ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Uncategorized category.

Secondary School Days

It was always cold and dry in November towards the end of the school year, and the season always came with a certain bubbling feeling and restless feet. School was at Agodi, a stone throw from the governor’s office, and the state prisons. It was bordered by a military housing project/barrack which had some of the best eating shacks we had ever encountered. It was also the only place where we could go have burukutu in the after hours with the little money we could save. Fufu at Barracks was the best, for some reason. It was rock solid, and filling. It was just as well since the majority of the customers of the eating joints were military people expected to be tough, filled, and healthy.

The broadcasting corporation was about two miles away. It had a very large fenced compound where at this time of the year an exhibition was held. It was called an exhibition because it was conceived as a carnival for the Christmas season. In time, it became a spot for gaming, alcohol and peppersoup and not much else. It was the ultimate taboo spot of escape from school, and we took the liberties many times daring the always looming risk of being apprehended by state law enforcements sent out to find school children loitering the streets during school hours. The best way to get to the broadcasting corporation from the school without getting caught was to walk through a winding short-cut road that went through the Officer’s Mess of the Second Mechanized Division located just across the road. I see it now, a quiet living estate with fancy houses and barking dogs. Three, and sometimes four, young school boys in blue checkered shirts trekking across the land under a sometimes scorching sun. In their pockets are a few coins each, and some roasted groundnuts tied in transparent nylons.

The excitement at the exhibition grounds never always justified its anticipation, but it almost always compensated for gloom of confinement that the walls of our school represented. Dry harmattan Novembers on the streets of Bashorun as pesky loose cannon truants from a faraway place looking for a lost piece of their precocious childhoods… were good times. They also featured really dusty feet in rubber sandals.

Me Plus

Here is a riddle: what is the best way to take over the world? Need a minute? The answer is this: make something that everybody uses. This was my first thought on encountering the now almost inevitable internet destination that is Google Plus. What it is is an aggregation of Google’s top services and much of what we use on the internet, in one place.

It has got everyone talking. Even my grammar professor want to know how it can be used to teach an online class (hint: it can’t without the glitches of privacy and copyright concerns). It can, however be used to manage a social existence without worries to privacy the kind that Facebook brought. What exactly is Google Plus? I’d say it’s Facebook, Twitter, Blogger combined with some of other services we use everyday. Who would have thought that a day will come when everything we search for on Google can now be indexed publicly for our friends to see if we want. Who needs twitter? Who needs Facebook? Who needs a blog even? With Google Plus, everything comes together, and you still get to keep your gmail address.

Here’s how someone put it in a recent shared post:

Instead of saying, “I’m going to write a blog post now,” or “I’m going to send an e-mail” or “I think I’ll tweet something” you simply say what you have to say, then decide who you’re going to say it to.

If you address it to “Public,” it’s a blog post.

If you address it to “Your Circles” it’s a tweet.

If you address it to your “My Customers” Circle it’s a business newsletter.

If you address it to a single person, it can be a letter to your mother.

Why would you pay to keep a blog online when you can have everything a blog gives you for free on such a cool platform? Oh, I know the answer: that little issue of copyright and ownership. Besides that however, Google Plus is a nice new addition. I’ve already begun considering leaving Facebook though I know it might never really happen. It’s already a while since I last logged on to twitter. I think there is something relaxing about not having to open so many windows on my (wait for it: Google) Chrome browser.

I hope to use G+ to share some of my online curiosities and discoveries, particularly those not worth writing a whole blog post about. Join my Google Plus circle here.

Political Theatre Sucks

By the end of this year, one new phrase would have been added to the English dictionary – or at least the urban dictionary. That is “the debt ceiling”. To the layman, it means nothing other than the ball that both Democrats and Republicans in the US legislative houses have been kicking around for the past few months. If anything in the news is to be believed, in a week’s time, the credit rating of the country will be permanently damaged from the country’s default on its financial obligations except this “ceiling” is raised.

Horrible as that prospect seems, it has become nothing but a means of political posturing and hostage-taking by elected representatives. On the one hand a party that wants nothing cut out of its special interest programs, on the other another party (and its activist arm) which is hell-bent on opposing any compromise that involves as much as a tiny concession on revenue increase. From afar, all this just seems mad. This is not what you’d expect from “adults in the room”. I listened to the president’s speech yesterday where he did his best to again articulate his ideas of the best solutions to the problem. I also saw the almost immediate rebuttal and posturing by the Speaker of the House. And in that little space of time, the country was back again to a countdown to (as The Daily Show calls it, Armadebtdon: the end of the world as we owe it.)

Unfortunately, there is nothing else exciting on television these days so we will watch with bated breath. What works for me especially while watching an important football match is to imagine the worst, and just enjoy the roller-coaster ride of crazy emotions. I’ll do that now, since politicians have chosen this option over good old common sense. In any case, we still will always have Netflix.

Back on the Road

Driving for long hours requires more than just a strong will. Stamina also helps. And when the driver has spent previous days in the comfort of a good house and long hours of rest, it might be a lot easier than a sleep-deprived grad student taking three courses in one semester. The last time I drove for such a long distance, it took the alertness of the fellow passenger in the front seat to prevent the car from going off the road in a brief second of a careless shut eye. We were heading to Kansas City, five hours away. This time, there was no such instance, or even a minor risk. A strong body, a strong mind, a good healthy conversation, and a wide open road with pleasant breeze kept us all alert, and at ease.

The only other observation about this journey other than the presence of a large noticeable number of signposts advertising porn and “pleasure stops”, and smiling co-commuters racing with us in different cars at over 70 miles an hour, is the incredibly long and winding nature of the one road that took us on over 280 miles of the whole trip. Ah, and large trucks transporting whoknowswhat. It’s hard not to make comparisons with the roads on the way from the south of Nigeria to the north. The only difference will be the quality of the tar – not cars.

Terror in Nigeria

“I’m Nigerian, not a terrorist. I don’t kill people that’re not from another part of my country” from old post.

It’s getting old – the idea that government is now somehow able to provide adequate security for the citizens without being able to sufficiently understand the extent of the problem itself. Now, one day at a time, the country is disintegrating into the abyss and the citizenry is left at the mercy of a better equipped, better funded and certainly more resolute gang of zealots. In the south is MEND – the group that started ostensibly to protest the environmental pollution of the Niger Delta whose tactics now include setting up explosives in public places. In the north is Boko Haram – an equally psychopathic distant cousin of Al-Qaeda, opposed to civilization and westernization (but still use cars and bombs, go figure). Yesterday, Nigeria’s first suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at the national police headquarters in Abuja killing himself and a traffic warden, and wounding a bunch of others. Crazy times we live in.

It’s hard to analyze this any other way other than as a failure of government that made proliferation of explosives something of a possibility (because of poor security systems) in a place where some people still can’t afford to feed a family. But then, these days violence seems to always find an outlet. Ethnic clashes seem to have lost their allure, we’re back to making bombs and blowing each other up. Crazy times we live in.

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