The day before yesterday, while integrating line charges, I put Handel’s Alexander’s Feast on to keep me company; an oratorio on the text of a very silly Dryden poem, which I like because it has sick tunes and also because I love Alexander and particularly Alexander portrayed as a complete wacko clown.
Please, Mr. Stone, I don’t want a thinly veiled Iraq War allegory, I want whatever the hell this is! (Talbot Shrewsbury Book, 1444)
“What a goofy oratorio,” thinks I, integrating, “too bad I’ll probably never get to play it.” Though, only playing the bassoon here would not quite be sufficient. Much as we all know that playing percussion is just as difficult, subtle, and lifelong an enterprise as playing any other instrument (not even counting all the loading and unloading while everyone packs up and goes home!), Now strike the golden lyre again is the kind of timpani part that makes you think, “hey, I could play that. In fact, I want to play that. I ought to play that! I GOTTA play that! Someone get me two big drums to bang RIGHT NOW!”
…and then, the very next day, what should appear in my very own inbox but a gig full of Handel, including three numbers from Alexander’s Feast. (But only on bassoon. Womp womp. )
Got a Landwell in an under-the-table-stand knife deal at the halftime of pops with the Hamilton Phil tonight… now I have to learn how to sharpen a knife like an oboist properly
Between 1999 and 2015, errors in the British Post Office’s accounting software led to hundreds of employees being wrongly prosecuted for fraud. In 2020, the government established an inquiry into the software; that inquiry has now been published.
I’d assumed I probably am not an advanced enough programmer to see what other people were finding so funny about this report. I was… wrong.
Gotta be honest, I kind of love this function. It’s performance art.
Sharjah, as I would not have known if I hadn’t been here, is one of the seven Emirates of the United Arab Emirates; although that means that it is its own absolute monarchy under its own Sheikh, in practice (or at least to someone from the GT"H"A) it seems to be more or less a suburb of Dubai, which is why we are staying here for convenience before flying out of the Dubai airport.
Today we went to the Sharjah Aquarium, in search of fish.
Inshallah they find him finding nemo meme still going strong in 2024?
We did find these guys:
Then we took the water taxi from Sharjah, right outside the aquarium, to Dubai, for dinner:
But more importantly, to meet these guys. Or rather for them to meet me, for they are clearly experts in identifying suckers likely to behave clumsily with small pieces of meat. (Sound on: important meows ahead)
While we’re at it, this guy outside the art gallery we went to in Sharjah, whose dinner was already very well taken care of:
Visiting the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi is not like visiting any other religious building that I am aware of. Certainly it was very different from either of the other two enormous mosques we visited, Sohar and Muscat. In Sohar we just walked in, the only visitors during the non-Muslim visiting hours, and could have walked around basically unnoticed if we hadn’t specifically sought out someone to confirm that it was OK to go in all the places it seemed were basically left open for you to go in. In Muscat there was a main tourist gate, with a lobby area that had clothing available to rent or buy, and then after that you could wander where you wanted everywhere except the prayer hall, which had cordoned off walking areas for tourists around the hall.
In Abu Dhabi, the visit starts by reserving an entrance time. When you drive into the complex, you park in an underground lot that looks like it belongs to a shopping mall, because it does belong to a shopping mall. There’s a shopping mall in the mosque complex. After buying any necessary clothing– the dress code is the same as any other mosque, though signs at the entrance also specify a list of other forbidden things, such as teddy bears, suntanning, kissing, and a list of forbidden gestures that does not include the most common North American obscene hand sign– you proceed through a sort of airport security area with metal detectors, and then an even more airport-like corridor with a moving sidewalk and enormous photos of all of the political and religious leaders who have visited the space. Or you can take a taxi down the hallway!
Probably not the best idea to choose pictograms that can be deprecated…
After passing the fresh squeezed orange juice machine (?) you exit into the courtyard of the mosque proper, which has very specific areas where you can and cannot take photos.
The first “photo stop”
One of the halls of pillars
And finally, what we’ve been waiting for… the largest carpet in the world!
There was a sort of tourist path laid out, with the way through the prayer hall on a raised plastic surface so that you don’t have to take your shoes off. After reaching what seemed to be the final destination of that path, there were still signs that seemed to indicate you could go other places on the enormous grounds; specifically, we decided to try to see the women’s prayer hall– the above hall, of course, is only for men– and also the mausoleum of Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who ordered the mosque built, died during its construction, and was buried on the grounds.
