Mushroom

Right, I was going to stick to my guns on this until Chris Saul starting sending people over here to check the 111 letters out. So, purely in Mr. Saul's honour, another excerpt from 111 Letters for all Occasions.

But that's it. No more until next week. No. No. No.

Asking Forgiveness

I am mushroom on which the dew of your grace drops now and then.

Let us harbour no thoughts of revenge, for revenge proves its own executioner.

Ours are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings. Let us shake hands with time. Let us drown our differences in a cocktail at Ashoka Hotel tomorrow at 6.30pm.

Yours,

Rabid

Head for heights in Dubai

In a city that contains the world's tallest man-made structure, it can be hard to get a sense of perspective. Joy Lo Dico is dizzied by the highs and lows of the planet's most extreme tourist destination.

Saturday, 19 April 2008

For his 1979 travel book Arabia: Through the Looking Glass, Jonathan Raban stopped off in Dubai as the petro-dollar boom kicked in. Thirty years ago, no-one in Dubai could have foreseen the seven-star hotels, the extravagant shopping trips of Colleen McLoughlin and her fellow Wags, or George Clooney dropping into town. But its arrogance and aspiration was already evident to Raban.

"We passed the Dubai Hilton," he wrote. "It looked to me like a Hilton but it was marked by one of those singular honours which count for so much and seem – to an outsider – so numbingly unimportant. At that particular moment it was The Tallest Building In The Gulf and Sheikh Rashid of Dubai was apparently doting on it like a favourite child. Looking at its smug, slab-sides cliffs of glass and concrete, I hoped that it would not be allowed to enjoy its pre-eminence for too long."

STOP!

Stop right there. Yet another stupid report by a dumb 'been there for three days and know it all' blow-in, yet another useless, two-dimensional characterisation of Dubai from yet another someone who can't be arsed to look beyond the blindingly obvious. And the worst crime of all? She's started the whole stupid pile of ordure with a quotation from the original 'Been there, seen it, done that, gonna write it up and be home for tea' writer, Jonathan Raban. The man that dropped into the Gulf for a week, wrote a silly book about it filled with sweeping generalisations and assumptions and got away with the whole awful episode purely because so few people knew better in those days.

It is typical of Raban's slapdash, silly little book that he mistook the 33-storey Dubai World Trade Centre Tower for The Hilton, the four-storey building next door. It is even more typical that The Independent's brilliantly insightful journalist repeats the idiocy as she embarks on her shallow, idiotic sprint through Dubai before loading up on duty free and snatching her flight home to show her tan and some yellowish-looking diamonds to her mates.

It's enough to make you puke.

And if it's not, you can find the whole dumb, excruciating 'Paid a ferryman Dhs 100 to take me on a trip on the creek and bought a fake watch that fell apart, too' (Abra fare to anyone with half a brain, Dhs 50) piece of travel writing mediocrity here.

At least it's not as bad as the silly arse from the Daily Mail who wrote up how fun she found it shopping last year in Dubai's 'delightful and traditional old souk' - you guessed it, the Madinat Jumeirah.

The souk that was the inspiration for this blog's name, in fact.

More

I don't know why I'm so weak, I really don't. Here, then. But I'm not posting up any more of these until next Sunday. You'll just have to put up with the same old dross until then.

So. More excerpts from That Great Work, 111 Letters For Every Occasion.

Letters of Divorce

Divorces are not yet as common in the East as in the West, but the poisonous wind blowing around the world is infecting Indian youth. And we must do our best to protect our heritage of harmonious marital relations.

To the Mother

I am not feeling happy with Manmohan. He is given to liquour and has illicit sex relations with his brother’s wife.

O God, what should I do?

Positive Reply

Please have patience. Keep courage. Pray. Try to win Manmohan back from the part of evil.

I am sure God will help you.

Negative Reply

Your letter is shocking.

Really I do not know what to do.

Shall we consult a lawyer?

Consulting a lawyer

My husband and his mother are maltreating me and my life is very miserable. I am really living in hell. It is now for more than six months that we are separated.

Will it be possible for me to get divorce?

Positive Reply

I think it is possible for you to seek divorce under the circumstances that you have mentioned.

Please come to my office for further action.

Negative Reply

My gentle lady why must you hurry for a divorce?

