Space - A Literary Lacuna

I sat down to write a book sometime in 2002. I'd given up smoking and it was annoying me. I reckoned I'd just dash down the first thing that came into my mind and London's literary scene would fall at my feet. Shockingly, they not only failed to fall as predicted, they rejected me. A lot. In fact, Space went on to pick up well over a hundred little photocopied slips that said something along the lines of 'Not for us, thanks'.

Space spoofs a genre that I have come to call the ‘airport novel’; that comfortingly large slab of silliness that you invariably turn to when you have to survive a seven-hour flight. Just like the Avian Obsession and the Maltese Balcony and those other man-in-race-against-time-against-unfeasible-odds-to-save-the-world-against-shadowy-cabal-led-by-megalomaniac books, Space is a fast moving page-turner filled with baddies and secret agent babes. Unlike the majority of them, Space is also intentionally and successfully funny.

Main character Dr. Ben Jonson is transformed from being a happy middle-class GP into a wilful killer, chased across Europe by police and various intelligence agencies. His odysseyette (it is so a word. I looked it up on the Internet) brings him together with a psychopathic CIA agent in a catsuit, a sex worker from Weybridge and a devastatingly effective computer virus that causes widespread societal breakdown. It all ends up with American bombers, the police and army, the Russian Mafia and a number of highly eccentric octogenarians coming together under a stone circle somewhere in Southern England.

 In Space, the baddy spends most of his time with his hand up his pneumatic secretary’s skirt, the good guys are kooks and MI5 safe houses are staffed by pink-haired camp people. The book darkens a little when the action starts moving, but it never stops being irredeemably daft. By the time we’re ready to resolve things at the end, there’s lots of slightly strange sex going on. I always find that strange sex is so much more interesting than ordinary ‘boy meets girl and gets it on’ which, lets face it, has been done before.

It was a popular book on Harper Collins' Authonomy peer-review website, but never even garnered a 'full read' from an agent. Having taken a look at the original MS and edited some of the worst flaws out, I found myself rather enjoying reading it. I'll tell you one thing, it's damn funny.

So I've eventually (and with mild reservations) decided to publish it as a Kindle only book for $0.99 (or 79p to you). You can go here to buy it from amazon.com or here to get it from amazon.co.uk. If you've got Amazon Prime you can borrow it instead. If you haven't got a Kindle or Kindle software for your tablet, you're going to miss out, sorry. I'll plug it a couple of times here and there, but I'm not going crazy promoting it. If you enjoy it, you can do that for me. If you hate it, please feel free to leave a review on Amazon or a comment on this post! I won't mind, honestly!

I'd get it while it's cheap. If I sell more than a few copies or start getting good reviews, the price is going up faster than you can say 'nmkl pjkl ftmch'...

Warning - Space has got a number of rude bits in it. So if you're easily offended, please don't read it.

Justice For Natalie

Sometimes a cause comes to light that you just can't ignore. Natalie Creane's is one such. For two years her family have been fighting in the UAE's courts to get Abu Dhabi's Emirates Palace Hotel to admit liability for the injury she sustained when staying in one of their rooms. According to her family:

"After going to the Emirates Palace Hotel for a weekend break, Natalie opened the door to the wardrobe in her hotel room to put shoes in the bottom. A loose wooden panel high up in the wardrobe fell, hitting her on the front of the head. A member of the hotel’s staff found Natalie unconscious in the room.

Rather than call an ambulance, the hotel’s duty manager took her to hospital by car. It soon became clear that Natalie was very unwell. With no prior history of such problems, she began to suffer from violent seizures. The Emirates Palace Hotel referred the family to its insurance company. After talks with the company broke down, the family was faced with the hotel’s lawyers. Forced to take their case to court, a full two years after the accident, the family is still fighting for justice now – four years on."

The injury was a serious one, Natalie's family say the appalling seizures and a range of related conditions have seen her in four comas with a totally shot immune system and over twenty visits to intensive care. Right now she's on a ventilator in Rashid Hospital and in desperate need of specialist treatment her family can't afford any more - four years after the accident, they've spent all they have.

