A Different Drummer

This Wikipedia entry on the Encyclopedia Britannica is supremely meta-awesome, in that it demonstrates both how amazing a body of knowledge Britannica is, and exactly why something like Wikipedia makes it largely irrelevant. Example? There would never be room in a print encyclopedia for a gem of knowledge like this, even though it is pretty much the most awesome factoid ever written:

The Britannica has a popular reputation for summarising all of human knowledge. To further their education, many have devoted themselves to reading the entire Britannica, taking anywhere from three to 22 years to do so. When Fat'h Ali became the Shah of Persia in 1797, he was given a complete set of the Britannica's 3rd edition, which he read completely; after this feat, he extended his royal title to include "Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopædia Britannica."

That is possible the most ass-kicking honorific ever invented, and I am including Idi Amin's "Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular" - which I found via...umm...Wikipedia)

Of all the articles that have come out surrounding Israel's sixtieth anniversary, this one by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic is a real highlight:

"Grossman told me that after the press conference, he went home to work on his latest novel, which he had begun in May of 2003, when Uri, the second of his three children, was about to be called up for army service. Grossman’s oldest boy, Yonatan, had already completed three years in the army.

“I thought about writing a novel about an Israeli soldier, a tank commander, who goes to a big military operation,” he said. “His mother has a kind of premonition that he’s going to be killed, and she will do everything she can in order to prevent that from happening. So she escapes. She will not be at home when the army comes to announce the death of her son. She understands that bad news takes two people, one to deliver and one to receive, and she will not be there to receive. She starts a walk across Israel, a 500-kilometer walk, and she tells the story of her son’s life, from the smallest details to the largest things, to someone who is very significant to her. She believes that this will protect her son.”

Grossman himself took a similar journey while writing the book, spending weeks crossing Israel on foot, and he visited with army officers whose duty it is to inform families of the deaths of their children.

At 2:40 a.m. on Sunday, August 13, three days after the press conference, Grossman’s doorbell rang. There were officers at the door. Uri had been killed in action in Lebanon, in the village of Hirbat Kasif, when a Hezbollah missile struck his tank. He was one of 24 soldiers to die on the first day of the ground offensive. Five hours later, David and his wife, Michal, woke up Uri’s sister, Ruti, who was then 13. As she cried, she asked, “But we will still go on living, right?”

Again sponsored by the iPhone and its surprisingly decent camera, volume two of The Things I Have Seen:

- After doing some hard Cairo time in the land where the pork options were limited to the occasional pizza from Maison Thomas, walking into the special pork-only grocery story here run by the Spinney's supermarket chain - I have dubbed it the Spinney's Forbidden Garden - was an intensely emotional experience. Complete with a "non-Muslims only" sign on the door, the sight of a grocery story where pork infiltrated anything and everything, from the canned soups to the instant noodles and the frozen pizzas....well, i was wiping a tear from the corner of my eye with the intense specialness of it all.

The readers who are living in the West may look at the image below and see nothing interesting, but I guarantee that anybody who has been in the Middle East for a while will see undescribable beauty:

Thank you, Spinney's Forbidden Garden. Just for being there for me.


The best bar in Abu Dhabi is a Filipino place close to the Meridien hotel, rammed full of young Fillipino's getting their party on in an awesome way. Until moving here I had never heard of the whole Filipino cover band culture, but it exists, in an epic way. Never before has a culture and people been more fully proficient in producing excellent cover bands, and this bar in AD (no idea what it's called) is home to one of the finest. A nine-piece group with two backup singers and a dedicated bongo drummer, these guys will rock out on anything from an intensely soulful Bryan Adams number up to a full-throttle version of the Clash's 'Should I Stay or Should I Go'.

The dancefloor is crowded and awash in lasers and strobe lights, and you are likely to be the only white person there on any given night. And never before has a piece of signage fully captured the jubilance and exuberance of a crowd than this one:


As befitting a place awash with petrodollars, you see some pretty frigging insane cars cruising around here, often being driven by kids who look like puberty is a recent reality in their lives. We were stuck behind a Bugatti Veyron in traffic a couple of weeks ago, and the same asshole in a red Ferrari Enzo has cut me off in traffic on more than one occasion.

The best thing about the shit-hot looking 911 below, seen outside the Raffles hotel in Dubai, is that the driver was such a big-shot that the car didn't even have numberplates...


For those thinking of visiting Abu Dhabi sometime around 2018, I might not still be around, but you'll be able to visit what might be the world's most interesting new destination for high-end culture, Saadiyat Island. Here's what the corniche of the 'cultural district' of the island will look like, complete with performing arts centre (furthest), Louvre (middle) and Guggenheim Museum (closest, and completely insane in true Gehry style).


Although Frank totally got his Gehry on with the design for the Guggenheim, the highlight for me is Zaha Hadid's amazing performing arts centre, which spouts out from the land and flows into the water like like a stream of Arabic calligraphy, or the head of a snake, of the coolest toy a 10 year old could ever hope for at Christmas, depending on how you look at it:

The National is really starting to hit its stride, and no more so than in this opus by our Delhi correspondent...

My nomination for best paragraphs of the month:

What happened on my 27th birthday:

- Wake up, eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. The first bacon and egg breakfast I've had since being home in Australia for Christmas, probably the third of fourth in the last 3 years. This was my birthday present to myself, the bacon bought specifically for this purpose a couple of days before.

- Go to work, find out, via furious phone call, that I had messed up some important details in a story published the day before.

- Spend next half an hour trying to work out how badly I had messed up, and contemplating fleeing to argentina and become a sandwich-maker.

