mercredi 30 mars 2005

The shape of things to come "So you'll be going down to the betting shop on Zim?" someone asked, this eve of the parliamentary polls. No. To bet with President Bob, who's gone very nastily twisted to the ruin of the country, when 'Mugabe Predicts Win in Zimbabwe Elections' (AP summed it up well) and make money out of anybody optimistic enough to hope for a different outcome would leave me feeling filthy inside. Some folk hold that whatever your faith -- and even if you've got nothing you believe in as a benign being beyond our ken -- that if enough people pray hard for something, such a concentration of "prayer power" alone can make it happen; if this is true, then all I'd pray for myself, expecting no miracles, is peace during the vote and honesty, rather than blindness, from the electoral observers. No more politics here: yes, I said that. But I have friends and colleagues in that brutally ruled country who have suffered enough. While Mugabe goes on bashing Tony Blair -- to hell with the pair of 'em, I reckon -- and everybody else but himself for the misery of Zimbabweans of all races, there are people who've lost almost everything. April is set to be the cruellest month so far in some parts of Africa, with a list of trouble-prone events already on the agenda to be covered by we media experts on the continent. Though I'll leave it off the log unless more than usually outraged, since there's no lack of excellent sources for people who care about both the bad and the good news, maybe I will be doing some praying. 'allAfrica' is particularly comprehensive, though sometimes "late" with some of the news. Better late than lacking in insight, they're also to be commended for a sub-section which has joined 'Sustainable Africa' in my blogroll: 'Peace Africa'. I may be coming home from the Factory so pissed off by the horrible things we report on that you'll be served up more poetry, music and funny stuff than ever. The sex now goes without saying. Just so people comfortably used to easy ways of getting the word round know it's a bit different in Africa, here's a bit of one of my favourite Factory service notes of the past month. Martin had the temerity to ask Dave, bureau chief in Nigeria, just as I have, to "please put the fucking conversions in the story before you send it to us". This is what's required to oblige: note-engdesk "attn mb LAGOS - 1525 - 12/3 - Sorry late reply on your (10/03/05 - 1230) re dollar/euro conversions. We take your point, and I will try to ensure Tunde and Ade always include the calculations. Please note, however (re: your recommending http://www.xe.com/ucc/full.shtml) that for someone on the desk to visit this useful website takes two clicks of the mouse. For us, we'd likely have to get a motorcycle taxi to a cybercafe and wait there for the afternoon powercut to end, or ask a large number of engineers to come to the office some time in the next 24 to 48 hours and sit looking at our modem sucking their thumbs for a while, at least until siesta time or evening prayers. We'll do the calculations with a calculator, taking the forex rates from the last wire story (so long as we can access EAA, touch wood) but please bear with us. cheers, dc" We'll go on doing the conversions. Anyway, I'm solvent! I am finally solvent. The nearest branch of my bank said "No cash over the counter." The next said "No cash over the counter on Wednesdays." My own, which is the furthest walk but open on Saturdays -- it seemed like a good idea at the time -- made me late for work, but gave me money. As well a functioning bank card they'd inevitably failed to tell me was ready. Instead of calling in the engineers and waiting for evening prayers, I've already started punching the new digits into all the websites that banned me. The iTunes Music Store is next stop and kind enough to warn us that some items are "explicit", including by VoW ('Voices of Women'). If "explicit" means the likes of Angela McCluskey singing "you know what that fucker can do" in 'Sucker', listed on Angel Records with no reference to Mugabe, then that's angelic indeed, compared with a routine day's work. So I'll leave the routine out of my records, huh, and just get on with the mental gymnastics. By the way, Kate was so nice today, only once telling me to shut up and never to go and wash my mouth out, just cut my fingernails a bit, that I've got over that short-lived nervousness around women. I'll even oblige with the sharp claws, since they're no longer required for dealings with the local branch of the International Monetary Fund, which has treated me rather better than the institution does many Africans. 