scottymac.blogspot.com

2010-11-23T14:27:00.000+01:00

Looks like I’m trying to draw something, but I don’t know what:

See Wandering Savage, traveling from Morocco to Mali and onward, overland.

2010-10-13T15:49:00.002+02:00

Oh my! I think I forgot to tell you. I have a new website!

It's called Wandering Savage.

Please visit!

2008-11-07T12:12:00.002+01:00

Not sure you know this about me, or if you care, but this is my blog, so I'll tell you. Living abroad, for some reason I never felt any particular shame in being American, even when there were good reasons to do so. I grew up on the East Coast and moved abroad in 1996 at the age of 22, shortly after graduation. I never really thought I'd stay away for that long. Just wanted to see what was out here in the big old wild world and then go back to New York City.

In fact I always said I'd be living in New York by the age of 30. Well, you do the math -- for whatever reason, that didn't happen.

Over the summer I spent a few days in New York and it sort of occured to me that life is pretty damn short. Too short, in fact, not to be living in New York. And I was dumbfounded by how easy it could be: I could in fact just move there anytime I like, and live there as long as I like, for the rest of my life if I so choose, without ever having to worry about things like visas, paperwork, potential deportation, or anything like that.

Shocking, I know. Maybe I was more dumbfounded by the fact that I was dumbfounded. This was not new informtion, but there's knowing and then there's knowing, if you catch my drift.

Mom's a solid New England Republican who, due to breeding, could never physically bring herself to vote Democrat. I felt her wavering this year and gave her all my reasoned "good conservative" arguments for flipping. At the last minute I brought out the bigger guns: If both my parents voted for Barack Obama, I said I'd come home in 2009.

Start packing your bags, they said. So that's the news. I gotta move back to the USA finally.

2008-10-19T13:16:00.001+02:00

Today I learned that "skeevy" comes from the Italian word "schifoso" meaning disgusting, detestable, rotten, repulsive, foul, hideous, loathsome, distasteful, lousy, filthy. I did not know that.

2008-10-07T22:30:00.002+02:00

Does it count as blogging if I just mention that I read this old blog post of mine and was really, really, really amused with my three-years-ago self?

Three years! Man, three years is one of those things that just never feels like three years. Sometimes it feels like one, sometimes ten. (In this case, ten.)

Klára's website - Homepage

2007-04-23T12:33:00.000+02:00

Holy guacamole! I just found out Klara, an old friend of mine, is climbing Mt. Everest. As we speak.

2007-03-13T09:29:00.000+01:00

The truth finally revealed via Google's new news archive service: Prince William NOT circumcised. (For some reason, this blog often turns up when people do searches to try and find out.)

YouTube - Jumeirah Beach Hotel

2007-02-28T21:23:00.000+01:00

"Look out the window!" she shrieks. As if there's anything else to look at in a glass elevator.

CTV.ca | Lebanese army imposes curfew on Beirut

2007-01-25T19:34:00.000+01:00

I'm supposed to go to Lebanon Sunday for an advertising awards festival. It's been on again off again whether we're actually going to go -- strangely I'll be disappointed either way, but surely more so if I don't. Right now I read there's a curfew in Beirut.

If you're wondering why I don't post more pics of Dubai on Flickr it's only because the maid threw away my camera. That's the only thing I can imagine that happened. It disappeared suddenly along with a pair of Dr. Scholl's sandals. I think I must have shoved them into a plastic bag which she mistook for rubbish. At least I didn't have any pictures on it.

2007-01-20T09:38:00.000+01:00

There was an earlier post where I had the wrong link. I meant to say: "I finally put my first pics of Dubai on my Flickr page."

2007-01-20T09:14:00.000+01:00

I just discovered my account of a visit to an archaeological site in Northern Syria in October 2005 is online. Looking back, I'm a bit disappointed nothing more came of that little caper. The excavation director, Peter Akkermans, has a fascinating theory about how life in pre-historic times was totally transformed, in some places, by a little-known climatic blip called the 8.2 kyr B.P. Cooling Event, discovered only in the 1990s via drilling into arctic ice caps. Akkermans also discovered the earliest traces of stored milk at Tell Sabi Abyad.

The article I wrote for Syria Today could have been a lot better. I had a lot of stuff going on at the time, and I was hoping to sell the article to a much more mainstream publication, but these plans came to naught, as so many do.

2007-01-11T14:51:00.000+01:00

The song Superstar has a history that pre-dates The Carpenters. That is new information.

2007-01-08T23:57:00.000+01:00

The photo on the front of the new Slate piece on Dubai was taken from my helipad.

"You'll have to see my helipad," I said.

He laughed. I gave him a second look.

"No, really," I said. "I have a helipad."

2007-01-04T08:41:00.000+01:00

Without even coming close to passing any sort of judgment, this story ("Parents defend decision to keep girl a child") just tells me the world is getting more bizarre by leaps and bounds. (That and the Palm Jumeirah, which I see from my new office window.)

This paragraph made me scratch my head though: "The case was approved by the hospital’s ethics committee in 2004, which agreed that because Ashley could never reproduce voluntarily she was not being subjected to forced sterilisation, a form of racial cleansing promoted in the 1920s and known as eugenics (it was satirised in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby)."

It was?

2006-12-30T14:32:00.000+01:00

What a strange selection of people to die within a few days: Saddam Hussein, Gerald Ford, James Brown. Is there a joke there?

2006-12-22T16:16:00.000+01:00

I finally put my first pics of Dubai on my Flickr page.

2006-12-11T20:45:00.000+01:00

I have nothing further to add.

2006-12-10T18:22:00.000+01:00

I lost my Site Meter password and can't get it back. Now I can't even tell who, if anybody, is reading my blog. I'm totally blind.

Recently re-read: "Araby," by James Joyce.

At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me.

Taken out of context, these sentences may not seem funny. But within the story they're brilliant and hilarious, as is the amazing ending.

Meanwhile, Roger Ebert's review of John Huston's film version of "The Dead" (a Joyce story with an even better ending) made me curious about the movie. It also reminds me of the song, "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying", not because of the death connection, but because of the ending about endings.

"Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning." A nice ending: "A sad story, don't you think?"

Madonna's "Live To Tell": Kinda creepy, cryptic and brilliant, don't you think? (What's she talking about? What's the secret? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?)

Finally, Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You": You can't be blamed for switching it off by the time the first chorus start, but if you actually listen to the verses, something strange is happening.

No summer's high, no warm July,
No harvest moon to light
One tender August night.
No autumn breeze,
No falling leaves,
Not even time for birds
To fly to southern skies.

Lovely, but are these supposed to be a counterpoint to the commonplace (yet profound) "I love you"? Have you ever picked up the phone to say, "I just called to say the leaves are falling"? Or, "Hey! The birds flew south!" I have not.

Moreover, the Harvest Moon never appears in August. The full moon nearest to the autumnal equinox, the Harvest Moon usually falls in September, and can occur anywhere between September 8 and October 7.

Then again, that guy's totally blind.

2006-12-04T01:14:00.000+01:00

How often do you meet a girl from Kobylisy in Dubai? Not often, I imagine.

OK, OK. So she wasn't actually from Kobylisy. She was from Marianske Lazne. And it looked like she was more interested in talking to Enrico than me. Nothing wrong with that. Enrico's a Swiss-German dude who sails for a living. Turns out, in fact, Enrico's on the team that's defending the America's Cup. No kidding! He's here practicing.

Enough about Enrico. Marcela wasn't actually from Kobylisy*, but she has a flat there, and she's studying for her law degree at the pravnicka faculta** while working at a waitress in the sky for Emirates airlines, which must be hard, doing all that at the same time.

I've only actually been to Kobylisy once in my life, and it was in 1996 or early '97 when I was looking for one of my first Prague flats to stay in. Didn't move there, in the end, and never looked back.***

Anyway, she wasn't actually from Kobylisy, but she has a flat there, and the first and only thing that comes to mind when I hear the word "Kobylisy" is this story.

....how funny it would be to hijack a tram. You'd get in the tram, and tell the driver, "this tram is now going to Kobylisy."

"But this tram is already going to Kobylisy," the driver'd say.

"Shut up and drive."

I still laugh thinking about that.

Me too, so I repeated it to her.

It was a bit loud at the bar. She said, "Really?!"

I said, "No, of course not. That whole story's made up. Never happened."

Thing is, my delivery was wrong. The story's not funny at all the way I tell it. It involves a gun to the tram driver's head, and the goofy punchline, "Don't ask any questions!" But I can't hardly get it out without cracking up.

She started whacking me, accusing me of making fun of her. (For what, having a flat in Kobylisy?)

* District of Prague known only as the final stop of many many trams.
** Charles University Law Faculty.
*** Come to think of it, the guy trying to rent the flat was an airline pilot.

2006-11-12T10:34:00.000+01:00

Dubai Notes - Five guys in white come to my door, and I get a new iPod

This happened to a friend of mine.

2006-11-12T10:33:00.000+01:00

Dubai Notes - Five guys in white come to my door, and I get a new iPod

This happened to a friend of mine.

2006-10-25T21:48:00.000+02:00

I'll be in Kafkaville Sunday morning, and I'll be in touch with a complete list of my speaking engagements.

2006-10-24T16:53:00.000+02:00

Recently I was asked if I'm enjoying myself. The answer came swiftly and naturally. I was not enjoying myself, but I am now.

2006-10-11T16:31:00.000+02:00

Hey, I just decided to listen to Radio 1 over the web for the first time. I went to the website and what a coincidence, my friend Klara's show is on right now! Nifty.

2006-10-05T10:44:00.000+02:00

"The glittering fantasy land from the travel brochures is only one of those cities, a beautiful optical illusion arranged by the the world's public relations managers. Whoever believes in it must think of Dubai as a kind of fairy tale, a place of Arab magic, an oasis of camels and sheiks and a cluster of luxury hotels where no day goes by without a golf tournament or swanky horse races.

But Dubai these days is mostly a noisy, rough, unkempt city -- one of the world's largest construction sites. Construction work is going on throughout most of the urbanized coastal strip, and the jackhammers can still be heard from the terraces of seaside hotels at night."

Story....

2006-10-04T14:45:00.000+02:00

Uh.... hi.

My gosh, it's the longest I've not blogged in like forever.

I'll be in Prague the first week of November.

In September I moved into a great new apartment in the Marina section. I never blogged about how awful it was to find a decent place to stay here. I never blogged about it because it was too awful, on a deep spiritual level. It's better now, much much better.

I bought a Toyota Corolla. It runs nicely, but cars here require constant washing.

Over the weekend I drove to Al Ain, on the Omani border, for an excursion. It was much different from the city I live in. I drove to the highest point in the country. Sadly this was the first I'd really been out of the city I live in, but now that I have my own wheels I plan to do that more often.

Both my sisters turn 37 today. Congratulations.

Here's a little video about the city I live in. I found it didn't really get under the surface, but it's nice that somebody shot some video inside the Cyclone.

2006-09-13T17:12:00.000+02:00

I recently discovered Columbo.

When I met my Slate editor, face to face for the first time, at a wine bar in Brooklyn, she pouted cold water on my plans to buy a sporty convertible like a BMW Z3 or an Audi TT. What I needed in Dubai, she declared, was the anti-Dubai vehicle: a jalopy, she said, like Columbo. At the time I didn't realize the importance of the Columbo reference, having only a passing familiarity with the TV show, and knowing Peter Falk primarily as the former angel (playing himself) in pre-89 Berlin in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. ("I can't see you, but I know you're there...")

