A Different Drummer

US Presidential candidate John McCain sings "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann". The video is classic in more ways as well - he appears to be speaking in a small grimly lit den of loons, and the question is asked by a guy who, as Achewood would say, appears to have "spent all night snorting huge rails of coke and doing push-ups to old Sam Kinison routines"

I love this post by Sveta, my old best buddy from Rotterdam. Sveta is on a dream internship in Sydney now, and held a Belorussian lunch to teach all her collegues a little bit about her come country of Belarus. I don't think I had ever met a Belorussian before I met Sveta, and I might never again...

As you can see from the post, she is a wonderful ambassador for a seriously different country. The average Aussie, myself and everyone I know included, wouldn't know jack about Belarus, and her collegues look to be loving what must be a lunch straight out of leftfield for them - how many Belarus-themed lunches do you go to on average each lifetime?

Check out Sveta's posting on the whole thing - the mini Belarus facts are eye openers....

# of people who wished me happy birthday yesterday - 51
# of them who only knew it was my birthday because of facebook - 46
# of the facebook people who I'm not even sure how I know - 4
# of cheek kisses recieved from octogenerian doorman upon him learning that it was my birthday - 3
# of my housemates who, it turns out co-incedentally, were also born on April 23 - 1

(Updated below...)

Another Egyptian blogger and journalist has been arrested for saying the wrong things. This time round, it is Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, a Muslim Brotherhood blogger who writes for the Ikhwanweb site. Arabawy has a series of posts going through the background to this.

It isn't surprising to see this happen - but it is surprising to see the lack of concern among the same people who were pretty loudly expressing their dismay at the arrest and imprisonment of Abdelkareem Soliman.

The big difference between the two? Abdelkareem was heavily anti-Islamic in his writings and Mahmoud blogs for the Muslim Brotherhood. Thats all I can really see.

Ironically, Mahmoud actually got some attention for writing in support of Abdelkareem. Just for some context here, lets remember Abdelkareem is the guy who wrote that

"For as long as Islam exists on this planet all your efforts to end wars and disputes and upheavals will fail because Islam’s dirty finger will be found behind every catastrophic event to humanity."

Despite saying about the nastiest thing you can possibly say about his religion, Abdelkareem was defended by Mahmoud (who is, remember, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood). Mahmoud said:

"I disagree with Abdul Kareem Amer’s views. However, I do not disagree, at all, that this security practice is unjust towards a youth in the prime of his life. Punishing him, or punishing others having their opinions, will not succeed in changing their ideas."

So far, I haven't seen much support for Mahmoud from any of the usual defenders of free speech. Most disappointing is that it hasn't even been mentioned by the pretty widely publicised Free Kareem site, which was happy to publish Mahmoud's defense of Abdelkareem when it was useful. Here's to hoping this situation changes, fast.

UPDATE - the Free Kareem site now has a big post on Mahmoud. And check the comments to this post - Esra'a Al Shafei, director of the Free Kareem Coalition posted a couple of good ones, along with one from Egyptian blogfather Alaa as well...

I'm hooked on DangerDoom, the collaboration between DJ Dangermouse and MF Doom (the certified lunatic behind Madvillian). These are two of the weirdest and most creative guys going round right now, and their album together is absolutely spot on.

Listen here to "Old School", a sweet DangerDoom Track featuring the one and old Talib Kweli. As Bob Dylan once said, play it fucking loud.

"Me and my people break bread, sit and smoke
The conversation rich, but that depend on what you consider broke
I draw on anything for inspiration
A fond memory, a piece of paper, walls in a train station
It's just that I'm old school like that, roll that rap over soul loops like that"

The whole album is sweet. You can listen to a fair bit of it on their myspace page...

Kurt Vonnegut died today.
It isn't really a sad moment at all, because if anybody understood life and death and the meaning of both it was him. As he said in Slaughterhouse Five, one of the books that first made we want to be a writer:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

Finding Bluebeard in the Attaba book market was a Godsend that came at exactly the right time - late 2004, starved of decent books after 6 months in Cairo, and then Vonnegut literally falls into my hands, hidden between reams of Agatha Christie and pulp romance. It lit up my mind and got me thinking more and more about how far I had to go before my writing could even be considered gutter standard when compared to the greats.

He had this wonderful intonation and rhythm and beat that left you almost nodding your head as you made your way through the pages. He had amazing instinct, much like Hunter S. Thompson, that meant that even his little throwaway lines were golden. And for me, his most amazing characteristic was his ongoing ability to smile ruefully at the terrible things all around us. His characters could be outraged and disgusted and horrified all at the same time, but still keep a wry smile on their face as they appreciated the fundamentally beautiful humanity of everything good bad and evil that we do on this Earth.

"Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.' Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future."

Like I said before, it was Slaughterhouse Five that helped me realise the power of good writing. It can help you see the world in a different way. My favourite Vonnegut passage, from Slaughterhouse Five, sees the main character Billy Pilgrim watching World War II footage in reverse. It almost brings tears to my eyes:

"He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed."

I'll see you on Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.

Was awesome.



Heres the photos - raving 'best-place-on-earth' rants to come...
(UPDATE) - More photos from Salman and his much-more-awesome camera

I have a couple of solid articles in this month's Business Today Egypt magazine, including a chin-stroking piece on the future of the mobile telecomms business, and a look at new high-tech R&D firm who have set up shop in Cairo.

Two articles by me? How can a magazine get any better? Well, what about back-to-back interviews with two of the most important members of the Egyptian government? Check out the interview with probably the most important figure in the Egyptian economy right now, Minister for Trade and Industry, Rachid Mohamed Rachid. And theres also an interview with Minister for Social Solidarity, Ali Elmoselhy.

This month's Egypt Today is also a pretty good issue - "Down with the Pajamahideen" looks at the jailing of Egyptian blogger Abdelkareem Amer, "Living a lie" profiles the Egyptian novelist Alaa El-Aswany (author of The Yacoubian Building), and in "A Perfect Peace?", Gwynne Dyer looks at the nightmare that is life in Mogadishu.

Off to Siwa tomorrow and wanted to post something without having to do the actual work of witing something decent. So, three half formed thoughts will do...

- Props to Britain for setting an example for how grown-ups conduct their foreign affairs. Classy.

- Will there be a bombing in Egypt in 2007? If so, this weekend is one of the most likely times for it to happen. Monday is Sharm El-Nessim, an Egyptian national holiday for the start of spring, and this is also the easter long weekend for both orthodox and catholics. Dahhab was bombed last Sharm El-Nessim. Egypt has seen bombings on a public holiday weekends in 2004, 2005 and 2006...

- Related to the previous, I'm pretty happy I will be about as far from all that wackiness as you can be in Egypt - 1000 kilometres east of Cairo in the middle of a desert oasis.

Awww yeah...

This NYT article about John McCain and co.'s recent visit to Baghdad makes for hilariously sad reading, particularly when it comes to the sheer reality gap between what happened and what was said regarding their visit to a Baghdad street market.....

"The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.

'They paralyzed the market when they came,' Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. 'This was only for the media.'

He added, 'This will not change anything.'

At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, and his three Congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — 'like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,' offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation."

This reminds me of the scene in Team America when peacenik Sean Penn tries to convince everyone that Iraq is just fine and doesn't need invading or regime change: "They had flowery meadows, and rainbow skies and rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles."