Image Surgery

Today, Mandy and I drove to Dubai through the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The process of getting here over land is the story of a thousand and one Arabian immigration booths. It is a story that will be told, but tonight’s story is much shorter, much simpler.

On the way through Saudi, our SUV needed fuel. We were down to half a tank. All service stations here seem to be aptly named, so the gentleman filled our tank, topped it off about ten times, then took our hundred saudi riyal note. He gave us 75 saudi riyals plus ten Qatari rials, I don’t know why. At today’s
exchange rate, do you know how much we paid for roughly 25 litres of petrol?

4.78 Canadian.

Or about 21 cents per litre.

Seriously.

I just read the most amazing article by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post, [Pearls Before Breakfast][pbb]. (via [Mike Davidson][md].) I haven’t read anything that I found so relevant in a long time. It presented such an interesting concept in such detail, depth, evocative prose and with such a _human_ subject, it was very captivating.

I will not do it justice in summary; I will only say that is about context and appreciation of fine music, presented in the form of an experiment during a morning rush hour. It is relevant, however, to my photography, and some of the challenges I am currently facing. What I am going to say won’t make much sense without the context of the article, so if you haven’t yet, [read it][pbb] now.

Since my father is in Kenya, he’s now using a cellphone to connect to the internet. I wanted to see how much it would cost him, and in doing so I ended up comparing it to my cell provider, Fido. Shocking. Jaw-dropping shocking.