A Different Drummer

If there's a building more that looms more ominously over a skyline than the DeathSpire in Dubai then it has to be the downright Mordor'ish Ryugyong Hotel in Pyonyang:




But never fear, North Koreans, there is a nation of people with a historical ability to build enormous pointy structures as tribute to absolute rulers! And they are now open for business!

The Daily News Egypt reports Orascom Construction (part of Egypt's Orascom group) is going to begin work on completing the hotel. This is after Orascom Telecom signed a $400 million deal to build North Korea's first mobile network.

Reports that this is an attempt to gain experience in pyramid building in preparation for a major upcoming construction contract for the Great Leader Hosni Mubarak could not be confirmed at press time....

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: