All Good Things: BBC Arabic Takes a Hit

Last week, I learned that earlier this year, the BBC World Service discontinued broadcasts in ten foreign languages. Among these was the BBC's Arabic Service, which had been broadcasting to the Arab world for more than eighty-five years. For me, this marks not only the end of one of the more consistent and reliable Arabic audio streams, but also the end of the BBC Xtra podcast.

al Jazeera: BBC Arabic radio goes off air after 85 years

Middle East Economy: Hundreds of jobs lost following BBC Arabic radio transmisson stoppage

Arab News: End of an Era: BBC Arabic Radio goes off air after 85 years

Zawya: BBC's Arabic radio service bids farewell to the world after 85 years of broadcasting

Daily Mail: BBC World Service is to cut 382 jobs and will AXE Arabic and Persian radio stations under plan to make more of its broadcasts 'digital only'

For the uninitiated, there are actually two BBC entities that sort of coexist like conjoined twins in the same ecosystem. The domestic British Broadcasting Corporation, often affectionately referred to as "Auntie Beeb," provides domestic programming to the British audience (though some of those program(me)s are subsequently proliferated to other countries on outlets such as BBC America). "Auntie Beeb" is funded by the infamous licensing fee, by which any Brit who owns a television (and maybe a radio?) pays a fee for it, which goes to support the BBC, public broadcasting style. The other twin is funded by the British Foreign Office, and focuses on the production of content aimed at informing and engaging an international audience.

The Arabic service celebrated its eightieth anniversary in 2018, and the History Extra podcast - a production of the BBC domestic service's BBC History magazine - used the occasion to interview one of the BBC's executives, Wissam El Sayegh. Five years later, and even under these unfortunate circumstances, it's still worth the listen.

I experienced the BBC's Arabic Service in three contexts. The first was in either late 2007 or early 2008, when I discovered the BBC Xtra podcast. That was not too terribly long after its 2005 debut. It's since jumped around a bit, but you can catch the last few episodes here, at least for a limited time. I retain a cache of dozens of episodes of Xtra from the period ranging from around 2007 to around 2013, and a handful of later episodes. I had started studying Arabic in mid-2005, with very few resources easily available to me, and Xtra was great because it's consistent format helped me to learn words and build an understanding based on what I knew was going on. I paired Xtra listening sessions with lessons from ArabicPod.

The second incarnation, which I would have experienced intermittently starting around the same time, was the live Internet stream of the BBC's actual Arabic Service, which would broadcast the Xtra programs, but also offered other programs and live news coverage. Same idea: listen, identify different segments, and learn words and phrases. The live stream was the Internet-accessible version of the BBC's aforementioned long standing Arabic radio service, which broadcast across the Arab world. During my own stint living in Kuwait, when I drove alone, I'd regularly tune the actual, bona fide radio program in on 90.1 FM - though if I'm being honest, I was usually more likely to tune in the BBC World Service's English programs on 100.1 FM.

I had noticed a couple of months ago that my previously successful efforts to access the BBC Arabic Service via the Radio Garden app had begun to fail. As stations occasionally disappear and reappear, I didn't pay it much mind, but then I decided to do some Googling, and discovered the sad news: that not only had the BBC shut its Arabic service down, I'd missed the whole thing. I managed to download the crew's farewell special. Even though my Arabic was never strong, and has deteriorated significantly since I left Kuwait more than a decade ago, I was able to get the gist of the various conversations. It was a bittersweet listen.

The BBC's official position is that this was a difficult decision to make, that it was driven by the restrictive budgetary environment in the United Kingdom following Brexit, and that their goal is to focus on digital content. So, maybe there's room to hope that some incarnation of the BBC's Arabic radio content may return at some point. In the meantime, I'll pat myself on the back for saving as many episodes as I did, and continue to enjoy those episodes when I resume my Arabic studies... Soon, hopefully.

Self Control and My Big Mouth

"All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison."
- James 3:7-8

At some point when I was in college, I stopped into the parking lot of my high school to get my car washed by one of the teams of female athletes, who were running a fundraiser. I ended up briefly meeting their coach, who may have also been a teacher, and found out that she was engaged to a guy I went to high school with. The conversation somehow produced the key data point that she was engaged to a guy I'd gone to high school with, and I said something to the effect of "Wow, that's too bad, because that guy is a jerk." She politely expressed her dissent, and that was the end of it. We never ran across one another again.

In high school, I was voted "Most Outspoken" in my graduating class. One of my student newspaper advisors gave me an end-of-year award for "always being willing to share his insights on the world"; and my AP English teacher gave me an award that translated to "Most Self-Righteous," though that was at least partially in jest, because he also gave me an award at the same end-of-year event that said "Most Likely to Pose for a Nerd Poster." The obvious take-away is that those who knew the high school incarnation of me thought that I talked too much, and also that what I said rendered me somewhat unpleasant to be around.

I like to think I've gotten better of the years. I look back at many situations in my life, think to myself that I should have kept my mouth shut, and I try to let those regrets inform my behavior. I make an effort to listen more, and to talk less. My tone and many of my positions have moderated over the years. In some cases, I've been known to de-escalate or mediate situations, rather than escalating them. I like to think that there's almost nobody on the planet that I wouldn't buy at least one beer for, and willingly sit for ten or fifteen minutes of discussion, unpleasant though it might be.

