Tom Gara

Dec 30 2011

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Announcing winners of the 2011 Springies

In a year defined by unimaginable bravery and heroism, lesser deeds must still be recognised: introducing the Springies™, rewarding services to hilarity and general greatness amidst the Arab Spring. With no further ado, the 2011 winners are…

Most Innovative Use of Barbeque Equipment as Tool of Repression

This creative and presumably meat-loving Jordanian plainclothes security staffer, who went to work on a protester using a barbeque grill (vid) during protests in July.

Best Combined Use of Facial Hair and Military Weaponry in Egyptian Election Campaigning

Bow your heads, ye of underlying inadequacies, because Here Stands a Man:

Proof Egyptians are not yet ready for democracy: this man, Hasan Abu Aineen, was unsuccessful in his bid for parliament.

Best Oral Sex Metaphor Employed During Live Aljazeera Interview

Bernard-Henri Lévy, whose comment sounds much classier in his native French: ”fellations aux dictateurs dans la monde Arabe”

The Joseph Stalin Award for Being So Thoroughly Disgraced That Even Azerbaijan Takes Down Your Statue

Hosni Mubarak, whose Jeffersonian statue on the outskirts of Baku:

Was replaced by a more generic Egyptian figure:

Worth noting via this Radio Free Europe report that this wasn’t the only purge of Mubarak remnants in Azerbaijan: “A school in Khyrdalan named after Mubarak’s wife Suzanna was also re-dubbed “Egyptian school.”

Individual Achievement Award for Men Named Hitler Whose First Name is No Longer the Most Problematic Part of Their Name:

General Hitler Tantawi (retired), former head of Egypt’s government corruption watchdog and only man named Hitler to briefly star in Wikileaked US diplomatic cables as a “longtime embassy contact“. The unexpected events of 2011 are possibly the only conceivable way in which “Tantawi” could have become the part of his name that raises eyebrows.

News Feature so Thoroughly Scrubbed From the Internet That it’s Now Only Available at PresidentAssad.net

Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert, Vogue

National Achievement Award for Widespread Gluttony-related Medical Emergency

Qatar, where more than 1300 citizens (1/200th of the local population) were hospitalised for excessive eating during the feast of Eid Al-Adha

Worst Song

“Egypt”, Wyclef Jean

(Sample lyric: “And if the pyramids could talk, they would probably say, ‘assalam alaikum’”

Best Musician and/or History’s Greatest Man

The Libyan Guitar Hero:

(Who is this man? Channel 4 News got in touch with the photographer and did a little digging, and while his identity cannot be confirmed it is very possible he is Masoud Biswir, a Benghazi businessman who joined the rebellion as a warrior musician. Money quote: “The 38-year-old moved through the crowd with his guitar in one hand and his Kalashnikov in the other. Soon he was on a plywood stage as young girls in colourful headscarves were jumping and cheering”)

The True Winner of 2011′s Many Experiments in Gulf Democracy

Abdullah Hamad Rashed al Shamsi, of the UAE emirate of Ajman, who became one of 20 elected members of the UAE’s Federal National Council after securing a total of 287 votes.

Most Innovative Use of Traditional Arab Headdress Accessory as a Weapon in Parliamentary Fistfight

This guy, who let his agal do the talking during an all-in rumble in the Kuwaiti parliament, after an argument between Sunni and Shia lawmakers regarding Kuwaiti detainees in Guantanamo Bay turned into a full-fledged donnybrook.

Most Inexplicable Use of Umbrella

Moammar Gaddafi (deceased), Brother Leader, Guide of the Revolution and King of African Kings

Authoritive guide to emerging online slang Urban Dictionary defines the term “Gaddafi Umbrella” thusly:

Noun: An indication that someone is on the verge of a breakdown due to stress or mental instability. eg: “Man! If I don’t get a vacation soon, I’m gonna break out the “Gaddafi Umbrella.”

People’s Choice Award

In the spirit of popular rule that has overwhelmed the region in 2011, we have decided to add a people’s choice award to this year’s Springies. Leave your nominations in the comments.

