ktravula – a travelogue!

Blank Head Rants

“No one can ever know for sure what a deserted area looks like.” – George Carlin

I honestly, honestly have nothing to blog about today. Ask me, I can’t wait for January to be over with. It’s the longest month of the year, especially because it follows an already long festive one of December. February however is the shortest month, which is nice, except you are a compulsive blogger who has to write up to fourty-six interesting articles in a month.

What I intend to do in this short post then is to tell you the response to my so called “Charity Work”. It is interesting to see the responses so far, which is to me quite encouraging. We already have $100 pledged to Jos, Nigeria; I think. And today, Thursday, I will be making out the said photograph to send to the said donor who lives in Dolton, Illinois but wants to remain anonymous as soon as I receive the proof of said donation. There are two other pledges from contributors to this blog, and I thank them, Yemi and Tayo. Needless to say, it’s not sufficient. It is not the best we can do.

In a similar vein, I wrote a letter to the Fulbright Organization yesterday informing them of the project, and to the coordinator of the Haiti relief effort at my University. I haven’t received a response from either of them. What I hope to do in the next week is to hold an exhibition, if possible, of some of these photographs on campus. What I’m afraid of is that students may not have that much money to spare, adults who can spare may have already donated to Haiti. So for all its worth, if that ever happens, it will be more of my opportunity to showcase my work rather than to raise money. In any case, I’d be glad to explore the opportunity. Day by day, the pictures look better and better to me. I didn’t know that I’d taken so many shots in this little period of time.

If you’re interested in buying the works in this effort to raise money for Jos, Nigeria; and the country of Haiti, please head here for more information. I will try to keep the offer open until the end of my Fulbright Programme in May, if I can. From then on, you will have to pay heavily to buy them, by which time they would have become a collector’s item, even if I say so myself 🙂

SOMETHING ELSE: I heard that Apple has finally come out with it’s new tablet, and they have chosen no other name to call it than the iPad. The obviously flawed marketing strategy has now spurned so many spoofs and parodies on twitter since yesterday. The product was actually called the iTampon by pranksters in the extreme of it. What worried me the most why Mr Jobs hadn’t considered the fact that the iPad uses the very same sound patterns as the iPod, at least in Americans English. How will listeners be able to tell them apart? This may as well be a failure of language sensitivity as it is a failure of marketing. My two cents.

Short Observations from Class

Most students tended to make hasty generalizations from what they read. The book A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt had very many interesting stories from the perspective of the then young and uneducated Toyin Falola and his upbringing, but most who read it tended to think that his story was true for everyone else, e.g. people not remembering their date of birth. This happened last semester as well. Maybe we should bring Chimamanda back.
Americans wrote the shortened form of the English word for mother as “Mom” instead of “Mum” as I have been used to. I didn’t know this before. I’ve always written it as Mum, until someone from class gently corrected me after I wrote it on the blackboard. Then I gently corrected her too, and voiced my reluctance to ever adapt to American English. They found it amusing.
One of my students said on Monday after submitting an assignment to write a summary of the life of Wole Soyinka that his mother had met the Nigerian Nobel Laureatte once before, and found him to be brilliant. “Cool,” I said.
Many students used Yoruban whenever they used Yoruba as an adjective in an English sentence, rather than the usual Yoruba, e.g Yoruban boy, Yoruban culture, instead of Yoruba culture. Yoruba boy etc. I noticed this in the scripts of my Fall semester students last year as well. Do British English people make this generalization as well?

Let The Bidding Begin!

Here is my promised post about my short project to raise money for the victims of the Earthquake in Haiti, and the senseless ethnic pogrom in the Nigerian city of Jos. I know that many of you want to donate money but haven’t found the time or the way. Here is an opportunity to do so, and get something back for it. This is how it goes:

1. Choose one of my photographs that you want to receive on a 20×16 inches high quality photoprint paper (frame is optional, depending on where you live). It comes with a postcard and an autograph from ktravula.com. (You can tell me which of the photos you want by going to the page where the photos are posted, and starting your bid in the comment section. See the bottom of this post for a list.)

2. Make an offer in cash that you’ll like to pay for the said artwork. Bidding starts at $50, and has no upper limit. All you have to do is write something like this in the comment box on said page: “I want pic number 4, and I’m bidding to pay $80 for it.” or “I want the pic with the filename IMG_0114 for $500”. As soon as you do, your comment will show up on the comment bar on the right side of this blog, and anyone who has a higher bid will see it. In 24hours, and in the absence of a higher bid, you will be confirmed winner of the said artwork which will be sent to you by post as soon as you make the donation promised to the either of the following sources.

3. Donate 50% of the amount (or whatever percentage suits you) to facilitate relief for the homeless victims of the Jos crisis through this link, and ask for a proof of said donation either through email or through a written letter. (Read more about the Jos crises here on Jerremy’s Blog).

4. Donate the rest % via Yele Haiti,the American Red Cross, UNICEF or PlanUSA to the relief efforts in Haiti. When you do, you will be sent a confirmation email. Keep the email safe.

NOTE: You can make all your payments to either of these two causes, Jos or Haiti. You don’t necessarily have to split your donation, except you want to.

5. Send said proof of donation to me via JosHaiti@ktravula.com, with your name and postal address. You may also need to pay $50 for handling and postage of said artwork to you wherever you are all over the world. Residents of the United States will get their artwork within one week. For those overseas, it might take a few days later.

Now, here are the pages where you can find my photos all taken since August in locations in the United States. (Note: photo quality is better in print than on the computer screen):

To Carbondale and Back

Yesterday

An Evening Ride

Lights

In actual fact, you can ask for any photo on this blog, as long as it is the one I took myself.

