Whale meat again

Hot news on several blogs, websites and Facebook pages is that Sammy the whale shark has been tagged and released. Since her September 2008 incarceration in the Atlantis hotel on Palm Jumeira, there was initially a lot of talk, but little apparent action.

We, Atlantis, are studying the whale shark. It's under medical care and observation before we release it back into the wild.

We, Atlantis, have no intention of ever releasing the animal.

Release Sammy!

Personally I’ve never darkened the doors of Atlantis, pending the release of the fish. And I’m not alone.

Isn’t it somewhat surprising that Sammy’s release into the wild was a quiet, unassuming affair with no fireworks, photographs or even witnesses? Surely some form of commemorative photo story would have been appropriate to undo some of the public relations damage done by taking the fish from the wild in the first place? Or perhaps a backtrack from “We’re keeping the shark for ever” to “It’s been tagged and released” constitutes the dreaded Loss Of Face. Therefore it has to be done in secret and at the dead of night, so as not to stress the fish.

It’s curious that, according to the inevitably biased Set the Whale Shark Free from the Atlantis Aquarium Facebook group, requests for the shark’s tag number result in the correspondent asking for it getting blocked from Atlantis’ Facebook group. Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida currently does not carry any information about this particular tagged animal on its website. Atlantis’ employees are allegedly banned from discussing the whale shark.

Why the apparent cover-up? What’s with the obfuscation? What is there to hide?

Those of us with a cynical streak a mile wide might infer from the lack of any evidence to the contrary that the shark was removed from the aquarium and turned into cat food. I fervently hope that those cynics are wrong.

Unfortunately, being a threatened, vulnerable species, the aphorism that “there are plenty more fish in the sea” simply does not apply.

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Spitting bullets

There I was, out for a little errand-running ride on my motorcycle. Unfortunately mid-afternoon on a Saturday is not a good time to be anywhere near the Mall of the Emirates, and sure enough I found myself stuck in heavy traffic. It was pointless trying to beat the traffic, what with a signal a hundred metres or so ahead which would surely turn red before I reached it, so I bimbled along behind a Nissan Tiida being piloted by a driver who was clearly more interested in his mobile phone than his driving.

But this angry post is not about the Tiida or the mobile telephone. It's about the Arabic-speaking gentleman in a new Land Cruiser who decided to undertake me and my motorbike by using a bus layby. When it had become apparent that the layby was rather shorter than the distance needed to complete this manoeuvre, the driver of the Cruiser had a choice of three obvious courses of action:-

1. Bounce up the kerb;
2. Stamp on the brakes;
3. Push the motorbike out of his way.

He chose the third option, to my immediate surprise and displeasure.

Now, I was unable to take any evasive action. With cars to my left, a Land Cruiser to my right and a Tiida ahead, where was I supposed to go? I stopped.

There was a bellowing of Toyota horn, a shriek of brakes, and then the Cruiser swerved behind me, pushed into the lane to my left, the passenger side window opened, and I was treated to a torrent of Arabic abuse. I don't understand the words, but the tune was obvious.

Given the nature of the offence (and the scratch to my paintwork), I yelled back: "You! Police! Now!" before noting that the damage was extremely superficial, and...well, what was the point? The Land Cruiser driver showed no inclination to stop and await the arrival of the Constabulary.

I noted his registration number, but since getting home I'm extremely irritated to have lost the scrap of paper on which it was written.

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No kidding

Gleaned from all over the internet, here is some helpful guidance for anyone considering the middle east as a destination...





























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Ministry for Clarification of Clarifications

I’m glad that the situation regarding the requirement for an Emirates ID Card has been clarified. Previously, as reported on the EIDA website, in the local press, and also here on this blog, it was not going to be possible for residents (both Emirati and expatriate) to do anything offical without one:

“...the Ministry of Interior made it mandatory for all residents (both Emiratis and expatriates) in four northern emirates to have an ID card from November 22, 2009, to avail [themselves] of its services, except for visa renewal.”

Today’s Gulf News tells us that there is “...no immediate plan to deny any government services — especially to expatriates — for not having identity cards...”

I guess the problem is that whilst since 1 April 2009, it “...was mandatory [for Emiratis who wished] to access government services...all government departments have not followed it strictly...”

That would be such as in when I registered my motorcycle, and was required to produce my passport and visa copy instead of my ID card.

Inevitably, having discovered that without one it would be impossible to function in the UAE is a falsehood, there are plenty of residents who have simply not bothered with the ID card. Indeed, Gulf News states: “People without ID cards continue to have access.”

Today’s newspaper announcement includes an announcement that “...the new enrolment strategy...will be announced within two weeks." So not today, then.