Jun 25 2011

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The Hangover 3, potential Middle East editions

My friend Jaber posted a screenshot today of a fun little magazine infographic proposing possible locations for the third movie in the Hangover trilogy. After Las Vegas and Bangkok, where else should a buch of dudes go to wreak drunken havoc and forget all about it the next morning? One suggestion was Dubai, which got me started on possible Middle East locations for the next film. The tweets got a lot of attention, so I’m republishing them all here (with bonus extended Israel/Palestine editions), in one place, for the sake of our children and our children’s children:

The Hangover 3, in:

Dubai: the wake up in jail. They remain there for the next three years. The end.

Iran: They wake up buried up to their waists in sand, with a bunch of dudes standing around eyeing a pile of rocks, checking their watches.

Saudi Arabia: They do not wake up.

Beirut: They wake up. Antics from previous night were considered tame by Beirut standards. Hizbollah has their friend though.

Cairo: They wake up. Spend five hours in a cab trying get to their friend, who is in a cafe 5km away. Za7ma. The end. (za7ma = particularly soul-crushing Cairo traffic)

Doha: There was nothing to do, so they went for dinner in the hotel and had an early night. (Everyone who sees this movie is paid $5000, it wins every Oscar)

Kuwait: There was nothing to do, so they went for dinner in the hotel and had an early night. Nobody sees the movie, because it took 14 years to film due to parliamentary bickering.

Abu Dhabi: They wake up. Their night was the same as one in Dubai a few years ago, but cost $170bn and wasn’t quite as awesome.

Bahrain: What these terrorists did to our country cannot be forgiven, we stand behind our king as he brings them to justice.

Jordan: They wake up. The night was OK, fine. Saudi Arabia gives them $600m, they tell their friends it was the best night ever.

Tunisia: They wake up. Their night of partying has set in motion a chain of events that changes the Arab world forever.

Syria: They wake up hanging upside down with electrodes on their genitals. All they remember is having the best shawerma ever.

Pan-Arab edition: They wake up. It’s fairly easy to piece together the previous night because @sultanalqassemi live-tweeted it.

Iraq: They wake up, are told to leave the country immediately but fear its stability and fledgling democracy could suffer if they do.

Libya: They wake up, a madman in a velvet cape, aviator sunglasses and fur hat lectures them incomprehensibly for 3hrs. The end.

Palestine: They wake up and all their stuff is missing. They try to get it back but some other guy says God promised it to him. This movie goes for 60 years and is incredibly repetitive but for some reason people can’t get enough of it.

Israel: They wake up with a room full of stuff they stole the night before. 300 men kick the doors in and try to get it back, but somehow four guys manage to kick 300 guys’ asses. They complain that they live in a rough neighborhood of violent thieves. This movie goes for 60 years and is incredibly repetitive but for some reason people can’t get enough of it.

Jun 21 2011

Is Dubai what the future looks like?

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum visits Dubai. She is a little bit disgusted – but then again, she stresses a few times, so were the natives of Old Europe on their early visits to New York:

Similarly to 19th-century Europeans’ thoughts about America, I resist the idea that Dubai heralds the civilization of the future. But I have to concede that in some senses it might. Not only Singapore and Hong Kong but parts of central London, now populated by transient bankers and their semi-legal Filipino servants, have more in common with Dubai than with their own hinterlands, even if the architecture is different.

She’s onto something with Dubai’s real futurism though – after living here a while and using the city as a base to view the world, it becomes clear Dubai’s real futuristic vibe isn’t the buildings (which, with exceptions like Emirates Towers or the DIFC, are fairly conventional trending towards tacky).

The more futuristic part of Dubai is the number of people who aren’t from anywhere . This ranges from the literally stateless Palestinians to the practically stateless people born in Dubai but citizens of countries they will likely never return to – Iran, Iraq, Pakistan. A whole lot more are stateless by preference; citizens of rich countries who roam wherever the action (or pay, or both) is.

The quintessential experience of this is when you ask someone where they are from: they’ll often not answer immediately and unequivocally, but sort of look upward for a minute, thinking about the answer, and say “well…” and then begin a five-minute explanation of how their Palestinian mom married a Frenchman in London, but they grew up most of their life in the US but then moved to….

The thing about all this is that it just feels like where the world is heading, particularly for people who spend most of their time in the middle of big cities. As this fascinating LA Times piece shows, the emergence of a city that no-one is from is not something limited to mercantile trading hubs like Dubai, Singapore or Hong Kong. It’s the story of all the biggest cities in the world:

Never in human history have so many people changed their locations and lifestyles so quickly. Each month, there are 5 million new city dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. China alone has an estimated 200 million “floating” citizens with one foot in a village and the other in a city. If current trends continue as expected, between 2000 and 2030, the urban population of Asia and Africa will double, adding as many city dwellers in one generation as these continents have accumulated during their entire histories. Between now and 2050, the world’s cities will add another 3.1 billion people.

Dubai takes a liberal dose of that phenomena, and sprinkles it with the urban-to-urban migration pattern of a globalised elite. And on the futurism front, that shit blows the architecture right out of the water.

Tagged Dubai, Middle East, The Future, UAE

Jun 08 2011

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The Gorillaz church service

I probably listened to the Gorillaz album Demon Days 50 times in 2005. I just didn’t get sick of it as background music. The end of the album is a kind of three-song medley, starting with “Fire Coming Out of a Monkey’s Head,” a bizarre monologue by Dennis Hopper set to a hell of a beat, that just transitions and grows into the next two tracks. It is one of the very rares times when an album climaxing with a choir seems totally appropriate and not-at-all-wankerish.

Anyway, this clip of that medley, performed live at the Manchester Opera House, just shows how expansive Damon Albarn’s music can be when he gets given a big canvas to paint it on. I’d like to see these guys live more than almost anyone in the world, and even made an ill-fated trip to Syria to see them perform in the Damascus citadel in 2010, only to be turned back at the Jordanian-Syrian border. Unlikely to try pulling that shit again anytime in the foreseeable future though.

Sure, the end of the clip, replete with stained-glass window cartoons being beamed onto the wall and a church service vibe, is kinda pretentious. But it’s almost deserving, because this is some seriously wonderful music being played here – watch out for the moment at around 7:30 where Damon Albarn, sitting at the piano, just appears to be completely immersed in how awesome it all is.

Tagged Music, Video

Jun 06 2011

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On mushrooms, and their expansive potential

As part of my new, almost entirely plant-based diet, I’ve learned a pretty fundamental cooking lesson. A dish can never really have too many different varieties of mushrooms:

Bok choi in oyster sauce with three kinds of mushrooms and an awfully out of focus camera.

There’s a few important things you need to understand about mushrooms to really make the most of them, and they are:

- Chinese people understand them in a special and beautiful way, and are therefore the most reliable suppliers.

- Dried mushrooms are almost always better – or at least equal to – fresh ones, with the added benefit of being able to sit in a jar in your cupboard for the duration of a reasonably serious period of nuclear contamination, while the world beyond your sealed off doors and windows is populated by hungry, roaming maniacs.

- Most things you are told about dried mushrooms are a lie.

On point one and 75 per cent of point two: I imagine that if I lived in a rustic-but-somehow-wealthy village, or a hip urban enclave with a quality farmers market, there would be ways of buying a whole universe of fancy mushrooms, foraged that morning by old men in misty woods or grown by an artisanal mushroom hipster. But I don’t. And if you share that limitation, your best bet for exploring the mushroom universe is a Chinese grocery store.

(Dubai people – there are a bunch of really decent Chinese supermarkets in International City. Worth the drive.)

They will likely only sell dried mushrooms, but that is a feature, not a bug. Because they will sell thousands of different kinds of dried mushrooms, from the entry level shiitake – the Coldplay of mushrooms, solid, never lets you down, but never takes you to a place you haven’t been before – to the more adventurous cloud ear and silver fungus.

Oh yeah, fungus. About that.

If you’re really going to get into a Chinese dried mushroom habit, you need to embrace the fact that you are eating fungus, that is what it called, and the people of the East don’t pussyfoot around with words, especially in translations. Every mushroom you’ve ever eaten is a fungus, although a good dive down the rabbit hole of Chinese dried mushrooms will take you closer to actual fungus and further away from the dome-roofed little brown houses for the pixies that we know of as mushrooms.

But just like meat comes in many vessels, so to does mushroom. View it as a category of protein, rather than a specific thing. There’s a fair bit of room between a prawn and a cow, and likewise for the mushroom universe. Get down with it.

Anyway, what you really want to do is head into a Chinese grocery and buy up as many kinds of dried mushroom as you can. Get them home, and that’s where the party begins. Jar those bad boys up, put the jars somewhere visible to make you look worldly and slightly dangerous (“What, those? Oh, they’re my nine varieties of dried mushroom. Doesn’t everyone do that?”) and you have enough mushrooms to last months and months. If only all groceries could be shopped for this way.

Which brings me to my third point – you are being lied to about mushrooms. You’ll read in recipes that you need to soak dried mushrooms in boiling hot water for 30 minutes: this is madness, like recipes telling you to peel the asparagus or de-seed the tomatoes. What you really need to do is pour boiling water over your dried mushrooms and leave them for about five minutes, or until you can chew on them without harming yourself. There’s no problem leaving them soaking longer, but we are international men of mystery, the flight to Zurich departs in three hours, and waiting for mushrooms to adequately soak is beneath us.

Remember, once you’re done soaking those mushrooms, that the water you soaked them in is basically a natural stock, minus the MSG of a stock powder or the 4 hours preparation time of home-made stock. If you need to add liquid to whatever you’re cooking, use the mushroom water first.

What to cook? Here’s five stir fries – in each, try to use three different mushrooms, ideally one fresh and two dried:

- Mushrooms, tofu and asparagus, where tofu can also mean “chicken” (sauce: oyster, with mushroom water)

- Bok choi, mushrooms, snow peas (sauce: oyster, with mushroom water)

- Mushrooms, bamboo shoots and bean sprouts (sauce: black beans, mushroom water, soy)

- Mushrooms, water chestnuts and purple cabbage (sauce: soy, rice wine, maybe a little honey)

- Mushrooms and squid (season with sesame oil, salt, pepper, five spice powder)

One other option that is good both for single man cooking and scales almost infinitely is a kind of generic soup that is infinitely adaptable, and seems way more impressive than the effort required. Boil up some water with the dried mushrooms (you don’t need to soak them first), and add some soy sauce and honey, tasting it to get the balance right (throw in a piece or two of star anise if you want to be kinky). What you’ve got there is a base that can take on any of the following, and more: broccoli, cauliflower, purple cabbage, snow peas, buckwheat soba noodles (or any noodle), bok choi, asparagus, sliced fish, etc.

The key to this being properly delicious is making sure all the vegetables are just cooked but still crunchy – err on the side of undercooked, if you are going to err at all. This means chopping things into sizes that will take equal amounts of cooking time, and/or dropping things in progressively. Serve it all up in a big bowl and top with more chopped mint and cilantro than seems reasonable. Works for me.

Tagged China, Food

Jun 03 2011

Silvio Berlusconi is an actual midget

The New Yorker’s wonderful new piece on Silvio Berlusconi is brilliant from beginning to end, but one detail really jumped out at me:

When I finally met Berlusconi—“Mr. Winner, Mr. Machismo,” as Flavia Perina described him—I was shocked. He is tiny, no more than five feet four inches tall. He wears white eyeliner on his lower lids to make his eyes pop in photographs, and he uses heavy foundation on his face, which renders him the same orangey-brown color as the cast of “Jersey Shore.” His hair is thinning—“because I had too many girlfriends,” he once said, before he got implants—and dyed a vivid burnt sienna. Despite these efforts, he is not a young seventy-four; Berlusconi, in the words of his best friend, is a bit dilapidated.

Five foot four?

Jun 01 2011

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And much loyalty was pledged

A fun little bit of snark in a generally on-the-money piece on the UAE’s harsh response to a domestic Arab spring that basically doesn’t exist – in particular, the arrest of five activists (emphasis mine):

Notably, even the defendants’ lawyer, Abdel Hamid Al-Kumaiti, was reported to have signed a statement condemning “false statements recently made by small groups in the foreign media and social networks,” in a May 3 National article titled “Lawyers pledge loyalty to Rulers” (not to be confused with a subsequent National article, published May 30, also titled “Lawyers pledge loyalty to Rulers”).

The only thing more notable than the absence of significant domestic opposition in the UAE is that authorities seem to be freaking out about the slightest signs of it anyhow. On the a 1-10 scale where Switzerland is 1 and Syria is 10, the UAE is probably at a 3 in terms of its crackdown on opposition, while its actual opposition is probably at something like a 0.25. That makes the crackdown both way out of proportion, and kind of unnecessary.