Alright, let the bidding begin. I hope it’s simple enough. 🙂 If not, please let me know.

I heard that singer Lionel Richie is assembling a new cast to remake the 1984 hit We Are The World to raise money for Haiti. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was praised today by the President Bush/Clinton Haiti relief funds for his personal donations. Singers Beyonce, Twista, Rihanna and Wyclef Jean are doing all they could in their capacities as musicians. I can’t sing, unfortunately. This is all I have. I hope that you find the pictures good enough for you to spend your money on, especially with the aim of saving lives in some other part of the world. Cheers.

NOTE: This is totally not-for-profit!

On January and the Friggin’ Weather

I was almost surprised to discover that it is already the 26th of January 2010. Oh how time flies. It was just a few days ago that this new decade began with fireworks and an almost panty bomb. And just like that, we’re already one month up the new dozen ladders of this new year. Impressive indeed. At ktravula.com, you know what that means, don’t you? It means that we’re getting close to another season of 10 Reasons. I still have no idea what we’ll be debating this time. But the blog always surprises. In a related info, by the end of this month I’d have blogged for six straight months on ktravula.com. What would that make me? A blogaholic? I think so. All I need is a dose of Nigeria to cure me of this malady. Today I heard that another opposition politician in the country was assassinated in Ogun State. Very classy indeed. What a good thing to spend the quality time of state doing – assassinating opposition. My country is never short of deep depressing distractions.

In other news, the Winter season here has proven not to be Winter at all, but a winker one. I just don’t understand the darned weather at all. One day it’s freezing cold, and the other day, it’s hot. In the evening, it rains. I brought it to the attention of my students in class today and they gave me this wonderful nugget peculiar to Illinois, particularly Edwardsville: “You don’t like the weather? Just wait a few minutes!” I mean seriously, I’m depressed by its inconsistency. It just never stays too long to be defined. The ktravulake has refused to stay frozen long enough for me to play on it. It started de-freezing on the very first day of my planned play, and it has not frozen again since then, thanks to the weather. Well, it snowed today, but only for a little while. Let’s see for how long it stays cold before it warms up again.

I heard there was Harmattan in Nigeria. It was funny because I first heard it from a friend on gmail chat who had just gone to heat water for a shower. I was curious about how cold it could have been to necessitate boiling water, so I went to weather.com to see for myself. It was 28 degrees Celcious (82.4 degrees F). What? If we get that kind of temperature here, it will be called summer! I guess that explains why the first time I got off the plane, I was wearing three thick shirts and an overcoat. And that was in August. 28 degrees Celcius looks more like a very hot day to me right now, and Lagos and Ibadan people have absolutely no reason to take showers with hot water. Trust me 😀 If you doubt me, just take a look at the blog temperature on the upper right hand corner.

PS: I’m still waiting for the first bid on my KTravulartworks, seen on the wall of my apartment – without a frame – in that photo. The offer is still good to donate all profits to victims of disaster in Jos and in Haiti, so send me an email at ktravulart@ktravula.com to make an offer. It is your chance to get a beautiful artwork in your living room while donating money to a worthy cause. There’s nothing as fulfilling as killing two beasts with one shot. Is there?

For All You Pandorans

What impressed me most about the blockbuster movie Avatar is, surprisingly, not the amazing 3D animation, which nevertheless blew my mind as it did everyone else. After a while though, my eyes got used to the 3D effect; the novelty didn’t last long. It was not even the utterly patronizing storyline featuring a White Messiah coming from an advanced civilization to save a tribe of nature-oriented locals by undergoing a change and becoming one of them. How could that have impressed anyone? The storyline was predictable after a while as just another typical action movie with love thrown in, except with the twist of a White Messiah which we have seen in a few other movies like “A Man Called Horse,” (which is said to have started the pattern), and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” What about “Dances With Wolves” or “The Last Samurai”, “Pocahontas” and “FernGully.”?

No, what I was most impressed with was the Na’vi language of the movie, which I’ve now discovered was totally made up. Now that’s creativity. Of course, from the time I saw the movie last week, I knew that I was watching a totally made up language, and this is not a slight on the movie but common sense. It would be foolhardy to expect a White director to put a real world language in the mouth of a made up tribe of “primitive” aliens, especially in the age of political correctness. But I wasn’t reallysure until I confirmed today on Wikipedia. Here’s what it had to say:

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script and developed a culture for the Na’vi. Their language was created by Dr. Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC. The Na’vi language has a vocabulary of about 1000 words, with some 30 added by Cameron. The tongue’s phonemes include ejective consonants (such as the “kx” in “skxawng”) that are found in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, and the initial “ng” that Cameron may have taken from New Zealand Māori.

As a linguist, this fact tickled me to no end, and it should tickle you too. Click on the Na’vi language link on Wikipedia to see the form and phonology of the Na’vi language, developed solely for a movie. This is how to make a movie. This is one of the qualities of great artworks – the attention to detail, and the lengths to which artists go to make their work authentic. All the actors in the movie had to spend quality time learning to speak this totally made-up language, and master its nuances of speech – at least, its accepted speech patterns. The last time I was this impressed with movie language was after seeing Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ in which the actors spoke old Aramaic and Latin, two altogether dead languages that are no longer spoken by any group of living people (except the Catholic church, and scientists, for Latin, and a very small group of people, for Aramaic). So this is what makes Avatar great, and not the patronizing earth-saving story of the renegade crippled-White-Marine-who-falls-in-love-with-native sentimental crap. And the movie is darn too long!

« Older Entries Newer Entries »