reflections on the world
Browsing the archives for the Fun category.
These series of youtube videos highlighting cultural/linguistic eccentricities have been all around the internet. These three made my day.
Jamaica
and New York
And No one
There are a lot more online, some funnier than others. It’s fun wondering what expressions would be in “What Linguists Say?” video.
The last couple of days has brought a record number of new visitors to this blog. That brings with it a certain kind of delight. (Welcome people!) I may yet resume a regular dump of my thoughts on you once again as I have been doing for the past two years. Sitting here for the past few hours has brought me into a few ideas none of which have furthered the work into my thesis beyond a few sentences. On one screen is my twitter feed that shows me diverse opinions of trending topics, from the Golden Globes to the Fuel Subsidy fights in Nigeria (in which my heart absolutely resides), and the Republican Primary fight in which another video has shown up with frontrunner Mitt Romney offering an unbelievably cold response to a sick man who had asked for his opinion on medical marijuana.
As I have discovered many times over, coming back to the empty page of a new blogpost always brought words back to my fingertips, bringing me back to a required level head to continue my work. In any case, here is what I thought: a solution to an old puzzle. All the (about three thousand) pictures that I have taken since this travelogue began need to go somewhere. As from today, I will be putting one (or two) of them per week out on the blog’s Facebook page with a little back story. If I never eventually make it to writing/completing that travel book of all those experiences, pictures and short back stories would have to do. Of course, you would be missing out on this if you are not already following the page.
Alright, that is out. Back to wondering how to successfully measure the progress of second language tonal acquisition, and communicate same to a thesis committee.
America’s most famous astrophysicist dropped by campus today for an event of the SIUE Graduate School. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and the recipient of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest award given by NASA to a non-government citizen. He is also the author of The Pluto Files and Death by Black Hole (and other Cosmic Quandaries).
His talk, titled “Our Past, Present, and Future in Space” focused on the regression and eventual end of the US space program and the contribution of public and political apathy to this end. Those who have heard him talk will be familiar with his worldview: a passionate defense of imagination and a unified, inspiring public policy for science. The end of the space program, according to Mr. Tyson, is one of the worst things to have happened to America in a long time not only because of the now total absence of motivation among young people, but also because of how the general apathy has now negatively affected the status of the country in the world. In a preview to the visitor’s speech, Dean Aldemaro Romero of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences had this to say: “While I was growing up in Venezuela and told my parents that I wanted to be an astronaut, they told me ‘You have to be either an American or a Russian.’ Now, many decades later, as an American citizen, I have found out that to go to space, I’d either have to be Chinese or Russian.”
There was a lot more. The maps of the world, when plotted on a chart on the basis of resources spent on science (and, on another chart, on the basis of scientific progress/development in the last decade) shows the African continent virtually invisible. What concerned him however – as well as the members of the audience – was the shrunken shape of the American map as well. Even Brazil, and Japan, on this map showed far more encouraging progress, to the dismay of all who have previously believed this country as being on the farthest frontier of future advancements. Many things are wrong, among which is the absence of a political will and imagination.
I asked for his opinion on the absence of scientific advancement in Africa, and whether the frontier had irrevocably moved west. He disagreed, opining instead that like every great civilization had come and gone, the continent would have its turn again at some point in time. There is a particular initiative at the moment in South Africa, he said, where scientists have begun training young high school students in order to be able to produce the next big scientist (of the stature of Albert Einstein) and a Nobel Prize in Physics from the African continent.
What did he think of Physicist Richard Feynman? “He’s as brilliant as he has been described,” he replied. Known among young people in America today as the man who relegated Pluto from the status of a planet to that of a mere floating astral rock, Neil has contributed to the progress of modern science and astrophysics in popular culture than most people in the world today, and continues to do so. It was quite an enlightening event. His autograph on my copy of his book simply read: “To Kola, welcome to the universe.” His book, The Pluto Files details in a fun manner the arguments and debates surrounding the relegation of the former planet Pluto, including also letters from angry young children and cartoons from the media weighing in on the many sides of the relegation debate.
Previous guest speakers at the Arts & Issues events here include Maya Angelou, Ken Burns, and the Basie Count Orchestra. I recommend this video, by the way, Dr. Tyson in conversation with Stephen Colbert. (H/T @loomnie)
Google has just come up with a great product called the Ngram Viewer (discussed in this equally fascinating TED video). What the Ngram Viewer does is to give users around the world the ability to sit at home and search through a database of billions of texts. These texts have been scanned into the Google database from all the books published in the world to date. Among other things, what this gives us is the power to discover the rate of occurrence of certain words, phrases or names in publishing history. Extremely fascinating, right?
