INGULFED
(Notes for the Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah)Archive for ancient
The First iPhone Ever Made – في التأريخ iPhone اول
According to this undoctored photo, this phone is bordering on its 43d year. Having been running for three-hundred and seventy-six thousand four-hundred and ninety-one hours (and still ticking), it must certainly be the oldest iPhone in the world.
It would have been made in 1968, a leap year that started on a Monday.
Entran¢e Fees
Sri Lanka Part Nine
Kandy revealed itself in the morning, pressed against a wide sunny lake invisible the night before. We left our hotel — the cheapest of a certain class in Kandy, with dark gray carpet and heavy curtains and clearly designed for vampires — for the Temple of the Sacred Tooth. The entrance fee: more than 10 US dollars — a shock after driving through towns where so much could buy dinner for a week. “We’ve come from America,” we suggested, readjusting our sarongs. Half price. Is it okay to get a deal at a temple?
The temple is stunning, not for its size or for the goldenness of its Buddha statue, but for the smells of floral offerings on the second floor, and the beautiful devotion with which they are laid. Common practice is to touch the flowers with flat hands and fingers outstretched, to lean forward to touch them again further along the table, then to pray with palms pressed together above the heart, and lift them to the forehead. I stayed bent over to smell the flowers. “Wow, this American is very devoted,” they might have thought. “Mmmmmm,” I was thinking.
INGULFED 
