Showing posts with label Just stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Just stuff. Show all posts

Sunday, 6 September 2015

Of Migrants And Emigrants

English: US President Barack Obama and British...
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It's interesting to see the pictures on our screens showing the masses swarming Europe's borders. The proportion of women and children is tiny - the vast majority of  migrants would appear to be able bodied men.

I'm probably not allowed to say that, this week.

It's amazing how fickle we've become. Public opinion is now capable of turn and change at remarkable speeds as we all get caught up in it all; the mood of the mob has never been so unpredictable nor so quick to whip up. And the mob has never been so large.

A week ago Katie Hopkins, the somewhat egregious voice of Right Wing Reason, wasn't so out of step. The Sun has even been deleting Tweets promoting the infamous Katie column urging 'gunships to stop migrants' as it tries to get with the new mood of its readership. This is entirely different to last week's Mood Of The Readership, which would likely have cheered our Katie on to new heights of silliness.

This week, you're on a fast track to grovelling apologies if you so much as suggest that migrants aren't lovely and your home is open to as many as it can hold.

The haunting image of a Syrian 3-year-old lying face down on a beach has a lot to do with it, helping to do what 'father of PR' Edward Bernays called 'crystallising public opinion'. Governments found themselves neatly caught out, too. Our very own David Cameron was still fighting them on the beaches, missing the sudden and drastic public mood swing until (apparently) his wife tugged his sleeve and said 'Dave, I think you'd better take a look at this...'

I'd like to think this was all human compassion at its best, but I suspect it's just a mob. Mobs form online fast, and they dissipate just as quickly - and unpredictably. They're like clear air turbulence: even the best weather radar can easily miss them. Sometimes they fizzle out, sometimes they catch on and woe betide anyone who's not following the tide of public opinion with split second precision. The media these days aren't driving the mood, they're just amplifying it because they're getting on the bandwagon.

Mobs don't think very much, they just express themselves, whipping each other up in a frenzy of encouragement until it all gets out of hand and the monster's house is afire. Then they sort of look around a bit, a little dazed, before shuffling off home for tea.

We, the British, were dragged into war in Iraq by our leadership - rather against the desire of the majority of the people one suspects - a US-led war, and bloody aftermath, that destroyed the physical and moral infrastructure of Iraq so completely that it created a vacuum for the lunacy that is Islamic State to fill. We bombarded Libya in the name of regime change and swiftly spent not one penny on supporting the foundation of a new state in place of the one we helped destroy so expensively. I'm guessing the Syrian uprising had more than a little covert support from Langley and Millbank from the get-go. And let us not forget Afghanistan...

The UK is now to 'fulfil its moral responsibility', even if the US has been keeping its head down and Not Getting Involved. You wonder how much simpler it would have been if we hadn't been so glib about supporting the high-handed destruction of these countries' systems of governance and civil infrastructure with no plan - or appetite - for getting involved in the aftermath.

Now the 'War on Terror' is coming home...

Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Meeting Mr Fox


The shell which almost killed them all had come with no warning, sounded no different to the thousands of others scudding around the blue summer skies like little birds. Baba was reading a newspaper, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Ahmed was sitting under the wooden kitchen table. The shell exploded and suddenly Ahmed wasn’t under the table anymore. There was a lot of dust and smoke. Baba looked asleep but mother was holding her head in her hands and crying. Ahmed wanted to go to her but his legs wouldn’t work. Baba had eventually woken up and Ahmed had walked with a limp ever since.

After the shell, they had a big piece of orange plastic sheeting over the hole in the wall. It stretched from the floor to the roof. Now winter had come, it let the cold in. Finding wood for the fire had become very difficult. The winter took everyone by surprise. This proved, Ahmed’s father growled as he hunched over the mean fire in their damaged kitchen, they were all donkeys. Winter always came, this year was no different. Except this year they were distracted as the fighting became worse, the houses shaking with relentless concussions.

Ahmed didn’t go to school anymore, so he was at home when the soldiers came. His mother was making bread, the bakery having been shut by an explosion that took away ovens and bakers alike in a single savage moment. Baba had salvaged a sack of flour from the ruins before the flames took hold and the stock room collapsed on the heads of some thirty men trying to do the same. They ate bread every Friday to try and make the flour last.

Sunday, 8 February 2015

Strange Searches Ride Again

English: The CERN datacenter with World Wide W...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Search engines are funny things. There they are, making billions of dollars out of giving you what you're looking for on the Internet and here I am, clearly screwing up that process for a small but frustrated number of searchers.

Sure enough, some people get what they're looking for - and there is a constant stream of people finding out what's in Tim Horton's deeply egregious French Vanilla coffee as well as crappy, additive-packed products like Pringles, Aquafina, Big Mac Chicken Nuggets and their (mostly really gross) ilk.

And there are quite a number who find their sojourn here truly useful, believe it or not. I know, I know, I'm amazed myself. But thousands have landed here and found, for instance, the secret to how to switch off the trackpad on a Samsung S5 Ultrabook - I am truly glad to have helped so very many of my fellow sufferers. And many searchers for Sri Lankan gems have found my 'buyer beware' post, which is a good thing, I would submit.

But others haven't been so lucky...

Here follows a compilation of some of the stranger recent visitors to this dusty and neglected backwater of the Internet.

Subsy onche emarat
You never know, you might win a game of 'Internet Era Trivial Pursuit' with this. Nokia's head office in Finland enjoys the IP address 131.228.29.81. Which is how I know that the person searching the World Wide Web for 'subsy onche emarat' works for Nokia. Other than that, and the fact this blog is the second Google result for the phrase, I am utterly baffled. What on earth was he/she looking for?

Food adultery
This one seemed funny until I found the post the searcher found and, clearly finding it amusing at the time, I had actually headlined it 'food adultery'.

Tent Grand Hyatt Dubai octoberfest shirt
It's an oddly specific search string, isn't it? It gets you this here post from a search on Bing, sadly not the first result. However, I had totally forgotten the post and it brought back memories of an ancient - and glorious - promotional fail.

tim hortons french vanilla ingredients
*little first page win dance*

mkene fishermen in  lotoboka
It's not that someone searched Bing for this odd - inexplicable even - phrase. It's not even that they landed on the blog by searching for it. It's that when I repeat the search, Bing or Google, it returns no results. SO HOW DID THEY GET HERE? Doodeedoodoo doodeedoodoo...

faking girl sudani dubai uae
Look, I don't mean to be rude, but if you can't spell it, I don't think you should be allowed to do it. The charmer searching for this got to this post, which I am glad to say was no help whatsoever to him, but did amuse me greatly as I had forgotten it.

paper,printer,ink to print fake money
I love this one. The putative commencement of an international criminal's career, cut short not by enforcement agencies acting on his/her clearly larcenous search history but by said criminal finding instead of the clear instructions he/she sought, this blog. How that happened, I do now know, because searching the first ten pages of results on Bing, I couldn't find the offending post myself!

best way to stop my etisalat frm consuming so much dataplan in a very little time
Clearly an unhappy customer. The answer, of course, is turn off data on your mobile. You're unlikely to find any answers here, of course...

dubai faking girls sex pics
This delightful person a) can't spell and b) works for (or has access to the network at) Lutheran General Health Systems in Chicago, Illinois. The visit came from 168.235.196.136, see. Not very Lutheran as searches go, is it? 

Sunday, 18 January 2015

A Cairo State Of Mind

English: View from Cairo Tower
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The pollution is staggering: the air is grey with it, the sunlight dappling the twisted trees by the roadside moves with the slow miasma. It rained in the night, the moisture still shines in the ruts and gulleys of the serpentine backstreets and alleys.

Cats dart nervously between cars or feed on the rubbish piled up on the kerbsides, a broken-legged skinny dog whines. Its ribs are stark, skin-stretched.

The traffic grumbles and roars, constantly punctuated by the cacophony of blaring, bleating horns. People weave between the battered cars, squeezed into each other by the press of steel as they scurry or loiter.

Everything's grubby, despite the rain.

The statue of Ibrahim Pacha stands proud on its great block, the leader of Egypt's armies, the defeater of the Ottomans, defender of the realm and much other rot beside. His hand is raised, his mighty, verdigris-streaked steed below him as he looks out over the filthy, crumbling city around him. When it has all fallen in on itself, neglected until it simply collapses under its own febrile weight and the vibrations of the traffic - like an African Jericho - he'll still be proud, still be there. The downtown area is increasingly being bequested to the poor and marginalised as the Money moves out to 'New Cairo', with its Emaar developments and Al Futtaim Malls.

Over lunch at the conference, one of my fellow speakers tried to prod me about how fake and spangly Dubai is. I was too polite to tell him it was the one thing Cairo's brightest and bestest aspire to, so much so they're building a facsimile of Dubai on the outskirts of their fatigued city just as Dubai is building its very own facsimile of the pyramids. Let's swap: your culture for our glamour. Don't forget to spit on your hand before shaking, buddy.

A subway takes you away from the Great Man, steps take you down to pass under the road around the statue. Two men loiter for tips at the bottom. They have a plastic table to rest their prayer beads and ashtray on. There's an escalator going up and two fat old women approach it nervously. One is holding a box of food on her head, the scarves covering them drape over shapeless shoulders. They hop on, grasping for the handrail.

Disaster: a mis-step and their movements become increasingly Lorenzian, catastrophically they reach out for each other and lose the handrail. The younger of the men with the plastic table starts to move, sensing the unfolding tragedy. He's too slow, the ladies tumble, one onto her back, one falling forwards. The box of food goes flying as he belatedly hits the escalator stop button. I catch the food, the ladies wailing and scrabbling at the glass sides of the stairway as they try to heave themselves to their feet. They bat away the vain attempts of the man to help them, calling to God to help them. I right the food box and leave it aside as other onlookers rush to help the howling women.

Coming up out of the subway into the exhaust-laden sunshine, a man with one leg has paused to regain his breath after the climb, his crutches under his armpits supporting him as he fumbles for a cigarette. His clothes are shabby and his trousers shine with dirt.

For three Egyptian pounds, Dhs 0.50, I enter the Hadiqat Al Azbakiyah, the Azbakiyah Garden. It's marginally quieter in here, the traffic outside carving its way around the Great Man presiding over his crumbling eternal triumph. The pathway is a precarious walk, the paving has caved in. The kerbing is worn and shattered, litter and piles of leaves block the pathways. There's a destroyed, inexplicable low building with a collapsing rusty iron balcony at the end of the pathway, an Ottoman era relic clashing with the 1970s architecture of what can only be a toilet block, its slab sides spattered in bat shit. It is, of course, padlocked shut.

There are gardeners here and a grubby-looking heron vies with two crows to get at a small geyser gushing up from a broken pipe as a turbaned man in a gelabiyah hoses down the matte leaves of the exhaust-dusted plants. A group of men loiter around a gazebo. One calls out to me, 'Hello mate, hey buddy.' I wave a hand as I leave them behind.

I wander around, wondering at the unkempt, smashed-up state of the place. Only the Egyptians could break a garden.

Back to the hotel, then, to feed the mosquito in my room. He must be missing me by now...

Monday, 22 September 2014

Smokes

No more smokes for him^ Were you to blame^ - N...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It must have been wittering about Gin Pahits yesterday that put old times in mind or something, but I found myself in the car on the way home last night reminiscing about how I used to smoke.

It seems odd to think about it now, but I did. And so did Sarah, and her mum. And her older sister. And her husband. We all did it. And none of us do now.

Staying in Tipperary, I'd get up at 6am and nip downstairs for a quick smoke with Mrs W, a cup of tea and some brown bread and jam. In the kitchen. Smoking. Can you imagine?

We used to smoke in the car. I had a natty MR2 T-Bar (lovely, lovely car) and I remember filling the ashtray. The lord alone knows what that motor smelled like. We must have been oblivious.

I used to smoke for England. I qualified for the olympic team. I'd chug a fag in between puffs of shisha. I was on 60 a day. I went for a medical and the GP who did the summing up was in a state of quiet fury. 'You have no right to enjoy the health you do.'

Now it all just seems strange. I can't imagine why we all did it. I look at people smoking now and just think it's odd.

I always said I wouldn't become one of those annoying rabidly anti-smoking ex-smokers, but it kills me now. If I'm in a smoky room - despite still liking the smell of fresh smoke (stale smoke's icky) - the next day my throat's knackered.

I gave up in 2001 after I realised I was increasingly culpable of manipulating social situations so I could smoke and didn't like myself for that. I wrote Space partly to give me something to do with my hands (they did a blog interview with me for the last Emirates LitFest when I said 'I wrote Space so I could find something publicly acceptable to do with my right hand' and the PR types primly edited it out. Le sigh) and had to edit out all the indoor smoking - there was a lot of it, too - when smoking bans came in.

I had a short but nasty fling with cigars and then realised it was a case of clean up or toes up.

It's been over ten years now and I have not the faintest desire to stick chopped up leaves in my mouth and set fire to them. Which is lucky, because when I was going through the initial cold turkey it was all I could think about. What an odd chap I must have been.

Talking of which, I'm doing another series of writing, editing and publishing workshops at DIFC next month and a literary lunch thingy at Trade Centre in November. More news as I find out more myself...

Sunday, 21 September 2014

Gin Pahit

English: W. Somerset Maugham British writer
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One and a half ounces of gin, half an ounce of Angostura.

It's a very odd thing to put in your mouth. It's the sort of thing meths drinkers would recognise: powerful, alcoholic and somehow carbolic. It's drunk without ice

Somerset Maugham mentions it in his various tales of the South Seas, compelling and luxuriant reading all - if somewhat mean and clinically observed they be. I would love to find myself sat in deep buttoned leather chairs around a teak table in the company of Maugham, Evelyn Waugh and Hector Munro (better known as Saki). You'd be hard pressed to find a more vicious bunch of louche, literary bastards.

It's the sort of thing planters drank to while away the boredom, lift the spirits or cleanse the weary soul. The air in Raffles must have been heavy with its odour. A few of those and you could forget the sultry heat, the soddenness of everything and the sullen glares of the beaten natives.

Pahit is Malay for 'bitter'. Gin bitter is made so by the addition of Angostura, a deeply odd drink which actually hails from Venezuela via Trinidad, which is where it's currently made. It was invented as a stomach tonic for Bolivar's army.

I'm re-reading Alexander Frater's Beyond the Blue Horizon, a travelogue that retraces the Eastern Empire Route of Imperial Airways from Croydon to Brisbane. The drink gets a mention and reminded me I had been curious about it when it came up in Maugham's stories. It's also known as a pink gin although properly composed, as above, it's not pink but a sort of poisonous maroon.

While the cat is alive, I can't say I'm a fan...

It's growing on me. I might be 'going jungly'...

Friday, 9 August 2013

Leave (ing on a jetplane)

Zahnkranzpakete
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Back from Wales, off to Helsinki. Well, why not?

We've been whizzing around Pembrokeshire on our new mountain bikes - they have silly names like Raptor and Vengeance Is Called Rex and stuff. It's not until you screw up the gearing hitting a hard uphill (the nice chap at Halfords, asked to explain how Derailleur gears work, started, "Right, then. I'll try to be polite but it's not easy...") that you truly appreciate why gym training people make you do squats.

Up until the point where I first skulked into a gym two years ago - and then spent the following week walking like a strychnine-poisoned octogenarian with the staggers - I'd thought squats were what happened when you ate out in Cairo...

The weather's been lovely, all cumulo-nimbus and sunny spells. It's summer and the hedgerows are teeming with life, the air is rich with the smell of cut hay and the buzz of bees. Most of which, I swear, have slammed into my forehead as we've been whizzing along those undulating country lanes.