My new flatmate, Eliot, has the complete first season of Columbo. Watching the show, he says, "is an unfortunate habit I picked up from my dad."

What a truly brilliant character Columbo is! He's the perfect illustration of Elvis Costello's famous remark, "My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant" (indeed, reaching that noble goal far better that Elvis Costello himself).

By far the best episode I've seen so far is the second full-length film, "Ransom for a Dead Man," in which the murderess issues the following speech:

"You know, Columbo, you're almost likable, in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it's the way you slouch in here with your shop-worn bag of tricks." (The word "slouch," by the way, should always connote movement, not posture.)

"Me? Tricks?"

"The humility, the seeming absent-mindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family, the wife. Yeah, Lieutenant Columbo, fumbling and bumbling along, but it's always the jugular he's after. And I imagine that more often than not, he's successful."

But here's the thing. I always try to imagine what characters might be like when they're not onstage. So let's imagine for a moment that Columbo really exists. It goes without saying that no lieutenant in any homicide department anywhere in the world could ever come across case after case after case where the crafty murderer almost gets away with the crime, but doesn't.

After all, cop shows never show the boring bits where the cops sit around in the car outside the house, drinking coffee and eating donuts waiting for a suspect who never shows.

Doesn't Colombo ever investigate a sordid, run-of-the-mill crime of passion? A sloppy crime?

Actually, I imagine that between each episode there are ten or even a hundred more cases in which Columbo acts really awkward and makes a complete nuisance of himself for no good reason. He fumbles and he bumbles, and then what? Nothing but a whole lot of unpleasantness for everybody.

Is was often asked if Hamlet faked his own madness. I'd like to know if Colombo is faking his awkwardness. I'd say he's not. He's a hopelessly clumsy man who, at a certain point in his life, realized he'd always be that way, and he might as well make the best of it.

And that's be beauty of it: Nobody could ever really be Columbo, because the real Colombo would be a useless pain in the butt 99% of the time.

Anyway, I've decided to bide my time on the hot set of wheels, investing in a sensible Toyota Corolla in the meantime.

2006-08-31T08:38:00.000+02:00

Nobel-winning novelist Mahfouz dies, aged 94

I do not normally dream about famous writers and judges. So I consider it a premonition that I dreamt about Mahfouz just two weeks ago. It was only after I sent the dream to my friend Raymond that I learned that Naguib Bey was in intensive care and might soon die.

Last night I stumbled into the lavatory at Grosvenor House, a hotel in Dubai. There was a flat-screen TV on the wall, turned down way low, tuned to CNN. I looked up and saw the words "Nobel" and "age 94" and pretty much knew immediately Mahfouz had died. I was certain when I saw pictures of the old man, and I was super certain when I saw the talking head being interviewed was none other than my friend Raymond.

2006-08-28T16:34:00.000+02:00

I dreamt that I accompanied Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- looking suspiciously like an ex-girlfriend's mom -- to deliver her resignation. She included a special turn of phrase that indicated disapproval of George W. Bush's abuse of executive power. I asked if there was a precedent for this. Justice Ginsburg indicated there was not.

Shortly afterwards she started choking on a bread roll. She couldn't breathe at all so I whacked her on the back. A large, whole and seemingly unchewed bread roll came flying out of her mouth, but she still couldn't breathe. She started to gurgle, however, as a vomity fluid began flowing down her head from beneath her wide-brimmed hat.

I tried giving the Heimlich maneouver. Still nothing but gurgling. I tried and tried, but there was only gurgling and gurgling. The woman lay lifeless, still gurgling, as I awoke.

2006-08-20T18:23:00.000+02:00

If you're wondering why you've not seen me on Skype, it's because Dubai seems to have blocked the service completely.

If you're wondering if I'm still driving the borrwed company pick-up, I am. I'm thinking now of getting a Ford Focus, which means I might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says "I have no gonads."

If you're wondering whree I'm living, I'm staying in the spare room of a friend. It's been dire and dismal and depressing, with multiple false alarms when it comes to finding a decent place to call home.

If you're wondering what's the most exciting thing I've done lately, I'm not sure what to tell you. Let's see. On Saturday, I went on a booze run to the liquor store in one of the neighboring emirates, Umm al Quwain, where it's legal to buy alcohol. I can now make Harvey Wallbangers. I am ashamed to say that's the first time I've been to any other part of the UAE, except for that broadcasters' conference I went to in Abu Dhabi.

If you're wondering what's the most exciting thing I've not done lately, I guess it would have to be the thing that I didn't do with the man from County Clare I met at a bar. An interesting guy -- he's been a session percussionist for Pink Floyd and is friends with David Gilmour. After several drinks he used an expression with me that I wasn't overly familiar with. I don't remember what it was exactly but it had the word "pants" in it. He explained that it means, "I would love to give you a blow job." I can't for the life of me remember the expression.

2006-08-16T09:21:00.000+02:00

Recently I dreamt of a conversation with the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz. (I was introduced to Mahfouz in Cairo in real life once.)

I approached Naguib with my friend Raymond translating.

"In your book Miramar," I began, "you tell the same story repeatedly from several points of view. You tell the story of the peasant maid in the pension from the point of view of each of the male guests."

I was planning to ask if, while writing the book, Mahfouz had ever considered telling the story from the peasant maid's point of view.

I waited while Raymond translated the first part of my question.

Mahfouz nodded. "Yes!" he replied, not waiting to hear the completed question. "Perhaps the story is not entirely correct from a structural point of view but from a moral point of view, it is completely true!"

He misunderstood what I was trying to say and I didn't get to finish my question. I awoke.

2006-08-10T16:30:00.000+02:00

The Vehicle

Part of the deal when I came to join the company I'm working for right now (it's a little publishing outfit owned by a French-Lebanese family, if you must know) is that I could borrow the company's old BMW for about a month while I find my bearings and get my paperwork in order so I can buy my own wheels.

Well, I've been here three months and ten days and I haven't bought a car yet. Why? I don't know. I guess the main reason is that I'm lazy and I procrastinate a lot. Or, as a former friend of mine once not-so-famously said: "I have a block."

In any case, the company has demanded the BMW back -- not out of spite or anything, it's just that they hired a new sales girl and promised it to her in the contract -- but has been nice enough to lend me the Nissan pick-up, which is normally driven by Fahad, the dude from either Yemen or Tanzania (I think he might be a Yemeni from Tanzania, but that's not important right now). Fahad seems to do most of the actual work around here, but who's on vacation for the month of August.

Mind you, driving a dirty white pick-up truck around Dubai is kind of sexy, in an opposite-day sort of way. I mean, it's a delivery vehicle. You won't find many white people doing it.

About a week or so ago, I was cruising around in the pick-up with a female friend of mine (Greek-Cypriot-British) when a car behind me starting honking its horns and blinking its lights. I pulled over to the side of the road and rolled down the window. A woman -- I suspect she was of some non-Gulf Arab extraction, but I can't be sure -- pulled up along side and said this:

"You stopped in front of the [something or other] where you're not supposed to stop, and she got scared." She points to her young daughter in the front seat.

Come again? It sounded like she was chastising me, which is odd because a) I hadn't stopped the car for at least ten minutes, and b) so what if I had? I figured I must be misinterpreting the situation, and maybe she was asking for my help.

"Are you OK?" I asked. "Do you need help?"

"I'm find, it's just that she was scared," she said.

Lady, I thought, if you were my mother I'd be terrified. Ferrr-reak.

"I'm very sorry," I said.

"It's OK," she said, and drove off.

My passenger was really unimpressed -- angry, in fact -- that I had needlessly apologized to this bizarre interloper. I don't know, but this could be one of the reasons I don't see her much anymore. The passenger, I mean.

Later, however, after relating this story to a colleague, I realized what must have happened. She probably saw an unveiled woman in the passenger seat of a dirty white pick-up -- the kind of thing usually only driven by Yemeni or Tanzanian delivery guys -- got all suspicious that something was amiss, and decided to be meddlesome. When the passenger didn't scream for help and the driver turned out to be a Westerner, she made up some idiocy about her daughter getting scared. That's my best guess, anyway.

That's only the beginning of the long, dull saga of the pick-up, but since Mohammed just brought it back and I need to finish packing it with my stuff (I'm moving -- again) I'm afraid I have better things to do now than actually finish the story.

2006-08-08T15:17:00.000+02:00

In case you wanted to know how to make a capon.

2006-08-04T16:05:00.000+02:00

The Google referal of the day is: How to dress like Dr Emmett Brown. Some people just want to know the craziest stuff.

2006-08-04T12:08:00.000+02:00

Rather than bore you with the sad saga of the company pick-up truck (which is currently idling outside my apartment building, its diesel engine hopefully burning through the traces of gasoline that remain in the tank) I'll tell you a little story that took place a while back, which I wrote down but never posted.

Shortly after I arrived in Dubai, I had the honor of attending a lavish birthday party at a private villa. There was a DJ (a Czech guy, as it turns out), lots of flashing lights, a dance performance, an open bar and tons of food prepared right before you eyes (a pasta station, for instance). Quite something.

The father of the birthday girl is an expat Indian, a well-known editor who has worked at various English-language newspapers in the Gulf region. We struck up a chat.

Turns out his pet interest is airline safety. Yes, airline safety. He knows just about everything there is to know about the topic.

“Tell me,” I said to him. “Did they ever figure out why TWA flight 700 went down off the southern coast of Long Island in 1996? 'Cause that’s been bothering me for years.”

“Assymetrical flaps,” he replied, not skipping a beat. Then he paused. “I think. TWA flight 700. What year did you say it was?”

“Summer of 1996. I was living on Long Island at the time. It was just before I left the country,” I said. “I remember arguing about it with the people from work. At first everybody said it was somebody using a shoulder-launched missile from a boat, but then they realized that in order for the missile to reach the height of the plane, you’d have to be directly beneath it, which is just impossibly unlikely."

"That could happen now, actually," he said.

"Yes, I hear it could, but I'm not sure the technology was ready available at the time.

"Anyway," I continued, "after that theory died, everybody insisted some guy shot it down with a surface-to-air missile fired from the back of a flatbed truck, as thought that were something easy to conceal in suburban Long Island. Eventually they conceded it must have been something mechanical.”

“Yes, I’m pretty certain it was assymetrical flaps.” He paused again. “Now it’s bothering me. I have to know for certain. I’ll go check on the computer for certain.” He ran off, leaving me with my drink.

A few minutes later, the dad came back. “My computer’s not working. I’m pretty sure it was assymetrical flaps. I’ll check and get back to you. TWA never recovered from that crash, you know.”

The talk turned to the practice of writing and the profession of journalism.

“You will never make money in journalism. I have never made money,” he said, leaning against the open bar where the umpteenth bottle of vodka was being emptied. “No money at all.”

“Sir,” I suggested, calling him by his first name. “You have managed to throw one hell of a party here.”

“Oh, that,” he said, gesturing to the festivities. “That’s all my wife’s. I have no money.” I laughed.

That's the end of the story. The only point is, there are some colorful characters out there who are experts on oddball subjects. I wonder what I'm an expert in anything that arcane, without quite realizing it.

(Update: I have related this conversation from memory, as I remember it happening. Steve in the comments correctly points out that I'm talking about TWA Flight 800, and of the theories in circulation, none seem to have anything to do with flaps.)

Moving on...

One of my guys at the office is an ultra-reserved South African guy who spends most of his spare time building tube amplifiers. Tube amplifiers, apparently, are something like fine wines. They take a long, long time to make, no two sound quite the same, and the character comes from the anomolies.

