Nomadicity

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2010-02-04T20:12:00.001+01:00

New Years Greeting 2010

2010-01-04T13:28:00.003+01:00

For years I've been sharing New Year's greetings by email with friends; from this year, I've decided to start posting these messages here as well

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Greetings of the season to all of you from Hong Kong, where I am spending a few days recovering from my “holiday” in Hawai’i (I spent it with my family, which thanks to my Mom, is as weird as ever, and thanks to my brother, larger than ever) before heading back to Doha to put my nose back to the proverbial grindstone.

I’ve had an absolutely great year (and hope you have, too) but based on what I’ve been reading in the press and on the web, that hasn’t been the case for most people. This being the end of a decade as well as the end of the year, many have been inspired to write essays and opinion pieces reflecting back on the decade just past, and I’ve yet to find one that suggests the author wishes this particular decade could be extended by a year or two. Paul Krugman’s piece in the New York Times, entitled “The Big Zero”, was a representative example. Paul noted that the “aughties” or “naughties” or whatever term we are supposed to use for this decade should in fact be referred to simply as “the zeroes” in recognition of the fact that this decade has been characterised by zero economic growth, zero job creation, ponzi schemes, and the property bubble. Others have noted that this was also the decade of the WTC attacks, two failed wars, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the Bush Administration, and of course, Britney Spears. I suspect many of you may share these depressing views on the last ten years, so rather than add yet another voice to this chorus of despair, I’ve decided not to do a “decade in review” as part of my annual greeting, but instead reflect my eternally and irrepressibly optimistic world view by offering you a “decade in preview,” in which I share my sunny predictions about the decade ahead. Here’s my year-by-year forecast for the twenty-teens:

2010: the decade will open with thousands of humour writers – on the brink of despair from the pressure of having to produce entertaining copy without the benefit of the Bush Administration – planning to drink themselves into oblivion on New Year’s Eve. Fortunately, most of them receive copies of Sarah Palin’s book for Christmas from concerned loved ones and fall weeping to their collective knees shouting “Thank you, thank you, there is a God!” (Most, however, drink a bit too much on New Year’s Eve regardless).

After experiencing chest pains over the holidays, Rush Limbaugh undergoes a heart examination at Queen’s Medical Centre in Honolulu, Rush Limbaugh notes the excellent care he received and declares that “I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy.”* When doctors remind him that Hawai’i is the only U.S. state with the sort of socialised medicine that President Obama is trying to bring to the other 49 states, he experiences sudden recollections of long waits and sub-standard service.

In the mid-term elections, the American electorate decides it’s had enough of Capitol Hill gridlock, and so decides to punish Congress by voting just enough Republicans back into power to ensure that nothing whatsoever gets done.

Following a review of the Detroit incident, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) bans solids from U.S. aircraft

2011: A radicalised Indonesian madrassah student attempts to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner over Los Angeles using a gas explosive I.E.D. he had secreted in his rectum. The effort is thwarted by alert passengers who use their 100 ml shampoo bottles to extinguish the detonator. The TSA responds by finally admitting that none of their silly policies do anything to make travellers safer, and all 50 000 TSA employees resign en masse. I am JOKING of course! The actual TSA response will be to demand that Congress fund the hiring of thousands of Rectal Inspection Officers (RIOs) to deter future attacks. The general public expresses support for the TSA’s new policies on the basis that “it makes me feel safe”. All states of matter (liquid, solid and gas) are barred from aircraft.

Americans are outraged that the new Congress is attempting to restore all the failed policies (deregulation, tax cuts, “pre-emptive” war) that caused the economic and foreign policy mess of the 2000s. When reminded that this is happening because they voted the idiots who caused these problems in the first place back into office, the electorate claims “we forgot.” In a related development, France issues a statement noting that many of its cheeses exercise better political judgement than the American electorate.

Outraged over the obvious liberal bias of most social networking sites, American conservatives establish alternatives for their followers. Most popular are Sarah Palin’s Twatter and Rush Limbaugh’s Fascbook.

2012: Sarah Palin kicks off her presidential campaign with a Twatter posting noting that all of Obama’s so-called successes can be attributed to reality’s obvious liberal bias.

Speaking of reality, television networks in 2012 launch a new genre of television programming called Real Reality shows in response to a viewing public that has grown bored with a format in which participants are encouraged to compete with each other for prizes in order to create stress and tension on air. Instead, viewers are able to watch contestants complete various reality-based challenges such as trying to order cable service, get an insurance claim filed, renew their driving licences, or speak with an actual, live ****ing person by telephone at their ****ing bank.

The TSA thwarts an apparently wide-spread Al-Qaeda conspiracy when TSA RIOs detect thousands of would-be air passengers attempting to board aircraft with more than the permitted maximum of 100ml of gas hidden in their rectums.

President Obama wins re-election to a second term as President when a divided Supreme Court narrowly rules that Alaska, in fact, is not a real state (costing Palin the three electoral votes she needed for victory), and that the U.S. should ask Russia for its money back. President Medvedev, who is also re-elected as President of Russia, responds by noting that all sales of Russian territory can only be exchanged or refunded within 30 days of purchase, and that in any event, he “cannot do anything if America cannot find the receipt.”

2013: Climate change is back on top of the agenda as flash floods devastate Bangladesh, the Maldives national territory shrinks to the size of one of Britney Spears’ stage outfits, and Antarctic penguins abandon their tradition of dressing for dinner every evening, claiming that “it’s just too hot” for tuxedos. World leaders spring into action, flying thousands of heads of state, ministers, specialists and bureaucrats to a climate summit in Mexico City, which concludes with a firmly worded resolution noting that all are “seriously concerned” about global warming and committing all parties to schedule future talks aimed at exploring when they might start developing potential solutions to the problem “as soon as possible.” A footnote to the resolution clarifies that all parties agree that this means “when someone else is in office.”

Sarah Palin’s political career comes to an abrupt and tragic end when she and Dick Cheney go moose hunting in Alaska.

With passenger numbers shrinking and the TSA bureaucracy growing, Transportation Security Administration employees outnumber air travellers for the first time.

In a desperate effort to stimulate spending and re-start the still-struggling U.S. economy, the Treasury Department issues new 20-dollar bank notes featuring portraits of Britney Spears, Jennifer Anniston, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Lopez, and Ben Stiller, in the expectation that consumers “will want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.”

2014: Democrats are once again voted back into office in mid-term elections. Angry Republicans accuse them of wanting to “turn America into a socialist wasteland with a failed economic model,” before flying off to Beijing to beg China’s communist government for more loans to cover America’s growing budget deficit.

The TSA angrily rejects criticism over the discovery that Osama bin Laden was permitted to board a flight to Caracas at LAX, noting that their alert employees successfully confiscated both his toothpaste AND his litre bottle of Evian, as well as carefully verifying that the name on his boarding pass matched his ID, which clearly indicated that he was “Santa Claus” and that he lived at the North Pole. The TSA statement further clarifies that “in a red suit, he looks JUST like him.”

OPEC votes unanimously to begin pricing all petroleum contracts in Chinese Yuan.

2015: After winning preliminary rounds by successfully booking a plumber, having an error corrected in her credit record, and getting her insurance company to actually pay a claim for her daughter’s knee surgery, 42-year old Cindy Lynne Harper of Carbondale, Illinois wins Reality Challenge 2015 when she manages to sell a U.S.-manufactured product to China. The product, a “Chia-pet” bust of Abraham Lincoln, was purchased by housewife Aimee Li of Hangzhou, who proudly displays it on top of the water tank of her toilet.

In order to re-shape its curriculum to better reflect the preferred learning style of its students, New York City Public Schools restructures its school day into 168 class periods lasting 2½ minutes each.

2016: In an effort to re-connect with disinterested younger voters, the Republican and Democratic parties decide to drop their traditional nominating conventions in favour of choosing candidates via a poll on Facebook. Oprah Winfrey and Rush Limbaugh square off in the November election, which Oprah wins in large part due to her performance in the new “talent” portion of the contest, which Amendment 28 of the U.S. Constitution has restructured into a fresher, more youthful reality show style format.

The TSA claims vindication of its policies when a hijacked United Airlines flight from Chicago crashes into a corn field in Indiana and all three passengers, the pilot, and the flight crew are found to have been terrorists.

Wal-Mart announces it will no longer accept U.S. dollars at its North American stores, requiring all purchases to be made in Chinese Yuan.

2017: In a desperate attempt to limit the soaring cost of maintaining the landscaping around their homes, U.S. Senators pass the Stop Price Increases for Casual labour (SPIC) Act, which funds the construction of a massive wall along the U.S.-Mexican border in order to staunch the flood of undocumented aliens attempting to return home.

President Winfrey declares war on France after President Sarkhozy responds to a question from her by replying, “no, it’s the fat that makes you look fat.”

2018: Exasperated over Dick Cheney’s increasingly strident public statements claiming that her policies are “putting Americans at risk,” President Winfrey uses Bush-era anti-terror laws to have him declared an “Enemy Combatant” and water-boarded until he confesses to having planned, plotted and executed the “9-11” attacks, as well as being personally responsible for the Civil War, the explosion of the Maine, the Kennedy assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and to being the previously unidentified evil genius behind American Idol.

In response to research that indicates that the only people still attempting to board commercial aircraft are terrorists, the TSA begins re-routing all US-originating air traffic directly to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where passengers are immediately arrested. After being driven past the base McDonalds, Starbucks, Papa John’s Pizza, bowling alley and cinema on their way to Camp X-Ray, where they are housed in cramped, uncomfortable quarters before taken to an interrogation centre for questioning, some 40% of travellers remain unaware that they have not actually landed in Cincinnati, checked into a Motel 6, and proceeded to their customer’s offices for a sales presentation as they had planned. The other 60% are tipped off when they notice that the coffee is much better than usual.

Two Chinese “taikonauts” successfully land on the moon. In a historic, live address to the people of the world broadcast from the lunar surface, taikonaut Jing Quan of Wuhan says “Ha, ha! Look at me! Moon is SO bouncy!”.

2019: New York City Public Schools decides to drop English composition from its curriculum, in recognition of the fact that student papers and essays “are comprised mostly of emoticons” and that no teacher could recall grading a student paper with anything recognisable as English since the spring of 2014. In fact, no student had actually delivered homework on paper since some years before that, with most assignments being submitted by text message a few minutes before start of class.

China successfully sues the United States for loss of resources and emotional distress after Chinese counterfeiters inadvertently produce and distribute millions of pirated copies of Britney Spears’ latest “album,” Britney Exposed, which Chinese consumers compare to the sound of “deranged chipmunks being stir-fried alive.”

Reporters from the New York Times attempt to interview the last reader of the Times print edition, 96-year-old Jack “Buster” Camigliano of Bay Shore, Long Island. According to an article in the final print edition, Mr. Camigliano responded to reporters’ questions by telling them to “get off of my lawn,” and asking “don’t you bums have anywhere to go?” Camigliano is in the news again a few months later when he is found wandering around his local Wal-Mart muttering “what have you dang commies done with the 8-tracks?”

2020: Oprah Winfrey trounces Rush Limbaugh in the Presidential election despite her running mate Britney Spears’ lacklustre results in the talent segment, in which voters overwhelmingly preferred Limbaugh running mate Glen Beck’s performance, particularly the part where demonstrated his intense patriotism by farting the first six bars of “God Bless America”.

America’s last air traveller, Bart Spencer of Lockwood, Pennsylvania, is put on the “No-Fly” list after it is learned that “he was only doing it for the free rectal exams.”

The U.S. Treasury unveils re-designed coins and notes. Officials explain how the different sizes and colours will make them easier to use for people with vision problems, and the new design, featuring a semi-profile of Mao Tse-Tung on the front of notes of all denominations, will eliminate “all those confusing presidential portraits.” Americans will be able to exchange 10 of their old dollar banknotes for one of the new ones. In a totally unrelated development, President Winfrey asks Americans – just to collect some initial, non-binding views on the idea – how they would feel about singing the March of the Volunteers in place of the Star Spangled Banner before baseball games.

_____________________________

*Actual news item

OK, so I’ve done all the hard work for you telling you what’s going to happen, now all you need to do is live through it all.

But I will depart from the forward-looking theme of this year’s message and take a little time to update all of you on what’s been happening in my world in 2009. I know it has not been a great year for many of you, so I hesitate to be too enthusiastic about what has been a really great year for me.

After five years of developing an independent telecommunications consulting practice that has taken me on assignments throughout the Middle East, as well as Europe, Africa and Latin America, I decided 2009 was the right year to return to full-time employment with an operator, and hence I joined Qtel as Business Development manager in June, with responsibility for Qtel’s new wholesale service business. I’ve recently had a range of other projects added to my portfolio as well, so I am keeping very busy, but the work is stimulating, I have an excellent team and most days cannot wait to get into the office and have at it. I have to admit that Doha often is not my favourite place in the world, but I am making the most of it and am looking forward to taking some trips into the desert with the new Land Rover Defender 110 I expect to take delivery of in January.

In September, I had the best holiday of my life when I spent five weeks in Honduras and Nicaragua diving, visiting Mayan ruins, slogging through rain forests, paddling across pristine lagoons, and visiting remote Indian villages. The experience confirmed for me my basic travel strategy of going places right after the U.S. embassy issues a consular warning sheet advising Americans to “avoid all non-essential travel.” Like my trip to Croatia shortly after the end of the civil war there, the hotels were empty, the beaches were un-crowded, and I never had a problem getting a restaurant reservation.

Like many of you, 2009 was the year I reconnected with many long-lost friends through Facebook, and felt the world shrink as current, but distant, friends became a part of my everyday life.

I finished the year with the trip I am still on, trying to finish this from my seat on board a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Dubai (back in the office tomorrow!). I spent Christmas with my brother, his two amazing children, and my parents in Hawai’i, where my brother’s family now lives on a coffee plantation. (If you have coffee bushes that are ready for harvest, my brother rents out his children for this purpose at very attractive rates. They also can do fruit harvesting, salt mining or other tasks involving heavy, poorly maintained machinery). Visited friends in Tokyo and Shenzen on the way there and back, did some diving, some hiking, ate some great meals and did my share of partying.

As always, hope to see some of you come for a visit this year; the rest of you I’ll see on Facebook.

Best wishes to all of you for 2010 and the decade ahead

฿%€#$£±≈§! (the cranky old man post)

2009-03-30T00:54:00.007+02:00

Progress is a two-sided coin, I guess. While hardly a day goes by that I don't bless the arrival of mobiles, the www and email, and wonder how we ever managed without these technologies, my thought was always that these would be in addition to – not instead of – existing technologies. I love email, but I do find it irritating that it's become next to impossible to send a telegram. Postal mail is the next under threat – the Royal Mail is talking about reducing deliveries to 3x weekly (after previously eliminating twice daily delivery), and the United States Post Office wants to eliminate Saturday deliveries.

The change has been a bit slow in arriving, but the global economic crisis seems to be spurring things along. Arriving here in Washington, I pick up a slimmed-down Washington Post and was dismayed to read that more reductions are on the way. The weekday Business section is being eliminated. Stock listings are being slashed. Comics eliminated. This comes in the wake of the news of other papers either being threatened, shut down, or moving to on-line only format. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will be on-line only in the future. The Independent may not last through the end of the year. News articles cite statistics noting that the average age of newpaper readers is reaching into the 50s, and young people have never read one (OD once noted to me, "Do you know what I hate? Young people!"). I love all the new sources of news, I really do, but I don't want to ever, ever give up popping by the newstand, buying a paper, and sitting down with a cup of coffee and a croissant to read it end to end. It's just a different experience than the disjointed, fractured dribble of news you get throughout the day from web pages and podcasts.

The shrinking Post was bad enough, but just now I tried to go onto the IHT website. Not only is the IHT the best newspaper in the world, they also had the best web-site in the world – very user-friendly and organised. Now visits to www.iht.com are redirected to the "New York Times Global Edition", which is basically just a sort of one-page front-end on top of the NYT web site. Some day, newspapers and mail delivery will disappear altogether. I hope I'm dead by then.

BlognDog
Washington, D.C.
29 March 2009

Sleepless in Washington

2009-03-27T11:18:00.006+01:00

It has been a very long time since I have flown a U.S. airline and not come to regret it. I've spent a good part of the last 48 hours in the air, and the normal stresses associated with travel aside, most of it has been at least tolerable, if not pleasant. On BA between Doha and London, I stretched out for a reasonably comfortable night's sleep in one of their fully flat sleepers. Yesterday, I had quite a nice lunch on Lufthansa from Stockholm to Frankfurt. I chose Lufthansa because it offered one of the few itineraries that avoided U.S. airlines altogether. But as I've done so often in the past, I forgot about code-sharing, and looking for my flight on the departure board at FRA, I was dismayed to learn that the flight I had booked as LH9252 was in fact UA933.

The general crappiness I've come to expect from U.S. airlines started in the departure lounge. Again, I had spent quite a few hours over the previous days in various lounges, and this one was most definitely crappy in comparison. Unlike the sleek, spacious BA lounge at Heathrow terminal 5 I had just been in the day before, nibbling from the buffet of fresh fruit, warm ham sandwiches and other snacks, this one wasn't much bigger than a lot of your friend's living rooms, and looked like it last saw a decor refresh about 1987. A few sad looking platters of cheese and crackers were all that were on offer.

On board, not much better. This was not a new aircraft and the seats and entertainment system were ancient. The only laptop power used the special aircraft adaptors rather than the standard mains power that most jets are fitted with now. Since I didn't own such an adaptor, they helpfully offered to sell me one for US$125. At least the economy class passengers didn't have to suffer as I did on AA a couple years back when they not only charged for drinks, but made the Euro unit price the same as the price in USD; United at least charged €4 or $6.

But of course the worst was yet to come. In their ongoing efforts to insist that things that are done with no difficulties elsewhere in the world are impossible in the U.S.A., U.S. customs makes all arriving passengers claim their bags, go through customs with them, and then re-check them. Arriving at Dulles (yes, they named an airport after that S.O.B.) Airport in Virginia last night, I claimed my two bags, was selected for secondary inspection, had my bags searched, re-packed everything, and re-checked them. I then had to proceed to the main terminal 400 meters away to claim the bag. It was 23:00 by time I got through all that, but United assured me I would have my bags soon.

They repeated these assurances multiple times over the next several hours. They also told me that if I preferred, I could leave and they would have the bags delivered -- for US$75/bag, payable cash on delivery. At 2:30. they finally told me they couldn't find them and that they would have to deliver them (for free).

At this point, the only transportation option was a US$100+ cab ride, so I opted to wait at least until 6:00 when the buses would start running again. In the meantime, I checked in with the office a couple of times and had a very rude and impatient reception - "sir, we cannot do anything more for you."

Every bag loss incident I've had in recent years has involved a U.S. airline. I don't know why they cannot manage what airlines everywhere else do.

BlognDog

Dulles Airport, U.S.A.

27 March 2009

Nomadicity on Khouri on Obama on Iran

2009-03-26T20:04:00.007+01:00

I am not generally one of those travellers who seeks out familiar reminders of home whilst they are travelling; generally, I am adventurous and flexible, and not infrequently, the things other Americans travellers gravitate towards whilst abroad are a source of irritation and annoyance on my part. I certainly do not share the stereotypical American enthusiasm for Big Macs, over-chilled lager, or drinks with 85 ice cubes.

One exception is my appreciation for the International Herald Tribune (IHT). I love this newspaper, and try to read it every day, even if its reporting does sometimes reflect the narrow-minded arrogance that is typically associated with things American. One reason I am able to forgive this transgression is that it does often break with North American conventional wisdom and publish a piece more reflective of the majority view. Today was one of those days, when the IHT’s editors saw fit to publish an opinion piece by Rami G. Khouri of the Daily Star, who wrote about Obama’s outreach to Iran.

The invisible propaganda machine appears to be shifting gears with respect to Iran. Recently, PM Gordon Brown of the U.K. publicly noted something that the MSM has previously gone out of its way not to acknowledge – that Iran has the right (under the terms of the NPT, to which it is a signatory) to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

Today’s opinion piece went ever further in bringing balance and objectivity to the discussion about Iran. Khouri noted some of the numerous positive aspects of Obama’s overture, not least of which was the “courage and self-confidence” it took for Obama to make his public appeal to Iran.

But Khouri also noted the “lingering streak of arrogance” inherent in “both the tone and substance” of the Obama message. Obama notes that Iran is “a great culture with proud traditions,” and then goes on to lecture Iran about the obligations of a leading member of the international community of nations. Khouri rightfully notes that this reflects a “lingering colonial tendency,” in which the West believes it is entitled to “write the rules of conduct for other nations.”

I congratulate the IHT for having the courage to print such candid observations, but also note what is missing from Khouri’s column. While the U.S.A. has engaged in lecturing, condescending language and arrogance towards Iran and other nations, it has also hypocritically ignored Iranian history.

At the time of the establishment of the United States in 1776, Iran had already passed its 200th year of peace with its western neighbour, Turkey, a peace that was not be broken until a successor state to the Turkish Empire, Iraq, under the leadership of a U.S. client by the name of Saddam Hussein and with U.S. encouragement, launched an unprovoked attack against Iran. Iran had also had a long and successful history of encouraging peace, stability, learning and trade, establishing friendly diplomatic relationships with numerous other powers to the East and West, despite its existence as a leading civilisation surrounded by less sophisticated, more brutal societies such as the Uzbeks to the north, the Afghans to the East, the Gulf pirates to the South and the Kurds to the West. The U.S.A would do well to emulate the enlightened, pragmatic approach taken by Persians in its effort to stabilise Afghanistan, and to heed its own advice about reliance on violence as a policy tool.

