A round-up of the best blogs from the Middle East and beyond this week.
Celerity in celebrity
What happened of the World Environment Day of yesterday? Forgotten by the media and thrust upon viewers was the drug possession by a supposed celebrity, DJ Aqeel. Pray, with all due respect to Aqeel and his achievements, when did he get the "celebrity" tag? Caught in the Dubai airport for possession of 0.4g of Ecstasy, Aqeel could face serious charges.
This happened on World Environment Day, and the media did after all get the opportunity to make Aqeel a celebrity. It is quite true: the more the controversy around an individual, the more famous the personality.
desicritics.org
Brake Dancing
An excerpt from this weeks Time Out:
We all know the problems with Dubai's traffic - speeding hummers flasing their dazzling lights at you, snarling Sheik Zayed traffic jams and a lack of decent commuter options. But a new problem has surfaced, and it's one that's giving the Dubai Traffic Police a bit of a headache.
Caught on security footage groups of cars are travelling around Dubai in the early hours of the morning. So far, so ordinary. But it seems that when the vehicles stop at traffic lights, the people in the cars pile out onto the road and start dancing widly to music blasting out of the speakers.
As soon as the lights go green, they all scramble back into their vehicles and speed off to the next junction. While some of the dancing has caused offence to bemused onlookers - one witness was apparently alarmed by the poor robot style moves - the police are getting a barrage of complaints from motorists stuck behind the mobile discos! What a world!
travelblog.org
Construction shot
My colleague and I went to a construction site near our office and made an ocular inspection for the upcoming portrait shoot. Feeling paranoid (last time a police patrol stopped us during a “stake out''), this time I asked the officer in charge of the site for permission to take some pictures.
dubaichronicles.com
