Eva, radio DJ

Last night, Mahmoud and I guest DJ'd on Dubai Eye. It was my first time on the radio and I was a little nervous. Fortunately, Mahmoud is a pro and Zahrah, the host, made it easy. I was told I didn't even mumble!

Here's us dancing while a song was on air and below is our playlist:
1) Time to Get Away - LCD Soundsystem
2) Dead Disco - Metric
3) Pump Up the Jam - The Lost Fingers
4) Oh Mandy - The Spinto Band
5) I Put a Spell on You - Screamin Jay Hawkins
6) Prezlauerberg - Beirut
7) Undone - DeVotchka
8) Flashdance, what a feeling - Yael Naim
9) Parentheses - The Blow
... We had 8 more songs but, alas, not enough time.

The nicest thing was that Dad, Nancy and Joe were listening live -- 7000 miles and 9 time zones away!

Au revior, corporate hair!

My pink streak has come out of hiding after 3 years! Hurray!

21 Hours in Athens

I'm back in Dubai now, ensconced in my normal coffee-quaffing spot on the balcony and reflecting on my few hours in Athens earlier this week.

I have high praise for my hotel, the Magna Grecia, which, while much smaller than its name might suggest, boasts a friendly staff who were quite patient with my inability to open and close my safe and who continually insisted that it was a little cold out and that I should put on a coat.
... Oh, and the view of the acropolis from the lounge isn't bad either. I was plugging away at a contract on my laptop for about an hour before I finally looked up and thought "hey! that's the acropolis!"

I didn't get out much though. I spent most of my time on the computer and, at some point between 3am in the time zone where my soul was and 3am in the time zone where my body was, I dozed in front of George and Magdaleni's crackling fireplace. I didn't think it was possible to doze in front of a crackling fireplace and simultaneously to create a cash flow model but, when I awoke, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a beautiful cash flow model with complex formulas clear! Eureka!

The next morning before my flight, I managed to snatch a few hours of Athens on foot. Here are the highlights:

- Down the street from my hotel, I came across this pint-sized church. It's placard indicated it had been there since the 1600s. I love the way its neighboring building has grown up and over it organically.



- Guards with pompoms! It was one of my most hilarious discoveries of my first trip to Greece that the guards of the parliament building are dressed with woolen white tights and giant pompoms on their shoes. To this day, I have never -- anywhere in the world -- seen a less intimidating guard uniform.



- I bought some Menthos. They were mysteriously labeled "chewy dragees" -- anyone able to explain this to me?



- I found a guy who sings worse than me!


- A merry crisis to all and to all a good night!

Adventures in Greek Television

So, what does one do whilst waiting in an Athens hotel room for someone to come pick up one's jetlagged self? We flip on the TV of course and see if it's still as surreal as I remember it being from my month here in 2004... I have the most vivid memory of laying tucked up in a twin sized bed in Patmos (the bed was hard as a board), eating greek yogurt and watching -- and crying, to be honest -- some movie which involves Macaulay Culkin dying.

Well you'll all be pleased to know that Greek TV is still as spectacularly random. On tap today:
1- Black and white footage of some people singing in Spanish on a bus. This is not merely one scene; I deduce from my repeated visits to the channel that this is the subject of the entire show. The singers appear to be hippies and radiate the type of joy you'd expect of hippies on a bus.
2- Home shopping network, seemingly devoted entirely to beaded necklaces. It is possible that the channel is called Ricardo. That is surely not the name of the model. I would guess she's an Elena and she looks bored shitless of beaded necklaces.
3- A cowboys & Indians movie. The lead character is named Charles White Eagle. He has a son who wears feathers in his hair. Everyone is speaking in American accents so sharp you could cut cheese with them.
4- Documentary about russian gymnasts. The adult being interviewed looks like she is pining for her days of glory.
5- A music concert that looks like it was filmed at a school gym. The singer resembles a young hippopatomaus, if it were possible for a young hippopatomaus to have her make-up done by a drunk prostitute. She's dancing enthusiastically, though, which is much to her credit considering that it doesn't appear there is any one in the audience.
6- The news. American soldiers somewhere.
7- A news panel set in front of a gold and purple wall. There is a silent blonde woman and two male commentators (one with a lot of hair on his head and one with none) who rattle like machine guns at one another.
8- Softcore lesbian porn. It conveys a surprisingly gentle and soothing mood through its black-and-white tone and near-silence. It's layered behind a mild fuzz of static which occasionally makes one half of the screen jump. There are unintelligible logos and phone numbers covering most of the juicy bits.
9- Football. Gooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaalll! There is no static on this channel.
10- More news. John McCain, looking much less stiff than he did during the election.
11- Something so static-y I can't even figure out what I'm looking at.

That's it from Athens tonight. Over and out!

In Praise of the New MacBook

I am blogging for the first time from my new MacBook 2.1, fresh out of the box with a perfect scratchless platinum finish and a dizzying English/Arabic dual-keyboard.

I resisted for a long time, insisting on remaining loyal to my old 2004 PowerBook G4. "I can still turn her on," I'd say, "it's fine -- what do I need a new computer for?" But the fact is that she is old, at least 90 in computer-years, which makes her a starra-Baba laptop, and she's also never been quite the same since her concussion in a tragic dining table accident last year. She's pretty much on life support now, unable to stay awake for more than a few minutes unless plugged into the wall. She forgets where she puts things and sometimes cries softly in confusion if I ask her to do too many things at once. Occasionally when we sing songs together on iTunes, which was always our favorite way to pass the time, she forgets the words and sings instead in her native binary blips and beeps. Poor starra computer. I think she has earned a restful retirement as part-time keeper of my music library.

