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  • Authenticism

    Antique sepia engraving of a towering stone lighthouse secured with ropes to a wheeled wooden platform inside an ancient fortified city during battle.
    July 28, 2026

    Christopher Nolan made The Odyssey. And before anyone had seen a frame of it, the internet decided who was allowed to be in it.

    The casting was attacked. The accents. The costumes. The ships. All of it called a betrayal of historical authenticity.

    Some of that is worth arguing about. A ship that looks centuries too late can be checked against archaeology. Changes to the story can be checked against the surviving poem. And the absence of Greek actors in a Greek epic is a fair question about who gets to be part of their own culture.

    But most of the loudest attacks are not about accuracy. They are all the usual isms wearing the respectable clothing of authenticity. And here is what makes me laugh: if we actually want to argue about authenticity, the argument runs against the people making it.

    Because none of them know what the original was.

    Start with the casting rule they invented. The idea that an actor must look like the character is not an ancient Greek rule. In Athenian theatre, men played women. All of them. Masks and costumes did the work. Aeschylus wrote a play whose main characters are Egyptian women. The original performers were Greek men.

    So if you want real fidelity to ancient practice, Helen would be played by a man in a mask.

    Now the bigger problem. The idea that there is one fixed original Odyssey sitting somewhere untouched.

    There is not.

    The Odyssey came from an oral tradition. Poets performed it and rebuilt it each time using inherited phrases. It was written down eventually and how that happened is still debated. Different versions circulated. Ancient scholars compared copies, removed lines they doubted, and produced competing editions.

    Nobody has Homer’s handwritten copy. What we read today is assembled from scraps that do not always agree with each other.

    This does not mean anything goes. But when someone calls an interpretation impossible, they are usually defending a Renaissance painting or an old Hollywood film. Not Homer.

    And the Greeks did not treat their myths as fixed. Euripides wrote a play where Helen never goes to Troy at all. A phantom takes her place while she waits in Egypt. That rewrites the entire war. Written by an ancient Greek. Not a modern director looking for attention.

    Which brings me to the part I actually care about.

    Translation.

    Between the eighth and tenth centuries, scholars in the Abbasid world translated a huge amount of Greek philosophy, medicine, and mathematics into Arabic. They did not swap words. They compared manuscripts, revised older translations, and invented new vocabulary to carry Greek ideas into a different language.

    And in some cases, that work is the only reason we still have the text. Parts of Apollonius survive only in Arabic. Sections of Galen exist because Arabic carried them after the Greek disappeared.

    Homer did not come to us that way. But the point holds. Preservation and change are not opposites. Sometimes a text survives because someone changed its language.

    The same is true of every English Homer you have read. Nobody in the Odyssey spoke with a British accent. “My father” sounds more dignified than “my dad.” Neither is ancient Greek. Both are decisions made by a translator in a room.

    Rowling did the same with Harry Potter and nobody called it vandalism. She borrowed from folklore, mythology, and boarding school novels. Then the films changed what she wrote. Then the play changed what the films changed. And the fans who insist the seven books are the only real canon, myself included, are doing exactly what the Homer purists are doing. Drawing a line and calling everything after it fake.

    The difference is that I know I am doing it.

    The same care applies to how ancient people looked. Ancient identity does not fit the categories we use now. Poetic phrases in Homer are not birth certificates. That uncertainty does not make any casting choice correct. It just means the people shouting about accuracy are treating a modern assumption as an ancient fact.

    There are real questions to ask about this film. Does it follow the poem? Are the ships plausible? Does it understand what the story is about? Is it good cinema? Did any Greeks get to work on it?

    “Does every actor look like the version in my head” is not one of them.

    And here is the ending nobody sees coming.

    Nolan’s film may become the original.

    A thousand years from now, the Greek text may be read by a handful of specialists while pieces of this film and adaptations built on it circulate everywhere. Some future director recasts the whole thing. And the audience revolts. That is not what Helen looks like.

    They will think they are defending Homer.

    They will be defending Nolan.

    That is how cultural memory works. A translation becomes the text. A performance becomes the tradition. An adaptation becomes the thing later generations call authentic.

    The classics did not survive by staying untouched. They survived because people performed them, copied them, edited them, translated them, and argued about them.

    Nolan’s Odyssey is not the final Homer. It is just the newest one.

    Fun Facts

    Ancient scholars were already editing Homer. Editors in Alexandria compared copies, deleted lines they thought were fake, and produced rival editions. Some old papyri contain verses that are not in the version we read today.

