Aswan

This isn't really in Aswan, but the only way for tourists to get to it is a little flight from Aswan's airport. This is the temple at Abu Simbel, a monument to Ramses, who was something of an egomaniac. Those are four of him in front, and most of the temple's reliefs are devoted to him slaughtering and enslaving all comers, Nubians especially. The mountain is artificial and hollow...the whole temple would have been underwater if it hadn't been moved. That guy in the black shirt between the rightmost two Ramseses is a tour guide, and his T-shirt says "Abdul" on the front and "Follow Abdul Please" on the back.


The temple of Hathor at Abu Simbel. It's supposed to be dedicated to Hathor and Ramses's wife, but, surprise, it's all about Ramses slaughtering and enslaving.

This is a large chunk of Aswan as seen from the roof of my hotel, the Nubian Oasis. Elephantine Island is in the middle of the Nile, a lush place with a Nubian village that's fun to walk through: the village is small enough to have no need for vehicles, so the streets are wide enough for a couple of Egyptians to pass down, which translates into about one and a half of us titanic North Americans. The houses also have a more celebratory form of decoration, but once again I missed taking decent pictures. Aswan was warm, relaxed and the people were kind. I spent way too much time there, from the perspective of someone who wanted to see lotsa sights; aside from Philae and Abu Simbel, there's nothing eye-popping around. Just a good place to relax. I ate an orange up on the roof and in a little while the peel crunched under my foot: no humidity at all. That little peak on the hill is a mausoleum, which is a nice starting point for a walk across the dunes to the decaying monastery of St Simeon. Dig under the rocks there and you can steal a certain camel driver's drug stash, which I think is adequate recompense for his being rather forward with me. The rule appears to be that all foreigners are whores.

After a few days in my hotel room in Aswan, Ramadan struck, which meant no meals, liquids, medicine, or smokes during the day for the devout, but an orgy of gorging before dawn and after dusk. That made dusk a nice time for a nap, because the streets would empty out while everyone ran home and stuffed themselves. Soon enough though, they'd come back out. The guys extending the hovels into this dumping ground outside my window were no fools: they only worked at night, so they could eat, drink, and smoke while doing it. Bastards, hammering away at all hours, taking valuable nesting space away from the flea-bitten felines and garbage-eating chickens...hey, I guess those chickens are free-range, huh?

Most of the sand in Egypt is actually a deathly gray, but it's heavier than the yellow sand which blows around and hides it. This is the monastery of St. Simeon, and the walk to it is a good one for Indiana Jones fantasies. Not many tourists seem to walk in the desert...can't think why. It's silent and desolate in a really inspiring way. Deserts in Arizona seem like fertile pastures in comparison.

Philae's another temple that would have been lost under the waters of Lake Nasser, the lake formed by the High Dam at Aswan, had it not been moved from one island to another with the help of huge infusions of foreign cash. So you get to it via little motorboats. It's a spectacle. Not to be missed.

Philae. Roman addition in the background.

More Philae.

Heck, I think it's more Philae, this time with people for scale, although I recall trying my damndest to eliminate them. [Editor's note - Although "elimination" brings colourful images to mind, rest assured that our naive traveler was simply wishing people were not in the picture he was taking because he hates people with a passion.]

This is probably a temple at Kalabsha, another island temple rescued from hydroelectric might. My memory's fuzzy on this one, but when I look at it I hear a security guard bragging about just having acquired his second wife and fantasizing about a further two. Yup, gotta be Kalabsha. Then the guy wanted baksheesh (palm-greasing money) for having subjected me to his company. Through all the temples, tombs, and whatnot, guys were hanging around trying to point something out to you so they'd have an excuse to ask you for baksheesh. Sadness, pity, annoyance...you could feel all these plus a triumphant cruelty when you thought of slick ways to brush them off or put columns between them and yourself. A lot of the time they have little to offer but things like "Ramses. Snake. Sun." Thanks professor.