She is a very sick woman indeed.

The luxurious 'seven star' Emirates Palace Hotel, which is managed by the Swiss/German multinational Kempinski Hotels, has apparently consistently refused liability and the family say the hotel's legal team has 'aggressively' fought their attempt to take the issue to court, appealing against expert opinion that has favoured the family's case. That court battle has arguably cost Natalie dear - and the family is now finally so desperate they've decided to take it public. The family is scrupulous to point out that the legal system and judges in the case have been fair and professional. But time is running out for Natalie...

This is the Facebook page, 'Justice for Natalie'.

There's also a petition for her at Care2.

Could I suggest you go there and add your voice? If you can give help, expertise or do anything to help her cause (for instance publicity), you'd be showing a great deal more humanity than any wealthy international hotel management organisation that would stand by and watch this happen to a young woman in the name of liability.

Dumpster Divers Done

International Recycling Symbol  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The United Arab Emirates sits smack bang on the socio-cultural tectonic plate that divides the east and west of humanity. With remarkable ethnic and nationalistic diversity, it's home to people of all faiths, shades, backgrounds and origins. We come from around the world to live here for one reason and one reason only.

We're all better off here.

That's as true of you and me as it is of labourers and housemaids. It's one reason why the crime rate here is so unbelievably low - we're all on the hog's back and wouldn't risk our privileged position just to pick a few pockets or steal money from someone's car. Other reasons include, it must be said, a draconian judicial system. I've seen the cells (from the oustide, thankfully) and stumbling lines of prisoners in leg gyves. You don't want to be there.

But better off is relative. My better off is a great deal more clover-lined than, for instance, an uneducated man from the Swat Valley or the Bangladeshi flood plains. For them, better off would be something simple like a decent billet, regular food, the absence of constant fear and a few dollars to send home every month. In fact, there are people here whose 'better off' is combing the rubbish bins in the streets for cardboard, tin cans and even plastic. They sell these to recycling companies. You'll often see chaps pedalling along with a great stack of cartons bungied to the back of their black-framed Chinese pushbikes.

Well, they're a thing of the past now. Sharjah Municipality has just herded them all up - 150 of them over the past six months according to Gulf News - to protect Sharjah's estimated 10,000 dumpsters from their unwelcome depradations. You'd have thought they weren't hurting anybody, wouldn't you? Even that this form of recycling, perhaps an uncomfortable sight for those who'd rather pretend this sort of thing didn't happen, is nevertheless actually efficient and a demonstration of free market economics at work. Cripes, you might even get carbon credits or something.

But no. Sharjah has not only nicked them all, but has issued them with fines ranging from Dhs 1,000 to Dhs 50,000. Where in blue blazes is somebody who's making his living rooting through bins going to find Dhs 1,000 to pay a fine?

"Raiding waste bins is considered a violation of Municipality property, as there is a special recycling plant for the various types of waste," a municipality spokesperson told Gulf News. And therein lies the answer. The dumpster divers' few pennies here and few pennies there tend to rather mount up with 10,000 bins at stake and there's Bee'ah, the national environmental company, at the end of the line, making revenue from recycling. Because where there's muck, there's brass...

You can only hope that these people are shown clemency in the traditional Ramadan amnesties.

The Joy Of Summer

"Modhesh", Arabic for amazing, is the mascot of Dubai Summer Surprises. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You know it's summer in the Emirates when:

• Hot water comes out of the cold tap. 

• Gulf News runs pictures of pigeons drinking from a standpipe in a public park. Alternatively, people shading themselves from the harsh summer sun or labourers sleeping in the shade.

• You can't seem to get dry when you get out of the shower.

• Everybody you've ever done business with needs to meet face to face for no particularly good reason.

• Your shirt's stuck to you by the time you've made the walk to the car. The car's baking hot when you get to it.  

• The back of your shirt in contact with the car seat never quite dries out.

• By the time the car has finally cooled down you've arrived at the next meeting.