I tried to explain to my tube-amp-building colleague how, as a teenager, I plugged a microphone into a drum pad kit (i.e., a small black box into which you're supposed to plug cables attached to little pads affixed to the drum heads on a drum kit and then hook up to a drum machine or synthesizer so you can play fake drums while banging on real drums as the same time). My friend Adam was a drummer, you see, and we had an experimental noise band called The Trouble With Harold. This is perhaps the topic for another story. Anyway, the drum pad kit converted analog signals (like from a sensor on the drum head or, in this case, a microphone) into MIDI signals. So then I plugged the drum pad kit into my synthesizer (an Ensoniq VFX, if you must know, still in my parents' basement if anybody wants it), which I had programmed with an inverse relationship between MIDI note velocity and the starting pitch of the note it generated (i.e., the softer the signal, or in this case the louder the sound coming into the microphone, the higher and louder the starting pitch of the note coming out of the speaker). Plus, the note descended in pitch over time (imagine Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff). Then I programmed something like a five second delay into the start of the note. Then, in a quiet room, I placed the microphone next to the speaker and snapped my fingers. Five seconds later, the result was recursive generation of perpetual aural cacaphony (the starting note generating its own response five seconds later, and so on) and for sure I've gotten dumber by the day since then.

I tried to explain this, but I failed. I couldn't even remember myself precisely how it worked.

Like I said, he (the tube amp guy from the office) is ultra-reserved. Painfully shy. Quieter than a ray of sunshine.

I hitched a ride to the mall with him the other day. As we turned into the parking area, a guy in a BMW pulled ahead of him and abruptly cut him off, as people often do here for no good reason.

"You fucking asshole!!" he screamed, pounding on the wheel of his little Peugeot. "They're not running out of oil fast enough!"

2006-08-04T10:43:00.000+02:00

If I had more energy for blogging I would certainly tell a long dull tale about what happens when you put regular gasoline into a deisel engine. It ain't pretty.

2006-07-25T13:14:00.000+02:00

Man throws urine in construction protest.

I've lived that already.

I'm back in Dubai and I shall rhapsodize no longer about how much fun my vacation was.

2006-07-16T17:59:00.000+02:00

Funny! New York is also beautiful and fun in the summer. How about that. In fact, I guess most places are like that in the summer. I say "most places," but of course I mean most places that you and I are likely to visit, which excludes Dubai, just for instance.

On my last day in New York I visited a friend who, after years of living in squalor, rented an apartment way down by Battery Park with a magnificent view of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. I was gobsmacked. She's financing this from the future sale of her novel. That's not quite as nutty as it sounds, as it will be her second (published) novel.

I have another friend who's been living in the same rented apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn for the past ten years. But he recently got a job teaching sociology in Berkley, so he's vacating it within the month. Times change. I don't know where I'm going to stay in New York anymore.

I went to a couple of unexpected parties with NYC writers and journalists and sociologists and the like, and it was all very beautiful and unexpected. And I finally had drinks with my editor at Slate, a woman I've never met in person and with whom I've only spoken to voice-wise for a few fleeting moments in 2003. She gave me a complimentary copy of the magazine's new book, The Best of Slate, plus a pair of Slate flip-flops, two things no proper household should be without.

Speaking of proper households, I had a strange experience yesterday upon waking up. It's been awhile since I slept in my own bed. In fact, I'm not sure what the phrase "my own bed" refers to at the moment. Yesterday was the first time in as long as I can remember that I woke up and genuinely didn't know where I was.

It was a stronger, more disconcerting and far more remarkable feeling than that momentary confusion when you start to wake up and think, "Where am I?" For what seemed several minutes, I was fully conscious, looking around the bedroom, thinking something along the lines of the following (though somewhat less fleshed out):

"OK, let's see here... This looks like a house, not an apartment. Probably suburban. I imagine myself in a bedroom on the second floor. [That may have led my mind astray: In fact I was on the ground floor.] This does not appear to be a particularly European bedroom. Am I in Britain or Ireland? Is this a B&B? I'm alone in bed, so unfortunately it doesn't look like I hooked up with a woman and went home with her. The lamp on the dresser across from me has a shade that is still covered in plastic, and there's some framed embrodiery on the wall showing two rustically dressed rabbits, he and she, one handing the other some flowers with the tagline sewn in, 'You're nobunny til somebunny loves you.' If there were a bookcase filled with Nancy Drew books, I'd swear I was on the set of The Virgin Suicides."

I'm not sure what tipped me off to the fact that I was actually in my parents house in Massachusetts, but as I look around the room now, I can only guess it was the duck decoy made into a bedside lamp, which has been in the household since before my time, through four moves.

Yesterday there were two big items dominating the news here in Massachusetts: First, some poor woman was killed was some ceiling panels fell from the I-90 tunnel in Boston. The entire city ground to a halt, the governor is personally overseeing the investigation and nobody talks about anything else.

Meanwhile, some woman in some faraway state got a visit from the cops due to a loud music complaint. She thought one of the cops was cute so she called 911 and asked if he could come back. The cop came back and arrested her for misuse of emergency services. The incident made news nationwide.

Meanwhile, I got a message from my boss saying he's stuck in Lebanon and so are the production designers. I should be exploring Plan B options to put out the next issue of our magazine without -- ! -- a production designer. When Lebanon comes up on the news, people's attention generally seems to drift elsewhere.

My nephew keeps bringing me oatmeal cookies! Mmmmmmmm.

2006-07-12T00:08:00.000+02:00

Prague is super fun in summer. Sleepy summer hot fullmoon fun in the summertime. With humid nightblue fruit.

I'm in NY tomorrow.

2006-07-06T11:01:00.000+02:00

Thousands of requests have poured in asking for my comment on the conviction and subsequent pardon of Dallas Austin (apparently his real name), the hippity-hop producer who moseyed into Dubai with a gram and a quarter of cocaine and got thrown into the local clink, subsequently sentenced to four years in jail and immediately pardoned by the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed. (A gram and a quarter of coke is about enough to get you through the night if you're a heavy user or sharing with friends. So I hear.)

The local press has given the story plenty of coverage -- up to the pardon, which has been reported, but then sort of swept under the rung. Leading dailies' letters pages are generally filled with rants about everything from the traffic to the weather to the trouble with kids these days and recent news items. Emirates Today hasn't published a single letter about Austin's pardon.

Most people I know here were thrilled to hear about Austin's conviction. It's pretty hard for me to get excited about anybody going to jail for drug possession charges. On the other hand, his summary pardon -- obviously based purely on the fact that he was a high-profile American -- makes a total joke of the country's justice system. Then again, the more I think about it, the more I think this country is a bit of a joke.

2006-07-06T10:53:00.000+02:00

3 Accused In Theft Of Coke Secrets: "Then in June, an undercover FBI agent met at the Atlanta airport with another of the defendants, handing him $30,000 in a yellow Girl Scout Cookie box in exchange for an Armani bag containing confidential Coca-Cola documents and a sample of a product the company was developing, officials said."

It's those telling details that really make you feel like you're there.

2006-07-05T16:30:00.000+02:00

Yes, this has become a running commentary on encounters with the acupuncturist. Today the doctor told me he was going to try something new to try to force out a persisent chest cold which has manifested itself in an unpleasant phlegm-spewing cough for over a week now.

For the first time, I was to sit upright rather than lie down. (He sorta came up with this idea on the fly. He's that crafty.) Then he inserted the needles into all sorts of nervy spots on my hands and legs and told me to sit there and breathe and meditate "like a monk" and to ring the bell if there's any problem.

So I sat there and started to breath. I began to feel somewhat light-headed. I thought, I wonder if I should ring the bell. Then I started to feel even more light-headed. Then I thought, that's funny, my face seems to be on the ground. Think I'll just stay here for a bit.

Yeah, I fainted. I finally got up and rang the bell and informed on myself.

The doctor wasn't too pleased, saying I should have rung the bell as soon as I felt light-headed because one of the needles could have gone way into me and pierced my lung. But everything's fine, and he said in the end it was probably a sign that we were doing something right.

I'm moving into a new apartment, which is a major life improvement. I'll have some British roommates. And TV and internet and stuff. And a sofa. All the mod cons in other words.

Problem is I haven't found anybody to take my current apartment and I'm leaving on Sunday which means I might be stuck paying two rents. That is not good, really not good. But I'm happy, happy about getting the new place.

Next thing I have to do is buy a car, but I can't seem to find my U.S. driver's license, which I need to do so.

I'll be in Prague on Sunday if anybody wants to find me.

2006-06-28T12:27:00.000+02:00

This morning my acupuncturist jabbed me in the foot. It hurt.

"Yow!" I said.

"That's your anger spot!" he said. "That's your payment for your anger!"

2006-06-27T16:26:00.000+02:00

UPDATED POST

You know, I am angry, really really angry. I told the following story to a friend of mine and he suggested it was good enough that should blog it. So here goes. I have to warn you, it involves me getting kinda angry for no particularly good reason.

Before I begin -- and maybe just as a way to build up your anticipation of future posts -- I make the casual yet perhaps meaningful observation that most of my halfway decent stories these days seem to involved conversations between myself and women I've just met. Not all of them. There are some quirky men out there, too, like my friend Hari, or the dude with the airline safety fixation. But I'll probably have to make an extra effort to keep the gender ratio on the reasonable side.

While I was in France I met a woman who works for a big advertising agency called, let's just say, Leon Furness. And let's just say her name is Arlene, and let's just say she was there with a colleague named Cindy. (I should clarify that this is not the same non-Arlene who appears in the photograph in the previous post.)

Not sure what it was about Arlene, but I found she had a certain style. Later I realized I only thought this because long ago I saw her standing on the banks of the Nile, rocking her newborne child in a wicker basket. I was strangely drawn to her pensive beauty, so I made my way over to the riverbank. Things didn't go far between us, because I was a crocodile at the time. As I approached her, she spotted me and panicked, but not before I ate her baby. I didn't understand what the big deal was at the time. I was just a hungry crocodile, after all, and I didn't know any better, but needless to say she threw a total fit, screaming and screaming and crying from the embankment, "My baby, my baby!" as I chewed the little thing to bits and swallowed it whole, leaving the bloody remainders of the reedy basket to float slowly down the Delta.

We were both scarred by the experience. Through many lives, her face stuck with me. Meanwhile, she remained sore about the dead baby.

Fast forward 5,000 years and I try chatting her up. It's not like I was coming on strong or making a pass at her or anything like that. I just asked her to tell me something about herself, such as what kind of music she listens to. She told me David Bowie.

"Me too. Do you know the song 'Lady Stardust'?" I asked. I told her the version of "Lady Stardust" on the "Bowie at the Beeb" compilation is one of my favorite things in the whole wide world.

She said yes, she knew that song, and it goes like this: "Ground control to Major Tom...."

"No, it doesn't," I said. "That's "Space Oddity." 'Lady Stardust' begins, 'People stared at the make-up on his face...'"

Well, the conversation didn't go far. She confessed to being a bit drunk. She probably recognized me as the croc that ate her baby at this point, because she spun around suddenly and said, "Where did everybody go!" and ran off to find the other people in the group.

Well, that was that. I would have chalked it up to her being a little tipsy - or perhaps to me being a bit too blunt when it comes to her ignorance of David Bowie songs - but in any case, I felt this strange passive-aggressive energy building up between us throughout over the next several days. Cindy, her colleague, would see me and be all kiss-kiss, while Arlene just sort of looked in the other direction.