At last, the EIDA has caught on to the idea that processing several million people involves a whole heap of effort. It was obviously not possible to anticipate this, and a couple of years passed before the Authority decided that “...expatriates will soon be able to simultaneously apply for a residence visa, labour card and ID card through a unified application form.” And this will be undertaken“...at primary health centres."

Who can have failed to notice that combining the ID card process with the existing Residence Visa and Labour Card was perhaps a sensible way to proceed? Only the MoI and the EIDA, apparently. But huzzah! At last, light dawns over Marblehead. The dirham drops.

But it’s not going to happen until “...the third quarter of this year, Dr Ali Al Khoury, Acting Director General of EIDA told Gulf News.”

I suspect that within a very few years, the mandatory ID card for expatriates will be quietly forgotten. We have already moved from No government services after 22 November 2009 to No immediate plan to deny any government services, and it’s a small step from here to dropping the ID card idea completely. It will of course remain necessary to produce a passport and visa copy in order to do anything with officialdom, and the ID card will be an optional extra; the option doubtless being decided at random by the ministerial underling, based on what documents are to hand, in order to maximise inconvenience.

Every expat of course has a passport and visa. Only Emiratis within the UAE might conceivably not possess passports, and for this reason, their having some alternative official form of identification seems to be a good idea.

And why the ID card requires any more than a name, mugshot and expiry date is a mystery. My need to register my car, open a bank account or have a mobile phone should not in any way be influenced by what pantheon I may or may not choose to recognise, so the need for my religion to be encoded is unclear.

The Gulf News article, from which I have extensively quoted, is here.

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Useful and clever

Question:

If I tell the bank to cease making a regular payment, what do I expect to happen? Discuss how this compares in practice with what actually happens.

Answer:

I cancelled the standing order through internet banking once it had become painfully apparent that the bank was incapable of not imposing bank charges in error. I had to complain every month, obtain an apology and a refund, and then repeat the whole process the following month. And the month after that. It is more cost effective to pull the cash from an ATM and visit my friendly neighbourhood money exchange. The FOREX rate is better too.

Internet banking confirms that the standing instruction was indeed cancelled. Unfortunately, it seems that internet banking is not attached to the rest of RTB’s empire. So three weeks later I found myself on the phone to the bank, spelling out that the standing instruction must be cancelled. “Yes, now. As in immediately, seeing as you failed to action my specific instruction three weeks ago.”

And it happened to Beloved Wife too, which makes me infer that the problem was not a one-off error, rather a profound system failure over at Red Triangles Towers.

Just as well, then, that the transfer is from me at RTB to me at GoatBank. What would happen if the money had gone to some third party; a party who then refused to refund it? The bank would reimburse me in full, perhaps. Unlikelier things have happened, but these are mostly limited to the pages of Sunday Sport and Fortean Times.

And what if the transfer (that I had cancelled) caused a cheque to bounce owing to insufficient funds? Would the bank compensate me for my extra-spanky short haircut and my stay in a minus-several star desert resort?

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Full of yummy badness

I must have anorexia. You see, every time I look at myself in the mirror, I see a fat goat...

My doctor had an absolute fit a month or so ago when he saw the results of my cholesterol test. “You must reduce the fat in your diet. Wholesale lifestyle changes, otherwise you are going to die.”

“And since when have you been the custodian of the secret of immortality?”

“All right. ‘You’re going to die soon.’ Happy now, Mr Semantically-Sensitive Goat?”

So in addition to the new prescription of cholesterol-lowering medication I have switched to a low-fat, low cholesterol, low taste, healthy diet. I now eschew lard, eggs, processed meat, red meat, butter, cheese, cream, pies, pasties, and proper milk, and instead eat fresh steamed vegetables, grilled chicken, salads with balsamic vinegar dressing, tofu, low-fat yoghurt, whole grains, horse food and rabbit food.

It’s all been a bit of a struggle really. Most of the list of Verbotenfruct is stuff I seldom if ever ate anyway: fast food burgers, cream cakes, anything containing trans-fats, deep-fried pizzas and sausages in batter. So this leaves very little in the way of Yummy Badness still to cut out. English fry-up breakfasts, steak and chips and pies are what I have had to drop, and as a self-styled Lord of the Pies this has been difficult. Now it’s zero English breakfasts a month rather than one.

Beloved Wife and I have worked hard to think up new and inventive ways to make this healthy diet palatable. At least I enjoy seasonal vegetables, and moderate consumption of booze is considered OK. There’s no cholesterol in beer, wine or G&T, although ‘moderate’ clearly precludes drowning one’s sorrows.