• The walk from the car to meeting sticks your shirt to you. 

• By the end of the meeting you've cooled down just in time to walk to the baking hot car with your shirt stuck to you. The first blast of air from the AC through the hot dashboard makes it worse. You're better off opening the windows initially to bring the car down to ambient temperature.

• When you forget to put up the sunshade you have to hold tissues in your hands to protect from the super-heated steering wheel.

• Your electricity meter starts to defy the rules of physics and proves the theory E=M$2.
  

• You see strange, yellow sprung maggots with evil, leering grins start to appear. You know this is not a hallucination, but a strange annual manifestation of that cargo cult known as Dubai Summer Surprises. 

• Somehow, you're not surprised.

Worth Its Weight In Gold?

English: A 1st generation Apple iPad. This is the 32GB WiFi model and shows the home screen. Please check my Wikimedia User Gallery for all of my public domain works. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in the distant past, when Dubai was all sand and mobile phones a novelty (and dinosaurs ruled the earth), we were regularly beaten down with offers to win a bar of gold. It was all Dubai's ad agencies could seem to think of, win gold was a sort of promotional catechism and nothing else seemed to matter.

'We want an ad campaign.'
'Sure. How much gold can people win?'
'We were thinking of five ten tola bars for runners up and a kilo as the first prize?'
'That should do it. We'll get cracking on the creative.'

The 'creative' usually included The Dubai Radio Ad, where Bob would meet Jim at the lights and wonder where Jim was in such a hurry to get to. Jim would reply that the Khara Centre is giving away a bar of gold. It is mandatory at this stage to have Bob and Jim repeat the phrases 'A bar of gold?' and 'Yes, a bar of gold!'. Preferably breathlessly and in the excited tones of someone who has just discovered that snorting cocaine and breathing helium are quite fun when done in unison. Bob would then speed off, with Jim wondering where he is in such a rush to get to. The Khara Centre, of course.

I once knew a successful ad executive who come here from Hong Kong. Over the months I watched his slow decline into chronic alcoholism as every idea, scheme and stunt he came up with was met with, 'Yes, that's all very nice. And the bar of gold?'. I had to stop meeting him in the end, my liver couldn't take the lunches. I lost track of him, but believe he eventually left. It's the only time in my life I've sympathised with someone in advertising.

Now there's a worrying trend emerging. I'm starting to hear those self same radio ads again, but this time there's no bar of gold. It's iPads. Yes, win an iPad! An iPad? Yes! An iPad! What do I have to do?

It's confirmation that the iPad is now widely seen as a Most Desirable Thing, as desirable in fact as a bar of gold. You'd have thought that was all a bit behind the curve, but then look at the increasing number of stupid ways people are finding to try and have some of that Apple 'halo brand' spangle dust stick to their sloppy brands.

I posted a short while ago about the pointless restaurant that doled out iPads instead of menus. Colleague Carriington reports of a restaurant in the Ramada that goes one step further than using an iPad as a like for like dumb replacement for paper - this restaurant lets you select what you want using the iPad and the application has an 'order' button so your order can be placed with the kitchen. Guests are asked not to press this button but hand the tablet back to staff so they can place the order. Brilliant.

Beirut, Beirut and GeekFest Beirut

The Salim Slam tunnel is arguably the most polluted place on earth. Well, apart from the Aral Sea. It's a brilliantly designed long road tunnel that crests a hump and has no ventilation so the concentration of exhaust fumes literally forms into billowing, choking clouds of noxious grey gases. I'm stuck in the back of a hot taxi with cracked leather seats, no AC and the windows open as we hit the traffic jam. As usual, I held my breath as we entered the tunnel, a 47 year-old man playing an eight year old's game of holding my breath until we get to the other side. As we draw to a halt, I realise I'm about to fast track my way to a powerful hit of carboxyhaemoglobin. And I don't care. I'm back in Beirut.

