1 to 6 of 6
The city of Lagos, Nigeria, as seen through the lens of a 1975 guidebook.
One of The Wife's American friends spent part of her childhood in Nigeria and mentioned that her mother had written a guide book on Lagos during that time. I immediately asked if I could take a look at it and thank her for allowing me to scan its pages. Hence I present to you a photo album:Guide to Lagos 1975.
[view whole blog post
]
Wherein I reproduce a couple of apparently futile musings on the announced death of Google Reader. I've always preferred that my public utterances be available in a feed and Google Plus by design doesn't provide one. Further I received a transatlantic call yesterday from The Parents who are alarmed and incredulous that such an important and incredibly useful tool - an essential part of their experience of the web, would be summarily executed, as it were. They raised a point that I hadn't considered as I've been thinking about Plan B. It is easy to say that there are other feed readers, but almost all the proposed alternatives will not be free if they operate at Google's scale, and this presents complications if you live in a country like Ghana which is a black sheep in terms of e-commerce. ...
[view whole blog post]
Another case of the new formula, another case of a company juicing the books: the diaper wipes that we had settled on for The Daughter got the New and Improved! treatment last week (the exclamation mark is the usual signifier of duplicity). It's the now customary scenario: a company decides to wring out surplus value by squeezing every ounce out of its means of production, typical latter day capitalism at work.
Working in an industry that is perpetually focused on the new and shiny, I probably shouldn't begrudge innovation in a mature market, and what is more fundamental than diaper wipes after all. Furthermore The Wife suggested I should censor this particular rant - perhaps wanting me to elevate the discourse and not fall into a parental blogging rut. I had even planned initially to use ...
[view whole blog post]
Five times in the last eight years, I've woken up one day having lost the hearing in one ear (the ear in question seems to alternate). It's a matter of physiognomy I've been told: the combination of poor drainage of my sinus cavities (their perversely shaped contours apparently don't help things), small ears, and a latter-day propensity for prodigious production of earwax. These episodes of partial deafness have typically lasted from as little as two hours to a few days. The current assault on my middle ear, however, at ten days and counting, is pushing beyond the realm of temporary inconvenience.
It's not just that I haven't been able to listen properly to the new José James album - hearing his golden voice in muffled mono as if coming from a locked trunk packed with ancient ...
[view whole blog post]
'Twas the night before Halloween - Halloween's een perhaps? when I first heard the ghost of Ramsey Lewis's version of Nights in White Satin in the cadences of Tina Turner's We Don't Need Another Hero. Or was it the other way round, I wonder? Had time's arrow changed the perspective? As I hummed the stately theme that the violin led in Lewis's take on the tune (from his 1973 Funky Serenity album), I couldn't help but start interposing Tina's voicing of the lyrics "And I wonder when we're ever gonna change / living under the fear 'til nothing else remains". In my trance, the songs seemed separated at birth. How could it be? It was a musical puzzle, what made these anthemic songs congruent? How was it that the limpid and ethereal jazz piano seemed to mesh so well with the soulful and bluesy ...
[view whole blog post]
