A Thousand Words

music

A directory of wonderful things

music

1. Music Theory Online at www.dolmetsch.com

2. French Money Talk at www.blogCFA.blogspot.com is the newborn counterpart to UpNaira / Money Talk.

Also wanna know:
James Joyce via Ulysses
Poincaré via his writings

Promiscuous

music

When will you marry? This year? Next year? Sometime forever?
Who will you marry? Rich? Poor? Beggar? Thief?
Which car will you enter on your wedding day? Wheelbarrow? Bicycle? Danfo? Mercedes?

I think the good answers were Mercedes, rich, sometime forever,...actually i was never really sure what "sometime forever" or "lailai forever" meant, or if we were saying something else that actually made sense. This was the song for a skipping game, so for example if you stopped/tripped on poor, then I guess the other kids had a good laugh. Or if you answered "this year" - a little too young.

The sun is back, and the hopefulness and happiness of the season makes me think about who I will marry. So many exciting choices, it's ridiculous that you're expected to stick with one forever.
So...
I'm building a marriage team
One Rufus, one Nadal, maybe Nadal AND Federer. I dumped Tiger years ago, before he dumped me thank-you-very-much. My boyfriend Raj reminds me that Rufus is "flaming gay." Hmmm.

I saw de Villepin on TV the other day - brilliant guy. He'll be the "seasoned" one in my little fraternity.

Might as well throw in a physicist. They have sharp minds and know something I want to know. I know a few hot physicists. Maybe a good mathematician for the same reasons.

I still like my Portuguese/Angolan João Ricardo from last year...why isn't his career as stellar as his World Cup showing? Well, I would love to help him figure that out - on the coast of Portugal.

There really should be a Nigerian on this list for the whole shared homeland and possibly shared language thing, but I like never meet them.

Who did I forget?

I have baby names too.
A number of Yoruba names - WURA (treasure/gold?) and AYO (joy) as in Ayokunnu/Ayokunu - I knew lovely girls by those names when I was a kid. I like the fact that Yoruba names are largely gender neutral.

FELA is another, as in Fela, although I still don't know what it means. (Let me know if you do.) There's also INULEWA from family lore. It was my grandfather's nickname, and means inside + is + the value.

In non-Yoruba names, there's ANNELISE - a complex character from my favourite film - and ALEXANDER/ALEXANDRA of course.

There's COCO - not just the name of a fashion icon, "Aunt" Koko was a super-cool neighbour when I was a kid living in one of the world's most beautiful places.

I must really like light, because I also have CLAIRE, LUMIÈRE, and CANDÈS in my top-ten.

My runners up are
LUDWIG, AMADEU,
ANNA,
APRIL, MAY,
NERO, NEO,
NEHRU, SUPRIYA,
UMA, MALA,
AMEERA, SAMIRA/SAMEERA/SAMIR,
FARDOOS/FARDOWS - I'll have to be feeling really high to name my kid "paradise, as in the Muslim's afterlife" but giddy happens.

I've always thought Daniel was such a good, fortright person's name, Goke a very pretty boy, and Jonathan a good and loyal boy - this comes from David and Jonathan when I was a kid, I think I was the narrator and, thanks to my mum, the best dressed narrator ever in my pink butterfly dress which I just loved. The tall boy in my class, a complete sweetheart named Efanga, played Goliath. There were "crowds" of Philistines and Israelites. Anyway.

When I was more Christian, my favourite names were Jonathan, Joshua, Joel. I knew their meanings. I don't know if I picked girl's names. Oh cool, I was really young, so those were possibly names for the love-of-my-life, not the kids. I still don't know why people promise to marry only one - that can't be easy.

It's important that all the names don't mean something silly in a major world language; they may have to go to school somewhere exotic and I want to be kind. It's not easy to find names that fit the bill actually: if you try to exclude all the words that translate into giggle-worthy words in say 10 major languages - no funny body parts, no unpronouncable letters.

Nick is a big joke of a name in Arabic. The Norwegian Kora and Tone were small jokes. Kora is a (sports) ball, Tone is tunafish.

Rufus would need to sell more records (opera or whatever) to get people to start naming human children that again, since it seems to have taken hold as a dog's name - why oh why?
The letters "gb" and "kp" in Southern Nigeria, nobody in the West has those. And the Arabs make "p" into "b" - there were two blackbirds sitting on a wall: one named Bita, one named Ball.

As the joke went when we were in school, the phroblem with the pheephle phrom the northern phart oph Nigeria is that they do not know how to phronounce the letters eph, phee, and phee. So f, p, and v, are sort of dangerous letters too.

Wow, I need to get a job.

Release The Stars

Release The Stars, the latest music album by my beloved Rufus is available as (free) streaming audio on vh1.com. News courtesy of usatoday.com "Pop Candy" blogger Whitney Matheson.

My first pop concert ever was Rufus Wainwright, last month at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. My groupiehood while now concert-certified remains at a comfortable orange intensity, since I feel like I know him so well already. Next time I'll make more of an effort to talk to him or something.

Before l'arrival de Rufus on stage, I'd started to warm up to the opening act Teddy Thompson, who's much younger/hotter than I imagined - he's a country musician after all, and they're not supposed to be so metrosexual. He plays awesome guitar, lovely voice too, and is an old family-friend of El Rufus. His music is so modern, it barely qualifies as country.

Rufus is a totally stylish guy. He had this sash or something around his hips, stripes and colours all around, and great new cowboy boots as he sashayed on stage. He's so look-at-me. He played mostly the new stuff, backed by a very energetic percusssionist and four/five others.

Try I'm Leaving For Paris and more, while I try to find video footage of him channeling Judy Garland.

11 days later: No Judy Garland video yet, but there's this and hundreds more on youtube. Rufus make great success.

Arab Film Festival 2006

music

Don't forget to follow the links to read official synopses and watch the film trailers!!!

The Short Films

I already mentioned A Stranger in Her Own City, the Sana'ani film about a "tomboy" named Nedjmia. There were seventeen other short films at the festival, arranged into programmes of four to six films each. I missed most of the shorts - sad sad sad. I caught Yasmine's song, La Femme Seule, and bits of Beit min Lahm and Little Beirut.

Yasmine's Song is probably very similar to The Syrian Bride, an award-winning full-length feature film that I'll soon watch. Both are marriage stories focusing on the separation caused by the Israel-Palestine conflict. At the end of the short film, Yasmine and her lover are on opposite sides of a freshly-built fort-quality wall and the image is moving, to say the least.

I enjoyed being able to translate many of the film titles, including Beit Min Lahm - House of Flesh - which thematically resembled a European taboo-sex-lite film. I believe the story was a mum and her daughters in a love web with a man. The images were all in shadow; deliberate, a good and gentle art film.

Little Beirut showed unrest among the Lebanese émigré in France.

La Femme Seule is about a Togolese housegirl. One of the most special and original films I've ever seen. It's a story about a domestic worker that is entirely from her point of view, in her voice, with still pictures. It's in French with subtitles. To all Africans, film-lovers, and especially filmmakers: Watch this one. Trust me.

I wish I had seen many of the others. (That's what I get for being late.)

The Not-Short Documentaries

I saw Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced Majority, remember? By now you ought to have hunted down and hosted a viewing party for this political film. There was a special high-school viewing of this film and discussion with the directors afterwards. A favourite scene shows footage of an Iraqi diva, maybe five years old, animatedly complaining about how the explosions have spoiled her things. Really. I want to see her again.

You also remember Goal Dreams, another poignant Palestine documentary, about hope against all hope? In this case, the hope was to build a Palestinian team and qualify for last year's FIFA World Cup. Little did the coach know that the biggest challenges would have nothing to do with playing ball.

Dam Akhii, or The Blood of My Brother (watch the trailer) was an Iraq death film. A man is killed, for no reason, like thousands and thousands, in Iraq. What is the family feeling, how are they living, how do they cope? That Iraqi communities have been presented with such horror is troubling. One of the surprising moments in watching this film was that a fellow audience person gasped as a ram was slaughtered in a ritual marking the man's death...where was her expression of horror when the man was slaughtered and buried, as his mother beat her chest and cried?

I Know I'm Not Alone is a crowd-pleasing documentary about a crowd pleaser. He's an American musician, a silly man, a deep man, who takes his music to the war-ravaged areas of the Middle East to meet, to greet, to laugh, to heal. He meets undergound Iraqi rap musicians who are inspired by the black struggle in America. He needs no prompting to start strumming his guitar and belting his sing-along song HaBiiBiiBii HaBiiBiiBii HaBiiBiiBii HaBiiBi.
Habibi means beloved, and is to Arab pop music what Corazón is to Spanish pop, or Love to English, that is, the most (over-)used word in the songs of the language. This film follows the adventures of an ambassador.

All these are very highly recommended. Of the documentaries I missed, I would have especially loved to see Linda and Ali, about a cross-cultural couple: Linda is from Arizona, while Ali is Qatari.

The Feature Films

Coming Wednesday/Thursday.
For now, I have to get back to preparing for a job interview tomorrow at which I'm not likely to discuss Arab film; I think it will be about statistical data analysis and such. Interviews, finally: there's another on Friday with an electric power company. Yay! Wish me luck.

The People

The filmmakers' panel included the completely captivating actress Meriam Serbah. I mean, I didn't watch Bled Number One, in which she starred, but in person, she had such a dominating strength of presence in a room in which many people had such great strength of presence.

I met Sufyan and Abdallah Omeish, the brothers who directed Occupation 101. They're nothing if not passionate, and it's amazing that such young people have done such important work.

There were also: Maya Sanbar, the très beautiful BBC documentary filmmaker and co-director of Goal Dreams, who not only knows how to make a great film, she knows how to fund and sell; Stephen Olsson, who directed the reportedly psychedelic Sound of the Soul, which was presented at the festival with Improvisations, a film about the oud, which was probably a delicious work.

I met Samir Nasr, who directed Seeds of Doubt (English title of the German Folgeschäden.) I have a few goals as an actress, one of them is to work with this man. I suspect he's that brilliant. He's making a film in Arabic next, and I'll someday soon be fluent in Arabic.

As a film festival volunteer, I met other volunteers, attendees, judges, directors, actors, and organizers. If there's a heaven, the people who organize a beautiful thing like this are definitely going there.

I was a little shy about handing out my newly-made headshot/acting-resume card.

I felt very beautiful in a small-world of very beautiful people. I felt very beautiful at the afterparty - dancing in the gorgeous dress (completely gorgeous, I tell you) that a friend in Sana'a had given me when she learned of my missing luggage. I was the stuff of dreams in that dress. I loved living in French and Arabic, learning about the human condition, being in a social condition, having a brand new boyfriend and many new friends...

More Film Links

AFF has organised several other film events following the wild popularity of the main event last year. How I would love to attend them all. In particular, it's co-presenting films at the 50th annual San Francisco International Film Festival.

I first wrote about some of the films (Occupation 101, A Stranger in Her Own City, Goal Dreams) in this September 2006 post.

I once met a friend of the guy who directed this vegetable animation called T-Day. I just love the filmmaking in T-Day, and though I can't say I understand Lior Chefetz's other films to date, he's clearly a star filmmaker in the making.

Very exciting update:

Found on the myspace page of Occupation 101. Join their myspace!!!

I hate _

music

I haven't been depressed since I got here, six months ago.
Today and yesterday I've been choking with rage. I won't write why on the internet, not today. I just want to go to sleep and not deal with it. I've considered chugging some wine or cough syrup.
Then I found this site:

Two minutes later, I'm sharing the link here and maybe I'm ready to pick myself up and breathe.

Hermès, schmermès. Buy this scarf.

music

I'm knitting.

Why? I signed up to do a local playreading (in Oakland, tomorrow.) My character is a librarian named Joan, who knits throughout the short play. I could fake-knit on stage, but OF COURSE I drove to Michael's before rehearsal one day and bought some conspicous gold-coloured knitting needles, some yarn and a beginners kit a helpful attendant picked out for me, which includes a how-to-knit book with pictures.

The basics are easy, I've been back to Michael's for more yarn, including a different colour to pattern it, and now the knitting has grown to about 40% of a scarf.

Just now I picked it up to continue and exclaimed "God, it's beautiful." It occured to me that I had more than a stage-prop on my hands, I had a scarf in the making.

First thought: give it to Raj, but he's a man who hasn't learned to wear pink yet. So I'm going to sell it.

You should buy it. See sidebar on the right for Google Checkout button. I'll ship no sooner than a week from today, after it's completed, insha'Allah.

New magazine article on my friend Billy

music

A Terrible Thing to Waste
From laweekly.com
Convicted as an ecoterrorist, a brilliant young scholar nose-dives in prison. UPDATE: Exceprts of Billy Cottrell's letters from prison
By JUDITH LEWIS
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 1:00 pm

Billy Cottrell in kindergarten

When Billy Cottrell was first sent up to Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, he thought he had landed the perfect job. A brilliant student of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Cottrell has a high-functioning form of autism that makes it difficult for him to pick up on people’s emotions, but also gives him a grave appreciation for detail. At Lompoc, he thought, he would do secretarial duty in the “boiler-room office,” spending many hours alone, filing, sorting, typing and proofreading. He could be useful.

Before his first day, however, prison officials got nervous. They knew Cottrell was smart; they’d seen his physics textbooks and writings. And wasn’t this the kid who’d been convicted of blowing up Hummers somewhere in Los Angeles? Thinking he might find a way to rig the water heaters to blow up the prison, Cottrell says, they denied him the job.

Next, Cottrell was offered a job mowing Lompoc’s copious lawn. Read more...

This article joins my other posts on Billy's legal trials at http://lifelib.blogspot.com/2004/11/mrs-smith.html
If you have comments, please leave them there. Thanks.

Look and listen :)

     
By Banky: My Regret and Capable.

Artistes

music

I'm listening to the music of Banky on his myspace page right now. You should too. He make great success! I like!

Browsing the web today and finding nascent Nigerian lifestyle (women, fashion, entertainment) media like this one. There's some very good content out there.

My sister Taiwo wants to be a leader in this sphere. She has all it takes, including a business education, trademark ideas and a spirit that is singularly beautiful and very strong.

Unlike the larger Nigerian blogosphere, the lifestyle segment of Nigerian bloggers seems to have a network i.e. members link to one another, so that finding one helps you find others.

You know where else there is a tight network? In modeling. The young female models, from alumnae of America's Next Top model to home-grown international models from Africa and Europe. You find one myspace page and you've more-or-less found them all.

Surviving Picasso

music

1998, I was seeing a man who was famous for being a brilliant student, who was slightly balding, fit and short. "Seeing" meant sharp-tongued banter and kissing in the hallways. I assumed he was seeing other people, in a more grown up way. I assumed that had nothing to do with me. I remember the pretty film, Surviving Picasso...I was Françoise, the young one who survived Picasso. I had too much going for me to be engulfed by this guy.

Anthony Hopkins' Pablo Picasso showed a portrait to his new girl Françoise (Natascha McElhone) of a razor-tongued woman, his x, who "had a sharp tongue to nag, nag, nag," he said in a nagging Hopkins accent. "She has a sharp tongue to nag nag nag."

I started hearing myself say the same things over and over to my current boyfriend, so much my throat literally hurt sometimes so I'd say "my throat hurts, I can't talk so much." But I'm stopping. By the way, Raj helped label the stuff for garage sale yesterday. It all took a few minutes, after I spent 10 times as long saying we had to do it. What a waste! Nothing gets done when you nag - except rapid aging.

Television

music

My new favorite TV channel is CNBC World, carrying quality near-global financial and business programmes.
see SCHEDULE

How I know that I'm evil

music

Because I allowed people to create a violent war in Iraq. I murmured a bit, and then moved on with life and quotidian concerns.

If it's "not my job" to do something, and not your job, and not her job, and not his job, then who will do something? And who will do something when I am (or you are) the victim?

Better Half

music

Best Couple Award

Eleven years and one month ago, I fell giddily in love with a boy. My hormones had played similar tricks on me before, but unlike all my prior loves, he was actually in my age group and I actually knew him in real life. I felt very certain that I was his girl for ever. Although he is a most delightful friend, I guess I can be grateful now that my willpower wasn't enough to make us marry.

I remember the week we fell in love. I remember too how Saamu (camp clown) organised an impromptu award contest on the bus back home. There were categories, nominations, votes, most of which I was oblivious to, being engrossed in my Beloved's speech as I was. I was embarassed - blushing red despite my dark brown skin, I was told - to find that we were Best Couple.

I was also secretly pleased to have won a cool award. It was nice to get attention for something not serious or schoolish, but Away-an: foreign, Western, ...cool.

Some things haven't changed much. I'm still waaay more geeky-cerebral than cool (although at Caltech, I was considered radically cool, which just shows that "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the King.")

Nigerian Blog Awards

I nominated myself for a bunch of Bloggies this year. You should nominate your blog(s) too. Or other deserving blogs, if you're so inclined :)

According to TaureanMinx, another blog award organiser, a few people are now authorized to wear this badge of honour on their blogs:

These are only some of a multitude of fabulous Naija blogs out there. Next year, the awards will be even more awesome, because more people will vote, for more diverse blogs.

See all the 2006 Naijablogger winners!

Do Believe The Hype

music

Watching Dreamgirls was a sumptous experience.

When I was about seven, my family got a videotape with footage of Jennifer Holliday, spotlit on a dark stage, in glittery dark clothes, microphone in hand, performing the You're Gonna Love Me solo. I could never forget that performance - the sweat, the depth, the passion.
Fast forward many years, and everybody's talking about the same song.
Thank you, Miss Jennifer Hudson, for giving a musical film performance that will be remembered for generations.

Let the music play on

music

There are so many songs I'm dying to post here.
I'll keep up with blogging and with posting the songs...server problem for hosting the songs needs to be worked out...still owe you the rest of the Arab Film Festival gist, I know...be back in a few days.
Peace and love.

iCall

music

My calls with Skype have been of really poor quality recently. Maybe it's the new wireless connection that has problems. Or maybe Skype is overloaded and underperforming. I just read about iCall, so I'm downloading that right now to use for my calls from home.

My cell phone plan is stupid. It costs a lot, yet I can't use it freely because of the very very limited minutes included and the stiff penalty for going over. I want to dump the company (T-Mobile) but they gleefully informed me that I'm under contract for a year. The phone itself is ancient. I can get another one at a heavily discounted price if I sign up for two more years of this misery. "TWO YEARS!" I exclaim, "I don't even know what COUNTRY I'll be in in two years." (I hope it's Yemen.) I'll find a way to dump my phone Company soon, you'll see.

Peace.

12 hours later: I just tested iCall and found similar problems, so the problem is with my low-bandwith wireless and Skype is still fabulous.

Who moved my cheese?

music

I have now joined the rat race. Used to drive less than 10km/week in Pasadena. Now I'll drive five times that, and ride the train the other half of the time. I love the Bay and the City. Work won't feel like work at all.

The work is/will be: brokering/trading forex, tutoring SAT math, acting. Lucky me.

Localized

music

Still job-hunting. From tutoring and petroleum R&D to trading desks and "financial engineering." Trying to stay within 15 miles of Berkeley.

In other news, there may be some more acting and playreading in my immediate future. I like!

We need to unpack and sell/donate at least half of the junk in this apartment. Then I'll feel much saner, we'll have a nice long Thanksgiving weekend, I'll start studying Arabic again...

Peace.

Still don't know

music

Despite my best efforts to hate the career fair, it was fun.

Some fun people and companies, like a Nevada technology company that makes slot machines, or this "normal" technology company - with people I like, actually like - that analyses/tests Internet Protocol performance.

I sort of liked Advertising.com - had never heard of them.

I lost some of my apprehension about DE Shaw, so I'll look into that further.

I saw new "trading" companies besides the ones I'd already decided against. One of them is based in LA and hiring right now. Like "can you start next week?" They like my math, seem like cool people, but are not sure if I really want to be a trader - very perceptive. Another one is doing their first interviews / math tests tomorrow morning, so I'll go and try to see if I remember any math. By the way, traders buy and sell stocks or derivatives or financial products people make up. So far that's beautiful. It's said that they work long hours. Pause.

I cornered a recruiter who was not so busy to learn about how she figured out what to do in life. Answer: elimination. I love old people. And all other people who are not too harried to answer my questions.

In A New York State of Mind?

music

Spent the past few days in bed nursing a cold and reading the Wall Street Journal. Would like to do the same today, but I have to take a few hours out to meet the people at the career fair. Used to be good at career fairs; now I'm old and cranky. There's a lot of stupid work out there, y'all. Don't live in this country: it's full of people working very hard at stupid things. Not you of course!

Thought New York / Wall Street work might be fun, until I went to visit my sisters in DC two weeks ago and remembered how intolerable cold weather is to me. Now, I'll only go to work in New York if it's something I really really want, if it pays an evil amount of money, or if it doesn't include October - March.

Would work in DC year-round, on the contrary, since seeing my sisters daily would make up for the cold weather.

Moving to Berkeley, 400 miles NW of Pasadena, in ten days. A guy named Raj.

Beyond Borders

music

I saw Anousheh Ansari on The Oprah Winfrey Show today. She spent days in orbit around the earth as a space tourist. She loved the lovely view outside her capsule: it was of the earth, and there were no borders, she said. NO BORDERS. Really. Did you know that?

Yet there is such suffering in the name of borders: a Jewish state called Israel, the often deadly northward passage through the Southern half of North America, Bakassi, and hundreds more large-scale conflicts between the in-group and the out.

Are you in the EU, or not in?
In North Korea or South Korea?
Israeli Arab, or born right outside the borders in Palestine/Lebanon?
Northern Moroccan or Southern Spanish?
Who cares - it shouldn't matter. Sadly, it matters too much.

There are people who see that it doesn't have to be this way. I met N. at the film festival. She and I talked about how far we are from where we need to be in designing a peaceful world...how the framework itself, one that divides with borders, is flawed.

There are no borders.

Yes, we have inherited a recent tradition of knowledge that partitions as much as possible, puts things in mutually exclusive classes: this country is in Africa, this in Asia...this is a mammal, but that is a bird. All this grouping is sometimes useful for representing data simply but incompletely. That is, it's not the whole story...not the whole truth...Is this land Camerounian or Nigerian? Maybe the answer is both. Or neither.

Perhaps you dare to dream of a new world order that doesn't have division built into it, but increases freedom. Maybe you dream of something crazier. Hold fast your dreams, anyway.

Social intercourse

music


I just got back from the Arab Film Festival.

The first film I saw there was a short documentary shot throughout Sana'a and titled A Stranger in her own City. It was utterly emotional for me to see video of the place and to watch a girl living out loud in a culture that has other ideas for people of her sex.

Next I saw the equally captivating Goal Dreams. Days later, I met Morad, a Palestinian and American who was prominent in this film about the quest for a World Cup qualification for Palestine. I said "you were in the film" and we introduced and smiled and...quit smiling and parted ways.

The ONE film from the festival that I want everyone I know to see is Occupation 101. Wait for its release, get it, have a viewing party. Let's get the word out and move towards peace and away from stupid violence.

Sadly, most of the films I saw were so good that I anguish over each one I didn't see. (It's impossible to see all the films at this festival, but that doesn't console me.)
I'll write more about the week's movies soon.

San Francisco loves me
Maybe I'll move to the San Francisco Bay Area soon: on this trip, besides watching a lot of films and hearing a lot of Arabic, seeing and liking Berkeley, reading about bonds and stocks, and detoxing from my addiction to toiling on the Web, I met a number of lovely people, some of whom want me to live closer to them.

I had a soul-mate all along

music

It's pleasing to think that I'm so connected to someone, though scary because I want him to stay alive. OK, it's not so scary anymore.

My mother often said I should have been a boy/man.

I'm looking forward to figuring out my hairstyle(s) for work.

Your money or your life

music

Just saw this quote on 43 things:
When we go to our jobs, we are trading our life energy for money. The truth, while simple, is profound.
The New Road Map is one attempt at a fair trading strategy.

I have an over-the-phone job interview this morning.
I am genuinely very interested in working at En*, and assume
1. I will do great work here
2. my interest will die out after a short time
Ideally, I'll work here for (a few/many) months, and later go to work somewhere else.
To work "somewhere else," I need to read gobs of finance.

This dead Aussie clearly lived out loud - the way we ought to want to live.

Romance

music

Spice
I just saw A Touch of Spice. It was singularly sensuous: a collection of images of beautiful people; people whose hearts touch; people mired in attachment and addiction to those oils and spices that fixed a place called home in their skin - so deeply, it would never be forgotten.

I have started to unlearn some of my deep love for the many textures of meat - tendon and cartilage and marrow and kidney. It's still there, but poisoned with the idea that meat is a sirloin or a rib-eye or New York strip steak; a sanitized and standardized and very oversized and overnourishing slab of loot.

Caribbean Restaurant
A few days ago I was starving, so I found myself at this new nearby restaurant. Actually, it's more than two years old, and I've been there maybe three times. On previous visits, I noted that I like the decor, that the passionfruit juice is mind-blowingly good, and that I doubt any true Carribean people eat such bland food as they serve there. My complaint? They don't know their sauces.

Well, if the food was tasteless a year ago, why was I back there last week?

A charming man (not the owner, who's also charming despite being a perhaps overeager businessman) made me order some juice, brought me a loaf, which I devoured, followed by a very very good and simple salad. I quickly annihilated the rice and beans; only when it was just the meat left was I calm enough to actually taste the food. The meat reminded me of suya. I have never had meat in this country that reminded me of suya before.

I bought some suya on the street near the embassy in Victoria Island last time I was in Lagos. Took some home to my brother. It's so hard to take suya home - hard to stay honest - but I love the boy. He loved the suya. I hope that means he loves me too.

The restaurant owner told me the carne asada I just enjoyed was a filet mignon, butterflied, all that crap. I don't care. I had butterflied whatever before, and it didn't taste like this. I had expensive steak before. In undergrad, a Microsoft recruiter took a bunch of us kids to dinner. I was going to stay in school to study for tests, but gave in to the pressure to be interested in a wealthier future at Microsoft. I recall that dinner for maybe ten people cost as much as a semester's meal plan at Howard. No, I don't remember the food, but it was one of those dinners at which people made a big to-do about things being butterflied.

Honey
I saw a honey-coloured insect today on my way back from the movie. Outstretched wings, elegant craned neck...I came closer and it was a cockroach. Then I thought it had too many feelers...oh! that's another one next to it. The grate they live on is labelled as covering a drain that feeds into the sea. Oh there were many cockroaches on the draincover. The first placid family of cockroaches I've seen.

O happy day!
Before the Greek Spice movie, I ate ẹba at home, with leftover ọgbonọ from a trip to Veronica's Kitchen. Before that I saw Trust the Man - my kind of film.

Today was so right. And warm. I was so happy. I hope I die on a day like today.

Desire

music

On desire:
The sheer desire of these young people!
The link is to a set of eight pictures, see them all.

On nesting:
This jibjab animation shows how people use the Big Box Mart to satisfy so many needs.

Luc Leestemaker

music

It was my first time at The Grove in Los Angeles. December 2002: I had just learned to drive, got a car and a license three months earlier, and was desperate to escape worrying about my qualifying exams for a few minutes or hours.

The Grove was magical at Christmas.

That evening, I had a thought-provoking conversation with a Dutch, almost American, artist while waiting to see The Hours. I see on his webpage that he recently founded The Art Fund Corporation to help build artists' careers. (I'm jus' sayin'...so you know...if this is your thing...)

Although I don't remember the story, I'll never forget the images from and the thoughts evoked by The Hours, a movie I watched more than once - drove friends to LA to see it days later.

Material girl

music

Gucci now has video?
Probably temporary link showing 2007 cruise collection. Because I like.

Paper or Plastic?
I had two bags at home that, with their bold science conference labels, were definitely not fashion runway material. They were too large and unwieldy for school. I already had a white canvas bag for, who knows, like, if I ever went to the beach. The point is that my two conference bags had no function...
Meanwhile, I wanted to stop growing my useless stash of supermarket plastic bags and paper bags. For inspiration, I looked to the women of Aix-en-Provence, always alluring, addicted to understated seduction. Years ago, I had watched them walk down to the street markets clutching simple baskets, to hold fruits and a baguette, say.
When Mediterrenean-inspired fashionista meets ex-science conference attendee meets environmentally conscious food buyer, you have me at the supermarket, answering the "paper or plastic" question with "I brought my own bag(s)." I'm really proud of this.

Want
What I want these days, in addition to a fab job, is still mostly media - books, music, movies.

Araro̩mi

music

I'm going to finish up school this year.
If you've been just dying to call me Dr. O. - sorry, it's not going to happen.
I'm taking a Masters degree and moving by the end of this year.

If you're a friend who wants to know where to, please allow some time for me to work out the details.
Since I'm not trying to be too busy anymore, this year is a great time to get in touch with me.
If you just want to cyber-stalk, I'm on 43things.

Stolen copper wires

music

I just heard this story about copper wire stolen nearby from a communication company. I didn't know this happened in the US.

Nineteen years ago, my family lived on TinCan Island in Lagos, where we hadn't electricity for a long stretch. The power outage went on for weeks, longer than normal for that time and place. The reason was stolen copper wire.

We cooled off on mats outdoors on the veranda, sharing riddles and stories. My father explained what sea breeze was. We fanned the twins, who were then babies, with a raffia fan. The joke was that they were oyinbo, because they were born into air-conditioning and couldn't endure being hot.

In Lagos of the eighties and nineties, street light parts got stolen - lamps, wires, and metal. Once, during a fuel crunch, some people poked a hole in a remote petrol pipeline and as the news travelled, people rushed to fetch petrol as they fetch water - in kegs and buckets and open basins.

Feast for the eyes

music


The World Cup is like Miss Universe, except, it lasts longer.

summer of paper

music

The summer of the solo paper
I looked at my research problem two days in a row and at least one day last week. (Really.)
There's a lot of potential for good work there. The problem with going after the answers is that I'll have to spend less time doing other things that I also like to do: movies, daydreaming, reading, surfing the web.
I really want to go after my dream of doing science - it's exciting, I can feel it - but I also want to take life slow as I've recently learned to do. We'll see what happens.

The bribe for the solo paper
I'm going back to Yemen next year, insha' Allah. I'll go to Aden this time. Well, Aden for the first month. Then I'll either stay in Aden or return to Sana'a, which I think I know and love.
Maybe I'll write and submit material this year and go to a conference in Europe next year. I'm fairly itching to dance in a club in Europe.

Emancipation Proclamation
T. became Dr. T.D. Neal last week. Wheee. I got to meet his family and learned to play Texas Hold 'em. First time around black people in a long time. Good times.
Soon, half of my friends will be "Doctors." Panic! I need to find some real friends ;)

Bright lights

music

Alumni in tha house
I've noticed a number of potentially fun talks scheduled for this week, that is, they're closely related to things I'm currently interested in. I went to one last week that was potentially interesting and yet just somehow not magical enough, hence I'm attending none of this week's.

What does it say that I go to lectures to be entertained...when so many other people are at "work."

I've stubbornly insisted on being thrilled at school, and have often been. in love.
with a book.
with a class, so much that I couldn't wait to see my Prof. again.
with the "story" of a field: what it's useful for, or the context in which it was developed by people, how it answers a question that i've had, how it opens my eyes to something new, or to a new trick in thinking.

The lecture announcements:
1. COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR
DATE: May 24 (Wednesday)
and May 26 (Friday)
TIME: 12:00--1:00PM
LOCATION: 110 Steele
SPEAKER:
Pablo A. Parrilo
EE & CS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
TITLE:
SOS-based computational methods for polynomial games

ABSTRACT:
In the last few years, techniques based on sum of squares (SOS) decompositions of multivariate polynomials, semidefinite programming (SDP), and results from real algebraic geometry have proved extremely useful in the formulation of hierarchies of convex relaxations for difficult polynomial optimization problems. In this talk we show how these can be extended to a game theoretic setting.
In particular, we discuss a class of zero-sum two-person games with an infinite number of pure strategies, where the payoff function is a polynomial expression of the actions of the players. We show that the value of the game, and the corresponding optimal strategies, can be computed by solving a single semidefinite program, thus providing a natural generalization of the well-known LP characterization of finite games. We also discuss the possible extensions to correlated equilibria, and to the nonzero sum case. In addition, we show how the results can be applied, with suitable modifications, to a general class of semialgebraic games and problems with two quantifiers.

Wednesday's lecture will be more introductory in nature, and discuss the basic setup of separable games and SOS/SDP methods. On Friday, we will put these basic elements together and discuss some further extensions.

BIO:Pablo A. Parrilo received an Electronics Engineering undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires, and a Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1995 and 2000, respectively. He has held short-term visiting appointments at the University of California at Santa Barbara (Physics), Lund Institute of Technology (Automatic Control), and UC Berkeley (Mathematics). From October 2001 through September 2004, he was Assistant Professor of Analysis and Control Systems at the Automatic Control Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC).

Prof. Parrilo is the recipient of the 2005 Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, as well as the triennial SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory (SIAG/CST) Prize. He was also a finalist for the Tucker Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society for the years 2000-2003.

His research interests include optimization methods for engineering applications, control and identification of uncertain complex systems, robustness analysis and synthesis, and the development and application of computational tools based on convex optimization and algorithmic algebra to practically relevant engineering problems.

LUNCH WILL BE SERVED.

2. CDS Seminar: Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Time: 2pm-3pm
Location: 070 Moore
Distributed Coordination and Consensus algorithms with boundary:from flocking and synchronization to geographic routing in adhoc networks

Ali Jadbabaie
University of Pennsylvania

In this talk we provide a unified view of several distributed coordination and consensus algorithms which have appeared in various disciplines such as distributed systems, statistical physics, biology, computer graphics, robotics, and control theory over the past 2 decades. These algorithms have been proposed as a mechanism for demonstrating emergence of a global collective behavior (such as social aggregation in animals, schooling, flocking and synchronization) using purely local interactions. Utilizing tools from spectral graph theory and control and dynamical systems theory, we provide an analysis of these algorithms.
Furthermore, we show that by imposing fixed boundary conditions (e.g., designating a leader in a swarm) , one can obtain algorithms for a wide range of applications, from leader-follower swarms to synchronization in oscillator networks, and from shortest path routing to geographic routing without location information.
Finally, we describe a one-parameter family of distributed consensus algorithms with boundary conditions, which at one extreme, recovers the well-known Bellman-Ford Algorithm for shortest-path routing, and at the other, results in a routing scheme based on diffusion, and mean-first passage times. Connections between these algorithms and harmonic functions, electric networks, and discrete Dirichlet problems are also discussed.

Biography
Ali Jadbabaie got his BS from Sharif University of Technology in in 1995. He received a Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1997 and a Ph.D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in June 2001. From July 2001-July 2002 he was a postdoctoral associate at the department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University. Since July 2002 he has been an assistant professor in the department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a recipient of an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator award, and the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society.

3. CDS/CIMMS LUNCTIME SERIES SEMINAR: SEPARATION AND COHERENT STRUCTURES IN
TIME-CHAOTIC FLOWS

Francois Lekien
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Princeton University

May 25, 12 noon
114 Steele (CDS Library)

In autonomous and time-periodic dynamical systems, transport and mixing can be studied using the stable and unstable manifolds of hyperbolic fixed points and periodic orbits. Numerous experiments have revealed the presence of similar coherent structures in aperiodic systems. These mixing templates are usually invisible to the naked eye but can be extracted, for example, by computing finite-time Lyapunov exponents or finite-time hyperbolic invariant manifolds. These structures indicate alleyways and barriers to transport and provide a geometric description of the mixing processes in the system. In recent years, there has been much effort in applying this methodology to the study of mixing in fluids and geophysical flows. Indeed, these systems are strongly aperiodic and do not have, in general, fixed points or periodic orbits.