Thankfully, Condi Rice and her arrogant, non-negotiable pronouncements that frequently characterised her narrow, self-interested demands as something the “international community expects” (usually not the NAM, which represents a super-majority of the world’s people; their more legitmate articulations of the 'international community's' expectations were routinely ignored by "Doctor" Rice), have moved on, and Obama is attempting to put something more reasonable and pragmatic in their place, but the world should not relent on its demands for fairness and balance – as Khouri says, the choice is between attempting to “dictate rules,” or engage in honest, meaningful dialogue.

BlognDog
Over the North Atlantic
26.02.2009

Between Worlds

2009-03-21T14:13:00.009+01:00

One of the many weak excuses I have for not updating Nomadicity more frequently of late has been the intensity of my work-load over the past few months. Besides that, the strict confidentiality rules around the work I've been doing wouldn't allow me to blog about work, and there hasn't been much to my life besides work for some time now. I essentially haven't had a break (except for a few days in December) since my trip to Slovakia in September.

As you may know, a consortium composed of Vodafone and the Qatar Foundation (an oil and gas revenue-funded foundation that serves as the vehicle for H.H. Shaika Mozah's sometimes flaky social development objectives*) was awarded the second mobile licence in Qatar in December 2007. ictQatar didn't manage to actually issue the licence until the following July, when I was on holiday, and I soon found myself being called back to Qatar to answer to Vodafone's impatient demands to commence interconnect negotiations. We've been working on a number of other agreements as well, and last week these months of effort finally bore fruit, in the form of the first two agreements signed between our respective companies.

As I said, there are more agreements in the works, but I am nonetheless taking a much-needed break. Yesterday I drove here to Manama, in neighbouring Bahrain, just to get away from Doha for a while. Naturally, I had to pass through Saudi Arabia on the way (the road and rail causeway linking the two countries is not expected to open until 2013) and can confirm that Saudi drivers are still maintaining their reputation as the world's most dangerous and irresponsible. I also had to mentally note, whilst driving the stretch between Salwa and Hofuf, that if someone ever organises a competition for the country that most resembles a giant litterbox, I believe Saudi Arabia stands a excellent chance of taking the top prize.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: sovereign nation? Or giant litterbox? We report, you decide.

So although I have a few more things to do next week to wrap things up with Vodafone, I am trying to relax here in Manama, forget about Vodafone, Qtel, Doha, and Qatar, and mentally shift gears for next week, when I head to Washington again for my third "Overseas Americans Week", a volunteer citizen-lobbyist effort that brings attention to issues of concern to Americans living overseas. Hopefully I'll be able to blog about those experiences as they unfold, but I won't be surprised if my work and social schedule makes that difficult. But I am looking forward to saying "good-bye" to Qatar and "hello" to Washington, at least for a short while.

BlogDog
Manama, Bahrain
21 March 2009

*H.H. recently publicly declared that "access to pornography on satellite television" was the "biggest problem facing Qatar today" (or words to that effect), and complained that these stations lacked "proper controls" (read: "censorship"). This in a country with the biggest per-capita carbon footprint in the world, in which youths seem to spend most of their time killing themselves and others through reckless, irresponsible driving, domestics are regularly physically and sexually abused by employers who are never held to account, and in which autocracy, religious prejudice, racism, superstition and tribalism are all enshrined in law, culture and practice.

Stimulate this!

2009-02-20T19:25:00.016+01:00

I never seem to learn. Optimism is my fatal flaw. Back in 2001, when we watched with open mouths as images of passenger jets slamming into the twin towers were endlessly replayed on our computer and television screens, I couldn't help but have the thought creep into the back of my mind, "well, now at least they'll finally be forced to give up on this stupid idea that they can protect people through airport screening." I really believed that the success of those attacks would convince the government to give up on the whole retarded screening idea, and within weeks we'd be back to the way things were when I first started flying, when you just left the check in counter and walked to your gate and boarded your plane without stopping for anything except a newspaper and shoe shine (Also, they didn't have 'flight attendants' in those days, they had 'stewardesses,' who had a mandatory retirement age of 30, you could smoke on board, they gave you a hot meal on a plate with metal cutlery, and no one had ever heard of 'air rage.'). Of course, instead we got Michael Chertoff, Kip Hawley and the TSA.

Similarly, when the metaphorical aircraft of reality and underlying value slammed into the twin towers of the housing bubble and Republican tax cuts, exposing what appeared to be solid economic structures as houses of cards that came dramatically crashing down in clouds of dust and flame, I honestly expected the entire conservative establishment – from Congress to the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and Fox News – to meekly present themselves to American people and to admit, humbly and publicly, that apparently they had completely misjudged just about everything and would be dedicating the rest of their lives to the advancement of Socialism.

Instead, Rush Limbaugh (yes, he's apparently still on the air) voiced his hopes that Obama's economic stimulus plan would fail so that the Republicans could re-take control of Congress in 2010. William Kristol, in contrast, decided to pretend that the past eight years had never happened, and wrote an opinion piece in his new role as opinion page columnist for the New York Times entitled "Will Obama Save Liberalism?," as if it was the politics of the left, rather than his own, whose future survival is looking dubious. Amongst numerous other ridiculous suggestions was the assertion that "[c]onservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day," as if the Great Depression, Viet Nam, the hunt for Saddam's WMDs, the 'war on drugs,' Anastazio Somoza, Jacobo Arbenz, Mohammad Mossadegh, Fulgencia Batista, global warming, Watergate, Contragate, and the current economic meltdown had never happened.

But even Kristol's deranged rantings appear reasonable and reflective in comparison with the fantastic diatribe written by former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen entitled "2688 days", named for the period of time over which "our" country has been spared a terror attack. In Thiessen's view (apparently based on understandings of the nature of terrorism he's developed through years of experience watching the Fox series '24'), there hasn't been an attack "on American soil" since 9/11, thanks to Bush administration's readiness to equate the Constitution with toilet roll. Apparently, Thiessen is unconcerned about the fact that during this 2688-day period, thousands died in terror attacks in Baghdad, Fallujah, Madrid, Bali, London, Tunis, Damman, Beslan, Amman, Istanbul, Beirut, Moscow and numerous other places. In the overwhelming majority of these attacks, Americans and their allies were the targets and the mis-guided policies promulgated by Bush and supported by people like Thiessen were the cause of these attacks.

Similarly, Dick Cheney has been making the rounds of conservative radio shows criticising Obama and his supporters for being more concerned with "reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist" than with protecting Americans (note Cheney's implicit belief that anyone he says is a terrorist must in fact be a terrorist). Thiessen and Cheney claim their violent methods have "prevented attacks". But this is like some third-rate, violent drug dealer, who has enslaved the young men of the neighbourhood through drug addiction into stealing from the rest of the community in order to support their drug habits. One day they catch one of these addicts breaking into their own house (the only nice house in the neighbourhood) and violently beat him to death. Then they brag to their neighbours about their contribution to 'crime prevention.' Yes, Cheney's waterboarding may have "stopped" some attacks, but only ones which would not have happened in the first place were it not for the abusive policies he has promoted.

So given the Republicans complete disconnection from reality, it should not surprise us to see that their reaction to the disastrous consequences of the series of tax cuts they have promoted over the past 30 years – which obviously have no purpose beyond accelerating the transfer of wealth from poor to rich – is to suggest that what is needed are more and deeper tax cuts. That's the nice thing about being a Republican – you never need to think or analyse, no matter what the problem is, the 'solution' is always the same – more tax cuts.

BlognDog
Doha
20 February 2009

Glory, Glory Halellujah!

2008-12-20T17:13:00.011+01:00

I've held off on putting my own response to Obama's election down on virtual paper, mostly because so many other bloggers have been doing the same thing, and one thing we always try to avoid here at Nomadicity is being part of the crowd. Also, with so much being written about it, and so many facets to the political and historical significance of the event, I hesitate to implicitly suggest I have something to say about it that someone else hasn't already said, and said a bit more eloquently than I ever will. And, like many I am of course still holding my breath, unwilling let go of my final doubts that this isn't just yet another sophisticated plot by the capitalists and Washington insiders to create an illusion of change whilst continuing with the status quo. Progressives have noted with concern Obama cabinet choices, such as keeping Gates on in Defence, or his ill-advised appointment of Hilary Clinton to State. Yes, for a guy who ran on a platform of "change," he certainly seems to have surrounded himself with Beltway insiders: from his VP pick, Joe Biden, to Clinton, Gates and Tom Daschle for HHS. But most of his critics seemed to have overlooked many other choices. One traditional voice from the Left that has not is Mother Jones magazine, which devoted this article to cataloguing the numerous progressives that have been appointed to senior positions on the transition team.

But the concept of "change" that we projected onto Obama and his team became truly tangible for me for the first time today, when I read the article in today's New York Times entitled "Obama Appoints Climate Change Experts." With climate change being arguably the single biggest threat to our society (and indeed, our very survival), it should not of course be in the least bit remarkable that Obama has appointed some respected, knowledgable, capable and intelligent experts to be responsible for developing plans and formulating policy to address the problem. But of course it is very remarkable indeed, for the simple reason that for the last eight years, U.S. policy on climate change under Bush has been focussed around, a) pretending it doesn't exist, b) obstructing efforts by others to address the problem, and c) attempting to aggresively and viciously besmirch the reputation of anyone silly enough to note aloud the Emperor's lack of garments.

Many have noted the huge challenges Obama faces – cleaning up a whole range of tangled messes left by Bush and Cheney on everything from civil rights to foreign affairs to national finances. But perhaps no President has ever had it easier – Bush has lowered the bar so far that if Obama simply spent the next eight years ignoring problems – rather than exacerbating them – it would be a huge improvement. But for me at least, his choices for leadership on climate change indicate that even our highest hopes for this Administration have not been misplaced. But beyond the impeccable credentials of the two respected experts – John Holdren of Harvard as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Jane Lubchenco as head of the NOAA that Obama has chosen – for me it was his comments on these appointments that convinced me that we have indeed elected an individual who is truly committed to change:

''From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way,'' Obama said in announcing his selections in his weekly radio address. ''Leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process.''''Because the truth is that promoting science isn't just about providing resources -- it's about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology,''

Ten years ago it would have been impossible for me to imagine that simple integrity amongst government scientists would seem so refreshing and different. Yet, thanks to Bush, that's where we are. The Truth is Marching On.

BlognDog
Doha
20 December 2008

Back to the Smörgåsbord

2008-10-12T19:22:00.032+02:00

We're feeling a bit dizzy and disoriented here at Nomadicity, having spent the last few months alternating between long, intense days at the office and relaxing holidays around the Mediterranean, watching the Republicans and the global financial system implode, visiting new places and meeting new people, and having the opportunity to hang out with old friends in familiar surroundings at home in Stockholm. So I felt it was time for another Nomadicity Smörgåsbord Post™, in which we bounce randomly from one topic to another in an unbalanced, intoxicated manner that I hope is as intriguing as it is irritating. It may help to pour yourself a glass or two before reading – God knows I plan to imbibe a bit while writing.

Let me begin with a Smörgåsbord Post™ tradition by sharing with you another interview by John Oliver of the Daily Show:

But Nomadicity's pandering to the masses doesn't end with an embedded video or two – in response to demand from our many semi-literate visitors, I am pleased to be able to dispense with our obligation to provide an update on our recent holiday travels around the eastern Mediterranean, Slovakia, Austria and Switzerland by borrowing a tradition from EuroNews by posting a dozen or so photo highlights from our travels with "no comment."

As a card-carrying member of the international digerati, being out of town didn't mean I was out of touch, and between surfing at hot spots and listening to BBC News podcasts, I was able to remain plugged into the 24/7 news cycle and didn't miss any of the numerous dramatic news stories that emerged during my travels, including the breathlessly delivered report that the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider did not create a massive black hole that swallowed the earth and most of the rest of the solar system, as a number of home-schooled conservatives expected it to. I was also able to watch Sarah Palin attempt to persuade voters that she was an better candidate for public office than Joe Biden by demonstrating that she was even more common and ordinary than George Bush, yet more paranoid and vicious than Dick Cheney, and of course to watch the cumulative effects of 8 years of Bush economic policy play out in the financial markets.

The Bush "bailout" package – a piece of legislation that caps his years' of effort to introduce communism to America – is the perfect complement to his earlier initiatives to develop gulags, torture programmes, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and a party-loyalty based approach to managing the federal bureaucracy. Now, with the introduction of a planned economy, the transition is complete.

Sarah Palin was enthusiastic in her endorsement – "We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings" she said, and noted that "there was greed and there is corruption on Wall Street. And we need to stop that". Such talk might have won over a Socialist like myself, except that – secure in the knowledge that the morons that she and Bush call their "base" would never be bright enough to notice the difference – she promptly contradicted herself by revealing herself to be an unreformed advocate of liberal economics by declaring that "I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle " and talked directly to bad, evil, banking-and-financial-system-regulating government by saying: "government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper".

This is of course, precisely the mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. It all started with a repulsive little man named Ronald Reagan, who was the first politician to discover the previously untapped power of the now-critical moron voting bloc by declaring that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" His ideological successor, George Bush, turned that ignorant statement into official policy by ensuring that no one in New Orleans ever heard anyone utter such terrifying words in the days following Hurricane Katrina. Those suffering from unemployment, lack of health insurance, or abusive lending practices have been similarly celebrating the absence of any official meddling with capitalism's unrestrained orgy of abuse during the Bush years. Those who want the party to continue will of course be voting McCain-Palin. Those of us who believe that wealth should bubble up from the masses, rather than trickling down from the capitalists, won't.

But let me conclude by counting a few of my many blessings. Doha is a much more liveable place than the one I left a few weeks ago -- the temperature has dropped substantially, Ramadan is over, and the bars are open again. All of my savings are in cash and gold. I don't have a mortgage or own real estate in the USA, the UK or Spain. So far, the Gulf is unaffected by the financial storms sweeping the rest of the world, and my job is secure. Barack Hussein Obama is all but certain to be the next President of the United States. With the exception of the fact that Britney has just released a new album, life is pretty good.

BlognDog
Doha
15 October 2008

How do I Like Them Apples? I'm Glad you Asked...

2008-08-24T17:36:00.020+02:00

Regular readers (yes, both of you) know that I switched back to the Mac platform after nearly a decade in the Windows®™ world. You may also know that I have had some mixed feelings about the result.

The biggest problem continues to be synching with other devices. Previously, I was carrying a Palm PDA, two Nokia phones and a Windows©☢☠ laptop, and synching between all those devices – and both Plaxo and Yahoo! on line – without any trouble.

Apple, on the other hand, doesn't even support synching of notes and to-dos at all, only calendars and contacts. What it does synch is buggy, prone to failure, and frequently generates duplicates (both duplicate records are created and information within a record are duplicated). I've spent many hours over the past year trying to get around this problem. I thought using Microsoft's Entourage (basically, Outlook for the Mac platform) might be the answer, but when I upgraded to Office 2008 this past February, they dropped support for Palm synching. Then I learned about the "Missing Synch," a third party synching application that seem to be written with people like me in mind. It claimed to be able to allow you to set your synching parameters, so you could sync your calendar and address book with the Mac OS, your to-dos with Entourage, and your notes with a special Mac Notes application provided in the package. As an added bonus, it also included a conduit for synching AvantGo, something that AvantGo itself did not offer. It also offered a way around one of the biggest problems with Mac calendar sync -- unlike the Windows world, in which calendar entries are assigned into "categories" (e.g., work, personal, etc.), Mac creates separate "calendars" for each. Palm also uses the Outlook "category" approach, so these two applications sync without problem, but synching a Palm with a Mac means you lose this feature. Missing Sync resolves this problem by translating between the two.

It all sounded great in theory, but in practice, Missing Synch always crashed when trying to sync either the Notes application or AvantGo, so I had to turn those two sync conduits off. My Palm was getting outdated anyway, and its paltry 64 mb of storage (which had seemed so generous when I upgraded from my earlier 8 mb Palm device 5 years ago) was causing problems. So I decided I could solve it all by moving to a new iPod touch as my handheld.

The iPod Touch is definitely a very cool device. High resolution graphics, an awesome touch screen interface, and of course, music. But the main thing that made my Palm my constant companion was all the applications available for it. I relied on the currency and units convertor, weather, time zone, and flight information in the WorldMate Companion, on the underground maps in Metro, my Lufthansa flight schedule and my DB rail timetable to get me around the world. I communicated with the help of my Ectacto French, Polish, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Swedish dictionaries, I passed the time waiting in ticket queues and at departure gates reading e-books, and I managed my expenses with the help of PocketMoney. None of these were available for the iPod touch, and although the release of this device was more or less simultaneous with the release of Leopard – which introduced a to-do list and notes application to the Mac platform – they still didn't sync with similar applications on the iPod or with on-line platforms such as Plaxo.

Additionally, synching with either of my Nokias has been a disaster. Both (a 6680 and an E65) worked flawlessly with Windows®✞☹ and both worked for a while with my Mac. But the E65 now refuses to sync altogether, and the 6680 I can only do a "reset sync info" on and override the data on it with data from my Mac, but cannot enter data on the phone and have it uploaded to the Mac. So away from my desk, I am doing something I haven't done since 1996 -- scribbling things down on paper and waiting until I have a chance to put them in the laptop later.

But enough whining. Here is the good news. First, iPhone has now come out with a new model that addresses most -- but not all -- of the flaws in the first model. First and foremost, it now supports 3G, and indeed, most of the various flavours of 3G found around the world, so it will work in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia like most phones, but it will also work withthe non-standard variants used in Australia, the United States, Japan and parts of Latin America. Second, Apple has seen the light and abandoned their retarded bundled marketing model, so I can buy a phone and then go out and decide which data plan I want to go with it. Or, I can swap out my home operator's SIM for one from the country I visiting. This is of course how everybody uses their phone, but that didn't stop Apple from deciding it was a smart idea to try to stop people from doing it.

At the same time, Apple upgraded their iPhone/iPod Touch software to fix a number of stupid problems. Amongst these was the fact that not only did the Mac OS Calendar application use separate calendars instead of categories, the iPhone supported only a single category. Anything synched to your iPhone from your Mac showed up all in one category, and if you entered a new event on your iPhone, it was placed in whichever category you pre-designated as default when synching with your Mac OS computer. The new software now includes the same categories as on the desktop (although stupidly the iPhone supports only 5 colours, instead of the 6 that are on the desktop version). And they still haven't addressed the problem of no syncing of to-dos or notes.

Another welcome introduction was the replacement of .mac with "mobileme". This is a web-based application that allows you to sync with a web-based back up (similar to Plaxo), and also to sych with Outlook. Finally! A solution to my problem – NOT! Plaxo synchs fine with my address book in both Mac and Outlook, and Plaxo calendar synchs fine with Outlook, but I cannot get Plaxo calendar to synch with Mac calendar. A calendar entry made in Mac OS will appear as it should in MobileMe on line, and then show up in Outlook. An entry made in MobileMe will show up in both Mac OS and Outlook. But an entry made in Outlook never shows up in MobileMe. What could the problem be? I decide to have a look around the Apple support web-site, and what do I find?

MobileMe syncing allows you to sync your contacts and calendars with Outlook, unless Outlook is connected to an Exchange server. In this situation, syncing your Outlook data with MobileMe is not supported.

So very typical of Apple – their marketing folks inundate us with sales pitches saying things like, "you use a Mac at home, and a Windows©™™℃ PC at work, get MobileMe and keep both of them in Sync!". Right, fine, as long as your office PC isn't connected to an Exchange server! All four or five people this applies to are probably delighted!

Additional disappointment came in the form of the drawbacks Apple did NOT address with the new iPhone and the new software. You still cannot:

Use your iPhone to connect your laptop to the internet, like you can with just about any other phone made in the last decade
Connect your iPhone to any Bluetooth device except the Apple proprietary Bluetooth headset (no, no listening to your tunes using wireless Bluetooth stereo headphones, or sending your photos to your laptop)
Send an MMS(!)
Make a video call(!)

So you are probably wondering by now -- where is the good news? There is a fair amount of it actually. Most exciting is the new "App Store" from Apple, in which they have unleashed the creative power of thousands of independent developers to bring specialised software to market. Unfortunately, to date, most of it is a bunch of gimmicky nonsense -- there are at least a half-dozen developers who have come up with clever pieces of software that manage the complex task of turning your iPhone into a flashlight in the event of an emergency. I am disappointed because for the most part, I have yet to see my favourite Palm applications appear there. MobiMate has informed me that they are not planning to develop an iPhone version of their WorldMate software. AvantGo seems to have halted development work of any kind. Metro has said on their web-site that they cannot develop for iPhone because they would need a Mac -- resulting in several devoted Metro users offering to send or buy them one if they would reconsider. I am pleased that Hardy Macia at Catamount Software has already released an iPhone version of his kick-ass PocketMoney software, probably the most useful, versatile and stable piece of software I've ever had the pleasure to use. (If only other developers were as good).

But Mac has unleashed the best energies the capitalist system has to offer (which, despite its many flaws, is really good at things like this), and I am confident that it will not be long before all the software we need will be available. Already it is possible to find single-city applications for major public transport systems such as New York, London and Tokyo -- and it shouldn't be long before we have something like Metro's application, featuring hundreds of cities -- from Aachen to Zagreb, including places like Quito, Poprad Tatry, Kazan and Cremona – available for the iPhone. No one has yet replicated WorldMate's all-in-one functionality (which included animated satellite weather maps), but I did today find a gem amongst the numerous "conversion" programmes on offer in the AppStore. "The Convertor" by Vladimir Kofman blows MobiMate out of the water with respect to the conversions function. It offers conversions in 26 different categories, including the old standards such as distance and area, but also more exotic measures such as luminance, charge, density and torque. It will calculate how many chi are in a light-year, or the number of kabiet in a sea league. Currency exchange uses an on-line source to give you the Gambian dalasi equivalent of the street snack you just bought in Tegulcigapa for 65 Honduran lempira. If you want to update the exchange rates from the on-line source, you just give your iPod a shake – is that cool or what?

