On a recent trip to Mexico city (to attend a Creative Commons LatAm meeting) while we were waiting to be cleared for take-off, i overheard my neighbour in seat 21C (one of the best economy class seats on this type of plane, that is usually occupied by frequent flyers) talking on the phone to his family at home. Somewhat surprisingly he expressed astonishment about the size of the plane (‘there is a staircase next to me’) and curiosity about how he would handle a flight this long (12.5 hrs). While i usually avoid talking to seat neighbours like the pest, this tickled my curiosity and after we were on the way i found myself inquiring where he was headed and about the purpose of his trip.

Turns out my seat neighbour was in the tomato business (given the fact that Mexico and the Netherlands are the two biggest tomato exporting countries in the world, sitting next to someone in the tomato business on this flight should not really be a surprise).

More specifically, he mentioned, he used to run a family farm, growing tomatoes and other vegetables in a small number of green-houses but about five years ago he had to sell the business because he could not scale up to remain competitive. Nowadays, he told me he was working for one of the large tomato conglomerates as a quality inspector.

This company had been hit pretty hard by the EHEC crisis two years ago when pretty much their entire European market (read: Germany) had collapsed. This had led them to decide that they needed to diversify there and become active in other markets outside of Europe.

As a result the company started to explore the possibility of licensing the production of snack tomatoes to US companies that would operate greenhouses in Mexico producing snack tomatoes for the North American market. They has recently completed the first such deal and given that his manager who would usually oversee these kind of operations had just gotten a baby and prefers not to travel that far, here he finds himself in an aeroplane, the size of a greenhouse flying across an ocean for the first time in his life in order to spend a week in Mexican greenhouses to ensure that the Mexicans do not mess up the carefully controlled Dutch formula that is supposed to produce thousands of thousands of identical small red snack tomatoes. Makes me wonder what i will be doing in five years from now…

After being in Iran for a week one of the biggest dissapointments so far (right after the food, which is the most unimaginative i have come across so far) is the fact that they seem to have banned ghalyun smoking in most places outside of Teheran. If you belive the daily star (which of course would be a foolish thing to do) this is part of the ‘toughest moral crackdown in years’ which is otherwise fairly invisible (at least to my eyes).

When we were looking for a tea house to have a smoke in Isfahan a couple of days ago we actually got a slightly different explanation: It seems like the governemnt (or the ayatollahs, or whoever runs this country) decided that young girls where smoking too much, to the extend of becoming addicted to smoking ghalyun/argileh (I have heard this concern in other middle eastern countries before). Therefore the wise rulers decided to ban women from smoking in tea houses which seems to have resulted in the girls rightfully pointing out that it was unfair that men were continued to be allowed to smoke in the tea houses. This in turn seems to have resulted in the tea houses being closed altogether (apart from Tehran), and now eveybody smokes at home or in the park or whereever one decides to have a picknic (which seems to be one of the favorite passtimes of the locals here, as long the picnic place is less than ten meters away from a mayor highway and less than 1 meter away form their own car)

This whole situation severly limits your options to pass time in the evening, which now basically consist of eating (unimaginative) or drinking tea and reading (which is actually a fairly relaxing way to spend a vacation).

… used to be the subtitle of this blog for a while (in fact it still is, but i have not really found a place in the layout where i could put the subtitle). in the meanwhile (which is the title of the blog) collateral knowledge has teamed up with identity & aesthetics and got promoted to be the title of the second el-hema koopavond (evening shopping event) at mediamatic in Amsterdam on the 13th of September:

According to the programme i will present my idea of ‘collateral knowledge’ by ways of a nice old-fashioned slideshow (with a twist) of my travels through Dubai, Lebanon, Amman, and Damascus. Also presenting is my dear friend Tarek Atoui who will close the evening by a performance dedicated to the populations who have been suffering from the latest political and military events striking Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq (Tarek sounds a bit like a diplomat these days!). The evening will be opend by Mounira Al Solh who – again according to the programme – will present her artistic practice, wherein she addresses issues of identity and aesthetics by weaving together matters related to Lebanese politics, diaspora, immigration, and the condition of the art world.

Should be a splendid evening, so if you are in Amsterdam make sure to drop by. The whole thing will start at 2030h and entrance seems to be free (i guess they expect you to buy t-shirts like crazy). Many thanks to Nat for pulling this together.

I had the sentence ‘this macbook has the lifespan of a hamster’ as my desktop background for a while now. had assumed that hamsters do have a lifespan of about two years. Yesterday Tamara mentioned that her hamster had died after one year when she was 10 and coinciditially my macbook died yesterday evening (after about a year of good service).

This happend while taking notes during the reflection group meeting of the ECF in Amman for which i am supposed to write up the report. So now i am stuck whith tareks 2nd powerbook which somewhat unfortunately has a french keyboard. If you type ‘this macbook has the lifespan of a hamster’ on a AZERTY keyboard you get ‘this ;qcbook hqs the lifespqn of q hq;ster’ very annoying…

We spend all day today in south Lebanon, which is not as badly destroyed as i had thought (sometimes it is a bit difficult to tell if a ruin is the result of the local culture of leaving lots of buildings unfinished or of an israeli air raid). Some of the villages seem more or less undamaged, while others look like it has been attempted to raze them from the ground for good. We spend some time in Bint Jebel, where the entire center of the the village is in ruins (the place saw intense house to house fighting during the war) and then went on to Khiam, to see (what is left of) the prison. I had been to the prison in khiam during my last trip so the destruction here was visually much more revealing as i had a pretty good memory of how the place looked one and a half years ago. Basically the entire prison is reduced to rubble (There is one cell block left). looks like this has been an convenient opportunity for the IDF to get rid of this rather dark episode of their history.