In this talk, I will describe fluid transport in Monterey Bay. High-frequency radar stations provide current measurements in real-time for the bay and permit the computation of dynamical barriers and alleyways in this complex system. The coherent structures reveal the existence of optimal release windows in which contaminants can be efficiently advected away from the coast, reducing their negative impact on the marine environment. In addition, the alleyways can be used to optimize the deployment of drifters and the routes of underwater vehicles to maximize coverage of an area. Transport and mixing near a coastline can also be studied in terms of separation and re-attachment profiles attached to the boundary. I will discuss how to obtain exact criteria to detect and control separation points and related separation profiles in Monterey Bay. Jet-actuated systems can control their separation points to a desired location and fine-tune the lift on an airfoil, or transport fuel efficiently along separation profiles. For drifters and underwater vehicles in the ocean, weak actuators, such as a rudder or a deformable rogue, can be used to control the effective separation points seen by the vehicle. Such controllers do not "fight the currents". They take advantage of the strong hyperbolic structures that are present in the ocean, require less energy, and increase the time that the vehicle spends at sea.
_______________________________________________

I'm skipping the talks and going outside to browse a too-advanced math book. The book ends in a historical sketch of the field written by the the author. (anticipation. yay.)
I may also find and interact with humans in an exciting way.

On Love and Marriage
Movies you should watch, if you care to:
Houseboat and Friends with Money
These movies have very little acting, that is to say, the performances in them are very good: mature, natural, smooth, untheatrical.

Just another manic (May) monday

music

I just woke up from a nap of maybe five hours, pleasantly surprised that it's not even morning yet. The good thing is that I get to go back to sleep before moving on to 1. laundry and 2. phoning home, the things on my plan for tomorrow morning. I won't tell how long it's been since I last did laundry, let's just say I have a lot of hauling and baling to do in the morning...if I actually wash the clothes then.

May began, like all Mays do, with my birthday. It's not a holiday in the U.S. but this year there was an immigration reform rally that had supposedly hundreds of thousands of (almost all Latino) people marching in downtown Los Angeles. I went, and on the train from Pasadena I ran into a guy named Dave who was going with his parents to watch and photograph the event, so I hung out with his group. The next evening some friends treated me to dinner and great company.

I've spent my time since then reading Kissinger's Diplomacy, being annoying, listening to Martha Wainwright's B.M.F.A. and Baby on her myspace.com page, listening to a lot of other music, and going to Caltech things: a Desi show that included the world première of the seriously funny film Made in Heaven, Arranged in Mumbai, the second half of an utterly fantastic glee clubs/orchestra concert, Capitol Steps, a theater friend's birthday party - and catching up with that crowd, another birthday party - saw two car accidents that night, a non-birthday party - met yet another trusty Taurean, et cetera, et cetera.

Went out to dinner in Little Ethiopia with Ṣọna, two-time ex-schoolmate, who just moved back to Pasadena after two years skiing and visiting Naija with his family. Also, called G. to say happy birthday. That call lasted one minute and ten seconds - he was busy. My father's phone call minutes before my birthday was half as long - I was driving. A few days later, I called dad about an hour before his birthday. It lasted a few minutes - I had woken him, so I promised to call later...
no use being so busy!

My neighbor's smoking. I just shut my sliding door, in part to protest his blowing smoke into my home. I must be the most annoying second-hand-smoker.
One minute life is perfect, I'm breathing fresh air, and the next I'm wondering if there's a fire and if not why I smell smoke. Why do people smoke?

Where was I? Hallmark or whoever makes money selling sentiment these days would love this idea - ex-day. A day to celebrate your former girl/boy- friends. As with Mother's Day, you can feed or gift or party, or you can hate it and "celebrate" by throwing out some garbage, physical or otherwise, or you can ignore it and let other people waste their money. That's fine too, Grouch. :)

I finished Diplomacy last night. It was long.

She gets it

music

The last two episodes, the girls of America's Next Top Model have been in Thailand.
Joanie really shines here because she is in the right place for her reverent attitude.

Sugar Rays

music

The weather is hot these days. I can sit outside, and get more coloured, less boringly even-toned. I have something to look forward to in life.

Yorubas worship many things but not the sun.
There's Olokun and Ṣango, there's Ọbatala and Oduduwa, Ọrunmila, Ọṣun, Ọya, Ṣanpọna, Ogun, Eṣu, Yemọja, Egungun,...

They are associated with rivers/the sea, thunder/fire, the future/divination, smallpox, iron/weapons/war, birth, and our dead ancestors. Oduduwa/Oodua is the founding father of the Yorubas, while Ọbatala makes people. Olodumare/Eledumare/Ọlọrun is over them all. Ọrunmila is second-in-command, like the manager.

I love the story about how when people are made, their headless bodies are made first, but each person chooses his own head. So you might have picked a good head before you were born, representing your lot/luck/destiny, or you might have a bad destiny. Oloriburuku - a person with a bad head - is one of the first words non-Yorubas learn in Yoruba, to use to insult people. What a deep insult it is...if you think about it.

The Arabs, or maybe just Sana'anis, call people crazy all the time, for fun, because they love you, or because you puzzle them, or annoy them. If you're superstitious in the cast-out-demons Christian sense, however, there's nothing funny about being majnoon/majnoona, which really means having spirits - and probably not "The Holy" one.

Speaking of trinities, a crazy person in Yoruba is were. First word. The second word people learn is usually oloṣi - a rubbish person, a nothing, or one who does foolish things, I suppose. The third is oloriburuku.

After you master these, and add perhaps "your head is not correct" - "correct" in pidgin, "complete" in proper English - and "your head is not good" (ori ẹ o pe and ori ẹ o daa), you're ready to proceed to hello, good morning, good afternoon...

In Igbo, I know Onyioshi - possibly the same as Oloṣi?, Onyara - mad, mechionu - shut up.
May I just add that Ibo people sound so foolish saying some Yoruba insults, that if I was in an altercation and heard someone say "oriope," or "orodaa," I might just burst out laughing.

In Hausa I know barawo/barauniya - thief, sege - which you say pushing your palm in the direction of the object of your contempt, and which I suppose means curses in general, banza - bastard, and, thanks to a curse-a-lot childhood housemaid, I know how to combine and embellish them to say things I didn't understand, let alone mean.

In Italian, ...

Anyway, back to the subject: sunshine.

I met a very quiet guy on Friday, who after I told him what my first name meant, asked me to which Oluwa/God it referred. Not sure. I'd never been asked that before. I suppose whichever one you believe in, that is, either Olodumare the one who delegates to dozens of gods and helpers whom you may worship freely, or the jealous, first-commandment-is-there's-only-one-me God of the Bible.
I imagine my parents and millions of other Yoruba people don't care.
It's not one of the lesser gods, because the god would have been mentioned explicitly, like in Ṣangotosin, or Oguntosin - both being names I've heard before...and cast-out-demons Christian people would be very careful about saying your name and thereby invoking the evil spirits of a false god.