I am still waiting for some decent foreign language dictionaries to appear -- so far, the limited offerings available so far are, well, limited. But given that it's only been possible to develop for this platform for a few months, I am sure we won't have long to wait for something better to appear. And no sign DB will make its railway timetables available in iPhone format.

More reason for optimism comes from Steve Jobs' public comments about the OS. The next version of the OS -- code-named "Snow Leopard" will, in Apple's words, "take a breather" from the addtion of new features and functions, and will instead focus on making it more compatible with Exchange. Does this mean we will finally be able to enjoy seamless, reliable synching with our other devices? Connect to our mail servers at work with our Macs?

I expect to see all these problems ironed out over the next 18 - 24 months. They had better be, since I have bet on them by now buying not only a PowerBook and an iPod, but also a Time Machine, and I expect to invest in an AppleTV box, an iMac and an iPhone in the near future. Obviously, I am reasonably confident this will happen, but it is still somewhat incredible that my devices are substantially less compatible and less integrated than the ones I was using 24 - 36 months ago.

BlognDog
Doha
24 August 2008

Circle of Karma

2008-08-15T15:31:00.013+02:00

Like many others (particularly in the blogosphere), I often fault the MSM (mainstream media) for their failure to report on stories that are odds with views and conventions dictated by "establishment" authorities, whether that means the Bush administration, the Pentagon, ExxonMobile or AIPAC. The purpose of my post today is not repeat or recount such failures, which have been adequately documented elsewhere. But what has not often been noted is that the MSM also frequently fails to note or recognise the connections between or broader implications of the stories they do report on.

Reading recent stories in the New York Times and elsewhere about the politicisation of the civil service by the Bush Administration, I wondered why none of the news analysts noted how this revelation fit into the broader historical framework; specifically, how the introduction of a Nomenklatura style approach to the recruitment of civil servants appears to be the final step in a natural progression, in which the ideology and methodology of the Soviet Union has been steadily and gradually incorporated into US policy since the end of the Cold War. The politicisation of the civil service was not by any means and isolated or exceptional development. A system of gulags for incarcerating American political enemies has been established (not so much an archipeligo as a constellation), complete with show trials run by kangaroo courts for putting a veneer of legitimacy on the system. Torture techniques used on prisoners held within this system were not merely inspired by Soviet methods, it has now emerged that in 2002 the C.I.A. actually reverse-engineered Soviet era torture manuals and trained "interrogators" to use the same techniques that American leaders and diplomats had spent decades criticising. Fox News now fills the role held by Pravda (Правда) under the Soviet system, complete with the demonisation and dehumanisation of political enemies and simplistic appeals to viewer emotions in place of objective fact gathering (both Fox and Pravda also of course share the Orwellian tradition of brazen assertion of obvious falsehood - "правда" is the Russian word for "truth," which was rarely found in the pages of Pravda, and Fox uses the tag-line "fair and balanced" for its blatantly partisan "news" casts).

But of course what the Americans are doing is nothing new. The Soviets themselves adopted these practices after defeating the Nazis, despite the fact they led this battle because they opposed everything the Nazis stood for. Similarly, the Americans spent blood and treasure in alliance with socialists such as Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh and others because they obstensibly supported their anti-colonialist message of liberty and self-determination, yet promptly betrayed their former allies in favour of reactionary forces in China, Japan, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere as soon as the Axis powers had been defeated. And the Jews of course, have been busy for years exterminating and oppressing the Palestinians with Prussian efficiency and ruthlessness for decades now.

But you'll find no observations about these obvious historical paralells in any analysis published in an American-controlled publication or broadcast.

BlognDog
Doha
15 August 2008

Suck like an Egyptian

2008-07-19T08:42:00.010+02:00

After having shared my thoughts on the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon in Mexico last year, I thought it obligatory to do the same for my recent visit to the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. I spent half a day there, my final day in a 10-day visit to Egypt, five of which were spent in Cairo. But this entry isn't really about the Pyramids (except perhaps incidentally), but rather about my impressions of Egypt.

The Sphinx and the Pyramid of Khufre, Giza

Egypt has spent many years near the top of the list of places I haven't been to but would really like to visit. I have many well-travelled friends who have visited, and they almost invariably loved the place. I too, found much to like about Egypt, but both OD and I both felt what can best described as a sense of frustration, frustration resulting from Egypt's failure to make small, easily achieved changes to its society that would have made the experience 1000 times better. Having travelled extensively throughout the Arab world, problems like corruption, nepotism, sexism, racism, sexual harassment, tribalism, hypocrisy, lack of transparency, lack of personal responsibility, indifference towards the environment, etc. are hardly new to me, nor are they unique to Egypt. They are endemic throughout the region, but nowhere else did I see any of them reach the levels the Egyptians have managed to accomplish.

The scope of these problems was evident before we even arrived. We travelled to Egypt by ferry from Aqaba in Jordan. The terminal there was half construction site, half disorganised pandemonium. We arrived fully expecting that the ferry would not depart for at least four hours after its scheduled departure time at noon, but the fact that it didn't actually depart from the pier until 18:50 was only the start of the problems. These started with the exit procedures. Signs at the entrance directed passengers to first go to the first floor to purchase a ticket, so we hauled our typically heavy load of baggage up the stairs and found the ticket window. The agent directed us to a travel agency on the other side of the hall. He, in turn, directed us back to another one of the shipping agency's ticket windows. The agent there informed us that tickets would not go on sale for another hour, and that we should check back.

Vehicles waiting to board the Aqaba-Nuweiba ferry: items tied to car roofs include sofas, toilets, refrigerators, water tanks and – possibly – other cars

In the meantime, I decided to get the emigration formalities sorted out. The emigration office was thoughtfully located near the ticket windows, but after reaching the front of a longish queue, I was informed that I first had to go downstairs to pay the exit tax. Logical. Go downstairs, pay the tax, come back upstairs, get the passport stamped. Sit and read for a while. Then a helpful Jordanian gentleman approaches and informs us that we should go buy tickets and head to the ferry now. I go back to the ticket window, even though a full hour has not passed. He again directs me back to the travel agency. This time I tell him I've already gone to the agent, and he's just directed me back again. He waves the agent over and says something to him in Arabic. The agent motions for me to accompany him back to his office. On the way, I tell the agent to be sure to give me tickets for the "speed boat." [There are two types of ferry operated by AB Maritime – hydrofoils (which they call the "speed boat") and conventional ferries.] He tells me, no, the speed boat is sold out for today. I insist that I must have a ticket for the speed boat. He repeats that it is "sold out." I repeat that he must sell me tickets for that boat. He turns around, heads back to the ticket office and speaks briefly to the agent, then turns back to me and says, "OK, no problem". By this point we have been waiting around for over an hour, we've been directed back and forth across the departure hall to one window after another, been given all manner of conflicting information, and then, finally, the agent simply takes my $140,00 cash from me and hands me two tickets. Done. We head for the port.

On board, we are surprised to see signage in English, Finnish and Estonian, and it soon becomes clear that this vessel – the Queen Nefertiti – was recently purchased (May 2007) from Tallink after previously serving on the Helsinki-Tallin run. Upstairs we find posters promoting tourism to Tallin still in place on the walls. Otherwise, it bears little resemblance to the clean, efficient Tallink vessels I see regularly in port at home in Stockholm. There is trash everywhere, and it's obvious that many surfaces have not seen a cleaning in some months. The inlaid hardwood floor, which would have been shined to a high polish under Tallink's management, is marred with thousands of aging globs of chewing gum. The condition of the vessel in no way resembles the gleaming pictures that AB Maritime proudly displays on its website (see http://www.abmaritime.com.jo/main.html). Later, OD is to find the floor of the ladies' toilet awash in 3cm of urine.

The boat experience fore-shadowed the problems (which admittedly never rose above the level of petty annoyance) that we experienced over the next few days. Every tourist site was mobbed with persistent, annoying vendors and littered with debris. The Egyptian museum, the Pyramids and other sites had strict rules against taking photographs in many areas, a rule which enabled the police to earn a steady side income in bribes collected in exchange for looking the other way while you took pictures. Egyptian men were incredibly creative in finding excuses to touch OD.

We spent our first few days at a resort in Sharm El-Sheikh. On our second night, I signed up for a tour that took us to St. Catherine's monastery, at the base of Mt. Sinai, arriving at around 2:30 in the morning. From there we climbed to the summit of Mt. Sinai, where I joined thousands of others in waiting for the sunrise. When it did rise, its rays illuminated a landscape of empty plastic bottles, cans, cups, foil, paper and dried feces. Returning to the base of the mountain, we were assailed by hordes of bedouin flogging guidebooks and cheap trinkets.

The Pyramids were even worse. You stand before these ancient and awe-inspiring monuments, attempting to reflect on their beauty and meaning, and you are assaulted with an unending barrage of "excuse me, where are you from?" For reasons I don't understand, this question has become the standard opening line in every Egyptian's attempt to sell you trinkets, offer you guide services, or (if you are a woman) to find an excuse to touch you somewhere. It doesn't matter how you respond: "England", "Sweden," "U.S.A.", "Italy", etc., the response is invariably "[Name of Country], number one!" You could say, "I'm from East Bumfuck, Texas," and they would enthusiastically respond, "East Bumfuck, number one!" If you told me them that you were a homeless person who was currently living in small, smelly shithole, their eyes would light up, they would break into a broad smile, and loudly pronounce, "Shithole, number one!" It doesn't matter, because Egyptians apparently believe that once you have responded, they now have a personal relationship with you, one that involves some combination of giving them money or (again, usually only if you are female) and allowing them to touch you in some manner.

Talk to Egyptians about these problems and they will readily acknowledge them. But they will never admit to any responsibility for causing them, something that will always be blamed on Mubarak and his cronies. In many ways, they are right to do so – the corruption and lack of acceptance of responsibility does start at the top and no doubt much of the problem is due simply to the rest of society simply imitating their leaders. Egyptians will also attempt to minimise the importance of these problems by noting that despite them, theirs is still the most ancient and amazing civilisation ever to exist, and what's a bit of litter in comparison with an accomplishment like the Pyramids? Trying to persuade them of the illogic of this thinking is pointless.

But like so many visitors before me, I still recommend a visit. It's a unique and amazing place.

BlognDog
Doha
20 July 2008

A Sad Farewell

2008-04-26T20:02:00.016+02:00

Back in Doha after a visit to the U.S.A., where I participated in a lobbying effort in Washington before heading to New England to pack up some things at my parents, who are on the verge of retiring and selling the house they have lived in for the past 20 odd years. All of that went according to plan, but unplanned was the sad yet somehow fortunately timed demise of the second of two cats I left in their care when I left the USA 13 years ago.

Although they were litter-mates, Spike and Spud had very different personalities, and although my ex-girlfriend and I named them before we had a real sense of their characters, time proved both of them to be appropriately named. Spud was the gentle, affectionate smaller one, whereas as Spike was the independent, assertive one that dictated the terms of his relationship with his owners from the very beginning. Not long after bringing him home from the shelter, we learned that failing to rise promptly at six and immediately tend to his empty food dish was to risk having him tunnel his way under the covers until he found an adequately sensitive area of flesh to nibble on until you understood that whether you fed him or not, you weren't going to get any more sleep.

Spike in healthier, happier days

Spud died a few years ago after developing a carcinoma in reaction to a feline leukemia shot, but Spike carried on, despite his significantly overweight 10 kg bulk. In December, my mother emailed me let me know that his health was deteriorating, but after a few weeks he rallied and regained his energy and appetite. Then, as I walking up 24th Street in Washington last week, on my way back from a day of meetings on the Hill to my hotel in the west end, my mother called to tell me he had taken a sudden turn for the worse, that the vet had drained 90 ml of bloody fluid from his lungs, and that he might expire any day.

I arrived a few days later to find Spike sitting on a towel in his favourite spot, where one of the overhead spotlights in the living room created a warm spot on the floor. His breathing was laboured, and he uncharacteristically was refusing all food. He rarely moved over the next few days, his legs unsteady and clearly exhausted by moving just a few meters. Occaisionally he would drink water, but rarely took any food. But gently stroking his ears or his back still elicited a gentle purring. A couple of days later he emitted a pained yowl, something he would do with increasing frequency until Thursday, when he began complaining almost constantly. He stopped purring in response to my attentions. He was so weak that he was unable to make the trip to his litter box and urinated on the floor. Finally we made the decision to have him put to sleep early Friday morning. Thursday night I spent sleeping on the sofa next to him, stroking him and calming him when his yowling let me know he was suffering.

Saying good-bye, 25 April 2008

I got up early on Friday and finished digging the grave my Dad had started for him the day before, next to the spot where he had laid Spud to rest some years previously. Then it was time. I snapped a few last photos of the two of us, wrapped him in a towel and carried him to the car. Immediately he found reserves of strength, scratching my arm deeply and crying out loudly and repeatedly. As my mother drove towards the vet's clinic, I pleaded with him to calm down and not make it harder on me. Just then my mobile rang; it was my ex-girlfriend, calling to check on him. As I updated her, he cried out again, then emitted a gasp, and was limp. I was grateful that he seemed to be finally resigning himself. I stayed on the phone with my ex- until we pulled into the car park and it occurred to me that he had already expired. It was obvious this was the case as soon as we brought him in and laid him on cold steel examination table. He had collapsed in such a natural position, with his forepaws on my arm and his head resting in the crook of my elbow it felt like he did when he was young, when his trust in me led him to sprawl limply and languidly across my lap. The vet came in and checked for a heartbeat, expressed his condolences and remarked on what a good cat he had been. So Spike died the way he lived – in his own time and on his own terms. We took his still-warm body home and laid it in the grave we had dug with two of his cat blankets. My mother stroked his head in farewell and then left me alone to cover him over and spread a blanket of pine needles back over the bare spot of earth. I am mourning him still, but so, so grateful for the 15 years he brightened my life with his unpredictable antics and unique personality.

BlognDog
Doha
26 April 2008

We May be Americans, but We Ain't Stupid...

2008-03-25T20:33:00.007+01:00

At least not us Democrats. Okay, at least not most of us Democrats. ALL RIGHT, at least not ALL of us Democrats!

Unbelievable what Hilary has just posted on her campaign web site. Yes, I know that things like re-electing George Bush (yes, he did have to cheat, but only a little) and believing that the "surge" was a "success" have led to some rather cynical views about the intelligence of the American electorate, but it is nonetheless shocking to read things like the proposal for bringing the USA out of its deepening, self-inflicted economic crisis that Hilary has just posted on her campaign web-site.

Amongst other key economic milestones the USA has achieved under Bush are:

for the first time in any nation at any time in the history of human civilisation, having a society in which more than 1% of the population is behind bars
the emergence of a two-tier society is indicated by a growing divergence in average life expectancy between rich and poor
nearly a third of Americans now live at or near the poverty line
most recently of course, there is the laissez-faire economic policy-driven liquidity crisis , which has directly bankrupted millions of Americans and indirectly led thousands to suicide and other acts of despair

Bush, of course, deserves much of blame, but we all know a half-wit like him could not have achieved such a total state of failure on his own. Bush's co-conspirators are well known, but instead of hunting them down and sending them to prison, Hilary proposes that Bush should immediately "appoint an Emergency Working Group on Foreclosures" and that this working group should consist of the very people who got us into this mess in the first place, "eminent leaders like Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker, and Bob Rubin".

Sure, Hilary, and then we'll ask ExxonMobil to solve the global warming problem, and have a Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice task force to figure out how to end the war in Iraq. And to think nearly half of registered Democrats think she should be President.

BlognDog
Doha
25 March 2008

A Historic Easter in Doha

2008-03-23T19:25:00.005+01:00

Last Saturday, I attended consecration ceremonies at the new Our Lady of the Rosary Church here in Doha. Any consecration is of course a special occaision, but this was the first church of any denomination to be built in Qatar in more than 1400 years.

Most states in the Gulf region have had hostile attitudes towards religions other than Islam for some time. In response to diplomatic pressures and the economic realities of needing to rely on an expatriate work-force, most have been gradually loosening these restrictions. Dubai has several large churches, and the Catholic and other churches have been operating more or less freely in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman for some time now. The two Wahabi states, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the State of Qatar, have been the slowest to liberalise. Saudi Arabia continues to forbid the practice of any religion other than Islam, and priests who serve in the active underground church community there are subject to detention, torture and expulsion. As it is has in so many other areas, Qatar has dealt with the issue by trying to have it both ways. Churches have been formally banned, but buildings such as the shed-like structure I have been going to every Sunday for the past few months for Mass are ignored, with the understanding that the church does nothing to draw attention to them. Now the Emir has decided to take a step forward, and he has made a gift of land to several congregations so that real churches can be built here for the first time since the arrival of Islam in the 7th century (which of course in the Islamic calendar is the 1st century). My own Catholic church was the first, but it is to be followed by Anglican, Coptic and Orthodox churches, and an Indian church to be shared by 11 different Indian denominations.

This does not, however, mean the end of Qatar's tradition of ambivalence on this and other issues. As is the case elsewhere in the region, no overtly religious symbols – such as crosses – are permitted on the exterior, as are bells and steeples. Additionally, the land the Emir so generously gifted is a half hour drive outside of Doha, in the middle of flat, stony desert area it shares with petroleum storage tanks and power substations. You can see the church on the horizon in the photo below.
Although the church is finished, the road leading to it and the car park are not. The last 500 meters of the drive there was over rough, stony ground that was harder to drive on than the off-road desert tracks I've been cruising around on the weekends. The "car park" was just an area of field that some half-hearted effort had been made to remove the larger boulders from.

If all these things are not enough to discourage attendance, it has been reported that muslim extremist web-sites have made threats against the new church, if warnings provided by the American, British and Australian embassies are to be believed. (The Brits and the Australians have subsequently removed their warnings pertaining to the church).

All of this aside, it was a beautiful, if long (four hours) ceremony. I was exceptionally fortunate in getting a place to sit – thousands stood through the entire thing, including 2000 who were only able to watch it outside on giant video screens. I stood for the first half-hour or so, but one of the features of the ceremony – the "parade of nations," in which representatives from the 70-odd nationalities represented amongst the parishoners entered the church behind their national flags – resulted in the organisers reserving more seats than needed near the front, and once that part of the ceremony was over I was able to take one of the reserved seats for myself.

This must have been about 90 minutes into the 4-hour long consecration ceremony

The highlight of the ceremony was the depositing of the "relics" of Saint Padre Pio da Pietrelcina, a Capuchin monk who died in 1968 after spontaneously developing cruxifiction-type bleeding wounds on his hands and feet, into a reliquary built into the church's altar. None of the official material on the church or the ceremony have been terribly explicit about the nature of these relics. All that I can say is that when the presiding Bishop held the relics aloft and announced that he was about to place them in the altar, I couldn't really see anything, although I was sitting fairly close. Whatever parts they were, I think it's safe to say that the Vatican sent the better bits, such as his skull or femur, off to some other, more important church.

A happy and blessed Easter to all.

BlognDog
Doha
23 March 2008

Coincidence?

2008-03-06T17:16:00.009+01:00

As Hillary's campaign failed to falter on schedule on 4th March, I have been deprived (temporarily, of course) of my rightful opportunity to gloat over her loss. So Nomadicity therefore has nothing to add to the discussion over the Democratic race.

We have, however, observed something about the Republicans that is so readily apparent to us it is baffling that no other commentators that we are aware of have picked up on it. Unlike the other candidate's spouses – who have been highly visible – John McCain's wife, Cindy, never caught our attention until photos of her dutifully standing by her man were splashed across front pages following rumours of an affair between John and a 40-something lobbyist.

Cindy McCain

Am I the only one to notice that she and Laura Bush both look like escapees from the set of the Stepford Wives? Is this a coincidence, or is it officially mandated policy of the Republican Party that all first ladies must conform to this standard?

Laura Bush

I'm not trying to be a conspiracy-monger -- but have a look at Paula Prentiss from the original 1975 Stepford Wives film and judge for yourself.

Paula Prentiss

I'm taking a welcome break from the stifling morality of Doha, spending some time in the anti-Doha, Prague, where pork, alcohol and provocatively dressed women are found in abundance. My former regular Prague hang-out, Square, has been converted to what the manager proudly described to me a few minutes ago as "the first Starbucks in Central Europe." I was further informed that Poland is next on their list, but as yet still no plans for Sweden. Not that I feel deprived.

BlognDog
Prague
6 March 2008

Souk on This

2008-02-16T17:38:00.013+01:00

After many months here in Doha, I am finally managing to find some things to see and do here besides complaining about the lack of things to see and do. One recent find was Doha's old souk. It's no competitor with Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, but amongst Doha's sterile forest of glass-façaded skyscrapers, I discovered Souk Wafiq, one of the few surviving fragments of old Doha. It's old character has not been destroyed by updating its shops and facilities to serve contemporary needs, but neither has its vibrancy been choked by well-intentioned but misguided attempts at "preservation", thus avoiding an artifical, Disney-esque result. Pavements, lighting, and ventilation have been upgraded; historical elements have been preserved, and its clear that obviously incongruous shops (such as computer retailers) have been kept out, but otherwise it's an ongoing commercial enterprise, with merchants selling spices, supplies, desert and maritime gear, jewelry, clothing, antiques, artwork, furniture and carpets. So often living in the Middle East imparts a sense of despair that Arab society is incapable of basic competency, but every so often something like Al Jazeera broadcasting or the Doha souk comes along to provide a bit of hope. Following are a few shots I took whilst wandering around on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

In addition to the souk itself, there are a few blocks of traditional homes around the souk area that have been carefully preserved, and even a traditional mud-plastered fortified tower (that no doubt once represented the bulk of Qatar's defence expenditure) has been retained.

