Why, yes it has been six weeks....

...and thus I have to apologize. Qatartistry will be at least weekly from here on, with new posts every Friday at a minimum.

Anyway, as an apology, please accept the following picture of H. Stockton Brothers for the very first time holding his head up while laying on his belly.




Anyway, two quick weird things for you:

• Occasionally the Qatari Gov't station police men at the roundabouts to direct traffic. (Quick side note: Roundabouts are what traffic lights would be if they worked on the honor system. You know, terrible.) These guys will stand on a little jutting area of cement at night with now flashlight but with a reflective yellow vest to protect them from the whims of the crazed drivers of 1000 nations. I do not know what they are getting paid, but it is not enough.


• I went to a Ramadan dinner (iftar) a while back and saw a whole roasted goat served on a huge (4 feet in diameter) plate covered with rice and vegetables. By the time I got to it in the buffet line, it had been completely stripped, so the whole dish looked like nothing so much as a skeleton sitting on top of a huge paella. (More about Ramadan next week.)
  

Oh, one more thing: If you want to find me on Skype, just look under Brothers.

The Painted Word

OK, tonight's installment is going to be a LOT of pictures, as I haven't posted any in a while.


H. Stockton Brothers and Father after a long day of sleeping, crying, and eating.


Due to Lufthansa destroying our stroller by tearing off a wheel, Henry has been travelling around primarily in this car seat, i.e. we've been carrying him. It's quite durable, but everytime I see it I think there should be a little deflated poarachute hanging off the side, as it looks like nothing so much as an ejection seat from an airplane. It is great, however, as it provides a great deal of protection for Henry in a country where concepts of personal space are more malleable than in the US.


Yeah, he's a good looking kid.


This is my Uncle Ron. He's a WWII vet, and served with the 10th Mountain. He asked to hold Henry, as he wanted to talk to him. Here's what he said: "Henry, if you were forty years older and I was forty years younger, we'd get some fast horses, some young girls, some old whiskey, and head to Kentucky."


I don't think I posted this before. This is Henry in the Lufthasa bassinet. I thought the seatbelt was a bit off overkill versus the size of Henry.

(The next three pictures should be viewed together. Use the location of the silver car and tent in the images to see how thay should combine into one image.)



This is the view out the front door of my villa. Immediately out my front door is the tennis court, followed by (panning to the left) a green space with a semi-permanent tent, a pool which includes a deep end as this country has no product liability laws, and the clubhouse for my villa complex. Beautiful, eh?


This is the view out my back window. Sand, rocks, and nothing. They'll pave it, eventually, but for now it is just a desert patch. Note that this is what the green-space would turn into in a few days without constant watering.


Nicole and I ordered pizza last night, from Pizza Hut. (Yeah, I'm living exotically.) Pizza was exactly the same (except it was beef pepperoni), bit for some reason was delived with 30 ketchup packets. I have no idea why. My Brother-in-Law suggested that we go to the Pizza Hut and observe to solve this mystery. But where do you think it should go?

Three unrelated things.

Item 1: If you ever go to a TGI Fridays or some of the other "Fun/Cheesy" restaurants¹ you will see in the US various sauces on the menu made with liquor, like Friday's "Jack Daniel's Honey Barbecue-Flavored Corn Syrup Magic For Meat" or "Jim Beam Spicy Chipolte Chicken Cover-up." In Doha, except for VERY limited situations, there is no liquor, but these menu items are still available. They are now simply slathered with a generically named "Tennessee Sauce." If, however, the sauce can be made with no booze, and booze is always more expensive than no booze, do you really think that the sauce in the US contains the liquor it was named after?

Item 2: The villa I was assigned to came with a computer an Internet access, and it ran slowly (probably a bloated setup), so I put Linux (Ubuntu 8.04.1) on it in place of Windows. I would say that I got about a factor of 5 speed up, and in general had a very positive experience. More impressively, my wife, who never used Linux before was able to interact with it easily and accomplish all of her daily computer tasks. That said, I finally had to revert to Windows today, due to webcam support. I got the cam to work in Skype, but only sporadically, and I spent three evenings messing about with drivers. Plus the exact same cam on my Sister-in-Law's slower/older computer looked like a TV show when using the Logitech-written drivers, whereas on my machine the frame rate was such that you looked like you were trapped in Benny Hill episodes, without the quasi-nude English birds. If webcams worked (since I don't play a lot of computer games) I think I could actually go Window's free for my primary box.

Item 3: I have to go get fingerprinted tomorrow at a gov't office, according to an email I received this afternoon. I have absolutely no idea why, as in what part of my immigration or getting a driver's licence this is part of. I have reached the "Oh, OK, whatever" phase of interacting with bureaucracy.


(1) Quick rule of thumb: It is a "Fun/Cheesy" restaurant if you would not be surprised to see an LP cover attached to the wall. Of course, this definition would thus include the Hard Rock Casino, which doesn't make it wrong.