When I first started this website, I had all number of goals. I wanted to be as famous as Seanbaby, I wanted to be as prolific as Pamie, I wanted to be as cruel as Old Man Murray, I wanted to be as ubiquitous as Mighty Big TV, before it became Television Without Pity.

Yeah, I wanted a lot of what other people had. It’s just the way I’m built. When you’re trying to get a chip in the big popularity game called the internet, you do what you can.

But what I never expected — what I never could have hoped for — was to get banned. I’ve had some modest fan mail, I’ve been mentioned by some internet people who are measurably more famous than I am, and I’ve even been threatened with a lawsuit. One time, my website was even screened on my company’s firewall, making it impossible for anyone who worked there (at a huge corporation employing something insane like 300,000) to view the site. I was horrible enough to make their blacklist, and I stayed there for a good few months.

Just recently though, I got an e-mail from my old amiga Jackie, whose site I used to host back when she was a mere mortal blogger like the rest of us:

For those of you who are just like me, you might not know what the United Arab Emirates actually are. Prior to this e-mail, the only thing I knew about the UAE was that it was spelled with three vowels, was populated by a mix of Arabs, Americans and an awful lot of money, and that my ex-girlfriend grew up there.

So I did some research. According to Emirates.org:

The United Arab Emirates is a constitutional federation of seven emirates; Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Qaiwain, Ras al-Khaimah and Fujairah. The federation was formally established on 2 December 1971.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) occupies an area of 83,000 sq km along the south-eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Qatar lies to the west, Saudi Arabia to the south and west, and Oman to the north and east. The capital and the largest city of the federation, Abu Dhabi, is located in the emirate of the same name.

Four-fifths of the UAE is desert, yet it is a country of contrasting landscapes, from awe-inspiring dunes to rich oases, precipitous rocky mountains to fertile plains.

The United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s fastest growing tourist destinations, has all the right ingredients for an unforgettable holiday, sun, sand, sea, sports, unbeatable shopping, top-class hotels and restaurants, an intriguing traditional culture, and a safe and welcoming environment.

Basically, whenever you see those incredible hotels or entirely man-made islands that are shaped like palm trees and are completely lousy with celebrities and wealthy industrialists, you are looking at the United Arab Emirates. Dubai in particular is apparently quite open and welcoming to Western businesses, if not actually Westerners themselves, and are also apparently in the business of suppressive subversive content like, oh, my website.

Interestingly, emirates.org doesn’t really make mention of anything that has to do with the suppression of material like my journal about the time I went to go see Virus, or the pictures I put up from the Metro Toronto Zoo. However, on the subject of television, it has this to offer:

The majority of local channels are government run, contain very few commercials and are in Arabic. There is only one English channel in the UAE, One TV (previously Channel 33 or Dubai 33), which is run by the Dubai government. It has became a full-day channel in December 2004 and is also available as a satellite channel. The emirate of Ajman has a commercial channel, Channel 4, which has a few English programs and is a satellite channel.

As the local channels are not sufficient to most peoples TV needs, people decide to buy satellite dishs and receiver.

In other words, “The government runs the media here, and almost nobody watches it because it’s so censored.”

Interesting stuff, but it begs the question, just what is so exciting and subversive about my website that has brought about its censoring in a far-flung land? Is it my delicious sense of humor? My far-too-frequent use of the word “Fuck”, which is apparently offensive to at least a few regional governments? My fascination with hilarious sex-toys that are constructed to resemble everyday objects?

Or is it something more sinister? In the catastrophic aftershocks of what was an otherwise perfectly amicable breakup, did my ex-girlfriend pull some strings back home to make sure that my writing was brutally repressed by an automated whitelist sitting on a government server somewhere? We may never know, because as of now, this message will never get to the teeming masses of the United Arab Emirates, starving for hilariously pointless internet writing, thirsting for the freedom to read my webpage and shrug with indifference.

But I make this pledge, here and now: I will keep going! Someday, the good, incredibly wealthy people of the Emirates will cast off their shackles, put aside their caviar and park their Mercedes — and when they do, Miscellaneous etc. will be there, waiting for them.

For freedom.