Stupid Fun

It turns out that renaming files with a tool that fires out random names helps make your animated GIFs zippier and funnier: you wind up dumping files into your GIF building thingie in random order. Those interested in such a dangerous file-renamer (it does other less damaging but remarkably confusing things to text and audio and video) and possessed of a Mac should check out Argeïphontes Lyre.

Anyway this took a stupid amount of work for a first try, no thanks to Blogspot which doesn't want to host these.

Mean Google Search of the Day

Skateholder.

Spellcheck is not God.

Sarah Palin: Not Quite That Stupid?

Only time will tell.

Fish War Poetry

BASS! Bass! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy fish tanks just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And sautéing like a perch in salt or lime.
_____________

“Forward, the Whitefish Brigade!”
Was there a fish dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and fry:
Out of the valley of Depth
Rode the six haddock.
______________

The zaniness began here.

Dialogue with Children

Kid: WAIT WAIT! You forgot dessert.
Dad: What are you talking about? There's no dessert after breakfast.
Kid: But in SPACE there is.

Cairo

It's unclear from the following, but while I was trudging my feet bloody in Cairo I was having an excellent time. It was my first real experience as an alien, a very important lesson in the contextual nature of ignorance and the amount of improvisation communication may involve. May you experience a similar clumsiness one day if you haven't already, and I mean that in the nicest way.
__________________


An appropriate word on a jet-lag day. Egypt's colonial masters built bunches of beautiful buildings which are slowly crumbling. There aren't a whole lot of caretakers or maintenance workers around, and there probably wouldn't be a payroll for them in any case.

A very clean and beautiful (therefore rare) street in Islamic Cairo. Remarkably serene. It was early morning and girls were sitting in the street sketching the arabesques hanging off the walls. Lotsa sketching in that town...but only by women. Men must be far too busy doing Important Things.

This is a typically busy little street i n Islamic Cairo, confusing, packed full of people carrying junk here and there, with a minaret overseeing all. This is where you go to walk in shit and get date-pits in the treads of your shoes. Donkey carts roll through here with cabs behind them honking. What falls to the ground gets picked through by chickens. Them chickens must have been tough to make it to adulthood despite the throngs of scraggly cats. Sensitive eaters beware.

This photo was taken from the minaret of the mosque of Sultan Hassan. You're looking at The Citadel, where various palaces and mosques are, including that huge attempt at Turkish majesty right there. The interior of it is at once very impressive and kind of tasteless, as its builder, Muhammad Ali (a different one) was something of a vulgarian by mosque standards. No naked women with clocks in their stomachs or anything, but it's glitzy in a non-figurative Frenchified way.

This is a courtyard in Muhammad Ali's mosque.

One of the mosques in The Citadel, En Nasr. The minaret has some nice green tile work, which you'll have to use some imagination to see.

Okay, this is an ugly shot, but low light was not helping me. This is En Nasr's minbar (where the iman chants Qu'ran from on high) and the little nave-like area where the Qu'ran is kept. Islam is the Op-Art religion. Look at those inlays.

This is the only decorated irwan in the mosque of Sultan Hassan. He was a puppet ruler, and his masters killed him when they found out he was spending so much money making this titanic monument. In standard Egyptian fashion, nobody bothered to complete the work.

The inside of the irwan above. Those lamps are hanging from the roof by chains...imagine being the poor fool who had to keep them lit. They're electric now of course. The minaret here is a fun climb...up a stairway to the roof, up a stairway inside a dark circular tower, another tower after that, and you get a great view of Cairo. Look out for that missing step.

The minarets of Rifai from the minaret of Sultan Hassan.

The mosque of Hassan on the left, and Rifai on the right. The Shah of Iran's tomb is in Rifai for some reason, surrounded by green flourescent lighting. Coloured flourescents are the official neon substitute in Egypt.