So at the festival's closing party, I saw Cindy and Arlene and walked up to them with a handful of cherries. Cindy was all kiss-kiss, while Arlene was awkward and silently belligerant.

Without invitation, Cindy grabbed one of the cherries and said, "That's a very good idea - where can I get some?"

"Over there by the ice," I said, and Cindy ran off looking for cherries, leaving me standing with Arlene.

Naturally, I offer Arelene a cherry. She declined.

I said, "So you like David Bowie."

She said, "Did you see the TV commercials tonight?"

"Yes, I did," I said. "I said, 'So you like David Bowie.'"

She nodded. "Where did Cindy go?"

(At this point in telling the story, my friend interrupted and said, "Heheh. This is why people hate you." I think he meant that in the best possible way.)

I obviously took the hint that this person didn't want to talk to me, but I didn't understand why. So I got angry. I GOT REALLY ANGRY.

I didn't show it and I didn't say anything, at least not immediately. I just continued to mingle. And I plotted. During the course of mingling and plotting, lo and behold, what do I happened upon but a water pistol.

I don't know whose it was or why it was there, but somebody had obviously set it down and nobody was claiming it, so I pocketed the water pistol. It was almost like it was there for me to find, saying, "Take me, and shoot that nasty girl in the face with me."

I was carrying that thing with me for at least an hour before Arlene made an appearance again. And when she finally did, I shot her in the face.

It was anticlimactic. I guess I was hoping she'd lose her composure, but she just got pissy and walked away. Imagine that.

We bumped into one another again, and she made a face and walked away. Finally there was one last exchange where I went up to her and asked - well, demanded to know, more like it - if I'd said something to offend her.

She said, "I don't like your jokes. You got water in my eye."

"I didn't like your jokes long before that," I said. "So I'm trying to make peace." I placed the water pistol down on the table.

She smiled and sort of patted me. I found it a bit condescending.

I said, "One of us is really unpleasant. Probably both of us." And I think we both walked away simultaneously at that point.

Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that's the end of the story. I suspect it'll be another 5,000 years before I see her again.

UPDATE: You know, as I re-read the post, I realize I perhaps haven't come entirely clean. During our first conversation, Arlene confessed to having had a little bit to drink - as though this were an impediment to having a proper discussion (so had I, but for me that's a completely normal way of facilitating sociability). In any case we shall never know the true tenor of our initial interaction, but in hindsight, I do wonder if it might not have gone a little more like this:

"Do you know the song 'Lady Stardust'?"

"Yes."

"Oh yeah? How's it go?"

"'Ground control to Major Tom...'"

"No, it doesn't, you fool, that's 'Space Oddity.'"

2006-06-24T11:30:00.000+02:00

By far the best thing I did in Cannes was to rent a scooter, thus avoiding having to take buses and taxis from my hotel to the festival and back.

Driving the scooter from one town to the next, I realized I initially hadn't entirely understood what Dr. Chen meant when he said I should relax. I think I may had forgotten what exactly that meant. Thankfully, I pinpointed the exact feeling of relaxation while scooter-riding, which I guess is to say that I really enjoy driving scooters around the south of France -- duh, like, who wouldn't.

The advertising festival has been fun but, at times, a logistical nightmare, mainly due to my leaving important things like my power converter, laptop cable, and USB key back in my hotel room in the next town over. I haven't done anything "official" like the various seminars and workshops. (Why should I? I'm not in advertising.) But the nights have been pretty late and the parties have been a lot of fun.

At a party last night I showed the pictures on my camera to a attractive young woman I'd just met. She spoke perfect English with an American accent, despite having never set foot in America. She'd attended the American school in Dubai. She had a prom.

So I'm showing her the camera, and we come to one picture of me and a another girl named, let's just say.... Arlene. (For some reason I don't want to say her real name, so I picked a random name. I realize now that I must have picked Arlene because I went to the prom with a somebody named Arlene.)

"Who's THAT?" she said.

"That's Arlene. Do you know Arlene?"

"Yes, I know Arlene. Who's that?"

"That's Arlene."

"No, who's THAT?"

"That? That's me!"

"Oh!"

"What, does the picture make me look better or worse?"

"Better."

I said, "Fuck you! I'm hot in real life, too, you know."

Shockingly, Salad Nicoise is much better here than in other parts of the world.

Finally, I learned something today. I learned that Odie, from the Garfield comic strip, is not actually owned by Jon, at least not originally, but by another guy named Lyman who was eventually written out of the comic strip.

And this -- Garfield, but with all of Garfield's thoughts removed, leaving us with a lonely man talking to his cat -- is insanely moving.

2006-06-18T13:13:00.000+02:00

I'm in Cannes. I don't know anybody here and my hotel's not even in Cannes, it's in the next town over. I fell off the wagon last night quite intentionally and today instead of rays of Chinese energy shooting out of my fingertips I feel small and sad and insignificant and my life feels devoid of meaning.

I met a local guy named Laurent and watched the US-Italy match at a pub. I didn't know who to support: The Italians are my team because I picked Italy out of a cup in the office lottery, and the US, well, because I'm American. Happily, it ended 1-1.

Afterwards I ate pasta, and it was quite yummy. The red wine was quite cold. I had to take a taxi home because the buses stop running at night.

2006-06-16T18:04:00.000+02:00

And oh by the way, happy fucking Bloomsday everybody.

2006-06-16T15:16:00.000+02:00

Hey everybody. Here's my travel schedule for July.

July 9 I'm frying to Prague.

July 12 I'm frying to New York. Hopefully I can find a sofa to crash on that night (and who knows, maybe even the next night) and then I'm up to Boston.

July 20 I'm frying from New York back to Prague so I'll be able to celibate my birthday there. July 24 I'm frying back to Dubai.

There's no way I can change those frights, so if that doesn't work out right for you, sorry dude.

I heard an awful rumor that the Pixies are praying at Akropolis on Jury 13, the day after I leave. Yes, it's true. Why that's just nuts, nuts I tell you. What next, the original Doors playing Lucerna?

2006-06-14T14:05:00.000+02:00

As in any newsroom, we have many arguments and discussions over AP style rules here. I just recounted the story of my Slate editor who called "rules is rules" when I questioned her removal of a hyphen from "stigmata-like." Sure enough, if you Google the word "stigmatalike," mine is the first of three usages on the whole of the web. I'm chuffed. I own that word now.

2006-06-14T08:34:00.001+02:00

A couple of strange things have happened to me. Small things. I'll tell you one.

Because I have a relatively generic Gmail address, occasionally I mistakenly get emails intended for other Scottymacs out there. Sometimes they're interesting because they involve office politics, and people making threatening noises like, "If you continue to have this attitude about so-and-so I'm afraid I can no longer be your friend."

This morning I received an email from guy I don't know with a name sort of like mine. I won't say where he is, altough it's a Scottish city and it's spelled G-L-A-S-G-O-W (which makes this whole following exchange seem like something from a Belle & Sebastian song). He meant to CC himself on a message, but he sent it to me instead. It was the tail end of an exchange with his wife, and it was so touching, it almost made me cry.

At the risk of being emotionally obscene, I shall quote it verbatim (I can't imagine how this could be traced back to or discovered by the source, otherwise I wouldn't put it out there):

From wife to husband:

Hi Babe

Thanks for my card, I didn't open it, we will open them together tonight. What do you want to do for dinner and what time will you be home? I can phone the [insert name of a restaurant] if that's where you would like to go?

I love you, sorry for my lack of life last night.

X

Reply:

Hiya,

No worries. I was gonna book the [restaurant] at lunch time when I take my break. I thought if I booked t for 7pm that would give me time to get home and get a shower and stuff.

I’ll try and get away 4pm sharp to get home for 5:30 at the latest.

Don’t worry about last night, you did a 5K, what did you expect?

Love you too.

S
XX

Reply:

Hi

Can you read over my application and see what you think? If you are going to make any changes save it as another copy and email me it back.

Love ya

x

Reply:

Hi babe,

Had a quick look over this just now, will do it again tomorrow night. See what you think in the meantime, no major changes made so you might not see much difference.

S
xx

There is a job application attached for a youth social worker position.

2006-06-13T10:43:00.000+02:00

I am trying to anonymize this blog. You will have noticed I've removed all references to myself. The problem is that if you Google my name, I'm second after the Halifax composer. So if you've linked to me from your own blog using my full name, please do me a favor and change it to "scottymac" or "groping savage" or something.

Soon there shall be rays of Chinese chi energy shooting from my fingertips.

2006-06-09T11:55:00.000+02:00

Bishop's right in the comment to the post below: I'm quite into "The Blues Are Still Blue." I dare say as of today it's my new favorite song. I can't remember the last time a song made me want to gyrate my hips in the driver's seat, but maybe that's because I haven't driven much in the last 10 years. And even though the temp's edging towards 50 Celsius, the track may actually have convinced me to buy a convertible. (It's not totally an impulse thing. I have to buy a car anyway, as I'm not allowed to use the company wheels forever.)

I'm going to the Cannes advertising festival a week from tonight. I'll be there for a whole week. I haven't been to the south of France since September 2000, a fantastical little holiday I took with a woman with whom I had remarkably little in common. She was into horoscopes and Wicca. We don't really keep in touch.

But hey, don't get the wrong idea! Life's not all about convertibles, clear skies, sunny days and French resort towns. No, no, no, no, no. After all, I'm here alone in the office on a Friday, which totally sucks (Friday being a weekend here in the supposedly Muslim world), I have no social life (I'm new in town and have no close friends although there's a tentative squash arrangement tomorrow followed by a tango lesson) -- and worst of all, the acupuncturist told me I can't drink booze. The latter makes it difficult to keep my mind off the dreadful and hopeless aspects of life. But anyway, that song totally rocks! And I'm getting a convertible! And by jove, I'm gonna finish that novel!

Dude!!! It's the video. OK, the video doesn't quite match my initial feelings about the song. It's a bit more, shall we say, on the low-budget Scottish hipster side as opposed to me driving around a half-built desert metropolis in my new convertible, wayfarers on baby. I hope you can make the necessary mental adjustments.

2006-06-08T11:55:00.000+02:00

The new Flaming Lips album is so phenomenally disappointing, I want my money back. Not like, say, this cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

2006-06-06T11:56:00.000+02:00

I finally picked up the new Belle and Sebastian album. It’s not really so new, as it came out last year, but I only recently saw it for sale. I don’t know why it took me so long -- well, yes I do, I was living in Cairo -- but I guess I also figured a friend would buy me a copy and give it to me when I swing through Prague in July, but I can’t wait for that, so I bought it. Isn’t it funny how sitting at home alone listening to a new album can make you feel different in such a good old-fashioned way, and different is better if you were in the kind of mood I was in yesterday, and different is better especially if you have a frozen pizza. I’m writing this last night because I don’t have Internet at home. And I can’t think of the last time I bought a new CD. Funny, even the one song I know well, “Another Sunny Day” sounds different when it’s played on the album even though I’m sure it’s exactly the same track I downloaded a couple months ago and I’ve been listening to on my Ipod. I know it’s such a sad song. Well it’s an interesting record anyway. I do like the parts that sound like T-Rex. I pretty much like anything that sounds like T-Rex. It’s a fun record, but the funnest part is the liner notes where all the kids write to the band and the band takes turns answering. For instance: “Dear Stevie, I just picked up the courage to ask this ultra-cool girl out to the pics; her response was that I have to compile a CD with only 10 songs on it, that’ll help pass away a rainy Tuesday afternoon in February...” I believe this is an actual letter sent to the band but I don’t believe that story actually happened because I don’t think such a girl really exists. Well, maybe in Wales, where the guy wrote from. Also, this: "Q: If Bono owns any of your albums which do you think it would be? A: the next one. Like us, he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for." Ho ho ho! I also got the new Flaming Lips CD but as of this writing I haven’t yet removed the plasticwrap. (Update: Listened to it in the car on the way to work today. Not nearly as impressed with that as I was with B&S, but I've only listened to each of them once.) Also I’ve started going to a Chinese doctor for acupuncture. Ouch!