Now that I'm on the new laptop, woooeee I'm whizzing around with this amazing trackpad and its glorious gliding and pirouetting. My fingers are dancing like Fred Astaire. They're flicking and flowing like the conductor's baton for a tiny magical orchestra. Thank you, Apple, for making my fingers so happy!

Many more blogs to come, now that typing is so fun!

...and also now that I have Photobooth, which is an ENDLESS source of narcissistic entertainment...

The Death of Cynicism

If patriotism were helium, I'd be afloat above the Burj Dubai right now. What a night. What a speech! What a country!!

I am so proud to be an American. This is a feeling which I had forgotten entirely before the elation of election night, which I watched all night until the results were called and I danced in my pajamas as dawn broke through my living room windows. Michelle Obama -- who I adore as much as her husband, for her brains, her sensibility, and her incredible beautiful hugeness -- could have been speaking for me when she said "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country."

I love the fact that Obama didn't shy away from the difficult messages. I love that he delivered that entire speech without defaulting to lazy rhetoric, without once saying "terrorism." I love his focus on the need to redefine our relationship to the world. I loved his call for responsibility: fiscal, diplomatic, and environmental. I just love HIM. I would take a job bringing this man coffee in the morning. For free.

On a less profound but equally giddy note, I also want to celebrate Aretha Franklin's amazing diva hat.
Yay!

¡¡Andale, andale!!

I am completely enchanted with the idea of the Biblioburro. Luis Soriano is a Colombian teacher who has started a private mobile library for the battered rural area around his hometown of La Gloria. He has a collection of 4,800 books, which he personally circulates by donkey every weekend. How cool is that?! To have books delivered by donkey!

There’s an excellent article about Luis y tus burros en el International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/20/america/colombia.php


Though a world apart from Colombia in terms of socio-economics and urban development (not to mention a world apart in terms of the actual world), Dubai also lacks library institutions. I recommend that we establish Ktab bil-Camel!

Please go away, Sarah Palin.

I can’t take it anymore. I’ve avoided blogging about politics until now but I am so offended by this election campaign that I have to write this.

Her rallying cry “you folks, you just get it!” summarizes everything wrong with the way McCain is allowing his campaign to be run. It is divisive, inflammatory, and intellectually deadening. It encourages people to cheer wildly in favor of their unexamined fears. It takes those fears, which are legitimate and deserve to be discussed openly and analyzed deeply, and encourages people to harden themselves around them. “You just get it!”means “hey people, you can claim to have moral and political conviction and you don’t even have to be able to explain what it is!” It is a rallying cry which encourages people to be complacent and self-righteous.

Elections are an invaluable opportunity for the country to engage in productive conversations that help us all think more sharply about where we stand on matters of critical domestic and foreign policy. How can we accept the nutritionless garbage we are being fed in this campaign? Why do we take seriously a candidate for the number 2 position in the country who stands up in the one and only vice presidential debate and says openly that she doesn’t want to give direct answers to the debate moderator’s questions?! Why are we wasting our time listening to irrational, McCarthyesque challenges about who is more “Pro-America”? We are squandering an important time to examine qualifications and policy plans, and it is our duty as voters to do so.

We are at a critical point in the history of the US. Our moral authority has crumbled, our military successes are patchy at best, and our economic dominance is severly eroded. We need the smartest minds of the century – on both sides of the party line – to guide us into a safe and productive future. I feel cheated by the offensively inadequate ticket the republicans have put to us, and I am baffled that 40% of the country finds it acceptable.

I am reminded of the anecdote my father tells to explain how the obnoxious pretensions of art school culture in New York in the 70s compelled him to drop out of Cooper Union. He said he was in class one day for a group critique. One of his classmates walked in the door, late, swaggered over to the board at the front of the room and pinned up a plastic baggie of feces. He said, “This is a crap I took this morning. It is art. Analyze it.” My father walked out.

This is the way I feel about the republican campaign in 2008, except I don't want to walk out -- I want them to walk out. A president is only as good as the people around him and, in my opinion, McCain has made an unforgivable mistake in appointing this bad joke to be his closest political associate. You can dress it up in lipstick and let it make some feminist-sounding comments about high heels and mom-power, but anyone who doesn’t recognize what’s been pinned up to the board is kidding themselves.

The only way I know it's Autumn

My pumpkin cravings are out of control.

I have 8 ramekins of pumpkin pie custard in my fridge today (basically the pie without the pie crust, due to a kitchen catastrophe last night in which my crust was destroyed), and that is after eating it for dinner and dessert last night and breakfast today.

Do you think I’ll turn orange?

Current Jogging Conditions

Yesterday I decided to hit the track. The worst of the infernal summer blaze is over so I figured it was time to end my summer's hiatus from outdoor exercise. I bounced out the door with a load of new gear: new socks, new hair band, new headphones, and a new playlist.

Current conditions are still pretty sticky though. And HAZY. As I jogged along, to one side, the sky and ocean fuzzed into a single blue-gray hue and, on the other side, the haze obscured all the towers, save the upper tip of the Burj Dubai which emerged about 500 meters up into the sky. Ahead of me, the bent arms of construction cranes on the Dubai Maritime City port were sunk into enough haze to resemble from afar an enormous slow-moving tarantula.

Another aspect of jogging conditions at the track on Russian Beach is that it remains an immensely popular hangout for all sorts of non-jogging people. Yesterday, cricket was the order of the day with the Indian men. There were 3 pick-up cricket games at different points along the track and, yes, I did almost get hit with a tennis ball at one point.