Riiiiight. Sure they'll be completed.
The image that haunts me most is this one, unmarked, unexplained, out in the desert. The upper image shows a closer-in view; I then zoomed out for the bottom image.I'm not 100% sure how to interpret these pictures. The broad roads and traffic circles tell me that someone had planned to build a city or suburb here. And yet the project seems to have come to naught. Look closely at the upper image: The sands of the desert have blown over the roads, partially eradicating them.
A foreshadowing of Dubai's future? Or perhaps of our own future? As Shelley wrote:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decayHorace Smith wrote a competing poem on the same theme, and it too is worth quoting:
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
9 comments:
And we have Obamandyias in the White House.
Ah, Joseph, but here is where we are different: you the straight male will spend will stare at that partly sand-covered stretch of Dubai for at least 30 seconds and think of riding horseback across our coming Ozymandias with Linda Harrison in her loin cloth riding back saddle, and I will spend the same 30 seconds in the same day dream, but with me back saddle, holding on to Charlton Heston. Either fantasy still ends the same, at a dune-covered statue of Lady Liberty.
The good people, innocent people, working people need not be swept away with the cascading collapse of the monetarist empire.
Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt came back the other day and held a news conference explaining the way out and denouncing the increasingly exposed-as-pathetic enemy. Completely blanked out by the news media. JFK, Bobby and Martin were there speaking too. God, it was beautiful.
The Good doesn't fall; it is immortal and increasing. We die, it doesn't. They lovingly encourage us to lend a hand.
Reposting comment about your anti-Jolie post just to make sure you get it.
Joe: I assume you are trying to drive viewership to your site by naming Angelina Jolie in your post. And, I hate that you are making me defend a superstar who needs no defending from a barely-read blogger. But, I mean - come on. You are siting a "source" from US WEEKLY! to disparage Jolie as if it came from her own lips. Could you be more of a tool. The same US Weekly who has had her and Pitt breaking up a few dozen times now, them adopting yet another child, her pregnant again about 5 times, etc. etc. You see where I am going with this, right?
You call "conspiracy theorists" nuts (which many of them are), but then you use nothing more than second-hand gossip from no better than a slightly up-market tabloid to insult someone you do not know.
By the way - her father is a rightwinger, and she has also been estranged from him for years. Correlated - I don't know. But, there is a reason she doesn't trust him. And, maybe she doesn't trust Obama. Neither do you. But, we have no reason to know if she does or doesn't and if she doesn't trust him why. May be for the same reason as you, and someone just simply made up the "Socialist" line because it sounded better to get themselves quoted in a tabloid.
Secondly, Alphaville is wrong about Jolie investing in Dubai. They just saw Pitt having bought and attributed it to both of them. It was rare, but shoddy journalism on behalf of FT. They didn't look at the dates he bought, but I did. Pitt bought property there in 2002. That was when he was still married to J. Aniston. He was married to Aniston until 2005. It is very likely he didn't even know he was buying property there, and his financial manager just bought it up as part of his portfolio. Still his responsibility of course, but the point is he bought 3 years before he got together with Jolie, and at least a year before he even met her.
Why not attribute the purchase to J. Aniston?? Or, more accurately to Pitt - the man - and the one who actually made the decision. Either it's sexism on your part to just believe awful things about a beautiful woman without bothering to do basic checking or you think Jolie will drive more viewers to your site than even Pitt or Aniston.
Either way - shoddy, shoddy, shoddy.
In fact - I will donate $100 to your site if you can back up the comments you made about Jolie with facts. If you can't then you owe her an apology.
According to the San Francisco Gate: "Hollywood couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have bought a man-made island in the shape of Ethiopia off the coast of the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai."
Dubai Island: at the top of the bubble, after the bubble burst
I'm not sure where Ethiopia is on the new map.
Jolie, or not Jolie?
That is the question.
A follow-up: Reader Eric points to a news story which talks about an island off of Dubai owned by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Pitt, through his representatives, has denied the story.
I'll take the denial at face value, I guess -- but why do we keep seeing articles linking Pitt and Jolie to Dubai? How did that start?
marie's comment was posted twice. I replied to her in the post below.
Just UPDATE reposting because the Sf Gate story in the comment above about BP and AJ buying property in Dubai in 2007 was already updated saying that the story was not true. Pitt bought that property in 2002. And, frankly, if we are going to take tabloid stories as true now - why not the ones that say that Jolie is upset with BP's profligate spending - probably on Dubai property!
Joe: This is getting silly. You are now claiming that because Jolie doesn't either come out with a comment disputing an anonymous source in US Weekly (and that's the original - which NY Daily News and probably a lot of other worthless "journals" plagarized from) or SUE them, then it's true???!!
You seem to have connections in Hollywood or LA media land. You surely know as much as I do that stars in the US almost NEVER sue tabloids no matter what, given US libel law. Maybe in the UK, but it doesn't even make sense to say - well why don't they sue if it's not true - given US libel laws.
Also, Jolie probably either hasn't even heard about it - after all it came out over Thanksgiving weekend, and most sane people who have families in the US are not glued to internet gossip/news - or could care less. As I mentioned, it certainly would be far from the first lie told about her and if she was going to spend all her time refuting anonymous gossip in tabloids, she wouldn't do anything else. Even if it's something about Obama. All she has to do is call Obama up and say - hey - not true. No reason to dignify a tabloid with a statement just to please us.
And, I'm not saying the story isn't true. I don't know; I doubt it given that it doesn't sound like her to even say something like "Obama's a socialist." But, we don't know whether she said it or not.
Frankly, my point here has not got to do with Jolie, really, who certainly can defend herself but with you, Joe. You are usually better than this. I mean - accusing someone of endorsing slavery is a pretty serious charge. I would want you to maybe look a little deeper into the evidence before doing that.
I also would want you to have BRAD PITT's name front and center too. He bought the property - I still have not seen anything saying that the Dubai property deed was after 2002 - long before he met Jolie. But, even if they bought it together, where's HIS name??????
Post a Comment