Welcome to Al-gul

The Weaker Sex

mokane — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:59:44 +0000

In Mexico City one must be careful when choosing a taxi: taxi drivers have been known to kidnap tourists and hold them for ransom. This is known as a rapisecuestro. If you are only robbed by the driver, consider yourself lucky. Things are something else again in Beirut, for as the readers of this blog can probably guess, the Middle East is different.

According to the Beirut Star, a gang of women, sometimes accompanied by their children, has been arrested for robbing taxi drivers. The women would board the taxis and ask the driver to take them to north Beirut, to Mount Lebanon or the Bekaa. Upon arrival, the driver would be robbed and his vehicle stolen.

On the bright side, luxury hotels in Beirut are over-booked for the holiday season. While visiting, the holiday makers may have difficulty finding local transportation.

See, http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2011/Dec-18/157216-gang-of-women-arrested-for-robbing-taxi-drivers.ashx#axzz1gyCjLK6x

mokane — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 09:57:09 +0000

James Salter’s 1960′s novel, A Sport and a Pastime, is a gem of a novel whose reputation has only grown since its muted publication. Salter has had an interesting life: he was a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who fought in Korea before turning to writing in his 30′s. Literary studies in the 1970′s forbade a study of author’s lives in conducting ritual explications de texte but we practice these rituals no longer. Still, Pastime is one of those books that stays with you, a haunting.

In 1975 Salter published Light Years. The book was recommended to me by my college roommate, Steve Thompson (he of WCMS fame). Steve told me that the book “is about divorce.” Divorce is a depressing topic. Out of curiosity I leafed through a mass-market paperback edition of the book at Kroch & Brentano’s but decided not to buy it. Kroch & Brentano’s is no longer with us, and neither is Steve, whose birth name was Wayne. While I am certainly a fan of Salter’s, Light Years is one of his books that I have never gotten around to reading, until fate insisted that I do so.

One evening, while in the process of moving out of the windowless room at the Al-Dorra in Al Khobar I left two suitcases in a covered compartment inside my automobile. The next morning one of mangement’s minion banged on my door at 7:00 am because there was a problem with the car and my presence was needed immediately. At 7:30 I went down and saw that the window on the car had been broken–shocking in Saudi Arabia–and that the two suitcases placed there the night before were gone. Under these circumstances, a police report would only have occasioned a corruption, so I did nothing. This is often the best approach to crime. I realized that the suitcases were mostly filled with books and that their loss, while unwelcome, was hardly tragic. Two weeks later I received a telephone call because my business card had been found in one of the suitcases. They had been found in a stolen car that had been recovered by the police. The likely result in Saudi Arabia would be that I would be investigated for car theft but this was not the case. A week later, the suitcases were returned, and with them my copy of Light Years, picked up during my last visit to the U.S., was returned to me.

So I figured that I better read it.

Divorce is certainly part of the story, but it is far from the whole story. Salter’s lyric style is graceful; wonderful, but this is not a story with a beginning, middle and end: Aristotelian conventions are essentially ignored. It may instead well be a middle-aged bildungsroman, with Salter trying to express sentiments and emotions felt during a particular time of his life, a time when divorce may have featured in one way or another.

But there is at least one wonderful passage. The failed husband and architect has gone to Italy to recover. There is a meme throughout the book that Europe is some kind of paradise, or at least a counterbalance to the vacuity of American lives, lives that are lived and lived well but seemingly without purpose. So Viri (a diminutive of Vladimir that I have not seen before or since, a name that would be particularly inconvenient during the Cold War) goes to Italy and starts consulting with an architectural firm there. A young woman working at the firm sees him and gulps. She engineers a marriage, but he longs for his life in America, his children. She tries to disabuse him of this:

“Yes,” she said, I know you are frightened. I know your habits, I know your thoughts. You have married me for my sake, but not for your own—not yet. That will come. Oh yes. It will come because I will wait. I am a cornucopia, I am overflowing. I am not sweet—no, not in the way one tastes at first. But sweet things are forgotten quickly, sweet things are weak. I have the patience to wait, yes, as long as necessary. I will wait a month, a year, five years, I will sit like a widow, playing a kind of napoleone, because, slowly, slowly I will enslave you. I will do it when the moment comes, when I know it is time, that I can succeed. Until then I will sit at your table, I will lie beside you like a concubine—yes, I will give myself to you in whatever way you like, I will raid your fantasies, I will pillage them and keep the pieces to hypnotize you with. I will say, ‘Those things you are dreaming of, I will make them real.’…Amore, the secret is to have the courage to live. If you have that, everything will sooner or later change.”

What a wonderful passage!

