Meet a (few) Magical Horned Creature(s): Dubai Edition!

If you ever watch television, read the news, surf the internet, listen to the radio, or, in short, don’t live in a hole, then I’m going to assume that you’ve heard of Dubai. You might not be able to point it out on a map, but neither can I, and it really doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that it’s an absolutely astounding place, with a wondrous list of wondrous achievements: world’s biggest mall, world’s largest fountain, world’s tallest building, world’s only indoor ski slope, and generally the world’s most excessively luxurious city. But before the arrival of three very magical creatures with three indistinguishably similar names, Dubai might as well have been non-existent. Their story starts in 1958, with a man named:

Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum
(1912-1990)
Ruler of Dubai from 1958-1990

When he came to power in 1958, most of the people were still riding around on camels and living in huts. There was a small dribble of a creek going through the middle of Dubai, in which some of the small trade ships coming from Asia and Europe could dock. Seeing the opportunity to turn that into a massive trading port, however, Sheikh Rashid solicited about $100,000 of funding from American investors to dredge that creek. American investors, being short-sighted as usual, refused; but Sheikh Rashid, being a baller, raised his money anyways and transformed the city into a major international trade hub.

Dubai’s economic development exploded with, naturally, the discovery of oil in 1966. The trade infrastructure that Sheikh Rashid had built meant Dubai could start exporting that black gold almost immediately. In 1973, Dubai strengthened its economic and political influence when it joined the UAE as a principal state, and established the first of many “Free Zones” in Jebel Ali in 1979, where foreign companies could be entirely exempt from taxes, tariffs, and duties. This attracted millions of dollars of overseas investment, and by the time of Sheikh Rashid’s death in 1990, Dubai was one of the richest regions in the entire Middle East.

Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum
(1943-2006)
Ruler of Dubai from 1990-2006

Unlike its neighbor Abu Dhabi, who has about a tenth of the Middle East’s oil reserves under its lands, Dubai’s oil reserves are expected to run out next year in 2010. Sheikh Maktoum, son of Sheikh Rashid, knew that relying on oil wouldn’t be a sustainable long-term economic strategy. So as an alternative, he decided to expand tourism.

Let me start off by explaining that before this man, there was absolutely no reason any sane person would want to visit the Middle East. Its major exports are oil, oil, and a repressive religion. The natural scenery consists of sand, sand, and very very high temperatures. So to try and transform a sweltering dirtpile into the world’s most popular tourist destination is nothing short of batshit insane.

So what did Sheikh Maktoum do? Well, he took all the billions that Dubai was making from trade and oil, and he invested them into projects that were as equally batshit insane as he was. He was, perhaps more than any other politician or economist alive, a firm believer in the mantra that no one remembers second place. So Sheikh Maktoum made sure that everything Dubai did would be the first, the largest, and the best of its kind in the entire world. This is the man who oversaw the construction of the Burj Al Arab and the Burj Al Dubai, who started building man-made islands in the ocean, and who established Dubai as a luxury and trade capital of the world.

Few people can say that they literally changed the geography of their country.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
(1949-)
Ruler of Dubai from 2006-Present

And what on Earth could a successor to such a brilliantly crazy man as Sheikh Maktoum possibly do to match his predecessor’s accomplishments? Well, one way to get attention is to donate a lot of money. And by a lot, I mean that incumbent Sheikh Mohammed has pledged more than $10 billion dollars of personal money to expanding Middle Eastern education, making him one of the most charitable individuals in modern history (I say “modern” because Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s donations, inflation adjusted, come out to several kagillion dollars).

Also, in a drastic bureaucratic reorganization that puts Obama’s efforts at modernization to complete shame, Sheikh Mohammed digitized every single branch of Dubai’s government within the first eighteen months he was in office. Nothing is handled on paper. Messages, forms, memos, referendums, are all transmitted instantaneously. The residents almost never use snail mail – instead, everything, including bills and taxes, is handled online.

His work on establishing and expanding economic free zones have led rise to “Internet City”, where the biggest players in the worldwide IT industry, including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and HP, have major headquarters; “Media City”, the Middle Eastern home of CNN, Reuters, Bloomberg, and BBC; and most recently, “Health City”, where the Dubai government invites hundreds of doctors, medical experts, and healthcare innovators from across the globe to convene in cutting-edge hospitals. His newest brainchild is the creation of a super-massive theme park that will not only combine Disneyland, Six Flags, and Universal Studios under one roof, but will also showcase 1:1 replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids of Giza, and the Great Wall of China. So why visit anywhere else, when Dubai has it all?

He's awesome and he knows you know it.

We, as a country, have a lot to learn from these guys. Just consider for a moment the magnitude of what they achieved. They turned a desert pothole, with nearly no resources of its own, into a thriving economy, a remarkable tourist destination, and a true beacon of modernization and capitalism. And for that, I salute them with the most honorable award that I can give: magical horned creature status.

Cumulative Magical Horned Creature Rating: 7 (+1 for being nonfictional)
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)

Meet a Magical Horned Creature: Cthulhu!

The moment you’ve all been waiting for! I now present the second installment of…

Meet a Magical Horned Creature!
This Week: Cthulhu! (a.k.a. Tulu, Clulu, Cighulu, Kulhu, etc.)

An artist's pitiful attempt at evoking the paralyzing terror of Cthulhu.

Meet the Great Cthulhu and be glad he doesn’t speak any human language, because he would otherwise be quite offended at your inability to pronounce his alien name. If you’re trying to communicate with other hominids, however, the commonly accepted pronunciation nowadays is “ka-THOO-loo”.

Describing Cthulhu is a bit like an atheist trying to describe God, because it’s nearly impossible to figure out where to begin. And in all honesty, their origins are pretty similar. Cthulhu, like God, first appeared in some hallucinogen-inspired writing some years ago and has since inspired a cult-like following. More specifically, he (or maybe she? or it?) debuted in horror and science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, as a mythic cosmic entity who crash-landed on Earth eons ago and subsequently coaxed the development of all sentient life. But unlike God (or so I hope), Cthulhu is really, really ugly.

Being a cosmic entity does have its drawbacks. Once the stars began to drift out of alignment, Cthulhu “died”, though not in the usual sense of the word. He cast a spell to protect himself and his spawn, so instead of dying he went into some sort of magical suspended animation and is now waiting for the stars to realign to make his comeback. Without a physical body, he communicates with people through their dreams, where he chants something along the lines of “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagi fhtagn” (sic). Thankfully, he and the similarly un-pronounceable city he lived in, R’lyeh, both sank to the bottom of the ocean, so at least for now we don’t have to stare at his terrifyingly ugly corpse all the time.

And just how ugly is Cthulhu? He’s described as a slimy, green combination of “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature”, with a “pulpy, tentacled head” and a “grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”. He’s also as big as a mountain. To get an idea of what he might look like, just imagine a gargantuan Davy Jones + a gargantuan pterodactyl + a gargantuan amount of Nickelodeon slime, and then make it ten times uglier and bigger just for good measure.

Possible relations to Cthulhu: Pirates of the Caribbean Captain Davy Jones, Jedi Master Kit Fisto, and a man with an octopus on his head.

If you think the story of Cthulhu is all imaginative folly, a series of ultra-low-frequency, deep oceanic sounds recorded in 1997 nicknamed the “Bloop” indicates otherwise. Scientists are pretty sure that the sounds were biological in origin, but the bloops were also so loud that only an animal several times the size of a blue whale could’ve made them. Clearly, no other explanation exists, other than the fact that Cthulhu is real.

One of the several recorded "bloops", sped up 16x and probably around 1,000,000 times quieter. (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Magical Horned Creature Rating: 8.5*
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)
*I was considering giving Cthulhu a 9, but he seems a tad too undesirable to be rated that close to a lovely unicorn.

Meet a Magical Horned Creature: Huey Long!

Since this blog’s current subtitle (subject to change) implies that I’ll be writing about “pop culture, accountants, and magical horned creatures”, and since the number-crunchers at Google and Microsoft in my last post are more or less accountants, then that means I’ve been unfairly neglecting the magical horned creatures section of this website for the last two weeks. In an effort to ameliorate this journalistic travesty, I now present the first of what might become a multipart series:

Meet A Magical Horned Creature!

