ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing ktravula – a travelogue! blog archives for March, 2010.

10 Reasons to Lose Your Hard Drive At Least Once

10. If you’re a workaholic, you will get a few more hours of sleep afterwards.

9. You will have an excuse to be lazy and late on work deadlines.

8. You will have a reason to get new up-to-date softwares, sometimes free from the University.

7. You will get to know the workings of Dell’s (or your computer’s manufacturer’s) customer service.

6. You may get to know who loves you and who doesn’t. 😉

5. You will learn new lessons on how not to use a laptop (e.g. leaving it on all night playing music)

4. You will appreciate the value of $65.05 and five gruesome days of waiting.

3. You will be rid of all the junk in your computer that you have always wanted to delete but didn’t have the required gut, time or patience to delete.

2. You get to read more books.

1. You will get to spend more time with the rest of humanity for a little while.

10 Reasons to Lose Your Hard Drive At Least Once was published on March 30th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

10 Reasons to NEVER Lose Your Hard Drive

10. You may actually get sleepless nights and withdrawal symptoms.

9. You will miss a couple of important work deadlines.

8. New hard drives cost money, and you will have to wait for days, go through frustrating customer service phone responses, before you get it back.

7. You may not remember any/all of the things you’ve lost with it.

6. Everyone thinks it serves you right for not backing it all up when you had the chance. The rest don’t just give a damn. 😉

5. Your students’ grades, results and records might be in it, and you will have to work double hard to get them all back.

4. You will never get back poems, skits, writings, translations in their original forms again.

3. The Geek Squad at BestBuy and all of their good brains may not be able to recover any of your lost data.

2. The computer in your office may be occupied everytime you want to use it.

1. By losing Skype with your hard drive, you might miss your mum’s birthday party.

10 Reasons to NEVER Lose Your Hard Drive was published on March 30th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Diana on the VOA

My friend Diana and fellow FLTA speaks to the Voice Of America, here.

Diana on the VOA was published on March 30th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , under the Academic, adventures, News category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Recommendations

Here are a few blogs about literature, travelling and journalism that you should check out. I have also recently added them to my Favourite page.

Richard Ali on Nigerian Literature and the Arts.

Belinda Otas – Journalist, Writer, Blogger and theatre fanatic.

Naijablog – A British academic in Nigeria: views, observations and links.

Jude Dibia – Author of Unbridled and Walking With Shadows.

Novuyo Rosa – The Pen and I: Thoughts of a South-African writer.

Ruona Godwin-Agbroko – a Nigerian Journalist and 2010 Nial Fitzgerald Scholar in South Africa

Loomnie – thoughts of a Nigerian Anthropologist in Europe.

Ethan Zuckerman – My Heart’s in Accra.

Wordsbody – Nigerian Writer and Arts Journalist

Recommendations was published on March 29th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , under the News, Observations, Opinion category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

What Am I Doing With A Nancy Friday Book?

It began with a suggestion by a German friend to get an old book that offers perspective on feminism and new ways to look at the world of women. Against my better judgement, I was not skeptical about it this time because she had recommended two similar books before that turned out great. The first was Roald Dahl’s My Uncle Oswald which is actually not anything about feminism at all as it is a fictitious look at the life of a philanderer, beautifully written with one of the best humour styles I’ve ever encountered in writing. The author is one of Britain’s best known children novelists. The other book was Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues that went on to become a global sensation and a staple for feminist agitators in many parts of the world.

So when she mentioned Nancy Friday‘s Women on Top, I ordered it without thinking.  Unfortunately, since I got it, I had not been able to get beyond a the few random lines that I encountered in my first random opening of the pages. First impression: boring prose. I just never developed sufficient curiosity to go beyond the unimpressive first impression that stared me in the face and pore through the novel’s thick pages. Yet whenever we conversed, she asked me how I was doing on the book and I told her, she told me that I was missing out on interesting ideas that I could benefit from either as a writer or as a curious reader. I believed.

In any case, I still haven’t read it till today, and I may not any time soon. But when my friend Chris stayed over at my apartment this weekend, he stumbled on it and read it almost all night, and he has now been bombarding me with questions about why any woman would write such “depraved”  or “perverted” book disguised as experiences and fantasies of real-life women. In his words, some of the details were not only sometimes too disgusting for words (bestiality etc), but they were too far-fetched to have been dreamed up by real-life human beings. Nevertheless, he seemed attached enough to give the book more than one more reading before he left. According to what I’ve now read on Wikipedia, and the review in Time Magazine, I believe that the author has tried to use the book to show that men do not have the monopoly of perverted thoughts or sexual experimentation. If this is a victory for feminism or not – like The Vagina Monologues perhaps, or plain pornographic literature – I have no idea, and I doubt it, but I’m not going to find out soon. However it looks like a very bold statement of new directions.  Not new actually, it was published in 1991.

What Am I Doing With A Nancy Friday Book? was published on March 28th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, Observations, Opinion category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.