February 7th, 2008, 1 Comment »
- The best name in the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations is unquestionably Junior Agogo. I watched Junior and his Ghanaian teammates lose 1-0 to Cameroon, who scored in the second-half, against the run of play. The game was spirited, and got a little ugly when Cameroonian defender Andre Bikey bizarrely pushed over a medical official who was attending to a fellow player.
- On my way back from the bar, I suffered some serious cognitive dissonance. A guy was sitting on a cardboard box, selling cigarettes in ones and twos. He was wearing a batter Calgary Flames hoodie. If I had better French, I’d have chatted with him about it.
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February 3rd, 2008, 4 Comments »
I just got an email which finished with “Go Giants!” The Super Bowl is today, isn’t it? I don’t even know who’s playing. The Giants, apparently, versus…the Patriots.
I haven’t been a fan of the NFL for about two decades, but I’m usually slightly more attentive than this.
Coincidentally, I was watching a different kind of football this afternoon. We went for a walk on the beach, where there were at least a dozen games of soccer ongoing. Most were informal, but some were the equivalent of little league back in Canada. They don’t have any grass fields (that I’ve seen), so they play on the beach.
Then tonight we got a drink and watched a depleted Ghana squad beat Nigeria in the Africa Cup of Nations. I was glad to see the host nation make it through to the semi-finals.
Morocco got ousted in the group phase, so the locals seem to be pulling for neighbouring Tunisia. They face an uphill battle against Cameroon tomorrow.
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December 27th, 2007, 1 Comment »
I recently listened to yet another great BBC radio documentary. Africa’s Cocaine Coast tells a story I hadn’t heard before about drug trafficking in Africa:
Ranked by the United Nations as the fifth poorest country in the world, Guinea-Bissau is awash with cocaine…
Guinea-Bissau’s coastline, dotted with uninhabited islands, provides a virtually open border for drugs traffickers, who use the country as a warehouse and distribution point.
Reporter Grant Ferrett discovers hopelessly ill-equipped police struggling to tackle the problem and so far receiving very little help from the rich western governments whose countries provide the market for the drugs.
‘Hopelessly ill-equipped’ is an understatement. The police force in charge of preventing the drug trade has 77 officers, no computers, no radios, no navy and exactly one car. There’s no rule of law in the country, and even if they do catch a dealer, there are no jails to incarcerate them.
I feel dumb saying this, but I had no idea that Europe’s cocaine came from Central and South America. I guess I’d just never thought about it. Guinea-Bissau functions as a convenient way-station between Latin America and Western Europe.
The documentary also points out that the demand for cocaine in Europe is estimated at a ton a day. If, like me, you’re wondering what a ton of cocaine looks like, here’s some old Irish dude with a ton of flour.
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July 24th, 2007, 7 Comments »
I can’t say enough about these BBC World Service radio documentaries. Each one is fascinating, in-depth and articulate. They come from all over the world (the diversity of accents is a nice bonus), covering a breadth of topics that matter–from the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict to homophobia in Jamaica. They’re served up in 22-minute chunks, but usually have multiple parts.
I just listened to the first episode of Globesity. Paul Bakibinga, an overweight Ugandan, visits South Africa to investigate the vexing, exploding problem of obesity in a developing nation:
With 1.6 billion people overweight worldwide, fat is now recognised as a major global health threat - even in the developing world…
According to the World Health Organisation, there are twice as many overweight as the 800 million who are undernourished.
The program is full of interesting facts. One doctor descries South Africa as now facing a fourth epidemic (after violence, third world diseases like Malaria and HIV/AIDS) of obesity. The phenomenon is worst amongst urban, black women, two-thirds of whom are overweight.
It’s a madly complicated problem. Not only is access to nutritional food unreliable, but there are also AIDS-related and ingrained cultural stigmas against appearing thin. Ironically, many of the overweight people are also undernourished because of their poor diet.
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May 23rd, 2007, 7 Comments »
SHEREEF: hello and how are you doing this is Mr Agdar [name changed] and i would like to order some flowers from your shop to my company in West Africa and can you tell me the types of flowers you have and their prices each so that i can make my selections. hope to hear from you asap..
ME: I’m afraid you have the wrong email address–I don’t sell flowers.
Best of luck.
SHEREEF: Ohh Okay What do you sell?
ME: Nothing, really, we do services work.
SHEREEF: Dont you know any shop there so tht you give me their address so that i buy some of their goods?
This guy wants to buy anything wholesale and re-sell it. Where should I sent him?
I’m sure this happens to everybody, but certain Google users have a mentality about their search results. It goes like this:
“Because your site is ranked highly in Google, you must be an expert in my search terms. Furthermore, you must sell them for a living.”
He no doubt found me because of Flowers For Al and Don. If he’d asked for something other than flowers, I would have thought it was just a variation on Nigerian spam.
Another recent example is horse soccer balls. If you Google “horse soccer ball”, my site is the fourth result. The first result is a site which actually sells horse soccer balls (the excerpted text in the search results even implies this).
And yet I’ve received more than one call from people wanting to buy just such a ball. Odd, eh?
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