(Un)Sound Engineers

When I loud-listen to music made in America or Europe, the notes fall clear and crystalline, but homemade Hiplife, played at high decibels, distorts the Bose baseline, and ferries fart sounds through the loudspeakers. The same boom-boom blights neo-Naija music too. Why?

Is It Like That For Shop Assistants?

I dived into a convenience shop, at 10 p.m., on my way home, last night. The friendly shop assistants were counting coins by the tedious thousands at their sales stations. They told me that they had to repeat the routine morning and night, everyday. I didn’t have the heart to take my (substantial) change.

“Am”

Maybe it’s the currency of cyber-speak; maybe it’s lowbrow laziness. I can’t stand people who write or say “Am” when they must mean “I’m”. They’re too lead-lazy or dynamite-deaf to learn the difference in pronunciation. I hear it spoken everywhere, I see it in magazines, newspapers and on TV. “Am tired” of hearing people say “Am ...” anything. See how that repulses.

Taxi Driver Kwasea

This one taxi driver would not go scot-free. In just 3 hours, I had been rudely road-rushed by crazy manoeuvres in double digits. He did it at Kwame Nkrumah Circle. I hounded him on Ring Road Central up to Bus Stop. As I gained on him, I shouted “Taxi driver Kwasea”. He was pained to shock, hardly expecting effluence like that. But I was gone before he could react, and all he could do was to honk hysterically.

Public Pubic Pawing

An office mate and I ‘visioned’ a vulgar vassal in black, velvet shorts vocalising on his violet celly on the avenue behind the British High Commission. In the vivid daylight at 10 a.m., and inside his shorts, the vile vole was holding a varicose bulge! By confidently looking at us, he made us rather feel ashamed.

Five Lives

A young mother of five
Didn't want to see them alive
She administered death's drink
And immortalised her name in ink.

For an interesting note on the woman who is suspected of murdering her 5 kids, all below age 10, by poisoning, see Co-blogger Que's note here

Fraudulent Festival

A season for sellers to move their chocolates and wines and gizmos more briskly than usual. A reason for other people to extort presents from you without appearing as beggars.

And what remains unsold or un-cadged will have to go in less than 2 months, when Valentine’s Day creeps along. It's only business.

Regardless of what I have said, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Please stick with me in 2010.

Visit my new blog of controversy: What Do You Really Think?

Accra, City of Squatters

Whenever one gutsy vote-winner tries to make angsty Accra ‘marchable, ‘breatheable’, ‘tourable” and humanly habitable, another (usually more powerful) will freeze the Fahrenheit of the effort. We, who are lightsome with free-flowing pavements, may well be in the minuscule minority now, and politics being a statistical sport, we are doubly doomed to lose our homes and space to streptococci-squatters

At The Cinema, A Twice-Told Tale

At the Silverbird, ’spooking’ ‘New Moon’ with the lovely Lil Girl, the guy behind us kept echoing the dialogue in the fantasy flick to the chesty-and-cheeky chick with him – not translating; just repeating.

So, she was either not cosy with the accent – which was quite universal, by me – or she was doing some...thing, else, that was dulcetly distracting her in that darkened, slightly isolated corner of the frigid room.

‘New Moon’, itself, was all it had promised to be, after Lil Girl had shown me ‘Twilight’ on her lemon laptop. But, from the way the well-muscled werewolf, the gothic girl and the vanishing vampire left it, a tantalising trilogy is truly served.

University Liberian

I sensed a judge’s anguish, today, as she subtly struggled twice (and crashed) to enlighten a university registrar that, although the people of Liberia are famous for achieving higher education, it is not every university in the world that has a Liberian student or lecturer. So, the clueless registrar made off from the courtroom not knowing that what he really wanted to say was “Librarian”.