Solar power: Sorry, but the US is not tops here, for one thing Congress is still mired in recriminations about the loan guarantees that went to the bankrupt Solyndra. As for the Chinese, they have made rather more progress, to the point of allegedly “dumping” polysilicon solar panels on the US market.

But it’s the Germans who are really into solar. They claim to be the world’s biggest solar market at present. And they have just scored a major coup, as we hear from Die Welt:

Erneuerbare Energien: Saudi-Arabien unterstützt Umsetzung von Desertec http://t.co/93C3FnEs

February 20, 2013 3:52 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

Yes, there’s still a heck of a lot of oil in Saudi Arabia, but there is also quite a lot of sun constantly beating down on its desert sands. And the Saudi authorities are sensible enough to want to do something to exploit that. Well, that’s understating things somewhat: they want to invest $109 billion through 2032, so that by that time they want to be generating 25 gigawatts of power from solar-thermal plants, and a further 16 gigawatts from photovoltaics.

It’s a German “civil society initiative” called the Desertec Foundation (site in English) that is about to sign an agreement with the Saudi governement to be in on the ground floor of this effort, by establishing a Saudi company to be called “Desertec Power” whose mandate will be “above all planning, execution, local value-added [Wertschöpfung] and running the installations,” but also the “closely related themes of education, training and employment.”

Apparently Desertec Power will rely mainly on so-called Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology, which is not photovoltaic but rather uses parabolic mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays in salt-water tanks and thereby store the energy, so that it’s available even when the sun goes down – and also can contribute in some way to providing desalinated water, another thing the Saudis prize highly.

You can click through to peruse the photo at the top of the article if you need some idea of what CSP arrays look like. (It’s a picture of them in Spain; they’re not yet in Saudi Arabia, the contract hasn’t even been formally signed!) Here in this post I’ll give you instead the grip-&-grin photo of the two principals in this deal. And just as with a Saudi official you can expect a name along the lines of Ahmed al-Malik (whom we see to the right, in Arab garb), with Germans I’m afraid you sometimes run the risk of silly-sounding names: that’s Dr. Thiemo Gropp to the left. And Thiemo has got the desert-dollars.

In the run-up to Valentine Weekend, the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita offers a brief cross-cultural vignette: Arabia doesn’t want any Valentines. It turns out that, while it’s normally no problem to import or deal in red roses, red hearts, or any sort of “Be my Valentine” articles in Saudi Arabia, the big exception happens to be during the days immediately preceding February 14, when the religious police crack down on that stuff, inspecting shops and confiscating anything of that sort that they come upon.

Frankly, I’d venture to say that Valentine’s Day is little more of a traditional, long-standing part of Polish culture than it is for the Saudis. Rather, it’s more likely the kind of Hallmark-card-driven “holiday” that intruded into both nations the more they became exposed to the West – and although that exposure came rather more suddenly to Poland, in the wake of the anti-Communist revolution that culminated in 1989, Saudi Arabia clearly is more determinedly vigilant about counteracting it.

UPDATE: Yes, I was right about the place of Valentine’s Day in Polish culture (it’s namely a rather recent thing), as we can see from a quite interesting article on the subject by Jan Cienski on the GlobalPost website. There is also a brief Valentine’s Day piece from Rzeczpospolita, written by Ewa Łosińska (Valentines with the Saint), that mentions the importance of the actual Saint Valentine to Polish Catholic worship (i.e. what Valentine’s meant in Poland before the opening to the West with the fall of the Iron Curtain). But this is all rather meager stuff: there are relics of the Saint within the Saint Florian cathedral in Krakow as well as a statue of him in the Ethnographic Museum in that same city, and then another figure of the Saint in a village in the area, but that’s about it.

Oh joy! Longer-term €S readers will remember all the way back to May, when I first brought you word in this space about the “Miss Saudi Arabia” pageant. Due to the . . . er . . . somewhat different nature of that extravaganza’s judging-process, it takes rather longer than your average beauty pageant. But now this year’s winner has finally been crowned, and that is eighteen-year-old Aya Ali Mulla. I had not really been on the look-out for any sort of follow-up to May’s story – I promise! – but my RSS feeds nonetheless came up for me big-time and alerted me to recent coverage of that pageant’s outcome from the Czech press, namely from Lidové noviny and Mladá fronta dnes. These articles are (almost) the same, as they both are by-lined to the same Czech press agency piece. For example, they have similar headlines: “Saudi Arabia has new Miss, but no one has seen her” and “Miss Saudi Arabia’s face seen only by female jury-members,” respectively.

Naturally, both Czech papers ultimately refer back to the Saudi press for coverage of this marquee event, but have to report that no Saudi paper was actually able to state what it was about Ms. Mulla* that catapulted her to victory. It was easier just to report what she won: an amount in riyals that, from the Czech-crown equivalent that is cited, seems to be just under €1,000; a pearl necklace; some diamonds (mounted on what, is not revealed); a wristwatch; and a paid vacation to Malaysia, which, although of course another Islamic land, is a pretty nice place to visit, I’ve heard. There’s also further detail here on one of the event’s key competitions, the “How much do you respect your mother?” event: apparently contestants each spend an entire day out “in the country” with their own mother, under the observation of one of the jury-members (wielding a clipboard, no doubt). I say, get coverage of that on the X-Games channel, pronto!

The Czech papers are able to contribute some added detail, perhaps somewhat wistfully, about another beauty pageant held in the Arab world that does actually conform a bit more tightly to what most of the rest of the world understands by the concept, namely the one for Miss Lebanon, where the girls do actually appear in swimsuits (one-piece only, though) and in evening gowns, and are interviewed in front of an audience. In contrast, returning again to Saudi Arabia, the LN article states “Beauty competitions there only have to do with goats, sheep, camels, and other animals” – despite the considerable effort required each year to get the camels into their one-piece bathing-suits!