2006-06-05T13:21:00.000+02:00

A friend recently I'd be better off practicing my Arabic on the spot here in Dubai rather than learning to speak Italian, which is one of my recently conceived goals in life. (Yes, I am in fact taking Italian lessons.)

The thing is, this isn’t really an Arab country in any meaningful sense of the word. In fact, I don’t know how the rumor got started that people spoke Arabic in the United Arab Emirates. In most public places (McDonald’s, Starbucks, the malls, in taxis, on the national airline) not only is Arabic not spoken, but they often won’t even understand you if you try. This isn’t because of all the Western expats, but because of all the Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos and Bangladeshis who do all the actual work around here. Less than 20% of the population is native Emirati. (With all the expat Arabs from around the Middle East here, you do in fact here Arabic spoken around and about, and considering the number of Italians here numbers in the low thousands at the most, I’ll grant you that opportunities to practice Italian are pretty low. But you get my point)

So if you’re going to study a non-English language and practice it here, Hindi would be a better choice than Arabic, because then you could use it with the cab driver and discuss strange-looking vegetables with the market vendors. I consumed a bitter gourd, and boy, was it bitter. I haven’t yet touched the dreaded durian.

I befriended one Indian guy named Hari who works as a sub-editor at a local English-language paper. Hari’s from Bombay, or Mumbai, or whatever they call it these days. He’s a bit older and his life companion is his dog which he left back in India with some people that run a Chinese restaurant. (Really, that’s 100% true. It’s what he told me and it wasn’t a joke.) Occasionally a friend checks in on the dog to make sure it’s OK with the Chinese restaurant owners.

Hari works ten-hour shifts, six days a week. He doesn’t have much time to do anything here but work and sleep. Occasionally he’ll go out for a beer after work. That’s his whole life. He laughs loudly and often, sometimes for no apparently reason.

Earlier last month Hari and I went for a walk in the evening along Dubai Creek. Outside the Dubai Museum is a big model ship. Hari says he dreamt about that ship before he came to Dubai. He often has dreams about the future, he says. I ask him what else he dreams about. Different things, he say. His dog, for instance. He laughs.

I’ve lived here a month. I occasionally consider, in a reflective Eleanor-Rigby sort of way, what it would be like living the way Hari does for the rest of my life, as so many people do. The idea sort of makes me want to drink a liter of lead paint and chase it with a shot of mercury, yet Hari seems perfectly happy, living a solitary existence and dreaming about his dog back in India.

Seems. Actually, I recently asked Hari, after a few beers at a local subcontinental hang-out, if he was really as happy as he let on. He confessed, with a laugh of course, that it was a bit of a façade.

He then asked me if I would consider dating or marrying a woman with a child. I replied that it would depend on whether or not the kid and I got on, since I’d basically be marrying the kid, too. Hari says a fortune teller once predicted that he would one day meet his ideal companion and that she would be a single mother.

And that's about all I have to say right now about my friend Hari.

2006-06-01T14:26:00.000+02:00

Egypt arrests bloggers rocking Mubarak's boat.

See also manalaa.net.

*

Are you familiar with what happens to your glasses when you enter a bar in Prague in the middle of the winter? They fog up. The same thing happens in the summer in Dubai when you walk outside.

2006-05-28T10:45:00.000+02:00

Wow, I just learned (via Pestiside) there's a Magyar tribe in Upper Egypt, descended from Hungarian troops from the Ottoman days.

2006-05-24T17:19:00.000+02:00

I'll write something about something very shortly. I'm quite busy now with work. I want to tell you that, in the meantime, that I walked into a glass door, right in the courtyard of my office in front of lots of people. I have no idea if anybody saw. I did what I always do in those situation which is to pretend it didn't happen. It really hurt and now the bridge of my nose is a little swollen.

2006-05-20T13:07:00.000+02:00

A cork inside a bottle. That's the third ad I couldn't remember for Hymen (TM) tightening gel (see below).

2006-05-15T13:35:00.000+02:00

Meanwhile, back in Cairo.

"They took my purse and copied the messages and numbers from my phone. "Nobody will know where you are," the officer said. "You are lost." They tore at my clothes; my shirt buttons. They continued to slap and punch me. I was lying on the floor. He placed his shoe on my face and said, "Anyone who comes here will get the same treatment."

All this stuff is going on just two blocks from my apartment in downtown Cairo. A friend of mine, a guy I met in Alexandria covering the elections there in November, has been arrested and is looking at five years in an Egyptian prison for demonstrating against the Mubarak regime.

2006-05-15T10:22:00.000+02:00

Sometimes you get up and you do things differently for whatever reason. I think yesterday my mind was elsehwere, perhaps because because I had a doctor's appointment later in the day and, well, see, it was a type of doctor that I've never been to before. Never mind that, the thing is I left my mobile phone at home (I never do that) and I forgot to put on deoderant (I never do that either). And the craziest thing of all is that my phone didn't ring all day, and I didn't smell either (even though it was really hot).

2006-05-10T15:23:00.000+02:00

This computer rendering of Dubai Sports City in theTimes makes Dubai look a bit like Alderaan or something. Then again that's sort of what Dubai seems like on many days.

Sorry, I just took a quick look at the Alderaan entry in Wikipedia. Alderaan was mountains, seas, forests, and plains. Few shining cities, no deserts. I think I perhaps meant Coruscant.

*

For whatever reason, I get a bit queasy and freaked out when it comes to anything having to do with the physical act of sexual intercourse these days. (Too much information for some of you, I'm sure, but there are important bits of cultural knowledge in this post. Read on...)

To start with the most glaring example, a company is Saudi Arabia recently began marketing a product called Hymen (TM) tightening gel. Today, the company's ad agency showed me the print ads they created: The first was a screw lying inside a nut, but the nut was too big for the screw (or the screw too small for the nut). The second was two scrunchies (elastic hair thingies) laid side by side, in the shape of a -- in the shape of an oval; one is all loose and tattered and frayed, and the other is, well, not. There's a third ad I can't remember, but if I do, I'll let you in on it.

The point is that being able to please their husbands in bed is one of the most important things for Saudi women, and for Arab women in general, because if one can't make one's man happy, he'll go find himself another wife. And when you reach your mid-thirties, and after you've had a few babies, well, this becomes an issue. (Of course, this raises the question of the success rate of penis-enlargement spam in this part of the world....)

Hymen (TM) flew off the shelves when it was first introduced last year. The company could not keep up with production.

The point is, when I first heard about this, it made me uncomfortable just thinking about it.

Another thing -- and perhaps this is not so freaky, but it still made me uncomfortable. Durex, in addition to condoms and lubricant, now markets little vibrating thingies sold in a plastic package. I have not brought myself to buy one or inspect the package closely, or maybe I did and blocked it out, but I believe these to be ring-shaped. They're for sale right near the cash register at the convenience store within my office complex. Sadly, I guess this means sex toys are no longer in the realm of the adventurous. (Most of them remain firmly within the realm of those getting laid on a regular basis.)

Hymen tightening gel and convenience-store vibrating cock rings.... It all sounds a bit like science fiction, like something from Coruscant.

2006-05-10T13:44:00.000+02:00

I started driving. It's not so bad, but the city's so big and spread out, it's a big pain in the bum going to meetings and stuff. I had a meeting at 9:30 today on the other side of town, and then I "stopped by" for a quick cup of tea without another guy on the way back. (The thing about cars is, you have to find a place to park them.)

I'll have to buy a car once I get legal. For now I'm tooling around in the company's BMW. This is not as stylish as it sounds. The radio's broken and it won't go above 90 on the dial, so the only two stations I can get are BBC World Service and the local Indian station, where the announcer speakrs in a hybrid of English and Hindi. Seriously, the guy just switches in and out effortlessly and, it appears, quite randomly. Sort of like most Arab yuppies do, in fact. I'm not sure if this linguistically counts as a creole, or if it's just randomly speaking two languages.

2006-05-08T13:40:00.000+02:00

I have many blog reflections but lack the time to flesh them out fully. Like: Chemistry's a funny thing. I had a friend in Cairo with whom I had a fair amount of that. But it never really mattered for a bunch of reasons. When we met, I was engaged and she was just getting over a broken engagement. Then my engagement unexpectedly ended. For a few days, neither one of us were engaged. Then I flew to Prague and Kiev and while I was away, she got back together with her ex-fiance. Now she's engaged and I'm just getting over a broken engagement. Our timing's always wrong, she said. Indeed. Absolutely nothing ever happened, which is a good thing because she'll only marry a Muslim and it's safe to say the two of us have very nearly incompatible value systems. So I was glad and not glad at the same time. Sometime's the timing off, sometimes the outlook on life is all off, sometimes everything's all off but you can't deny there's something you can't quite put your finger on, which I guess is what people mean when they say "chemistry." That's the only point I'm making. I wish I could say more. I would say more, but it would take a while to tell the story properly.

2006-05-07T15:24:00.000+02:00

Sure, I guess there's plenty to blog about, but where to start? Like the fact that one beer costs 163 Czech crowns, and yesterday I went for a walk mid-day during 40-degree (104 Fahrenheit) heat -- and that's a cool day for Dubai -- before getting a ride in a Bentley to the Mall of the Emirates where I watched people skiing at the bottom of the indoor ski slope. Stuff like that.

2006-05-02T14:00:00.000+02:00

I just tried to take a look at my Flickr page and found the following message in its place: "We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates." I don't know if this is the case for the whole country, or just from where I am (the press center at the Arabian Travel Market). I recall there being tons of photos from Dubai on Flickr. UPDATE: Apparently it's blocked outside Dubai Media City, which is where my office is.

2006-05-02T13:27:00.000+02:00

I have two things to note.

The other night I went to a bar and watched a band play. It was a bar band playing cover songs that everybody knew. I realized I've spent so much time in Eastern Europe that I've gotten used to the idea of things being good only because they're so bad, if you catch my drift. I am told this is never the case here in Dubai, where the good things are good because they're so ridiculously superlative. This bar band, fronted by a little Filipino woman and two white guys in homeboy duds, was hands down the most amazing bar band I have ever seen in my entire life. They were so tight they must have practiced ten hours a day, everything down to the synchronized boy-band dance moves. (No kidding. One of the guys even did handstand push-ups!)

Everybody warned me about the traffic, but mere words are not enough to prepare you for this. I have never experienced anything quite like it. Last night I had to get from the New Gold Souk, where I live, to the Hyatt Park hotel on the other side of Dubai Creek. It's a journey of perhaps, I'm guessing, 7 kilometers, through downtown Dubai. It would have taken about an hour to walk, but I unfortunately I didn't bring a map. The cab ride took close to 90 minutes.

2006-04-30T11:48:00.000+02:00

At in my new office now in Dubai. My desk has a view of the Persian Gulf.

I wasn't sure how many spaces to reserve for my going away party Friday at Abu el-Sid restaurant in Cairo. I figured my friends would come but I don't have any idea how much friends I made in my seven months in Cairo. So I said 12, and just invited pretty much everyone I knew. Eventually 12 people showed up but they weren't all there at one time.

