As Towers of Babylon go, they don’t get much bigger. But will the reality of now having the tallest tower in the world (opened officially today) come to haunt the rulers of Dubai as they confront a multitude of problems in the former Gulf fishing village.

Such edifices undoubtedly become symbols of the socities they represent, and its highly likely that such a highly visible and attractive target to Islmaic terrorists may well prove irrestible. After all, who needs to worry about the hassles of boarding a jetliner bound for the US when there is a plethora of death champions in the immediate vicinity.

That’s the ultimate doomsday scenario. The more likely economic one would see the complex operating at well below its intended capacity, taking years to fulfil its feted promise of accomodation, retail, shopping, and nightlife behemoth (you can apparently live and do everything within this vertical city without even leaving below the 50th floor). Empire State, Sears, Tapei 101 and the Petronas all were opened in similar times and all took quite some time before they became the accepted landmarks they are now.

The final is the ultimate in one-up manship the building represents, in no small part a direct challenge to the West directly. Dubai’s dreams of crafting itself as a true cradle of modernity in the medieveal Middle East risks being instead overblown into a cololuss of bling, whose insatiable need for unending electricity to power poorly patronised indoor snow parks seem strangely at odds with the needs of a post Copenhagen world.

After all,  it’s only going to take another foolhardy endeavour to build a taller, sleeker Babylon in Abu Dabai and the Burj is toast. Or should I say Turkish?

Postscript – in the christening ceremony, the name ‘Burj’ has been cast aside in favour of the harder to prononce (and remember) – Khalifa. Burj just means tower in Arabic so Dubai Tower just wasn’t going to cut it amongst the global bling brigade!

I knew it had been a while but a whole 5 months. Yep – that’s how long since my last post. Count em. Five long lousy months. Actually, they haven’t been lousy at all. More on than in future posts.

My ‘blogmistress’ has been urging me to post (repeatedly) after the raft of  fantastic theatrical experiences I’ve had recently. You can count quite a few of these as well – Cate in Streetcar, Liza in, well Liza, Marcus Graham and Sascha Horton in God of Carnage. And yet after all of em, I don’t know why I haven’t? I’ve had so much to say about all of them, as great as they all were in their own way. I suppose it’s just a combination of guilt, indolence and sheer  bloody mindedness coupled with a concentration on other things.

So as they say on the shrink’s couch – acknowledging you have a problem is the first step in progressing to solving the root cause and progressing toward a cure. Bear with me as I work through the process of less about thinking about doing things and actually doing them.

Well not really if you consider the Grandma Yetta lace work and 1970s Lost in Space velour that went into making my hetro retro Austin Powers outfit. But our team DID have fun doing this promotion yesterday to one of our EGM teams of our new Enterprise Services wide Recognition Program called “Leading Lights”. It has as you’ve probably guessed – a movie/entertainment theme.

Not sure why I wound up as Austin – probably had something to do with the other costumes not really fitting perhaps (lol). As you can see below, we all got into the spirit of the occasion. A few of us actually had to talk to 50 or so executives about our respective Service Culture programs of work while in this getup – so I can really present anywhere or anytthing now after doing this.

Here are Jess and Lidia looking fabulous as Marilyn and Cruella (give me those PUPPIES) De Ville.

The lovely Sue donned a Queen of the Nile look for her alternate movie persona (not a Bangles clip extra).

Here is a shot of Austin and the lovely Nadine suited up as a very fetching and delicious Batgirl – albeit with a slightly retro Diahann Carroll twist.

Elsa came as a wandering 60’s flower child refugee from the movie Hair (or was it Woodstock Elsa)?

And last but not least is a shot of the entire team that frocked up for the presentation.  Although a tad nervewracking, it was loads of fun and will hopefully enable our people across ES to have a little bit of fun with the new program.

PS – I will post some of the other photos soon. Hooray for Hollywood!