And now to the Home of Nokia, expensive booze and, apparently, inwardly focused existentialist angst. So far, every arrangement has been made over email with responses so fast they've met our outgoing mails, Tangoed them and made it into our inboxes three seconds before our enquiries left.

This, then, is 'leave'...

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Thursday, 14 February 2013

Eye eye! The Bluewaters Dubai Eye Ferris Wheel

The first Ferris wheel from the 1893 World Col...
The first Ferris wheel from the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Funny thing to name a giant Ferris wheel after, a radio station, but there's no telling what folk will get up to these days.

National news agency WAM carries the news Dubai Ltd has announced another megaproject, the latest in a clearly signalled campaign of 'We're back' announcements. Braggadocio or bravado? You tell me. The Bluewaters plan will see a £1 billion island development off the beach by 'live the lifestyle' Jumeirah Beach Residence. On said island, developers Meeras are plonking an hotel (five star, natch), residences, a souq, an entertainment zone and the world's largest Ferris wheel.

Of course it couldn't just be a big Ferris wheel. It has to be a jaw-dropping, eye-popping 210 meter billion Dirham Ferris wheel. Ideally, scattered with hundreds and thousands and topped with glacé cherries.

It's all based on market studies that indicate the project can expect three million tourists a year to flock to its candy-floss stores and queue up to get a ride

Ferris wheel watchers will likely think this baby will be pipping the London Eye to the biggest Ferris wheel in the world post, but they'd be wrong. It's already been pipped twice - at a mere 135 metres, the London Eye is the mini-me of Ferris wheels (named after their inventor, a Mr. George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr) and was outstripped just six years after its opening by The Star Of Nanchang, a 160 metre behemoth. Just two years later, Singapore ripped the rug from under Nanchang's feet with the Singapore Flyer, which sneaked past the Star to take the Guinness Book entry with a mere five metres' lead.

The Flyer cost Dhs 876 million to build, so it looks like Meeras is getting a bargain from Hyundai Contracting, which will build the Dubai Eye wheel. If the Dubai Eye takes after the Star and the Flyer, it'll rotate once every 30 minutes, be in constant motion (no stopping to get on and off) and have gondolas with a capacity of 28 people.

Those with the memory span of a Higgs Boson will recall The Great Dubai Wheel, which was to have been built in DubaiLand by the Great Wheel Corporation. The project gained planning permission in 2006 and was officially announced as kaputski in 2012 after GWC had gone belly-up with a trail of failed Ferris wheel projects behind it. The Great Dubai Wheel was to have been a 185 metre wheel.

The fate of the Great Wheel Corporation is a fascinating one. It reeled from merger to acquisition to bankruptcy to collapse, through a number of iterations right up until 2012, when it finally folded. By then it was called Great City Attractions Global. GCAG's assets were acquired by Dubai-based Freij Entertainment International which operates GCAG's UK assets through its UK subsidiary Wheels Entertainments Ltd - including the controversial 53-metre York big wheel.

Freij bills itself as 'The world's biggest operator of Amusement Rides' although taking a look at www.freij.com you could also call it the world's biggest operator of a totally rubbish web presence.

Freij operates Dubai's Global Village, the site of the recent fatality when a part fell off the 60 metre Ferris wheel there - it was subsequently revealed this travelling wheel had been linked to the deaths of five people under previous ownership.

And in fact it was Freij CEO Freij Al Zein who first talked to media in April last year about a billion Dirham giant Ferris wheel to be called the Dubai Eye. Slated at the time to be a 170 metre wheel as part of a major 93,000 metre indoor amusement park complex, the project would appear to have finally come to fruition.

Quite whether Freij is still involved is pure speculation - developer Meeras hasn't updated a press release on its website since 2011, so any reliable information on the Bluewaters project beyond the WAM story is scant right now.

But it's interesting, isn't it, the way in which the Great Dubai Wheel dream never really went away but became a baton to be passed from hand to hand?

I wonder when the undersea hotel scheme will bob up to surface again...

PS - It seems to be a coincidence, as the WAM story doesn't mention it, but the story broke on George Ferris' birthday, as celebrated by today's Google doodle! Eerie!
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Sunday, 25 November 2012

Nuts

Small bowl of mixed nuts displaying large nuts...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I posted the other day about stumbling across a trove of old articles. Here's another one that amused me. It originally ran in Communicate Magazine under the pseudonym of misanthropic journalist Mike Gruff...

I thought that the idea of ad agency types brainstorming over Chablis and dry-roasted peanuts was a typical piece of apocrypha until I was invited to one. Interestingly, the product in question was dry roasted peanuts, so there were bowls of them on the frosted glass-topped table. The Chablis was in ice buckets, which shows a certain sense of style.

Why, oh why, they invited me I do not know. A friend of mine worked at the agency and had mumbled something about wanting a different opinion. He went on to say, darkly, that if anyone had different opinions it was Gruff. I took it as a compliment.

So I went along. I can’t say that I was particularly happy at the prospect of sitting around a table with a bunch of yahoos dressed in over-large shirts and sporting pony tails, but I was nevertheless intrigued to see the whole process of creative thinking, so celebrated by the agency world, at work.

