The Pink Elephant in my Head

The mind has a mind of its own at times. You give it a specific instruction for instance; it goes on and does the exact opposite. “Don’t think of a pink elephant” you tell it, and rest assured, you WILL spend the next 24 hrs thinking of pink elephants. You get a seemingly irrelevant question in your head, can’t find an answer, and decide to chuck it to the side. It will keep coming back to bother you, like the pebble in your shoe that will obviously stick around unless you do something about it.


The latest pebble in my mind: How come I have never seen, at any time, any of Zim’s favorite cars (please refer to the short glossary below for explanation of underlined term) being advertised on TV. Yeah I know, seemingly irrelevant issue to be bothered with, but it’s driving me nuts not knowing why. I guess that makes me a little OCD, but look: I see lot of car ads on television (please refer to the short glossary below for explanation of underlined term) advertising an awful lot of makes, even the Chinese’s Chery for crying out loud, but none of our favorites. Why?


Oh, the short glossary I meant:
Zim’s Favorite Cars: Toyota is the dominant brand on Zimbabwean roads (the best Automotive Superbrand of 2011, and one of the top 10 overall Superbrands in Zimbabwe for two years running…just in case you wanted to argue out this obvious fact). It also has a number of world famous makes of vehicles, but it would be a mistake to think these international hits are also Zimbo’s favorites. Walk along any street in the country and you will quickly realize that we have our own personal favorites spotting…um…unique names and designs. More about that a little later.
Television: In Zimbabwe, we only have two local TV channels, or more accurately, two halves of the same channel running concurrently. Fortunately, we also get to watch neighboring South Africa’s terrestrial SABC channels, and this is generally what we refer to as our ‘television’ down here. We watch them completely free of charge. I don’t think they mind.



There she blows, with a huge behind for all your groceries and stuff

Explanation 1) Maybe the cars are a little dated: the ads came, stormed the screen and went before I discovered digital TV. It would neatly explain why I’ve never come across any of these cars on screen, but it’s an explanation that makes me appear a total shmuck for getting worked up over something with such a simple answer. And anyway, I bet no one ever came across a 2001 ad for, say, the 2001 Toyota Picnic even in 2001, so there.

Explanation 2) Toyota has never placed any ads anywhere for these cars, ever. It’s possible, seeing as most of the cars in question are not exactly…er…aesthetically pleasing and wouldn’t make good TV viewing. Makes a lot of sense, especially since it shifts the blame from me to Toyota, something I am perfectly comfortable with. The problem with this solution is that it could get me in a lot of trouble with my fellow country mates, seeing as they have already fallen in love with these cars and are buying them in droves, weird shapes and all.  Also, it lets SABC completely off the hook, and I’m not prepared to do that yet.
Explanation 3) The SABC just couldn’t bring themselves to flight ads of vehicles bearing so obviously silly names. I mean seriously, how the heck did Toyota ever think ‘Toyota Spacio’ or ‘Toyota Starlet’ would be great names for a car? Where did they get such ideas from – a late night, slightly inebriated, Friday brainstorming session?

Mmmh, I like that train of thought. I can almost imagine the setting:-
 “So what are we gonna name these cars?” The head in the creative department goes, “Come on guys; let’s have some fun with this…” He looks around his team members expectantly. Of course one of the guys, the genius from India, finally braves it and timidly offers an idea, “Well…it’s like…um…this probably sounds like a dumb idea,” Laughs nervously, “But me and my wife, we’ve just had a baby girl and um…I’ve always thought it would be really cool to, you know, like name a car after my daughter. She’s called Raum.” The department head, to everyone else’s surprise, unexpectedly jumps up, clapping his hands with glee, “Brilliant, I love it! Sue, take that down.”
And of course everybody opens up after that and starts throwing around crazy name after crazy name, some of which eventually end up in the incredulous hands of the factory manager, car body designer…or whoever is responsible for stamping brands on cars’ behinds. Now that would neatly explain the conception of other ingenious names such as the Noah, Gaia, and probably Ipsium.

 

I kind o’ like this theory. It lays the blame for the lack of ads squarely on Toyota and the SABC. The problem, though, is that such an explanation would also probably get me into trouble with my fellow Zimbos as well, so I decided to contact the SABC marketing department and get an explanation from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Instead of tackling the problem however, I was met with a barrage of diversionary questions - whether I would like to place a commercial during The Bold and the Beautiful, whether I voted for Isindigo in the SAFTA’s awards, and (when I answered ‘no’ to both questions) how the heck I was able to view any SABC channel in Zimbabwe in the first place when it was clearly illegal to do so.

With the fear that my meddling attempt to merely kill the pink elephant in my head could earn the whole country an SABC blackout, leaving us entirely in the hands of (*shudder*) BTV, I made a hasty retreat. This means I still don’t have a proper answer to my seemingly irrelevant question. And the fact that at every corner I turn, I am confronted by either one of these perculiarly shaped, unadvertised and inappropriately named vehicles doesn’t help.

