Book Post: The Displaced Nation

It's quite a neat title for an expat blog, isn't it? The Displaced Nation is a blog that ties together people from all over the world who have decided to live, well, all over the world. It shares the experiences and tales of people who have decided to leave the comfort of hearth and home and live somewhere alien, foreign and different.

I can imagine nothing more fun than alien, foreign and different.

Anyway, DN has been a great supporter of my book publishing endeavours over the years (They're +Displaced Nation or @displacednation) and I love 'em for it - which is why now that we have three books in the Levant Cycle, officially a 'trilogy' since I gave in to popular opinion, it falls to the Displaced Nation team to reveal details of the fantastic, limited time offer that's about to take place globally and in glorious Technicolour.

I'm going to put Olives - A Violent Romance, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy up for sale at $0.99 each for a couple of days before Christmas. This is clearly an ebook only kind of deal, so if you're wedded to print there's no bonanza - but if you've got a Kindle, Sony, Kobo, Nook or iPad and want to get three decent thrillers based in the mystical and majestic Middle East for under $3, this is your perfect opportunity.

For accountants and others inclined to autism, that's about $0.00001 a word.

The kicker is you have to subscribe to the Displaced Despatch to find out when the promotion is taking place. It's linked here for your listening pleasure. The Despatch is a weekly summary of book reviews, recipes and posts from the DN blog and actually a decent enough sprinkling of international fun and games in its own right.

As you're in the mood to go signing up to newsletters, you can also sign up to mine (link on the right hand side there - it's a bit more random than weekly. Let's call it 'occasional'...) which gets you a copy of Olives - A Violent Romance for FREE! So then you could get your jammy paws on a whole trilogy for just $1.98!

Oh, the BARGAINS to be had around here! It's enough to make your head spin!

The Passing Of 'Lawrence Of Arabia'

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He was 'Lawrence of Arabia' to so many people, the brilliant Peter O'Toole made the role his own in David Lean's stunning epic. Of course you'll know by now he is dead - here's Alex Ritman's excellent obituary in today's The National.

I've long been a big fan of the film. It's bunkum, of course. Lawrence didn't say lots of the things the film has him say, including that glorious, "small people, silly people" line. And the whole thing with the two boys was outrageous. But O'Toole neatly nailed the enigmatic persona, the aloof yet ambitious 'Little Lawrence'. And Lean, wow, what a job.

I had Paul Stokes re-enact the scene in Wadi Rumm where Lawrence danced in his Sherifian robes, in the original MS of Olives - A Violent Romance. It was all part of Paul's assimilation, his growing 'Arabness' as he faces precisely the dilemma Lawrence faced as he betrayed 'his' Arabs to the mendacious Sykes-Picot Treaty. Paul was created purposefully in Lawrence's role as betrayer and friend, a foreigner who offers help and is not to be trusted.

The scene didn't make it through into the final novel, I guess I thought it was all a little too much. Anyway, I've got the Director's Cut of Lawrence of Arabia. And now I'm going to watch it...

Book Review: Waiting For Sunrise (William Boyd)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I hate to do this. I have long been an admirer of William Boyd's stuff, but this book was one I had to force myself through, often finding myself skimming. It's always such a disappointment to approach a book by an author whose work you've enjoyed and admired (A Good Man in Africa and An Ice Cream War, his first two novels, had me hooked and I've enjoyed his other work since) and then find yourself increasingly alienated as you realise this just isn't, well, 'doing it' for you.

Waiting for Sunrise is set in the period just prior to, and during, the First World War. Lysander Rief is sexually dysfunctional. He visits his psychologist and is entranced by a society beauty he meets there and then joins up when war breaks out. He enters the intelligence service and has to save Britain by discovering a code.

The main character, Rief struck me as being all over the place - I often found myself drawn up to ponder why on earth would he do that or say this? I suppose part of that is because little personality shines through that isn't self-obsessed and obnoxious. A sexual predator with little love for women, Rief is half Austrian but not interred or even interviewed as war breaks out, in fact he is recruited by military intelligence.

There doesn't seem to be much structure on offer here, it reads as if it was made up as we went along. Rief in Austria, Rief the sexual failure, Rief the actor, Rief the upper class twit, Rief the soldier, Rief the spy, Rief the lover, Rief the boozer. They none of them appear to be going anywhere cohesive that follows a growing narrative, they just wander around in Brownian patterns. And they all become a tad exhausting.