My first mistake was deciding that I didn’t like anyone around the table. There were three girls and four men, not counting me. The girls were smart, dressed up to the nines and drawlingly, casually superior and the guys were so hip they kept their pockets sewn to avoid ruining the lines of their pinstripe trousers.

Nobody smoked.

The girls had already thrown me pitying glances: I was, as usual, dishevelled and wearing jeans and a scruffy purple shirt. The guys were being nice to me, which I hated. So I sulked.

My second mistake was saying ‘No thanks’ to the offer of a Perrier and getting stuck straight into the Chablis. Very nice, too.

The session started with a guy called Nick asking people for ideas on positioning peanuts. This made me snort into my Chablis and got me a withering glare from a girl in Red called Bryony.

“Well, actually, Nick, I think we’ve got a category killer here if we can position it right against the health food freaks, you know?” said Bryony. “Like, we’ve got artificial flavourings to deal with here, so let’s just make a virtue of that.”

And now I made my third and most fatal mistake of all. I reached across the table and picked up a handful of the nuts and ate them. The hit was instantaneous, my mouth freeze-dried, like I’d just filled it with that silica dessicant they put in television boxes. The chemical high came on like a steam-train as I munched and crunched, spicy flavours filling my brain and clamouring for attention. My shoulder muscles contracted and I felt my eyes trying to pop out of their sockets. I reached for the Chablis and knocked the glass over in my haste. Ignoring the pool of hooch slowly spreading across the table-top, I refilled the glass and drank deeply.

Suddenly the Chablis tasted soapy. I felt my mouth working, flicked my tongue around to dislodge the little pieces of nut caught in my teeth, realised that everyone had stopped talking and was looking at me as I sat, my mouth stretched into an insane, toothy grin as I tried to reach the nutty bits, my tongue caught between my teeth and my upper lip. I reached for more nuts.

“Right. Great.” Said Nick, in that way that people say right great to mean not. “So let’s move on here. We’re looking at maybe turning it all around, at making a virtue of the flavourings. Kind of, it’s bad for you but that’s what makes it good, yah?”

The second mouthful of nuts was better than the first. I gasped for breath as the powerful chemicals coursed through my veins, sucking the moisture out of my body and tearing at my tongue like highly spiced acid.

More Chablis.

“You OK there Mike?” said a girl called Naomi, looking concerned. I didn’t care. She was distorting, now, becoming Daliesque, her full torso melting and drooping over a forked stick. Voices started to moan in my head as I drank more of the cold white liquor. Everyone had stopped talking.

“No. No, I’m not alright.” I heard myself saying through a mountain of cotton wool. “Have you eaten these things? Have you actually tasted what you’re trying to sell to people? This isn’t legal. These things are dangerous.”

Nick was laughing, nervously now. “Sure, Mike. They’re great, aren’t they?”

 I was standing now, could feel myself weaving. “No they’re not. They’re fuller of chemicals than ICI. We’ve gone beyond this, surely! People are aware of what they’re eating these days, they don’t want to munch on man-made hyper-flavourings any more. This stuff drives kids mad. You can’t sell this!”

The rush was dying, so I took more nuts and Chablis. I tried to go on speaking, but the mixture was solidifying in my mouth like concrete, a kind of peanut butter lockjaw held me silent, standing up in front of them all, my eyes rolling and my jaw clenching spastically as I tried to manage the serious symptoms of toxic shock.

“Er, Mike, don’t you think you perhaps should…”

“Shut up!” I shouted, holding onto the table for stability, throwing my arm out and strewing nuts across the wet table top. The group sat, nervous and even scared, looking at me through wide eyes. “This is evil! Evil! You are twisted, monstrous.” Flecks of nut were escaping my mouth, but I didn’t care. “This isn’t FOOD!” I roared at them, grabbing more nuts. “This is the SLUT of all nuts!”

I stood glaring balefully at them all, as Bryony came out of her trance and sat forward and then stood, a shocked look on her face.

“Oh my God.” She said and then, turning to the others with a grin. “That’s brilliant!”

I collapsed, gibbering, into my chair.

My friend says that they won’t be asking me to any more brainstormings. Apparently they were very grateful for the idea, which they used. But they felt that perhaps it was best not to let people know that you didn’t have to work at an ad agency to come up with brilliant creative ideas. I met the girl Bryony at a party a few weeks later. She smiled nervously at me when I said hello and then left a few minutes afterwards. Apparently her tortoise was ill and she had to go home to look after it.
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Sunday, 28 August 2011

We are not the problem

Airport security machinesImage via WikipediaMy heart sank as we walked into security at Belfast's 'George Best' City Airport and I saw the Group Four logos on the staff's shirts. Outsourcing airport security, for some reason, just struck me as wrong.

My word, but they were professional. Scrupulous, painstaking and unfailingly polite. Sarah's bag was re-scanned and finally hand-searched by a staffer who explained what was going on, why and what he was doing - who was pleasant and yet businesslike, his movements careful, considered and in no way threatening. He even offered to help repack the bag.

The whole experience merely highlighted for me how utterly dehumanising and demeaning the awful security at Heathrow is - and how it really doesn't have to be like that. I have had run-ins with the staff at Heathrow before, aggressive and pumped up with their own importance, they seem to jump on any chance to crack the whip and let you know that 'sir' is a word used to call dogs. Their attitude is bullying, aggressive and at times sneering - they use aggressive hand gestures, are above any explanation and seem to thrive on working in one of the filthiest security areas I have ever encountered.

I have been increasingly puzzled at why we all put up with it - cowed and compliant, we let the staff running this demeaning regiman treat us like criminals rather than the people they are charged to protect. We shuffle through the barriers, herded with curt grunts of 'this way', 'down here' or 'this side'; we stop obediently when hands are shoved in our faces, wait for trays to be brought before we take our laptops out of our bags (not Kindles, for some reason) and take off our belts and shoes to shuffle through the metal detector - all the while being barked at by the camp guards.

On one flight, Sarah was selected for random body scanning. Not unnaturally, she asked about the scanner - what technology was it, were there any risks associated with it? She was told to 'read the sign', which helpfully said you have been selected for scanning and if you don't comply you won't be allowed to fly. It was the final straw. We complained to the Important Looking Man With The Radio and pointed out that he might like consider a trip to Belfast to look at best practice because Heathrow's security area was a deeply - and wholly unnecessarily - unpleasant place to be (in fact, friends refuse to fly through Heathrow for this very reason).

He agreed with us. Apparently BAA recognises the fact they have poor people skills and that their management of passengers has become secondary to their management of the task. Which is all very well, but the people in this case ARE the task. We have security, surely, so we can travel without fear and the shadow of extremism over our heads. The people providing the security are public servants, accountable, open to question and responsible for managing the task, in this case protecting people, appropriately.

Or have I gone mad? Should we really be grateful, in the name of protecting us against extremism, to be treated like dumb beasts every time we travel?
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Wednesday, 25 May 2011

Who's Afraid Of A Regulated Web?


French president Nicolas Sarkozy has come out and said he wants a regulated web - "You need to hear our limits, our red lines" he told an audience at the two-day 'e-G8' conference. The AP report is linked here. His is not the first whiff of regulatory sulphur, of course - only the other day I posted about the British culture secretary sending out a clear 'enough is enough' message regarding privacy on the Internet after Twitter 'made a mockery' of that Great British Institution, the super-injunction.

Of course, it should come as no surprise to hear those who govern us (all too often, you can't help but think, forgetting they're supposed to be representing us) starting to talk about regulation. Wikileaks was a massive wake-up call to governments, followed by the wake-up call of the 'Arab Spring'. We now know two things we did not fully appreciate a year ago.We have to redefine privacy, secrecy and transparency and we have to redefine governance, the aspirations of people and the way in which they are represented.

But redefining these things doesn't necessarily mean micro-regulating them, at least in part because it's so fast moving out there you'd be hard put to keep up - and that's a key problem governments have found in the past: you can't create legislation that keeps up with innovation. The Microsoft vs DOJ case showed quite clearly that an entire technology market, let alone platforms and applications, can change during a single action in the courts, let alone the time taken to draft and pass a piece of well defined legislation.

Establishing a set of principles might be a nice approach to take, but then we've been doing that ourselves: up to now, morality and behaviour on the Internet have been largely a function of communities - we all know what the rules are (if you use someone else's link on Twitter, you include in the tweet that it was via them; if you send unwanted emails to people you'll be called a spammer and face consumer unhappiness; if you hijack a hashtag, you'll get pwned all over the place and so on) - or are in the process of coming to terms with changes and defining rules as a pretty much consensual process.

Of course, regulating the Internet in the name of privacy and responsibility is all very well, but we also have to be wary of regulating discourse - even when that discourse is uncomfortable for us. And here's the issue at the heart of government discomfort with that discourse: the ability for people to share opinion and organise in shows of public opinion that are not ordered through the representational process that has put the people in government where they are.

I mean, imagine a world in which everyone's voice could be heard! How insane would that be? A world where everyone had access to a viable way of voting instantly on any given topic, of canvassing opinions and sharing information without fear of corporate interference, lobbying or governmental mendacity, a world in which we didn't actually need to be represented by politicians because we have the mechanisms in our own hands to represent ourselves.

Why do I need an MP to vote on my behalf in parliament when I can register a vote on a website instantly and have that vote counted in picoseconds? What if the Internet could slim down government in the same way it has slimmed down other disintermediated processes?

What if?

Saturday, 21 May 2011

Big Bang (Blowing up Paradise)


As if you needed any, above is incontrovertible proof of my long-held assertion that Modhesh is evil.

Yesterday, largely unheralded, was the 55th anniversary of the first airborne hydrogen bomb tests on the Pacific island of Bikini atoll. Life magazine, in commemoration, has released a remarkable 35-slide set of images from the bomb tests of the cold war, including one that scared me more than even the awful plume over Muraroa atoll - an image of a group of sublimely insouciant nut-heads cutting into a mushroom-cloud shaped cake. What tremendous idiocy it must have taken to celebrate this dubious 'achievement' in this way.

Take a look at the picture set, linked here,do - it's really quite stunning.

Of course, the 36th picture never made it to Life's pages. It's the one above, exclusive to Fake Plastic Souks, that proves what we've always known about the little critter...

Tuesday, 15 February 2011

Ola Abu Jarmous - Update



Many will likely remember the story of little Ola, whose sheer liveliness and spit captivated Ussa Nabulsiyeh's Sara and sparked an online fund raising effort that raised the $18,000 needed for her life-saving surgery in record time.

