This looks like Beirut!

Image via WikipediaI have long been meaning to post this but for one reason or another the timing has never seemed quite propitious. Today, the omens augur well.

I follow an awful lot of blogs around the region. I don't always comment as often as I'd like to (comments are always nice, they let people know there are eyeballs out there), but I'm usually pretty diligent at dipping into Netvibes and seeing who's been updating.

One of my favourite treats is Jad Aoun's blog, Lebanon: Under Rug Swept. A great highlight for me is Jad's one-man campaign to stop people using the cliché 'Looks like Beirut' to describe any given scene of destruction or degradation. Apart from finding the mildly obsessive spirit of Jad's endeavour attractive (he snail mails a 'looks like Beirut' certificate to offenders, as well as outing them on the blog), I'm amused by how, over twenty years after the end of the civil war, people are still using the phrase.

It's something I have encountered in my writing life, an oddly jaundiced Western view of the Middle East in general and certainly of Beirut in particular. I have had agents rejecting the manuscript of my second serious novel, with the rather over-complicated working title of Beirut, based on the fact that people don't want to hear about war zones. (I am currently represented by Robin Wade of Wade and Doherty, who is shopping Beirut around various London publishers) The book's about an international hunt for two missing nuclear warheads and is set in Hamburg, Spain, London, Brussels, Malta, Albania, the Greek Islands and, last but by no means least, that most sexy of Mediterranean cities, Beirut.

I love Beirut. I always look forward to visits with anticipation and excitement. I don't live there, so I don't have to experience the city's everyday frustrations (and they are legion) - I can just drop in and fill myself up with wandering around the streets, enjoying Ottoman architecture and the vibrant street life. I wander around stealing locations for books or snapping vignettes, exploring the fascinating diversity of the place, from the flashy shopfronts of Hamra and Verdun to the labyrinthine ethnicity of Bourj Hammoud. The city sparkles and jostles, stretched out from the long corniche along the splendid Mediterranean up into the mountains, all presided over by the great white-capped bulk of Mount Sassine. At night it lights up, bars and restaurants serving a constant tide of laughing, happy people - Gemayzeh no longer quite the place to be it once was (and Munot before it), while Hamra is becoming busier. It feels good to be there.

So I am always pained to get reactions to Beirut like 'This gritty and realistic novel is set in a war torn city' or 'We don't think the British public would be interested in a conflicted city like Beirut'. The first comment made my blood boil even more because the book is most certainly not based in a war torn city. It's based in a sexy, modern city that fizzles with life. (The fact that much of its infrastructure teeters just to the right side of disaster just adds frisson...) The comment just showed the reader had, at best, skimmed a few bits before spurning me like one would spurn a rabid dog. What made it worse was the reference, twenty years after the fact, to the place being war torn.

In fact, thinking about it, I may well just refer any future perpetrators directly to Jad!

Trapped

Image via Wikipedia
We are blessed in Northern Sharjah in that we are surrounded by ADNOC and Emarat petrol stations - the closure of every EPPCO and ENOC station in the Northern Emirates has hitherto had no practical affect on our lives.

Until I left Dubai yesterday with no petrol. I didn't realise until we'd hit 'murder mile', the road that links Dubai to Sharjah. We had travelled 30km with the petrol light on (I always zero the trip when it comes on so I know I've got 30km to get petrol in), which was not good news. I have once travelled 32km without petrol but I'm far too scared of running out to ever push it further than that.

There are two reasons why running out of petrol is a major fear factor. My first, and principle, reason is that I could never live with myself for running out of petrol whilst driving in one of the world's major oil producing countries. The second is that running out of petrol means getting a taxi and then finding an open petrol station. Now, in the UK I know they all sell nice red fuel cans. I have never seen one on sale here and don't know where I'd get a suitable container from. I've seen petrol sloshed into all manner of odd containers at petrol stations, but I've never seen an actual petrol container used. The prospect of having to dance around trying to find a spare container at least marginally fit for purpose doesn't fill my heart with stuff.

I have only run out petrol once before in my life, and that was on purpose. The publishing company I worked for in the mid-eighties had gone bust following an acrimonious boardroom putsch and The Evil Receivers had demanded the prompt return of my company car. They got it too - empty from driving around the building and coasted nicely to its parking spot after the engine had died. (I still have the cheque for 67p from them in settlement of hundreds of pounds of outstanding expenses).

Of course, southern Sharjah is the land of EPPCO and ENOC. Driving around, pricked by increasing desperation I started to realise just how this whole closure thing must be hacking a load of people off - the odometer kept ticking as we tried to head towards where we knew there was an Emarat station (but which I had no hope of reaching before the inevitable cough of a dying Pajero was heard). 34km, 40km and by now my hands were sweating. I have never seen so many EPPCO and ENOC stations in my life. They seemed to be around every street corner. And then, at last, at 43km, an Emarat station hoved into view, with cars cascading down onto the street as they queued and jostled for fuel.

It did rather leave me wishing fervently that ADNOC would hurry up and take 'em all over...

We are not the problem

Image 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?

Benihana - Dumb and Dumber

Image via WikipediaYou might recall the brouhaha around Benihana Kuwait, the restaurant that sued blogger Mark Makhoul for posting a mildly critical review of the restaurant. Mark, the man behind uber-popular Kuwaiti blog 2:48AM, defended himself in court and won the case.

Benihana Kuwait, a licensee of US based Benihana of Tokyo. (which has maintained an atrocious silence throughout), has appealed the Kuwaiti court's ruling and has won on appeal.

The whole sad incident has already created massive, global negative coverage online for Benihana. The story was picked up by bloggers in the Middle East as well as by a number of top global websites and media. Benihana, both franchisee and franchisor, could hardly have managed the whole sorry incident more cack-handedly. It's even recorded on the company's Wikipedia entry.

Mark's update post about the case is linked here. The court has awarded damages against Mark of KD1,000 - a pretty paltry sum, but an award nonetheless. He's going to take it to appeal because it's about more than KD 1,000, it's about consumers' right to hold and freely express an opinion and I must say in his shoes I'd do exactly the same thing.

What amazes me is how utterly, unbelievably stupid Benihana Kuwait is being in pursuing this tawdry case - and how idiotic Benihana of Tokyo is being by allowing these morons to drag its name through the mud like this.

Cancer Air

Image via WikipediaI went to look at 'New Shelter' with Ahmed Bin Shabib recently. We took his car. The New Shelter looks stunning, they have been true to their word and built a barn within a warehouse. Mad.

(The Shelter is Dubai's uber-funky hangout for designers, architects and other creative types. It's the Mother Ship for GeekFest)

We wandered around, talked about possibilities and took in the surrounding funky art galleries and stuff.

The big car was hot from standing in the Dubai summer sun. Ahmed pulled down all of the electric windows as we got into it, putting the AC onto 'blow' as he pulled away. He caught my surprised look.

'You don't want this,' he said. 'This is Cancer Air.'

He explained, and I have to say after twenty years in the Middle East (and twenty years of clambering sweatily into hot cars) I think he has a point - one that I've missed all this time. I mean, do you really want to be breathing in the fumes from an enclosed space jammed with super-heated plastics every time you get into your car? It's like doing glue from hot vinyl bottles...

I've started popping open those windows, no matter how hot it is outside. I wish I'd thought of it myself - twenty or so years ago.

(My all time record was in the early '90s, a miserable day when the Paj's internal thermometer measured 65C and I turned the starter to be met with a blast of super-heated air through the dashboard. Yummy!)

I'm off to the UK tomorrow, BTW. Enjoyyyy! ;)

PS: Where the hell is Gulf News' picture of a pigeon drinking from a standpipe? It's usually happened by now. Don't tell me we're going to get a Modhesh drinking from a standpipe instead...

PPS: Posts over the next few weeks may be somewhat erratic. :)

Twenty

Image via WikipediaToday is our twentieth wedding anniversary. This day in 1991, Father Patrick Cooney married us at the Cathedral in Ennis. We had Irish traditional music instead of organ music at the wedding, then everyone trooped across the road to the Old Ground Hotel for a reception on the lawn followed by a dinner in the Flag Room. There was an awful lot of Irish music about, mainly because Sarah's family were all involved in music and we had some of the country's finest with us that day playing in the church, on the lawn and then, once the band had done their repertoire of wedding songs, an impromptu seisiún.

We also had the first day of sunshine in Ireland that year.

We spent our first night 'legally', as my best man so helpfully pointed out in his speech, in the Old Ground's De Valera Suite, where the great man himself had once slept. Above the kitchen, it smelled of boiled cabbages. No wonder Dev was grumpy.