Somehow I got a nice picture of this nice open courtyard in, I think, the mosque build by mystical tyrant El Hakim. It's a relief being in a place like this when the crowds and squalor around it can be so overwhelming. It was a particularly instructive mosque: the folks in charge of taking money did an excellent job of fleecing me by not having change and so on...and at that point I was too polite to complain, especially in the face of such bad dental work. Under those arches? Pigeon nests. Watch where you step. You can wash your feet at that fountain in the middle though.

What's behind the pyramids? Nothing. Get a little distance from the Nile and everything is bleak. In front of the Pyramids? Millions of Cairenes and a golf course right under the hill the pyramids are on.

This is some dope at the pyramids. He claims his camel's name is Charlie Brown. The pyramids are impressively monomaniacal piles of rock but they're surrounded by weasels who are desperate for your cash. This is understandable, as tourists are loaded, relatively speaking, but it can get pretty frustrating trying to look around when people are constantly trying to sell you things, including opportunities for outstanding pictures like this. I paid this guy a little money for it, for god's sake. What a soft touch. Eventually my sole souvenir purchase in all of Egypt was a T-shirt that read "I CAME TO SEE PYRAMIDS. LEAVE ME ALONE." I paid too much for it of course.

HYUK

Reference.

Important Cows Have Been Civilization

Ancient Times

A few years ago I was in Egypt. Some of the forthcoming posts are reposts of my very first website ever, made with the venerable Claris Home Page. Look at the lovely ComicSans. Not enough credit given to primitive photoshoppery: these are tweaked in a major way.

_____________________

Here are some photos I took in Egypt. I actually hadn't planned to take any photos, which was pretty dumb, and once I was convinced to do so, I just bought some disposable cameras...also dumb. I'm not the kind of guy who should waste a lot of money on a camera - I don't think I have any particular talent or patience for that kind of thing - but once I was there I regretted not having worthwhile equipment. The results speak for themselves: virtually all outdoors shots because that's where the light was, not enough shots of people due to misanthropy...and so on. So there's a lot less of a really terrific trip than I would have liked, but that's that. Sorry the pics are so huge, but I'm too lazy to change it all now.

These are columns in, I think, the fairly spectacular temple in Edfu.

Because Egyptian edifices are generally oriented to catch the sun, it's usually difficult for a guy like me to catch a shot of reliefs: they're in shadow or direct sunlight. Here, though, you can see the kind of thing that nearly every square inch of temple surface was either covered with or was supposed to be covered with. The guy on the right is one of the pharaohs holding multiple enemies by the hair with an arm raised to whack them, much as we do today. Crowds of people tended to be represented as one person with echoing lines around them; directly underneath the pharaoh's hand is the central figure kneeling to the right and cowering, much as we do today.

Great gosh a mighty, it's another temple somewhere.

Here's where I got very worried and offended: a bunch of not very subtle looking guys appeared to be painting colours onto the reliefs. Silly me, they were cleaning the damned things with some kind of solution.

Woo Woo!

Quoth a crazy loon you've never heard of:

The lefties have nothing to lose if swarms of the ‘poor’ are ‘starving’ while having babies in the streets and need food and housing and they can work the levers of ‘compassion’ while ignoring the rusty Rule of Law. Soon, we can enjoy the splendor of countries like France and Germany as our new friends torch a few hundred cars every night to get attention. We desperately need Sharia Law to restore what is left of our religious culture, particularly Methodism.

Also note the stylistic improvements on the common nut:



Those colours aren't links, they're just colourtastic.

Megan McArdle Remains Employed

"I'm not voting because I forgot to register."

Embarrassment

Death of a Graphics Card?

I'm getting irritating artifacts on my screen:


Anyone seen this before? I've got a dual G5 Mac with an ATI X800 XT card and I figger that's dying.

Sentence of the Day

Standard boring "education should be run like a business" article includes:

Too many cooks spoil the broth and the result is that grade inflation has exploded like a space rocket.