Anyway, the process was apparently a success, and my total cholesterol has dropped from an allegedly life-threatening 254mg/dl (or 6.57mmol/l in old money) to an astonishing 127 (or is that 3.28?) which is well below the desirable maximum value of 200. Triglyceride and LDL levels are also now the healthy side of maximum. And my blood pressure had dropped too, no thanks to work-related stress. Mysteriously, even though the new diet leaves me constantly hungry, my body weight steadfastly refuses to budge.

LDL and HDL are interesting. The misnomer is that these are ‘bad’ and ‘good’ cholesterol. Given that cholesterol is the specific molecule C₂₇H₄₆O there ain’t no such thing as a good one or a bad one. Actually LDL is a protein that carries cholesterol from the liver so that it can be deposited in artery walls and block them. HDL is a different protein whose purpose is to carry cholesterol from the artery walls back to the liver. Logically then, lots of HDL and little LDL is a good thing.

Unfortunately, my recent diet and pharmaceutical habit has reduced all the horribly high numbers, but has also pulled HDL below the minimum required for a healthy life. I may currently be at higher risk of heart disease that I was before messing with my body chemistry. The solution is to boost HDL by eating wholegrains, tofu, lean meat, nuts, fruit, olive oil, only moderate alcohol consumption and not smoking. This is exactly what I have been doing, paradoxically only to see HDL drop.

What constitutes high cholesterol anyway? Back in the mists of ancient time, five years before the turn of the millennium and before cholesterol had become a fashionable stick with which to beat the populace, I had a total cholesterol test that resulted in 5.7mmol/l and my doctor advising me that this was way below the average value of 7mmol/l and that I should keep up the good work. Several years later, in 2001, the result was 5.79mmol/l or 224mg/dl. Now I was advised that this was borderline high and I should take steps to lower it. An increase from 220mg/dl to 224mg/dl makes all the difference, it appears. Last month the test yielded 254mg/dl, which is now the high side of high. That’s 6.57mmol/l and still below the 1995 average.

Going off on a brief tangent here, the conversion between millimoles per litre and milligrammes per decilitre works like this:-

One cholesterol molecule C₂₇H₄₆O has a molecular weight of 386, so one mole weighs 386 grammes.
One millimole per litre is 0.001mol/l, or 0.0001mol/dl
Since 1mol C₂₇H₄₆O weighs 386g, 0.0001mol weighs 0.0386g = 38.6mg

Thus to convert, 1mmol/l x 38.6 = 1mg/dl

Back to the rant.

I am a cynical old goat. If the medical experts and pharmaceutical companies are in collusion, what better way to increase sales of cholesterol-reducing drugs than to move the goalposts defining what constitutes ‘low’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘high’? And then doctors will have no difficulty in prescribing medication to progressively more and more customers, thus increasing sales. Until we reach to point when all natural levels of cholesterol HDL and LDL are deemed unhealthy and everyone is on medication to achieve and maintain unnatural levels.

There is a long rebuttal of the widely perceived idea that ‘fat in diet = heart disease’ on this hyperlink, for anyone who’s interested enough.

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Gold crocodiles, they snap their teeth

They don't only snap their teeth on your cigarette, as the song goes. They also snap their teeth on your - or more to the point, my - wallet.

Regular readers may remember my complaint that I was obliged to pay import duty on the postage in addition to the value of the goods. Today I found out new and inventive additional ways to extract more funds from unsuspecting importers of goods that are Not Coming In Dubai.

The value on which 5% duty is charged ignores any discount applied at the other end! Thus, my goods attract 5% duty on $360 for the full price including postage, rather than on $315 plus postage (which is what I actually paid the seller for my stuff), nor on $270, the value of the goods. I was told to complain over at the Department of Seaports and Customs, but previous experience leads me to infer that this would be a waste of oxygen.

In my case the additional duty paid amounts to only a few dirhams, but the principle as explained to me by the nice Egyptian gentleman behind the desk was that:-

If I import something invoiced at Dh1000 with free shipping, I pay Dh50 duty.

If I import something whose original price was Dh100,000, but is discounted by Dh99,000, I have to pay Dh5000: 5% of the original Dh100,000. And there's something morally obscene about that particular arrangement.

My new Egyptian friend told me that I was lucky: in Egypt there's a 200% import duty, etc, etc, blah, blah. Which is of course part of the reason why neither he nor I live in Egypt.

Insult to injury time. There was an additional administration fee to pay Customs, and a further fee to pay Emirates Post for 'storage'.

Apparently I have to pay for two weeks (or part thereof) of storage of my package. I know it left the US on 06 February, and Track and Trace said it arrived in the UAE on 15 February and landed in my local post office on 16 February, six hours before I collected it. Yet I had to pay storage for the eight days when the parcel didn't officially exist, but was actually sitting unsorted somewhere in Dubai.

The moral to this story is labelled Shop&Ship.

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