The Montreal Canadiens (also kown as the Habs) are out of the NHL playoffs, much to the relief of those of us who were sick of seeing Habs flags on every other car a few weeks back.

Local cops are cracking down on jaywalking, much to the bewilderment of residents of what is affectionately known as the jay-walking capitol.

The low-cut jeans with g-string sticking out is finally out of style. Who ever convinced young women that plumber’s butt was sexy?

Activist-y Montrealer’s are worried about Harper and his ilk trying to push the rights of women and queers back by at least half a century.

However, the vegan and indie scenes are thriving.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/hotels-in-afterlife.html

Bldgblog is one of my top blogs. I LOVE it.

John: Many of us overseas I think are sort of wary of the situation ‘over there’ in the US. This is a routine subject of conversation, like, how much of a US will there be to go back to, should it come to that? The healthcare situation in particular is enraging. Education too: I live in the country that now trounces all others in OECD measurements thanks to an excellent primary education situation. I don’t have kids myself (most of you I think may have guessed this), but I reap the benefits of this system in terms of very talented and serious students with excellent English!

Another buzz thing: May Day is coming up. The streets will be strewn with broken beer bottles and the youth will be sunning themselves in drunken stupor on public lawns. I will be trapped in my office writing. As usual.

Consumerism runs amok. While the place I stayed is really far from being considered downtrodden, everything was noticeably peeling and falling apart (in one shop, as the shop owner came down the stairs, one of them literally crumbled under his feet; I looked concerned, and he brushed it off: “It’s nothing! Really!”), but that’s pretty standard for Cairo, so I only noticed it by comparison with the new malls, which are made with polished marble and granite and lots of glossy, clean glass. The biggest mall that everyone goes to is in Nasr City (a northern suburb) and it actually had a Virgin Megastore. I had brought gifts of CDs to certain friends who I knew loved the Buddha Bar series, but it was always a taste marker for the upper class because you couldn’t buy the CDs locally. I was shocked to find that not only does the Nasr City Virgin Megastore carry all the Buddha Bar CDs, they are the same price as in Sydney!

The spread of both international and local franchises proceeds similarly. A gas station in Mohandiseen now has an On The Go (or whatever that little shop is called that gets paired with gas stations). It was really well stocked. A local book store chain that seems to be really popular is Diwan. There are cafes everywhere called Cilantro, and this cafe chain produces a little monthly in English that seems to be written entirely by Egyptians, not expats, signaling the importance of English as a marker of aspirations to upward mobility.

Some things haven’t changed: the Cook Door restaurant still calls their crab-and-shrimp sandwich “The Viagra” (available as “Fried Viagra” and “Grilled Viagra”) and the drug is very popular and features in a lot of jokes. But now sildenafil is also available under a range of locally-produced brands: Vigoran, Virecta, Vigorama, Erec, Phragra, Vigorex, and Kemagra. The last has a picture of a tiger on the package. Rrawr!

Another change is that cafes with wireless are everywhere, and they are crowded with teenagers with laptops chatting online and checking Facebook. Even my poor working-class friends are borrowing friends’ computers to check their e-mail, and a taxi-driver was telling me about how he uses Facebook. It used to be pretty expensive to get a mobile phone and line, but now it seems like 75% of the people in Cairo have one. No taxi driver was without one. Bloggers are the face of information and political protest in Egypt, and recently someone was arrested for creating a Facebook group, several thousand strong, that called for a strike to protest the rising cost of bread.

I think that the new malls and increased consumerism of the middle-classes must be linked to the calls for a strike on April 6th in which a few people were killed by the police. Several people have also died in fights while standing in the long lines for government-subsidized bread, and the police now patrol bread lines. The rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor, and they’re spending their money at the City Stars Mall in Nasr City. And the bloggers are reporting on the protests that the state-controlled newspapers downplay.

The skinny jeans look you describe sounds vaguely reminiscent of the legging/shaker sweater combo I remember from junior high in terms of silhouette. The kids here are doing skinny jeans too of course, but as I mentioned it is more about a hair metal moment. A friend returning from a recent trip to NYC said also that the skinny jeans there had reached some sort of zenith of skinniness, like denim second skins.

Food prices. Maybe if I had made this thread, such as it is, about food prices, more people would chime in. As you know, the story out of the US is that people are hoarding rice and that Sam’s Club and Costco are restricting purchases. Unclear whether this reflects panic buying on the part of consumers or more stockpiling on the part of store and restaurant owners. My glycemes being indexed the way they are, you know that I don’t hang out in the rice aisle too much, so I can’t say what prices are doing here… N Europe is typically just much much more expensive than the rest of Europe.

I did see a presentation recently on the rise of bilateral trade agreements in the 1990s, during the WTO era, which ostensibly was supposed to usher in a more nondisriminatory multi-lateral trade ethos. As it turns out, bilateralism is sky-rocketing. Causes of this aren’t clear I guess, except that maybe corps can more easily manipulate bilateral trade settings than multi-lateral ones. But the food crisis is giving bilateralism further impetus, according to the “Financial Times”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c4cb03dc-074a-11dd-b41e-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

bq. Governments are racing to strike secretive barter and bilateral agreements with food-exporting countries to secure scarce supplies as the price of agricultural commodities jump to record highs, diplomats and cereal traders say.

Then there is this story out of highland Papua New Guinea, where a single mud slide is causing a very local food and fuel crisis: “PRICES of goods and services in parts of the Highlands region have doubled from yesterday with transport operators penalising passengers as fuel runs low and most of the depots have already shut down. This is becoming a major concern for the people and the Government faces pressure to intervene quickly to clear the roadblock caused by the landslip at Gera village outside Kundiawa.”

Finally, a great documentary on NYC serial killers though the ages was on broadcast tv last night. There are no (widely publicized in the media, at least) serial killers in Senegal, nor have there ever been. It seems very exotic.