A Different Drummer

I bought this bad boy back from Australia and it's seen some pretty decent action. On the menu tonight: a fairly decent attempt at Laksa, Aussie-Malaysian style. Pictured: Bok Choi in Oyster sauce.

Gazans have the nerve to bust out of the cage that Egypt and Israel keep them locked up in. They'll need to be severely punished for such rudeness...

Because where else can this happen?

"Three aspiring Italian Big Brother contestants preparing for a few weeks of easy celebrity in a comfortable apartment got a dose of hard reality on Monday as 60 supporters of a far-right political party trapped them in a Rome piazza to demand housing rights for low income Italians."

Waving fire crackers and carrying a banner reading "A home is no game", the protesters attacked and burst a four metre high transparent plastic bubble set up in the piazza to host the hopeful contestants, who were appearing live on TV waiting to hear if they had been selected to enter the Big Brother house.

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The live footage was quickly blacked out as chanting protesters stabbed holes in the bubble using knives...

By the end of the evening, the student had been voted into the Big Brother house, set up at Rome's Cinecitta film studios, joining an entire Sicilian family and a transsexual from north Italy among other contestants. The protesters, meanwhile, marched away in triumph across the nearby Roman Milvian bridge." (Guardian)

A few days ago I shared some links about my new employer, so this time, a couple of good reads about what will be my new home, the UAE.

"Fear and Loathing in Dubai" - A well written, lefty critique of Dubai by Mike Davis in the New Left Review:

"Thanks to his boundless enthusiasm for concrete and steel, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board upon which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, glass-domed ‘snow mountains’, Truman Show suburbs, cities within cities - whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with architectural steroids. The result is not a hybrid but an eerie chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan, Orlando, Monaco and Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly."

"Abu Dhabi: East Leans West" - An interesting look by Judith Miller (yes, that Judith Miller) in City Journal at the emergence of Abu Dhabi as a regional culture capital:

"To make itself the region’s true cultural hub, the emirate has forged surprising partnerships, and is negotiating others, with some of the world’s leading cultural and academic institutions, several based in New York. In 2006, for instance, Abu Dhabi commissioned the Guggenheim Museum to construct a vast, 450,000-square-foot branch in the emirate. (Abu Dhabi shares Dubai’s obsession with gigantism: having the world’s “tallest” skyscrapers, the “best” hotels, the “largest” shopping malls, and so on.) This past November came the announcement for New York University–Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), which will be the first comprehensive liberal arts campus that any major American research university establishes abroad. The emirate has also recruited the Sorbonne to create a French-language university and inked a whopping $1.3 billion deal with the Louvre to use its name, build a classical art museum, and share and jointly acquire art. Further, Abu Dhabi is talking with the New York Public Library and several other great libraries about opening branches, and it has approached New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center about a partnership, though executives say that no deal is imminent....

“It’s better for all of us that Saadiyat be a cultural complex than a naval base,” agrees Bassem Kudsi, who went to college in Oregon before returning to Abu Dhabi to work for its Authority for Culture and Heritage. “My jihad is culture: let’s let a thousand festivals bloom! What our region needs is more culture and less conflict.”

The sun sets on a frigging radical three weeks in paradise. Its been real.

There has been a couple of good stories published recently in the UK press about the new Abu Dhabi newspaper and its boss, former Telegraph editor Martin Newland. For all those who keep asking me about my new job, check them out:

Bridging the Gulf with grand aims and a huge budget (Guardian, most interesting of the lot)

Media firm rises in desert (Times)

Coming Out Party in the UAE (Sky, with video)

From the Times piece:

“The timing is right, too. We’ve caught the mood. You can smell the opportunity here when you get off the plane. This is the place to be right now. It just oozes potential. We’ve got a hell of a good chance of pulling off something great.”

In spite of government ownership, he dismisses suggestions that he will be browbeaten into censoring coverage. He insists that ministers have encouraged him to challenge state bodies.

“Nobody has told me what I can and cannot do. In fact, government figures are on record as saying: ‘Test us. We’ve given you a dagger. Now use it.’ I intend to.”

He claims that previously taboo subjects will make it on to the front page, including stories about money-laundering that could damage investor confidence. “I want to push forward some barriers and push some things out there that are not being properly or robustly discussed,” he said.

Interesting stuff....

It has been a thoroughly awesome couple of weeks in Australia, and I am in such a deep chill here that it is hard to imagine returning to to the work and craziness of Cairo. What have I been doing all this time? I'll let my shiny new Nikon D40 do the talking: ladies and gentlemen, a fortnight of Australian sweetness in pictures:
I've been:

Spending about six hours a day at wonderful Port Willunga beach. I'd forgotten how Mediterranean and azure'ish it was.

Soaking up as much of my beautiful backyard as possible


With the soaking done via barbeques, of course....

Remembering how frigging beautiful my home town of Willunga really is....

Eating like a fine gourmet demon (pictured: Pheasant and Porcini mushroom terrine at the Pheasant Farm in the gorgeous Barossa Valley)

Tasting many a fine wine in aforementioned Barossa Valley - this glass at the beautiful Yalumba estate


Making sure that former teammate and current Sydney resident Sveta enjoys her first (and probably only) time in South Australia. It was an awesome week Sveta!

And last, but certainly not least, appreciating the styling black swans of Adelaide...