We got an update from the Palestine Children's Relief Fund's Steve Sosebee this morning. It reads as follows:

"I would like to update you on the status of Ola Abu Jamous from Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem. Because you responded to our appeal to help us cover her expenses to go to Florence, Italy to have a tumor removed from her brain, and then to have radiation therapy for cancer, she has had what doctors there are calling a "miraculous" recovery and will be coming back to Palestine in a week of so.

As you know, we sent this beautiful child there in November with her mother, and sent her father a month later when the tumor was discovered to be cancerous. As you can see from these photos, she is still full of spirit and life, and we thank you for making this possible. I'll let you know when she gets back to Palestine. Thank you Diya Khalil for sending me these photos. I apologize for not getting photos to you sooner, but we had very little support there due to our almost nonexistent contacts in Florence. Thanks again for all of your support and help in saving this beautiful child's life."

I'm wearing a stupid grin this morning...


Sunday, 13 February 2011

Sharjah Shipwrecks


We live by the sea in Northern Sharjah. The other day, after the bout of bad weather that trashed our brand new and unused gazebo, we noticed a ship washed up on the Sharjah Corniche, seemingly dug into the sand back first, a small tanker by the looks of it. It's not often you see shipwrecks on the beach by your house and we were mildly curious as to quite how you manage to end up beached in Sharjah - it's sort of hard to miss, so it can't really have been a case of lost at sea. She's officially a shipwreck - more info here. Today, a second ship ended up smack bang next to the first one. Now there are two shipwrecks on our beach!

To wreck one ship on a beach may be regarded a misfortune, to wreck two looks like carelessness.

The Sea Mermid, the first ship, has now been joined by the Lady Rana, quite a large vessel (81 metres long, in fact). There's a pervasive stench of hydrocarbons in the air. We're wondering if a third will turn up. It seems so very odd that two ships should be beached in two incidents and end up feet away from each other. The Lady Rana had a very lucky escape indeed, at least she's in one piece and missed the vicious stack of rocks to her right. She's flying a Panamanian flag, but two years ago was flying a North Korean one. Shipspotters have already got her down as beached in Sharjah!

The Sea Mermid is a double mystery. Did they get the name painted on the cheap by the world's only dyslexic maritime signwriter?

Emirates

This is a photo showing airplanes from Emirate...Image via WikipediaThis excellent article in the New York Times got me thinking about Dubai's greatest success story - its airline, Emirates. I've been flying with Emirates since the 1980s and it's long been my airline of choice. I'm a fan and I don't mind letting you know it.

One thing that has always amazed me about Emirates is how the management team, based around the near-legendary figure of Maurice Flanagan, has managed to turn two leased 'planes into one of the world's leading airlines. I don't care how much of Dubai's money was poured into it or how much support from the government EK has had in the past - the sheer achievement of creating the organisation, facilities and partnerships needed for something on this scale within one man's lifetime is breathtaking.

I've had my off moments with EK, alright (one story ended up with me being flagged in their reservation system as a 'Rude Pax', which made it into Arabian Business magazine, thank you very much Rhys bloody Jones). But I have had very many more satisfactory experiences and even occasionally been delighted.

Which is what it's all about, really. Exceeding high expectations is so hard to do - and yet EK so often manages just that.

You listening, HSBC? Good, just checking...
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Friday, 4 February 2011

Awesome

CAIRO, EGYPT - FEBRUARY 01: Youths smile as th...Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI know I'm a grumpy old man, but I do have a number of pet hates. You know, things that any reasonable human being would rail against like grocers' apostrophes (Avocadoe's 2 for £1) or the awful American habit that has crept across the Atlantic of referring to everything as awesome. It's all too often accompanied by a specific pronunciation, AWESUUUUM! It helps to assume the expression of a particularly stupid chihuahua presented with a chocolate a moment before it has been smacked on the back of the head with a cricket bat.

It's like a linguistic background radiation. That Kit-Kat was awesome! You breathed in and out again? Awesome! This is all so totally, awesome! Wouldn't it be awesome if they have fish on as a special today?

No. It wouldn't.

I think my least favourite thing about this over-use of the blasted word is that if a Kit-Kat is awesome, what is the sight of two million Egyptians gathered in brotherhood in Cairo's Tahrir Square? What is the sight of them praying together, Christians and Muslims alike? What is the sound of two million voices raised in unison demanding that Hosni Mubarak resign on this 'Day of Leaving'? What is all that hope, that joy and that peacefully expressed, human want for justice, peace and freedom?

Yes, people. This is awesome. Mind-bombingly, thrillingly awesome. I have the feeling, the first time since that awful low of the early hours of Thursday morning when it looked like it might all be over after the terrible violence from Mubarak's thugs throughout the night, that these voices might, finally, be heard. I'm supposed to be editing, but I'm glued to AlJazeera, whose team must surely now win every award in television, journalism and sheer bloody minded determination this year. They're using satphones to broadcast their images - cameras stolen, office closed, license withdrawn and journalists under threat and yet they're still maintaining world-class non-stop programming. Awesome.

