For the second time in a year, I am dropped in this shark tank for your amusement.
Went wandering through the Dubai Mall and happened upon this Sega arcade/theme park that has me dancing on an endless loop outside the entrance.
I had never heard a word about this. No one thought to tell me.
It's basically Sega Mattland. Basically. I tried explaining this to the staff, even breaking into the dance directly underneath the screen. I don't know what they're pumping through the AC in that mall, but I got nothing but blank stares and zero free rides on their roller coaster.
The arcade is sponsored by Visa, so no one is doing anything they shouldn't. I got paid.
Also, here is a vending machine that sells gold.
You swipe your credit card, it spits out a slice of gold as if it was a Snickers bar.
Emirates business class en route to Dubai on the new Airbus A380.
This is the open bar in the back of the upper deck, in case the mini-bar at your seat is insufficient.
My passionate love/hate of Dubai is saddled with yet another layer of ambivalence. While I'm living out this fantasy of geek tech opulence, we are straddling the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And I can't help thinking someone in one of the private cabins up front is looking out the window and snickering as he twirls his mustache.
Walked the 3.5 mile length of the Palm man-made island in Dubai. Least possible place I have ever been. Nothing can be that big. The whole thing is obscene.
The 20 or so residential towers that line the trunk of the palm.
About halfway across, the trunk ends and the eight long, thin fronds (for maximum beach front real estate) extend out with gaudy villas packed along all of them. A monorail continues straight out into the ocean toward the Atlantis resort at the far tip.
A monorail stop in the middle of nowhere. A mall will supposedly spring up around this station at some point.
Continuing the journey to Atlantis, the road turns into a vast, empty tunnel under the ocean floor before rising back out at the end.
I have to admit, the water park was pretty fun. Was too wet to take pictures of the inner tube ride through the shark tank and the almost vertical water slide that shot gallons of water up my nose.
Inside, they've got the Lost Chambers, which is worthy of an adjective I never thought I'd use in Dubai: classy.
Take an aquarium and remove even the vaguest pretense of science or education, then swap in some elaborate sets posing as archeological remnants of a lost civilization. What I enjoyed most about this is they don't actually explain any of what you're seeing. It's up to you to imagine and interpret.
Through one window you can see a distant throne room where the king and queen once held court. Schools of fish swirl around the giant, empty chairs. It's actually beautiful and haunting, rather than the anticipated: tasteless and cheesy.
New low point in my life: succumbing to food poisoning on the runway in Karachi and hwarfing all over my clothes...and my iPad...5 times. Got loads of fun looks from the other passengers. They moved me to the back of the plane and threw blankets over me cause I kept yelling that I was cold.
Just finished an IV drip in Dubai to get the salt and potassium back in me -- that's apparently why I felt like I was freezing. Going to try to avoid shrimp for the rest of this trip.
Flew out from Dubai this morning with a perfect view of the unreal Palm islands. Stealing someone else's photo off the web...
Literally, they are unreal, if the term can include that which is entirely man-made.
Looking down on it, one's visual cues for proportion are thrown out of whack. Is that a pedestrian walkway or a 4-lane highway? That can't be a cruise ship, can it?
Then, through the sandy haze, an even larger sibling comes into view. The outline is the same, but it's only bare sand with minimal construction. All progress looks to be stalled, as if someone woke up one morning and said "Wait a minute, stop everything. This is completely idiotic."
Or, more likely, someone finally maxed out a very big credit card.
I'm in Damascus now, killing time until sundown in a somnambulant state with the faint hope of bouncing back quickly to the 11 hour jump.
I have nothing interesting to say about Damascus yet other than; I like it a whole lot more than Dubai.
Here's one thing I have in common with the Arab world: we both appreciate a nice glass of fresh-squeezed, pulpy-as-a-paper-shredder orange juice.
In case you haven't noticed, my site got a Brazilian wax. Thanks to Joel at Yellow Button for getting into those hard-to-reach places.
The Videos page is redone, with lots of material that's accumulated over the years finally collected in one place.
The Maps page is now actually, actually, seriously, for-real working, with all new maps for 2009 and 2010 for anyone who gives a crap.
The Front Page has been sorted out, with the most important addition being a link to the new Signup page. We took it down just before finishing the 2008 video, and now it's finally up and running again. So if you want to dance in the new video and you've never emailed me before, you might want to hop over there and let me know where you live.
I welcome any feedback, of course.
I gave a talk about a recent obsession of mine at the Ignite event in Seattle last month. The talk is called: "The Imaginary Line of Ancient Cosmic Weirdness." If you get nothing else from it, you may learn a new vocab word; apophenia, which you can use to impress atheists.
I'd like to embed said video, but Syria seems to block all access to YouTube (not to mention Facebook, PayPal, a weirdly hobbled Wikipedia, and who knows what else). The best I can do for now is a link to this page, which I suspect has the video on it, but all I can see right now is an empty white rectangle.
Boy, that last post kicked up an unexpected kerfuffle about Fox News. In hindsight, I should know better.
As a policy, I try to stay mute about site comments, especially those of a cringe-worthy and trollish nature. There's certainly no point in arguing or correcting, and the hope of actually reconciling my views with anyone else's runs against the very fundamental nature of this sort of thing. Talkbacks are not a place where opinions converge.
It's just that, well, seeing the term "close-minded" used repeatedly to describe my aversion to Fox News...How? Words. Broken. Make mean opposite. Must not...give in...
Look, I'll just say this, with regards to the notion that I could've broadened anyone's horizons in a three minute talk show segment: that is not what talk shows do. I've been on a bunch and it doesn't really matter if there's a left slant or a right slant or if everything's in perfect, sterile equilibrium. Their job is not to broaden or inform. In fact, they try to avoid it. Most talk shows are about pushing product.