Note to readers outside Zimbabwe: The author of this post did not invent the vehicle names contained in this article just to provide comic relief to the anonymous readers prowling this blog for want of better things to do. These cars really do exist. Honest. Just ask any Zimbabwean, or better still, any Japanese national.And back to the main issue. See, more I dwelt on it, the more I started thinking there is something fishy going on at the SABC: why are they not advertising Zimbo’s favorite cars? What is wrong with our cars…or more to the point, what is wrong with the SABC for not having them on during ad breaks? Who is to blame for this discrepancy that is giving me one sleepless night after the other?

I'm Alive! I'm Alive!

The loud but abrupt yell of joy in the early hours of 22 May 2011 was the sound of me waking up and suddenly realizing that I was alive. Of course, this is not my usual morning reaction to a brand new day. My normal routine is to open my eyes, look at the time, then let out a long drawn out sigh at the uninviting prospect of jumping into the cold early morning shower.

22 May was kind of different though - somebody had chosen to carelessly predict that the world would come to an end the previous day, that is, 21 May 2011. I mean that literally…not the ‘my girlfriend dumped me for another guy, it’s the end of the world’ kind of meaning, but the real earthquakes and lightning and fire ‘mankind is doomed save for a select raptured few’ kind of meaning.

Thats the world exploding, and that
silhoutte is a some lucky dude getting 'raptured ' the last minute

The culprit is a certain Harold Camping, an 89 year old American (of course he’s American) who adamantly stated that Noah had a 7 day warning before the flood so that  translates into a 7000 year warning for us, starting from 4990 B.C (the dubious year he states the flood started)  and ending on - yes you’ve guessed it – 21 May 2011.

Frankly, I didn’t see any Zimbos scrambling to prepare for the great day of the Lord Almighty. Most, it seems, had no idea the world was coming to an end.

 I spent a lot of time surfing the net so I knew, and wondered why God would reveal the info to anyone, seeing as He clearly pointed out in the Bible that no one can ever know such a thing. I also wondered why such an important fact would be revealed to just one corner of the world which happens to be the least to care about such trivialities (they have greater things to worry about see, like Baseball, McDonalds and Charlie Sheen).

I gotta hand it to this Camping guy though, he definitely has guts. Think about it: it was a prediction about an event which the rest of the world was convinced wasn’t gonna happen. And he put himself all out to the world. I am pretty sure a lot of journalists had their 22 May articles written, revised, edited and re-edited way in advance.

I’m was glad to see that somebody in America still believes that the world, as we know it, is going to end someday through divine intervention. Most people in the…um…developed world believe that if at all, the world will end when we all nuke ourselves out of existence, get hit by a meteorite or when BP messes up and pulls another fast one on us…a much bigger one.

The problem with these quirky predictions, however, is that they make people throw out the baby with the bath water. What I mean by the inappropriately inserted saying is that people will become much more skeptical about anything religious. The end of this system of things is going to come…amidst a very cynical population.

In the meantime, all the Non-Christians of the nasty disposition are probably rubbing their hands with glee. Just imagine all the possible taunts that could stem from the already existing ‘Christian’ idiosyncrasies:

 ‘Hellfire…so much for the “God of love”’

‘Christmas? Funny, your main guy stole his birthday from a pagan god!’

‘Trinity? Three in one God? Can this script get any weirder?’

And add the latest, thanks to Harold Camping, ‘Apocalypse now? Apocalypse maybe…Apocalypse maybe not!’

Windows Is Shutting Down...

So, there is this huge influx of strange cell phones into the country which is threatening the monopoly of our trusty and dearly loved Nokias. They are loud, they are flashy, they are huge (I mistook one for an iPad) and they carry multiple sim cards so you can simultaneously receive calls from your NetOne, Telecel, Econet lines as well as an MTN one on roam.

Think its a Nokia? Look closer...

We call them all G-tides down here in Zimbabwe, probably because that particular brand seems to have pioneered the invasion spirit.

Doubtless, it’s a completely new breed of phones the likes Zimbabwe has never seen before. And this, being a country endowed with its fair share of quirky individuals, has challenged my sentiments that Zimbabweans are really great guys. They are not taking the invasion lying down: they are saying some not very nice things about the phones.

For instance, some people are calling these phones ‘radios with sim cards’, and one guy went as far as saying that ZBH should start collecting licence fees from all owners. Well, I admit they do tend to get a little loud…aw okay, VERY loud, but c’mon: radio with sim? Not very nice.

Another popular legend doing the rounds says that one particular phone fell into a plate of good ole sadza. Immediately, they say, the phone sprang up from stand-bye mode and started flashing on the screen: ‘Phone charging’. Lame shot, really.

Then there is the other one, which can’t possibly be true but can only be an obvious stab at the linguistic dexterities of the phone makers. It was related to me with a straight face, a face which insisted that when he sent a message on an acquaintance’s cell, it  indicated simply ‘Message Went.’ And a minute later, when the message was replied to on the same phone, the notification read simply: ‘Message Brought.’ Very funny guys, cut it out.