We were intercepted on our way to the mausoleum by a security guard who said yes, we could go those places, but he would call us a taxi. So we took the buggy to the mausoleum; nobody else was there besides another guard enforcing the no-photos policy of it. Interestingly, the mausoleum was noticeably simple: inside a huge marble enclosure, the founder is buried in a raised box open on the top, so what you see is the pile of dirt on his corpse.
Then we went over to the women’s prayer hall, which a previous security guard had said only women are allowed to enter. (This wasn’t the case in Sohar or Muscat.) So I went up to the security guard outside that room, and asked if I could go in. “For the prayer?” she asked, looking at me like I was insane, since it was 9:45 in the morning. I said no, just to look, and at first she seemed to be saying no, but as I was about to leave she said yes and indicated a separate room to leave my shoes in and again, no photos of the room.
Maybe it was just the contrast with the insane opulence of the rest of the place, but even compared to the two other major mosques we visited, the womens’ room seemed, well, a little neglected? There was a carpet, and an intricate design on the ceiling, but in context it seemed to be making a clear statement that that this was not a place of major importance to, well, anyone of major importance.
Then we took the taxi back through the tourist corridor, and ended our visit at… the mosque mall Tim Hortons.
Today we started out at the Yas Marina Circuit to join the happy throngs at the most popular race of the year: radical (?) qualifying and the Clio Cup.
Me hanging out with all the other people
My issue with car racing as a spectator sport, besides the complete mockery it makes of the effort to de-emphasize the role of the personal automobile as a necessary agent of personal freedom and agency in an effort to still have somewhere for our species to live, is that the range of risks available for the competitors to take that exist within acceptable bounds of non-lethality is extremely small. In most sports, athletes have the option of making visible, noticable and exciting risks: a high-value move that could result in a fall, an audacious steal of the ball or puck, a breakaway that could win the game or leave you worse off than before. The risks of these moves generally range from embarassment to the potential for minor injury. In motor racing, the potential “loss” outcome of any big move that the audience can actually see is fiery death for you and everyone around you. So while arguably just being in a car going that fast is inherently audacious and exciting, it doesn’t exactly look it to me, a person who has seen cars go before, and when the most exciting crazy move that anyone might pull is to intentionally get close to another competitor, there isn’t a lot of room in the “I want to be excited and impressed but not worried about witnessing horrible deaths” space.
A moment of extreme sporting excitement
Some excitement apparently happened somewhere else
In the afternoon we went to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which I didn’t take a huge number of photos of, probably because everyone else was. I mean to the point that it was difficult to look at objects, because they were constantly in use as the backgrounds to people’s photos. There was also one of my favourite places, one of the funniest things I have ever seen, one of the many sights of this trip which made me wish David Foster Wallace had lived long enough to see it, which we observed for quite a while whole eating lunch at the cafe: the Hot Girl Observation Deck. The HGOD setup was that a Hot Girl walks out on this runway thing:
A photo captured with difficulty in the brief moment of pause in the Hot Girl lineup
Then, her boyfriend takes photos for her instagram (presumably???) from either the steps or from here:
Then they fight about the photos, and if necessary she rejoins the runway lineup to redo them.
This was obviously the intended usage of this piece of architecture, so I can’t really fault them for showing off how hot they are in the show-off-how-hot-you-are-for-instagram place. However, it would be nice if in front of every single work of art were not ALSO the show-off-how-hot-you-are-for-instagram place.
Showing off how deep I am in front of a different place, I guess
We read in the paper at breakfast that it was the final day of an important camel racing tournament held just outside of Muscat. Scouring the website of the Oman Camel Racing Federation failed to turn up any sort of event schedule, so we just got in the car and drove out to the grounds– until the very final turn, where we realized that 4 wheel drive was more or less a requirement to make it to the stadium; the rented Suzuki Dzire was not going to do it.
So we turned around, and this was as close as we got to any camels:
After the outlawing of child jockeys, robot jockeys are now the standard in the UAE; I’m not sure about Oman, however, so cannot report back for obvious reasons. (News reports on the events seem to report the name of the camel and the owner, but not the jockey; so the jockey seems to be at least considered a nonperson, which is either benign or sinister depending on whether or not they actually are.)