    Three books of a Greek maths classic survive only in Arabic. The Greek text of Books V to VII of Apollonius disappeared. We can read them because a medieval Arabic translation survived.

    Arabic translations can be older than surviving Greek copies. The Arabic version of Aristotle’s Poetics appears to preserve readings from a Greek manuscript older than any Greek copy we still have. The translation is not a copy. It is evidence.

    Some Arabic editions of the classics were translated from English. Not from Greek. And here is the embarrassing part: in some cases the English itself came from Arabic. We translated the Greek first. Europe translated us. And now we translate Europe back into Arabic. Four languages to travel in a circle. We had the text. We just stopped reading our own work.

    For the record

    Englishالعربية
    Epic poemملحمة
    The Odysseyالأوديسة
    Homerهوميروس
    Troyطروادة
    The Iliadالإلياذة
    Odysseusأوديسيوس
    Achillesأخيل
    Helen of Troyهيلين الطروادية
    Write in the logbook
  • Beeb Beeb

    Vintage-style children’s illustration of a smiling yellow car hatching from a giant egg, with a blue motorcycle on the grass, a red helicopter, a grey aeroplane, a friendly tow truck, a scrapyard and a shining lighthouse.
    July 27, 2026

    Beeb beeb. That is the car. It is also the pram, the toy car, the cardboard box he sits in and steers like a bobsleigh, and my father’s wheelchair.

    Anything that moves is beeb beeb. Anything that has ever moved is beeb beeb. A parked car is beeb beeb because it is only resting.

    The wheelchair is the one that stops the room. He says it with the same delight he gives the toy car. Because to him it is the same thing. This thing goes. My father laughs every time. He has been called worse.

    There is a word for what my son is doing. Linguists call it overextension. A child takes one word and stretches it to cover more of the world than the word was built for. Doggy for every animal with four legs. Daddy for every adult man, which is a moment for the family and a difficult afternoon for the guest. Ball for the balloon, the apple, the egg, the moon.

    It has an opposite. Underextension. The word comes out too small. Car means our car and no other car. Kitty is the cat on our street. The ones two streets over do not count. Shoe is his shoe. Not mine.

    My son does not underextend. Not once. He runs this household on few words and beeb beeb does more work than the other together.

    Maybe he is lazy. I have thought about it seriously. He worked out that two syllables repeated will cover enough of the world to get by. Why learn wheelchair. Why learn pram, trolley, bicycle, bus, when beeb beeb arrives faster and has never once been misunderstood.

    And I envy him. I have spent forty minutes choosing between two words that meant the same thing to everyone but me. He points. He says beeb beeb. Everything arrives.

    But this is the part I actually sat down to write.

    Parents hear this and something tightens. Their child calls the wheelchair a car, calls the neighbour daddy, calls the moon a ball, and they start counting months. They wonder if the words are late. If something is wrong. I have watched that face at family gatherings. I have made that face.

    He is not confused. He is sorting. A child who calls the wheelchair beeb beeb has not mistaken it for a car. He has built a category in his head called things that go. Nobody has given him enough words yet to break that category into smaller pieces. He is not making mistakes. He is drawing a map. And we are watching him draw it.

    And he understands more than he says. Ask him for the ball while he is holding the apple and watch which one he hands over. He knows the difference. His mouth just has not caught up with his brain. That gap is normal. Adults have the same gap. We just stop talking about it.

    My mother watches all of this and says there must be something wrong. She has raised more children than any paper I could read. Yet I’m the expert in this situation both as his dad and from academic perspective.

    So it is Normal. Loudly normal. It happens in every language anyone has studied. And it happens in the same categories every time. Animals. Vehicles. Food. Shapes. Different homes. Different children. Same work.

    He will lose it. That is the part nobody warns you about. Someone will teach him wheelchair. And pram. And bus. And each new word will take a piece of beeb beeb away. The world will get more accurate and much smaller. He will be precise. And precision costs something.

    I have thousands of words. I use them all day. At work. On this blog. In two languages. And I still cannot get one of them to hold everything I mean.

    He has one word that holds everything that moves.

    I know which of us has the bigger vocabulary.

    Write in the logbook
  • The Blueprint: SEMAD

    A lighthouse casts a warm amber beam across luxury Kuwaiti villas, revealing neglected gardens and hidden debris behind immaculate hedges and boundary walls.
    July 26, 2026

    Sustainable Environmental Management of Agricultural Debris. SEMAD. In Kuwaiti Arabic, سماد. Fertiliser. The plan is named after the thing it makes.

    This summer the municipality cleared the hedges. The ones wrapped around every garden wall and streetlight pole. For years they looked like green walls. Neat. Trimmed. A neighbourhood that cares.