I have been playing around with the program and here is my first experiment: to figure out which of these men in Nigerian political/social history is most frequently referenced in text, and since when. The men are Olusegun Obasanjo (who ruled the country for a record 11 years and played a crucial role in its political history), Chinua Achebe – Africa’s foremost novelist whose first 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is the most widely translated texts in English literature from Africa, Wole Soyinka – the continent’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and finally Obafemi Awolowo – nationalist, politician and visionary. The result is stunning and will offer nuggets for discussion among people who have argued (many times without proof) that one person was more famous than the other.
There are a few more I have tried out. This graph showed that the word “nigger” got more usage in the mid 1800s (just after Lincoln set the slaves free, which made sense), dropped in usage in the 1980s, and is now coming back into use after the year 2000. Go figure. The word “nigga” however is a totally different matter. The word “Republicans” was initially more famous than “Democrats” but eventually fell around 1900 and has remained stably lower ever since. And what about languages/cultures? This graph shows how much the African languages/cultures Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Swahili, Twi, Edo, and Zulu have featured in texts through time. Fascinating result, and not only because Yoruba leads the pack with a clear margin! Yoruba is not the biggest language/culture in Africa. The word “Nigeria”, according to the Ngram has been in use/print since around 1860 (contrary to what we have been told) although it finally gained currency at the beginning of 1900s. Finally, I did a search on my favourite comedians: George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor. The result puts Bill Cosby on top and George Carlin at the bottom. Oh well.
What Google has done with this project called the Ngram Viewer (I say again, an extremely fascinating project) is to endow the world with a new great tool to do anthropology and study history with nothing but access to the internet. Life, and history, just became even more enlightening.
Hanging out with writers and poets at a cafe downtown last night…
The open-mic poetry reading was sponsored by the English Language and Literature Association. Poets and readers include Jason Braun, David Rawson, Geoff Schmidt and others. Earlier in the day was a similar event at the school library featuring Eugene B. Redmond, the Poet Laureate of East St. Louis.
I read four unpublished poems.
The last in the 2011 American World Series games will take place tonight. The St. Louis Cardinals are playing with the Texas Rangers. I support the Cardinals, of course, not only because they’re our team, but because they have come back with resilience in each game where they’ve been written off. Whoever wins today’s game will become the “World” Champions. Why shouldn’t it be the Cardinals?
Here’s another conceit: maybe Governor Rick Perry of Texas will reconsider running for president if his team loses. I’m kidding, of course. 
Go Redbirds!
Update: We Won!!! The Cardinals are the World Champions!
Watching a cover of Rihanna’s “Man Down” yesterday, I noticed something curious: one of the girls in the video pronounced the word “man” with a familiar consistency. I became intrigued and went to see other videos by the young ladies. Eventually I found one in which they answered questions from their fans, and I got what I was looking for. They were born to Nigerian parents, raised partly in Nigeria and in the United States. It’s unmistakable. That pronunciation of “man” in the video is of someone who has lived in Nigeria at one point or the other in their life. Watch the song cover here.
The last time something like this happened to me was four weeks ago on the streets of Chicago. “Are you from Nigeria?” I asked the taxi driver who had spoken just a few words to me through the window as I complained that his fares were too exorbitant. “Yes, in fact,” he responded, to the astonishment of my company. “There was something in his pronunciation,” I told her later. It turned out that the man had grown up in Nigeria but had lived in Chicago since 1979. Like her, he was also astonished to hear that I had guessed his nationality from just a few words in a big city.
There are some very distinct peculiarities in Nigerian English pronunciations observable usually only to compatriots, residents or regular visitors. This must be why all comedic imitations of African speech by American actors seem to be funnier (or sillier, depending on how you look at it) for being too inaccurately generic. (Chris Tucker does another one of those impressions at the end of this video, and Steve Havey in this one.)
PS: Here is a related video in which we played around with the perceptible difference in “man” on a Nigerian or an American tongue.
Pictures from an exhibition of African contribution to 
American history, at the Missouri History Museum last week. They included Epa masks from Nigeria, real doors, manacles and other relics from the slave castles in Ghana, clothes and artifacts from American slavery, and plenty 20th century notable artifacts including Alex Haley’s typewriter, Mohamed Ali’s famous track jacket, the KKK’s hood, Michael Jordan’s vest, Michael Jackson’s whistle, Prince’s purple vest, Serena William’s top, Louis Armstrong’s bugle, a black astronaut’s suit, among so many others. Hanging from the ceiling of the history museum is “The Spirit of St. Louis“, the famous airplane that made the first transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927.
More about the exhibition here.
SOPA breaks our internet freedom!
Any site can be shut down whether or not we've done anything wrong.