[Cymbal crash] No, that last part I made up myself . . .

*Quite a suitable name, eh? No, I’m not making it up, click through above to the articles and see for yourself if you want. But don’t be fooled when you see the winner’s last name as “Mullaová”: that last “-ová” part is added routinely in Czech, Slovak, and some other Slavic languages to women’s last names.

It’s summer now, tourist season – and maybe some of you are even dietary wayfarers, perennially off (when you get some vacation time) in search of new and interesting culinary experiences. Perhaps you have already sampled the renowned horseburger served up at the Hot Horse burger-stands in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, a country where horsemeat is a normal part of the national culinary culture. Myself, I’m no sort of dietary tourist, but I’ve done that; I can recommend it, and the delightful city of Ljubljana generally.

Now the Czech daily Lidové noviny brings word today of a new gastronomic challenge along this line: camelburgers! A fast-food restaurant in Saudi Arabia’s own capital, Riyadh, is now offering its customers hamburgers made from camel-meat, and owner Saleh Kuvaisi is happy to explain to the press why he thinks this will be a big hit. “It’s all about the love people here have for camel meat,” he declares, and indeed the article notes that upper-scale restaurants in the Kingdom have long offered their customers camel “delicacies” (pochoutky) such as livers. Still, the article does give the impression that this rather has more to do with the regard Saudis have for camels per se, namely as fond tokens of the Bedouin existence from the good old days that they harken back to as the origin of their Arab culture, even as at present they are much more likely to get around in some sort of Toyota pick-up.

In any event, camel burger (that is, ground camel-meat), is still something new, but you wonder how it is that nobody ever thought of it before. The meat is said to be particularly low in fat compared to other animals (the same goes for camel milk, by the way); one camelburger customer is quoted in the article as approvingly noting that aspect and also praising the meat’s “refined taste.” And a certain Walid Sanchez, who according to the article runs a popular Internet guide to Saudi Arabian restaurants*, asserts to the reporter that camelburgers are bound to be popular, because Saudis generally are open to new things gastronomic – but then again, of course they will like them all the better if these things have local origins.

There you have it, then, another gourmet experience to put on your personal bucket list. This one might pose a particular challenge, though: there’s no such thing as a tourist visa to Saudi Arabia, you either need to be a Muslim going there on pilgrimage to Mecca or else have some other practical reason to be allowed inside the Kingdom – and I don’t think “having a camelburger at Saleh’s joint” will cut it!

* I have to note with disapproval here that this LN article mentioned Sanchez and his website, but only generically and without providing the URL; that I had to go find for you, dear readers, using the power of Google.

Ah yes: Miss World! Miss Universe! Miss What-Have-You! They all raise loads of money and attract widespread media-interest. And did you know that they even have a beauty pageant for young misses in Saudi Arabia? Indeed they do, in the capital Riyadh; the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad is kind enough to report on this today (Miss Pageant in a niqab).

That reference to the niqab – namely the veil over the face worn by Muslim women – and for that matter to Saudi Arabia should warn you, though, that what is going on here is somewhat different from the normal template. Take “beauty”; in Saudi Arabia, it’s all about inner beauty, you see, which is good since naturally no sort of evening gown – much less bikini – competition could ever be allowed.

So how do they judge that? Apparently the whole evaluation-process takes ten weeks, and is conducted by a panel of all-female judges – and that last bit alone tells you quite a lot. What is examined is things like respect for elders and how contestants respond when asked about how they “discover their inner force.” There’s even a “bring-your-Mom-to-the-contest” day, during which contestants are evaluated as to their respectful interaction with their own and everyone else’s mother. At bottom as a fundamental consideration, as you might expect, is any given candidate’s fealty to “Islamic values.”

Not likely to be a top-ten television hit, then, either in the rest of the world or, I dare say, within the Kingdom itself. On the other hand, there’s some serious money involved: the woman with the “most beautiful soul,” as the AD puts it, walks away with a prize of $2,600. And that prospect has attracted this year a field of some 200 contestants.

UPDATE: What do you know: It looks like even the Saudi beauty pageant has fallen victim to scandal! Yes, topless photos have been discovered of the winner – you can even see her entire forehead.

[Cymbal crash] I wish I could take credit for that one. But no, it’s from Jay Leno.

Eight years for marriage, that’s what the Belgian French-language paper La Dernière Heure wrote about in a recent article. No, that’s not the average duration of matrimony in Belgium, that’s as in a marriage for a girl of eight years of age, united in connubial bliss with a man in his fifties (Married at eight years? The judge “gives himself some time to reflect”). (more…)

This story came to me via the trusty RSS reader from the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel (also picked up by Die Zeit) – a handy reminder about life and culture (and death) “on the other side,” in this case in Saudi Arabia. But the German article stated straight-off that it was just passing on reporting from the Arab News, which happens to be an English-language on-line publication so, without further ado, any reader interested in this case’s down-and-dirty details is directed thereto.

Here’s what it’s all about: It seems that last year one Sabri Bogday, a Turkish barber working in the Saudi city of Jeddah, rather lost his head and started insulting publicly both God and the Prophet Mohammed in his barbershop. (more…)

For whatever reason, Michael Moore’s blockbuster documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 was first exposed outside the US to French-speaking audiences, opening on 7 July in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. And, as you’d probably expect, it had a Smashing Début, as stated in the title of an article in the Nouvel Observateur. It was seen by 100,000 in France on its first day of showing alone (of which 30,000 in Paris), the best opening of all time for a documentary. Still, the (unnamed) writer does give Moore’s previous work, Bowling for Columbine, greater credit for being fully researched and documented. (more…)