Take time to cool down.

Letters

I have a number of prized possessions, for which I am thankful. Some of them are relatively valuable, like my first edition Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Mint. Some have no value, like a neem leaf from a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka or a rhododendron leaf from Cloud’s Hill. Some of them have a different value, like my 1845 copy of Household Management, an early cookbook. And some of them are simply beyond value. Into this last category falls my copy of a book called 1111 Letters For All Occasions. It is a work of insane genius. The authors are K. Malik, Anand Sagar and JS Bright. To them, and to New Light Publishers of New Delhi, I am eternally indebted. The book is intended to be a template for every letter you will ever have to write in life. All you have to do is pick up 1111 Letters, flick to the appropriate section (Matrimony, employment, commercial, official and others) and look up the letter you need. Although occasionally tempted to use one, I have always allowed wiser counsel to prevail.

I found 1111 Letters in an old stationery shop in Sharjah. It was lying, unloved and unwanted inbetween some Islamic esoterica and some charts for small children to learn how a tooth is formed. I idly picked it up, was instantly enraptured and bought it on the spot regardless of cost, considerable or otherwise. I simply had to have it.

“This must be regarded as the unique book of its kind. No author has ever attempted to write such a large number of letters, covering every walk and talk of correspondence.” Say the authors modestly in the preface, noting that when the publisher commissioned this great work the authors were hesitant to take on a task of such enormity. But, luckily: “When we proceeded deep into the woods of the correspondence, we found the jungle both fascinating and rewarding.” They finish their introduction with an assurance. “The reader will reap the fruits which the authors sowed and we are sure he will relish it.”

You can sing that one, boys. Never has one relished so much as I. The book’s charm lies partly in its strange and colourful language but mostly in the fact that its authors have simply made up a number of scenarios and written letters to suit these. We are therefore introduced to a whole fictitious universe, the lives of Manmohan, Singh, Prabakher, Lal and others are exposed as they quarrel, seek appropriate daughters, ship goods to each other, fall out and then go to court. Their strange correspondences give a new insight into an odd and wonderful world.

The following is a typical slice of the genius on offer in this most compendious and compelling of works.

Failing to keep appointment

You had promised to meet me in the Stock Exchange but you never turned up.

What is the fun of having any appointment when one does not have the capacity to keep it.

Reply to the above

Dear Mr Lal

You are mistaken. You had promised to meet me in the bank and not the Stock Exchange.

I fear your memory needs some training.

With best wishes

Yours sincerely

Sohan Kumar

Reply to Reply

Nonsense!

You are a dirty liar.

We had an appointment in the Stock Exchange and not in the bank.

Final Reply

Please don’t lose temper.

There could have been some kind of misunderstanding between us.

Let bygones be bygones.

The above is carefully typed and verbatim. It is only a scintilla from what is, to steal a certain Dubai Shopping Mall’s catchphrase, a rare collection of wonderful things. I shall offer more on a weekly basis, I think.

Darwin

The chances are that you've heard of the Darwin Awards. One of the cruellest and yet funniest corners of the Internet, the Darwin Awards are given to people who have done the world a service by removing themselves from the gene pool. It's a celebration of the many pointless, stupid and utterly dumb ways in which people choose to die. And it's very funny indeed.

The most wonderful thing about the Darwins is that they're real. Each award is sourced and must be backed up by a 'proper' print reference from a known medium. A couple of examples from this month's batch for you follow. And yes, I did say this month's. You can subscribe to the Darwin Awards newsletter (as I, in fact, do) and get a monthly update of clownish carnage. The fact that there enough utterly stupid deaths going on to keep this thing going on a monthly basis is in itself something of a worry.

I do hope you enjoy these. You can go to the website here.

NEW YORK: Joe, 20, was drunkenly driving through Wayne County farmland in upstate New York. With the utmost of inebriated care, he steered his car directly into a ditch and knocked over a powerline. Oops! How could he rescue his car from the ditch without getting a DUI?

The only way out was to steal a nearby farm tractor, and winch the car out himself. So he aproached the nearest farmhouse, managed to start a tractor, and motored over to the scene of the accident. He then proceeded to drive several tons of metal into the downed power lines.

Goodbye Joe. Hello Darwin Award.