And if you're worn out by a day of haggling and carrying around your purchases, at the end of the souk a cluster of cafés and restaurants – Turkish, Moroccan, Egyptian and Lebanese – stand ready to serve up a meal in traditional surroundings.

BlognDog
Doha
16 February 2008

London Crack Whores

2008-01-25T19:06:00.000+01:00

One of the few diversions I have in Doha's immorality-free environment is spending a few hours at the hotel's fitness centre, vainly trying to burn off the extra kilos I've piled on in the course of pursuing my only other diversion, namely, stuffing my face at the hotel's breakfast, lunch and dinner buffets.

The fitness centre -- or "spa" as they refer to it -- here at the Four Seasons is definitely the most lavish facility I've ever graced with my grotty work-out outfits and flabby physique. The whole place positively reeks of luxury from the moment you are greeted at the reception by the appropriately fit-looking staff. There are a number of water features, starting with a vertical cascade down ridged ceramic panels at the entrance, which creates a soothing, mountain stream kind of sound. Moving past the reception area, another oval fountain lined with river stones stands in front of an incredible backlit golden agate panel.

This wall was created from thinly sliced pieces of back-lit, translucent golden agate

Here's another view showing the small fountain in front. My simple camera phone snaps don't do it justice.

It all is very effective. The stunning visual effects, combined with the soothing sound of gurgling water, the relaxing new age ambient music and the scent of the aromatherapy oils in the air do combine to quickly put you in mellow, relaxed frame of mind. Downstairs – where you find the changing rooms, plunge pools, thalossotherapy baths, massage rooms, sauna, steam room, ice room, Swiss showers, and other facilities – there are some additional water features. In the massage area is huge bubbling baptismal font looking thing, and surrounding the main reception area (where they assign you your locker key and offer you a refreshing glass of honey lemonade after your massage or workout to restore your body's electrolyte balance) is an artificial stream that makes a pleasant babbling-brook type sound as it passes over the white river stones that line its bed. Until recently, you could actually hear that sound, but over Christmas, they installed tempered glass panels over the water channels, so that you no longer really hear it. And since the water condenses on the inside of the glass, you don't really see it either.

Here's a view of the glass-covered water channels that line the walls of the reception area the passage leading to the pool and thalossotherapy areas

A detail showing the glass covers that have been installed over the water channels

Many of you are probably wondering why they installed these panels, since the designer's objective is obvious – create a striking visual feature and the soothing, natural sound of rushing water. Those of you who are not baffled by this probably, like me, saw some of the recent news coverage concerning the numerous injuries that have been sustained by visitors to London's Tate Modern Gallery, which has recently installed a new work titled "Shibboleth" by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo in the museum's Turbine Hall. The work basically consists of a giant crack in the floor, which Salcedo says symbolises "racial hatred and division in society". I think that she secretly has meant it to symbolise the huge gap that separates most people from intelligence and awareness, since numerous art lovers have managed to hurt themselves by tripping on or falling into this crack in the floor since the piece was opened to the public this past October.

View of "Shibboleth" in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall

Just contemplate this for a minute. These are people who have taken time out of their busy lives expressly for the purpose of going to the Tate Modern for one reason -- so that they can look at a crack in the floor. Yet there is no escaping the conclusion that if people are managing to hurt themsleves on this exhibit, it can mean only one thing – they weren't looking. But what else can you do in the Turbine Hall besides look at this exhibit? It's not as if museum officials allow or encourage visitors to, for example, bring their ironing or reorganise their recipe collections whilst they are in the hall. Like the Four Seasons, Tate Modern officials considered covering Shibboleth with perspex panels. So without bothering to ask for confirmation of my suspicions from the staff at the Four Seasons spa, I think its safe to conclude that some moron has managed to hurt themselves on this water feature, and the Four Seasons lawyers have decreed that rather than banishing this idiot to the specially designated area that has been created for such morons on an island in the Bering Sea, the spa should instead totally ruin the inspired vision of the designer by completely neutralising the whole concept with some silly glass panels. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but it does go a long way towards explaining Bush's re-election in 2004.

BlognDog
Doha
25 January 2008

Benvenuto La Macchina

2007-12-27T18:33:00.000+01:00

There is a logical explanation (or if you prefer, a lame excuse) for the subdued level of activity at Nomadicity over the past few weeks. Since mid-October most of my free time has been occupied with the complicated task of migrating from the Windows world over to the Mac platform. Yes, I know that Apple has an optimisticly worded web page that explains how simple it all is. In technical terms, they are big fat liars. The complexity was not entirely unexpected – I originally moved from the PC to the Mac environment shortly after Macs were first introduced in 1984. From that time, I was a big advocate of the platform, but when I moved to Poland in 1997, Mac support in the country was limited and my company gave me a Windows™ laptop for free (Resistence is futile! Lower your shields and prepare to be assimilated!). In those pre-WiFi, pre-magsafe days I was living in a flat with a phone jack on one side of the room and a power point on the other. So I had a choice – have a phone line snaking across the floor towards the power point, or have a power cord snaking across the floor towards the phone jack. One day the inevitable happened – I tripped over the cord and my mac laptop came crashing to the tile floor, breaking the LCD panel. So from that point on, I've been resigned to being a part of the global Windows®™© empire, patiently enduring an endless series of hangs, crashes, freezes, blue screens of death, viruses, trojans, spam, malware, adware, spyware, obtuse error messages, the cheerfully obnoxious Office®™ "assistant", and "wizards" more evil than anything JK Rowling ever dreamed up. After losing my job in 2002 and going freelance, I no longer had a company IT manager standing between me and a Mac, so when it came time to buy a new laptop in 2004 I came within a panther's whisker of doing so. But my business partner, who was hoping to maximise the discount we could get by buying several Dell machines together, planted doubts about system and platform incompatibilities in my mind, and in the end I chickened out. I almost did so again this time to – I actually prepared an order for a high-spec Fujitsu-Siemens machine with built-in HSDPSA from a local supplier in Stockholm earlier this year, but this time I had the good fortune to be working with several consultants who were Mac users and found that most of my compatibility concerns were unfounded. Printing on an office LAN, file and folder sharing, and even connecting to an Exchange®℠™®© server all apparently work reasonably well. This was also about the time all the Windows©®™®℠ Vista℠®©™® horror stories began to appear in the media. So, this past October I took the plunge.

It was a pretty deep plunge at that, at just over 40 thousand Swedish crowns for a MacBook Pro, software, extended warranty, etc. I must say that the initial impression did not disappoint in the least – judging from the packaging alone, Apple clearly deserves much of the hype it generates. The attention to detail and concern for æsthetics were obvious the instant I had the elegant black box in my hands. Inside, under a thoughtfully designed and implausibly attractive protective foam panel that precisely balanced the competing needs for protection, bulk, and weight, sat the laptop itself, and underneath, nestling in a sort of little niche that presented and protected it in the way that some holy object might be housed in the temple built to display it, was a elegant little box holding the OS DVD and the instruction manual, with the words "Tutto Mac" emblazoned in a confident, yet unassertive, 24 point dark gray sans-serif font. I thought the Italian was an attempt by some left-coast designer to try to nudge up Apple's cool factor another notch or two, no doubt after being inspired by Starbuck's belief that using the Italian words for coffee with milk somehow makes their drinks cooler. A glance inside the manual, however, revealed that, in fact, the entire manual was in Italian, and I soon learned that it had been delivered with an Italian keyboard as well. Hence, I decided to christen my new machine "La MACchina".

The patient, delicate and time-consuming effort I've gone through over the past few weeks to move everything over to the new environment and get it all working properly has reminded me why "macchina" is a feminine noun in Italian. I'm still fussing with getting the synching with my Palm device and telephones working properly. At various points, I had addresses but not calendars synching, then one phone but not the other, then both phones but not the Palm, then massive duplication of entries, then losing all the entries, then restoring the entries, and finally, as of yesterday, getting the calendars but not the addresses synching. Still some more fussing around to do, I am sure, but am getting close, and now I've finally managed to get Apple to replace the Italian keyboard with a Swedish one, as I originally ordered. I also ordered an English OS, but it arrived in Swedish, and that apparently I am stuck with.

Despite the pain, it's good to be back. Apple has come a long ways since I last used their OS under System 7, at a time when computers were simple enough that I knew what every last file in the System Folder was there for. Systems 8 and 9 have come and gone, and now System X has gone through several feline permutations – Jaguar, Panther, Tiger and now Leopard. Hopefully, they'll name the next one "Tabby".

Speaking of cats, the big news from the USA this week was the escape of a 4-year old, 150 kilo Siberian tiger named "Tatiana" who killed one and injured two at the San Francisco zoo. The police shot her to death, despite the fact that her species has been driven to the brink of extinction by humans, so she wasn't exactly unjustified in scoring a point or two for her own team. But I suppose if I were facing a member of the most powerful feline species in the world, moving towards me with fresh blood dripping from its claws and fangs, I would probably also reach for my police revolver if I had one handy. But I would probably do something else first, without taking the time to locate the nearest litter box to do it in. So if you have cats, it may not be a good idea to be watching the evening news with them in the room if the tiger attack story comes up – they might get ideas. Odds are you are a bit tastier than that dried, re-processed meat flavoured cereal you've been feeding them all these years anyway.

BlognDog
Stockholm
28 December 2007

Fun with Republicans

2007-11-17T11:07:00.000+01:00

Having long ago made up my mind on who to support in next year's Presidential election in the USA (Barack Obama), I haven't been bothering to pay much attention to what the other Democrats -- particularly Hilary Clinton -- have to say. Clinton is in fact one of the worst apologists for Israel amongst all United States Senators, a body long infamous for its extreme pro-Israel bias. I knew this about her long before her decision to support the Lieberman legislation that attempted to pressurise Iran over its civilian nuclear programme, even whilst Israel's 200 illegal nuclear weapons are ignored. But she has many other bad positions on a range of issues. One that particularly irritated me was her vocal support of the requirement adopted in 2003 that requires passengers simply transiting a US airport -- but not entering the country -- to have a US visa. At the time, Clinton made a number of irritating public statements, complaining to Tom Ridge that the lack of a visa requirement would allow a potential terrorist "to take a flight from a country with less-stringent security to a U.S. airport and possibly roam that U.S. airport during a layover." Just imagine! Someone freely ROAMING -- Buffalo style -- around in an airport! Possibly stopping at Starbucks for a skinny latte, wandering unmonitored down the single malt aisle at the duty-free, or even purchasing uncensored reading material from Hudson News! I contacted one of her staff, an apparent policy-wonk wannabee named Josh Albert, and asked how Clinton planned to handle things when the airlines started moving their transit hubs and the thousands of jobs that go with them out of the USA as a result of her short-sighted policies. He said he doubted that would happen, but in 2004, Iberia airlines did exactly that. So no need to waste our time over at the Hilary for President web site.

For pure entertainment value, however, the Republican candidate sites are unbeatable. Most amusing is their fascination with Nazi-style political slogans and tag-lines. Tom Tancredo is For a Secure America, Mike Huckabee's tag-line is Faith-Family-Freedom, whereas Fred Thompson prefers the decidedly non-alliterative Security-Unity-Prosperity. Mitt Romney offers the more verbose True Strength for America's Freedom, whereas Guiliani uses the unoriginal but still catchy Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer! Actually I just made that up -- "Rudy" not only doesn't use his surname, he also is the only Republican without a campaign slogan or tag line. Next time he runs, he'll probably take things a step further by stealing the Jenny Craig weight loss centre approach to branding by sticking an exclamation point after his name (Rudy!) as if it's impossible to articulate without getting excited.

All of them clearly are trying to adopt the proven election-winning approach pioneered by Cheney and Rove, which is to try to convince voters that letting anyone else into the oval office is essentially the equivalent of handing the country over to an unholy alliance of job-stealing Hispanics and wild-eyed jihadists. Tancredo, who earlier displayed his leadership skills by advocating that the US bomb Mecca and Medina in order to "deter" terrorism, has a new ad that opens with the words "Tough on Terrorism" (just in case you didn't get the message with his For a Secure America slogan) and closes with the tag line "Tom Tancredo: Before its too Late". In this ad, Tancredo first softens up his audience with images from the Atocha and London Underground (7/7) bombings as well as the Beslan incident, with ominously Rovian narration and music. Having put us in a suitably fearful state of mind, the narrator then solemnly informs us that foreigners pose a threat "beyond the 20 million aliens who've come to take our jobs," and blames "spineless politicians who refuse to defend our borders against those who've come to kill" and then shows an anonymous terrorist (in silhouette only -- no need to show him for the viewers to just know he has dark skin) depositing a bomb in a crowded shopping mall. Also no need to specify the kinds of measures those "spineless politicians" are refusing to take -- it goes without saying that Tancredo is just itching to expand the Guantanamo-Bagram-Abu Ghraib gulag system into the USA.

Mike Huckabee prefers to stick to discussions of more abstract concepts such as "leadership" on his campaign web site, allowing him to avoid more embarrassing topics, such as the fact that he's a racist, immigrant bashing, anti-abortion, gun-toting fruitcake whose supporters appear unable to articulate any reason for backing him other than their conviction that he was chosen by God.

Fred Thompson takes a more traditionally conservative view -- all problems are caused by foreigners and poor people, whom he intends to deport, kill or imprison until life gets better.

Mitt Romney is one of several Republican candidates who pledges to "punish sanctuary cities", those annoying municipalities who have the bad taste to try to provide some limited protections to immigrants, and worse, do it through legislation and initiatives enacted by democratically elected officials supported by voters. To his credit, he is the only republican who has a site in Spanish as well as English. But clicking on "en español" changes more than just the language. While the English press release section contains a long list of threatening declarations explaining how, as Governor of Massachusetts, Romney signed legislation to "allow state troopers to enforce Federal immigration laws," how he made immigrants pay higher tuition for the same education at state universities, forced them to learn English and prevented them from getting driving licenses, the message from el Romney hispanicó is entirely different. In the spanish press release list we learn that "Romney favorece más visas para trabajadores extranjeros" (Romney favours more visas for foreign workers) and the very short page on "migracíon" quotes Romney as saying "Queremos que Estados Unidos sea más atractivo para los inmigrantes legales" without, of course explaining how his extensive plans to harass, track, and intimidate them is going to achieve that.

Strength through Joy! Work Makes you Free!

BlognDog
Doha
23 November 2007

Censors 2, BlognDog 1

2007-11-16T16:17:00.000+01:00

As I blogged earlier, I thought I had finally put the net censorship issue behind me for good after finding some proxy sites that allow you to get through Qtel's filters. It's been working great, and one reason I was pleased is that one of the blocked sites, TorrentSpy, is where I've been getting my "LOST" fix every week. LOST is an American sci-fi/drama televsion show that I have become terribly addicted to, and until the season ended in May, I would wake early each Thursday morning, log on to TorrentSpy, and download the latest episode, which was always reliably uploaded by a contributor named "DEATH734" who did this for nothing more than the eternal gratitude of myself and thousands of others like me around the world. The files are high quality, no commercials, and they would be there just a few hours after the show finished airing in eastern Canada, where he lives. The site was not blocked in Saudi Arabia during the several weeks I spent there in January and February (thankfully, because I would have been apoplectic if I hadn't been able to get my weekly fix), but for whatever reason, the Qataris block it.

Although LOST is not being aired again until February, I logged on to TorrentSpy today to see if I could download an episode or two of the daily show, but upon attempting to search, I was presented with a message announcing "Torrentspy Acts to Protect Privacy - Sorry, but because you are located in the USA you cannot use the search features of the Torrentspy.com website. Torrentspy's decision to stop accepting US visitors was NOT compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws." Obviously, the site's operators are concerned about the growing power of the media industry in the USA, which has been successful to some degree in forcing ISPs to reveal private information about their customers. What wasn't so obvious is why I was getting this message, but a quick visit to IP Chicken showed that because of my proxy server, which had permitted me to visit the site, it appears to sites I visit that I am located in Dallas, in the USA. Bastards.

Somewhere I remember seeing another service similar to the one I am using, if I can find it, I'll have to see if it is based in Europe or somewhere.

In my efforts to search around today and see if I could find an alternative proxy solution that would allow me to use TorrentSpy, I happened across this site maintained by Harvard Law School, which lists many of the sites blocked by the Saudis. Unsurprisingly, this list includes numerous non-Muslim religious sites (Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Scientology, and even the "Neo-Pagans"), anti-drug law sites, gay sites, human rights organisations, etc., but the list also included other sites such as anti-pornography sites (Porn-Free.org), "sex addiction" recovery (www.sexaddict.com), and the Warner Brothers Records site. But the most surprising of all was iVillage, a site for "busy women sharing solutions and advice". I had a look around the site (whose lead story today was titled "Tales of Turkey Trouble") to see what might have attracted the ire of the mutaween, but couldn't find anything that couldn't be honestly described as totally innocuous. Maybe they just don't like women going somewhere besides their husbands for advice.

Some excitement coming to Doha this weekend -- the World Powerboat Championship, which I last managed to see a couple of years ago in Oslo, is starting tomorrow, and on Sunday there will be an airshow put on by the Red Arrows, the RAF's precision flying team. And there isn't a better vantage point in the world to see both events than from the balcony outside my office on the 24th floor of West Bay Centre.

BlognDog
Doha
15 November 2007

Social Networking Re-visited

2007-10-27T08:32:00.000+02:00

Long-time readers know that part of my motivation for starting this blog was to observe and comment on some trends in blogging and social networking. At the time, "micro-blogging" sites like Twitter and Jaiku were just making their appearance, and others like Facebook and MySpace seemed to suddenly be the focus of a lot of attention, both in the blogosphere and on Wall Street. Things change fast in the techno-world.

When I first wrote about micro-blogging just a few months ago, it was a brand-new phenomenon. After checking out a number of them, I decided a little-known start-up called Jaiku was the best of the bunch, and earlier this month, it was acquired by Google for undisclosed terms (how does a publicly traded company like Google get away with that?).

I've been mostly ignoring the growing hype about MySpace and Facebook, because I've considered them mostly US-centric phenomena. A lot of the tech press is US-based, so they often carry on about what they view as huge technology sensations that are transforming entire societies, such as the Blackberry or the Palm Treo, that are often scarcely known outside of the USA, and at the same time not even notice transformative technologies such as SMS or Skype simply because the USA is one of the few markets they haven't had an impact on. Nonetheless, I thought it was time to have a look at these two social networking megasites, and also a couple of alternatives that haven't received as much attention.

As I've mentioned in earlier postings on technology issues, one of the things that irritates me the most about many US-based sites is their US centricism. For example, use any US-produced software package or web site that requires to specify your time zone and invariably, the default time zone will be San Francisco. Other producers don't suffer from this kind of egocentrism -- Finnish-based Jaiku or Nokia, for example, logically and neutrally default to Greenwich Mean Time. Facebook is unfortunately one of those sites that goes much further in this respect. The default time zone issue is only the beginning. "Social networking" as a web-site genre is a term coined to cover those like Facebook don't fit neatly into other categories. Some use it a business networking tool, à la LinkedIn; others use it for dating, more like Meetic or Match.com. I think the emergence of the category reflects the way in which the sharp dividing lines we once maintained between our personal and professional lives are gradually fading. One result, for Facebook, is that you are asked to answer a question in your profile about your "political views". You answer this question with a drop-down box, which displays a series of linear options, ranging from "very liberal" to "very conservative," reflecting the American belief in the two-party system in which everyone's politics can be plotted along a narrow linear spectrum. There is an option for "other," and presumably the designers of the Facebook web-site see nothing even vaguely inappropriate about lumping the Fascists, Socialists, Marxists, Monarchists, Anarchists, Platonists, Theocrats, Maoists, Greens, Peasant and rural parties, Federalists, Whigs, Tories, Trade Unionists and various other parts of the political continuum into this single catch-all category. This succinctly says more about American political and social attitudes than most PhD thesis dissertations on the topic probably do.

If that was just an irritation, another short-coming of the Facebook site that really inhibits its utility is the designer's decision that members may only belong to a single geographic "network" at a time. I was added by default to the "Sweden" network based on the address I provided when I signed up; if I want to change to the "Qatar" network I must drop my membership in Sweden, and the frequency of change is limited. Again, a decision very reflective of uniquely American prejudices, and not supportive of the increasingly globalised lifestyle most of us at (at least those of us outside of the USA) are now living. As I divide my time between Sweden and Qatar, it would be sensible for me to join both networks, and also to join networks in other countries I visit regularly and where I maintain active social and business networks, such as the UK, the USA, Jordan, Hungary and Poland. Overall, I like MySpace more than FaceBook, but there are two others I think are better than either .

First is LinkedIn, which for reasons of simple utility and effectiveness is a much better business networking tool than either Facebook or MySpace. It much more down to earth, with none of the vapid time-wasting nonsense like gifts, lists, groups, chats, "poking", "writing on someone's wall," etc. It's a well-designed, serious business tool that I have already used to do business networking, find jobs and projects, and share ideas.