Catching up with friends, wrangling with Virgin (who, like Virgin in Dubai for various reasons of their own devising, won't sell my books) and generally mooching around the city take up my time, but I still have time to finish editing the last few pages of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and send it off to its editor. I hadn't planned to finish Beirut in Beirut, but it's worked out that way and I am glad. I'd just like to say thanks to the Ministry of ICT for the awful Internet, which went down totally for a day and more. A nation offline, but a man with nothing to distract him from editing!

Sara, Eman and I went for lunch to one of my favourite places, the Cliffhouse restaurant in the tiny village of Shemlan up in the Chouf overlooking Beirut. The traffic in Hamra is broken and we spend an hour in hot, snarling lines of lane-swapping, jostling cars and vans. More mad traffic on the Saida road and then we're free, breaking upwards into the cool, clean mountain air. We're much later than we'd planned, but never mind. A seat by the open window and sunny warmth, beige stone walls and the sound of music, chattering and argileh soothe. A quick toast to absent Michelines and we start to tuck into the plates of food pouring out of the kitchen in a tide of riotous colours, the dark red muhammarah, the creamy houmous piled up around little pieces of grilled lamb, the fattoush. Ah, you know.

Then sitting back with chai nana (and an argileh nana for part time caterpillar Eman) and full stomachs, enjoying the breeze and the sight of Beirut turned golden by the waning afternoon sun. It really doesn't get much better.

GeekFest Beirut in the evening. I love The Angry Monkey, from its daft logo to its wireless internet. The Alleyway is literally that and the peeps at the Online Collaborative have set up a stage there. Something like four hundred people pitch up, a big cheery crowd of lively, chattering geeks spilled out onto the busy thoroughfare of Gemmayzeh, Rue Gouraud. The talks are talked, the fashion show is catwalked - both are enjoyed by the crowd, hands in the air clutching mobiles to snap the occasion. It's all impeccably done, if a tad hot out there. Four hundred beaming geeks is a lovely sight...

I take refuge in the air-conditioned Angry Monkey where later on the bands excel themselves, combining with pints of 961 to induce a warm, happy perma-grin.

GeekFest Beirut 5.0 was the most ambitious, diverse and stunningly put together event that has ever been held under the GeekFest name. Darine, Mohammed and the team produced something wonderful, a community-driven event that was slick, diverse and gloriously exuberant.

And so to home. I do so very much like Beirut...

GeekFest Beirut 5.0

I have a confession to make.

GeekFest Beirut started because I had to find a reason to go to Beirut in order to research Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, my second novel. Although I've been travelling to that most sexy of cities since 1997, I hadn't been back in a few years and needed to get to grips with the city again before filling it with my characters and their antics.

So I called the delightful Alexandra Tohme and said 'GeekFest Beirut - what about it?' - the rest, as they say, is the rest. Since then, Alex, Naeema, Lilliane, George (and the Maniachi) and many, many others have been responsible for putting together GeekFest events that have been arty, gamesy (boozy!) and generally suffused with that Yahooooo! sound that is Beirut having fun.

GeekFest Beirut has never been less than fabulous. And its fifth iteration, UNorganised by The Online Collaborative, looks set to be the most amazing GeekFest of all time. It's all built around the twin themes of Fashion and Music and was the brainchild of Darine Sabbagh and Mohammad Hijazi.

The Online Collaborative is an organisation centred around AUB, containing a number of very lovely folk (including HM Ambassador and my favourite funky lecturer, @LeilaKhauli)  and dedicated to the promotion of digital citizenship. To be fair, they have actually organised GFB5.0 rather than UNorganised it - it's set to be one heck of an event, with music and comedy performances, fashion shows and all sorts of things going on, as well as the traditional talks. It's even got sponsors and logos and things!

Oh, the shock of it!

GEEKTALKS

Maya Metni
Le Geek, C’est Chic! How to dress like a Geek? A practical guide
Maya is a visual communication consultant. She gathers her musings & inspirations in her blog www.mayametni.com  @mayametni

Toni Yammine 
Crowdsourcing Music Videos – Meen the Band
Toni is a Lebanese musician/director. He likes chocolate  and knows how to count very well in both Lebanese and English. He also has an RC plane and tweets on @toniyammine.

