A Different Drummer

A Badly Translated, Innacurate but Fundamentally True Account of the Conversation that Just Happened in Front of Me

Dubai Airport, 1am, every Egyptian in the world is lined up trying to check in for the last Egyptair flight that will get them home in time for Eid. Everyone is carring way too much luggage, loaded to the brim with the wondrous Dubai gifts that will be the star attraction of their family get togethers on their return: 100-piece dining sets, 5 kilogram packs of shelled pistachio nuts, thick downy blankets and bedroom sets. Mothers and aunts and in-laws will beam with pride and joy at the bounties brought home by their hard-working heroes:

Working Class Upper Egyptian Man In Front of Me: What is the problem?

Egyptair Check In Lady: Sir, you have 140 kilograms of luggage, and your limit is 20 kilograms.

WCUEMIFM: No problems! Its nothing, just a little thing!

(Among the things he is trying to check in is one of those big 25 litre barrels of water you would put into an office water cooler)

ECIL: It is a problem sir, we can make an exception, but this is too much

WCUEMIFM: Too much? Thank God! Thank God! Its no problem...

ECIL: Thank God. But you will have to pay for the extra above 40 kilos

WCUEMIFM: OK, OK, lets go, how much

ECIL: It is 170 Dirhams per kilogram, so in this case, it will be 11,700 Dirhams ($3200)

WCUEMIFM: God! God! Look, here, I have....

(counts money carefully from wallet, note by note...)

WCUEMIFM: 175 Dirhams . Thank God. Happy Eid. Happy Eid.

(tries to hand the cash around the side of the counter directly to ECIL)

ECIL: Happy Eid. But this cannot be accepted, it is forbidden.

WCUEMIFM: OK, who is the boss here. Where is the boss, the prince (Arab-speakers, translate Pasha as you wish)

WCUEMIFM, gesturing at a man with a moustache in a suit jacket in the corner: Prince, Prince

Man: She is the boss, I just do the bags

WCUEMIFM: Something in Arabic I couldn't understand that makes both men crack up laughing, presumably related to the woman being the boss, but I might be wrong

ECIL: Shame! I am trying to help you!

WCUEMIFM: For 11 thousand dirhams! Shame! Happy Eid! Thank God! Thank God

ECIL: Thank God!

At this point I had my boarding pass and was just hanging around watching the beautiful spectacle. I assume it went on for another hour, and I have the feeling our Hero-Protagonist got his luggage on the plane without paying 6 month's wages. I just saw him walking into the booze section of the duty free.

On the way to a shisha place we saw a car park loaded with young Emirati men and some pretty interesting looking cars. We stopped to check it out. All over the world you'll see this: young guys on a Friday night, converging on a car park somewhere to show off their cars and sound systems. But I will say this with authority: only in the Gulf will you see a Nissan Sunny modded to have gullwing doors. And not just two gullwing doors. Four gullwing doors:


It must have been crazy door theme night, because just opposite it was a giant Chevy Suburban rocking the same deal:


But as an Australian patriot, my true highlight for the night was this evil looking Holden Monaro. They export these to the UAE as a "Chevrolet Lumina", but this one still had the Holden badge on it, suggesting a private import by a discreet young Emirati man who demands nothing but the best from his Australian muscle cars:

I always knew that my Hungarian ancestry and instinctive connection to Egypt could be resolved rationally, and now it has - I am a member of the Magyarab tribe of the Nile Valley:

The Magyarab are a people living along the Nile River in Egypt and Sudan. They are of Hungarian ancestry, probably dating back to the late 16th century.

According to legend, Christian Hungarians who had only recently been brought under the control of the Ottoman Empire formed a part of the Ottoman army that was fighting in southern Egypt. Evidently, a portion or the entirety of the fighting unit remained there and intermarried with the local Nubian women.

It's like all the pieces are slowly coming together, and it is a giant weight off my shoulders, identity-wise.

As the locals in Southern Egypt say about their Magyarab neighbours, "Ras el Magyar zey el haggar" - "The Hungarian's head is as hard as stone."

I'm sure plenty of people who know me well will back up such sentiments.

"You're fucked, and your unborn children are fucked"

- A smart, experienced man, with abundant qualifications, explaining the ramifications of the current economic craziness

The American girl killed in the Yemen embassy attack may have been killed by her own cousin, a senior member of the local Al Qaeda cell:

Susan Elbaneh, 18, and her Yemeni husband, Abdul Jaleel, whom she had just married on a trip her ancestral homeland, were among the 17 people killed in the well-coordinated attack Wednesday in Sana, the Yemeni capital, relatives and State Department officials said.

Two senior federal officials confirmed that the investigation of the attack, the deadliest direct assault on a U.S. embassy in a decade, is focusing on local Al Qaeda cells that they believe have some connection to Jaber Elbaneh, Susan's cousin. (LA Times)

The story suggests its a total coincidence - she hasn't met the cousin since she was a little kid, and she was just waiting outside the embassy to get in. But a sad and incredible story, however it turns out.