But my favourite social networking site of all has been evolving into such a site from very different origins. Plaxo was originally designed as a clever utility that simply allowed members to have their Outlook contact databases automatically updated whenever another member changed their contact info. No need to send out emails when you moved, or to manually update your friends' details when they moved. Later they added synching of all your Outlook data -- calendar, tasks, and notes as well as contacts -- with Plaxo on-line, which enabled you to view this data from anywhere. With the latest version, it's moved much closer to a full social networking site, and has introduced a really cool feature called "Pulse" which is a sort of way of putting all of your friends activities in more than a dozen sites -- Jaiku, Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, Del.icio.us, YouTube, Digg, etc. into a single "Pulse" stream. As a Plaxo member, I can register my accounts with all these other sites into my Pulse, and then any of my contacts can receive a notification when I send out a new Jaiku, post a new video on YouTube, add new photos on Flickr, or make a new post to my blog. That way the connections I already have on Plaxo don't have to become "Friends" on Flickr or MySpace in order to keep up with what I'm doing -- with the proliferation of these services, I'm getting overwhelmed with email request to become "friends" with people I already connect with on two or three other sites.

BlognDog
27 October 2007
Doha, Qatar

The Smörgåsbord Post

2007-10-04T21:09:00.000+02:00

Life in Doha is as stable, boring, predictable and unbloggable as ever. My big excitement for the week was finally finding a way to get around Qatar's offensively paternalistic efforts at protecting me from web content I might not be able to handle through their internet filtering system. I happened across an internet ad for Proxy 1 Arabia, a service that guaranteed unfiltered access to the entire internet for the low, low price of 20 USD/month, or 90 USD for six months. I was a bit sceptical, but decided to risk 20 bucks, and paid for a month using my Google checkout (a competitor to those greedy fascists over at PayPal) account for the first time. To my surprise and delight, it worked like a charm, and one of the first things I did was check out a link to a video about Qatar a friend sent a couple of weeks ago, which I've been unable to view thanks to the censor. I'm not going to tell you anything about the content -- just check it out for yourself -- it's hysterically funny, and at time mark 0:45, there's a nice shot of the building I work in.

I titled this post the "Smörgåsbord Post" not because of my participation in a broad conspiracy to increase the usage of Swedish terms in the English language, but because of the somewhat diverse and disconnected of the subjects I wanted to touch on. Today's post is sort of the linguistic equivalent of my buffet lunches at the Four Seasons here in Doha -- yesterday I returned to my table from the buffet with a platter bearing some tabouleh, some sushi, some macaroni and cheese, some quiche, some aloo wat, and some chicken madras.

A couple of days ago I spoke with my brother, Maggot, in Hawaii. I was curious to know how the new interisland ferry service, the Hawaii Superferry, was faring. I have long found it almost inconceivable that the Hawaiian Islands do not have a ferry service sailing between them -- despite the fact that on a clear day, from a good elevation, you can see just about the entire island chain from the Big Island, the only way to get from one island to another is to fly. I regard the situation as just another manifestation of de Tocqueville's "American Exceptionalism," the phenomenon that dictates that Americans must do everything differently than the rest of world, no matter how immoral or illogical. Hence, the death penalty, 120 volt electricity and the use of the English system of weights and measures. America has very few ferries. If you cannot drive there, you probably have to fly there. Somehow, however, someone managed to sneak some logic into Hawaii whilst nobody was looking, and the state decided to introduce an inter-island service. Two gigantic state of the art ferries were ordered from Incat, in Hobart, Australia, the first of which was delivered to Honolulu in August. It should be understood that prior to the approval of this service, the plan had to survive all manner of legal and environmental challenges from every kind of fruitcake you can imagine. Some said it could injure migrating whales. Others said "invasive species" (I presume they were concerned about species other than environmental alarmists) would hitch-hike from island to island in the bilge water. All of these numerous hurdles were patiently dealt with by the planners of the service. The first of the two ferries arrived for service in Honolulu. The company's website opened for sales, and people began buying tickets. It was a huge success and all the acrimony and concern that marked the planning phase was quickly forgotten! No! Of COURSE not! This is America! Arriving in Kaua'i on 28 August, the ferry was met by a bunch of protesters, who were concerned about "the environment". Here's a video of this event:

No need for me to comment on the intelligence of the people participating in this protest. What really irritates me is that if you were truly were worried about the environment, you'd be out at the AIRPORT, blocking flights from landing out of concern for the massively larger carbon footprint of a flight in comparison with a relatively eco-friendly ferry journey. Beyond the lack of logic, the opponents of the ferry have attempted to slap every socially-charged label they can think of on this initiative -- according to them, it's a race issue, it's a class issue, it's a mainlander versus islander issue, it's a development vs. environmental protection issue, it's an Oahu vs. the other islands issue, it's a North-South issue, it's an East-West issue, it's a Conservative-Liberal issue, it's everything in the world EXCEPT a TRANSPOR*FUCKING*TATION issue! All I want is be able to take the ferry from Honolulu to the Big Island next time I visit my brother -- mostly because sea transport is my favourite mode of transportation, but also because it will mean two fewer encounters with the TSA.

Finally, I think readers should have look at the long and in-depth article the New York Times published today on the Bush torture programme. Although most of us have known for a long time that Bush's public denials of endorsing torture were blatant and obvious lies, now we finally have "smoking gun" proof that when Bush said "We do not torture," he was lying through his teeth. A few years ago, a Republican-controlled congress got its collective knickers in a twist over Clinton's declaration that "I did not have sex with that woman;" consistency demands they respond to Bush's lie the same way: impeachment.

BlognDog
Doha
4 October 2007

Down from the Mountaintop

2007-09-23T08:56:00.000+02:00

Apologies to my readers for leaving them hanging after my last entry. I was indeed successful in reaching the summit of Mt. Blanc at 10:10 the morning after my previous entry. All the training and preparation really paid off -- I got my pack reduced to a minimum, I was fuelled up, hydrated and mentally prepared when my alarm went off at 1:00 the next morning. I dressed and pulled on my boots by the light of my head-torch, joined my guide Jean-Pierre for a quick breakfast, and headed out the door of the refuge just before 2:00. The next three hours were an arduous 500 meter ascent to the Goûter refuge, on a route that was near vertical in many places. We were so fortunate with the weather -- it was clear, cold and still, and as we climbed we could see the lights of civilisation far below, even as far as Genéve in the distance.

From Goûter, the route switched to snow and we put on our crampons to climb the remaining 1100 meters to the summit. Dawn broke as we reached the Goûter Dome, and finally before us we could see the summit, which appeared quite manageable until you realised the tiny black specks that dotted its white surface were other climbers far above. But still at that point I felt 100% confident of success for the first time -- I had the time, I had the energy, and conditions were near perfect. All I had to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other for five more hours and then sure enough we were standing there on the highest point in the Alps.

My one regret is that my phone battery died part way up so I was unable to get an appropriately victorious summit photo. No doubt this was due in part to the fact that I used my phone to tap out my previous blog entry. However, thanks to one of my climbing companions from the Swiss part of the course, I do have this really macho looking shot of me belaying down one of the mountains we climbed during the preparatory course.

Returning to Tête Rousse took another six hours, and I was exhausted by the time we arrived. However, I did manage to find enough energy and enough battery power in my mobile to snap one more picture, this one of a sign posted in the refuge's lavatory:

I actually have no idea what this sign means, but I am hoping our friendly language police over at Grouperism can help sort this out, or at least suggest some appropriate punctuation.

BlognDog
Stockholm
23 September 2007

High hopes

2007-09-09T19:54:00.001+02:00

It's been a dull and uneventful summer spent working away for my client in Doha. The weeks passed in blur of routine activity - Sunday through Thursday in the office, Sunday evening Mass at Qatar's first and only Catholic church, a (censored) movie at the local mall on Friday, and lounging around the pool at the Four Seasons on Saturday. The only that kept things from getting too monotonous was the Four Season's luxurious fitness centre, where I spent hours every day preparing myself for the effort I will attempt tomorrow - an ascent to the summit of Mt. Blanc at 4810 meters.

Currently, I am at the Tête Rousse hut at 3167 meters, which I have reached after spending the past week in and around Arolla, in Switzerland on an Alpine skills course run by Jagged Globe. So after six months of physical conditioning, maintaining the discipline of my training regime in fitness centres in Sweden, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Dubai and Qatar, undergoing a week of skills training, altitude acclimatisation and practice climbing on Swiss peaks, and having spent what seems like a small mountain of cash on shiny new kit, success or failure has now been reduced to the performance of myself and the mountain over the next 24 hours. If I can continue to ignore the blisters, the sunburn, the soreness and the stiffness, overcome my reluctance to trust a four centimer ledge of rock to support my foot over a 300 meter precipice, and above all, manage to keep putting one foot in front of another for 12+ hours; AND of course the mountain does its part by letting the absolutely flawless conditions we have been enjoying to continue for another day or two, then it will be hard not to succeed. I cannot see how my chances could be any better - my mind and body are prepared, I've got the right gear, a guide I feel comfortable with, and a good weather forecast. If all goes as I hope and believe, then my next post - inshallah - will be made from the summit. It's now about 20:30 and I'm about to turn in. At 1:30 tomorrow morning I'll drag myself back out of bed, put on a headlamp, crampons, climbing harness and all the clothing I've brought with me, and begin my trudge up the glacier.

As one of my many efforts to ensure success was to reduce the weight I am carrying to the minimum possible, I have reduced my usual complement of electronics (laptop, PDA and two mobiles) to a single small mobile, which means I have been forced to tap out this entry on a standard 12 key keypad. I am discovering it is an excellent way to incentivise linguistic brevity - if only lawmakers could be compelled to draft legislation; and lawyers their legal briefs - using such technology, we would all undoubtedly benefit.

BlognDog
Tête Rousse
France
9 September 2007

Fascism for Everyone!

2007-07-14T08:44:00.000+02:00

A happy Bastille Day to all. My recent experiences with the TSA in the U.S.A. have rekindled a latent interest in the TSA's ongoing efforts to undermine civil rights and the progress being made to counter them. It seems I'm not as special as I believed myself to be -- incidents like those I experienced recently are apparently quite common, as I have learned through a bit of Internet research over the past couple of weeks. In particular, calling over the cops and being threatened with arrest seems to be the standardised, approved response to any traveller who is uppity enough to actually exercise their civil rights anywhere near a TSA agent. You can find references to a lot of incidents just by googling a few select keywords (try "TSA" and "assholes" for starters), but there are two air travellers out there whom I think have been particularly exemplary in their efforts to expose the TSA's illegal and pointless practices.

First is Edward Hasbrouck, a writer, blogger and air traveller who has become a sort of self-taught expert on everything to do with air travel. I don't know anything about him beyond what's in his own blog, but he not only knows more about about fares, ticketing, air travel regulations, treaties, and history than anyone else, he writes about these issues in a very accessible way, and backs everything with detailed references to relevant legal code, treaties, etc. Hasbrouck had an experience similar to my own. (Both of our experiences took place at a Washington airport; mine at the one I refuse to name because it was named after the most virulently anti-Socialist President in U.S. history, one who actively supported genocidal megalomaniacs like Robert D'Aubisson and Jonas Savimbi simply because they professed to be 'anti-communist'; Hasbrouck on the other hand was flying out of the one I refuse to name because it was named after a certain U.S. Secretary of State, known for making his fortune by working with Nazi Germany and for starting the Viet Nam War). Hasbrouck was was detained, questioned and threatened with arrest simply for asking questions concerning the individual who was demanding to see his passport at the entrance to the inspection area. It turns out that this individual was an employee of a contractor called "Airserv," and therefore had no right whatsoever to ask for any one's identity documents. Hasbrouck, like myself, has travelled extensively and experienced his share of officiousness and arbitrary exercise of power at the hands of petty officials in many countries for all manner of real and imagined transgressions. He also notes (and my own experiences are similar) that nowhere else other than the USA, including numerous countries with reputations for totalitarian and/or authoritarian tendencies, has he ever been subjected to such aggressive harassment simply for asking some questions.

Although he is not as knowledgeable about or dedicated to air travel issues in the same way Hasbrouck is, the actions of traveller Ryan Bird were in many ways a more entertaining -- and therefore more effective -- response to the ludicrous "policies" promulgated by the TSA's security theatre apparatus. When TSA chief Kip Hawley announced the latest in the TSA's ongoing efforts to discover just how ridiculous they can make their demands yet still get compliance from the travelling public by decreeing that travellers now had to put all carry-on liquids in "3 ounce" bottles and pack these in a "one quart" plastic bag (and presumably carry-ons should now weigh no more than 2 stone, and not exceed 3/32 of a furlong in length and 7/16 of rod in width, or have a capacity of more than 17 gills), Bird decided to fashion his into what is now being called a "Freedom Bag" by using a marker to write "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" in large black letters on his bag before sending it through the X-Ray machine. The TSA inspectors at the security checkpoint in Milwaukee found it very amusing, passing it around and laughing at it in turn before handing it back and wishing him a pleasant flight. I am KIDDING of course! They summoned the police, who detained and questioned him before threatening him with arrest. When Bird reminded the TSA officer of his 1st Amendment rights, he was told "out there" you have rights, "in here" you don't. Bird subsequently started a forum thread on Flyer Talk that discusses the incident that as of today has grown to slightly under 2000 posts. It was also encouraging to see that Bird included a forum poll on this thread in which readers could vote on whether or not they approved of his actions -- almost 80% approved, which means that only a handful of travellers are actually being deceived by the TSA's "show us your papers, take off your shoes, don't carry on liquids" security theatre. However, it was discouraging to learn that despite all the intervening publicity and ridicule, the intervention of Bird's congressional representatives, and numerous follow-ups, the TSA has yet to officially respond to Bird, almost a year after the incident. And why is this overwhelming majority who are sympathetic to Bird, Hasbrouck and myself so pathetically timid? When I go through one of these checkpoints, I am clear, assertive and articulate about what I expect from the inspectors and specific about the demands I find silly and unnecessary. There are usually dozens of other travellers within clear earshot, yet not one of them has ever had the cojones to open his/her mouth and verbally support me -- something I would not hesitate to do if I witnessed another traveller being harassed for exercising their rights. Twice I have even had police or security officers involves discretely offer words of support, but only when out of earshot of their colleagues. Being a 'closet' freedom supporter isn't enough -- people need to speak up and get in the TSA's face more often.

I am still continuing on my own efforts to force the TSA to respond to my formal complaints about their threat to arrest me at SJO in 2004, and I have now filed complaints concerning my recent experiences at DCA and BOS. I am not optimistic, but if there are any developments, I'll write about them here.

Anyone who still doubts that the TSA is more concerned about maintaining the façade of their own security theatre -- as opposed to actually enhancing travel safety -- need only remember the cases of Nathaniel Heatwole and Christopher Soghoian. Heatwole was a college student who repeatedly smuggled box cutters (yes, the same kind used in the 9/11 hijackings) and fake explosive devices onto aircraft. He stashed them in rest rooms and other places, then emailed the TSA terror alert email address about their location, in an effort to bring these glaring security loopholes to light. First off, the TSA was forced to acknowledge that they didn't even read emails sent to that mailbox, since they "didn't have the resources." Worse, when they did eventually learn about the smuggled items they decided to prosecute him instead of giving him the medal he deserved. Why? Because the point is not to create security, but to create security theatre -- i.e., make the cowering masses of voters who have bought into the whole terrorist bogeyman thing feel like you are doing something about it. Heatwole's actions exposed the whole thing as an absurd farce, and therefore he had to pay the price. Soghoian's experience was similar: as a security researcher who regularly exposes security flaws in all sorts of public and private institutions, he created a web-site that allowed anyone to easily create and print a fake Northwest Airlines boarding pass authentic-looking enough to get you past the TSA's security monkeys. Again, rather than thanking this guy for demonstrating how flawed and inept the system is, he had his home raided by the FBI (at 2 o'clock in the morning, no less), and his computers taken away.

I suppose that's what irritates me the most -- even at the very moment you are being harrassed and annoyed by the TSA over your questioning of their petty and useless regulations, you can look around and in a few minutes mentally develop a half-dozen or more ways to defeat their ineffective measures. Figuring out a way to get some materials past some school drop-out with badge is no where near as challenging as the obstacles most of us successfully deal with every day in our professional lives. Yet when someone makes a successful and dramatic demonstration of how pointless the TSA's approach is, they're treated as if they are the threat, rather than the boneheads like Chertoff and Hawley who are responsible for this state of affairs.

BlognDog
Doha
14 July 2007

The Fourth Reich Extends its Welcoming Embrace

2007-07-01T12:56:00.000+02:00

Back in Doha after a brief sojourn in Paris, Washington and Boston. It's been only slightly over a week, but the intensity of my experiences makes it feel much longer. I've been through the entire range of emotions in the interim -- the thrill of long-anticipated reunions with friends and family, frustration over the unimaginable ignorance of the United States Congress; the pleasure of re-discovering familiar places, anger at the lack of progress in addressing old problems. Although I transit its airport several times a year, I haven't been into Paris for several years now. It's always a favourite city for many people, but I enjoyed it all the more since I was there to meet my brother and his family, whom I hadn't seen in two years. My brother, Maggot, hadn't been to Europe in more than 20 years, but now that his children (7 and 3) were getting to the age he was when he had his own first European experiences, he decided it was time for a visit.

That's me, the good-looking one

My visit was short -- just two days -- and my last night in town we put the kids to bed and went out for wine and oysters at a nearby bistro. I was to get up early the next morning to head for CDG to catch a flight to New York, but I was so drunk when I returned to my room that I neglected to set my alarm. Next morning I awoke (badly hung over) just 2 1/2 hours before my flight's departure. I packed everything up in 10 minutes -- discovering in the process that I had been surfing to a web site with current weather in Toronto the night before; I have no idea why -- and was checked out and in a taxi in 15. There were no lines for check-in, so I arrived at my gate in plenty of time. This was basically the last thing to go right travel-wise for the rest of my trip.

The image of the United States has been in free-fall for some years now. Once associated with liberty, democracy and freedom, the country has in a few short years come to be increasingly connected with torture, mass-murder, arrogance and ignorance. Like many, I've long blamed Bush and his cronies Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Ashcroft for the problem, but this visit has made it more clear to me that they are more symptom than cause of the underlying problems. The U.S. Congress deserves it's share of blame, as does the press, the schools, the military, industry, Wall Street, the legal system, the church, and a host of other institutions, but first and foremost it's now clear to me that it is the public at large, which has increasingly rejected thinking and reason in favour of a society built on fear and ideology, that deserves the bulk of the blame.

This state of affairs was not entirely unanticipated -- it's a big part of the reason I left the USA more than a decade ago -- but the speed of the decline, and the clear indications that the situation can be expected to continue to rapidly deteriorate are nonetheless breathtaking. I've known about the statistical indicators for some time -- the abyssmal levels of literacy, the third world levels of infant mortality, the shocking levels of greenhouse gas production, the incredible levels of incarceration -- but it was still stunning to witness the effects of this decline first-hand.

Osama bin Laden is presumably thrilled with this state of affairs. One thing that was consistent throughout my visit is that every failing, every weakness, every misfortune was routinely blamed on "9/11". The main purpose for my visit was to join a delegation from American Citizens Abroad, and to assist them in communicating with Senators and Representatives about citizeship, taxation, health care and other issues of concern to Americans living abroad. This effort involved a lot of running around on Capitol Hill, going from one meeting to another in the various House and Senate office buildings. Years ago, I had worked as a journalist in Washington and as a result knew those buildings and the maze of underground passageways that connect them quite well. Temperatures in Washington were near 40 degrees, with humidity at 100%, so knowing how to get from appointment to appointment without stepping outside was essential. Unfortunately, these passageways were now patrolled by security guards who explained that "since 9/11," visitors were no longer permitted to use the tunnels, so we were forced out into the heat. My suit was soon soaked through with sweat, but my colleague was in even worse shape. He had taken the train down from New York, and had no choice but to lug two heavy bags around all day because, Amtrak explained, they no longer had left luggage facilities "since 9/11". Even in London, where left luggage undergoes airport-style screening, they haven't taken such extreme measures.

Since we were meeting with elected representatives of the American people and the underpaid, inexperienced minions that comprise their staffs, these were far from the stupidest pronouncements we heard that day. In fact, nearly everyone we met with freely acknowledged that Congress was a seething nest of short-sighted, ignorant, incompetent know-nothings excepting, of course, their own office, which was burdened with the nearly impossible and completely thankless task of trying to get the morons who comprised the remainder of this institution to understand how important our issues were to the security and prosperity of the republic. Although I am usually quite partisan when it comes to politics, ACA's charter describes it as a "bi-partisan organisation," (like many Leftists, I had sometimes experienced "bi-curious" urges, and finally decided to act on them) so there really isn't an opposing viewpoint to our own on most of the issues we were advocating. As a good Leftist, I'm much more concerned about the social issues facing Americans abroad, such as those related to the transmission of citizenship, social security and medicare, but nonetheless broadly agree with my Republican colleagues on the tax issues they saw as more critical.

More than any of the numerous other manifestations of 21st-century America's unique blend of ignorance and arrogance I witnessed during my visit, the Capitol Hill experience provided the strongest indication that this is a society in free-fall. Many offices displayed boards showing the scale of the national debt (8,8 trillion and rising), but nobody seemed concerned about the growing trade deficit or the policies that inhibited American competitiveness and seriously threatens its prosperity and security. As one of my colleagues pointed out, the national debt is like a mortgage on your house, so it doesn't matter if you never pay it off, since you always have an asset to balance it against. The USA's budget deficit, at around 7% of GDP, is more or less in line with that of other industrialised countries. The trade deficit, on the other hand, is like credit-card debt, and it either gets re-paid directly in cash, or indirectly in the declining value of your currency. Not only is the USA racking up a record trade deficit (now approaching US$1 trillion/year), but the United States is in numerous other ways failing to capture any of the benefits of globalisation, whilst fully paying the costs. Everywhere else you go, you meet people learning a third or fourth language, raising kids with three passports, and maintaining homes on two continents. In the USA, Wyndam hotel's television advertising featured guests talking about why they chose the chain over others; one guest said it was "because I don't want to have to learn another language." Seriously -- indulging this kind of ignorance was actually touted as a benefit of this hotel chain. Whilst globally the number of managers working outside their home countries and the number of foreign tourists is establishing new records every year, both the number of Americans working outside the USA and the number of foreigners visitors to the USA are in free-fall. A society already noted for its insularity and ignorance is responding to the challenges of globalisation by burrowing deeper into its shell, apparently hoping the rest of the world will just go away and leave it alone. Unfortunately, that's exactly the result the USA is headed for -- as the deficit accelerates and the USA becomes less and less competitive, costs will rise, incomes will plummet, people will start demanding answers, and politicians will belatedly respond. But no one will likely do anything before it is too late. One of the few countervailing forces that is at least injecting some growth into this otherwise declining economy is the arrival of new immigrants, continuously providing the economy with fresh impetus. As such, one would imagine that Congress would do everything it could to encourage these new arrivals. Instead, on my last day in the USA, Congress defeated an immigration bill that would have created a guest worker programme and made it easier for those in the country to legalise their status. One gets the idea that if one of these legislators were drowning and you threw them a life-ring, they would try to beat themselves senseless with it.