    Then the hedges came down. And behind them were the gardens nobody was supposed to see. Cracked tiles. Broken pipes. Dead plants. Plastic bags. Construction rubble that was never removed, just hidden behind a green curtain that grew tall enough to cover the shame.

    Monica’s closet. The spotless apartment with one locked door. Open it and everything she could not deal with falls out.

    But it got worse. The hedges were cut and the debris was thrown. On the street. On the pavement. On the corner. Piled against someone else’s wall. Left for someone else to collect. And of course they did not care where it landed. They never cared about beauty from the start. The hedge was never decoration. It was a door. And now that the door is open, the mess is everyone’s problem.

    That debris is sitting on the streets of Kuwait right now. And this post is about what to do with it.

    The problem.

    Kuwait has an issue with green waste. Green waste means anything that was once a living plant: tree branches, hedge clippings, palm fronds, garden trimmings, grass. Kuwait cuts down more of this than any Gulf neighbour of its size. And then it burns the pile.

    The evidence.

    Every driver has seen it this year. The municipality ran a nationwide campaign to clear unlicensed hedges, fences, and greenery wrapped around streetlight poles. In 2025 the agriculture authority stopped new ornamental palm planting to save water. Both decisions make sense. Both produce mountains of cut vegetation at once. And that vegetation meets the country’s older habit: dumping it in an empty lot and setting it on fire.

    A 2026 report called the burning of palm waste a wasted opportunity. Behind the smoke sit the numbers.

    Kuwait’s agricultural waste reached about 577,000 tonnes in 2022. That is up more than 100,000 tonnes from the year before. To put that in perspective, imagine roughly 57,000 fully loaded trucks.

    Organic material, meaning anything that was once alive and can decompose, makes up 45 percent of everything Kuwaitis throw away.

    And the one number that matters most does not exist. Nobody has ever measured how much of this is specifically green waste. Not a bad figure. No figure at all. Kuwait is trying to manage a waste stream it has never counted.

    Meanwhile, the national waste strategy, five years of work with Germany’s Fraunhofer institute, was presented in 2024. It is still at the study stage. Treatment projects are not expected before 2028.

    The pile is growing. The plan is waiting. And the match keeps getting lit.

    Who else had this problem.

    Saudi Arabia. Same climate. Same palm fronds. Same desert. Abu Dhabi as the supporting example. And California as the warning.

    What Saudi Arabia did.

    Saudi Arabia has over 36 million palm trees. Every year those trees produce millions of tonnes of dead fronds, stems, and trimmings. The same waste Kuwait burns. Saudi decided to turn it into something useful instead.

    They did two things.

    First, mulch. Mulch is simply wood chipped into small pieces and spread on the ground around plants. It does one important job: it covers the soil and stops water from evaporating in the heat. In a desert country where every drop of irrigation water costs money, a layer of mulch on the ground means less watering. It is the simplest, cheapest use of green waste. You chip it. You spread it. The soil stays wet longer.

    Second, biochar. This is where it gets interesting. Biochar is what happens when you burn wood in a sealed container with very little oxygen. Instead of turning into ash and smoke like an open fire, the wood turns into a lightweight, carbon-rich material full of tiny holes, like a sponge made from charcoal. When you mix this into soil, it holds water, holds nutrients, and helps plants grow faster.

    The difference between burning in the open and making biochar is enormous. Open burning of one tonne of palm waste releases about 3.5 tonnes of harmful gases into the air. The same tonne processed into biochar releases only 646 kilograms. Same waste. One method poisons the air. The other feeds the ground.

    In September 2024, Saudi’s National Centre for Palms and Dates, working with the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture, launched the region’s first palm-waste biochar programme. The results they are projecting: 30 percent less water needed for farming. Faster plant growth. Higher crop yields. And they are not stopping at biochar. The centre runs a full circular economy programme that supports anyone who wants to take palm waste and turn it into a product, whether that is biochar, mulch, animal feed, or building material. They are treating 36 million palm trees not as a waste problem but as a raw material supply.

    What Abu Dhabi did.

    Abu Dhabi answered the obvious question: doesn’t composting need water? And the desert does not have water to spare.

    Composting means piling up green waste and letting it decompose naturally into rich soil. In a wet country, you leave the pile outside and nature does the work. In a desert, the pile just dries out and sits there.

    So Abu Dhabi built enclosed machines. A sealed unit that controls the temperature, the moisture, and the airflow inside. The green waste goes in. Twenty-four hours later, finished compost comes out. The volume shrinks by 80 to 90 percent. No water wasted. No smell. No waiting months for a pile to decompose. Technology solving the desert problem.

    What California got wrong.

    California is the warning. The state passed a law banning organic waste from landfills. A good idea. But they passed the law before building the facilities to process the waste. The composting plants did not exist. They take twelve to thirteen years to permit and build. And even when built, nobody had confirmed that anyone wanted to buy the compost.

    The result: organic waste going to landfill actually rose 23 percent after the ban.

    The lesson is exact. Build the processing first. Confirm the buyers first. Then ban the burning. Never the other way around.

    How long it took.

    Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi moved from decision to working pilots in two to four years. The American programmes that actually succeeded, the ones from the 1990s, worked because towns built the composting capacity in the same year as the ban. Not a decade behind it.

    The result.

    Saudi Arabia projects a third less irrigation water on treated ground. Abu Dhabi diverts most of its waste from the desert pits. California proved, expensively, what happens when the order is reversed.

    What Kuwait needs to do.

    Five things. Same pattern as every Blueprint before this one.

    One boss. The 2040 waste strategy already exists. Adopt it with legal force and name one person responsible for green waste. Right now the municipality, the agriculture authority, and the environment authority each touch the pile. None of them own it. One boss. One signature. The pile does not care which ministry is responsible. It just keeps growing.

    Count it first. Kuwait is proposing to manage a waste stream it has never measured. Nobody knows how many tonnes of green waste the country produces. Commission a study. Publish the first tonnage within eighteen months. You cannot manage what you have not counted.

    Mulch before compost. Start where the climate is kindest and the cost is lowest. Buy a shredder. Chip the palm fronds and hedge cuttings into mulch. Spread it on the state’s own parks, roadsides, and farms. This saves irrigation water from day one. It is the cheapest first step in the entire blueprint. A waste problem turned into a water answer. One machine.

    The market before the mandate. California’s lesson written into the plan itself. Before any ban on dumping or burning, go to the farms of Wafra, Abdali, and Sulaibiya and ask: do you want this mulch? Will you buy this compost? Will you use this biochar? Size the processing plants to the actual demand. No compost nobody buys. Add the sealed Abu Dhabi composter and the Saudi biochar unit only once the mulch pilot proves the tonnage and the buyers are real.

    The public number. Tonnes of green waste diverted from burning each year. Published annually. Next to the litres of irrigation water the mulch saved. Two numbers the country can watch climb.

    The point.

    Saudi Arabia’s lesson in one line. The waste stopped being smoke when the plan got an owner, the right method for the climate, and a buyer before a ban. In that order.

    Kuwait’s first step, chipping the pile it currently burns, costs a shredder and a signature.

    The hedges are down. The debris is on the streets. Monica’s closet is open and everyone can see what was inside. The question is whether Kuwait sweeps it under someone else’s wall or turns it into something the land actually wants back.

    The plan is named after the answer.

    سماد

    Write in the logbook
  • 48 East

    Contemporary living room with a colourful patchwork modular sofa beneath a wooden world map decorated with coffee bags and a wooden lighthouse.
    July 25, 2026

    It is not about where it is done. It is about who does it.

    I am not new to specialty coffee. I have been in it since 2011. Following brewer and barista championships. Searching for 90-plus scored beans. Ordering from every roastery that made the top ten in world competitions. Gardelli from Italy. Koppi from Sweden. Hasbean from the UK before it became Ozone. Paying more in Aramex and DHL shipping than the coffee itself cost. Two subscription boxes arriving every month, each with three 250-gram bags from roasters I had never heard of in countries I had never visited. My kitchen counter looked like a customs office.

    And like every cliché specialty coffee person, I saved the bags. Every single one. I had a wall where I pinned the labels to a world map showing where each coffee bag was roasted. Finland. Sweden. Germany. Norway. Australia. Even Belarus. I am not proud of it. I am not ashamed of it either. It is who I was and still am, a cliché lover. And the map is still there.

    I watched the specialty coffee boom arrive in Kuwait. Everyone opened a roastery. Everyone had a logo and a story and a single-origin Ethiopian on the shelf. I tried them. I was never impressed. And although I believe in supporting local, when it came to my coffee, Gardelli and Koppi and Hasbean were always there. Local was not earning the cup.

    Until 48 East.

    I followed Mohammed Dashti from the start. His early coffee was not good. I will say that plainly. But I saw something the others did not have. Ambition that was not for show. While other roasters in his era travelled to coffee farms for the photos, he travelled to learn and to work. He came back and roasted again. And again. And each time the cup was closer to something I recognised from the international bags sitting on my counter.