Hind Hobeika
Smart/tech clothing and where that’s all heading?
Hind is an engineer, swimmer and a self-tracking geek at its most!

Beshr Kayyali
Making Arabic Indie Music Popular Sawt.com
Beshr is a true Geek through and through. He has worked on many successful web projects for geeks apart from his day job as a developer.

Bassam Jalgha
Live Demo How to Build an Audio Synthesizer in 10 minutes Using Open Source Information
Bassam is a maker by heart. Always high on solder fumes, he works with electronics, build robots. He is into the DIY cult and tries to annoyingly spread it among his entourage. Check him out on www.depotbassam.com.

Elie Habib
Tools that allow developers to build Social features on top of Music
Elie is the co-founder of Anghami.

Loryne Atoui
Fashion for a cause
Loryne is a graphic designer impassioned by a crusade against breast cancer as well as travel and photography.

FASHION SHOW

Using real people and geeks as models!

Fashion for fundraising – Bras for a Cause by One Wig Stand 
Up & Coming Lebanese and Middle Eastern Geeky/Urban fashion Designers staged by Fishy Nation
An Online Collaborative line designed by our own Joseph Maalouf
Geeky Tshirts by Maya Zankoul
Looks from top Lebanese Fashion Bloggers
Geeky Tshirts by NOBRAND
DJing the show is DJ Beats

GIG

Alternative Rock Performance by Near Surface
Special Vocal Performance by Hiba Kadri
Acoustic Cover Performance by John Nurpetlian
A Stand Up Comedy Performance by Malek Teffaha
House Music by DJ G. Real Party Time featuring a DJ set by Underrated
And more...

STUFF

There's an ongoing art show. There are swag bags. There are other things happening. There's a posh dinner menu or a 961-fuelled bar snacks package. There's REGISTRATION!!!

Go here to sign up and reserve a place and a 'formula' at The Angry Monkey or Couqley or just reserve a place at GeekFest. If you've got any questions, hit up @geekfestbeirut or get 'em on Facebook!

I'll see you there!

The Fast Service

English: Sharjah, UAE (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For some reason officialdom has all happened at once this year. Hot on the heels of the great health test and residence visa renewing, I've had to renew my tenancy, which means getting it attested.

As eny fule no, the UAE is a tax free country. This is a good thing, IMHO. It is not 'fee free' however and tenants must pay a 'fee' of 2% of their annual rent to the government and have their tenancy contract attested, which validates it in the eye of the law.

I duly presented myself at the appointed place and was given a queue ticket by one of the harried-looking chaps at the information desk. Clutching ticket 271, I couldn't help but notice the number on the board was 22 - and the hall was full of men standing around with tenancy contracts in their hands. After ten minutes, 22 had become 23 and I was starting to worry about the likelihood I'd be renewing my visa again before my number came up. I waited some more, starting to get that nasty feeling you get when you don't understand a system and are actually in the wrong place. Maybe the 271 related to another area or procedure? Surely I wasn't in a queue of 250-odd that was moving at one every few minutes?

By the time we got to 24, I went back to the information desk to check this was, indeed, my queue. Oh yes, said the chap. You have to wait unless you take the fast service. The what? The fast service. It costs 150 Dirhams. Right, I'll have one of those, please.

Ten minutes later, I'm out of there, clutching my attested contract. And while I am duly grateful for the fast service, I am left with two thoughts.

For one, rather than charge for a fast service, why not fix the system that's so broken that you need a fast service?

And thought the second is why did I sit and watch a man at Deyaar type my details into a PC, print them out on a form and hand it to me, which I duly took to the government office and watched a lady scan to input into some type of document management system? Surely, he could have filled out an online form - in fact, the entire process could take place online in a fraction of the time it's currently taking.