He thought it was strange that we didn't have a sun god. I guess our sun gave us no reason to worry, he showed up everyday on time. How would my grandparents, or their ancestors, have understood a life where the sun was fickle? Where their warmth depended on this great yellow light in the sky, and they would suffer cold when he did not visit? And the plants didn't smile, their leaves instead yellowing and reddening and dying, until the great bright orange had been bribed into returning?

The fickle sun of California has returned from hiding. We beg him to stay. I am alive since he came. I have painted my toes, I sit outside, I meet new friends, and I have hope.
But I know he doesn't care much about me. Let us pray.

Indecision

music

They'll say that she was great
born great,
achieved greatness,
had greatness thrust upon her

And alongside that greatness she nursed
enormous doubts
that nagged at her

Until she was worn out with struggle,
when she died.

But struggle she did.

Whuman rights

music

When the world learned of the Lawrence Summers remarks about women and science, I thought the man needed better judgement. I didn't wish that he would actually cease to be President of Harvard on account of this. I had mixed feelings about the guy.

Of course women can and do teach, prove theorems, make money, kill people, and manage organizations. Still, fewer women than men are identified as billionaires or army Generals. Taib.

People at the top of society in America find it in the Nation's best interest to not leave large groups of people undeveloped, their talent untapped. Maybe they think life is more fair that way. Maybe they recall having a door closed to them because of their height, gender, accent, family income, hairstyle, skinshade, body-mass-index, girliness, religion, or nationality.

Sentimental stuff.

They say they're doing diversity for the Nation, as in: otherwise we'll go to war with a country that has invented something that we never found because the person who would have found it is in jail or couldn't get hired because of our laws.

They don't always bring up their personal reasons, as in: I always wanted a son only got daughters and my daughter is really very good at volleyball (taught her myself, blush) and you know i've seen in her eyes how she wants to win olympic medals one day even if it hurts and, you know, i just want that girl to be happy.

The occasional political-correctness-challenged professorpresident (pp) thinks out loud: in future, who'll make dinner, and lunch, during the making of mr. dr. important if he's born/married to a fellow future dr. important? or who'll mostly raise the kids he wants to help raise?

Folks shout down the pp quickly because sometimes pp's are dim-witted, but often because folks don't want the arguments clouded or to risk rolling back the gains of their pet movement. That's politics, people.

Links, a diversity of pps:
speech and resignation
trying to make sense (of it all)
friend of the court
Exercises
Do academics care about truth? Do academics care about power?

Free speech

An email forward from a friend: a secular Arab speaks on Al-Jazeera.

More blogs. Bibliography

music

Acada

Inexistence
Geocentric Universe
Ah Yes, Medical School
Higher Cohomology Is Inevitable

Michael Nielsen
Shtetl-Optimized
Sidharth Jaggi's most excellent adventures

Some Words To Not
X in Vogue: Very Stylish Math
Caolionn O'Connell


Development and criticism

Money Talk
Global Voices
French Money Talk
Ekiti Legislature

GlobLog
Robert Reich's blog
Seb's Open Research
SJ's Longest Now

Bjorn Staerk
Oslogirl
pleasure pure madmen know
The Embedded Revolution

Arabia and around

A Family In Baghdad
Cinnamon Zone
Moments in Words from Hadhramout
TIME: The Middle East Blog

The Arabist
CNL in Uzbekistan
Rasheed's World
Sleepless in Sana'a

Me vs. Myself
Riverbendblog
Syria Exposed

Nigeria

Bella Naija
Fausset Nigeria
Adaure's Weblogazine
Nigeria. What's On?
Yola++

Chelsea Rules. Ok?
Musings of a Naijaman
Shola's Webspace
Naijablog

Aaron Rowe
Giant of Africa
Nick in Nigeria
Generation Nubian
Wazobiacrazy

Film, music, books

Erik's choice
Frances Uku
Wordsbody
Daily Dancer
Iram Parveen Bilal

Tennis, dreams, boys, and gist

ATP Tenistas
Down The Line
Women's Tennis
Forty Deuce
Tennis Served Fresh
Tennis Talk

LA Rag Mag
Post Secret
Raj's world
Waiter Rant

Dooce
Like A Wheel within a Wheel, archives
Possumqueen

not blogs...

Sarah May Photo
Thibaut Photos
The Guardian on Gender
This guy named Kim
womenswrite Journal

This post exists so I can keep my main blogroll very short, while keeping track of places I like to visit on the web.
All the blogs that have been on my main blogroll, past or current, are listed...and a few secret pleasures.
Some of the first blogs I ever read - parentheses was perhaps the first - and a few that I just noticed, are here.
Some are no longer being updated...some have been newly revived.
I like most of them very much.

January 27,2007 update: list now in rough categories, but still expect to be surprised.
February 28, 2007 update: adding directories, such as findnigeria.

Big screen, little screen

music

Hiam Abbass stars in Satin Rouge, a movie by Raja Amari that I've wanted for years and just ordered recently.
Coincidentally, I started watching the movie on Tuesday just after I'd seen Munich, in which she also appears. She's also in Paradise Now, which I haven't seen yet, but will like to watch soon.

In the past week, I also saw
Mrs. Brown, with Judi Dench playing Queen Victoria,
Madame Sata, a story about a Brazlian rebel,
Sexual Life, an American ensemble piece in the tradition of Things you can tell Just by looking at her;
In Good Company, a nice drama/comedy about love and work, it's realistic, touching, and higly recommended,
Private Benjamin, a sweet, sweet movie, which is now one of my very favorite,
Strictly Ballroom, directed by Baz Luhrman; when you're a ballroom dance fan, you gather with friends to watch this classic, the dancing is by no means fantastic.

I would note how expertly Munich is done - cast, located, shot, directed - it is a movie-making Master Class, but perhaps taken for granted because it's done by a master and holds no surprises. I saw it twice, so far. It has a few words in Arabic, which I try to pick out. Syriana had conversations in Arabic as well. Yay! for Arabic in the movies.

Satin Rouge is said to be in Arabic, but apparently Tunisian Arabic is peppered with French.

In the three-and-a-half weeks before the last, I saw only a few movies. (By now, this gross deficiency has been repaired. )
Walk The Line, the only movie on my Paris-Los Angeles half-day flight worth watching,
Ladies in Lavender, a very slow-paced, pretty movie and more Judi Dench goodness,
Brokeback Mountain, which is not about elderly British ladies,
Head in the Clouds, in which Charlize Theron does high glamour,
Festen (English title: The Celebration).

I'd wanted to see Festen for months because I liked Arven/The Inheritance, another Danish movie with Ulrich Thomsen, so much, but I found it sad and dark without good excuse.

Love Story

music

Official site, imdb, other: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Everything happens to me

music

Got my luggage today. It turns out it's been in Sana'a for two or three of the four weeks I've been waiting, but...Anyway, got the bag. I have my own clothes now. Little party tonight, at which I hope to take a few pictures. I leave in six days. It's soooo relieving to have my luggage back.

Love y'all.

Bigger picture

music

Wikipedia has a scaled-down, hard to read copy of the cartoons.
I think the debate inspired by these cartoons is good.
I hope nobody dies over this.
And I hope we can cut out the bullshit even more in future and talk.

Chat Room

music

I'm using MSN Messenger.
This shouldn't be remarkable except I don't chat.
It's a lot of fun chatting with Tolu. I see how it can be addictive - two hours and I can't bring myself to quit.

