My son occasionally sends us photos from his location in the Middle East. I thought living in a small rural town in the Midwest was a little less than stimulating, but here’s sunset in Kuwait.
It looks a little strange because there’s a sandstorm about to blow in. The next day…
Next time we get a blizzard or whiteout, I’ll look at that and think, “it could be worse” (which is a very Minnesota thing to say, by the way.)
It looks like your son is stationed on Mars.
My brother worked as an engineer in Riyadh not far away from Kuweit. Sand storms are not fun. At least, these days people can go to the bathroom indoors and not get sand in every orfice, causing inflammation.
Haboobs occur in the US too, even in eastern Washington (???).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haboob
I think I was in a mild one near Phoenix when I was a kid. I recall being sandblasted by the wind.
In Nomadland Jessica Bruder writes of hearing a weather alert while in Phoenix:
I wonder if that person ever drinks alcohol (al-kuhul).
A haboob factored into one of the most ridiculous scenes in a Mission Impossible movie Ghost Protocol.
Learn something new every day:
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/weather/article/Photos-Major-haboob-dust-and-windstorm-4825842.php
(Link from Wikipedia article above)
@1. jonmelbourne : “It looks like your son is stationed on Mars.”
Or on Tatooine or Arrakis – fictionality of the latter planets and oceans or at least water bodies aside discounting the previous* states of both those SF worlds.
Or in the vast northern areas of South Australia albiet with duststorms not sandstorms or parts of the Aussie outback generally.
We even have camels, indeed more camels than Southwest Asia here too!
.* Or in Dune‘s case future given that world’s and serie’s timeline and the very radical changes there caused by the Sandworms, Shai-hulud and Atreides and the planetologists / terraformers.
Or does he ever use arabic numerals?
I won’t even ask if he knows algebra, (al-jabr).
I’m sure he never made it that far in school.
I pinged my son – who was deployed to Kuwait last year – with a link to this post, to see if he recognized the location. His response:
“Hard to say. It doesn’t look like any of the living areas in Arifjan or Buehring that I’ve seen (though I only saw the transient barracks for Buehring. That’d leave Ali Al Salem Air Base.”
In addition to the sandstorms, I hope your son is holding up under the extreme heat and overall bleakness of the surroundings. I know it got to my kiddo after a while.
I think he’s in Buehring, but he has been traveling a bit lately.
If he is close enough to the sea to have high air humidity it must be horrible, but if the air is dry it will be almost endurable. Temperatures will start dropping in a month or so but daytime temperatures never get to what I might consider to be a comfortable range.
Imagine carrying a protective vest with metal or ceramic inserts.
I hope their vehicles have A/C.
Maybe PZ can ask him if there still remains traces of the tarry gunk from the burning oil wells on the ground near the wells. In that case it must be bad grazing for the camels and other fauna.
That brings back memories. In the early-to-mid 60s I lived in southern Iran (my dad was in the oil industries). Several times a year we would get these massive dust storms. My mother would spend the next few days cleaning up. That dust and sand got into everything. I was around 10 years old at the time and I recall sand somehow getting into my toothpaste*.
As an aside, I have fond memories of Iran. My mother used to go to the local markets to buy her food. That was long before the extremists took over. Which they wouldn’t have done if the U.S. hadn’t supported such a corrupt and tyrannical regime. Promoting tyranny in other countries because it’s profitable tends to backfire. But I digress.
[*All right, maybe I left the cap off.]
raven @6
To be fair, those are Hindu-Arabic numerals as they originated in India and were popularized by the Arabs.
To your point, English has plenty of Arabic loanwords including the names of some well-known animals (e.g. giraffe, zebra).
Fascinating. But, my only thought is I hope he eventually comes home safely.
PZ@8 – There are things to see/do in Kuwait City, although they did clamp down on off base visits after October 7th. The ban was lifted shortly before my son returned to the US in January. He wasn’t particularly impressed by the malls – reminded him of Las Vegas. But he enjoyed seeing the Towers – he loved James Burke’s “Connections” series as a little kid, so it was kind of a thrill to visit a landmark highlighted in one of his favorite series.
The kiddo was based at Arifjan, but also did some traveling around for work – including Erbil Air Base in Iraqi Kurdistan and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
I sure he’s this vocal about not sending the soldiers out to these imperial outposts in the first place then so they can stop learning local words (and stop occupying other nations, but let’s take care of the more important stuff first).
I take it the Arizona man would prefer to use original Arizona words for things, in Navaho and whatever language the Apache use.
How exceptional that the man from Gilbert thinks a dust storm is an Arizona phenomenon, rather than a type of storm that occurs in deserts.
I wonder if he also has issues with the words tornado, derecho, sirocco, monsoon, foehn, and hurricane?
@15. birgerjohansson : “I take it the Arizona man would prefer to use original Arizona words for things, in Navaho and whatever language the Apache use.”
FYI & had to look it up myself :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache#Languages
Apparently their languages plural – are related to the Navajo language which appears to be a single language albeit a highly complex one wth several consonants we lack in english. FWIW. .
A haboob factored into one of the most ridiculous scenes in a Mission Impossible movie Ghost Protocol.
It also factored into our equally-ridiculous hostage-rescue mission in 1980. There was one in Iran, and we tried to predict its behavior based on that of haboobs in the US. And our prediction turned out to be disastrously wrong.
PS: The second picture looks like (what was left of) Las Vegas in Blade Runner 2049…without any chance of weird/cute sculptures appearing out of the dust…
I honestly expected the AZ man’s objection to “haboobs” to be in the vein of “think of the children!”
@15 birgerjohansson / 17 me : See also – again, just wiki but still (hopefully) intresting :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Athabaskan_languages
Plus hear spoken and discusssed more on youtube here – Bylas Apache Lesson 1 Greetings which seems to consider the 5 languages to be dialects rather than separate languages. (Under 5 mins.) Plus Western Apache (Chesley Wilson) , 1 10, greetings colors, animals body parts, bartering, time by Arthur Harnisch – 12 and a half minutes.
I worked in Kuwait in 1983-4 teaching the Kuwaiti armed forces English. One day the word ‘hill’ came up. The students just couldn’t grasp the concept until one of them said, “Mutla Ridge” (5 metres above sea level …). The car park outside my flat in Kuwait City was basically the same as the rest of the country: flat and sandy. (Then the word ‘forest’ came up …)