Two excellent looks at the US financial craziness from two of the smartest guys in the room at The National. The economics editor Wayne Arnold:

What is perhaps most important is not the way that Lehman’s collapse is likely to affect America and its financial system. That will be truly breathtaking, but what is likely to prove more significant is how widely it affects investors and institutions elsewhere around the world, particularly dollar-linked economies like those herein the Gulf and in Europe, whose banks and economy are already looking poised to suffer the same drop whose consequences the US is now suffering (It isn’t the fall. It’s the sudden stop)....

Ultimately, Lehman’s failure will help hasten an end to the financial crisis, in the same way that a house burning down helps stop the fire that consumed it.

And the business editor Bill Spindle:

Among the highest priority of the cabal of investment banking chieftains who met over the weekend is to set up a system to prevent those securities, and the complex contractual agreements based upon them, from flooding on to the market at once. They agreed to set up a joint fund to that would take on Lehman’s troubled portfolio and unwind its positions slowly and spent much of the weekend in unprecedented sessions revealing trading positions with each other and attempting to puzzle out ways to pair and counteract them to lessen the confusion Lehman’s failure may cause.

Read them both.

The biggest thing for me is the way this effects confidence in what we used to call knowledge and expertise. A big assumption behind these investment banks was they that were filled to the rafters with quantitative geniuses who worked 110 hour weeks grinding away on the details; hence the crazy salaries and bonuses, and the huge profits.

The world's collective resources geniuses didn't pick the approaching spike in food prices until it hit the third world on the head. Nobody seems to understand what the right price should be for a barrel of oil. And the world's pre-eminent intelligence and military machine failed so flamingly in Iraq. Our understanding of how the world works feels extra fallible right now.

All we have left is the Large Hadron Collider. If that thing fails us, all hope is lost.

Ignore the terrible mauling of the English language in this Gulf News story, and instead bathe in the terrible awfulness of its underlying message:

"German company Schaub Lorenz has unveiled the world's most expensive and ultra luxurious LCD TV in the Middle East market for $130,000 (Dh477,100).

The 40-inch LCD TV is studded with diamonds and white gold. Each diamond is of V VS1 brilliant white colour.

The eco-friendly TV is made with degradable and reusable components....."
(Gulf News)

Oh God, make it stop. I don't know what is more offensive, that companies think that all you have to do is stud something with diamonds and it will sell like mad in the Gulf, or that these kind of things actually DO sell like mad here.

At least it's biodegradable. I like to throw my old televisions into the river every now and then, and the thought that they may not fully dissolve and return to the mother earth that they emerged from keeps me awake at night.

I'm all in favor of needless wasteful hedonism: taking your morning bath in 1960s champagne, colour-coded Ferrari for each day of the week, insisting on Ph.D qualified house cleaners, your own private superconducting supercollider to entertain the kids. Go right ahead and spunk your money on needless excess, enjoy.

Just don't become the clueless slack-jawed yokel of the rich world, gleesfully excchanging your cash for a handful of coloured beads. It's embarassing for all concerned.

This is a combination of public announcement and call for help.

First, the public announcement part. As of yesterday, I have made the vow to not read, watch, listen to or discuss another word about American politics until after this election is over. Despite being pretty important for the world (although less important than people think), I just don't care one bit about what happens between now and November.

Everything of importance that needs to be said, has been said. All that will happen for the next two months is an idiotic cycle of manufactured ups and downs and repositionings. There will be scandals, outrage, missteps, gotchyas and great rhetorical victories. All this stuff is irrelevant, and I don't care.

Second, the call for help. The other side of my resolution is to spend the time I would spend reading and thinking about the election on getting under the skin of other things of pressing importance to the world that I know nothing about. So far, I'm thinking I want to get some clues about Japanese and Chinese politics, Hindu nationalism and Russia.

My plea: if you are immersed in some topic or idea of flaming importance to the world that you think people don't spend enough time thinking about, let me know what it is and where I can read about it. As Rumsfeld famously put it, I'm talking about "unknown unknowns" here, things I don't know about and don't know that I don't know about them.

Disclaimer: Unless there is some new take on things vastly different to the one commonly thought of, I don't want to hear about the environment or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Bombs away! I'm thinking that given most of the people who read this blog are geniuses of some description, you'll all have something to contribute to my quest to stop caring about one thing and begin caring about something else....

After Bloomberg News accidentally published his pre-written obituary a few weeks ago, the very-much-alive Steve Jobs shows up to give another of his famous Apple product launch keynotes:


(Pic via Gizmodo)

Iftar at the Emirates Palace was delightful, and this gold-topped rasberry helped me realise that I haven't been getting anywhere near my daily intake of gold lately. That needs to change.

Women are supposed to be encouraged and rewarded for kissing each other, not thrown in jail.

The irony of a man who once claimed to be a socialist reduced to basking in the praise of a snivelling gaggle of second-rate heriditary monarchs is pretty delicious.

But the title bestowed upon him has some pretty hardcore precedents - among those who have been historically dubbed "king of kings" are Ramses II, Jesus Christ, and the great man himself, Haile Selassie, whose full title was "King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah".

You have to do more than lose a war with Chad and father a servant-beating pervert to earn that title, Colonel.