Emirates is a truly excellent airline, with over 500 channels of TV shows and movies on demand. So excellent, in fact, that it makes you wonder why they have to take so of your movie-viewing time with passenger announcements (which stop the movie mid-action) explaing how stupendously excellent the airline is. So numerous are these promotional messages they I could barely finish "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" during the flight from Cairo, and did so only by when the plane had taxied to the gate.

I can offer no further reflections at the moment.

2006-04-27T19:08:00.000+02:00

I just found out that foreigners in Cairo are supposed to be keeping a "low profile" on account of some ongoing demonstrations. Oops! Clearly that's not what I was doing when I took the following picture today:

I don't know the full story yet (and perhaps never will) but apparently the Egyptian government has done some bad stuff restricting the independence of judges, and people are upset and it got violent last night. So they sent the riot police out in force today to keep order.

There wasn't much at all going on today, as far as I could tell. I heard some mild chanting, but you couldn't even get within blocks of the High Court. There were long lines of bored-looking riot cops everywhere.

I did notice, at one point in the long line of riot cops, a string of un-uniformed roughs who I can only assume (from my experience observing the "elections," ahem, in Alexandria in November) were petty criminals swept up off the street last night by the local police. When the shit starts to go down, they're the ones sent in to bash heads. No joke.

Hold on. I just looked at the picture close up. That's them, just to the right of the orange guy's head.

Anyway, in honor of the Egyptian quasi-hipster dude on the right side of the frame (who had nothing to do with any demonstrations, seriously) I'm currently listening to Sonic Youth's "Teen-Age Riot."

2006-04-27T17:08:00.000+02:00

Two months ago I got some comments about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that I only read just now.

I regret to say that I never got far with the book. I don't know why, it just hasn't pulled me in yet. I could be convinced to keep plowing through, however.

I remember having the same trouble with The Sound and the Fury until it hit me like a .... like a... like a big speeding tractor how good it was. As I recall, that happened during the part where the little kid keeps following the main guy (Quentin, I guess) down those dirt roads and durn it won't leave 'im the heck alone.

I might as well follow my free-associative chain now and link to this super smutty post I now recall, posted by The Rude Pundit on the old Confederacy's anti-sex-toy legislation: "So Caddy Compson, for instance, could own a mini-rabbit that, perhaps, Quentin could control with a remote, but she couldn't offer to sell one to Dilsey...."

2006-04-27T12:27:00.000+02:00

People!

For so long I thought I was talking to the abyss. Then I happened to click on the "comments" section of the blogger dahsboard and I noticed that there are comments going back to February (!) waiting for my approval so they can appear on the site.

Sorry about the screw-up, folks. I've fixed it so comments should appear immediately, though there's still that pesky word verification to avoid comments spam.

Um... Chatter away! Talk amongst yourselves! I gotta demonstration to go to.

2006-04-27T11:53:00.000+02:00

I guess I can cross one more thing off my life's things-to-do list: Last Saturday I had tea in the Sahara.

2006-04-26T14:52:00.000+02:00

Nadia, the maid, has a wonderful way of informing me of ongoing current events in the Arab Republic of Egypt. She walked in today and said, “Mister Hosni Mubarak television blub-blub-blub.” (I guess he was on TV talking about the spate of bombings.) Really, those were her exact words. I shall miss her.

*

Do you know that feeling when you suddenly realize something really important to you is actually something completely different? The metaphor I always use is that of the cat that barks. One day you wake up and your cat is there beside you and it starts to bark.

As I’ve mentioned before, Cairo is filled with dead and dying cats. Since early this morning I’ve been hearing a crying noise coming from the garbage-strewn shaft in my apartment block. I figured it must be a cat who’d run into some mortal trouble, and I was hoping the doorman would do something about it, like rescue it or put it out of its misery.

Recently the cries turned into high-pitched yelps, something almost more like a bark from a little dog than a frantic meow. I went over to the window in the kitchen and peered down into the shaft in case I could see something.

On a disused stairway across the darkened shaft there stands a kitten. And I swear, it’s barking. It doesn’t appear to be injured or anything. It’s fine. It’s just barking. I do not jest. The cat is barking.

2006-04-26T01:56:00.000+02:00

I have been thinking back to the last time I was single, a period of my life I usually refer to as my “slut phase.” It occurred to me that the slut phase didn’t really last that long and wasn’t even all that slutty.

It began in May 2000 and ended in January 2002. During those 20 months, I had a two flings (a long-ish one and a really strange short one), a short and moderately enjoyable but ultimately ill-advised quasi-relationship, two one-night stands (one of which the other person wrote a detailed account and posted in the web; no, I’m not linking to it), one two-night stand, one ex-girlfriend that I hooked back up with numerous times, plus a brief, intense, illicit affair with a Swedish-Hungarian lawyer who had a serious long-term boyfriend in Japan.

OK, I guess that might be considered kinda slutty by some folks, including me, actually. You tell me.

The thing is, I didn’t actually enjoy that period of my life, and now I’m starting to remember why.

I told the lawyer than I would stop smoking pot if she left her long-time boyfriend. This would have been a huge step for me at the time, but that’s how infatuated I was. Alas, she didn’t take me up on the offer and soon moved back to Stockholm and now, I just found out, she’s married to him.

I was seriously bummed at the time and pined for the Swedish-Hungarian lawyer for some time, but recently I realized how much of a better person she is for not dumping her boyfriend for me. As for me, I’m pretty grateful for those few extra years of being a pot-head.

So much has happened since then. For instance, there’s my little friend Isi. She hadn’t even been thought of back then.

I know that posting pictures of cute kids on my blog is pretty cheap and sentimental, but I can’t help it.

2006-04-24T20:48:00.000+02:00

Stupid assholes.

2006-04-20T17:13:00.000+02:00

Remind me not to mix alcohol and Ambien and then start instant messaging with my parents.

2006-04-20T02:06:00.001+02:00

I finally got to pop the question to one of my Muslim friends today. The question, of course, is the following: If God exists, and He is merciful and compassionate, how do you account for the existence of flies?

Yes, flies. Horrible useless little creatures, and when I’m reborn as one, I’ll be anxiously abuzz looking for the nearest swatter.

She responded with the parable of the boat. If you don’t know the parable of the boat (I didn’t, and count me totally unmoved) it goes a little something like this:

If you’re standing on the shore of a river, and you want to get to the other side, and there’s some driftwood in the river, would you imagine the driftwood would come together and form a boat so you could cross? No, of course you wouldn’t. Likewise you could not expect something as perfect as mankind and womankind and all the sensible stuff that surrounds us to have been created without the agency of a higher power called God.

As ever, I felt like Mark Twain at Bayreuth:

This opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

Those raised to believe that all people are intrinsically and necessarily of one religion or another (in this part of the world, either Muslim, Jew or Christian) cannot bring themselves to believe that atheism is akin to anything other than nihilism.

Listening to: Belle & Sebastian, Tigermilk
Drink: Eight parts vodka, one part Bailey’s
Stage of grief: Phenomenally insulted

2006-04-19T17:47:00.000+02:00

Stories like the one about the riots in Solomon Islands (where? and why?) and Australia's entanglement there remind me how unfathomably large the world still is.

2006-04-19T13:19:00.000+02:00

Ten days left before I leave Cairo for Dubai to start my new job. I'm thinking (or perhaps hoping) it'll be a bit like pressing cntl-alt-del. For anybody still left wondering what ever happened to that South Africa trip, I opted not to go. This weekend I'm spending a leisurely three days in Siwa, a secluded oasis in the Western Desert way out toward Libya. In the meantime I'm just finishing up some long overdue work from my two weeks in Kiev in February, while researching something about golf courses in the vicinity of Cairo.

2006-04-15T22:18:00.000+02:00

Oh, man. I just learned from looking at the visitor stats that I'm the #3 result when you search on Yahoo for "fucking a man" (without quotes). The visitor who came to this site as a result of that search was from: "Iran, Islamic Republic of"

2006-04-15T02:24:00.000+02:00

Um, actually my new Flickr account is here, not where I said it was before. And now it has friends as well as family, so hey.

A fun game I recently discovered is scrolling through the letters on your mobile phone to view all the new words in your T9 dictionary. If that sentence means nothing to you, it basically means the words you have taught your phone though text messaging. If that sentence also means nothing to you, well then never mind.

The point is, this little exercise yields a list of words that speaks volumes about your life and personality.

So here we go:

Bardot
Brigit
Alitalia
CSA
Biotic
BBQ
Alex
Bulgaria
Ahit
Bulgarian
Cilantro
Aloha
Bollocks
Buehler
Andrey
Chummy
Chez
Bambus
Borsov
Crap
AUC
Barcelona
Berg
Brico
Budapest
BTW
Chameleon
Dubai
Dhabi
Fatih
Emirates
Fucking
Dublin
Damascus
Dusni
Dlouha
Deirdre
Haisam
Girlie
Holesovice
Invitable [sic]
Horni
Hned
Herna
Honking
Gmail
Hamas
Husa
Hottie
Hapu
Kotva
Lavka
Kiev
Letna
Kalimat
Mindy
Nadia
MSN
Madagaskar [sp]
Niro
Noah
Malek
Mugamma
OBG
Mahfouz
Nah
Maadi
Mohandiseen
Odeon
Murakami
Mustek
Melantrichova
Olina
Nebe
Mmm
Natasha
Mohamed
Mahmoud
Sheikh
Ripska
Prolly
Slut
Rosarno
Sharia
Shmancy
Royce
Radisson
Sequoia
Szabova
RSVP
Popo
Petl
Stromce
Paulius
Svetlana
Pissed
Sudu
Rudy
Revolucni
Roxy
Robbie
Spinach
Sharm
Sheik [sp]
Vendy
Vinohrady
Turd
Tariq
Veggie
Tamer
Tesco
Valentine
Vandas [sp - should be Vanda's]
Vladan
Yum
Zelivskeho
Wewaxation [ha!!]
WiFi
Zamalek

Remind to do this once a year.

Related: My friend once bought a new phone and discovered it already knew the word "Rehnquist."

Totally unrelated (from the archive, I just happened across it, checking to see that I hadn't made a similar previous list): Hey, we finally got some barstools.

Also totally unreleated: What my life was like about two years ago.

Totally, totally, unrelated (also from the archive): My biography through 2003 in a nutshell.

It occured to me that I could make an entire blog simply by blogging about my blog.

2006-04-13T15:28:00.000+02:00

My new Flickr account is here. Right now it's just family photos. Not that there's anything wrong with family photos.

2006-04-13T13:58:00.000+02:00

The trauma never ceases.

Today I had serious egg problems. I wanted to cook eggs. There were three in the fridge. One of them was cracked, and I had misgivings about using it, because I was afraid it might have gone bad or something. So I chucked it. The second fell to the ground as I removed it from the fridge and splattered all over the kitchen floor.

The third turned out to be rotten.

Oh. My. God.

Have you ever smelled a rotten egg? I mean actually smelled a really rotten egg? If your answer is “I think so” or “I’m not sure,” then the real answer is no, you have not.

2006-04-12T21:50:00.000+02:00

Check this out.

So I climb into a grotto in Tropea, on the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria, as you do. There are waves crashing up through a hole in the wall of rocks. I spend about ten minutes adjusting the settings on my camera so I can capture the shape of the water splashing at a suitably high shutter speed.

Out comes this:

There's a face staring out of the water! At least, there's an eyeball and a cheekbone. Some say hairline and nose, too.

2006-04-08T12:44:00.000+02:00

I’ve been thinking about what happens when you have to deal with one of life’s big traumas. It’s all about filing stuff away: Putting people and experiences in their mental cubby-holes and file folders, calling it just another sad episode in the story of your life, and then tidying up and moving on. The trick is just figuring out where to file things.

The problem is when, after much denial and forbearance and perseverance, you come to accept the unfortunate fact that the one person you trusted above all others is actually an irredeemable piece of shit that deserves no place in your life whatsoever-not even in a cubby-hole.

After all, what do you do with shit? You don’t put it in a box so you can take it out and look at it on a rainy day, or put it in a file cabinet so you can reference it quickly. You flush it down the toilet.

Now the mind’s toilet is a tricky device. The psychological plumbing is of third-world caliber. You can put this piece of shit where it belongs and you can flush and flush, but man, that stuff just won’t go down! And even when it finally does, you never have a whole lot of confidence that it won’t bubble up again and stink up your life at the worst possible moment.

2006-04-05T20:04:00.000+02:00

Owing in part to a tenacious case of psychological unpleasantness, I have fled Egypt to in southern Italy, this time to join my sister, her husband and my three-year-old nephew, Nicholas, who since last I saw him has attained the status of a properly functioning-and screaming-human being.

As far as I can tell, a straight one, too. I quizzed him on the various superlatives of the superheroes. Who’s the strongest? “Batman!” (Nick’s batman, so that was his answer for most things.) Who’s the fastest? “Superman!” (I’m Superman.) Who fights the most bad guys? “Batman!” Who’s … the most handsome? (Pause.) “Wonder Woman!” My sister mentioned he’s going through some oedipal shit.

2006-04-02T17:52:00.000+02:00

Right, so, anyway. Not much happenning around these parts but thanks for checking it, good to know that you care and all.

Yesterday or the day before I was walking down the street, downtown Cairo again of course, and I hear this guy behind me making that awful phlegm-clearing sound. You know the one--I heard non-stop in Aleppo, but it's all-too-common around here, as well.

Except this guy keeps doing it. Instead of spitting, he just keeps yacking and yacking. So I turn around and do my best to try to give him a dirty look, because believe it or not, I still find it sort of gross.

And check it out. He's covered in blood.

When I say he's covered in blood, I don't mean he had a bloody nose or some blood on his face. I mean his face, head and entire upper body is completely drenched in blood, like he's been standing in the front row at a Gwar concert or was an extra in a B-horror flick or had just been, well, swimming in a pool of blood.

Maybe it wasn't his own blood, maybe it was from a chicken or a sheep, or maybe it was just--something else the color and consistency of blood, I don't know. But it looked awfully bloody to me.

Nobody really made a scene, although one guy pointed at him, and he soon started to run down the street on ahead of me. I don't know where he went off to and I had no idea what to make of it. Strange town.

2006-03-30T14:31:00.000+02:00

Journalist Jill Carroll Released in Iraq. Best thing I have heard in such a long time...

2006-03-30T14:11:00.000+02:00

I went out to karaoke night in Mohandiseen last night and had a pretty good time, but for lack of much else to say, here's a little rant.

Christian convert case: Cheap political ploy serving Bush?

This is a priceless moment from Al Jazeera. Try this on for shoddy logic:

Some analysts, explaining the political implications of bringing up the issue of Abdul Rahman at this time, although he converted to Christianity more than 16 years ago as said in circulating media reports, they attributed that to Mr. Bush’s need to show the world that his mission, to spread “democracy”, now failing in Iraq, has actually succeeded in Afghanistan, once ruled by conservative Taliban regime.

Woah, there. Sorry, but who was the one who "brought this issue up" 16 years after Abdul Rahman converted? I think it was the people who were about to execute him, not Bush. This is a common trick in the Arab press, I've noticed: mention the issue of timing, and then hope the dimmest readers will fail to see that the timing doesn't even compute with the implied conspiracy theory. You'd have to be pretty dim to fall for this one. (Notice that nowhere does the article say outright Bush engineered for Abdul Rahman to be arrested to begin with. That would just sound like a silly conspiracy theory, eh?)

Speaking of silly conspiracy theories, I saw Syriana two nights ago -- the midnight showing at the Odeon cinema just downstairs from me. Why it took me this long to discover the midnight screenings at the Odeon -- just as I'm about to leave Cairo -- is beyond me. Then again I only just discovered karaoke night, too.

Anyway, I thought George Clooney's character was about the saddest and loneliest guy I've seen in a movie, ever. (Where were his wife and kids? They were referred to but never seen.) And I'm liking Matt Damon more and more now that he's taking on international-man-of-mystery roles. But in the end the film depended completely on its political message, and the political message was foolish and naive: omniscient and all-powerful American intelligence, in cooperation with the energy-industrial complex, is up to no good blowing up Arab reformers. There are plenty of negative things you could in a film about American foreign policy, but that the U.S. assassinates too many Arab reformers isn't one of them. (In fact, I thought this movie implicitly suggested we may have killed Rafiq Hariri, which is pretty odious.)

I wondered the same thing wathching Syriana here in Cairo that I wondered when I saw Crash at a crowded bar in the Christian quarter of Damascus: Does the average viewer in this part of the world see these films and think, "Wow, America must be really fucked up if even the Americans are making movies about how fucked up it is"? Or do they think, "Huh, funny how there are no Syrian or Egyptian movies about how bad our government is."

2006-03-30T14:05:00.000+02:00

Referral of the day: What does "sugar in a plum" mean?

2006-03-29T18:03:00.000+02:00

I’ve decided I’m finally going to look into one of those Flikr accounts that I keep seeing around. Pictures can be fun, and people have started reminding me that I have to take lots of pictures before I leave Cairo. I’ve hardly taken any so far.

Here’s something that deserves an illustration:

My friend Raymond Stock (translator and biographer of Naguib Mahfouz) has coined the phrase “man-presence,” rather than man-power, to describe the basis of the Egyptian economy.

Example: I’m sitting here trying, unsuccessfully, to connect using my laptop at Cilantro café, a Starbucks-style place downtown across from the main entrance of American University in Cairo. I just snapped a photo of the counter area: For a seating space of about 100 square meters, I counted no less nine wait staff in the photo. Yes, nine, and there are others lurking around, standing around not doing much of anything.

At my Tulip Cafe, back in Prague, we used to manage (or at least come close) a similar crowd in a similar area with two or three staff. (Although I hear Tulip has taken a turn for the Egyptian, so to speak, since I sold control of the company.)

About 50 minutes after I sat down at Cilantro, a waiter approached me for the first time and asked me if I would like the check. No joke. I laughed and ended up asking for a decaf Americano instead. I should have just allowed him to try and bring me the check.

2006-03-28T02:33:00.000+02:00

New Slate article: What's the Matter With Kiev? Sunday's vote wasn't a rejection of the orange revolution, it was proof of its success.

This is an piece I've been mulling over for almost a month now, since my two weeks in Ukraine in February.

It starts with me, along with just about everybody else in the room, being drunk out of my skull:

After some jazz standards, the Lithuanians join the singing with a drunken rendition of "Svetit Neznakomaya Zvezda" ("A Foreign Star Is Shining"), an old Soviet folk song about being in a foreign city far away from your beloved. Everybody but me joins in—they all know the words, even though none were adults when the Soviet Union collapsed—and for a moment I'm back in the U.S.S.R. This is the new Kiev, polyglot and approaching something almost like cosmopolitanism.

I'm very happy with the editor's work, but there were some important things that got snipped, such as the fact that the two Lithuanians' names were Paulius and Adomas, which come on, let's face it, are objectively brilliant names.

Also, she removed the word "Kuchmastan."

The words to "Svetit Neznakomaya Zvezda," and the translation, according to Paulius:

"Svety neznakomaya zvezda, snova my otorvany ot doma, s nova mezhdu namy goroda, yarkyi ogny aerodroma..."

"Once again we torn away from our home, once again the cities separate us, and bright airport lights, but hope is my eternal compass, and fortune is reward for bravery, and it is enough to have our song to remind us of home...."

Here are my initial impressions of Ukraine, without more stuff about me having to spend so much cash and less mumbling into my shoes about politics.

2006-03-27T20:23:00.000+02:00

Jesusjosephandmarymotherofgod. It's raining in Cairo!

(Not that they had anything to do with it.)

2006-03-26T16:00:00.000+02:00

What is it about apples that makes me not enjoy them as much as I think I should?

*

The editorial board of this blog has made a strategic decision to modify its direction somewhat. Not too much – impossible, because it’s never had much direction – just a wee bit. I’ve always been a little turned off by the idea of an online personal journal because, well, I guess because most people’s internal lives just aren’t that interesting. Yet lately I’m getting the most positive feedback from the melancholy posts that sort of scratch a nerve, like the one about the dying cat. So at the risk of alienating a small segment of my paltry readership, we’re veering in that direction. Just a heads up.

I’m glad I’m leaving Cairo, and not just because it’s a shit-hole. To be sure, it’s a real shit-hole, but I know a lot of like-minded people who love it here, perhaps in no small part due to its shit-hole qualities.

Late last year I visited a well-known Egyptian conceptual artist (there is one, I swear) in his downtown apartment. “I don’t know that I’ve been in a city as inspirational as this,” he told me. “That’s one of the reasons I live in the heart of Cairo. You can live here as in New York or as in Bamako or Timbuktu.”

So if you find me talking shit about Cairo or about Egypt in general, keep in mind that it’s probably because it’s been the site of the most painful experience of my life. I shan’t go into the details, though they may leak out. It’s just a demonstration of the extent to which circumstances really color your perception of a place.

Enough about Cairo. I hereby wish to issue the world an apology.

I’ve had a few friends who at various points in their lives have had something bad happen to them, or for whatever reason have been seriously down in the dumps. I’ve always tried to help, to listen, to try and say the right things. I have no idea whether I did a good job or not, but regardless, when I think back, I do believe that deep down inside, I was secretly thinking, “Dude, pull yourself together. Get a grip.” And I really regret that, and right now I just wish I could give enough thanks to the world (well, most of the world, anyway) for being good to me.

When somebody’s going through some serious turmoil, there’s not much you can say that’ll help. There are certain things that don’t help: “Snap out of it,” or “Chin up, man!” or “Don’t be so depressed” or, less bad but not great, “It's totally normal that you’d feel that way.” These are very well-intentioned – as is, “Don’t forget to smile!” – but they shouldn't be said. Acting like nothing’s wrong is also bad. Things that extol the personal virtues of the depressed one are more than passable – again, while these don’t make things better, they can probably have a sustaining effect, like helping a person tread water until things start to clear up. And the person would have to be a real jerk not to appreciate it.

One of my Buddhist friends gave me meditation advice. Just take five minutes, he said, make yourself comfortable, and concentrate on your breathing; let you mind wander, don’t judge your thoughts, but always come back to the breath. This is pretty standard stuff, but it helped anyway. The only problem is that I can't help but judge my thoughts based purely on the amount of pain they cause. So the whole process ends up going something like this:

Breath in
Ow!
Breath out
Ouch
Breath in
Ouch!!!
Breath out
Ouch

And so on.

Sometimes people say things and it helps because it just makes something click. Maybe it's just circumstances, and they happen to say something at the right time, rather than making an objectively helpful remark, but no matter. At the risk of revealing too much, I'll give some examples.

I asked a particularly beloved ex-girlfriend of mine, “How did you manage to be friends with me after I broke up with you?” The well-thought-out reply: “I realized and accepted we did not fit perfectly and started to look for what would make me happy personally and not how others wanted to have me, but I guess your situation is different.”