Where I’ll try and introduce you to a new magical horned creature, either real or fictional, in each installment. Disclaimer: just because you can’t see the horns doesn’t mean they’re not there.

This Week: Huey Long!

Admittedly, this guy’s horns were pretty discreet. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t magical. He was a crazy ass mofo with a congruously silly name, who you might remember in your U.S. History classes as the governor of Louisiana who nicknamed himself "The Kingfish".

He was self-conscious about his horns, so he Photoshopped them out.

Why, though, of all the magical horned creatures to talk about, did I choose him? Well, first and foremost because his name is pretty funny. And also, because I’ve been poring through The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester, a densely-packed, fifteen-hundred-page narrative history of America from 1932-1972. It’s like the Lord of the Rings of U.S. History, the ultimate combination of length, detail, and utter confusion, though unfortunately without attractive elves or talking trees. Anyways, I ran into Huey (his full name is actually Huey, not Hubert) a few chapters ago, and though this entire section of the book is overshadowed by the awesomeness known as Franklin Roosevelt, Huey still managed to stick out like a hobbit in the NBA, a small but hilarious gem floundering around in a sea of giants. Here’s a brief synopsis of his life:

Huey Long was born in 1893, in Winnfield, Louisiana, and it didn’t take him long afterwards to realize how baller he was. He was an excellent student in high school, so excellent, in fact, that he ended up getting tired of his principal and circulated a petition to get him fired. Huey was promptly expelled, but somehow still managed to win a debating scholarship to Louisiana State University.

The scholarship apparently didn’t cover textbooks that Huey couldn’t afford, so he dropped out of school almost immediately. After living an unglamorous life as a travelling salesman for a few years, however, Huey then felt that his career choices might broaden if he attended law school. So he enrolled at Tulane Law School, but instead of spending the typical three years there, he took classes for eight months, convinced the board to let him take the Louisiana State Bar, and passed. He became a lawyer at the age of twenty-one, an achievement that, apparently, had never and has since never been repeated in the state’s history.

He ran for governor twice, in 1924, where he lost, and 1928, where he won. He was always a champion of the poor, as his campaign slogan was “every man a king, but no man wears a crown”. His Share the Wealth program was American socialism at its finest (or worst), and he subsequently ravaged large corporations as governor. He collected enough taxes from the rich to expand the state’s infrastructure from thirty miles of paved roads to 2,500, zero large bridges to twelve. He opened up night schools to teach 175,000 illiterate adults how to read, and mind you, this was all during the worst part of the Great Depression.

How did Huey do all this? Well don’t forget this man was crazy. Throughout his stint as governor from 1928 to 1932, and later as Senator from 1932 to 1935, he centralized Louisiana’s government to revolve around, well, himself. All police departments reported directly to him. He bribed all the judges in the state, including the Louisiana Supreme Court justices; those who wouldn’t comply with his demands were removed through underhanded tactics like district gerrymandering or brute force. Newspaper critics who angered him were often beaten, kidnapped, and jailed. Right before his Senate election, Huey’s secretary’s husband threatened to sue Huey for “alienation of affections”, a.k.a. fucking his wife. And you know what Huey did in response? He flew the man up on a plane, waited until the election polls closed, and then had him brought back down. I have no idea how Huey managed to get him onto the plane in the first place, but I assume it was something along the lines of a free vacation to the Caribbean.

How I assume Huey convinced his secretary's husband
to get on an unexplained flight.

Huey then planned on moving into the White House with the election of 1936, but thankfully he was shot the year before. I say “thankfully” because otherwise he really might have won and turned the country into a communistic monarchy, or something. Capitalism was saved, FDR could continue his million years as president, and men everywhere could go back to work comfortable in the knowledge that Huey Long was no longer out seducing their wives.

Before I conclude, however, there’s one more anecdote that I think is worthy of mentioning. Huey, being the only Southern governor who treated blacks as equals during the 1930s, was immensely unpopular with the growing Ku Klux Klan. When the KKK’s leader threatened to come into Louisiana and march/protest/campaign against him, he replied with the following, which I think is much more potently demonstrated by a bad illustration:

He gets baller status in my book.

Magical Horned Creature Rating: 5 (+1 for being nonfictional)
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)