Consider the a petition calling for gentle reform, signed by the five arrested men and seen as at the leading edge of activism in the UAE. Its opening spiel, as translated by The Nation:

“Please We, the undersigned, a group of people of the United Arab Emirates, rise up to serve your Generous Highness and Their Highnesses Members of Supreme Council of the Federation of deep appreciation and respect…” the petition begins. “Out of our deep concern for this nation, and its people, who are your sons…”

Reacting harshly to that is, in watered down form, the same kind of full-scale delegitimisation of any and all opposition that led to the Arab uprisings in the first place. As Mouin Rabbani wrote in the so-consistently-excellent-it-hurts Jadaliyya:

Time and again, relatively modest demands that could have easily been addressed without affecting the existence or structure of the regime have instead been met with brutality and contempt, thus producing popular revolts calling for the ouster of the regime. One after the other, Arab rulers and their security forces are producing dynamics which rapidly eliminate any middle ground and leave victory or destruction as the only possible outcomes. So effective have these regimes been in eradicating (through murder, imprisonment and exile) not only organized opposition but activists of national stature, that they have left themselves no credible interlocutors with the millions of ordinary citizens assembling every week in squares and streets demanding their ouster.

The UAE isn’t there yet – far from it – but that is because its citizens are pretty happy with their government, not because their government wouldn’t treat them with contempt if they weren’t.

Tagged Arab spring, Middle East, Politics, UAE

Oct 03 2009

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The Answer is ‘Yes’

>The National’s Peter Hellyer on the ridiculous $950,000 “Sheikh Zayed Mosque rifle, designed as a tribute to the building and its creator, inlaid with 36 coloured diamonds and engraved with an image of the late founder of the nation:”

“The concept of this rifle is an insult to the mosque, to the man who spurred its construction and to Islam itself. It is also an insult to those attending the show. Do the gun’s manufacturers think that the deep affection in which Sheikh Zayed is held by the people of the UAE, both Emiratis and expatriates, is such that the mere tacking of his name on to a rifle adorned with diamonds is sufficient to persuade someone to buy it?”

Yes, yes they do. And they are almost certainly correct in their assumption, because the people of the UAE, both Emirati and expatriate, are suckers for the global “phenomenally expensive tacky shit” industry. In fact, they are fast emerging as a kind of global class of jet-setting slack-jawed yokel, getting gleefully conned into swapping their precious resources for handfuls of coloured beads.

From $80,000 Vertu mobile phones to “exclusive” $40,000 Montblanc pens with the UAE flag tacked on in coloured Swarovski crystals to an even more exclusive diamond studded television, one thing is clear: Getting your second-rate, overpriced product, covering it with lurid diamonds and crystals, pricing it in six figures and shipping it as an “exclusive” product to the UAE is a fundamentally sound business model.

Sep 11 2009

It sounds better in the original German…

>China prepares for its National Day:

Citizens might lift their spirits with a list of 50 officially approved slogans issued to mark national day (soldiers have been ordered to post them up and shout them in their camps). “Uphold the basic economic system with public ownership playing a dominant role and diverse forms of economic ownership developing together, and with the practice of distribution according to work being carried out as the mainstay alongside other forms of distribution,” goes a particularly snappy one.

Check out the whole story in The Economist (which keeps getting better).

Sep 07 2009

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Money happily wasted

>The newest addition to my desk at work makes me happy.

I wish it was a little bit more steampunk – would be great if I could plug the iPhone into it, or at least use it as a bluetooth headset for my mobile. On the plus side, if a man busts into our office and goes on a shooting rampage (this isn’t completely out of the question), I can grab my old timey desk phone by its two convenient handles, and beat him over the head with it.

Try doing that with an iPhone.

A Different Drummer

A blog about everything, by Tom Gara.

Posted by …

Announcing winners of the 2011 Springies

The Hangover 3, potential Middle East editions

Is Dubai what the future looks like?

The Gorillaz church service

On mushrooms, and their expansive potential

Silvio Berlusconi is an actual midget

And much loyalty was pledged

The Answer is ‘Yes’

It sounds better in the original German…

Money happily wasted

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