Happy mood

music

Duduyemi the tourist
Nick in Nigeria has several new posts on his blog. Yay!

Design and geometry
Three weeks ago, during my stopover in Abu Dhabi, I was very inspired to take pictures but had no camera. I walked around the airport several times and crashed in a chair, jetlagged, sleepy, finally.
(I still don't have my camera, because it's in my luggage which may or may not be stolen/incinerated, thanks to Air France the frenetic. )
Most of the terminals in Abu Dhabi surround this centerpiece that is a large pillar filled in with blue and green hexagons that continue on overhead and to the outer walls. The small airport has for sale more than its share of luxury goods: large gold necklaces, so-called Swarovski crystal ornaments, and chocolate and sweets displayed in a most shamelessly tempting way. Maybe on the way back, I'll photograph the airport in Abu DHabi.

Welcome to Yemen
Of course, there's a lot to see in Yemen too. You should see it for yourself. And hear it, and smell it, and feel it, and taste it...the man who cooks here, wa'Allah I want to take him to California with me.

Sometimes, the kids in the city greet tourists with shouts, Welcome to Yemen; Hello; I love you; and other bits of English. Sometimes they use an accent, as in the rising "hellow!" Sometimes they guess (wrongly) that I'm Sudani, or Somali. I fell in love with Ismaili, a brilliant, confident 15-or-so-year-old boy I met in Old Sana'a for a couple of minutes. At times like that, I'm so sure it's a smart idea to be a professor. Today, a cab driver called: Hellloooo, Honey. The most unexpected thing! I like to think it was directed at the blonde classmate I was walking with.

I'll be back in the Middle East soon, Insha'Allah.

Crappy Mood

music

I like this place.
I promise to not live in America any longer than necessary - it's miserable. Useful, wealthy, and miserable.

My baggage STILL hasn't arrived yet. I try not to be too irritated.

I bought a really good face wash and face scrub a couple of weeks ago in a supermarket in Sana'a. The city is Lagos without the overcrowding (cleaner, safer, ...) I like the food at school. The classes...learned so much in such a short time. Today, we talked about our schools (Caltech, University of Illinois, and some school in Germany) in class...I got to use a new word - malal - a lot. Malal jidan means "very boring."

If you're anything like me, I recommend Sana'a. You'll feel at home.

I expect to like Iraq / Israel even better. It's funny that it took coming to Yemen (supposedly anti-Jewish, Muslim, evil, wooooo) to make me interested in living in Israel.

The Queen of Sheba lived here

music

Magnolia is born
Kehinde and Taiwo are here for the holidays.
Taiwo started a blog last night. Thanks to her, I tried out the blog search button in blogspot, which is a good way to find Nigerian people/news/blogs.

Can't stop talking
I finally got both visas I need to go to Yemen.
The Yemeni one is almost entirely in Arabic. I can read my name, country, and passport number. I didn't try to read much else.
I never thought before about the fact that people carry travel documents in various languages. To think that someone at an airport can say, "sure that's my name on the visa - in Arabic script or whatever."

I'm scheduled to leave Los Angeles on Monday, January 2, 2006, and arrive in Sana'a on Wednesday afternoon. It's usually a challenge to keep smelling decent on those day-plus flights...

The school I plan to attend provides meals and wireless internet access!
The school I switched from couldn't get me a visa. It's apparently a great place as well, with half the fees, fan-tastic location, and an extremely pleasant director. (Scroll down on the services page to see testimonials).
A third school was fully booked till February.
We worked out a new plan - new school, new visa application - in under two weeks, despite an eleven-hour time difference, several holidays for Christmas, and the fact that our weekend begins when theirs ends. (Friday is the Muslim Holy Day, remember?)

While I'm in Yemen, I think I'll study Arabic a lot, go out and meet people a bit, read a couple of novels, and do my research. Maybe I'll visit Aden, and go on any included excursions.

I really hope to be a highly motivated, changed beast after this vacation...so I can focus for a year-and-a-half on doing my research, doing candidacy, doing more research, and writing a thesis. That's my plan and I'm sticking to it.

We Three Kings of Orient Are...

music

This is such a nice article.

A merry Christmas to all.

Al-Hamdulillah

music

On Friday night I answered a telephone survey. At first the chirpy recorded woman's voice was funny, and I had a good laugh talking back: as in "Hi, you have been selected to participate in this blah blah blah" and I go "Hi, your voice is very chirpy" and she keeps rambling happily "Do you think the economy is one improving two getting worse three about the same press one if you think the blah blah blah" and I go "how the hell am I supposed to know that."

Anyway before I know it, I'm taking the survey. I suppose it was meant for Americans, but Chirpy never asked me if I had citizenship or voting rights. I maintain that I don't know whether the economy is growing, or in recession, or whether in the next six months the economy will enter a recession. I don't imagine the average American knows.

Do I think Bush is one a fabulous President two a sorta great President three...and I pick: bad but not the worst.

Now do I think he should one be impeached...I think: whoa, for what? a lot of people voted him in office and re-elected him too. If he's an idiot, he's an idiot with support. Don't be trying to steal the Presidency. (Although they say that's politics.)

In the 2006 elections would I be one more willing two less likely...to vote for a candidate who pledges to work towards an impeachment. You guessed it: I'm not big on anarchy posing as politics.

Am I one African American two...I'm an alien: none of the above.

Do I consider myself one wealthy two upper middle class three...although I know what this means technically, that a highly-paid New York lawyer or the President of the United States is one class and there are people in a class above them, I pick wealthy because I can't think how I could possibly be wealthier...even if when it came to the last question on income brackets, my after-tax "household income" was in the first - that is, lowest - group.

We walk by faith and not by sight. That's possibly why Nigerians poll as the happiest people in the world...or why this happens in Iraq.

Hell is a cold place

music

I understand that there are colder places than California.
Still, I dream of warm, rational temperatures. Like in Lagos.

I've been in school all my life, except for one year off a decade ago.
Candidacy is next week. I just want to keep reading Anna Karenina.

I'm a star, I'm a star

music

I just got tickets for Sana'a, Yemen.

Not Related

music

read about the agent here

Cara is a STAR!

music

Her novel was released today. I hear "it has everything", not just romance.
I'ma get me a copy. It's been too long since I read a book with such a pretty cover.
1, 2, 3, more

When I grow up

music

G. said he really loved swimming.
I thought if he stuck with me, in a few years I would get him a pool. He could swim all he wanted. In hot weather.
He didn't stick.

I don't swim, although I have taken lots of swimming classes. When I grow up I want to rule the world - you knew that; I also want to be a synchronized swimmer.

I'm going back into my little tub now. I took a break from my very hot bath to get some air.

First time in New England

music

Washington, District of Columbia
I saw my sisters (two of three) on Friday. Spent most of the time in K's bed...I'm so into those girls. We saw In Her Shoes together in a movie theater. Can you imagine how wonderful that felt?
Boston, Massachusetts
The wedding was very tastefully done. My very charming host, Sammy, showed me around Harvard. He also taught me to bundle up against the cold.
Now I'm tense/tired and yet to recover from all the travelling.

Liberty's scales

music

On the one hand, my pay has been CUT: my Moore-sponsored Poincaré fellowship expired days ago.
On the other hand, my face is in a better state than it's been in weeks; thanks, Mary Kay!