Gulf News Stumped

Who took the decision at Gulf News to run today's front page headline?

'Lahore attack stumps world' must rank as one of the worst headlines I have ever seen.

Surely even the most feckless intern would balk at cracking a cheap gag at the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan yesterday? It's not even a great gag. It's a crap gag, playing on 'stumps' as in cricket stumps and 'stumps' as in Billy stumped me with his question

I'd rather have seen 'stuns' - not perhaps the most original headline in the world, but certainly one that would have accurately reflected public sentiment - but GN's sub preferred to be clever-clever. And crass.

It's not as if the story then goes on to show how the world was 'stumped' by the attack. The story clearly shows the world has immediately and strongly condemned the attack.

Decorated with a bloody picture of a dead commando, one of the seven Pakistani commandoes who died protecting the Sri Lankan team, the weak joke is an unjustifiable lapse in taste and common sense. On the front page of a national daily newspaper.

What were they thinking?

(Postscript: Have removed the original link to the headline as they link to the current day's front page rather than preserving the link to the day you originally linked to. Cheers Gianni!)

The Last Minute Dick

Image by

http://www.prestonlee.com/archives/67

via CrunchBase

Pal Carrington shared this post from Seth Godin's blog. Just in case you don't know him (cue screams of 'don't know him? Don't know him?' from the neologists and social media gurus out there), Seth Godin is a frequent, respected and much followed commentator on social media, marketing and suchlike. He's a big, major league US business guru.

In fact, there's something of a Seth Godin cargo cult going on out there. If Seth says 'Hey! Stick pins in your eyes to enjoy success on the Social Web', you'll hear the sounds of screaming from all over Silicon Valley.

But I do have to take issue with the Sethmeister over this one. He says:

I hate going to the post office in the town next to mine. Every time I go, they look for a reason not to ship my package. "Too much tape!" "Not enough tape!" "There's a logo!"

The same thing happens with the tech crew before I give a speech. About 75% of the time, the lead tech guy (it always seems to be a guy) explains why it's impossible. Impossible to use a Mac, impossible to use the kind of microphone I like, impossible to use my own clicker, etc. And then, the rest of the time, using the same technology, the producer asks, "how can I help make this work for us?" and everything is about yes, not no.

To get the full effect, you'll have to go to his post - I shortened it.

Now here's where I got the issue. While I agree with the general (and, I thought, rather obvious) point that people who say 'yes' are nicer to deal with, and more successful, than people who say 'no' by default there is, as Berthold Brecht tells us, an exception and a rule.

Nearly every major conference event I have organised, moderated or otherwise been involved with has resulted in the appearance of the Last Minute Dick, or LMD.

The Last Minute Dick ignores all calls for papers, all emails asking speakers to please note down any special requirements and all requests for their PPTs and other materials before the event. The LMD will miss the speakers' briefing the day before because he's way too busy for that kind of thing.

And then he'll turn up on stage with less than an hour to go before the start of the event (always less than an hour, from 55 minutes to 15 minutes) holding his memory key with a 90 page PPT on it that integrates to five embedded videos, requires a simultaneous sound track to trigger using SMTP time coding and absolutely needs us to download and install SWIFF player from the Internet on the stage laptop. His videos will need the newest Vidalia Codec to be installed and support for Flash Version X, where X is the version above the one you actually have installed on the stage system.

He'll also need an intro video to be played from another file that will invariably crash the carefully pieced together sound/light integration that the team has been working all night on to ensure it's stable. It's on a Blu-Ray disk.

He'll pull a full John McEnroe on you when you tell him that you don't actually have Flash Version X.

"Whaat? What kind of two-bit penny-anny dump is this? Call yourself conference organisers? Jeez! Everyone got Flash X! And Blu-Ray? What do you MEAN you don't have a Blu-Ray player set up? I don't need to tell you to get a Blu-Ray player, surely? I mean, every organiser in the world has a spare Blu-Ray player! Do you know how often I speak at these things? Proper ones? In big cities? Do you? Do you? I mean, do you know who I am?'

