A Different Drummer

See you in two weeks, possibly the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth...

This whole article by Douglas Coupland in the Guardian is well worth a read, but this paragraph just jumped out at me:

I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we're all assholes. We're assholes at the supermarket's meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we're assholes driving in traffic; and we're assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy.

Spot on. It's not just cell phones though, it's the way that so many luxury items, now mass market must-haves, move from being the domain of pretentious yuppie asshole-dom to regular everyday things - once we can all afford them.

Things like olive oil, espresso coffee, laptop computers, mobile phones and complicated gourmet/organic food were once all signs of a wanker: some asshole yuppie who wants the whole world to know how much better he is than everyone else through conspicuous consumption of unnecessary bullshit vanity items.

Now, every call centre worker and supermarket clerk has their special coffee order, laptops and mobiles are bare necessities for university students, and McDonalds sells a lemon, thyme and poppyseed muffin on its breakfast menu.

It's only a yuppie thing if we can't afford it.

Thanks to the iPhone, here are the top 5 phone pics of the last couple of weeks:


CNN were reporting live from Austin, Texas on the day of the Texas Democratic primary/caucus. For an otherwise totally straight news piece, they certainly chose a good store mural to do their piece to camera in front of...


The proudest moment of my wannabe-Egyptian life: When we went to get fingerprinted (yes, they fingerprint everyone applying for residency here), the guy at the first counter takes my documents, and a few minutes later, hands me back this.... Finally, my Egyptian blood is recognised legally... I asked him if perhaps there was a mistake, and he seemed to be trying to say that "Place of Birth" is an inaccurate translation of the Arabic and is meant to say "country of origin." Whatever, I was Egyption for a day and it was a beautiful feeling. Appropriately, I spent my day of Egyptian'ness standing around in the sun being watched over by military policemen and waiting to be let into a small dark room to have my privacy / dignity / presumption of innocence taken away arbitrarily by the state....


Novak Djokovic on his way to a convincing win over Marin Cilic at the Dubai Tennis Championships. Thanks to some fine corporate hospitality we were sitting ludicrously close to the action. In the next game of the evening, when big-server Andy Roddick aced his way past Juan Carlos Ferrero, I was getting legitimately worried that a wayward 230 km/h serve from Roddick was going to take one of our heads off...or at least spill our beers..


Marry a nice classy Arab woman and one day you too could sleep in a bed like this. Spotted in a big home furnishings store, that was, in true UAE fashion, clearly divided into three ethnic/economic sections: one area full of gilded, glittery, faux-royal, ornate Louis XIV style stuff (at Louis XIV prices) for the Emiratis and Arabs, a fairly stylish modern place for the moneyed expats, and a bare basics/ economic necessity section for the "workers." But by gosh, that bed. I know some pretty princesslike Arab girls but this is just one step over the line...


On facing this honorable warrior of the ocean, I immediately bowed in respect. What a beast. He had it all planned out - hundreds of millions of years of evolution leading to this, the perfect emperor of the deep: impenetrable spiky carpace, slick undersea camouflage colors, the whole deal. He made just one mistake though - his delicious, delicious flesh. Now he's stuck in a Hypermarket with the rest of us....

Frank Gehry on designing the new Guggenheim here, following on from his Bilbao masterpiece:

"I never expected to be able to design another one of these places," Gehry says. "But in Abu Dhabi you can do things that would be unthinkable anywhere else."

The quote comes from a pretty decent, although kind of boring, by-the-book, piece on Abu Dhabi in Fortune magazine. Worth reading, although theres nothing there that you wouldn't have seen already if you've read the other articles I've linked to here...

Cracker of a story in the NYT today on the woes of Windows Vista:

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price..... (NYT)

It doesn't get much more UAE than camel racing, and not just for the obvious reasons.

Until recently, young boys were used as jockeys for the camels - part of a long Arab tradition. Then, as the UAE got bigger and richer and unimaginably more complicated, things changed. The camel trainers started importing young boys from the subcontinent to do the jockeying, and the whole thing got a nasty air of international child trafficking, underage slave labour etc.

So the UAE came up with the most perfectly UAE solution.

Instead of little boys riding the camels, the camels are captained by a small robotic jockey, weighted to be about as heavy as a boy, with remote controlled reins and crop. The trainers drive alongside the track in Jeeps, hanging out the window of the car with the remote control in their hands, piloting the camels themselves.

They even have a little speaker on the camel, connected via radio to a microphone in the Jeep of the trainer, so the guy can spur his camel on. As the beasts come trotting past, little robotic jockey whipping them on, you hear a tinny speaker on the saddle yelling "hut hut hut! yalla! yalla!"

Then you turn around and see the trainer, one hand on the wheel of the car, one hand on the remote control, yelling those same words as he hangs out of the driver's side window.

The best part of all? They dress the little robots up like miniature Emiratis, flowing white robe and scarf over the head and everything.



Heres a closer look from a better angle:



This surreal fusion is something that can only happen in a place like this. It is the UAE in a nutshell: what happens when a proud, ancient culture collides in a head-on thousand-mile-an-hour embrace with the 20th centrury, swallows it whole, enjoys the taste, goes a bit crazy experimenting with all the wonderful weirdness the world has to offer, starts devouring its own traditions with 21st century condiments. You end up with robotic camel jockeys and ski slopes in the desert and five-star hotels on the top of 1500-metre mountains.

I was getting ahead of myself there. Mountains. After the camel races, we went to Jebel Hafeet, the tallest mountain in the UAE. You can drive to the peak on a butter-smooth three lane road.



Once you reach the summit, you can chill in a pretty styling 5-star hotel, or hang out in a giant car park where the asphalt is covered in the telltale swerving lines of burnt rubber. The place is obviously a burnout haven for kids in their expensive cars come nighttime. If you're going to head out for night of smoing tires and doughnuts, why not do it on the peak of your country's highest mountain?

The view from the top is fairly impressive, although it was pretty hazy when we got there. I was more interested in all the graffiti on the side of the mountain.



My limited ability to read and understand Arabic tells me that this guy tagged "Bani Yas" - the name of the ruling tribe of the UAE, onto the mountain. Makes sense I suppose - kids will normally tag the name of their crew or posse or whatever, this kid just tagged the name of his.

The fact that his crew is a 500 year old Arabian tribe? Welcome to the UAE.....