One Night Standup season kick-off

On Wednesday, standup comedy night One Night Standup treated the summer stay-backs to a season kick-off show at the 1UP Champion's Bar. The bar itself had been refitted somewhat since I last saw it, and was thronged with fans of local standup.

Writer and emcee Hisham Wyne, who started the series back in February 2012, hosted the free-entry event at the popular TECOM watering hole.

(clockwise from top left) Rami Salame; Salman Qureshi; Omar Shams; Omar Kazim

Local comedians were out in force, including a couple I hadn't seen in a while. Many were evidently trying out new stuff -- expected, I suppose, given that the usual summer slowdown was exacerbated by a couple of months' additional hiatus for ONSU, and the folding-up of another amateur standup night. The audience also seemed particularly predisposed to participation, which helped make it an entertaining event, and one that will only get better as bits get refined in the coming season's performances.

Rooftop Rhythms Dubai

Part of the revamp of the Boutique 7 Hotel near where I live was a new urban music and dance basement lounge they named "ego". I wanted to check it out at some point, and having previously attended a Rooftop Rhythms spoken word event in Abu Dhabi, I made their third Dubai installment (bottom) the occasion to visit the venue. The place has a cool look and the music during the post-event regular Friday night program was quite good, so I stayed afterwards a bit longer than I had originally planned (top right).

The event itself was very entertaining, including performances by spoken word artists both established in and new to the art. Two of the highlights of the evening were performances by hip hop artist Marcel Lteif (top left) and Dana Dajani (top right). Other notable performances were the first by a Filipino artist at RR, as well as a musical intermission by a talented flautist (bottom left). It also happened to be birthday of RR's founder and emcee, Dorian Paul Rogers, so the evening featured a cake moment (bottom right).

War of the Words at Cafe Scientifique

May 2014's Cafe Scientifique Dubai, held at Biorganic in TECOM, saw one of the biggest turnouts in the series' history. An audience spanning diverse age groups, genders and professions stood around, sat on chairs, or sat on the floor, to hear and talk about a topic that captivates most any inquiring mind: space exploration. In particular, planned Martian exploration through the Mars One mission.

The program commenced with opening addresses on Cafe Sci and the background of the mission by founders Rohan Roberts (left) and Raya Bidshahri (right) -- to the latter of whom we are bidding farewell, as she leaves for university abroad.

A bit of light entertainment with bits of philosophy and ethics was up next, provided by Adam Griffin (top) and Chris McDermott (bottom) locking oratorical horns in a debate on whether humans should go on a one-way trip to colonize Mars. With a show of hands, McDermott's argument against the motion seemed to have beat Griffin's argument for it -- much to my surprise.

Closing the event was Dubai resident Mikolaj Zielinski, who is on Mars One's shortlist for a future lifetime mission to land and stay on the red planet. He provided the audience with further information about the mission, including the challenges Mars explorers would face, and possible solutions. Clearly, he is not deterred at all by the outcome of the debate.

EDIT: The Cafe Sci team got Spectrum 7 TV on board to tape the event. Here's what they produced:

A very mysterious Cafe Scientifique Dubai

Cafe Sci Dubai's fifth event took place at the usual Lila Cafe on Friday, delving this time into a number of topics with one thing in common: mystery. The founders began with their introductions: Rohan Roberts sinking into black holes, dark matter, abiogenesis and whale beachings, and Raya Bidshahri pondering beauty and consciousness as evolutionary and neurological phenomena. Two videos were screened around the open discussion/meet-and-greet period: one about multiverse theory and extraterrestrials, and the other about black holes.

Following these, a moderated discussion was held about time dilation, stereoscopic vision, and whatever else attendees could come up with. Yes, a few of these could be looked up on the web in great detail, but many attendees' perspectives were rather insightful. Further fun was had during the post-event wind-down, when we played a little game I improvised by applying the game of charades to scientific terms instead of films and such.

Motion and illusion at the Moving Image Museum

TECOM is the kind of place one would associate with business and residential towers, assorted hotels and bars, and an odd, winding, ring road (seriously, it looks like an amoeba eating smaller microbes if viewed using Google Maps). Not "al culthshur", for sure.

Moving Image Museum in TECOM

But culture is exactly what we got earlier this year, when communications magnate Akram Miknas contributed his personal collection of pre-movie motion illusion novelty pieces to create the Moving Image Museum on level 1 of the MCN Hive, the HQ of his MCN company.