Yes, I do. And you're a dick.

You can guarantee, by the way, that his requirements will ensure that something goes horribly wrong for the next speaker. And that you'll be around to hear him telling everyone who'll listen what complete gherkins you and your crummy company are for messing up the stage settings like that.

I'm with the guy on the stage, Seth. If you didn't tell 'em you want your own Mac, clicker or wombat on heat up there on stage, he's totally right to tell you 'no' when you pop up demanding it as the gig's about to start. And I'd back him for telling you to get off his stage, too. Because the event's always bigger than the one, lone and invariable LMD...

The Holiday That Wasn't There

Image via Wikipedia

It's Sunday! No Monday! No Sunday! No Monday!

Finally Gulf News puts the endless speculation to rest. The forthcoming one day national holiday on the occasion of the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) will take place on Saturday for the private sector and Sunday for the public sector.

(Sound of tyres screeching)

Hang on. Isn't the Prophet's birthday by custom celebrated on the 12th of Rabi Al Awwal, corresponding this year (Hijri 1430) to Monday the 9th of March 2009?

This new arrangement means that the UAE's private sector, which takes a Friday/Saturday weekend - the same as the public sector - will not get a day off at all. And nobody will take a day's holiday on the right day.

"We did not want to cause any interruption between the public and private sectors," UAE Minister of Labour Saqr Ghobash told Gulf News, explaining the reason why the change made the holiday 'more coherent' with the public sector holiday.

Oddly, he also told GN, "As far as I know, the majority of companies in the private sector have only one day off, which is Friday."

Why, then, if you are going to move the holiday to the wrong day at all, would you not give both public and private sectors the Sunday holiday? "Giving the holiday on Sunday would have caused another interruption in the holiday," Ghobash told GN's hard-eyed hack on the front line of the war against flibble.

So that's nice and clear, at least.

PS: We're taking Sunday anyway. Nyer Nyer Nyer Nyer Nyer...

The Gulf You Put Between Us

"We rallied round a flag that wasn't there,' Margaret Atwood is quoted as saying by today's glorious technicolour Gulf News*.

She has my absolute respect for the way she has handled the situation regarding the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature book ban issue with total integrity - and with self-effacing charm. The fact that she was misled so effectively in the first place and reacted in the way she did is unfortunate, if understandable.

The fuss over Geraldine Bedell's book, created in a large part one suspects by a certain Geraldine Bedell, does rather smell like a slightly inept but certainly cynical publicity stunt. But now it's over. The book wasn't banned; the book likely isn't really that interesting anyway.

Those of you who followed my posts on Harper Collins' authonomy will be aware of my views on big publishers and cynical behaviour. I do allow it to be a possibility that large corporate publishing companies will dissemble shockingly.

But what I do believe to be a shame is that Dubai has learned a lesson. While people have been preaching about censorship, Dubai has learned a new form of censorship. It's more insidious than banning books - it's banning the freedom to speak your mind.

I do believe (sorry, Isobel) that Festival Director Isobel Aboulhoul's letter declining Bedell's book be launched at the festival was naive. But she was direct and did give her honest views. Now we've learned not be direct or give our honest views. We can use weasel words so that we're being 'politically correct' rather than open ourselves to criticism in future. In fact, Atwood herself said in the Guardian:

"This happens every day at every festival in the world. Publishers always want to launch or feature their authors, and all festivals pick and choose. Usually, however - being experienced - they don't give the real reasons for their rejections. They don't say "It's a stinker" or "The local Christians will barbecue us". They say: "Not suitable for our purposes." They know that if they tell the truth, they'll be up to their noses in the merde.