10:06:16 PM  link   your views? [] Too famous for my own felicity Note to self: Introduce self properly one day soon, if still of this world, to a self-styled "metaphysical designer". Meantime, "Hello Jacob, Your elogens Eloquence, M.D." as per request. Jacob has a nice virtual place where he's lately been writing about stuff on a telly I don't have, but on Monday wrote something I understood. The VerseGuru said: "The business plan for my Lumiere project is exciting. Transferring it from my brain to paper -- less so." Tell me about it! Tonight I've been busy on the 'Lotus Project' again and getting over the terrible shock occasioned by seeing just how many "hits" people have thumped me with in the past 36 hours or so. I'm unused to such popularity and mail from people like biologists who tell me terrifying things like "I'm excited by your project and wish you well in furthering public understanding of scientific thinking on the gradual demise of ownership concepts in affective relationships." I didn't know this was what I've been doing, since my aim's only to give you a good story or two. She presumably means that at some unspecified time in the last century human beings embarked on new ways of sticking together, like partnerships I enjoy where they don't "belong to each other", since the old glues of outmoded evolutionary principles have slowly started becoming extinct. The end of marriage, however, still strikes me as being beyond the current anticipated span of my life, which is now very short indeed. Even the Kid remains determined to get wedlocked in frighteningly few years' time, though I've told both her and you she'd better pay for it herself if she does. I'm aware of Jacob's existence because I prefer metaphysical silly money like blogshares (see left-hand column) to common currency, of which I've now been deprived for more than two weeks. Jacob at some time stuck a ladder across to my place, it seems. It's odd to find out whose blogrolls you didn't know you were on. Maybe it was a Bad Idea to inform Lauren, Ellie and others roughly how many hundreds of people apparently read of certain activities described at luxurious length to people who take the green pill (see right-hand column). Also the weather was yucky on the birthday of one of those much-loved friends, which wasn't what she wanted or deserved, so I imagine that soon enough I will be belted so hard for recent revelations that I will fly almost faster than light to Cannes, where Jacob once had his abode. My blogshares are on the up again to an alarming extent and I yearn to go back to the far safer days of the Faithful 5 & ¾. If I let Lauren fully tell us what happened in Touba, the sacred city where she failed to meet almost anybody but pilgrims who frequently pinched things, like her backside, and wouldn't have her in mosques though she behaved well about shoes and headwear, I expect her account will have to go in the orchard, along with the sex and other wonderful and weird stuff. Despite the harassment, which at least I can do without being too serious, she managed to send the Factory good stories about what Eric Ross calls a "spiritual metropolis of the modern world." But everything Lauren didn't put in her news copy sounded highly old-fashioned and unspiritual to me. I got the impression that "the astronomical proportions and many excellent (sic) attributes" Mr Ross referred to in a very slow-loading page at aui.ma, wherever that is, may refer to more material objects than the Tree of Paradise. With no offence intended to Muslims, either Lauren's sunglasses failed to let in the "tûbâ" of bliss and beatitude or the Tree of Paradise was not Lost but temporarily mislaid during her visit. When it comes to people being laid or mislaid, I think I've said more than enough already this week. My bank manager obviously agrees since I observed tonight on the Net that my account is no longer frozen but having more money taken out of it, partly by the bank, which still hasn't sent me a new card to access those funds myself. I've only one request to make of all the women who are probably ganging up now round the world to punish me in unison. Please go on telling me true-life sex stories in detail I can bung in the film if fitting, because they're much funnier than the whoppers made up by many men. They'll keep me entertained until the huge kick you deliver sends me spinning out of earth's atmosphere into an orbit where even the bank manager can't get at my overdraft any more. In that dimension, a metaphysical designer might come in handy. Bear in mind when you bash me that I briefly bask only in your reflected glory, which is scarcely my fault. Thanks and good night. I'm now going to watch somebody else's 'X-Files', with yoghurts aplenty, before retiring to bed. BJ paid for the yoghurts. See, even that couldn't last. I had to tap him for his canteen card. When I wake up, it'll be a woman, Kate, who will be helping me on Africa. Kate's great, but I'm still shaking in my sandals. No 'X-Files', perhaps. Even Scully would scare me tonight. 12:52:30 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.