So we went to the opera house instead. The Royal Opera House Muscat opened in 2011. If a survey of history has ever left you with the nagging feeling that democracy is good for many things but impressive buildings is not one of them, the opera house of Muscat would not do anything to counterindicate your hypothesis. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t seem possible to build in the 21st century; in the context of physical infrastructure for Western classical music, in scale it seems like the kind of place must have been build hundreds of years ago and involved a Habsburg. Which is of course more or less the correct context within which to understand it; it exists because Sultan Qaboos was a personal fan of the arts, and is both a performing arts space and a visible demonstration to foreign investors that Oman’s ability to position itself on the world stage. Sultan Qaboos’ personal collection of historical instruments is displayed in the lobby, which includes a few ceramic serpents as well as brass and string instruments, a glass flute, and my personal favourite, this little dude:
This is a pochette, an instrument I had never heard of apparently developed to allow dance masters to have an instrument handy while teaching steps and carry it around in their, well, pochette.
My pictures don’t exactly do the architecture justice, so here are some other ones:
At the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque Sohar we were the only people there during the visitor hours. At the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque Muscat, that was… not the case!
Before visiting the mosque in Sohar I had been somewhat perplexed by a line in the article about it in Oman Magazine stating of the Sohar mosque that “The carpet has a horizontally-lined pattern, which makes it less artistic than the unlined carpet of the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Musct, but definitely more practical.” A lined carpet, presumably, keeps people organized while praying; but why was a lined carpet “less artistic” than an unlined one? It turns out “unlined” does indeed mean “without lines,” but not, as I read it, without decoration, so I can confirm that this carpet is indeed the more artistic. In fact, this carpet is the second-largest carpet in the world, weighs 21 tonnes, and took four years to produce.
Now, while it is definitely the first most impressive carpet I have personally seen, that title of second-largest does lead one to ask… and the answer is that the numero uno carpet is at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, a short drive away from our hotel this weekend in Abu Dhabi.
This is also the site of the second-largest chandelier in the world:
and… you’re not gonna believe where the first is…
Archeological evidence indicates that irrigation systems existed in Oman from 2500 BC; here’s one that’s still hard at work today. The water looked really yummy. You ever seen a body of water that made you want to crouch down and slurp? You have now:
Falaj Daris, a UNESCO World Heritage Site
Contemplating a good slurp
You need a big fort to protect all that prime irrigated land, which Nizwa has, and has had since the 1650s, when Sultan bin Saif, the second of the Yaruba dynasty of Imams, got the massive fortification and castle done in less time than it’s taking to build the Eglinton Crosstown.
Mike’s natural habitat, the coffee preparing room (not to be confused with the coffee making room)
POV: you are about to get boiling oil dumped on you
Pats please
HELLO, I SAID–
Speaking of unexamined cultural assumptions– such as the notion that a number “goes” in order from most to least significant digit-- all of the light switches seem to work in reverse here. As in, the light is on when it’s in the down position, and off when it’s in the up position. This feels wrong, as if there must surely be some real, physical justification as to why up-on/down-off is the correct way for a light switch to work, which of course there isn’t.
Which reminds me of this document which showed up on my RSS reader a few weeks ago: Musical Pitch is Not “High” or “Low”, about different metaphors for pitch. Which was the first time I’d seen it suggested that the idea of high and low pitches is a metaphor; it’s so deeply ingrained in Western musical culture that it feels as if it must be a literal description of physical reality.
And sure, high notes are “high frequency”– but then also, they’re “low period,” so why not that definition instead?1 High notes seem “high” if you play an on-the shoulder string instrument because your hand is closer to your face… but then, if you play a between-the-legs string instrument, high notes have your hand closer to the ground. Vocalized, “high” notes feel higher in the body– but that’s because the only piece of objective physical reality at play here is that shorter objects produce “higher” pitches, and in the context of singing that translates to a higher feeling in the body. If you wanted to map shorter vs. longer objects to a vertical axis, though, a reasonable way to do so would be to stand them up on the shared reference point of the ground– in which case the terminating point of a shorter object is lower to the ground than the terminating point of a longer one, which is higher. And indeed, several cultures and studies on the list do indeed use the high/low metaphors in that other, “reversed” fashion.