Most, I said.
There are times when I have a reason to do those things, and every once in a while they can actually be fun. But these days I've got nothing to sell except my book -- and in financial terms that's akin to promoting a lemonade stand -- so I enjoy being my own master. And one of my favorite ways to exercise that mastery is telling the television people to go away when I feel like it.
Okay, sleep is coming. Tonight I am in a dorm room with a Kiwi and a Turk, both female. Speaking of which, at the airport just now, a lady bathroom attendant insisted on watching my luggage while I reacquainted myself with squat toilets. I'm about to give up on second guessing Islamic gender conservatism.
"Hi Matt, I represent a large adult video company and we would be
interested in featuring you and your wife having sex in various
locations around the world, similar to your current videos. Details are
sketchy at the moment but we would be willing to pay you each £100,000
and all travel fees, shooting would probably be completed over a 3
month period. Let me know if you are interested."
And Melissa asks, "You have a wife?"
I'm in Dubai at the moment, shooting an ad for Visa...as you do from time to time.
The ad is unrelated to the above inquiry and is of a non-pornographic sort...or so I'm told.
It's Ramadan right now, which means no eating or drinking during daylight hours. The crew has arranged a closed-off, private space near where we're shooting tomorrow so we can nourish ourselves in sin.
I'm told there is also no laughing during Ramadan, though I can find no confirmation of this. The internet says one must abstain only from things food and sex-related.
Our hotel is near the Burj Dubai, which is supposed to open before the end of this year. Construction is all but complete, making it the not-yet official tallest skyscraper in the world. You wouldn't know from looking at it, though. There are no tall buildings anywhere near it, so it's difficult to judge its scale.
It'd be much easier if the skyline looked like this.
Apparently reaching the height of the Empire State Building's observation deck wouldn't put you halfway to the top of this beast. The tip of the Burj's spire is over half a mile up in the sky.
Melissa and I bought a house over the summer. We were in a town home for a few years, but this is a real housey house. It looks out over the canal. All day we watch fishing boats come in and out from Puget Sound, drawbridges raising and lowering, locks opening and closing, trains passing down from Vancouver, and float planes using the canal for visual navigation. It feels a bit like Legoland.
From time to time a bald eagle perches outside our bedroom. I've stood in the shower watching seals feed on salmon. A couple weeks ago they picked up a 140 lb mountain lion that was spotted on our street.
I got a kayak. It makes me tremendously happy. I realized several of the best days of my life happened on a kayak. Shortly after moving in, Melissa and I paddled over to Ray's Boathouse for dinner. They let us park it on the dock, we watched the sun set over the Olympics, and that was one more for the list.
We went to Burning Man. Loved it. Most people who've told me about Burning Man eventually end up sounding like cult members. I don't want to do that, so I'm not going to go on about it. It's possible your life may still be complete if you never bother to attend, but it's certainly unlike anything else I've seen in this world.
Drugs weren't nearly as central to the experience as I thought they'd be. They're present, certainly, but used discreetly and if you don't want to be in the thick of all that you don't have to be.
Nudity, on the other hand, is omnipresent, but the bodies on display are generally of a fit and well-utilized sort, so you're usually staring because you want to, not because you can't make yourself turn away.
The art was much more of a thing than I expected. We mainly just wandered around looking at stuff.
I would go back.
I also went to Comic-Con in San Diego. It was great for a whole different list of reasons. I spent most of my time in the ever-dwindling comic book portion of the convention hall, sifting through old EC horror books and tracking down cherished Fantastic Four issues that still elude me.
My anxiety over my own book has settled. I don't know whatever happened with bookstores returning copies, but I'm not worrying about it at this point. The responses I hear are still all good, and it's selling well in the store on my site. I should have warned on the sales page that it sometimes takes me a month to get copies signed and out the door since I'm away from home so much, but I haven't had any irate customers yet. I'm starting to enjoy the whole process of packing envelopes and putting my pants on to go walk to the mailbox.
The book has basically become this thing I did that turned out okay and didn't fail miserably and I'm sort of a little bit proud of having done it. And since it's a book, it hopefully has a long life ahead of it, and once I get the next video done I expect it'll suddenly start doing very well for a while.
Did I mention I'm making another video? I think I've sort of mumbled about it in the past. I tell anyone who comes up and asks, and I did a thing at the TED conference about it, but I guess I haven't formally announced anything. I'm planning to start in the early part of next year. I'm going to putter around the planet in a low-key way for a while, and then do the bigger crowd stuff as I get closer to completion. It was a drag rounding up a huge group of people to dance and then having to tell them all that the video would be up in a little over a year. Schoolkids in Burkina Faso don't mind as much when you tell them that.
This new video won't be a rehash. I've got something planned that I'm quite excited about. In fact, to be honest, the world travel part doesn't thrill me nearly as much as this amazing thing I get to put together. I'm around the corner on travel. It'll always be a big part of my life, but I'm old now and I found what I was looking for and I wrote a book about it and I've got a nice house and a lovely partner and I mostly just want to be there doing all of that.
But I've also got this wonderful opportunity, and a thing to say that's worth saying, and an audience that seems to want to hear it. And, of course, I'm not much use at this point when I'm not dancing badly. There are lots more bills to pay now.
I'll put a sign-up page back up at some point like I did with the last video, so you can get an email when I'm dancing in your area. In the meantime, if you want to make sure you're on the list, just send me an email and tell me where you are. The nearest city will do. If you tend to be in more than one place, you can list them, but please limit it to just a few. And if you've emailed me in the past and mentioned where you live, don't worry about it. You're already on my enormo-giganta-list.