There are echoes of TE Lawrence in Rief - his superiority, his drawling insolence at a senior officer over whom he has a hold, his decision to become a private rather than take the commission he could so easily have achieved. And yet they are only echoes - and it's David Lean's Lawrence, not the man himself - there's nothing of the complexity and conflict that make either the real Lawrence or O'Toole's portrayal interesting. Rief isn't, well, driven to anything. He just muddles through.

I liked the setting and I liked the language, Boyd manages to capture the clipped accents of upper class schoolboy amateur spies nicely. There are elements of this book that are brilliant and reflect the talent and experience a much-loved novelist with a stellar career behind him.

But the thing as a whole rambled and just didn't come together for me. I came out of it feeling a little tired and perhaps a tad puzzled. For dark wartime espionage you can't better Alan Furst...

Three stars, then.

You can find the book here.

Book Post - Pills, Skulls and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. The Cover.

Gerrard King's Memento Mori

The search for a cover image for Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy was a long one. It was always going to be a mission to follow on from Jessy Shoucair's 'Lipstick Bullet' on the cover of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

The image had to be strong, stark and striking and somehow representative of the book itself. I spent long hours playing with various ideas, eventually settling on skulls and pills, an occlusion of the 'deadly' nature of the story and the dependency of protagonist, dying diplomat Jason Hartmoor, on painkillers and enzymes. There's also quite a lot of heroin in the book. If you're gonna do drugs, I reckon you might as well go all out, see?

I found one stock shot that seemed to go down that road, a skull and crossbones made from pills that I shared with the nice people on my mailer (Look! To the right! You can sign up too and get occasional updates, freebies and answer silly questions about book covers!), asking them what they thought. The answer duly came back and it boiled down to 'get what you're doing there but meh.'

A few more frustrated hours of playing with ideas and Googling followed before I stumbled across an image that leapt out of the screen, stuck its fingers up my nostrils and smacked my head on the keyboard. It was one of a series created by Australian artist Gerrard King, called 'Memento Mori'. I hit Gerrard up on Facebook and we quickly agreed a license for me to use his image on the book and in promotional work for Shemlan. Oddly enough, it turned out he had some history with Dubai - for a time he had been a 'trolly dolly' on Emirates. Seven points of separation and all that, see?

Gerrard's art is startling, surreal and bold stuff - you can follow the links below to explore more of his wild forays into gibbering insanity. In the meantime, I took the opportunity to interview 'Mr Pill Skull'...

What started your fascination with skulls as canvases? 
My thing for the skull has really incubated since youth. From the very first one adorning my school bag in '88 (I think it was Guns n Roses) to what you see now. The skull to me, is a perfect sculptural form with an ever-changing mood. It can be classical one minute and hair metal the next!

Why the pill/skull occlusion. What made you think of the image? 
The Memento Mori series really is about juxtaposing elements of pop, fashion and western culture with the classic skull, echoing the deep-rooted tradition of skull ornamentation prevalent in other cultures. The pill design harks to a classic '70s fabric design by Marimekko, which takes on a sense of irony when combined with the skull. I kept thinking of the song 'Mother's Little Helper' by The Rolling Stones while doing this piece.

Your work splits into pop, surrealism, realism and skulls. Will there be a fifth category? 
It's true that I do not like to be pigeon-holed with a particular style, preferring to float between whichever means serve the end. I couldn't say what I may do next, so yes, I will probably add another arrow to my quiver somewhere along the line.

Where do you sell most of your work - do you generally feel 'understood'? 
I sell my artwork at events, self-organised exhibitions and markets, as well as online. Living in a tourist area, one can easily feel misunderstood by throngs of holiday-makers looking for beach scenes and cutesy mementos. I have developed a bit of a support crew where I live who continually support my endeavours and drink free wine at my exhibitions!

Is this your first book cover? Do you see Gerrard King placemats or biscuit tins looming over the horizon? 
Ha ha! Yes this is my first cover image on an intelligent publication. I draw the line at prints and tee shirts for now, but if they were damn fine biscuits, well...!

Here's Gerrard's website with galleries and the like or you can see what he's getting up to here on Facebook.

And here, of course, is the handy link to buy Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy  complete with its scary cover in paperback, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Android tablet or iPad formats!

Red/Dead Gets Go Ahead

Lynch smiled. ‘Do you actually like her? She doesn’t seem your type.’
‘That’s none of your business.’
He leaned forward, his smile fading fast.‘We need your help. Dajani’s confirmed to a journalist from one of the Arabic rags he’s going to be bidding for the water privatisation and he’s claiming he has the solution to Jordan and the West Bank’s water supply problems. We’re deeply concerned about what he’s up to, Paul. The West Bank’s none of his business and it isn’t part of the privatisation as far as we are aware. The Izzies are screaming blue murder already and asking the Jordanians for clarification – and they’re saying nothing, not confirming, not denying. Your Minister has clammed up tighter than a shark’s arse at fifty fathoms.’
From Olives - A Violent Romance

It's been on what Gulf News likes to call 'the anvil' for something like 20 years now, but the infamous Red/Dead Canal is now set to commence. The problem is the Dead Sea has been shrinking at an incredible pace, its level dropping by up to a metre a year. Maps of the sea's outline over the past five decades look like maps of the Palestinian territories since 1948. It's inexorable and the scale of the great sea's decline is mind-boggling.

There simply isn't enough water to go around - I looked at the regional water crisis in my first serious novel, Olives - A Violent Romance because it's such a big (and unexplored) topic in the region. Israel and Lebanon almost went to war over Lebanese plans to dam the Litani river and there have been squabbles aplenty between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria as everyone tries to get more out of a well that is near dry. The River Jordan, which feeds into the Dead Sea, has been reduced to a sad trickle. You can stand on the shores of the great gloopy body of ultra-saline water and look up the shore-side cliff to see hooks let into the stone that were used to tether boats forty years ago. It's an unnerving sight.

The Red/Dead Conduit (or even the "Two Seas Canal") aims to address the problem by piping water from the Red Sea up to the Dead Sea. It's all part of a multi-billion dollar project involving water desalination at Aqaba to feed the Israeli city of Eilat and the Jordanian capital Amman. Alongside this, 100 million cubic metres (MCM) of saline water will be diverted to feed into the Dead Sea. The deal's a complex one and involves Israel selling water to the Palestinian Authority as well as releasing more water from Lake Tiberias (The Sea of Galilee if you prefer) to Jordan. Israeli opponents of the scheme have criticised it as a water swapping deal dressed up as an environmental deal.

Part of the problem is that this all represents, literally, a drop in the ocean. Back in the 1960s, the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers used to push some 1900 MCM into the Dead Sea. Today that flow has reduced to something like 2-500 MCM depending on the season. Another 100 MCM is unlikely to make a huge difference. The original Red/Dead project called for two billion MCM to be pumped into the Dead Sea. Worse, the companies extracting potash and other minerals from the Dead Sea are themselves evaporating anything up to an estimated 350 MCM. The World Bank's feasibility study into the whole project estimated an inflow of a billion MCM per annum would stabilise the Dead Sea. So 100 MCM ain't looking like 'the solution'...

Alongside that are concerns about the environmental impact, as well as quite where all the power to feed the huge pumping stations the project demands - water is being pushed 230 metres uphill before flowing down to the Dead Sea - and the pipeline to Amman is an incredible 178 kilometres long. Part of the project plan includes hydro-electric power plants, but it's not known how much these will offset the overall consumption of the pumping stations and the project's two desalination plants.

What is clear is that it's likely going to be a mess. Few of the news stories covering the project agree on the numbers - and there are so many of them it's hard to work out quite what's what here. It's not yet been clarified how the project (which appears to be a scaled back version of what the World Bank's $16 million feasibility study called for) will be funded. And the concerns of environmentalists - both at what feeding seawater into the Dead Sea will do and at how pumping large volumes from Aqaba will affect flows around the sensitive Red Sea coral reefs - appear to have been largely sidelined.

What's sort of cute is how the water scarcity that drives Olives has remained relevant. It was all a huge mess when I first sat down to write the book in 2004 and it's no less of a mess almost ten years later, despite the Wadi Disi project being completed and the Red/Dead Project finally being agreed...