First-time festivalite Abulhoul had not yet been hardened in the fire. She was candid. She sent her actual reactions in an email: publisher asked, publisher didn't get, here's why. She thought the exchange was frank and also confidential. She thought all parties were acting in good faith. Silly her. "

And so, in the name of freedom of expression, a little bit of freedom is taken away. We have learned to mask our true feelings. We have learned The New Censorship. We have learned that you have to use doublespeak.

So much more important than censorship in a 'culture of fear', this new way of not saying what you believe because of the repercussions...

*I've got bored with weighing Gulf News which is now pretty steady at around 640g. Would you believe that silly habit made it to the front page of The Financial Times? Sheesh!

The Fishermen of Kalba

The wide-winged birds wheel above the encroaching net, above the desperately splashing surface of the broken water. The old Toyota Landcruiser engine guns, the rusty wheels digging into the soft, wet sand and the dark-skinned men in their lungis loop another length of net on the beach.

Another rope plait is laid out on the shining surface before the car moves forward again. The inexorable tightening of the noose contains the afternoon’s catch, patiently harvested by a small boat dragging the net around in a huge mile-long arc out from the beach. The Toyotas pull back up the beach, heaving their complicated lengths into the shoreline. Each drag ends with a twist of the wheel that will bring the cars closer together by a few feet before the next pull back, creating a single, routine and gigantic sweep of the sea, stepping together along the beach to close the net and harvest the life out of the shoreline.




They come, the fish, as their options run out. This way and that, they start to panic, to thresh for space, for air. The net tightens, the birds dive for sprats and the fishermen smoke and laugh together, padding along the wet sandy flats in their bare feet as they gather and loop netting. Their mood lightens as the catch gets closer, the sea erupts into a froth of flashing wet bodies and fins and they laugh, white-toothed grins in brown, wrinkled faces.

As the loop gets smaller, grey and white scaled bodies break the surface, lunging for something, anything but the press of thousands in the gathering encroachment. Among them are the sand sharks, chunky rays that look like kites in the peaceful waters where they swim and are elegant. But the land renders them ugly and ungainly – and a breath of air is an instant, inevitable death for them. Once they take a deep breath of open air their gills are ruined: they can’t be put back in the sea. They can only die.

The fisherman don’t want them: there’s no value for sand shark in the market, although they’re edible. They’re left on the margins of the sea, gasping and reaching for the final, desperate breaths that just confirm their deaths. Shortly, they stop struggling and become still. The fishermen take their catch to market, leaving the shimmering beach dotted with the bodies of the rays they didn’t mean to catch and can’t sell.

Fifteen years ago, we watched as each catch turned up hundreds of sand sharks, the whole wide expanse of flat, dark-sanded beach dotted with upturned white bellies and threshing tails. Now there are only eight or ten of them left as the cars and their nets speed off to Kalba to sell their catch; eight or ten dead bodies lying as a harsh reminder of the law of diminishing returns.

Nobody will care until someone will realise one day that it’s too late to care: when there are no more sand sharks dying on the beaches after they've pulling in the catch at Khor Kalba.



A thought for the weekend...

Pammy in Sammy Whammy

Today's 7Days carries the thoughts of former Baywatch Babe Pamela Anderson, who is apparently heartbroken at the captivity of Sammy the whale shark. Pictured wearing an ET t-shirt, oh sorry, no a PETA t-shirt, Pammy found Sammy's sorry story 'heartbreaking' when a friend 'told her' about it. A friend had also told her that Dubai zoo is a dump. She also 'hit out at the live importation of sheep from Australia and described it as a "hell" journey for many animals'.

Poor 7Days. They could have gone for the 'Pammy Backs Sammy' headline except it was rival Gulf News wot coined the Sammy the Shark name...

(Pammy is, according to 7Days, to lend her name to an eco-resort in Abu Dhabi and will return to the UAE later this year. Whoopee.)

Now don't get me wrong. I'm firmly of the belief that PR-disaster Sammy should be allowed to slip into the wild and out of the acquarium. The whole episode has been an awfulness from the get-go and IMHO should have been dealt with quickly, quietly and with dignity long before it ever attracted the attention of international animal rights groups.