The only other visitors were a group of young fashionable men from beirut who were posing in the ruins with a hezbollah flag, which looked rather stupid given that about as likely to be hezbollah supporters as one is likely to find beer in Khiam. at some point it looked like they were actually trying to imitate a certain historical scene (which if memory does not deceive me was also fake), but i doubt they were aware of this:

For the rest the area is absolutely overcrowded with UN peacekeepers, who seem to have nothing better to do than drive water trucks through the narrow streets and go shopping. Not sure how this is supposed to help. Also the European Commission has embarked on repairing the street lights in the entire area, which they emphasize by putting up informative hoarding and putting stickers with the EU flag on every lamp post (pictures to follow, the upload speed here is horrible). This is of course against the background of schools, houses, roads and pretty much everything else needing repair. I wonder who sets the priorities at the EU and who seriously believes that stickers on lamp posts will give Europe a good name in this part of the world

Update: Pictures after the jump:

So apparently the European Commission has decided that the most urgent thing to do in South Lebanon is repairing the street lamps. i am not entirely sure if this prioritization does make much sense to the local population, they would probably be more happy with houses or schools being repaired or more resources dedicated to de-mining and disposal of unexploded cluster munitions. but then development/humanitarian aid is characterized by the fact that the donor sets the priorities and not those who are supposed to be in need of the help….

However in south lebanon the street-lamps come equipped with a poster of either Hassan Nasrallah (Hezbollah) Musa al-Sadr (Amal), the logo of either of the two organizations or the portrait of a resistance fighter fallen in combat. (‘martyr’ in the local lingo) not sure if the EU commission was aware of this fact before taking the decision to repair these very street lamps …

… and as the EU is very keen on showing all the god work they are doing, these very street-lamps now sport stickers of EU flags. gives you the impression that the EU is sponsoring the poles that hold the Hezbollah posters.

Dubai may be positively insane but then Hong Kong is absolutely shameless in its display of wealth and consumption, especially now that it is christmas time. Now x-mas is not only taken as an excuse for excess shopping but there are special x-mas themed stages all over the place. Passed by the one in central tonight where they had a chinese band playing covers of pop songs and while i passed there the (very attractive, young) lead-singer announced the next song (i am a survivor or i survive or something like this) by telling the crowd that

… two months ago she had a really tough time, because all three of her boyfriends had left her on the same day – on the same day get this! – but this experience only made her stronger because [song starts]

Meanwhile the the lcd screen that displays txt-messages send to santa changes from ‘i wish i had 2.000.000 dollars to spend’ (not specific whether HKD or USD) to ‘i wish all the people in the world had a gun and would kill themselves’.

I just finished uploading my pictures from Dubai to my flickr account. the most interesting ones are in the ‘Dubai construction‘ set:

[from the description]: I took these photographs during a stopover in Dubai on the 25th of november 2006. they are taken on various construction sites in the dubai marina area that this located about 25 kilometers south from the old city centre in the vicinity of the Palm Jumeirah artificial island. Most of the construction workers pictured here apporached me by themselfes and asked me to take a picture of them. For more information on the situation of migrant construction workers in the U.A.E see the Human Rights Watch report ‘Building Towers, Cheating Workers‘. Some more background on the insanity going on in Dubai can be found in the essay Dubai: self-help for those you wanted to build a 21st century city by Shumon Basar

The last article has a number of accompanying pictures. this one is my absolute favorite. pretty much sums up the hubris of the place in one sentence:

And if this intrigues you i recommend checking out the websites of some of the big real estate developers like emaar or nakheel.

Today i applied for my 5th indian visa in 3 years or so. Apart form having to pay a €50 fee you also have to include 2 recent passport pictures with each application. That means that the G.O.I now has no less than 10 passport photos of mine, which makes me wonder what the hell they are doing with them.

Do they all keep them in one file and some clerk occasionally checks how i am developing (like the notary i had to visit today to confirm ‘that the photograph [in my passport] is a reasonable likeness’ of mine who remarked that i had gotten ‘fatter’)? Do they just throw them away? and what do they need them for anyway? to identify my remains in case i become a victim of a tsunami/erthquake/train bombing?

As i can’t come up with a plausible use/storage scenario myself feel free to enlighten me in case you have a clue…

Check out this video [mp4 file – 20mb] of me and my bike having fun in Shivaji Nager / Russel Market in central Bangalore. Traffic has gotten worse every time i have come here. cycling is actually the fastest (and probably most dangerous) way to get around town even though one cannot run red lights like at home. In fact most of the time you do not even get to the red light as even cycles can’t navigate through the snarls of vehicles that pile up in front of traffic lights…

For some reason the hotel staff got the reservation a bit wrong and though that Monica, Vishwas and me are all called monica. at least they started addressing us like this when we checked in yesterday night. This already reminded me of the penguins in madagascar, but things got even more Madagascar-like a bit later. We had inquired about a japanese restaurant that would be open on a sunday night (which given how serious they take their sundays here is a bit of a difficult thing to find) which resulted in one of the ladies from the reception volunteering to walk us to one near Avenida Paulista that according to a friend of hers would be definitely open.

Now it is quite a trip to go from downtown to Paulista by subway (it involves changing lines twice) and a bit strange to be accompanied by someone from your hotel reception on high heels who is apparently eager to brush up her english by chatting to us. As one could have predicted the restaurant was closed and by the time we got back (t(stay) = 0 in this case but the rest of the equation being confirmed once more due to the fact that we took a cab on the way back) even the most reliable downtown restaurants were closed as well so we ended up in the hotel restaurant which managed to makes us wait for pasta for about one and a half hours. The whole hotel staff definitely resembles the slightly evil madagascar penguins a lot:

Completely unrelated i was wondering the other day if the vicious character of the penguins in madagascar is part of a secret plot by hollywood to discredit tux