The occasional scrivener

Work flew us all to a hotel in Dubai for our annual conference. I’m back, safe and sound, although tired.

Dubai is… weird.

The place it reminds me most is the final part of the city in the video game “Crackdown”. Huge glass-clad towers limned in neon, and of course the world’s tallest building Burj Dubai Khalifa [1] standing in for the Agency Tower.

I also get the feeling that the excesses of the expat lifestyle contrasted with the privileges of the Emirati elite will result in a novel or movie by this generation’s Bret Easton Ellis channeling William Gibson.

In retrospect it’s obvious that the outer signs of prosperity —the giant buildings, the lavish artificial islands, the ultramodern metro — were not the result of brilliant free market policies by the autocratic ruling family but were instead a combination of the global hunt for returns and a sovereign state’s implicit gaurantee from default. Dubai wasn’t defying the property bubble, it was its apotheosis, and the needle-like Burj Whatever looks like the the pin that burst it. Thousands of speculators lost a lot of money and multiple thousands more poor migrant labourers lost their livelyhood.

The place is ghostly, the malls inhabited by wide-eyed tourists arriving six months too late and listless vendors.

Without the debt pumping the economy, there are few attractions. It’s hellishly hot and humid in summer, the prices are high, the rigidly Muslim society frowns on stuff that creative types like, such as public displays of affection, alcool, and sex out of wedlock. I’ll be seriously surprised if Dubai is even a player in a decade.

[1] Sheikh Khalifa, president of the UAE, personally bailed out the project to the tune of $10bn and got the tower renamed after him. No-one has got around to updating the lavish presentation of the building in the visitor’s area: it’s refered to Burj Dubai throughout.

Here we stand at the end of paths taken
Guiding light inspiration, the slow decline
The crumbling foundation — the stations, and now the cross
But we’re still lost, we’re still lost

— Cowboy Junkies

This is what’s been circulating through the more hip and literary Swedish blogs lately (right this minute to be exact). Here’s the premise, which I doubt really is from the BBC (can’t be arsed to Snope it I may be lazy but I’m not that lazy, see below):

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Please copy and paste your bolded books read, italicized books as ”want to read”, and then sum up with a head count, so to speak. What does the list say about your reading habits?

Note the “apparently” weasel-word. This is in fact a list compiled by The Guardian, and it lists the 10 books people can’t live without (or something). More here. Anyway, I don’t need many excuses to flaunt my middle-brow literary tastes.

(As Isobel mentioned, would be fun to see a Swedish version of this list).

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (in Swedish)
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Score: 33 read, 2 I want to read. Nailed everything by Jane Austen, yet I am secure in my masculinity.

Glad to see Birdsong so high up.

Also, Dan Brown?! Seriously? And where’s Patrick O’Brian?

A fundamental[1] tenet of agile programming is DRY, “don’t repeat yourself”. In online photo punditry, of which this is a lame example, no such maxim exists; in the interests of increased page rank and -views, people all over the place repeat the same tired platitudes that have been common wisdom since at least, oh, 2003.

I too dreamed of making my infinitesimal mark upon the face of the online world, earning applause from that tight-knit circle of mutual admiration that shall remain nameless (remember, there is no conspiracy). But the days flew by and I did not plonk my ass down to decry the current cult of wide-open, wide-to-normal angle portraiture, which implies a fast lens and also pleasant “bokeh”[2].

The demand arises, if an online whining can be dignified by the term, when you use such a lens to take a portrait, instead of a medium-to-long tele as God intended you to do.

As you’re a lazy kind of guy, you invariably get a ton of background in your shot, which can be distracting. And instead of drawing the obvious conclusion and either changing your lens or Heavens forbid changing your composition, you want — nay demand — your expensive superfast lens to have good bokeh.

Note that good bokeh and a well-corrected lens wide-open seldom mix. This is a fact of optics, of which I know very little, but in my role as pundit this does not matter.

But I don’t have to develop this theme, complete with veiled barbs against the current status quo and implied superiority of my own position, because the estimable Dante Stella already did this long ago. So read what he has written, and repent. You may then send your Nikkor 35mm ƒ/1.4 to me for safe recycling.

[1] or is it? D-mned if I know, I just read blogs.

[2] this is where I should insert a paragraph explaining the origins of the term “bokeh”, its different pronunciations, and offer some pictorial evidence. That is, if I was a pundit as described in the first paragraph. But I won’t, because I assume you, dear reader, know how to use Google.

So, we’re back after two weeks of all-inclusive at the Grand Makadi hotel near Hurghada on the Egyptian Red Sea. It’s been an awesome trip, very nice for the entire family (my parents, my sister and her partner + 2 kids, and us five).

Of course, we’ve been cocooned in a resort environment nearly the entire time but the Red Sea area is basically devoid of cultural artifacts[1] anyway, seemingly consisting entirely of sand, speculative construction, and half-naked Russians.

The sea is amazingly clear though, and we had some good snorkeling right outside the hotel (hotel placement is largely guided by the quality of the beach and reef). I managed to catch a glimpse of two dolphins fifteen meters from me while I was snorkeling.

We made a trip to Cairo to get the authentic tourist experience by the Pyramids (I swear people have been offering camel rides there since the Greeks). The visit to the Egyptian Museum was interesting, too. While most people decry the grave-robbing of the Pharaonic tombs, you can’t help thinking that all that gold was more useful in the general economy than locked up in the ground. I also suspect that later Pharaoh ripped off their predecessor’s tombs to construct their own.

Photo-wise it was very much a holiday-snap affair, with the Sigma 18-50 crapzoom getting a lot of use. Taking pics of the pyramids that aren’t carbon copies of tens of thousand others it really hard, and underwater photography isn’t my thing — too expensive and you need scuba equipment to do it properly anyway.

All in all it was an awesome vacation!

[1] if you discount the nearby ancient monasteries, founded there precisely because it was so remote.