But haven't we seen enough wild commentary from people acting on limited insight, knowledge, facts and experience recently?

From Germaine 'bus tour' Greer through the unfortunate Margaret Atwood who withdrew her support for the EAIFL based on initial (and one-sided) media reports to the savage shrieks of international opprobium heaped upon Dubai by the blogging, Twittering 'DIE DUBAI' brigade, particularly over the Peer affair, we've been getting quite a lot of this 'I've never been there but I've heard all about it' stuff.

BTW - the latest in a long line of uninformed guff and total tosh from international commentators that haven't even bothered to visit the UAE before slagging it off comes to us courtesy of '3,000 cars at Dubai airport' newspaper The Washington Post, which has come a long way from Deep Throat and all that. Take a look at this excellent example of the genre.

At least PETA activist Chrissie Hynde came here and said her piece...

Weird Fish

The mysterious fishy catch that has been puzzling fishermen in Ras Al Khaimah since Sunday has not only been identified as an Ocean Sunfish but has also been cited by today's Gulf News (640g) as probably one of the most dense materials known to man.

Today's GN report describes the fish as being the size of a dinner plate and yet weighing in at half a tonne. Adult males can reach weights of a whole metric tonne, apparently.

Deliciously, the online version of the story also maintains the fish to be the size of a dinner plate.

Let's see how long that lasts...

UPDATE

Goofed. As Nick points out in the comments, the article reads dinner plate SHAPED not SIZED and so that means I screwed up in a big way... It's just a stupid Sunfish and is not in fact one of the densest materials known to man, or a SNAFU by GN and so the egg has quite proverbially hit the fan and is now heading my way at a speed of knots.

Poste in haste, regret at leisure...

Etisalat Makes My Day

400 calls in search of a human later. Much listening to messages talking about 'our world class customer service' included...
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Hello."
"OK. Hello, our telephone is not working. We have checked and it is not disconnected, but you get 'not available' when you dial in and an engaged tone when you dial out. Our ADSL is down, too."
"You have fault?"
Repeat
"You can change the handset."
"This is a company. All our handsets are not working. And our Internet."
"Internet?"
"Yes, Internet. Look, this isn't a radio commercial. What's the problem?"
"You have fault!"
"OK. You fix fault then."
"Yes. In three days."
"This is a company. How do you expect us to work for three days no Internet, no telephone?"
"It is problem, yes. You pay Dhs150 per hour, engineer will come in two hours."
"What, so because you can't provide reliable connectivity to your customers to ITU standards, you're going to charge me Dhs150 an hour to pay your engineers to do basic fault reporting on a multiple line failure to our location?"
"What?"
"Yes. Please. We pay Dhs150 per hour. or Dhs 1,500. I don't care. Fix it now."
"OK. Engineer will come."
To be updated

...Update...
Pilot's log.
Stardate Dubai 10.30am

The engineer hasn't arrived. The problem apears to have fixed itself. We have Internet and telephone connectivity. Spock has gone down the shops for a packet of celebratory Caramel Digestives and Scottie is sobbing into his engineering manuals. I feel a strong spring urge and Lieutenant Uhuru's looking damn fit these days...

...Update 2.0...
I forgot to post this, but a strange man called the next day and was surprised to get through to us. That's right, he was the engineer.

Tennis Ping Pong

It's going to be an interesting week at the tennis. I'm not referring to the game itself, the thrill of which has always, like that of golf, eluded me, but to the shenanigans around the Dubai Duty Free Open Championships tournament.

For a start we're going to be seeing how you resolve the interesting question of why the Women's Tennis Association is fining the organisers because the host country denied a visa to an Israeli player in accordance with that host country's practice over the past 30 years.

The United Arab Emirates joined the Arab League's Arab Boycott of Israel, has no diplomatic relations with Israel and it was always been clear that not only would an Israeli citizen be denied a visa, but entrance could be complicated and even denied on possession of an Israeli stamp in your passport. So quite what made the WTA think this would be ‘sorted’ without some pretty special handling is anyone’s guess.

Then there’s the even more interesting question of this week’s Israeli, doubles player Ram, whose visa has been granted. That left the spokesperson for the organisers sounding perhaps a little wobbly in today's Gulf News (640g), which reports:

Tournament director Salah Tahlak denied that any errors of judgement had been made, as claimed by a section of the players and the media. Commenting on his statement on Tuesday that Peer's visa had been denied for security reasons, he said: "Whatever reason was given last week, we had our reasons. Maybe then it was still fresh what happened in Gaza and we made that very clear in the statement.

Maybe indeed.

Dubai Book Ban

Five years before I was born, a new law, the Obscene Publications Act, allowed publishers in my native United Kingdom, for the first time, to escape conviction for obscenity if they could prove a work they produced had literary merit.

Its first trial was in 1960, when Penguin books went to court over DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a suit brought by the Crown. They won the case and a new era of freedom was ushered in, allowing people to explore ideas and concepts that had previously been impossible to air in public.

By 1971, the producers of the underground magazine Oz faced trial in a UK court for obscenity, again a suit brought against them by the State. After a lengthy and expensive trial, they too were acquitted (on appeal, in fact).

In the meantime, satirical magazine Private Eye was banned from sale at branches of WH Smith until the 1970s. In fact, the retailer also refused to stock the controversial 'Diana' issue as recently as 2004.

The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks (Here's the Sex Pistols) was banned from the charts, BBC radio and many record stores across the UK. Their 1977 single 'God Save the Queen' was banned by the BBC. As was The Stranglers' Peaches.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood's overtly homosexual record Relax was banned from the charts, BBC Radio and many record stores in 1983.

In 1992, Radiohead agreed to edit the word fuck out of 'Creep' and thereby avoided a radio ban.

This list of records banned by the BBC for reasons of sexuality, politics and 'obscenity' details the lot, right up to 1997, when The Prodigy faced an effective 'no airtime' ban by BBC radio.

Throughout my lifetime I have seen censorship in my home country, from the demonstrations against Monty Python's Life of Brian (and the cutting of the film to meet the demands of the UK's censor), the censorship of television (Mary Whitehouse and all), of literature (see above) and of music (ditto).

I don't like censorship. I'm against it. I have pushed against it, as slowly and surely as I believe I can within limits of reason I choose to set myself. I believe strongly in freedom of speech and expression.

But the sound of the newly secular and liberated voices of the UK media howling like a pack of infuriated Macaques at the temerity of people living and working in another society and cultural environment in deciding whether a work is appropriate for that audience is really too much. Over the period in which the UAE has been a nation, the UK has only just managed to stop banning, suing, censoring and repressing literature and music. Is it SO hard to understand that other societies might not be quite as... umm... 'advanced'?

Media freedom in the UAE has moved ahead in my time here. It's by no means perfect, but it's a whole lot better than it was and much more liberal than in many other parts of the Middle East and Asia. Greater freedom of expression is allowed here than in many other parts of the Middle East and Asia. But there are limits. These are being constantly explored, tested and pushed. Probably not as much as they could or should be, but they are. It's a long, slow game to play precisely because this Muslim society holds different values and is keen to preserve those.

As is its right, no? People do still have the right to uphold different values, don't they?

I agree on the principle. No book should be banned. And I look forward to the day when we get there. But in the case of the celebrated 'Festival Book', I believe the author knew exactly what she was doing. I believe this is a cynical attempt to use this ban to create 'buzz' around an otherwise, I suspect, unremarkable book.

In the meantime, I do strongly believe that the newly libertarian UK could engage in a little less hubris and a little more introspection regarding its own, hard-fought and newly won freedoms.