The UAE's Fat Problem - The Super Sized Soda Ban

(Photo credit: marsmet491)

The UAE's Federal National Council has announced steps to ban super-sized sodas in the country. The decision comes as part of a two-day session in which representatives discussed and brainstormed ideas in the educational and healthcare sectors, a discussion that took place alongside a much-publicised public consultation over social media.

The move is a fantastic idea and to be lauded - others have tried but failed to implement the measure. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has spearheaded a long legal battle to implement a super-sized soda ban, a fight that continues even as I write this.

It's a step in the right direction, but when you look at the journey ahead, even so big a step seems like a very small thing indeed. The UAE has a problem - and at its core is one small word. It's actually what I do as a day job and so I get a tad frustrated by it all.

It's awareness. Nothing more, nothing less.

The UAE is a young country, sometimes still painfully young. Its people have grown up in one of the most dynamic, fast-changing and evolving environments in the world. It's one of the most diverse collections of humans on earth - I'm shocked we aren't surrounded by thousands of anthropologists studying the place - with probably the world's wackiest demographics and societal challenges so great even trying to think about them deeply provokes brain skitter. One of the many, many products of that youth is an almost complete lack of food education and a culture of enjoying the plenty we have today - because within living memory there wasn't plenty, but scarcity here.

It's not helped by food producers and importers. Crisps fried in palm oil are the norm here, usually sprinkled liberally with MSG and 'Sunset yellow' - and other egregious dyes. The market leading brand of potato chip is fried in palm oil, a saturated fat. You can't throw a stone without hitting a fast food joint - each worse than the last. These have evolved very nicely to suit local culture and provide fun evening environments for the whole family - which of course gorges itself on processed meats fried in cheap fats (more palm oil!) and then slapped in highly processed buns to be served with processed french fries, flavouring coated onion rings or *shudder* curly marinated potato chips. Let alone the super-sweet sodas, shakes, doughnuts and ice cream sundaes on offer.

And, as anyone who read yesterday's post (or any of my posts passim on the topic of what's in our food) will know, being aware of what you're eating isn't always easy because food producers can be obfuscatory and even mendacious in the way they present foods to us.

The Khaleeji palate is fond of creamy cheeses, fried foods, dry biscuits and sweets. Cake shops sell highly processed confections slathered in artificial colourings and pumped with polyfilla-like artificial creams. And most of the locally sold brands of those dry biscuits are baked using, wait for it, palm oil.

Alongside this, we have a love of cookery and entertainment. The consumption of cooking oil by the average Emirati family is something to be seen to be believed - you can see the trolleys being lugged around Carrefours and the Co-Op. Demijohns of oil, pot noodles and worse things than that lurk in there.

I'm not being holier-than-thou here - I'm not saying anyone else is better. The UK in the 1970s and 80s was a paradise of processed foods, sweeteners and fats. It's not even particularly healthy there in these at least marginally more enlightened days. And the States. Oh, wow, the States. In any case, I'd probably know more about eating habits here than there these days.

But I am being realistic. There's a problem here - and at its heart is the fact the average consumer is totally unaware of what they are eating and there's nobody interested in making them aware because they are making a great deal of money by feeding the appetites of the nation. There are relatively few healthy alternatives - and when people don't know they're paying an insidious price for those burger meals, fried treats and creamy sauces zinging with 'E's, they're hardly going to opt for those 'no fun' healthy choices in any case.

So yes, great step FNC. But someone needs to get serious about letting consumers make more informed choices for themselves and, crucially, for their children.

I, for one, would be only too happy to help...

(PS Yes, I know there are expats who eat unhealthily too.)

(PPS The UAE can take some solace in the fact it isn't the world's fattest nation. Strangely enough that gong doesn't belong to America, but our next door neighbours, Qatar.)

Fancy A Quick Tumble, Chicken?

(Photo credit: @Doug88888)

Tumbling is the process whereby water is added to chicken breasts, typically with the addition of phosphates and hydrolised protein to 'bind' the water into the chicken so it doesn't deflate and become a puddle when you cook it. They also add salt - and then dextrose to re-sweeten the salty mix. I'd recommend a read of this excellent piece in The Guardian, which points out that consumers are paying something like 65p a kilo for water.