There was no Internet, no tweets from the church or even mobile phones to go diddledoodoodiddledoodoodiddledoodoodee in the quiet bits (like just after you've been asked if you 'do'). Our photographer, Liam Hogan, used one of those things with a bellows and took so long to set up each shot we were left with acheing cheeks and a set of pictures in which we look not unlike slightly stunned waxworks. Nowadays he's got a website where he uploads his digital creations!

We don't usually make a fuss of our anniversary. One year, we both managed to forget it entirely. But tonight we'll be having a bottle of pop or so.

Cheeky Nigerians

Image by Toban Black via FlickrDubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA to you, mate) has issued a warning alerting people to the fact that www.difcuae.org (Dubai International Financial Capital) is a naughty website that makes "false, misleading and deceptive statements" and advising people "not to deal with the Firm or persons connected with the website."

The site appears to be a link in an email scam, with The Real Dubai International Capital similarly getting hot under the collar that it has been cited as an authority by the scammers.  DIC publishes an example of one such scam mail, an email purporting to be from a gentleman called David Smoot. Mr. Smoot signs off the email with his hotmail address (always a confidence booster, that), dubai129@hotmail.com, which is strange given that he has access to the much more believable domain of difcuae.org - Mr Smoot is named on the website as CEO of Dubai International Capital.


A quick WHOIS lookup confirms one's suspicions - as The Chemical Brothers tell us, It Began In Afrika:

Domain ID:D162062108-LROR
Domain Name:DIFCUAE.ORG
Created On:18-Apr-2011 14:04:30 UTC
Last Updated On:18-Jun-2011 03:49:53 UTC
Expiration Date:18-Apr-2012 14:04:30 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:PSI-USA, Inc. dba Domain Robot (R68-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:ABM-11191927
Registrant Name:Olatubosun Olajubu
Registrant Organization:Olatubosun Olajubu
Registrant Street1:Isolo
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Lagos
Registrant State/Province:Lagos
Registrant Postal Code:00000
Registrant Country:NG
Registrant Phone:+234.8068929148

The website's got a Du mobile number as a UAE contact number, but you can always cut out the middle man and call Mr Olajubu directly in Lagos to give him your bank account details and a copy of your letterhead and signature.

Are people truly that stupid? Do they actually fall for these scams?

(Update: As you'll see from the comments, Mr Smoot IS the CEO of Dubai International Capital - just not the one in Lagos...)

World's Worst Web?

Back in the late nineties, I travelled to Beirut in the company of Microsoft's Middle East marketing manager to manage the opening of the company's office in Lebanon. The trip was the culmination of a long campaign I had been involved in to have an intellectual property protection law passed that would protect IP holders from the endemic piracy in the country. The campaign was kind of successful in that the law was, indeed, passed. The law was, of course, subsequently ignored by pretty much everybody, but that shouldn't really surprise anyone.

My marketing manager colleague was horrified* to see that there was a ledger on the visa desk, where issued visas were recorded manually. This despite the presence of a distinctly computery thing on the desk. Given MS was touting e-government pretty hard at the time, she seemed to find the presence of a totally manual, analogue thing in the middle of a process that everywhere else in the world had automated somewhat incongruous. That ledger is still there today, folks.

I mention this in the context of a few tasty finds by pal Bilal El Houri, following on from my amused post last year about old skool websites.His challenge was to find worse sites than these little beauties, all examples of quite how far down the e-government road the Lebanese government has travelled since back then. Clue: the answer is not very far, really.

This is the Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications website.These are the people responsible for the Internet in Lebanon. Yeah, yeah, I know: it figures.

Here are some other beauties. Remember, these are NOT snapshots from Way Back Machine. This is Lebabon today.

The Ministry of Higher Education

The Ministry of Agriculture

The Directorate General of Emigrants
(Their English version is a howl, BTW)

The Ministry of Industry

Thanks, Bilal. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry...

BTW, all those years back, we visited the Prime Minister, Selim Hoss and the president, Emile Lahoud in the same day, with an MS exec in tow, a 'veep' if I remember right. The BBC correspondent in Beirut at the time, the wonderfully named Chris Hack, had an acid aside for that one: "Where else in the world would the president and the prime minister be rolled out to receive an effing commercial traveller?"...

* You should have seen her reaction to B018, mind...

PS: Dany Awad (@DanyAwad) adds to the charge sheet with this here link to the Electricite du Liban website! Class! And they keep coming in - this link to the brilliant National News Agency website from Amer Tabsh!

.

Did Piers Morgan 'Invent' Phone Hacking?

Image via WikipediaThere are growing mentions in media linking my old pal* Piers Morgan to the phone hacking imbroglio that has so excited the British media and parliament over the past two weeks - and which is now showing every sign of crossing the Atlantic in a tide of Murdoch-toxic sludge and washing up against the shores of the home of the brave and the land of the free.

I'm sort of sorry about that, because I'm quite the Piers fan. I admire the way he picked himself up after riding the crest of a wave as Murdoch's brightest, blue eyedest boy, leaving Murdoch behind him as he became editor of the Daily Mirror and then being dumped massively overnight following the Iraqi abuse story that saw him fall foul of the very authorities that had courted him so assiduously right up to the day of his fall from grace. I've worked with him professionally on a couple of occasions and, once we all accept this is all about Piers, he's quite fun to be around. He's very smart indeed, viscerally and intellectually understands the dynamics of fame and celebrity and is very much the larger than life character that manages to project itself into millions of American homes.

He must be getting his wagons into a circle right now. You see, Piers is on the record as referring to some of the techniques used to do phone hackery. The smoke has already started rising, this post at UK blog Guido Fawkes shedding some light on matters by documenting how the Mirror hacked Ulrika Jonsson's answering machine to scoop the Sven Goran Eriksson affair, while MPs have now started baying for Morgan's blood after references in his most readable memoir, The Insider and in his diaries have clearly put him in the frame. This diary entry, in particular, was called out by one MP:

"Apparently if you don’t change the standard security code that every phone comes with, then anyone can call your number and, if you don’t answer, tap in the standard four digit code to hear all your messages."

This, of course, makes things even more interesting - pulling a major American talk show host (which is, love him or hate him, what is keeping Piers in Rice Krispies these days) into the scandal is going to add plenty new fuel to the flames and keep the pressure building nicely on Murdoch - although Morgan's comments don't talk to his time on Murdoch's watch, he does bring a nice splash of star quality to the story and keep it building nicely.

This has turned into the biggest story since the Daily Telegraph exposed MPs expenses - probably bigger, as it now has much greater international appeal. It's a fantastic opportunity for anyone wronged by the media to get stuck in and we can expect to hear lots of calls for restraining and reining in the dangerously unfettered press, particularly from those who have a vested interest in ensuring the media are cowed and sycophantic.

The fascinating question is whether this will bring Murdoch down and I, for one, would be selling any NewsCorp shares granny left me. Quite what impact it has on the rest of the Fourth Estate is yet to be seen, but I'm not optimistic. Parliament reminded me in a queer way of Tahrir Square. Here, again, was a people casting off the yoke of their oppressors...

*The 'my old pal' is ironic. Piers wouldn't know me from a broom handle.

Update: Radio-tastic pal Robert 'Wes' Weston turned me onto this - eight minutes enjoyably spent! Piers gives MP Louise Mensch a jolly good roasting over the hackegations story here: Piers owns MP Video.

When Sorry Doesn't Wash: NewsCorp and BP compared.

What have News Corp and BP got in common?

The UK's newspapers all carried advertisements from media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation headed 'We are sorry' this week. Which is an interesting response to the whole phone hacking furore (phonegate, if you likes your clichés). Murdoch himself has given but one interview on the whole debacle, to the Wall Street Journal, which he happens to own.

He has not responded to any other media. He has not said one word himself, but has relied on this advertisement to do the job for him. This is nice, as it avoids him actually having to say the words. It's different, you know, actually saying you are sorry rather than getting an ad agency to write up some 'sorry' copy.

It's a lesson BP learned (or perhaps didn't) over deep sea oil spill screwupgate. They spent $50 million on a glib 'sorry' ad campaign that backlashed harder than a snapped high-tension cable. Although CEO Tony Hayward actually appears in the video, something that Murdoch has failed to do in addressing the increasingly serious tumult around his company's journalistic ethics, Hayward didn't actually say sorry. Really, truly, sorry. Using advertising tactics to put out reassuring images isn't saying sorry. Talking about how you're making it all better isn't sorry. Saying 'We really, really screwed up and we recognise that' in person - now that's saying sorry.

You can't apologise by proxy and expect to be taken seriously.

And that's the key to the Murdoch ads. How many people think he truly is sorry? And how many think he just bought space rather than get out there and express true, humble, real contrition? And if he's not sorry after all - what's going to change moving forwards?