We encountered many different kinds of ignorance during these visits, but if there were a single unifying thread, it's the apparent belief that this is still the 1950s, i.e., that the dollar is still the world's reserve currency, steel is still made in Bethlehem, cars are still made in Detroit, computers mean IBM and global trade is whatever the USA says it is. But, as I said at the beginning of this post, the roots of the problem go much deeper than Congress, to the people who actually put them in office. As an outsider, the things the American voter does appear bafflingly stupid -- voting for Bush, opposing foreign aid, supporting military adventures, discouraging immigration, etc. One of the many other manifestations of America's decline I experienced was its decaying airline industry. Once again, Congress has played its part by making it illegal for foreign investors to acquire US airlines. As one result, I missed my connecting flights on both my way in and my way out of the country (and am currently still waiting for the second of my two missing bags to show up). I fly very, very often, and cannot remember the last time I had a late or cancelled flight, or had a bag go missing. Yet on the one and only trip I take on an American-managed airline, all three things happen. The airline put me up at a horrible little hotel outside Boston, where I had nothing better to do than catch up on the news on television. I first tuned to CNN. Years ago, I learned that CNN actually makes two versions of its newscast -- one for its global audience, and another that produces simpler stories and avoids words with more than two syllables for its American viewers. CNN was showing an interview with Paris Hilton, who had just been released from jail and was discussing her "ordeal." No, Larry King isn't going to interview Khalid al-Masri about the 5 months he spent being tortured in the CIA's "Salt Pit" prison outside Khandahar on his next show, in case you were wondering. Al-Masri had dark skin and therefore deserved to be tortured. On CNN Headline News, the CNN sister station, I was able to learn in detail about some moron in Ohio or somewhere who had just murdered his pregnant girlfriend. The same story was being carried by Fox News and all the local stations. Nowhere did I find anything about the war in Iraq, genocide in Darfur, Iran's nuclear programme, the new British Prime Minister, the upcoming Bush-Putin summit, global warming, the EU constitutional crisis, the apparent wrongful conviction of the Lockerbie bombing suspect, Castro's birthday celebrations, the resistance to growing authoritarianism by U.S.-allied dictators by Supreme Court justices in Egypt and Pakistan, or any of numerous other meaningful stories that were being carried elsewhere. Here in Doha, I can choose between the international version of CNN in English, BBC World in English, Al-Jazeera in English or Arabic, France24 in English, French or Arabic, SkyNews in English, Deutsche Welle in English or German, EuroNews in English or French, RAI in Italian or TVE in Spanish. I don't think any of them were carrying the Paris Hilton story, and so it's little wonder Americans vote as if they are living in a different world than the rest of us.

Flying out of Washington, the TSA and I went into our familiar routine. They harass me, I object. They threaten me with arrest, I invite them to go ahead. They ask if I want to make my flight or not. I tell them I don't care one way or the other, and they finally let me go on my way. Turns out agents at this same airport managed to thwart a dangerous plot involving a toddler and a "sippy-cup" filled with water just a few weeks previously (this incident was no doubt at the top of the news cast). Clearly pumped after their successful show-down with Toddler-bin-Laden, who was probably concealing a poopy diaper (which are defined as a chemical weapon by the 2nd Geneva Convention) in addition to his Sippy-cup-of-Mass-Destruction, they made a point of detaining me past my scheduled departure time. But thanks to America's declining competitiveness, it made no difference -- my flight was 40 minutes late and I boarded no problem. Unfortunately, boarding meant pulling away from the gate and sitting on the tarmac for 90 minutes before we finally took off, which led to my missing my connection in Boston. There wasn't another flight until the same flight the next day, so I got to spend the night there.

Next day, I thought I might as well take the opportunity to do a little sight-seeing in Boston, a city I knew well but hadn't seen in some time. Although I had no choice but to wear the same clothes that day because everything else was in my checked bags, I still had my 10 kilo lap top bag with me. I tried to check it at the airport, but was told that -- Surprise! -- they no longer had left luggage facilities "since 9/11". So I spent the day lugging this horrible huge bag around with me all day, re-visiting familiar sights along Boston's famous "Freedom Trail," such as the Old North Church, from where American terrorists signalled the arrival of British troops to their co-conspirators, such as the famous terrorist Paul Revere, who then spread the information to other terror cells in the interior, so that leading terrorists like Samuel Adams could avoid capture, detention as "illegal combatants" and probable torture at the hands of the British. ("It's been like this ever since 7/4!")

Boston's Old North Church, scene of one of America's most successful terrorist conspiracies

One sight that wasn't familiar was the sight that wasn't there -- the I-93 overpass. This was a huge elevated highway that used to cut through the heart of Boston, separating out the North End from the rest of the city. In some ways I actually liked the old roadway -- you were elevated above the city as you passed through it, giving you a sense of intimacy and connection sort of like being on one of those rides at Disneyland. From the other perspective -- of seeing it looming above you as pedestrian, darkening the sky, spewing fumes and filling the air with an unending dull roar, it was however quite different. After years and years of work and incredibly huge amounts of money (and accusations of corruption, mis-management, incompetence, etc. etc. etc.), the formerly elevated highway has been sunk 10 meters below the surface, which is being covered with a park. Despite the fact that this project started around a decade ago, the finishing touches were still being applied -- trees, landscaping, benches and walkways were being installed as I passed over on my way to the North End. Big money, big effort, but I would say ultimately worth the end result.

Eventually, the wandering about with my laptop bag wore me out, so I headed back to Logan Airport, again went through my routine with the TSA ("we don't have to tolerate any complaints, sir"; "I know you don't, you can quit any time they get to be too much for you") and finally boarded my Paris flight and relaxed in my seat. The flight attendant offered us drinks; I asked for a beer. She asked for five dollars. I checked my wallet. Spent the last of my USD in Logan, offered to pay in Euros. "Sure," she said, "five Euros". I asked her why American Airlines was charging for drinks, as if it were a discount airline, yet charging full fare, as if it were a full-service airline, and then accepting money at a ridiculous exchange rate, to boot. "I know it's terrible," she said, "but ever since 9/11..."

BlognDog
Doha
1 July 2007

Censor This!

2007-06-10T11:24:00.001+02:00

Two weeks now in Doha and so far have had less interesting, blog-worthy experiences than I did in a typical hour in Budapest. My liver does seem grateful for the chance to recover, however.

It's looking as if Doha is going to become my home base for at least the next few years, so I've been doing a bit of investigation of my new environment. Although Doha hasn't attracted the same kind of media attention as nearby Dubai, it has shared Dubai's frantic pace of development over the past few years, and also its sky-rocketing rents. Both my office and my hotel are housed in tower-blocks that were completed less than 12 months ago. They are also right next to each other, so during the day I look out of my 24th-floor office window at my hotel:

And during the night, I look out of my 21st-floor hotel room window at my office:

The whole area is a giant construction zone -- a 5-year-old building like the iconic, pyramidal Sheraton Hotel is considered an ancient landmark. I would estimate 70% of the buildings I can see from my office window are still under construction:If you are wondering why these images look a bit washed-out, it's not that there is a defect with my camera; rather it's all the dust kicked up by all the construction activity that creates a sort of permanent haze in the air.

On balance, I think I will be happy enough here. True, there isn't a lot of entertainment, but unlike Jordan (where I lived until recently) there is a large expat community here, so I expect making friends and building a new social life will be relatively simple. There are some decent beaches and clubs, and I expect some good opportunities for activities like diving and sailing. Purchasing alcohol requires a licence, but I'll be able to obtain one as soon as my residence permit is sorted out, and then obtaining booze will be no more complicated than it is to buy from System Bolaget at home in Sweden. And unlike in Dubai, Skype is not blocked.

Naturally, there is plenty of down-side as well. Being on the sea means living at sea level, which at this latitude means long summers with temperatures regularly over 40°, and not infrequently over 45 or even 50 degrees. Alchohol may be available, but unlike Jordan or Dubai, pork is not. But most irritating to me is the censorship of the internet. Both Dubai and Qatar have grandiose ambitions to become leaders in media and internet services. Dubai has built Dubai Internet City and Dubai Media City. Qatar has sponsored the establishment of Al-Jazeera, a first class global news channel that in the space of a few years has grown to rival the BBC and CNN. What I find incredibly and irritatingly short-sighted about the supposed visionaries behind these initiatives is their apparently complete failure to understand that you cannot build an information-based society in a controlled, fascist social environment. Even more irritating is the apparent mentality behind the censorship, which can be discerned by exploring which sites are blocked and which are not. A little exploration reveals an incredible level of stupidity and hypocrisy.

Not surprisingly, nearly every site that appears in the Google results for the search term "ass" will display only the Qatari censor's "this site has been blocked" notice.* I've never understood why Arab governments so completely fail to recognise the ancient and obvious correlation between creativity and naked girls. Throughout history, any place you've found writers, artists, musicians, etc., there has always been a nearby and plentiful source of naked girls, so if you expect your town to become the next art, film, or music capital of the world, you can't expect to hang on to whatever traditional sense of ambivalence towards female nudity your society may have developed during the period its economy was dependant on less glamourous industries, such as goat herding. As someone who enthusiastically embraces the whole naked-girls-running-around-stimulating-creativity concept, I find the Qatari attitude annoying enough, but some further investigation reveals that the underlying social attitudes are far more twisted than they initially appear. For example, Googling the term "penis" reveals that the Wikipedia entry for the word -- which has to be about the driest, dullest page on the internet containing the word, without even the slightest hint of prurient interest -- has been blocked by the Qatari censor. Similarly, dozens of other sites concerned with reproductive health, STDs, birth control, etc., have all been deemed to have a potentially harmful effect on Qatari society by the censor. More telling is the stuff that isn't censored -- whilst Qataris cannot find sites on sex toys (the Anne Summers site is blocked), they can have access to sites on how to beat their children properly, the Ku Klux Klan web site, the Aryan Nations web site (motto: "Violence Solves Everything"), and a whole slew of sites promoting racism, homophobia and misogyny.

You see the same sick, twisted thinking in the way films are censored. Go to see a James Bond, Bruce Willis or Steven Segal flick here in Doha and you will be sure not to miss a single frame of cars exploding, brains being splattered on walls, bad guys getting messily disembowelled by jagged metal objects, etc., but if Jerry Bruckheimer decides to throw in a short romantic scene as a sop to the women in the audience who have been dragged there by their boyfriends, you can be sure that anything steamier than a fond gaze gets chopped out by Qatar's defenders of public morality. This is, of course, a society that believes that allowing women to walk around with their heads uncovered will lead to fornication in the streets and the collapse of the family structure, as married men would be helpless to resist their basic animal urges on catching sight of, for example, a lady's naked ear.

This perverted mentality is of course not terribly different from the similarly hypocritical rantings that come out of certain quarters in the U.S.A. In 2004, Janet Jackson had a "wardrobe malfunction" during her performance in the traditional "half-time" entertainment during the "Super Bowl," America's national championship of American Football. For those of you not familiar with this "sport," it's basically ritualised, glorified violence, in which two teams of men with apparent thyroid problems, each wrapped in multiple layers of high-density plastic armour and lycra, hurl themselves at each other for 90 minutes whilst their fans work themselves up into a blood-thirsty frenzy. Half-way through this "game," they pause for a half-hour of singing and dancing about love, patriotism and neighbourliness by leading pop stars. American parents who had no problems with their children watching this spectacle of violence were up in arms that -- horrors! -- their children might have caught sight of an exposed nipple, and angrily demanded that the government do something about it.

So far, Nomadicity has escaped the attention of the Qataris, much to our disappointment, so in the hopes of joining the honoured ranks of the many web-sites that are considered unwholesome by Qatar's defenders of morality, we would like to present "Karen":
Actually, I have no idea if that's her real name -- I'm trying to keep my relationship with her casual, so we've agreed on no real names.

One day, I hope to start my own country here in the Middle East. It's going to be a different kind of place. For starters, no non-alcoholic beverages will be permitted. Men will not be allowed to drive -- a wise policy given that women will have to walk around with only their eyes covered. Anyone caught stealing will have an extra limb attached, and murderers will have an additional head surgically implanted. Most importantly, the internet will be filtered so that only porn sites will be available.

BlognDog
Doha
13 June 2007

*One key exception is the Wikipedia entry for the word, which notes that "ass" signifies (amongst other things) "the anus or the buttocks," as well as being a word for "donkey" derived from the Latin "asinus", or an acronym for the American Sociological Society, which in 1959 changed its name to the American Sociological Association. As the ASS was founded in 1905, it apparently took the directors of this undoubtedly esteemed and highly respected organisation composed of a brilliant and well-educated membership only slightly more than half a century to figure out why everyone sniggered upon reading their business cards.

Dancing to BBC World

2007-05-25T10:15:00.001+02:00

It's been an intensively social week back in Budapest, so much so that I am in some ways looking forward to travelling to the alcohol-free environment of Qatar tomorrow. In keeping with Nomadicity's strict policy of protecting the guilty through the use of nicknames, each of the numerous people I have been sharing thoughts, space and beer with over the past few days has been assigned a nickname, using Nomadicity's unique nickname generating methodology. In order to keep real world identities secure, and to prevent readers of Nomadicity from illegally profiting from information that might be used for inside trading purposes, this methodology employs a unique and powerful randomisation engine. How this works in practice is that after a random number of beers, I randomly ask someone who happens to be sitting nearby to randomly suggest nicknames for themselves and the others at the table. In this case, I was sitting at Bar Ellato -- my favourite in Budapest -- with a friend who designated himself "Akido Monkey" and then unhesitatingly declared the others to be named C3PO, Jaba the Hut, Han Solo and Adri. (Actually, he wanted Adri to be named R2D2, but C3PO insisted she already had the nickname "Adri", so why mess with it?). You might think from this response that Akido Monkey is some sort of nerdy Star Wars freak, but in fact, it's simply that he is a Scotsman with a somewhat limited imagination, and he was probably remembering those names from the commemorative glass he picked up at a Glasgow McDonalds 3 years ago that has since become a treasured possession. He undoubtedly used that glass earlier that day to serve himself a bracing belt of 18-year-old Glengoyne, inadvertently imprinting those names into his short term memory in the process, and they popped out of his consciousness again when prompted by me for suggestions.

C3Po is the latest in a series of petite women who have decided to take on the not insignificant challenge of being Akido Monkey's girlfriend. In exchange, Akido Monkey teaches her Akido self-defence techniques and English. Adri is C3PO's best friend, and both of them are prime examples of why Akido Monkey and Jaba the Hut decided to move to Budapest. That night in Ellato I asked a group of male expatriates "Why Hungary"? The instantaneous consensus response was "the women." Nobody seemed to think the food was particularly good, although "climate" came in a distant second. Apparently, I am the only foreigner in Hungary who would like to move there because of the national internet domain name, ".hu", which -- as far as I am aware -- is the only country domain that sounds like a sneeze when you say it, and thereby prompting others to say "bless you" every time you finish pronouncing your email address.

9 out of 10 expatriates polled believe "Hungarian women" are the best reason to live in Hungary (the 10th has since been demostrated to be clinically brain-dead and very possibly gay as well). Nomadicity plans to explore this issue further through a series of in-depth research projects.

All this fun was having a profoundly negative impact on my productivity. Sunday I spent mostly recovering from Saturday. Monday I managed to get a bit of work done, but Monday night found me back at Ellato, and Tuesday was another lost cause. Wednesday I managed to get a bit done, and then went to an excercise class led by a former ballet instructor named Zsolt, a powerful but compact trainer with almost no body fat and even less body hair (or head hair, for that matter). After the class, I was feeling pretty good (despite Zsolt's comment to me during the class that "I think you do not dance, no? Am I right?") and feeling optimistic that I could finally catch up on some of my work the next day. Then Akido Monkey suggested we go to Ellato "just for one drink."

I don't recall every detail of the next 9 hours, but the evening ended with four of us back in Akido Monkey's flat, polishing off his supply of Russian vodka and Scotch whiskey, and dancing on the hardwood floor as the sky was growing light. Actually, I'm not sure if C3PO agreed that what I was doing could properly be called "dancing", as she noted with some amusement that I have "completely no rhythm," and "I think you do not dance, no?" Gypsy-blooded girls like C3PO go through life in time with a powerful internal beat that carries on even when the music stops playing. She had proved this a couple days earlier when she and Akido Monkey demonstrated their ability to dance to a BBC World news cast.

Fortunately for me, Akido Monkey made the spontaneous decision to depart for Croatia early the next morning (in other words, about an hour after we finally went to sleep) with JtH and Han Solo. I didn't get out of bed until about 14:00, and spent the rest of the day nursing a terrible hangover. I went to bed early and this morning was up at 5:00 and have since spent 12 highly productive hours finishing off the Mexico project and a few other loose ends. Or maybe they were simply "productive," rather than "highly productive." It was a welcome distraction from my work when Adri and C3PO joined me for a final drink in Budapest earlier this evening, but Akido Monkey -- being a rather clever monkey -- discovered how he could be almost as disruptive remotely as he could in Budapest by finding an internet café in Split and -- not having anything better to do -- spending a few hours drinking expresso and sending me annoying messages via Skype. I do have to credit him for the fact that I now know how to make "mooning," "puking," "swearing," "middle finger salute," and other socially dodgy emoticons on Skype thanks to this interchange, a skill I will of course rush to add to my CV and make a point of highlighting during my next job interview. All concerned also agree that Wednesday night's drunken fiasco was entirely Akido Monkey's fault. Tomorrow I'm off to Doha, in Qatar, for a new project and possibly a new life.

As I suspected would eventually happen when I made the decision to start this blog without having sorted out my own nickname, I am pleased to announce that inspiration has struck, and that I will henceforth being signing off under the moniker "BlognDog." I have no explanation to offer for this choice, but am thoroughly pleased with it for a number of linguistic, cultural and personal reasons, including the fact that I think it has a nice rhythm to it when articulated. Not that I'm any sort of expert on such things.

BlognDog
Budapest
25 May 2007

!مبروك

2007-05-19T12:05:00.000+02:00

Back in Budapest after a gruelling 24 hour journey from Mexico City. I had hoped to hold on to the spirit of Mexico for at least a few days longer through the special power of a bottle of premium añejo tequila, but thanks to global paranoid security culture, Lufthansa would not let me connect with it as cabin baggage in Frankfurt, and there was not sufficient time to check it. I do, however, have to thank the Lufthansa check-in staffer, who tried everything he could think of to try to find a way to let me bring it along, but in the end, his hands were tied by the security fascists, and I was forced to abandon my precious bottles at the check point.

Connecting through FRA does have its compensations, however. Generally, I do not like Germans or the German language, but I do have to admit to taking an inordinate amount of pleasure from saying the word "anschlußflug," a word which -- despite being German -- seems to roll off the tongue in the most satisfying way imaginable. I make a point of saying it several times whenever I connect through FRA, and this time was no exception.

But there were some more meaningful events in the world yesterday. Last winter, I had the pleasure of summitting Ben Nevis with some other London Business School alumni and students. For me it was short but pleasant escape from the work I was doing in Jordan at the time. For them, it was the first step in their 15 months of preparation for climbing Mt. Everest. Last I heard from them was a few weeks ago, when I received an email announcing their imminent departure for Nepal, and for no particular reason I was yesterday seized with the spontaneous urge to have a peek at their website. To my surprise and pleasure, I learned that two team members -- South African Greg Maud and Egyptian Omar Samra -- had successfully summitted just that morning. This was a first not only for London Business School, but Omar has now become the first Egyptian to reach the highest spot on the globe, so Nomadicity joins LBS and Egypt in wishing him a special "!مبروك" (congratulations!) on his effort.

Adíos a Mexico

2007-05-18T03:01:00.000+02:00

A quick update from the airport -- leaving Mexico and Budapest-bound once again. I'm not in the least bit eager to say "adíos" to Mexico, but I've delivered my deliverables to my client, packed up, checked out, gotten into a taxi, checked-in, passed through security and immigration, done my mandatory duty free shopping, found my gate, a bar, a power point, and a wireless internet connection. God willing, I'll be in Budapest after spending only most of a day strapped into a cramped seat in a tiny metal tube hurtling through the stratosphere at Mach 0,8. I'll blog you when I get there.

Final Weekend in Mexico

2007-05-15T03:29:00.000+02:00

Life flashes by -- although I still feel as if I just arrived here in Mexico, soon it will be time to pack up the metaphorical camels and wander off into the proverbial desert on the figurative saddle. This past weekend was my last weekend here, and although a part of me was tempted to spend it lounging poolside and drinking Pacifica Lager, I decided to make the most of it, hence my sore feet, aching legs and sunburned face. Saturday I headed up the Avenida de la Reforma to the Bosque de Chapultepec. Every decent city has such a park -- London has its Hyde Park, New York has its Central Park, Warsaw has Łażienki, and Berlin the Tiergarten -- and any city that doesn't isn't livable as far as I am concerned. That's one of the things I hated about my 3 1/2 years in Amman -- not a single decent park there.

