair - we rank alongside Argentina, which is in itself something of an indictment) and Saudi Arabia seventh worst. The rest of the Middle East isn't included in the report, which is probably just as well.

TI's report found that 'no country was found to be wholly clean' and also that the construction sector was most likely to bribe its way into business, with the real estate sector coming in joint second worst. Which may go some of the way to explaining the UAE's ranking. This is, by the way, the first time the UAE has been included in the index.

The question is, did GN just paste up an AP file to fill some space without bothering to check if the UAE featured on the index or did it know and let the fact pass it by? If the former, we're looking at awful, sloppy no news-sense journalism - a half-boiled intern with learning problems would have Googled the index to see if the UAE featured (as I did, being a half-boiled intern). If the latter, GN could arguably justify the omission by claiming it's an AP file and as AP didn't highlight the UAE's position, GN didn't see fit to overrule such a respected international news source. Which is hardly tenable, but is probably preferable to admitting you're a bunch of craven, drooling morons who could no more serve the public interest than play Für Elise on a chocolate banjo.

The National ran the piece front page business, too:"UAE companies debut with 5th place in bribery global survey" as opposed to GN's "China, Russia most prone to bribery."

Spot the difference...