I used a hand-cranked drill to hang a cabinet and mount a shelf

That's why you will now watch a music video of DJ C-Saga feat. $tephen Hawking.



Who knew the universe had a nice backbeat?

Peace harbor

Ah, Dubai. You are apparently in a permanent state of construction and traffic jams, yet your beaches and sci-fi skyline make those problems seem so distant sometimes.

We spent the weekend at Mina a'Salaam--Peace Harbor, Harbor of Peace, Peaceful Harbor, something like that--at the Madinat Jumeirah. Even those of you living in a place that isn't a desert may have heard that name... it's where the Burj Al Arab is. Our room had a nice view of both the Burj (which we didn't visit) and the beach (which we very much did). Proof:

It's like a giant sailboat, except with a hotel instead of a sail.

Downtown Dubai wasn't too far away, but it was pretty hazy. Still, though, I think you can see the "is that REAL?" quality that the half-mile-tall Burj Dubai elicits from a distance.

Not a matte painting. (also not a great photo--taken with my cell phone)

We had a wonderful time. Ate a meal in a beautiful restaurant at the end of a long pier between the Palm and the Burj Al Arab. How long was the pier? They insisted on driving us back to shore in a golf cart. Superlative.

Now we're back in Abu Dhabi, awaiting a couch and pondering hardware choices for hanging lamps. But the peaceful glow will stick for a while.

Dear fire alarm,

I appreciate that you are loud enough to wake me up in the middle of the night if there's trouble. That reassures me that, should an emergency arise, we can hustle out to safety.

However, in the future, I think it would be best if you didn't randomly go off at 4 a.m. because of a short circuit or something. Being an alarm system, you never sleep, and that's cool. But the occupants of this building do. And predawn Saturday morning is no time to be awake for just about any reason.

Love,

Apartment 101

P.S. Dear guys trying to fix the alarm this morning: 9 a.m. on a Saturday is only marginally more acceptable for fire alarm tests.

Funny things happen here

For one, Mrs. Blog and I found ourselves drinking beer and smoking shisha in the Middle East last night. That's not so surprising today, sure, but it's not something either of us would have predicted, say, last year.

For another, I have a can of regular Coke sitting on my desk--the vending machine was out of Diet--and I can't really finish it. I'm as big of a soda fan as I am a hater of high-fructose corn syrup, so faced with the choice of embracing no-sugar sweeteners or abandoning fizzy drinks altogether, it was a pretty easy decision. The result is that I have been drinking diet sodas for a while now... and all of a sudden the regular stuff tastes like a sugar bomb. I'm not sure what any of this means, but I thought you'd like to know.

And I most likely will be mounting a shoe cabinet to the wall of our second bedroom using a hand drill. Yeah. The kind that runs on elbow grease. Again, not something I would have predicted.

Finally, we're heading to Dubai this weekend, to a hotel on the ocean nicely situated between this:

Fronds to the left of us.

... and this:

Sailcloth to the right.

An island made to look like a palm frond and a tower made to look like a sail: how's that for a funny thing... and a great way to celebrate a whirlwind month.

I'm not sure which is more bizarre:

Moammar Ghadaffi's speech--in which he pulled a Fidel-esque rambler of a nonsensical oratory, suggesting at one point that Obama should be made king for life...

or

The football and basketball teams of my alma mater getting in not one, not two, but THREE inter-squad scuffles in the last 24 hours. One of which put a basketball player in the hospital with a dislocated thumb.

I'm going to go ahead and vote for Ghadaffi, just because of the unintentional comedic value of making a long speech to a body (the UN) that he explicitly points out he does not recognize as legitimate. I wonder how his jumpshot is....

In which I ignore professional courtesy for a moment

Dan Brown makes a tremendous living from his work. I would be happy with 1/10 of his financial success.

And yet. And yet. And yet... the man's writing drives me nuts. To me, it seems slapdash, awkward and often just inaccurate. But don't take my word for it.

16. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move." On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly. Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

A silhouette with white hair and pink irises stood chillingly close but 15 feet away. What’s wrong with this picture?

This cracked me up. How couldn't it? And have his publishers given up on editing Mr. Brown altogether? This is the stuff an editing novice would pick up on in one pass where I come from.

Great moments in video game advertising

A couple of years ago, I wrote this.

That was an ad for a video game. Its live-action, documentary feel gave it a broader emotional appeal than you might expect. Now, with Halo 3: ODST hitting the market soon, Bungie has commissioned another live-action ad. And again, I'm impressed with the production values and use of something besides raw gameplay to get people interested.


Halo 3: ODST Live Action Extended Trailer - Watch more Game Trailers

Anyone agree? Or am I just thinking about this too hard?