- Conclude the mistake is survive-able, introspective freakout calms to a gentle humming feeling of bad

- Spend next hour putting the finishing touches on my favourite article written so far for The National, which came from one of the most interesting interviews I've ever done

- Make some phone calls and do some reading for another story that might turn out to be interesting

LUNCH - I cannot remember what I did for lunch, which means it was nothing interesting and I didn't leave the office.

- Find out the mistake was worse than I thought - bookmark jobsinsecludedargentinianvillages.com, begin the freakout.

- Relegate the freakout to background mode, there's work to be done. Start working on the story that turns out to be interesting enough to make something good out of. Do a couple of phone interviews, background reading, get writing.

- Realise the mistake isn't as bad as I thought, again, power-man of the company concerned is going to call me at 7pm to clear things up. 7pm becomes important emotional/spiritual checkpoint in my life.

- Finish the story - its good, but not revolutionary, like 99% of everything I will ever write, and I mean that in a good way...

- Check my gmail account. 45 people have sent me birthday greetings on facebook. No time to even think about reading them.

- Remember that its my birthday, reflect briefly on whether this is a good or bad typical day to commit to memory as a transition to adulthood style birthday day.

- Get working on transcribing a long interview that will hopefully be used in a story soon.

- Set 5:30 as finish time - need to be in Dubai, 140 kilometres away, for a dinner at 7:30.

- Oh yeah, the dinner. I am going to a dinner that night with a bunch of CIO's from the biggest companies in the UAE. Its a work thing, but it is at one of Dubai's best restaurants, so its not the worst way to spend your birthday night.

- Leave the office at 5:30, got to go home, put on a suit, freshen up, then haul ass to Dubai.

- Leave my house by quarter to six. Begin hauling ass to Dubai, emotionally preparing for the potentially furious power-man phone call that I will have to pull over the to side of the road and take, and potentially get my ass kicked during, at 7pm.

- Mind racing in anticipation of phone call and interesting dinner approaching, fail to make a crucially important turn-off . Realise a little later than I am going in the wrong direction, try to correct it by turning onto an even wrong-er road.

- Start to freak out as the road becomes a lonely desert freeway filled with trucks and dilapidated buildings: this isn't what the road to Dubai looks like at all....

- At 6:30, realise I am on the road to a place called Sweihan. Where the fuck is Sweihan? Salvation comes in to form of my iPhone and mobile internet - google for "Sweihan", first link advertises "The UAE's largest poultry farm". That doesn't sound like anything near Dubai...

- Use google maps on the iPhone to work out where the hell I am, Sweihan is on the way to Oman. I can get back on the right path by taking a detour through an ominous sounding place called "Zayed Military City"

- Sun going down, sky darkening, road becoming ambiguous, midst of detour, 7pm, lost. Phone rings. Ahhh Jesus, could the intense phone call come at a worse time?. Answer, turns out its somebody else, crisis temporarily avoided.

- Get back on the right road. 75 kilometres between me and my destination. Half an hour before the dinner starts. Call the guy and apologise, say I might be a little late. No worries.

- The 10-lane highway to Dubai rolls out comfortably before me, the getting lost crisis is averted. Phone starts ringing, here we go! Answer, the guy is in a meeting running overtime, can we do the call tomorrow? No problems with me. Crisis number two averted.

- Make it to the dinner, fifteen minutes late, which is 20 minutes early on Middle Eastern time. But this is a dinner full of Chief Information Officers, IT people, technical folk. Everything started bang on time, but no worries. Sit down and all is fine.

- A fantabulous dinner, complemented by high-end power-talk that I absolutely cannot write about here or anywhere else, commences. Frothy white tomato soup, horseradish foam accompanying little delicious things - I have no idea what they were. It keeps going, mixture of modern "molecular" style cuisine and traditional British, which I understand the chef Gary Rhodes is famous for. Wonderful, wonderful meal. Highlight for me was the plate of little miniture scones, accompanied by clotted cream and fresh berry preserve, that came right at the end of the meal. Best scones I have ever eaten. Scones!

- Post meal conversation covers a number of fascinating things that I absolutely can't write about. Interesting things are happening in the UAE, thats for sure, and technology people are right in the middle of it. Get leads for at least a dozen excellent stories to be written in the next couple of weeks.

- Leave at midnight, contented, full, filled with the joy of being in a time and place like no other, but then aren't we all? The valet parking guy brings me my car, I tip him far more than I should, but hey, I just had one of the best meals of my life and didn't pay a cent for it, someone should get a little somethin' somethin'

- Midnight, start hauling ass back to Abu Dhabi. The roads are clear and empty, I'll be home in an hour and a bit. Is this what adulthood is like? Busy, complicated, stressful, rewarding, filled with pleasures and opportunites and risks and an ever expanding world unfolding around you. Being a grownup is awesome.

Check out the world's newest newspaper at www.thenational.ae

We closed the first edition last night. It has been an incredible couple of months, and felt great to finally hold a lovely looking broadsheet newspaper in our hands this morning.

I have a couple of stories in the business section today - "UAE is the Spam Capital of the Gulf," "Etisalat Tops Saudi Telecom," and "Muxlim.com Named 'Most Promising'"

Will have some interesting stuff up over the next few days, so bookmark The National and drop by when you can....

A view over the old city from the even-older city...



This is what a harbour looked like 2000 years ago, and I wish it was what harbours still looked like today....



The swimming pool on the edge of our hotel room, at night.



The Byblos Old Souk at nighttime



Unfortunately for Byblos, it was not the prettiest thing I saw all weekend - and the competition wasn't even close.....