Car-tastrophe

Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about the amount of cars being abandoned at Dubai's airport? I was reading the newspaper on the weekend, and according to Lieutenant-General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, Chief of Dubai Police, only 11 cars have been abandoned in the past year. You can find the article here.

Then today I saw this post on Boing Boing that says there have been around 2500 cars left near Terminal 3.

So, who do we believe? 11 abandoned cars vs. 2500+ abandoned cars. I personally think that the Chief of Police is kidding himself if he thinks that only 11 cars have been abandoned, but at the same time, I'd be surprised if the figure was as high as 2500.

Then again, perhaps I'm in a state of denial about the seriousness of the financial situation the world has found itself in. This post about a $550 billion shift of money in the American financial markets scared the living daylights out of me, with this quote from Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania really putting things into perspective:
"...The Treasury opened its window to help. They pumped a hundred and five billion dollars into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic and there. And that's what actually happened. If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, five-and-a-half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our political system and our economic systems as we know it."

I really had no idea that we had come that close to financial disaster. I never realised that financial depressions could be so, well, depressing.

So to lighten the mood a bit, here's a video of Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street edited to make it look like they're rapping. Hopefully this puts a smile on your face: