Here's a little something for your amusement, since the discussion seems to be crumbling.

Yesterday, I had a student here for tutoring. While he was doing some autobiographical writing, I was reading a bit of the novel A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry - until I came to a sentence ending, "... the soft rains in Dubai". Dubai? I'd forgotten that the protagonist had some connection with Dubai. The flow of my reading having been thus interrupted, I took a glance at the writing my student was doing - and saw that he had just finished writing the word "Dubai" on his page. I was startled, particularly as I had had no intimation that this student, locally born and bred, had any experience with that part of the world.

End of story. These funny little things happen to me a lot. It's a mistry (ha, ha).