In the UK this meat is typically sold frozen in discount or bargain lines. Here in the UAE you can find a similar product as 'frozen' or 'marinated' chicken breast. It's not a marinade I'd choose to consume, I can tell you. These pumped breasts can contain anything up to 50% water. Bargain!

Hydrolised meat protein is extracted from bones, skins and other scraps of cows and, where permissible, pigs. This is accomplished using acid to break the meat down into its component amino acids. When it comes into contact with food, hydrolised protein naturally forms MSG or monosodium glutamate - so that watery chicken breast also packs an (unlabelled!) MSG punch.

So there's horse in your beef and beef in your chicken! Yum!

Dubai Traffic On The Increase. Whoopee.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The car dealers are rubbing their hands, gleefully cackling and singing 'happy days are here again' in their broken, wheezing voices. As miserable a bunch of avaricious hunchbacks as you'll find, the saggy-skinned troglodytes in suits are hearing the sound of tills ringing and they have pronounced the sound To Be Good.

It is within the pages of the mighty Gulf News today we are told that Dubai has increased new vehicle registrations by 10% year on year. That's presumably a sign that we're seeing a 10% increase in vehicles on the road - a total of 1,240,931 vehicles were registered with the RTA this year. Car dealers in Dubai and Sharjah have apparently told the newspaper of increases in new car sales of up to 40% and anticipate a continued strong growth trend.

Even Gulf News made the connection. That means more cars on the road which means more traffic which means more congestion which means more jostling with aggressive dolts in lines of glittering metal blowing out billowing clouds of choking fumes and general bloody misery.

One place there are less cars to be found than last year, incidentally, is the Sharjah/Dubai highway. Although it still gets gummy here and there, the traffic volumes are undoubtedly down as traffic concentrates instead on choking Al Wahda street because everyone's trying to leave at Al Khan and hoy off over to the 311 (The road formerly known as the Emirates Road but now renamed the Mohammed Bin Zayed Road) to avoid shelling out Dhs4. I am constantly amazed at what lengths people will go to in order to save Dhs4 - including spending Dhs5 in extra petrol.

So Salik (the name of Dubai's traffic toll system and Arabic for 'clear') has lived up to its name. Who knew?

The question is whether the expansion of the UAE's road infrastructure will keep pace with the expansion in traffic. There's a new arterial motorway planned to link the 311 down to Abu Dhabi, while a new road system around the Trade Centre Roundabout - started before the bust and now completed by Italian company Salini, which has somehow managed to ride out the recession and its significant exposure to Dubai - is opening this week. The conversion of the National Paints Car Park into a functional road appears to be nearing completion, too - it'll be interesting to see if any number of new lanes can bring clarity to what was the UAE's most notorious traffic bottleneck.

Meanwhile, property prices in Dubai rose by more than anywhere else in the world, according to a piece in The National, which identifies a 28.5% rise in the first nine months of the year.

Oh, joy. Groundhog day.

Book Review: The Summer Book (Tove Jansson)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You'll probably know Tove Jansson - if you've heard of her at all - as the Moomin woman - and that's certainly how Finland's tourist trade likes to promote her. You can hardly move in Helsinki without being met by one of the strange bulbous-nosed things. A celebrated illustrator and artist, Jansson was born to artist parents and was about as Bohemian as a Scandinavian gets - including a life-long relationship with her female partner (which everyone appears scrupulously to avoid calling a 'relationship' but which Jansson's own writing makes clear is a thing of shared beds).

Through a moment of Kindle caprice, I met Tove Jansson the novelist and was instantly entranced. My first buy was The Summer Book and, in Helsinki for the summer, the book made perfect, delicious sense. I went on not only to voraciously read everything of hers I could get my hands on in the weeks that followed, but went on to reread them too. Funnily enough, her Moomin legacy to this day overshadows her serious writing (look at her Wikipedia page and you'd think she'd never written a book) and yet her novels are gloriously written observations of humanity that veer dangerously close to philosophical. Her The True Deceiver is a book as dark as the Finnish winter nights. But, fie!, we're not here to celebrate darkness, but the summer.