I don't know what made me remember speaking to that coach at that car wash on this bright, beautiful June morning - wait, yes I do, I saw a photo of a woman who reminded me of a friend whom the guy in question once bragged about having taken advantage of while she was drunk, in earshot of multiple people. Anyway, as I reflect on it, it's one of the few examples of me opening my big, stupid mouth that I don't regret. That guy was a jerk, and I was right to say so.

Operation Alchemy, Dispatch #1: Metaphors for Being Too Busy

When I was a freshman in high school, Switchfoot released their debut album, The Legend of Chin. One of the strongest tracks on a truly classic album was Life and Love and Why, which featured one line in particular that's always stuck with me: "Give me a reason for life and for death, and a reason for drowning while I hold my breath." At the moment, I find myself reflecting on that line, and a litany of others. I feel "buried alive." I feel like I'm "trying to boil the ocean." In the opening pages of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic trilogy, the author has Bilbo saying, "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

I suspect that it's a feeling that most people can identify with: trying to accomplish things beyond one's capacity.

By the way, dear reader, that is a dram of twelve-year-old Highland Park single malt Scotch whisky. It's a fine facilitator of evening reflection.

Shortly before I turned forty, and additionally since then, I've been working on a sort of five-to-ten-year plan called "Operation Alchemy": the creation of something greater than its constituent components. A full accounting of all of the various components is another topic for another day, but the concept basically boiled down to this: assuming for the sake of arguments that (1) forty marks the halfway point between my birth and my death, and (2) my life hasn't played out the way that I had originally expected, and (3) I want to feel as if I've accomplished something when the end comes, (4) I'd better start planning for what I want to accomplish, and how to ensure that I actually accomplish it.

Honestly, even just planning this whole thing has taken forever. I'd say that I'm really still just in the initial phase. Even just moving from planning to execution requires me to finish up some projects and get myself organized. That's involved things like going through basically all of the documents and paper detritus that I'd accumulated over the last twenty years - actually, probably more like twenty-five - and either sorting it, or boxing it up for shredding. It's involved organizing and consolidating my digital files, and eliminating redundancies, so that my digital porfolio is easier to access and use. It's required me to consolidate my belongings and organize the work area that I've tried to establish in my garage. In early 2022, I finally obtained my Physical Security Professional certification. These are just a few examples. There are plenty more.

A lot of this was difficult between mid-2014 and mid-2017, when I was living on the East Coast and only had a small subset of my personal belongings with me. Of course, I look back to the period from 2007 to 2010, when I could have done some of that sorting, and didn't; and other, shorter periods in 2012 and 2014, when I had the time and apparently didn't have the foresight to utilize it. A lengthy global pandemic that largely confined me to my home was, on paper, a great time to work on all of that, except that we semi-unexpectedly brought home a specimen of one of the more notoriously demanding dog breeds, just as we were beginning to hear rumblings of something out of the ordinary happening in China. (When we initially contacted the breeder, we expected to land on a waiting list for a few months, but they'd just welcomed a litter, and the sole puppy that wasn't spoken for was exactly what my wife had expressed her preference for. That's not an expression of regret, just an acknowledgement that life played out differently than we'd expected.) And I have to say, the amount of time that just being married requires ended up really catching me by surprise! Again, not a regret, just an observation of how much time I had as a bachelor. The amount of time I wasted in my twenties and early thirties is simply unconscionable.

So, being deliberate about the planning and allocation of my time has been important. Being disciplined about sticking to those plans has been an additional challenge, and some of the preparatory tasks feel so critical to the overall plan that it feels sort of pointless to even start executing that plan until they're complete. Can I really start doing new research, or continuing old research, before I have a functioning webpage and archive online? Does it make any sense to try adjusting my diet and exercising without developing concrete plans for both? Some projects are big, some are small, some are planning, some are productive. Overall, though, there's a lot to be done.

A lot of this pre-work could get sorted if I had a solid week of just doing these projects. And, honestly, Tango has reached the point in his life at which he's vastly easier to manage than he was during the pandemic. I'm even getting plenty of encouragement from my boss to, y'know, take that time, because I'm maxed out on the leave that I can accrue. Unfortunately, as I've slowly reclaimed productive bandwidth over the last several months, a great deal of that bandwidth has, quite reasonably, been consumed by work. On the plus side, I'm feeling more engaged and ambitious about my day job than I have in a long time. Conversely, I'm constantly buried in work tasks, which acts not only as a deterrent to taking the time off that I'd like to be using for those projects, but also as an energy sink that prevents me from making productive use of my evenings and weekends. In that regard, there appears to be no end in sight.

Of course, all of this falls quite squarely into the "First World Problems" category, and I make a point of keeping in mind that I should be (and actually am) grateful for the situation in which I find myself. There's also virtue in being patient; after all, if I can pace myself, I can accomplish both the work tasks, and the personal/work-adjacent tasks. That doesn't stop any of it from being frustrating. It doesn't stop me from feeling like "butter scraped over too much bread," or as if I'm buried alive, or as if I'm drowning while desperately holding breath.

More on Operation Alchemy to come.