Poppadom Man

We're very fond of the Kerala poppadoms, the little four-inch diameter numbers made from garam flour and coconut oil. They're probably the one thing with coconut oil in that I'd eat.

The little cold store around the corner from us has been christened Poppadom Man because of the fuss he and his massive extended family of helpers like to make when I buy them.

"Pappadum? You want eat pappadum? This Indian food!"

Yes, yes, I know. Just hand out the poppadoms before I kill you.

They're kept in the little fridge behind the Kit-Kats, little plastic packs with a paper insert proudly proclaiming them as Kerala Poppadum. Toss 'em in a small, hot pan and dry fry 'em and they puff up and crisp - ideal for a crispy side on a curry night, just right for a slather of hot chutney - as evidenced by my ancient post over on The Fat Expat.

Of course, we quickly reached the point where my entry into the shop was greeted with much grinning and  "Wanting pappadum?" But that hasn't detracted by any means from the fun game of feigning surprise at the feringhi who eats pappad.

I have my revenge occasionally, usually when I drop in for something else (their herbs are good, certainly better than the droopy specimens so often found decorating Spinneys' Ajman branch) and the usual question isn't forthcoming, signifying they don't have any poppadums in.

This is when I ask for them on purpose, only to be told 'Poppadum not having, sir' therefore providing my queue to cause an almighty fuss about how any self-respecting Keralite cold store would never run out of poppadum. I mean, what kind of supply chain management do they have around here?

We all must take our amusement as we find it...

New Yea Cee Having

Air conditioning (Photo credit: niallkennedy)

We are fortunate in having a very good landlord. So good, in fact, when I suggested our AC units were - at some 20 years old - a maintenance (and environmental) nightmare for all concerned and could well bear replacing his response was to have them replaced.

This is a good thing, I would submit.

However, replacing ACs has, as so many things in life, consequences. The first of these is the necessity for a crane to visit and heft all the new compressor units up onto the roof and bring the old units down. They're quite big, one of the units is a 6-tonne, two more are 4-tonnes. And then we have a namby pamby 2-tonne as well. But the roof thing has meant no AC in the house until the new units are installed. The first of these came online yesterday.

The second consequence is every false ceiling behind which a fan unit lurks has had to be taken down - as have the old (and quite large) fan units. New holes have to be drilled in the concrete to take the threaded bars from which to hang the new units. This whole process is dirty (20 year-old watery residues abound), dusty and noisy and involves several workmen. The contractors have been scrupulously polite, as clean as humanly possible and generally the antithesis of the usual bunch of venial bashi-bozouks. But the week has still dragged with constant disruption, noise and mess all over the place.

But tomorrow will bring a new era - new yea cees!

Narratives in Action

United Arab Emirates University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As one or two of you might have found out, I have a nasty book writing habit and it's a combination of that and my day job as a crafter of Well Enunciated Great Truths for my clients that are responsible for me giving a talk tomorrow at Al Ain University's 'Narratives in Action - How Stories Shape Our Minds'.

The two day 'interdiscipinary workshop' is the brainchild of Massimiliano Cappucio and comes through the offices of The Department of Philosophy, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Deanship of Libraries of the United Arab Emirates University, in collaboration with Université Paris Sorbonne Abou Dhabi. How'd yer like them apples, Pip?

The workshop aims to explore how stories affect our cognitive functions, cultural heritage and social development and will explore narrative in its various forms and their role in our lives. It features a gathering of rare intelligences from academia and the wider world beyond - and, of course, sitting in a corner keening and eating razor blades will be none other than yours truly.

I'll be telling the usual room of stunned, wide-eyed people how to write a book. I'll let you know how it goes...

Make Business Hub Dubai

The brainchild of one Leith Matthews, Make is a painfully funky space located in the Al Fattan building, itself an incongruity nestled in the tottering beige multi-towered awfulness of Jumeirah Beach Residence. It's a 'business hub', providing workspaces with meeting areas, workstations, 8am-10pm hot and cold food and drink. And free wi-fi.

It's really too good to be true. The space is incredibly well thought out and 'works', artfully designed and flawlessly executed, soundtracked and freewheeling. The food and drink are, to judge from my breakfast today, simply stunning (avocado toast with a spicy organic virgin Mary and excellent coffee, my colleague had lemon souffle hotcakes with strawberry and loved that, too) and the staff are beyond friendly and incredibly helpful. On my last visit I pitched carrying my habitual perma-bottle of Masafi and an unprompted barman wandered over with a glass containing ice and lemon for me.

It's free, at least for now. I'm told on good authority that Make make their money from the F&B and renting the space for events, so there are no fees or other encumbrances such as membership. If you're into hot desking, have a day away from the office with meetings in DIC/DMC or simply want to do meets, eats and drinks offsite, Make is the perfect place for it.

Long Live The E-Gate Card! Oh...

passport. (Photo credit: kappuru)

The E-Gate card is dead. Honest, it's in Gulf News and everything so it must be true! Immigration has installed a nifty new scanner at Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport that'll scan data from machine-readable passports and combine this with biometrics to give an instant 'no touch' entry system.

Up until now, if you didn't want to join the long, shuffling queues at immigration and have your passport filled with inky stampy things, the E-Card was the way to go. Although not for me, sadly, as the system decided to start refusing to read my thumbs a couple of years back, even after I'd gone up to the E-Gate centre and had 'em rescanned.

It's actually been ten years since the introduction of the 'old' E-Gate card system.

I've used these new scanners at Heathrow and they're fast - certainly within the 15 seconds GN mentions. The scheme is to roll them out to all of Dubai's entry points after a two month trial at Terminal 3. They use facial recognition technology to compare a snapshot of your mug with the one stored in the chip in your machine readable passport.

It's a pretty advanced move for the UAE - while over 170 countries now issue machine readable passports, fewer issue chip-enabled 'e-passports' and only six countries are using 'heightened biometrics' such as facial scans, fingerprints or retinal scans in their border scanners. It's soon to be seven!

Where Did Nokia Go Wrong?

Steve Jobs shows off the white iPhone 4 at the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ratings agency Fitch has just this minute cut Nokia's stock to junk bond status, reports Reuters. Five years ago Nokia was the undisputed world market leader in mobile handsets. Today it's routinely referred to as a 'struggling Finnish handset maker'.

Where did it all go wrong? How on earth can you take global market dominance, a near-faultless track record of innovation and product excellence and a loyal base of customers around the world and simply blow it?

The answer is Steve Jobs and a small issue of perspective.

Jobs saw the mobile as a computer. Nokia saw it as a telephone. Nokia was working on making your phone smarter, Jobs was putting a content access device in your hands. Even Nokia's early N series phones tacked a keyboard onto a phone, a bit like a mobile One Per Desk rather than using the powerful combination of smart access device, applications and content wrapped up into a flawless user experience.

For me, the rot truly set in when Nokia first started shipping 'smart phones' that could link to its Ovi store and download apps and stuff. The store was pretty much empty for a very long time indeed. Nokia seemed to miss the whole idea that the mobile was to a handset manufacturer what a SIM is to a mobile operator - a cash cow. Ovi could have been an open platform for application developers and content owners. It should have been.

On June 29th 2007, Jobs took to the stage in his turtleneck sweater and launched the iPhone. Nokia's executives must still have been laughing when, in September, Apple sold its millionth iPhone. They must still have been laughing when Time named it Invention of the Year in 2007.

Apple's iTunes and Jobs' app-centric approach created a revolution. Nokia, in common with mobile operators around the world, persisted in a circuit-switched mentality. When Google joined in with Android, the writing was on the wall. They started fitting the brass handles when Elop announced Nokia was ditching Symbian a year before it was ready to replace the operating system with the Great White Hope - Microsoft's Windows, the operating system that never 'got' mobile. Remember Windows CE anyone?

Today, Apple and Samsung between them account for something like 50% of the global smartphone market. And Nokia is a junk bond. Its first Windows based 'phone, the Lumia, has a name that means prostitute in Spanish.

Am I writing Nokia's obituary too early?

What's In Coffee Mate?

There’s a series of ads running on Dubai Eye at the moment in which chemical company BASF extols the wonders of chemistry. And what better way to celebrate the achievements of chemistry than to look at how the marvel of modern food chemistry can be used to create a non-dairy creamer. A conversation with Jordanian blogger and coffee mate fan Roba Al Assi yesterday prompted me to pop the lid on that yummy tasting powder and see just what it is you’re putting in your mouth with your morning coffee. What I found was similar in many ways to Tim Horton’s recipe for happiness, a recipe many people found fascinating.

The first thing we should note about Coffee Mate is that each 3mg serving contains 1 mg of saturated fat and 2mg of carbohydrate as sugar. In other words you’d be as well off dipping a sugar lump in some ghee. The second noteworthy thing is that nobody ever uses a 3mg serving.

A Spoonfull of Coffee Mate Contains:
 
Glucose syrup
Arguably the precursor to controversial cheap sweetener high fructose corn syryup, glucose syrup is a concentrated commercial sweetener made by treating the starch in vegetable crops such as corn and maize (Sourced from the US, read this as genetically modified corn). Corn syrup is sweeter and cheaper than cane sugar.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil (may contain coconut, palm kernel and/or soybean oil)
This is where that saturated fat comes in – and don’t forget that 3mg (or a level teaspoon) of coffee mate contains 5% of your recommended daily intake of saturated fat. As a guideline, you could drink half a cup of whole milk to get the same saturated fat hit as three milligrammes of coffee mate. I do love the ‘may contain’, too. Oh, and the soybean oil is probably from genetically modified beans.

Palm oil is a nasty little ingredient I have written about extensively before. It’s a crop responsible for major deforestation of the Indonsian rain forests because it provides a cheap, stable at room temperature, fat much beloved of food processors. Expect to find it lurking in biscuits, ice creams and all sorts of processed packet sauces, mixes and other foods.

Added to that, this (already very high in saturates) oil is ‘hydrogenated’, which means it’s been heat-treated with hydrogen to change its composition – basically turning the unsaturated fats in the palm oil into saturated fats, known as trans-fats. Trans-fats are controversial and many manufacturers and retailers (including the UK’s Marks and Spencer) are acting to remove trans-fat content from the foods they sell after a number of studies linked trans-fat consumption to significant increases in the risk of heart disease.

Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative)
This is an odd ingredient, as it is permitted by the US FDA to be an ingredient in 'non dairy' creamers, and yet is, as it says on the tin, a 'milk derivative'. Casein is a protein found in milk and this ingredient, which is a thickener and adds a 'dairy taste' to products, is obtained from fresh and/or pasteurized skimmed milk by acid coagulation of the casein. The mix is then neutralised using sodium hydroxide and powdered. Yummee!

Dipotassium Phosphate
A stabiliser, tagged by the US FDA as ‘generally regarded as safe’ which never quite sounds as good as ‘safe as houses’, does it? It’s used to keep the powder powdery. Other uses of dipotassium phosphate include as a fungicide and pesticide. Interestingly, its use as a pesticide on food crops in the US has not been approved. But it’s safe, right?

Sodium Aluminium Silicate
Apart from finding its way into your daily cuppa as an anti-caking agent, this ingredient has been approved by the EU as a game repellent. Which is nice, no? A lovely cup of deer repellent to start the day!

Monoglycerides, Acetylated tartaric acid esters of mono- and dyglycerides
Also known as E472e. Mono and diglycerides are fats, used to extend shelf life, add a creamy flavour and help to bind other ingredients together. There's a lot of debate about them as they have appeared on food labels in place of hydrogenated oils, although they're a sort of new name for an old friend as they are, themselves, hydrogenated in the production process. The latter ingredient is sometimes referred to by the more friendly acronym DATEM.

Artificial Flavour, Colour
Nothing natural here, then...

So there we have it, the full skinny. Now you can nip off and slide a spoon of processed sugars, saturated fat, pesticide and deer scarer into your cup of instant coffee and know it's doing you good!

The Unbearable Lightness Of Clarity

dubai international airport (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Clarity is, apparently, being sought by the educational sector regarding quite what the Ministry of Education meant when it clearly mandated a unified holiday for all schools in the UAE.