Trying to compare parks is an apples and oranges thing, so I won't venture to rate Chapultepec against its peers, but I found it to be one of the best large urban parks anywhere, with a good mix of formally landscaped areas and more natural zones, monumental monuments and intimate corners. The other thing this particular park has is a large number of world-class museums. I only attempted to "do" two of them - the Museo Nacional Historia and the Museo Nacional Antropologia. The Museo Historia is housed in the Castillo Chapultepec, which is a former grand residence perched on bluff in the centre of the park, with a view straight down the Avenida de la Reforma. Formerly it has been the residence of the Presidents and Emperors of Mexico, as well as a military academy. It is a beautiful building, inside and out, and the exhibits describing Mexico's history from the Empire of the Mexica to the Spanish Conquest, the fight for independence, the wars with France and the United States, and the revolution of Villa and Zapata were really well done. I must admit that the swelling of outrage you cannot help but experience on reading the exhibits on the Texan and American aggression against Mexico, and the fabricated charges that were used to start the war (echoes of which were heard in subsequent conflicts initiated by the U.S.A. - the trumped up nonsense used to justify the coup d'etat carried out by the U.S. Marines that deposed Queen Lilioukalani of Hawaii, the cries of "Remember the Maine!" -- the falsified terror attack used to justify the Spanish-American War -- the war with Colombia started in order to sieze the Panama Canal Zone, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the "rescue" of medical students in Grenada, and most recently, Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction) is in part responsible for the recent strain of anti-Americanism on Nomadicity. More than the exhibits, though, I enjoyed simply wandering around the public and private rooms of the residence, and particularly the gardens and terraces. At one point I found myself on a huge terrace, surrounded by gardens and with a spectacular view of all of Mexico City in front of me, and despite the fact that it was mid-morning on a Saturday in city with more inhabitants than Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland combined, I had the entire place to myself, except for a few song-birds.

A corridor in the Castillo

A view of the gardens

After four hours of this, an ordinary correspondent would have called it a day, but I still had yet to see the Museo de Antropologia, which had been highly recommended to me as an don't-miss destination by several sources. As it turns out, they did not exaggerate. If you like Pre-Columbian New World history like I do, this museum is more fun than a drunken, under-aged congressional page and tube of K-Y is for a Republican Senator. I spent another four hours here, wandering through the Olmec, Toltec, Maya, Mexica, and other exhibits, and still managed to see only around 40% of the place. But one of my favourite things about the place was not an exhibit at all, but rather the unique fountain in the courtyard, which features water cascading from a ring shaped aperature in the roof around a central bronze column covered in Aztec reliefs.

Yesterday, Sunday, didn't begin auspiciously. My colleagues and I had agreed to meet early and to make the trek together by metro and bus to Teotihuacan, the site of Mexico's famous Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The day started a bit bizarrely, as I headed to the small church down the street from our hotel for mass. I had been there the week before, but didn't notice the plaque on the wall -- written in Spanish and Hungarian -- noting the Hungarian embassy's assistance in restoring the stained glass windows with the images of Hungarian saints. It was really bizarre -- there was St. Stephen and a host of other Hungarian saints, along with the Hungarian shield with its double cross.

After mass, as I was getting a bit sick of our second rate hotel breakfast, I decided to head for a nearby restaurant. Hurrying back to meet my colleagues after breakfast, I stepped on an iron access plate in the pavement and had it give way under my foot. I was hurled forward, my fall broken by my hands, knees, and my head striking a metal pole. It took a few minutes to regain my feet and my dignity, and on inspecting the damage found I had lost skin on both knees and both hands, and had a lump on my head. Only later did it start to sink how much worse it could have been -- a multiple fracture or knocked out teeth would not have been difficult to manage, but aside from the sensation that I've recently been beaten up, I'm mostly OK.

Certainly OK enough to get myself out to the pyramids and climb several of them, including the Pyramid of the Sun.

Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan

Another view of the Pyramid

The Pyramid of the Sun as seen from the Pyramid of the Moon

Stairway to Heaven?

As you can imagine, the place was brimming with the usual assortment of annoying tourists and obnoxious souvenir vendors. It's this part of the experience of such places that makes me hesitate to visit them, but I find it difficult to avoid feeling compelled to see certain places. You delude yourself by convincing yourself that by going you rid yourself of the compulsion, but if you have (as I have) visited Copán and Petra and Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall and the Kremlin and Mahabalipuram and Samarkand and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, you still have the Great Wall and the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids and the Acropolis and Ankgor Wat and Mt. Rushmore nagging at your conscience. I have no answers, no solutions, no insights; only sympathy for those who share my affliction -- so I raise my tequila glass to the weary, the shorts-clad, the camera-toting, souvenir-buying masses, and pray to the gods of Kyoto, Kandy, Cairo, and Canterbury; of the Blue Mosque, Borobdopur, and Beijing; and of Palmyra, Persepolis and Isfashan, to bring soothing relief to their blistered feet, to spare them the tedium of indifferent tour guides, the humiliation of abusive taxi drivers and the frustration of garbled translations, filthy toilets and over-priced snack bars, and the sincerest wishes that their treks bring them some small measure of the transcendental experience they imagined and aspired to during the guide-book inspired travel planning reveries that proceeded their visit. Cheers and Amen.

G.
Mexico City
17 May 2007

The View from Jamestowne

2007-05-14T02:06:00.000+02:00

The big news from the Fourth Reich this past week has been the 400th anniversary of the Jamestowne settlement, which as I noted in my last entry was the first successful English colony in the Americas. Elizabeth II herself was in the U.S.A. this past week to help with festivities, and as a result, Bush had to go and get a crash course on how to behave in civilised society.

As might be expected, Bush used the occasion of his recent visit to Jamestowne to talk about how the 400th anniversary celebrations represent a chance to "honour the beginnings of our democracy" and "to renew our commitment to help others around the world realise the great blessings of liberty." (Reuters News via Yahoo!)

As I noted in my last entry, the English settlement at Jamestowne, and the subsequent establishment of the Commonwealth of Virginia are anything but examples of liberty and democracy. On the contrary, they represent the worst of America, and are the prototype of the dark side of the moral dichotomy that Anglo-America has been from the start. Jamestowne and Virginia owe their survival and subsequent prosperity to the cultivation of a highly addictive weed, nicotiania, and this cultivation in turn could not have succeeded without the institution of slavery. The English settlers initially relied primarily on white indentured servants from Britain to provide labour to the colony, although the first black slaves, imported from Portuguese Angola, arrived not long after the colony was founded. The reason for the preference was simple -- whites were cheaper. Over the course of the 17th century, as increased slaving brought prices down, the economic dynamics changed, and from the middle of the century, Virginia's aristocracy began favouring imported black labour, and set about changing the colony's legal framework to suit their greed. In 1662 an unprecedented law was passed -- from then on, all children born to slave women were to be considered slaves. Slavery had previously existed in Europe, Asia and Africa for millenia -- Persia, Rome, Turkey and other empires had previously supported their economies by using the labour of captives, POWs and others, but never had any society made the condition of slavery hereditary. In 1667, laws which made it illegal to keep Christians as slaves were abolished in Virginia and in 1669, it was made legal for a slave owner to kill a slave as his personal property. Again, there been numerous other slave owning societies, but rarely were masters given the legal right to kill a slave, nor was it ever previously common for economic status to be explicitly and legally associated with skin colour. It has been often noted that the "democratic" Greeks owned slaves, but there was no ethnic difference between patrician, plebeian and slave in Greek society.

By the end of the century, black persons in Virginia were presumed to be slaves, and freed slaves were obliged to leave the Commonwealth. Even in other slave-labour dependent European colonies -- Spanish Cuba, French Guadeloupe, Dutch Suriname and British Antigua -- manumission was common and free blacks were an accepted part of society. Not so in proto-Fascist Virginia. According to the historian Edmund Morgan (author of American Slavery, American Freedom) Virginia whites began actively promoting racist ideology as a means to dividing black slave labourers from the white rural proletariat (otherwise known as "white trash"), which might have otherwise been natural allies in class struggle.

A century later, the whole racist house of cards was threatened by developments in England. On 22 June 1772, the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, ruling at the court at Westminster Hall, rendered judgement in a case involving a slave, James Somerset, who had been bought by one Charles Stewart in Virginia in 1749, and had subsequently followed in his service to Massachusetts, and then to London in 1769. Somerset, knowing that Stewart's visit in London was to be temporary, took the opportunity to escape, and in September 1771, disappeared from his master's service. Somerset was recaptured by slave catchers and placed in chains on a ship-- the Ann and Mary -- bound for the Caribbean and a life of labour in the cane fields. However, a witness to the seizure managed to secure a writ of habeus corpus, and the subsequent civil case revolved around whether or not a person could legally be considered property in the "free air" of England. Fortunately for Somerset, Mansfield's judgement was that "the exercise of the power of a master over his slave must be supported by the Laws of particular Countries; but no foreigner can in England claim such a right over a man." The consequence of this ruling was that regardless of his or her legal status in their master's home country, any slave was thenceforth considered to be legally free the instant they set foot on English soil.

Subsequently, opponents of slavery in Britain's American colonies sought to have the ruling applied to British America -- as well as England -- and the racist-capitalists of Georgia, the Carolinas, and above all, Virginia, knew that if they were successful, the party was over for them. Therefore, a handful of them, led by slave owners such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Arthur Middleton and John Rutledge, joined with northern abolitionists John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and others in revolting against British rule, under the strict understanding with their northern compatriots that their rights as slave-owners were to be preserved under the new, independent government. Without the support of the Virginians, the enterprise was doomed to failure, and the country founded on this compromise was ever since fundamentally flawed.

This pact with devil is the source of the contradictions in American society that continue to today. The first manifestation of this fissure was the American Civil War, which resulted in the deaths of millions and legal eradication of slavery. During the subsequent Reconstruction period, when the southern United States was under military occupation, the southerners found more subtle ways to continue their racist domination, most notably through the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. To this day, a number of southern American states officially fly the flag of the Confederacy, the moral equivalent of, for example, allowing Bavaria to continue to use the Nazi swastika flag as a state symbol. Despite losing the war, the Virginians have managed to cling to their privileges; until recently forcing blacks into legal second class status through segregation. The Norfolk and Western Rail yard near Alexandria, in northern Virginia, was the spot where for decades Negroes travelling by rail from north to south had to move from integrated to segregated carriages. The The Civil Rights Movement has been no more successful than the Civil War in shaking the white trash grip on power and society. Recently, a Virginia candidate for the United States Senate only narrowly lost an election despite being caught on videotape using a blatantly racist slur to refer to a dark-skinned American of South Asian ethnicity. To the millions of Virginians who voted for him anyway, there was nothing wrong with this, as this sort of knee-jerk racism is what passes for thinking with this crowd. When John Ashcroft needed a bunch of racist, red-neck, inbred, sibling-fucking, xenophobic, white-trash crackers to serve as a jury in his show trial of the "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh (a trial he could have staged in any state in the U.S.A. as he claimed universal jurisdiction), he unhesitatingly chose Virginia as the most dependably racist jury pool, one that undoubtedly would have found Lindh's choice of religion reason enough to send him to prison. And of course, most recently, this warped and corrupt society produced Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman who carried out the Virginia Tech massacre. Despite the fact that Virginia Tech is nestled in the most violent, racist, red-neck corner of this violent, racist, red-neck state, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh lost no time in declaring the source of the problem to be "liberalism."

So ramble on all you want from the podium in Jamestowne, George, about liberty, democracy and all that, but the fact is that the Jamestowne colony and its legacy, the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a society based on violence, racism and exploitation, and is the first economy to be based on narco-terrorism. It is the origin of the problem America has faced throughout its history. The United States was meant to be a product of the Age of the Enlightenment, a liberal, egalitarian democracy founded on the principles of reason and intellect, and freed from the burdens of race, class and birth. Instead, it has been repeatedly co-opted by proponents of some of the lowest and most despicable social theories ever to be inflicted upon humanity. The proponents of this philosophy have been been repeatedly crushed -- legally, morally and militarily -- in the American Civil War, in World War II, and in the Civil Rights movement, yet they still keep coming back like a bad case of acne, most recently in the form of "Neo-Cons" and "Red States". Final victory will no doubt one day be achieved, but no doubt the battle will make even the mass carnage of the Civil War and the Second World War look relatively modest in comparison.

Mexico City

13 May 2007

Try, Try Again

2007-05-13T02:49:00.001+02:00

I'm interrupting what has so far been an absolutely flawless weekend day here in Mexico City to have another go at wireless posting. Some of you may have seen the embarassingly unsuccessful first attempt I made earlier, using MMS, although I only allowed the results to remain on Nomadicity for a few hours. Despite the obvious problems, I did gain some valuable insights into the process, although these do not include how to post images wirelessly.

I also noted with some chagrin that in fact there are some Jaiku-nauts who have figured out how to post image Jaikus (yes, none of them have started shaving yet).

Irregardless, I have not today been blessed with the ambition to try to figure this out right now. After a very pleasant morning of exploring the positively exquisite Bosque de Chapultepec (Mexico's answer to London's Hyde Park or New York's Central) and several of it's numerous incredible museums, I am now waiting out a pleasant afternoon downpour in a very comfy chair in the bar at the Four Seasons. After depressing myself by reading what passes what passes for a newspaper in Florida's Guisano community (the Miami Herald), I kind of naturally thought to try again with wireless posting, this time using an email client. So once again - if you are reading this, it means I've been successful.

The news from and about the U.S.A. (as related by the Mexican edition of the Miami Herald) is depressingly moronic as always. The front page is depressing for what isn't there - still no impeachment and indictment of Bush or Cheney, no discussion of the cult of violence that led to the Virginia Tech massacre, no bold initiatives to tackle carbon emissions, no acknowledgent or recognition that the plagues of poverty, waste, fast food, urban sprawl, Christian fundamentalism, homelessness, racism, income disparity, and Windows Vista might all be rooted in single core problem - free markets. On page two, there is an article about how some communities in Texas are opposing innoculating girls with a safe and effective vaccine against a sexually-transmitted virus because of fears that it will "encourage them to be sexually active." On page 3, Cheney the draft-dodging apartheid supporter is on board a carrier in the PERSIAN Gulf, waving his big stick threatingly at Iran, declaring "we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region." Dick didn't mention that most of us are far more concerned with American dominance, and American nuclear weapons. Hint, Dick, there is only one country in history that has demonstrated itself untrustworthy in this respect by using it's nuclear arsenal to carry out mass slaughter of civilians, and it's not Iran.

Page 4 has a editorial diatribe by a certain Leonard Pitts, Jr., who rejoices in the recent sentencing of Paris Hilton to 45 days in jail for being "pulled over three times for driving on a suspended licence while on probation for drunken driving." Pitts thinks this is "poetic justice" because he thinks Hilton has for too long set a bad example for "the kids who admire her" by demonstrating indifference to "the rules that govern life here on Planet Earth." He goes on to muse gleefully on the mental image of Hilton in "an orange jumpsuit." Never once in his ramblings on the topic does he venture to make the painfully obvious logical leap (or more properly, "logical baby step") to the lack of consequences for George Bush, who started his career as a member of the privileged class (and whose vacuousness far surpasses that of Hilton) with getting let off for a drink-driving charge, and then went on to dodge the draft, steal two elections, lie to Congress, defy the security council, start an illegal war, and kidnap and torture thousands, and he is still yet to see the orange prison jumpsuit he deserves. I agree Hilton hasn't been a model member of society, but when you are a columnist and you have a choice between writing about the unpunished trangressions of serial commissioner of moving violations, and those of the biggest war criminal of the 21st century, focussing on Hilton doesn't suggest a good sense of priorities.

Moving on to page 5, an article on the 400th anniversery of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia (the first permanent English colony in the Americas) makes no mention of the fact that Virginia suceeded where the others failed because the twin economic pillars of race-based slavery and tobacco, which not only got the colony going, but 200 years later led the colony's elite (led by Washington, Jefferson and Mason) to revolt against a British Crown when it threatened to bring an end to the institution of slavery. Today the racist aristocracy of this state continues to rely on racial oppression, tobacco addiction and massive transfers of funds in the form of "defence" spending at the Pentagon, C.I.A. and Hampton Roads in order to keep their corrupt lifestyles afloat.

On page 6 is a story about continuing U.S. efforts to prevent Guantanamo detainees from getting a fair trial, and page 7 summarises the latest buffoonery of U.S. clients Olmert and Musharraf, as well as an accounting of US violations of the Nuclear NPT.

To Bush's undoubted relief, page 8 was dedicated to Mother's Day gift ideas (too late to give Barbara an abortion gift certificate?). On 9, Garry Trudeau once again gave thanks to the Bush administration for making life so easy for political humourists.

Page 10 was dedicated to "Home Stuff," but in the Opinion section on page 11, some moron by the name of James Pinkerton turned a blind eye to the poverty and despair of America, the the misery of slums of Rio de Janiero, the repression of Hong Kong and Singapore, and the skyrocketing rates of poverty in Russia since 1991 (as well as the mirror-image success stories in Socialist countries like Sweden, Viet Nam, Cuba, Botswana, Venezuela and elsewhere) to wax poetic about how Sarkhozy's election victory was an indication that the entire world now regarded Socialism as a big mistake and realised, with the benefit of hindsight, how much better off we all would have been if we had simply kept the Bourbon monarchs and Marie Antoinette in power in the first place. This is what passes for reasoning with these morons.

Also in the page 11 opinion section was this little update on the Millenium Development Goals by Jeffrey Sachs titled "The Poor Need Aid, not Lectures." Although Sachs, as a Harvard Business School professor and a long-time cheerleader for free-markets, might be expected to be a promoter of the Bush administration (which wraps itself in free-market ideology), this opinion piece was a litany of failed promises, unmet obligations and disappointments in the years since the Millenium Development Goals were established and committed to by the G-8 in 2000. Unsurprisingly, the biggest single dead-beat is Bush's America, which not only has completely failed to meet it's committments to contribute the 1% of GDP that economists almost universally agree is required address the massive economic imbalances that plague most of the world, but is now slipping even from the pathetic 0,1% level it managed under the Clinton Administration. On top of this, it appears the Bush Administration is engaging in an incredibly cynical (even for this bunch) attempt to obfuscate its failings by using misleading accounting (guess those ex-Enron guys have to work somewhere) and cooked numbers. Jeffrey seems honestly surprised to learn that the greedy capitalists who infest the White House aren't willing to meet the committments they themselves made, even though it's a well-known fact that the costs are minimal and the benefits are enormous. Why? Because the costs will hit a handful of Wall Street slimeballs who contributed heavily to Bush's last "election" campaign, and the benefits will fall mostly on some African families; although they number close to a billion, none of them helped Bush steal his last election.

Finally, page 12 contains an account of yet another failed American Conservative policy, the "War on Drugs". Thanks to Conservatives, it's become nearly impossible to get a job In the U.S.A without submitting to a urine test. As a result, millions of Americans have become desparate to find ways to defeat these tests, giving rise to an internet-driven myth that massive doses of Niacin will purge the system of drug traces. Instead, they are ending up in emergency rooms suffering from "heart palpitations, vomiting, blood sugar analomies and liver failure."

That's the news from what the Grouper has aptly named "The Fourth Reich," and that's my rant for the day. This was supposed to be just a technical test, but there you go - once I get started there's just no stopping. Makes me wonder if anyone has ever composed an entire novel using a telephone key pad.

G.
Mexico City
12 May 2007

An Update from Washington

2007-05-12T03:48:00.000+02:00

Last week Nomadicity brought you some brief information relayed to us by our Washington correspondent, OD, about the tragic fire at Washington's historic Eastern Market. Since then, we've received OD's own words on the event, reflecting the deep sense of personal loss she and the other long-time vendors felt upon hearing the news. She also tried to send a few images, but unfortunately OD is one of the few living internet users whose technical skills are below even those of my own. So instead, I give you a selection of images available from public sources. OD's words on the event follow.

Dearest friends, I send this with the heaviest heart:I'm sure by now you have heard about the fire at Eastern market. I don't have much to say at this point because I really am in a state of shock, but I wanted to pass this along. Please, please tell everyone you know that the Market Lives and we will continue to vend there, every Saturday and Sunday. the North Hall, which is Market 5 Gallery, was completely untouched by some miracle, and a very heavy duty Fire wall between the two halls. They would not let me into the Gallery to check on my belongings which I keep right up against that fire wall, but I was told by staff that it was OK. The meeting I went to this morning with the Mayor indicated that the South Hall would take at least 18 months to rebuild. Some of the inside vendors had no insurance, so they have lost everything. It was also mentioned that some type of temporary shelter would be made so that the food vendors could continue to sell. also, 7th Street will be closed to traffic Saturday and sunday, to provide more space for more vendors to sell. And the 44th Annual Market Day will be held this Sunday May 6th. If you can, please try to come out and support us. I'm not sure about my space along the wall because they have erected a fence the entire parameter of the building. I'm hoping not to be moved, but I may be. Please say a prayer for those who lost everything and for the death of one of the best, most vibrant, interesting and last of it's kind markets. I could feel the pain from the building as I sat there last night, stunned, just watching it for over 4 hours.

