Burj Al Arab

Burj Al Arab (Arab Tower), a Jumeirah Hotel in Dubai

I'm watching a video on YouTube and an ad for a hotel pops up. Jumeirah? Sounds Arab, and it is. Pretty building, and a very expensive hotel. Built on artificial island. The builders had to dewater the island in order to build the foundation. Dewatering is done by drilling a series of wells around the perimeter, putting pumps in the bottom of the wells and pumping all the water out. On an island like this you will never get all the water out because the sea is constantly seeping in, but you can lower the ground water level, which is good enough, I guess. Seems like they might need to keep the pumps running forever to keep it stable, but maybe if you built a foundation that was big, heavy, deep and solid enough you wouldn't need the pumps anymore.
    Dubai is a really weird little place. It's over there with all those other Arabian oil empires (map), but it's really tiny, kind of like Monaco, so there's no place to drill. Money is flowing into the place and the only reason I can figure is that money attracts money. The picture is very pretty, but the place itself doesn't strike me as very nice. The climate is about like Phoenix, Arizona, and maybe a little worse because of the high humidity in the summer. I guess if you were rich you wouldn't hang around in the summer, probably go some place cooler, like Switzerland.
    Then you've got all the horror stories about not-so-rich people having problems like being thrown in jail for being raped or broke.

Dassault Mirage

Dassault Mirage 2000-9DAD - United Arab Emirates Air Force

The Dassault Mirage 2000 first flew in 1978. France built 600 of them. They are in use by several countries.

Dubai

Expo 2020 Airbus 380, LAX

The decoration on this aircraft got my attention, so I did a little checking. Expo 2020 is going to be held in Dubai next year. Looking at the website, I notice this little blurb: 

How can we build more inclusive societies?

I thought that was a little odd considering that regimes in the Mideast are among the most draconian in the world. From Wikipedia:

Companies in Dubai have in the past been criticised for human rights violations against labourers. Some of the 250,000 foreign labourers in the city have been alleged to live in conditions described by Human Rights Watch as "less than humane".

Okay, that's not news. As I recall most of those laborers are from India and/or Pakistan. I suspect conditions in those countries are what prompted those laborers to come to Dubai. Could it be that working for as a wage-slave in Dubai is better than their life back home?

Okay, enough about the downtrodden masses, how about a little real-life James Bond type adventure?

Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum in January 2018

Seems Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, daughter of the Prime Minister of the UAE (United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is one), tried to 'escape' with the help of a former French intelligence officer via jet-ski and sailing yacht but was forcibly brought back.

Sailing yacht Nostromo

Could it be Latifa doesn't care for Dubai's brand of inclusiveness?

Bow = Front

Shinya Ocean at anchor off Fujairah

A Shipping Corporation of India LNG carrier collided with a very large crude carrier at a Fujairah anchorage in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday evening, resulting a major damage to the oil tanker. - Mike Schuler for gCaptain

Here is plot of what happened.


LNG Carrier Aseem Collides with VLCC Shinyo Ocean off Fujairah
Failure to communicate? Refusal to communicate? Drinking too much Kool-Aid? Whatever. Gadflys gladly fly:


Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off

. . . comedy sketch from the early 1990s, the parts of the politician and interviewer being played by Australian television comedy duo John Clarke and Brian Dawe as they discuss an oil spill that occurred in 1991 when the Greek tanker Kirki lost its bow off the coast of Western Australia. - Snopes

Previous broken ship posts here and here. LNG carrier here. Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Richie Rich

Dubai

Bentley (the car people) have a new ad campaign for selling their over-the-top lux mobiles to people with more money than god, and it starts with this image of Dubai, which has the world's highest concentration of potential Bentley customers. Bentley knows what side their bread is buttered on, and it's the side covered with sand and oil.

The original image has a zillion pixels. You can see it, and pan and zoom, here. Funny thing is that there are almost no people visible. Oh, there are a few people walking around at ground level, but no crowds like you might you see in a real metropolis, that is, one with a climate that makes going outside something you could do without being fried to crisp.

All the windows in all the skyscrapers, at least the ones close enough to provide enough detail, also seem to be devoid of people. Does anybody actually live in all these exotic palaces? Maybe they do, but they are all hiding in air-conditioned inner chambers away from the sun's burning glare. Or maybe they have all flown away to someplace with tolerable temperatures.

But back to the Bentley. You can't have a car ad without the car and it's right there in the center, parked on the roundabout sticking out into the water.

Bentley

The whole tone, or maybe texture, of this digital image kind of reminds of the video game The Sims. It's like it's not real, but maybe that was the effect they were shooting for.

Update: While I was talking about the color / brightness / hue in the images, another part of this 'Sims' effect could be the apparent isometric view of the car. Everything in The Sims, or at least in the versions my kids played, was depicted in an isometric view. Most pictures of cars are shot from much closer, so perspective frames the image. This one is not absolutely isometric, but when you are looking from far away, the effect of perspective is minimized and it looks like an isometric view.

Dubai is on the Persian Gulf, near the straight of Hormuz.

Via Road & Track

Previous Bentley posts.