Thanks Aunty Vera for your sterling work in handling all the technical jiggery pokery – much appreciated.  Best news is that the first lady of big queen dot org blogging has managed to retrieve my old posts going way back to 2005. So I was thinking of posting some of the better ones in a kind of retro series. Also as a way to spur me to keep blogging as well. I also just need to republish my old links along with a few newbies and we’re all set.

And in the spirit of Vanity Fair, here is my new internal work directory photo. Very businesslike methinks and a non too subtle signal with the ‘think pink’ theme.

Outside the Pink Palace

Looking WAY younger than her age, David K (aka Momma) jetted in from Singapore the other week to celebrate her 50th birthday at a downstairs  Darlinghurst bar. ARQ was the desintation du-jour for all the pretty once were young things later on.

It was good catching up with all the gang again. Steve and Ben had just gotten back from the US so their memory of Sandra wailing about seeing the Grand Canyon from the air.  Sample comment:

“Oh its just a big hole with some rocks in it”

Priceless!

Meanwhile – here is a happy snap of Rado, Momma and myself!

PS – I was feeling very sick and fluey this weekend. That doesn’t of course explain my woeful haircut!

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy.

It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.

You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell

“‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’

Sound familiar?

Sounding like its resonating with you?

The power of any writing,  script, prose, poetry or otherwise is how powerful they are on initial release and then how powerful they remain long after they are written. I know as I watched this film again the other night and was reminded how powerful it was and still is.

Hard to believe but the words above are not taken from today’s headlines. They are from what is probably one of the tightest scripts ever written for a film, 1975’s Network.

If you ever wanted to understand television, power, human nature, business, show business, politics, social dynamics, to name but a few – then this brilliant piece of cinema is for you.

Get MAD as hell!

As any Trek aficionado knows, the series movies were cursed by the “even number good, odd number bad” theory. Witness the Wrath of Khan (no 2), the Voyage Home (no 4) and First Contact (number eight) versus – amongst the worst in the franchise, the Final Frontier (no 5).

From net reports and twitter postings overnight, it would seem that Hollywood wunderkid J. J. Abrams has finally and thankfully managed to break that curse, delivering from two almost simulanteous premieres (an official Opera House one in Sydney, but an unnofficial and earlier one in Texas with Leonard Nimoy) a rip roaring adventure that looks like it has finally managed to inject much needed new life into the franchise.

Live long and proser indeed. For a good aggregation of the current net chatter, the redoubtable Harry Knowles over at AICN is your best bet!

Chilling words. Hard to think they could have been applied to US this week when news crept out that a rogue asteroid (or other such heavenly body) came to within a 60,000 km strike of Earth.

Think about it people – 60,000 km. To provide some perspective, the Moon is approx 380,000 kms away. To parphrase on the “toasters” (love that term) from Battlestar Galactica;

“It has happened before – and it will happen again”

Although the stellar object in question was only small by cosmic standards (some 100 or so metres across), scientists theorised the damage caused should an impact have occured would have been similar to the devestation caused in Siberia in 1908 – the famous “Tunguska” event (see above). At most, approximate evac time would have been 24 hours.

Which may or may not have been a strike with a black hole, depending on which loony tunes astronomy school of thought you belong to (I mean the Siberia thing).

Peak hour on Sydney’s M5 motorway.

Seriously – I think my all time favourite image from Mimi Leder’s thought provoking “Deep Impact“. I can hear the sound of the ‘roid crackling as it disappears over the horizon – a truly great image from quite a thought provoking film.

Well she is now. Whoever would have thought that Miss Brahms would have gone before Mrs Slocombe?

Sad news today that Grace Bros favourite “cockney knockers” tart Wendy Richards has gone to the great department store in the sky. Bone cancer apparently. She amassed a second generation of fans from her time on Eastenders.

But to me, she will always be the object of the resident Lothario Mr Lucas and his lustful longings across the perfume counter.