Akram Miknas narrating

A short video is first shown to visitors in the film room, narrated by Miknas himself, in which he describes the history of moving image art, and demonstrates with some examples and clips. In the timeline on the entrance wall, one can see that it is dominated by the 1790s to the 1890s, the golden age of the moving image. This is, of course, to be expected; it was the time when global fairs and expositions came into fashion, and attracting attention with crowd-pleasing innovation was the order of the day. To than end, men used all available illusions, materials, techniques and technologies to wow the masses.

Magic lantern

Although the museum looks small, there is a huge assortment of items within. There's an especially nice collection of magic lanterns, ranging from small to huge. These are the days in which projectors had chimneys, instead of vents, as they used combustion to produce light. Whether intricate or rustic, each piece is its own line, being made before modern mass-production injection-molding and standardized parts took off.

Depth illusion peep show and phenakistoscope slides

Other display cases house collections of stereoscopes, mutoscopes, zoetropes, praxinoscopes, and many other devices. There are also a number of these kept out of the display cases, so that visitors can interact with them.

Zoetrope with rotation mechanism, and thaumatropes

The far side of the gallery is dominated by a huge kaiserpanorama, with which multiple visitors can peer at beautiful, high-definition yester-century photography, colored vibrantly, and rotated through 3D steroscopic visors.

Interactive stereoscope and mutoscopes. You can watch the steampunk edition of Avatar 3D.

The gift shop has a nice collection too, priced reasonably. Outside, there's table space for private events. The entry price of AED 50 is about worth the experience; after all, this is the kind of exhibition one typically sees in European capitals. Each item on display is unique, incorporating intricate hand-crafted decorative art work as well as the mechanical and optical trickery necessary to amuse viewers, and and so will invite close inspection. If you're interesting in history and/or science and/or art, you will want to spend a lot of time here; I recommend an hour at least.

Osang concert and comedy at Rocky's Cafe TECOM

Jeffrey "Osang" Soliven, made famous through his X Factor Philippines performance, made Ramee Rose Filipino bar Rocky's Cafe his penultimate stop on his Ramee/Regent Dubai tour. Rocky's, which is conveniently in my 'hood, has a somewhat limited menu of Filipino food, but the resident band Off Limits made it worth a previous visit. After the band's set, Osang started his performance. The stand-up comedy was mostly in Tagalog, so there was very little for me there. I can imagine it was good for Tagalog-speakers, as he had stage presence and charisma. His singing, on the other hand, was very entertaining - not in the least, his Tagalog version of a popular dance fad song.

Cafe Scientifique on the brain

We had a bigger turnout at the second and latest Cafe Scientifique Dubai; I'm not sure if it was word of mouth or the two-hour radio special on Dubai Eye 103.8 that helped more.

Anyway, after last month's engaging cosmology/astronomy discussion, the topic this time was, as literature teacher Rohan Roberts and budding neuroscientist Raya Bidhshahri mentioned, a field of study in which we know even less: the brain.

Roberts offered a more core biological perspective on brain structure and complexity, moving on to describing fascinating experiments like rat brains cross-wired into each other on the internet. He also spoke about the BRAIN Initiative, a transhumanist perspective on information loss upon brain death. Next, Bidshahri described aspects of consciousness, speaking about self awareness, continuity, privacy, etc.

The discussion phase took on a lot of topics, including lucid dreams, qualia, memory, and even popular film (apparently, Inception is not too far off the mark). The evening's program also included an interpretive dance by Lara Matossian-Roberts to a poetic description of the brain's structure, a music video comprising auto-tuned snippets of brain science talks, and a dystopian video speculation of life in a world where memory can be digitized. If you'd like to check out the music video:

Dubai RTA finally opens DIC/TECOM Metro Station

And 6 other stations, including Ibn Battuta mall and Karama. Goodbye, morning taxi and evening bus. Hello, practically every significant location in Dubai.

RTA opens 7 metro stations on 30 April, 3 others on 15 May

http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidZAWYA20100417101655/RTA%20opens%207%20metro%20stations%20on%2030%20April%2C%203%20others%20on%2015%20May
Huzzah! In a suprising (but very welcome) move, the RTA has moved the opening date for my neighborhood metro station, Dubai Internet City/Tecom, from undefined-but-much-later to April 30th, which means massive savings of both time and money for yours truly.