Those Wacky Miami Cops in Another Shootout

mokane — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:34:42 +0000

Another shoot out in Miami; this time four were left dead. One of the dead was a police informant who told his buddies about a load of marijuana ripe for the picking at a ranch in the Redlands. There was no load, of course, and the police were waiting. The criminals were carrying guns and the police opened fire.
So what’s wrong with that?
This was a manufactured crime. The informant, who was also killed, was told by the police what to say. He told them how easy of a score it would be, and told at least one of them to bring weapons so that the police would be able to notch an armed drug trafficking bust. Supposedly it wasn’t in the plan for the informant to go along, but what likely happened is that the others asked him, “if this is so easy, then why don’t you go with us?” Informants are rarely the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. I am not suggesting that the dead men were innocent, but where the police create an irresistible scenario we cannot be surprised if some take the bait. The risk to the surrounding community was ignored.

Just as the police sometimes attack the wrong house, so do the criminals. In my old community of Coconut Grove, for a while there was an enormous increase in street crime on Shipping Avenue. We didn’t know why, but we later learned that the police had encouraged an informant to sell drugs at below-market prices and supplied him with the goods to sell. Soon, the city’s drug users converged on Shipping Avenue to take advantage of the low prices and hassle-free shopping experience. The police were less concerned about what the shoppers did after making their purchases, much to the chagrin of the community they were trying to protect.

By putting four armed men in a potentially violent scenario, the police did as much to harm the community as to save it.

Trouble in Bahrain and Need for Spellcheck

mokane — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:51:56 +0000

Our meeting this morning in Bahrain was canceled due to the police action at the Pearl roundabout. By the way, a roundabout can in no way be called a “square.” The Pearl Roundabout is near the El Seif mall. Al Jazeera more accurately described the roundabout as a landmark. Unfortunately, the following was in a report describing the morning’s events,
“Speaking to Al Jazeera from the scene, she said the crowd is chanting: “Down with Al-Khalifa”, in reference to the country’s ruling family.

“People are also chanting that the blood of the victims will not be in vein,” she added.”

Presumably not.

Profanation

mokane — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:49:31 +0000

One of America’s most cherished institutions, the Home Depot, was hit on Thursday in Miami by two men in drag who had previously visited the store in their disguises. This being Miami, perhaps they weren’t wearing disguises at all. News reports weren’t clear as to whether the tool department or the interior design section was the focus of their attentions.

In the meantime, police chief Esposito in Miami is fighting for his job. The African American community is upset–and well they should be–because SWAT team officers went “hunting” and shot and killed a black man on New Year’s eve. The chief called their practice of taking to the streets in unmarked black SUV’s “proactive” law enforcement. One of the team members, caught on camera during a pilot for a reality show, said that his team were predators out hunting.

A most dangerous game indeed. This is the result of the militarization of the police forces. Speaking of predators, Miami has just purchased military Predator drone aircraft for civilian use. There is no reason to have such military weaponry in the city of Miami. These aircraft have crashed in Iraq and Afghanistan and undoubtedly they will be subject to the same occasional technical problems here in Miami.

Thieves in drag at the Home Depot. The police chief hunting humans on the street. Predator aircraft in the air.

Welcome to Miami.

No longer in Iraq

mokane — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:41:02 +0000

I am no longer in Iraq. It was a wild ride while it lasted, I may post a few things about the experience in the future. Then again, I may not.

Why learn a foreign language?

mokane — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 15:36:20 +0000

Foreign languages are barely taught or studied in the United States. So often I hear, “why should I learn a foreign language?” Here’s a reason:

http://popurls.com/go/newsvine.com/l68e98bdf1e8cf2981e21d65351691c54

Chilean miners told they may be trapped until Christmas

mokane — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:14:49 +0000

Hmmm. Why does this resonate?

signed,

near Forward Base Liberty, Green Zone, Iraq

How many dinosaurs could live in Central Park? or, Taking another look at abiotic oil

mokane — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 08:29:38 +0000

James Farlow asked the question, “how common were the giant dinosaurs?” His conclusion is, “a square kilometre could host only a few full-sized sauropods with mammalian metabolisms.” http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19312-how-many-dinosaurs-could-live-in-central-park.html

In his study, Farlow looked at a region that contained not only sauropod remains, but fossilized plant life. This permitted Farlow to estimate how much food was available for Jurassic herbivores to eat.

But wait a minute. This is the same biomass that, after aeons of compression, became oil and came rushing out of BP’s Louisiana Macondo well at extreme pressures from a well depth of 17,909 feet (5459 meters). If Falwell is correct that a square kilometer harbored only enough biomass to support a few sauropods, then where did the biomass come from to generate oil? To put it another way, if we know how much biomass is needed to support a small colony of sauropods, how much biomass is needed to produce a single barrel of oil? And where is the evidence of this biomass?

It’s true that Falwell’s calculations were taken from only one site. But it is unlikely that the distribution of biomass was such that in some places there was only enough for a few dinosaurs, while in others, there was enough to support millions.

If Farlow has correctly answered the question of how common were dinosaurs, he has also disproved the “petroleum hypothesis” and shown that oil is not a fossil fuel.

Monday Night Shelling

mokane — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:41:49 +0000

I heard three mortar blasts last night. After the first two, the sirens went off. The Baghdad newspapers report that there were six. But I only heard three.

I guess the other three were far from my location in the IZ.