Yes, it's different - but huh! How about that. Stupid asshole me never even bothered to ask in six years. Her response made something click.

As did this: “You want to be friends with a woman who said she'd marry you and then ran away with another guy? How would you introduce her to your friends? Hi, this is the flake who dumped me. Fuck that.”

*Click.*

Then there's my mother, of all people. It came as a surprise because Mom's a woman notorious for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and who, to the best of my knowledge (not that I try to think about it much), has only had one lover in the last 59 years. “Time to start the rest of your life,” she said. Yep.

I think there’s a point to what I’m saying, and this is so totally Friendships 101, I can’t believe I’m writing it on my blog. But if you really want to help somebody who’s feeling low, don’t tell him or her to cheer up, but do say something. Just keep shooting. Sooner or later you might say something that makes a difference.

*

Though I can’t say I truly enjoyed it, I had the privilege of starting the rest of my life at the Four Seasons resort in Sharm el-Sheikh on Thursday and Friday. I was there for a travel feature I’m contributing to about the world’s hottest ports. Sharm el-Sheikh is not one of the world’s hottest ports, by the way, but I couldn’t argue with a cushy assignment. (It’s difficult to type these words, because it’s like this whopping admission that the world is really treating me nicely and my life is, objectively speaking, the cat’s pajamas. So it goes.)

The only real problem with the Four Seasons Sharm el-Sheikh is that it’s totally secluded from Sharm itself, which means that even if you’re getting comped for the room rate, you’re spending out the wazoo on extras like food, drinks, transportation and that single important long distance telephone call. The marketing director told me that 80% of the guests never actually leave the resort. If they can afford it, which they can, I’m not sure I blame them.

I did the overpriced nightlife thing Friday and, predictably, didn’t have a great time. I think the whole experience may have somewhat tipped the scales to send my political leanings back in a leftward direction, which is to say that the Four Seasons is so stupidly opulent that it made me feel like a Communist all over again.

Other that that, Sharm’s a great place and the Four Seasons rocks!

*

In genuine thanks to the world, in true adolescent fashion, I have created a mix for you. It’s not meant to be the best compilation in the world – just an OK mix, hopefully in the way that your favorite CDs actually have a few not-so-great songs to act as foils against the good ones.

The method of compilation was such: I told my computer to randomly play every MP3 on its hard disk, which means every song on every CD I own plus everything that ever ended up on the Tulip Café sound system (from staff, etc.) plus a bunch of stuff that just ended up there for whatever reason. It’s a huge, diverse mix. As the songs played, I sorted them by style, mood, substance, context, whatever.

This is just one of the piles, leaning heavily in a nerdy old-school East-Coast quasi-indie-rock direction. When I had enough stuff to fill a CD, I stopped and put the songs in an order that made sense. I didn't delete anything except one that didn't fit in under 76 minutes. Do not try to read too much meaning into the selection, in other words.

Since we are rapidly approaching the point where every song ever recorded is on the hard drive of every person everywhere, I only have to tell you the order of songs, and you'll just play them in that order. (OK, if you really don’t have some of these songs, I’d be happy to burn a CD and send it to you.)

This mix is called “Cairo Silo” because the first song I picked was “Silo” by the totally obscure and probably now defunct Western Massachusetts band called the Scud Mountain Boys, and because “Cairo” almost rhymes with Silo. Here we go.

1. Patti Smith - Ask The Angels (3:10)
2. Bloc Party - Banquet (3:18)
3. Talking Heads - Bill (3:22)
4. Scud Mountain Boys - Silo (3:42)
5. Yo La Tengo - My Little Corner Of The World (2:25)
6. Liz Phair - Shatter (5:28)
7. R.E.M. - Shaking Through (4:30)
8. Eugenius - Hot Dog (3:34)
9. Morrissey - Piccadilly Palare (3:26)
10. Elliott Smith - Track 08 (4:40) *
11. Wilco - Jesus, etc. (3:49)
12. Ugly Casanova - Track 04 (4:58) *
13. Sebadoh - Skull (2:17)
14. The Shins - So Says I (2:48)
15. Elvis Costello - Busy Bodies (3:34)
16. Dinosaur Jr - Green Mind (4:56)
17. Ben Fold's Five - Philosophy (4:38)
18. Folk Implosion - My Ritual (4:35)
19. Grandaddy – I’m On Standby (3:12)
20. Tom Waits - Closing Time (4:20)

* Sorry, I don’t know the title. That’s just how it’s saved on my computer. I could hum it to you if you want.

2006-03-18T16:34:00.000+01:00

What's so wrong with decaf coffee, anyway?

2006-03-17T12:46:00.000+01:00

I haven’t broken the news yet to Nadia, my housekeeper, that I’m leaving Cairo. I’m not sure how I should do this. Her son Ahmed calls me “Uncle Scott,” which is funny because I get pretty damned annoyed with his running around my two-room apartment when I’m trying to work. (I think Nadia sensed that, and hasn’t brought him around in the last few days.)

Yesterday Nadia saw me packing up my laptop and asked if I was leaving, i.e. going back to Dubai or Kiev or some such place. I replied that no, I was just going to a café to sit and work on my computer. (I just wanted to get out of the apartment, honestly. Nothing to do with Nadia or Ahmed.) She struggled to ask if it was a problem that she, “I am Nadia,” was here in the apartment while I was trying to work. I said no, everything’s cool. (All this with about 20-30 words in common.)

*

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, I just came across the word “mucilage,” as in, “a stack of black rectangles and a pool of yellow mucilage that she felt obliged to identify for him as toast and eggs.” As I’m writing this, I’m not online and I’m unable to look up the precise definition of the word, but it reminds of a strange brown glue-like substance we used in the early stages of elementary to school to – well, to glue two things to one another. It came in a plastic bottle with a rubber top with a slit on it through which the slimy stuff was dispersed. Can anybody remember this, and what it was called, and why it wasn’t called simply “glue”? And please don’t answer that glue was, by definition, white stuff from a plastic bottle, graced by a cow named Elmer, with a pointy orange lid. (Was the lid orange?)

When I was in first grade with Mrs. Connelly – a teacher blessed with the special talent of being able to put her leg behind her head, although I myself never saw this and relied upon my two older twin sisters for the information (they’d had her years earlier, when she’s been single under a different name) – we had a store. The class started a little play store in the back of the classroom. There was much debate over what we should call the store. My proposal seemed eminently catchy and reasonable at the time: “The SuperStore.” (Granted, at the time I didn’t spell it in the one-word way with a capitalized S in the middle.) We voted on it, and the name that won in the end, “The Calorie Store,” seemed just stupid at the time, but today I really do see its merits.

One day Mrs. Connelly sat us all down on the floor in the front of the room to talk about the news from the previous night. She asked, Does anybody know what happened? Yes, we said. John Lennon was shot and killed. Does anybody know who John Lennon was? “He was in the Beatles!” one girl yelled. Mrs. Connelly went on to explain to us the basics of the national debate over “gun control.” I find it remarkable that she was able to have this discussion with a group of six-year-olds.

The first news item I remember were the hostages in Iran. One day I got up early and watched the TV. I ran to my parents and woke them up with the news that the hostages, apparently, were doing OK. That’s the first thing I remember from the TV, that and imitating Jimmy Carter’s silly grin. Because I was able to imitate Carter’s silly grin, I was surprised to learn from my grandmother, may her Republican soul rest in peace, that Carter bad, Reagan good.

Ah. Mucilage: A thick gluey substance, often produced by plants. Mucilage school glue dries clear and is non-toxic. It is useful for crafts and scrapbooks and is a must in the classroom.

UPDATE: I got some complaints -- OK, one complaint -- about the comments not working, so I put the old ones back as a back-up.

2006-03-15T12:09:00.000+01:00

Hello, hello. Announcement time. On May 1, I'm moving to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to take a full-time job at managing editor of a trade magazine for the Middle Eastern advertising industry. This is big earth-shattering, life-changing news, since I haven't had a proper 9-to-5 job since early 2001.

In the meantime, I have more words I have to write than I can even think of (fortunately I can repeat a few of them) so I shouldn't be blogging too much.

2006-03-11T12:24:00.000+01:00

Ha: "'We have a major push into the U.S. coming up,' Clark said. 'I said to myself before that once the 'Bible Belt' starts talking about Dubai, we've won. And now, from coast to coast, everyone is talking about it. Is there such a thing as bad publicity?'"

That's from the director of Emirates airlines channeling Oscar Wilde.

Sorry I haven't written more on the blog. I recently realized there's so much to tell. So, so much.

And so I'm off to Dubai today for a three days (via Emirates airlines, surely you've heard of it!) for a job interview.

*

Adventures with Nadia, the maid (though I prefer "housekeeper")...

In Cairo, juice is cheap. They sell it freshly squeezed on the street for next to nothing. Yet for some reason Nadia, who is nice enough to go shopping for me, buys orange juice in a box, which of course is not actually orange juice at all but 50% sugar and water. Perhaps because I'm a foreigner, and she knows we foreigners all like our things in boxes and packages.

So I tried explaining to her, in the pidgin language inherited from the woman I sublet from, that it would be nice to buy the fresh juice from the street rather than the stuff in the box. So she goes out and gets a big load of oranges and squeezes me a fresh glass of orange juice.

Being thoroughly unaccustommed to being waited on in such a horrific fashion, I was pretty embarassed.

I let it rest, and later in the day I successfully managed to convey to Nadia that she had needlessly exceeded my expectations.

2006-03-08T12:20:00.000+01:00

Hello, I'm back in Cairo after trips to Prague and Kiev, with not much new to report except that I'm going to Dubai for four days for a job interview, and then for a splendid little two-day assignment at the port of Sharm el-Sheik in Sinai, and in the second half of April I'm going to South Africa for two weeks to write chapters in yes another annual country report in an emerging markets series.

Further to this (losing my non-existent notes) and this (losing and then finding my coat)...

The keys to my Cairo apartment had been a source of low-level anxiety for several days in Prague, because I'd left the keys at my friends' place during my first swing through Prague on my way to Kiev earlier in February.

Turns out my friends had nicely packed all the stuff I'd left in their apartment into my backpack. I worried the keys might have been misplaced in the shuffle - a potential problem because the flight lands at 3 a.m. and I didn't have the number either of the landlord or the maid, the only two people with copies of the keys.

Luckily, we found the keys in the bad, and drank tea and relaxed and chatted and played with my friends' baby. I boarded the plane that evening, and about halfway through the flight, realized I didn't have the keys. It turns out I'd left them on the table at my friends' place whilst playing with baby.

Waiting at baggage claim at 3 a.m., scratching my head, I decided to send a text message to a friend in Cairo who often stays up late working. I don't have many close friends here, mind you, but this guy is often up till the wee hours working on his stuff. Immedaitely, he gave me a phone call back and said sure, I could crash on his sofa. Whew.

Next day, after much investigation, it turned out my neighbor had the phone number of the maid, who had a copy of the key. After a long, tired, and unwashed wait during which I bonded with Mohamed the doorman, finally, the afternoon after I'd arrived, Nadia, the maid showed up, I entered my long lost Cairo apartment, and it was a blessed thing. Elizabeth Bishop says to accept the fluster of lost door keys. I did, and it wasn't a disaster.

2006-03-01T14:53:00.000+01:00

Who ever thought there'd be a Slovak Midnight Express.

Also, related to the below post: No more dead babies in Slovakia.