It's at that point I cast my mind back to 'the old days', when attesting a tenancy contract was a ten-step process of jostling queues and men who unpicked the staples from each bundle of papers before shuffling them around in a different order and restapling them and grunting 'seven' at you. This meant 'go and stand in queue number seven now for twenty minutes and he'll unpick the staple and reshuffle the papers back into their original order before grunting 'twelve' at you' and so on in the time honoured tradition of 10 PRINT ABANDON ALL HOPE; 20 GOTO 10.

The Fast Service is progress of sorts. I'll take it, with thanks...

Where's My Identity Card?

English: Letters in a post office box in a US post office lobby. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I renewed my UAE residence visa last month. Visas used to last for three years, now they last for two. This is apparently to improve the flexibility of the labour market. Sure enough, a new Emirates Identity Card is also part of the fun and games.

Yesterday marked the passing of The Last Great Deadline for applying for an ID card in Dubai. The Emirates Identity Authority, or EIDA, has been issuing dire warnings and waffling about deadlines since the whole thing started back in 2007. Five years later, the card issuing process is finally linked (or at least, operating in parallel) with the visa application process and a deadline has passed without being extended, clarified or otherwise obfuscated.

I had to go to Sharjah's Central Post Office yesterday. I wanted to wait around for fifteen minutes waiting for a listless youth, who had apparently had all the bones removed from his body, to find my registered letter and experience tells me this is the best place to do it. While I was waiting for the aforementioned youth to bother turning up, I noticed a long, shuffling queue which led to a counter labelled "ID Card Collection Counter". Behind this, there were floor to ceiling racks stacked of cardboard mail boxes stuffed with envelopes and two grumpy looking blokes flopping around and grugingly doling out envelopes to supplicants. Because your ID card isn't actually sent to your PO Box, it's sent to the post office where your PO Box is and then handed out individually. There are in fact two queues - the one with no people queuing in it is marked 'Ladies and Locals'. There must have been thousands of envelopes in all.

This dystopian little scene reminded my of my own, as yet undelivered, ID card. It's been nearly a month since the visa was issued and there's been no sign of any ID card. I asked around. A pal with a visa issued last December is still waiting for her ID card. Another who applied in May is set to go for fingerprinting late in July.

Anybody with a less charitable outlook would conclude that the EIDA people are swamped and the whole system is totally backed up trying to manage the tide of last minute applications. If the scenes in the EIDA back office are in any way parallel to the communications side of things, it must be a tottering, Heath-Robinson style system creaking dangerously under the pressure.

I prefer to think of it as a well oiled machine snapping into action. And anyway, I'm in no hurry to join that long, hopeless-looking queue in the post office...

Has anybody out there actually received an ID card recently?

The Definite Article

English: The first Qatar Airways Cargo Boeing 777F (A7-BFA) in Frankfurt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The is the definite article. It is used in front of definite nouns, for instance, the world. So if you want to be known as the world's five star airline, you need a definite article.

Someone forgot to tell Qatar Airways. Which is a shame as every night I try to catch the news on Sky before going to bed, my only regular TV consuming habit as otherwise I tend to shun TV like a rabid dog. And every night the weather sponsored by Qatar Airways plays out some cheesy image of someone being unfeasibly cosseted together with the tagline, "Qatar Airways. World's Five Star Airline."

I find this annoying. Not in a life-threatening call the anger management guys he's about to chew off Akbar Baker's face sort of way, but in a sort of itchy animal bite sort of way. I do often wonder if the ad agency responsible are client doormats or simply stupid and incapable of stringing together a five word sentence. Alternatively, I suppose, they might think it's clever or in some way 'disruptive' to intentionally mangle the sentence. I can actually see some pony-tailed, yo-yo toting cretin presenting this new way of getting the consumers' attention. It could catch on. Imagine: "A Mars a day helps you work, rest and marmoset". See? Disruptive to the max, baby.

And then in today's Gulf News I spot an advertisement for Qatar Airways to Perth. And lo and behold, the headline's RIGHT! "Fly to the capital of Western Australia with the world's 5-star airline" it says.

I bet someone's gonna cop it for that one.

"You're sacked."
"But it's right!"
"Yes, that's what's wrong. It's not supposed to be right."