Have a flip through these when you've got a moment. The amazing images of photojournalists Samuel Aranda and Iason Athanasiadis that bring this all home. They're awesome too.
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Monday, 24 January 2011

Torches

Placa en honor al estudiante checo Jan Palach....Image via WikipediaDon't forget young Jan Palach
He  burnt a torch against the Warsaw Pact

Modern history has been changed by men who chose to demonstrate against repression by taking their own lives in the most painful way I can imagine. The one I remember from history at school, and an abiding image of the '60s, was the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, who burned himself to death to protest the oppression of Buddhist monks. In 1969, Czech student Jan Palach (the couplet above is from Stranglers' bassist JJ Burnel's 'Euroman' solo album just in case you wondered) set fire to himself in front of the Russian tanks as they rolled into Prague, bringing winter back to the Prague Spring. I visited his memorial and it did make me terribly sad.

Palach died in January - the same month as Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose act of final desperation was to lead to the overthrow of the government. You're reading this because I was listening to the radio yesterday and heard the presenters mispronouncing his name, 'That Tunisian chap, you know, Booazzi or something.' It seemed odd to me that anyone living in the Middle East should be unaware of this man and why he was driven to do this to himself - particularly given the consequences of his action.

I find it hard to even think about what would drive a man to contemplate the act - the acrid stink of petrol, vapour shimmering, a scratch and whiff of phosphorous. The lazy whoomp of the flame. How could anyone with a shred of imagination even contemplate doing that to themselves? And yet Bouazizi was not to be alone - like Palach, his act has inspired others to follow the same course. There has been a spate of copycat immolations around the Middle East, five in Algeria, one each in Mauritania and Saudi Arabia and four in Egypt. In all, four of these people have died.

None of these men is likely to be remembered beyond a family's grief and a listing in the obsessive Wikipedia list of political self immolations (it's here - an odd list of lost causes and forgotten martyrs). But Mohammed Bouazizi, like Jan Palach and Thích Quảng Đức, changed history. Uniquely, he is the only man to have directly caused a government to fall by taking his life in this way.

Monday, 17 January 2011

Life is Good



Sarah Walton over at SandPitDiaries was kind enough to give me a 'Life is Good' award, whatever one of those is. It comes with some questions, which I usually avoid like the plague, but seeeing as it's Sarah, here goes:


1. If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing this? If you aren't anonymous, do you wish you started out anonymously, so that you could be anonymous now?
Nope. I think we should be accountable for our views.

2. Describe an incident that shows your inner stubborn side
 I wear my stubbornness on my shirtsleeve. I sat down to write Space, my first book, in 2003. I’m currently shopping my third book, Beirut, around. That’s 300,000 words of stubborn.

3. What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?
 I’m not getting any younger, but it could be worse.

4. What is your favourite summer cold drink?
Beer

5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?
Write and edit

6. Is there something that you still want to accomplish in your life?
Yes, get published.

7. When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person, or always ditching?
I was extremely mixed up and many things, including three of the above but never, ever overachieving. I resolutely underachieved and resolutely performed to a fraction of my potential. I loathed school and didn’t mind letting them know it. Given that I was handed a very expensive government-funded scholarship to attend a very expensive public school, I should feel more guilty about that than I do.

8. If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment in your life, what would you see?
My wife looking across a green and white tablecloth at the President hotel in Dubai asking me “What have we done?” on our first night in the UAE as residents.

9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog, or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people and events?
 It’s not about me so much as things that amuse or engage me.

10. If you had the choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?
The book. I’m scared of my new phone, it’s smarter than I am. Yeah, I know that’s not hard.


And now, as is the way with these things, I have to pass it on to three bloggers:


Sara Refai, whose Ussa Nabulsiyeh blog is a brilliantly well written delight and has arguably saved a life.

Roba Al-Assi, whose And Far Away always fun to read and furnished me with the soundtrack to the casino scene in Beirut.

Seabee, whose Life In Dubai is almost an institution.

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Dropping the WWW

WHERE THE WEB WAS BORNImage by Max Braun via FlickrI heard a radio ad this morning that rather stopped me in my tracks, for no particularly good reason other than the fact it was promoting a website and went to the trouble of saying it out loud including the dubbleyewdubbleyewdubbleyew.

I found myself wondering whether we don't all just take that for granted these days? I'd just say 'go to alexandermcnabb dot com' rather than give the WWW. I mean, why not go the whole hog and say 'Aitch tee tee pee colon  forwardslash forwardslash dubbleyewdubbleyewdubbleyew'?

Perhaps interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee (the man that put the hole in the toilet seat that was the Internet by inventing the world wide web) recently apologised for the forwardslash forwardslash, which was a programming convention at the time but by no means necessary - if you can only imagine the tonnes of paper, the zillions of wasted electrons, the megagallons of printer ink that this little quirk has caused...

In fact, the reason it gave me pause was that it sounded somehow charmingly naive. Here they are struggling to breathlessley get all of their 'dare to dream' and 'an apostolic momentum of carborundum epistles for you!' in, and they're wasting a precious slice of their 30 seconds giving me a redundant dubbleyewdubbleyewdubbleyew.

(Another ad I heard the other day gave the name of the thing they were promoting and exhorted the listener to 'Google us!'. When you do, the website name is simple and based on the name of the thing. It would have been easier all round if they'd just said 'go to nameofthething dot com'.)

It's time to drop the WWW, methinks. We all know it's on the web, surely?

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Tuesday, 4 January 2011

From The Dungeons

Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch

(Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber . This is perfectly natural, it's my latest...