    But I was still hesitant. The gap between a good local roaster and a world championship roaster is wide. And my palate had been trained on the wide side.

    Then Camel Step arrived from Saudi. They were the ones who opened the door. A regional roaster, not European, not Scandinavian, producing coffee that stood next to my international subscriptions without embarrassment. If Camel Step could do it from Riyadh, then the distance between here and there was not geography. It was commitment.

    Because of Camel Step, I gave 48 East another chance. And this time, it caught me.

    Is 48 East as good as Gardelli? No. I will not pretend. Gardelli is a World Coffee Roasting Champion and his beans are on another level. But there is one thing Mohammed Dashti shares with Rubens Gardelli that most roasters in the world do not share with either of them.

    Consistency.

    When it comes to coffee, consistency is the word. I want today’s cup to taste like tomorrow’s. I want to revisit the same bag in two weeks and find the same flavour waiting for me. I do not want surprises in my morning brew. I want reliability. And 48 East delivers that. Every bag. Every time.

    So because of 48 East, I started giving other local roasters a chance. I still order from abroad from time to time. But most of my coffee now, whether it is Kuwaiti, Saudi, or international, comes through local suppliers.

    This month’s Brew has been updated with a new collection. They are omni-roast, which means they work for both espresso and filter. Try them. I am still working out how to add the Xbloom recipes as downloadable links. I have plenty in my journal. They are coming. For now, the beans are on the page.

    It was never about where the coffee is roasted. It was always about who roasts it. And sometimes the person who roasts it is closer than you think. You just have to give them the second chance they earned.

    Write in the logbook
  • The Power of No

    A medieval knight in weathered armour stands in a golden field at sunset, carrying a four-part heraldic shield and looking toward a distant lighthouse.
    July 24, 2026

    The opposite of a weapon depends on how you use the word. Usually a weapon means a tool for attack. In that case the opposite is a shield. A tool for defence. But there is another meaning. The man is armed. He has a weapon. He is dangerous. The opposite: the man is unarmed. He is bare.

    But a weapon does not have to point at someone else. Some weapons point inward. Tools exist to arm us against our own weaknesses. They help us walk when we cannot. See when we cannot. Hear when we cannot. They turn what we lack into something we carry.

    In my case, I used a Snoopy agenda to keep track of my life when it had no structure. I used a dumb phone to stop distractions when the smart one was winning. I used this blog to stay in a constant state of production, though that has paused while I am down in the workshop.

    These tools armed me. They worked.

    But there is one weakness where I am still bare. Unarmed. No weapon. No shield. Nothing in my hands.

    Saying no.

    The power of no. I have mentioned it before. I still have not found it. But I have carried it before. During the keto years, and after, it was there. It was not a struggle. It was a force. Like the Force in Star Wars. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind. You do not swing. You do not fight. You just stand still. And the world moves around you.

    Have this. No. Just a small piece. No. But I made it. No. But it is Thursday and it is zwara. No. But it is 10am and a second coffee would be lovely. No. There are even treats that go along with them. No.

    The power of no during the keto years was not limited to food. It went beyond the plate. It entered everything.

    2:30 in the morning. A university library. A weekend. One of the best nights of the year outside. Everyone out. Everyone living the life how it is supposed to live. A text lights up the phone. Come out. No. I have a few pages left.

    A classmate sends a number of someone that will do your stats. Just call him. Save yourself days. No. I would rather spend these days reading and working.

    A friend after seeing my work. You know nobody is asking for this much detail. No. But I am.

    That is what the power of no does. It starts at the plate and spreads to the desk and the library and the phone and the conversation and the life. Because three times a day, every day, someone offered me something I had already decided to refuse. And three times a day I said no. And each no made the next one easier. Until after a month, the word stopped being a refusal and started being an identity.

    That is what keto gave me that no scale ever measured. Not weight loss. The muscle of refusal. The ability to sit in a room full of yes and be the only no and not flinch.

    I lost it. The way I lost the weight. Slowly. One yes at a time. One “just this once” at a time. One “it is rude to refuse” at a time. Until the nos were gone and the yeses had taken the whole room.

    So as I re-enter this era, before I have my final dozen of happiness in the form of wobbling Japanese pancakes, I remind myself that keto is not a diet. It is a training ground for the word no. The weight loss is the side effect. The real benefit is what happens to every other decision in your life when you spend three months saying the same word, three times a day, without flinching.

    The سحر is not in the diet. It is in the two letters.

    لا.

    Write in the logbook
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