dreaming

You were dreaming I am phenomenally stupid. Stupid in every conceivableRock drill way except one: I'm dimly aware that I'm stupid. This means I spend much of my time assuming the rest of the world knows better, that everyone else effortlessly comprehends things I struggle to understand. Things like long division, or which mobile phone tariff to go for. In many ways, this is a comfortingFOAM MACHINE thought, as it means there's a limitless pool of people more intelligent than myself I can call on for advice. But sometimes I find out my gut assumption was right china flights discountall along, and it's a deeply unsettling experience. Take Dubai. I'm no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sartimberland bootscastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai's skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense off-shore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn't enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system. When I first read about all this stuff, I feltplastic injection moulds a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I'd been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pairair jordan of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice. But even at their most huge andmagazine print demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai's The World archipelago hadn't even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in. In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots 24 hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows likemagazine print dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims.