And that to many on the street in Jordan, as a Western T-shirted and jeans-wearing blonde middle-aged woman, I fit somewhere between and outside of gender, an entirely different kind of alien other, a sort of free-ranging cash cow perhaps better avoided.

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Mr Obama is sometimes compared to Star Trek's emotionless and hyper-rational protagonist Mr Spock, and I can imagine him, hand gripped to the head of an alien humanoid of a startling orange hue.

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