CZECH REPUBLIC: Steel is valuable, especially the high grade alloy used in steel cable. Scrap metal dealers do not ask questions. They pay in cash. And a good supply of cables can be found in elevator shafts.

This particular goldmine was a towering shaft inside an empty grainery near Zatec, 40 miles northwest of Prague. The cable was tightly fastened, and the far end of it disappeared into the shadowy distance above.

After substantial wear and tear on a hacksaw, our man finally cut through the strong steel cable. At that instant, the counterbalance, no longer held in check, started to move silently downwards, accelerating until it reached the bottom of the shaft.

Result: one proud winner of a "terminal velocity" Darwin Award.

VIETNAM: A rolling stone is not all that gathers no moss. Three Vietnam men scavenging for scrap metal found an unexploded 500-pound bomb perched atop a hill near Hanoi, and decided to retrieve it with a little help from Sir Isaac Newton. After all, gravity is free. As they rolled the bomb down the hillside, it detonated, blasting a four-meter crater and sending all three entrepreneurs to a face to face meeting with their deceased hero.

Launch

Went on the radio this morning to witter on about The National, the new Abu Dhabi based newspaper. It was an interesting segment as I hadn't actually seen the paper - ADNOC might be selling cheap diesel (Gulf News finally picked up on that story!) but they weren't selling The National this morning when I dropped by.

I got a copy later. Congratulations are in order. It's stunning.

Conference

On June 1st in Amman, the iblogimedia conference will take place. This is the Middle East's first social media conference. I'm sort of mixing work and pleasure by posting about it here, because we're involved with supporting the event but, hey, rules are made to be broken, no?

Whether it'll do anyone any good to talk about Web 2.0 for a day is yet to be seen, but I am personally hopeful that the event will help to bring greater awareness of consumer generated media in the Middle East to a wider audience, share experience and ideas and also help organisations to define ways of gaining benefit from working with social media. There are some really cool speakers and panellists lined up already.

I look forward to seeing you there... :)

National

There's a certain excitement in the air this week as the media luvvies that populate Dubai's 'scene' all wait for the new Abu Dhabi newspaper, The National, to hit the streets.

The first issue's due out this Thursday: a big and heavyweight team of journalists headed by ex-Telegraph editor Martin Newland has been ramping up for months.

It's going to be interesting. Gulf News has already significantly increased its local news coverage and everyone seems to think it's GN that will take the hit, if there is going to be any hit to be taken. However, the commercial powerhouse that is driving that daily 1KG hunk of paper isn't going to be too worried, one suspects, at least not in the short term.

We're certainly going to see a huge increase in journalistic activity generally. There are going to be a lot of people chasing those stories and looking for differentiated coverage - Newland's team will add something like 45 UAE reporters and 30 international reporters. And they're looking at a business section comprising something like 20 pages according to business editor Bill Spindle, who spoke at the monthly MEPRA klatch earlier this week.

So can we expect better journalism, more competitive journalism and more investigative journalism? I think we can. Quite how long the effect will last and how deep it will go remains to be seen. And, for me at least, that's the interesting bit.

Stuck

Have been meaning to share this minor amusement for some time now. Got my regular (and expensive) treat, Q Magazine and scurried home for a read. Imagine my surprise to find two of the pages stuck together. Yes! Magic Menon and his team of stoned, magic marker sniffing censors had been at work!

It takes quite a lot of magic marker to remove 100 bare breasted girls on bicycles. Not a single cheeky little nipple remains peeping through the dense sea of black...

Flacks

The UK has a brilliant online technology publication called The Register. It's been going for quite some time now and has built up a massive and loyal base of readers - it's very influential indeed in technology circles. El Reg, as it likes to style itself, is also pretty hard-hitting - it's cynical, sarcastic and irreverent in the extreme. It's also very good at breaking news and very good indeed at taking a long, hard look at the dynamics of an industry in which it is not only specialised, but entrenched.

Which is why it's such a great read.

So when two, presumably slightly flustered, PR people from British telephone company O2 had a conference call to discuss quite how to deal with the Register's treatment of some issues they've been having with bandwidth allocation, the last thing they'd probably want to do is patch in Register reporter Bill Ray to listen to them discussing how they were going to manage him.

That would be stupidity beyond belief, wouldn't it? That would be Darwin Award class stuff.

Perish the very thought...