Word of the Week: Sustainable

Take a cross section of a cow's aorta about an inch long, then silver plate it. Now you have an object that looks precisely like the Dubai Award for Sustainable Transport, advertised today to a grateful nation and created for our listening pleasure by the Dubai Roads & Transport Authority or RTA. This follows the marvellous and admirable Blue Communities initiative for sustainable coastal communities from uber-developer Nakheel, launched earlier this week after the usual pointless, sorry I meant to say marvellous, expensive teaser campaign.

What, asks the inquisitive mind as it scans the screen, could the RTA possibly want to award us for? A cynical mind might assert that surely the only award we all want is the ability to travel around the city with at least relative ease.

The award, according to the advertisement with the cow's aorta on it, is to 'encourage organizations and companies to play an active role to implement the most innovative and effective initiatives in the field of sustainable transportation'. How very interesting.

Incidentally, Wikipedia defines sustainable transport, at least in part, as "a reaction to some of the things that have gone radically and visibly wrong with transportation policy." Which struck me as pretty much bang on.

The advertisement points you to the RTA website for further information about the award, categories and evaluation criteria. Sadly, when I went there to take a look at this most fascinating thing this morning, the website had crashed spectacularly.

So I shall have to wait to see how the RTA intends to award me. In the meantime, here are some suggested award categories.

1) Longest wait in morning traffic

2) Longest wait in evening traffic

3) Longest wait full stop

4) Longest run up the hard shoulder to avoid the traffic

5) The Dubai Foot on the Dashboard Award

6) Kerb Crawler of the Year

7) Fastest headlight flasher

8) Arrogant, aggressive, inconsiderate, dangerous git of the year

9) Short cut to work of the year (entry not open to the three RTA cars that use mine every morning: an irony that fills my heart with stuff)

10) The Dubai Darwin Award (for the most pointless self-inflicted death)

I had to stop there, but please don't hesitate to make more suggestions. Maybe, by the time the website is up, we can compare lists...

Yes! The race is on to win that cross-section of arterial matter!

Turning The Air Blue

Here is the link to the Blue Communities website. UAE property developer Nakheel, the company that is building the three Palm Islands and the World and now, today's newspapers reveal, the Universe developments off Dubai's coast, is behind the initiative.

Go here. Please. Watch the videos. Listen to the vision for a smarter, more caring way to work on building sustainable, environmentally wise coastal communities. And then share the link with your friends so that they, too, can marvel at this wonderful effort. Please do feel free to leave a comment here if you were as impressed as I was at the timeliness, sincerity and creativity of this important move from the company that has so carefully rearranged so much coastline.

I have an idea for Nakheel's next project. They must be sitting around wondering what to do after they finish creating the Universe, after all. It's important, I think, to avoid any sense of anticlimax when you're following a move like that.

I think they should look at a new development built on a turtle's back. Probably held up by four elephants. That sounds, somehow, as if it might work...

An Eventful Drive To Work

The sandy snicket has been turned into a scene out of Wacky Races: the rains have meant the sand has compressed and has a delightfully road-like quality - enough for every bus, truck and two-wheel-drive in the country to have a go. Result: you can't get near the place without getting stuck in queues as long as yer arm. So I had to go around the back to avoid 'em all.

And then, as I get into the delicious and generally lavish area of Satwa, the aggressive jerk in the LWB Cruiser who's been gunning his engine, swooping in and out of lanes and generally jinking around behind me in the morning traffic decides he's going to move from behind me, undertaking me at high speed as I pull over, indicating, to the right turn I need to take. And so he hit me.

I got out, a tad stressy, and then he wound down his 90% tinted window.

He's only a copper in uniform, isn't he?

Two hours and a fine later, I'm still fuming. The fine was for refusing to give my license and registration on demand to a policeman. Scrupulously fair throughout the whole incident, the sympathetic (and quite amusing) chaps down the copshop accepted that I am unlikely to give my documents to someone who has just had an accident with me and who could then choose to abuse his position in any number of ways - a position I maintained he was abusing by driving like that in uniform in the first place.

But the rules is the rules, boss, they said.

Which I suppose they are...

Postscript

Driving home tonight, I was caught in evil, snarled-up traffic for two hours. And the snicket was illuminated by hundreds of car headlights - mayhem and chaos that Dante would have recognised as a fitting illustration to his infernal vision. The cops were even there, Sharjah's 'Anjad' traffic police were regulating the flow of traffic back onto the tarmac as hundreds of cars, buses and trucks jostled aggressively - an enormous game of 'chicken' - to get through the partially blocked exits. Cars stuck, cars roaring in every direction, eight lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into a one-car gap, slithering on the churned-up sand.

Quite amazing.

I went round the back again.

:)

Oh no! Weather Post Warning!

Ya gotta blog about the weather sometime...

...and it might as well be when a country is forced to a virtual standstill by it! Yes, the rain has really stopped play in the Emirates as the bad weather continues and everyone looks forward to a second day of absolute chaos. It's been an interesting week so far, what with Dubai shutting down in honour of George W. and his mate Condi (by the way, Gulf News got some great pictures - including this one, image 4 of the 5 on the page, of a berk waving a camel stick around) and then yesterday's traffic chaos as heavy rains caused flooding all over the place, closing the arterial Emirates Road.

Last night the Ministry of Education decided to close all public and private schools until Sunday due to the weather - and we're apparently forecast another day of heavy rain today followed by a couple of days of fog. Way things are going around here, we'll get some showers of grasshoppers and perhaps some frogs as well.

Poor old Sharjah is, of course, worse hit than Dubai: the roads are flooded well above the kerbs in much of the city's Northern area, the inadequate drainage seemingly hardly helped by the multi-million dollar drainage project that followed the last major rains we had a few years ago. Many roads are only barely passable by two wheel drives. As if that weren't bad enough, yesterday's closure of the Emirates road has this morning apparently been exacerbated by Dubai Police deciding to close the Sharjah-Dubai carriageway because (wait for it) the Dubai-Sharjah one is flooded!!!

In short, it's miserable out there and the rain's still coming down as hundreds of thousands of cold, irritable and impatient commuters sploosh through the dirty grey-brown puddles, horns beeping, fan-belts squeaking and hazard lights set to on. Four died yesterday: let's hope everyone makes it in one piece today...

The Day After Bush - Private Parts!!!

Emarat Al Youm today reprinted some of the SMS jokes that were flying around Dubai, the city that shut for George Bush's convenience, yesterday. One such SMS suggestion was that George should replace Matar Al Tayer, the head of Dubai's RTA (Roads and Traffic Authority) as George at least managed to clear the roads for a day. Matar, obviously in very good humour, apparently replied to the paper "Why not? He's going to be out of a job soon!"

Which is lovely.

Meanwhile, French premier Sarkozy visited Qatar (which didn't clear the city for him) and was pictured by none other than yours and my favourite newspaper Gulf News as he held the hand of the Qatari Emir at the airport. A touching gesture except you'll notice that Sarkozy has grabbed the Emir's right hand with his own left hand: a cultural 'nono' that any newbie to the Arab World should be perfectly aware of.

And in totally unrelated news, apparently the RTA has banned the wearing of 'G-strings'. We are in possession (thank you, Sherif!) of a document, a facsimile of what would appear to be a leaked memo to RTA staff carrying the delicious instructions: "It is hereby prohibited to wear short clothing, bright colours, see-through dresses or tight jeans. It is also forbidden to wear what is known as G-strings as we also request that you refrain from touching your private parts in front of the RTA employees."

Outrageous and dated 20th September 2007. Must be a fake!

What a day of larks, Pip!

Bush Tickled

Well, it's official. Dubai has declared a day off to celebrate the day that George W. Bush came a visitin' - and we can all cancel our plans at 12 hours notice, reschedule our diaries or do whatever it is that lesser beings do when the great and mighty come knockin' with some apple pie and grits or whatever redneck losers bring round when they come a-socialisin'.

After a day of increasingly hysterical rumours and 'I know this bloke and he knows a Smurf who was down at the pub last night listening to a chap at the bar who works for someone in the know' type debate, we have had it confirmed. We can stay at home so that he can come around.

I, and most other people around here, would rather that he had stayed at home so we could have got on with our working lives. But then perhaps I'm just out of touch with the times...

'Unbalanced' Women Unfit to be Judges: Lawyers

According to this most amusing piece over at Arabianbusiness.com, sent to me by grumpy and misanthropic Scottish person Angus, Qatari lawyers have come out and told it like it is: women are of an unbalanced disposition and therefore unfit to be judges.

AB based its piece on a chucklesome survey carried out by Qatar's very own The Peninsula: the newspaper polled Qatari male lawyers on the question, no doubt expecting an outburst of blind, vacuous misogyny and getting its money's worth as a result.

"A woman is emotionally and physiologically not geared to fit in the role of a judge since the job demands a balanced disposition," one lawyer was quoted as saying in the Peninsula piece.

Meanwhile, in today's Peninsula, researcher Dr. Rana Sobh tells the paper's breathlessley excited reporter: "There is a lot of prejudice and misunderstanding of Middle Eastern women in the West. Middle Eastern women are depicted in the Western media as oppressed and ignorant."

I suspect I might not be the only person in the world to spot something of a disconnect here...

What larks, Pip!

Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud

Highly amused to note that this morning opened in Sharjah with torrential rain but, crossing the border into Dubai, not a drop has fallen: dry as a bone. Just goes to show what great value you get with that real estate, no?

The sandy snicket between the two had been turned into a muddy morass by the downpour, a deep brown drab and sulky looking piece of desert if ever there were one. The usual clusters of trophy cars (They call 'em 'Chelsea Tractors' in London) were stuck in all sorts of unfeasible positions. Driving past I was horrified to see, nestling in amongst the Cayennes and Hondas, a Pajero bogged down up to his running boards.

I couldn't help feeling as if somebody hadn't rather let the side down.

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Are Our Heads in The Sand?

We're in the perfect place to bury our heads in the sand: there's plenty of it around. And it looks like we're doing just that as today's scorching news sensation Gulf News brings us a story on how smaller grocers in the UAE are now operating an 'egg-booking system' because the massive culls in Saudi Arabia, the country next door to us, have hit imports of eggs and not only an acute shortage but also a steep rise in the price of eggs of anything from 50-100%.

So we're worrying about the morning's omelette while Avian Flu, the HN51 virus, is flaring up all around us. Saudi Arabia has destroyed 13,500 ostriches following culls of tens of thousands of chickens. In Pakistan a man has died of the disease which is also present in India. In Indonesia, the disease has claimed its 93rd victim: with GN reporting that 115 people have been infected, that's an impressive mortality rate.

So you'd perhaps think that we'd be worrying about what measures are being taken to enforce quarantine, track or manage the migration of wild birds, protect the UAE's small but thriving chicken and duck farms and deal with the potential requirement for early diagnosis and emergency care for anybody suffering from this alarming disease.

But no. We're worring about where the next tray of eggs is coming from...