The Summer Book is about a little girl, Sophia, and her grandmother - whose name we never learn. Together, the girl and the grandmother explore the island off Finland the family takes to each summer. Father is a sculptor, mother is never mentioned. Sophia's world is magical, her bafflements and quizzical nature delightful and her moments of rage and contrariness explored with an insider's knowledge. Her grandmother, bluff and all-knowingly wise, is as well able to see the magic of the island as Sophia - albeit through eyes that know they will soon close for ever.

"When are you going to die?" the child asked.

And Grandmother answered, "Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours."

Thankfully, nobody told Jansson how to write. The very first story in what is essentially a collection of sequential short stories progressing through the months of summer is 'The Morning Swim' and, horror of horrors, the POV is all over the place. One minute we're seeing the world through Sophia's eyes, the next through Grandmother's. And so it goes throughout the book, we share the world through both of their points of view with wilful haphazardness.

This lack of structured composition will horrify the Word Nazis, as will a great deal of 'Showing'. And yet both are critical elements in a book that takes its time narrating not very much at all really and yet which is enchanting, entrancing and utterly captivating. The constant POV switches are never confusing, never pull you up or jar. They just show us how two strong personalities see the same world with different eyes and yet with a charming regard and care for each other. It's not without its dramas, this celebration of Finnish island life: there are storms and malevolent cats, Venice sinks into the sea and little girls with curls split Sophia and her Grandmother.

And island life is critically important to the Finns. They have over 780 islands, from the great fortifications of Suomenlinna to skerries with single rusty-red wooden houses and bare guano-spattered rocks. The sun's warmth (and the sea's coldness), the sound of the breeze wind in the reeds, the smell of the sea and oil-cloth, cork floats and fishing nets and the whiff of Grandmother's sneaked cigarettes are in every chapter of The Summer Book. If great narrative transports us, this book has remarkable greatness in every page.

Five stars, clearly.

You can buy The Summer Book here.

Bring Out Yer Dead (Or why Lenovo Middle East Rocked This Week)

Last Friday I mentioned a need for laptop computers in Sri Lanka, after we had found a medical student was working towards his exams without a computer and cleaned up then shipped out one of Spot On's collection of trusty (if dusty) T61s. The IBM, subsequently Lenovo, T61 is a classic. You can run tractors over them and they carry on working.

I found out later that the machine was being shared by our student and four others. Anandharapura, where these chaps hail from, is not wealthy. It struck me as simply wrong that medical students should be forced to resort to sharing a laptop to prepare for their examinations - although we had at least ensured there was a laptop for them to share. So I posted about it and various people, including the lovely @shelo9 and @toffeeprincess came forward with offers of old laptops they'd cleaned up.

Lenovo got in touch on Twitter and also offered to help. And help they did - two sparkling and rather sleek ex-demo S-Series machines were duly conjured up and handed over. And here's the cool bit - with absolutely no expectation of anything in return. I had been dreading the request for a photo of the students with their new machines or something and I couldn't have been more wrong. "We're really happy to help and do let us know if we can do more," the Man From Lenovo said (@mkdubai, as you ask). I was blown away to tell the truth - left there open-mouthed clutching two long boxes full of smart notebook.

So our students are now kitted out. But there are more of them out there - students from villages and families too poor to be able to afford to give them the PC they need for their studies - and we've now established a line of communication and supply through a philanthropically inclined community Doctor we know in Kandy who has been helping identify clear cases of need. There are very many of these - we appear to have uncovered a terrible lack, but be easily in possession of the solution.

Members of the Sri Lankan community here in the UAE who are travelling home are taking the machines with them one at a time so we don't have to pay customs to the awful government responsible for this whole state of affairs in the first place. And that feels rather marvellous, as it happens. There are no middle men or administrators, this is simply a community thing. It's a much more efficient form of giving that goes straight from one community to another.

So if you have a dusty but functional notebook in your life that's given way to your sleek new Ultrabook, do feel free to clean it up (ie remove your personal data) and drop it off to The Archive (Gate 5, Safa Park), where the lovely Sarah and Bethany will happily take delivery of your bounty so we can get it over to Sri Lanka and help a young medical student rather than have it just gathering dust under the stairs. Don't for a second think you don't need to bother because others will take them along - it would appear we can use them all. So please do feel free to share a link to this post or just let friends know to drop off those old machines at The Archive.

Oh - and we could use some laptop bags, too.

And thank you, Lenovo. You rocked this week.