So far, I haven't received any any specfic reports of Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrinch attempting to blame the fire on "liberalism," although I'm sure we can expect that soon. If you're confused by this, it's probably because you are not aware that in additional to their nearly limitless ignorance about society, religion, economics, etc., American Conservatives also have difficulties with basic English, incorrectly applying the term "liberalism" (which for you non-Political Science majors out there is a term that properly refers to a laissez-faire approach to economic management) when they mean to say "Socialism." American Conservatives hate Socialism, because they hate any anything that hints at fairness or justice.

Again, I do hope those of you who are able to make your way to Eastern Market this weekend and show your support, preferably by spending generously on the jewelry, paintings, clothing, handcrafts and other items they sell there. You'll help raise their spirits, and in the process, you'll get to take home some very cool shit from one or more of the artists and artisans that sell from this venerable venue.

G.
Mexico City
11 May 2007

¡Viva Mexico!

2007-05-07T04:44:00.000+02:00

More technical failures on the mobile blogging front, but I'm figuring it out bit by bit, and hopefully at some point soon will have the entire process mastered sufficiently to produce a "G's guide to mobile blogging for the dim-witted, post-puberty set." But for now, I'm bored with the whole mechanics of blogging thing and having now had the weekend free from my project, I was able to do a bit of exploring in Mexico City, and I'd much rather write a few lines about that.

I did a bit of preparatory research on Mexico City before I came here, and the expectations created by my readings were mixed at best. (By "mixed" I mean that I was led to expect to alternate between being robbed by armed thugs and suffering from an attack of explosive diarrhœa every 10 minutes, whilst all the time choking on smog so thick you could spread it on toast for breakfast). Having now been here for over a week, I believe I can say with some authority that the city overall is under-rated, the dangers are wildly exaggerated, and as someone with no small amount of travel experience, I would put this place in my top ten urban destinations world-wide.

One of the main reasons I like Mexico City is that it has excellent transport infrastructure. Personally, I love good public transportation, and any place that lacks good transport is never going to score good marks in my book. The Mexico City metro is famous mostly for its size and the number of passengers (millions) it transports every day, but in my opinion it deserves recognition for other reasons as well. One of the many clever things they do is give every station a simple graphic identity, like this route description shows:

They've done this of course, because many of the system users are illiterate, but I found it useful just to commit to memory that I was to disembark, for example, at the station with bell logo, rather than trying to remember the name of the station. I certainly would have appreciated this approach if I my native language didn't use the roman alphabet, as I recall the challenges of travelling by train and bus in places like the Middle East and China, and trying to recognise the name of my destination when written in an unfamiliar script on a departure board.

But for all the media attention given the Metro system, I've heard little about the other elements of the transport infrastructure here. Electric trolley-buses running in dedicated lanes move people quickly around the city even during rush hour (without adding to the smog level), and the "Metro Bus" is a unique hybrid transportation approach I've never seen anywhere else, although my colleagues inform me they are also used in Bogotá and Buenos Aires, amongst other places. Metro Buses run through the city on dedicated lanes, which allows them to cruise through rush hour traffic, but the really cool thing about them is the way you pay your fare and board.

The buses stop at metro-style elevated platforms located in the median in the middle of the street, rather than at traditional bus stops on the side. Doors in the bus align with doors in the platform, so you just step directly on board.

Even better is the fact that you pay your fare in order to access the platform by passing through a turnstile. So when the bus arrives, there is no delays while the driver sells tickets, etc. And because each bus has four wide doors, boarding and disembarking are completed in seconds. These are big buses, and during rush hour they are completely jammed, despite the fact that they run only about 60 - 90 seconds apart.

Finally, I was pleased to see that Mexico has what every livable city has to have -- a network of dedicated bicyle lanes.

Seeing the simple but creative things cities have done to reduce automobile usage (and hence polloution and CO2 emissions), it makes me particularly angry to hear Bush rambling on about how America can't do anything about carbon emissions until we develop some new technologies. A few million invested in dedicated bus and bicycle lanes in the USA (which has very few of them) would probably be all it would take for the USA to meet it's Kyoto obligations.

Of course I had to do the obligatory tourist stuff -- the Cathedral, the Plaza de la Constitucíon, etc., and I wouldn't suggest you pass these things up. But those weren't the things I enjoyed the most. At the suggestion of the Grouper, whom I awoke at 2 a.m. in Kawasaki by ringing him for directions, I decided to seek out the Cantina Guadalupana, a very old and very famous Mexican restaurant. I tried without success to locate it using the directions the Grouper gave me based on his memory of his time there nearly 2 decades ago, but finally resorted to walking into a 5-star hotel and asking the concierge. As I suspected, the Grouper's recollection was a bit fogged, in part no doubt because of his massive daily intake of tequila at the time he was a frequent patron, compounded by an apparently severe case of love-sickness involving a Volkswagen-beetle driving Mexican girl named Rebecca. Rather than being near the Cathedral in the Centro Historico as the Grouper recollected, it was many kilometers to the south, on another colonial era square, behind another colonial era church, in absolutely beautiful neighbourhood called Coyoacán, where I've since learned Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leo Trotsky once made their homes. It was quite an effort to get there -- about an hour on the metro, 2 line changes, and about 15 stations -- then a walk through a beautiful park called Viveros, then some residential streets with graceful 17th, 18th and 19th century homes and beautiful landscaping, then a commercial area with trendy restaurants, coffee shops, art galleries and boutiques, then finally an exquisite colonial square with a baroque church, and behind the church, the Cantina Guadalupana, looking every bit as old and authentic as lettering on the façade that claimed it had been in business "desde 1932".

Even the Grouper's love and tequila-addled brain remembered the classic swinging saloon doors you passed through to enter, and inside was an interior every bit as authentic and original as the façade. I'm also happy to say the food lived up to the rather high expectations created by this atmosphere heavy with character and authenticity, and I re-emerged a couple of hours later refreshed and revived after my long trek from the centre. I wandered around the area a bit more, and found more tree-shaded streets lined with more cafés, restaurants and boutiques populated, naturally with the same painfully hip people who inhabit all such neighbourhoods world-wide.

I found myself involuntarily quoting the immortal words of a friend I shall refer to as "Wally Joe": -- "I could live here."

Finally, I have to thank the anonymous poster on Virtual Tourist who woefully related her own Mexico experience, brushing her teeth with tap water her first day in town and as a result being stricken with a particularly virulent bout of Moctezuma's revenge that lasted the remainder of her two week trip. Her post reminded me to be extra careful with the water here; I have't let a drop of it pass my lips and I'm pleased to report that after 10 days here, I have yet to have the slightest problems with my digestive system. Salads and street food I have decided to risk, and despite other warnings I've been liberally partaking of chilis in every form -- so far with no adverse consequences.

G.
Mexico City
9 May 2007

Disappointments Large and Small

2007-05-04T12:40:00.000+02:00

The photo below represents my first -- but failed -- attempt to use Jaiku for wirelessly blogging a quick text and photo update. This is exactly the kind of situation I imagined these sites would be good for -- I was transiting through Frankfort (FRA) on my way from Budapest to Mexico City, and so wanted first of all just to let a few people know I was re-locating to a different time zone. But rather than just send a simple update, it's cool to be able to grab an image like this out the stream of stimuli you're inundated with every day and share it with a few people.

The shot is in the tunnel between terminals 1A and 1B. I tried to send it directly to the Jaiku site by MMS moments after snapping it on tuesday morning, but have since found that you can only send text to that number. The site does at least imply that it's possible to send "blogs, photos, bookmarks, music, places, events, videos and RSS feeds" to Jaikus, but doesn't really give you much details on how to do so. Irregardless of which option you click on (e.g. music or photos), it simply gives you a field where you can enter a URL to a web page with a content feed. I've got Nomadicity connected into mine, so a Jaiku gets generated every time I update the blog, but I don't see any way to actually get an image or other type of file to appear. And in this case, I don't think the clever 13-year-olds have figured it out either (which means it is truly impossible), as none of the public Jaikus visible on the site have anything but text or the standard graphics that Jaiku allows you to add.

One thing I do have to give Jaiku a gold star for, however, is its apparently flawless support for non-ASCII characters. I noted with pleasure that all the characters in the hungarian language titled post I added were displayed correctly on both the blogger and the Jaiku sites; developers who forget the world is a lot bigger than the 105 character ASCII set are a pet peeve of mine.

Trying to remain optimistic and maintain my trust in technology, I was excited to find that Blogger itself has a mobile posting option. As with most of sites these, the directions are rather thin (yes, I am one of those annoying people that actually likes to read the manual before attempting something), basically consisting of "just send your text and photos to go@blogger.com! That's it!" Unfortunately the actual experience was all too typical. I snapped the photo below and sent it off to the email address whilst wandering around Mexico City yesterday.

Supposedly, "Blogger" was supposed to message me back with some sort of code, which I then am supposed to enter in the web site and thereby link my mobile number to my blog. No message was received, so I searched around the site a bit more and -- no surprise -- I find buried in some long FAQ the precious little tit-bit of information that "[t]he initial launch of Blogger Mobile will work with your phone if you are a US customer of Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, or T-Mobile". Oh well -- typical American site -- they just kind of forget to mention that for the 97% of the world that doesn't live in the USA, it doesn't work (and in fact the main page on the topic says "We support most popular mobile carriers in the US and worldwide"). Liars.

Well, all is not lost. Apparently, there is a way to post by email, and that I can do direct from the handset. I'll try that later. But before I finish with my U.S. website bashing, you may have read the comment I received from Derrick Oien at Rabble's parent company. Derrick corrected my observation that Rabble only works on the Brew platform by pointing out that it also works on a number of others, including "Blackberry and the Hiptop." So looks like they have all the platforms-that-Americans-have-gone-crazy-over-and-nobody-else-have-ever-heard-of covered. For my fellow non-residents of North America, Blackberry is a proprietary messaging platform offered by Research in Motion (RIM), a company based in Ottowa, Canada if I recall correctly. Although a few carriers in Europe, Asia and Africa offer the service, 99,9% of their customer base is in the USA and Canada. I've seen the devices, and like most non-Americans, my response to the whole "push" email thing pioneered by Blackberry has been lukewarm at best. Pero los norteamericanos estan locos para sus Blackberries. The "HipTop" is kind of cool device, designed by Steve Wozniak (the "other" Apple founder) but I've yet to see a single device of theirs for sale anywhere outside North America. No offence, Derrick, but you aren't going to reach any more than a niche audience if your application isn't available on the Symbian platform (which has 75%+ market share of smart phone operating systems) for at least the Nokia series 60 phones, and preferably for Sony Ericsson as well. It's not just the limitation of devices, but you are reaching an audience that is overwhelmingly concentrated in one place (North America), that sort of goes against the whole concept of any social networking tool, be it blogging, skyping, youtubing or whatever, which is all about connecting with others you wouldn't meet otherwise. Again, a pity, because, I've spent some more time on the Rabble site since my last post on the topic and I'm becoming convinced that they've got the most powerful micro-blogging tools, except maybe for Kyte.

But to keep my frustrations in perspective, I should mention that I received a rather distressed and excited voice mail in the middle of my last night in Budapest from the divinità nella potomac herself, the acolyte of Aurora and priestess of the cherry orchard, whom I shall refer to simply as OD. In her quest to make the world a more peaceful and beautiful place (or at least to make it smell a little better), OD has been selling her bath and beauty products to humans and Republicans alike from her spot at Washington's historic Eastern Market for over a decade now, and at some point Monday, the place caught fire and the south market hall was gutted. Fortunately, the 134 year old solid brick walls were not permanently damaged; more details in this article from the IHT. I finally caught up with OD by telephone from my taxi on my way into Mexico from the airport; she sounded as if she has just lost a child, or at least a beloved pet. I'm sure a lot of her fellow vendors feel the same way, but by now they're probably already planning how to bring it back better than ever. Have a look at the Eastern Market website, and if you find yourself in Washington, be sure to put the place on your itinerary (Eastern Market metro on the red line is your metro stop) and give the vendors there a little moral and financial support. It's a unique and wonderful place, a warm little bubble of soul and creativity in the otherwise mercenary and avaricious moral vacuum that is Washington's Capitol Hill.

G.
Mexico City
4 May 2007

Social Networking for Dummies (like me)

2007-05-03T04:27:00.000+02:00

The tech press and the blogosphere are innundated with references to "social networking" sites like YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook, which to most of us over the age of 30 look at and ask "why?" That's an acceptable enough reason to avoid them for most people, but in my case, I'm a telecommunications marketing executive, so I'm supposed to be all over this stuff and felt it was time to catch up with my customers.

The genre is evolving, too, and merging and converging into mobile and other services. The latest stuff to emerge (by "emerge" in this context, I mean hit the mainstream press, so that even people as uncool as myself have heard about it, signalling the teen digeratti that it's time to move on to the next thing) is the new Google personal maps site, where I'm keeping a running update of my wanderings from here, beginning when I left my home in Stockholm on New Year's Eve 2007. Another is a new genre of social networking site, sometimes referred to as "micro-blogs." I read about them in the IHT (my favourite newspaper), in this article from 27 April. These sites allow you to post photos and texts directly to the site, much in the way people SMS or MMS their friends with moronic little messages about everyday experience, like "dinner at Habana Cafe - awesome tapas" or "dude - u were right - snorting wasabi is a really dumb idea - can't make it tonight", etc. The difference is with these sites, you can post text or photos directly from your mobile, and your friends (or perfect strangers) can choose to receive them, either on the web or on their phone.

What the IHT didn't explain too well is that most of these sites were designed by and for 13-year-olds, so the pages explaining how it works are a bit short on detail, with instructions like "download the client, log in with your user name, and start producing shows on the go!" These are all the instructions 13-year-olds need to master new technologies -- by the time the time they finish reading that sentence, they've already got their first video live on the net, and they didn't interrupt the PSP game they were playing simultaneously in order to do it. People like me on the other hand, are still trying to figure out the "download the client" part three weeks later.

In addition to the four reviewed by the IHT (Twitter, Kyte, Radar, and Jaiku), I also found another similar site, called Rabble, which claims to offer "super cool awesome stuff," but which I found to be the weakest of the five. I'm hoping to play around with a few of them and perhaps later post a more detailed review, but my initial impressions of these sites are as follows:

1) Twitter and Jaiku are the most similar to each other, basically allowing you to post text and photos by SMS and MMS. Twitter, by the way, is used by at least two candidates in the U.S. presidential election -- John Edwards and Barack Obama -- to keep their supporters informed about campaign events and developments. Twitter's big downside is that it only allows you to post text, not pictures.

2) Kyte seems the most flexible and powerful, with all kinds of features like "channels," "shows," and "lifestream shows," as well as a mobile client that appears to allow users to everything from either web or mobile, although I haven't tried it yet. There is a pretty good range of Nokia and SonyEricsson phones that support the mobile client. Postings in text, pictures, video and slide shows are all supported. Posted pictures and videos can be embedded in blogs, etc., similarly to embedding a YouTube video. But Kyte seems more of a YouTube competitor rather than a true "micro-blogging" tool, so I decided to pass it up.

3) Radar I liked -- it was simple and straightforward. You sign up, you get a dedicated email address, you send text, pictures or video by email or MMS to that email address, and it shows up on your site. The email subject becomes the picture title, and the body becomes the descriptive text. A big difference between Radar and the others is that there is no way to make Radar pictures publicly available -- you have to send an invitation to friends in order for them to view your posts. The other sites allow to choose to make your posts public or private. Other than that, I thought it was a simple, elegant service, although the picture sizes are a bit small.

4) Rabble I never seriously considered, since its mobile client is based on the Qualcomm Brew platform, meaning that's basically useless to all except a few thousand North Americans clinging stubbornly to their proprietary technology. It's a pity, because it seems like a well designed, flexible, feature-rich service -- sort of the power of Kyte with the elegance of Radar. Also cool was the real-time stream of posts showing up on the home page, which gave some hint of why Radar may have chosen to make all images private -- it seems that for many, "social networking" means "trying to get laid".

5) Overall, I liked Jaiku the best. First of all, it's based in Finland, not San Francisco like most of the others, which means that it doesn't have the U.S.-biased perspective most American companies do. It has a really simple way of adding posts, which can include all kinds of media, it has a good mobile client, and it has a bunch of cool functionalities. You can share things like your availability, based on your phone's active profile (e.g., in a meeting), share your location information based on the cell tower you are connected to, items from your calendar, etc. You can add new posts by simply SMSing to a regular number in your home country, and you can link it to RSS feeds, other websites, and -- of course -- your blog. So I've set Nomadicity up that way, so that blog updates generate a new "Jaiku". This icon shows when I'm on-line:
Some of this stuff is pretty cool. However, I still think it's not quite mature. What's needed is a Niklas Zennström to come along and integrate it all into a slick, user-friendly cohesive package like Skype. Jaiku comes close, but we're not quite there yet.

G.
Mexico City
2 May 2007

Széchenyi Fürdő

2007-05-03T04:18:00.000+02:00

Just ending a really great three week stay in Budapest, Hungary. Great except for the fact that I was ill most of the time. If you're not feeling well in Budapest, best thing to do is to head for the baths at Széchenyi Fürdő.

Can't say I've bothered to inform myself much about the history of the place or anything, but the architecture is incredible -- couldn't resist snapping a few shots.

I can't count how many different pools there are, indoors and outdoors -- ranging from 16° to 38°, steam rooms, saunas, mud treatments, massage rooms, etc. My favourite was to sit in the downstairs sauna until I couldn't stand it any more, plunge myself into the 16° pool, then back to the sauna, have a warm shower, then go change and have a beer. You feel weightless.

G.
Budapest
30 April 2007

Procrastination - a Favourite Pastime

2007-04-30T20:22:00.000+02:00

I've been going through various stages of thinking about starting a blog, talking about starting a blog, researching starting a blog, and pretty much doing everything except blogging about starting a blog for over a year now. Every time I feel ready to take the plunge, I somehow find a new obstacle. I spent a month angsting over which platform or service to use, then I had to come up with a original blog name, a memorable URL, a description, etc. For the past week, I've been stuck trying to come up with a clever nom de plume, which I've decided is necessary so that I can feel free to discuss work related stuff and individuals, etc., and because at some point I'm sure to offend some right-wing fruitcake, whose usual modus operandi is to argue about things until they inevitably lose, and then resort to making (and occaisionally carrying out) death threats.

I named my blog "Nomadicity," which is actually a technical term in the field I work in, telecommunications, but I liked it simply because it's the only word I know of that has both the words "nomad" and "city" embedded within it.

I still haven't sorted out all these issues, but have decided to go ahead and take the plunge anyway. So for now, instead of some clever nickname, I'll be signing off simply as "G", in a sort of tribute to Ian Fleming, who instead of spending days angsting over character names, simply named two of his most memorable "M" and "Q".

I should acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the Grouper, who has helped to embarass me into getting this thing started by setting such a great example with his own blog, Grouperism. It not consistently brilliant, but often entertaining, and he makes it all look effortless. Of course, one big advantage the Grouper has is that he already has a nickname. I've had a few over the years -- Boris, Chalk, and most recently, "Captain Smithereen," thanks to my manic-depressive iconoclast attorney, but none of them has ever really stuck, the way "the Grouper" did for the Grouper.

For those of us without nicknames, trying to come up with one isn't easy. Fortunately, the web of course offers some assistance, in the form of a number of nickname generators. Some of these are amusing, others simply bizarre. The Ultimate Nickname Generator assigned me the nickname "Fairy Fabulous Chin", whereas Bzoink (which also bills itself as the "ultimate" nickname generator), which asks for your name, a name you like, your age, zodiac, and "personality", decided I should be nicknamed "Carravanquelo", (perhaps because I responded "none" to the question on personality). Over at the Mob Nickname Generator, I entered my first and last name, clicked the "Gimme my fuckin' nickname" button and was assigned the name "The Spaniard." (Also tried this site with my cat's name, who was assigned the name "The Butcher"). I don't expect to be using any of those suggestions, colourful as they are, but since I am planning to write about some sensitive issues, I'll have to give the people I write about nicknames as well, so I'll keep those sites in my favourites file.

My preference would be to have a meaningful name, like that of one of my favourite bloggers, The Man in Seat Sixty-One, a guy who blogs (very informatively) about travelling by rail all around the world, and who starts his journeys from his London home on the Eurostar, always in Seat Sixty-One, because this seat is one of the few where the table actually lines up with the window. But my blog isn't going to be that specific, so its a bit more difficult to come up with a name like that.

So what will my blog be? I've been a compulsive journal keeper for most of life, and one my treasured possessions is my collection of 16 volumes of journals I have kept more or less continuously since 1976. That's been both a source of inspiration and hesitation with respect to starting a blog. Inspiration because I know what I will write about -- the places I go, the people I meet, the food I enjoy, and my observations about politics, life and work. Hesitation because I'm not sure I want to keep both a journal and a blog, and I'm not sure I would want to give up the journal, and also because writing for the entire world to see is an entirely different experience than writing only for yourself. An on-line blog definitely has its advantages: it would be one less thing to carry around and I would no longer worry about losing them. I worry about this a lot -- if my house caught fire, the first thing I would grab on my way out the door is those precious 16 volumes -- I would be devasted if I ever lost them. But the physical journal has advantages the on-line version doesn't. You can put photos in both, but I also like to stick all sorts of things in my journal, and these are often the things that are most interesting to look at years later, such a my yellow 20p tube ticket from 1970s London. But I never recorded some very ordinary experiences in these journals, such as some of my long-term assignments as a telecommunications executive in Poland and Jordan, which included numerous situations that were just too wierd to make up. Next time something like that happens (and it will), I want to get it every ugly detail down in writing as it unfolds.

There is also another reason I'm doing this, but I think I'll save the detailed explanation for another post -- in my very short blogging experience, I've learned that shorter posts are best, and besides, some friends have just joined me at café where I'm spending my last evening in Budapest.

G.
Budapest
30 April 2007