I posted about this one last week and feel obliged to point out at the time that I spotted a strong whiff of Clarity To Come. GN's story today shows journalist Rayeesa Arsal clearly being given the runaround in her own mission to obtain clarity - a ministry spokesperson apparently sent our Rayeesa to Dubai's KHDA (Knowledge and Human Development Authority) who, brilliantly, "refused to comment on the announcement saying clarification should be sought from the ministry as the announcement was made by them."

The story goes on to quote an official who declined to be named saying "it is most likely that Asian schools are not part of the decision". However, just in case you started to think this was beginning to get clearer, the story goes on to mention a source from the KHDA who is unaware of any exceptions to the ruling.

The problem is that Indian and Pakistani schools start their academic years in April. This is compounded, as I pointed out last week, by schools already struggling to follow international curricula and also make allowances for the needs of international families (for instance, English schools will tend to have breaks at Christmas and Easter, major holiday periods in th UK). For this reason, 'international' schools have always had different, and frequently much shorter, holidays to the 'Arabic' or local schools under the Ministry of Education.

Meanwhile, while we await clarification, we can take comfort from the fact that the Emirates Identity Authority, which has so often in the past provided us with entertainment and wave after wave of Announcements Subject To Clarification, has quite clearly announced the final - and this time they really, really mean it, honestly, no kidding, take this one seriously because we're one messing around - deadline for applications.

They're hardcore about it this time. No more Mr Nice Guy. The final, final, final deadline is May 31st. Go past that, Aisha Al Rayesi of EIDA tells Gulf News, and you'll be fined Dhs20 per day up to a maximum of Dhs 1,000. It would be churlish to bring up the original deadline of January 1st 2009 at this late stage, wouldn't it?

Shiny Happy Poop

Bucket-headed dog (Photo credit: Paul Kidd)

"That'll be two hundred dirhams, mate."
"What are you on about? I'm just enjoying my shiny! Two hundred dirhams for what?"
"Dogs, that's what. We've introduced fines for having dogs off the leash and not cleaning up their poop. So give me two hundred dirhams."
"But I haven't got a dog!"
"What's that over there, then? Scotch mist?"
"Well, it's a dog, but..."
"So. Two hundred dirhams. I'll take cash or we'll just add it to your cooling bill. Of course, if you don't pay it, we'll cut off your electricity and water..."
"But who gave you the right to introduce and levy fines? You're a property developer, not a legal system!"
"As well as your cooling."
"But that's not my dog."
"Well I don't see anyone else around here, do you? So it's your dog, matey."
"I want to appeal!"
"There's no appealing this. Blimey, you're a callow one, aintcha? You can appeal if you're dealing with a properly constituted legal system, but this is a series of totally arbitrary regulations foisted on you by a property developer. Not that we'd ever say that in public, you understand."
"So whatever happened to 'dare to dream of a new future of freedom and choice' and 'iconic living that expresses your individuality'?"
"Oh come on, nobody takes that stuff seriously. Anyway, we never expressly said you could keep dogs at all. You should be glad we're tolerating your odiferous canines."
"I keep telling you, I don't even have a dog! This is outrageous! My Shiny never had the bathroom you promised, you keep putting up the maintenance fees, then you tell me what colour I can paint it and tell me which telco I have to use. You stopped me hanging a flag off it for the world cup and refuse to allow me to change the exterior. You even tried to tell me what newspapers I can read. This is just more abuse of my rights by a developer that seems to think it owns me! All in the name of FREEhold?"
"Now don't go giving me attitude, Sir, or I might have to invoke the abuse of development company staff regulation that allows me to mace you and then take your car away."
"But that's not even my bloody dog!"
"Think we're Peter Sellers, do we? Right. I'll add it to your cooling bill. Oh dear, oh dear."
"What is it now?"
"It's just done a poop. That'll be another two hundred."

(Shiny posts passim)

The Olives Blog

I just thought I'd mention there's a guest post over on The Olives Blog by Jordanian blogger and gal about town Roba Al Assi. It's linked here for your comfort and convenience.

Cheers!