Them phones, according to another tale, must surely spot what should be the strongest and most sensitive antennas in the world. As the story goes, one phone, just after a gonyet drove by, dutifully recorded ‘One Missed Call’ on the screen.

Antennas so strong, went the explanation, that any type of wave (cosmic ray, gamma ray, sound wave) gets translated into a cell phone signal.

The last is my personal fav...I mean…the one I personally dislike the most. It was a conversation (reportedly) captured between a lady and a cell phone repair guy. Now this guy had just had a god-awful time trying to resuscitate a dead phone. It went something like this…

“…you are sure you never dropped the phone?”

“No, I never did mukwasha,” the lady answers.

“Or immerse it in water?”

“No”

“You didn’t leave it near a huge magnet, like your home theatre speakers or something?” The guy is getting desperate, of course, because he knows this to be a highly unlikely cause for cell phone damage.

“I do not have a home theatre,” The lady points out.

“Okay.” The guy scratches his head, “What was displayed on the phone screen just before it blacked out?”

The lady has it written down, she read, “Saving your settings, Windows is shutting down.”

The phone never made it.

See, not some very nice things them Zimbos are saying about these phones. It gets worse…much worse: something I discovered when I stumbled on an I Hate G-TIDE Cell Phones Facebook page when I was concluding this post. If you are a G-Tide fan, please stay away, unless you have a exceptionally thick hide.

Very Much Alive...And Still Apolitical

Thought I should pop in and assure my loyal readers that I am still alive and kicking, like I’ve never lived and kicked before! Its been awhile since I posted anything, and considering the contents of my previous post, the place I am located these days (Chipinge!) and the season we are going through (Summer = lotsa rain = LIGHTNING!), some could have been inevitably led to some erroneous, if not startling, conclusions.

Stop the contemplations, I’m here. Alive.

And you can thank the guy who dared attack and ridicule my neutral stance on politics for this comeback as well. I am not so good with spoken words, so the best reply I could come up with at the time of the attack was “Read my blog.”

So, here I am.

In politics, you are most probably the dirt being stamped on.

Lest I insult a crowd larger than the anti-Mubarak protestors in Cairo, let me first point out that I do not despise anyone delving in politics (unless you beat me up for my neutral stance, of course). What I do hate is the whole wretched system. It is a gross failure. I mean, lets be honest here, man has been trying to rule man for some freaking 6000 years and no one has been able to do a good job of it so far. Or ever. It all goes round and round in circles.

It reminds me of an analog I recently heard. It goes something like this:-

You are travelling on a long distance bus, right, when this guy stands up from a front seat and tells everybody to surrender their prized possessions to him, or risk being thrown out the speeding bus. No one complains, seeing he is a monya...and the bus really was speeding. So he starts moving from seat to seat collecting cash, maG-tide cellphones, jewellery (nah, this is Zimbabwe, slash out jewellery)…and lots of other stuff.

But then there is a much stronger monya, you know, a real Great Khali, relaxing on the back seat. The passengers wait expectantly for the robber to get to the back seat. See, they hope this strong monya will challenge the robber monya and save them?

And it happens! A fight erupts between the two. They tumble together, fists fly, they throw each other onto the ground. They grunt, they groan until finally, the back seat monya wins and throws the robber out! Salvation: the passengers cheer; sigh with relief; pats on the back for the hero and all.

The backseat monya then slowly walks to front of the bus, gestures for silence and calmly announces, “Vabereki, ngoma ndiyo ndiyo: give me all your stuff, or I’m throwing you out!”

Maybe you have heard the story – but you have never thought of applying it to politics - have you? To me, it neatly describes why I do not like placing my hopes of a better life on mere mortal man. It’s all the same: an endless cycle of hoping, deferred hopes and eventually, certain disappointment. if anything,  that is one thing I have learnt from history.

They Call It African Science

I once told someone that eternal hellfire is a myth. He looked at me kind of funny like I had a screw loose in my head. At another time, I told the same person that Christmas is also a myth. For him that clinched it: I was definitely nuts. Sigh ~ disillusioning people, it seems, is a messy business. I never thought I would want to keep on doing it.

Then the rainy season kicked in with all its thunder and lightning and weird ‘campfire’ stories and I couldn’t help it - the disillusioning gene cannot be suppressed. This time, I am giving Christendom a break and going after the ‘African Science’ community. By that term, I’m talking witchcraft, black magic, voodoo, dark arts or whatever you call it in your part of the world. I’ll just call all of them witches for simplicity. There are 4 common myths:-

Myth 1: There is black magic…and there’s also white magic
‘White magic’ is an oxymoron, much like saying ‘pretty ugly’, ‘unbiased opinion’ or ‘awfully nice’. The phrase simply shouldn’t exist because all magic is evil EVEN when one supposedly uses it to do something ‘good’. Some call it African Science down here in Zimbabwe. Yeah, right. Sorry Harry Potter fans: no matter how cute he might look flying around with his round rimmed glasses and over sized magician’s gown, he is still evil.



Myth 2: Witches fly to China at night
….in the sense of surfing the internet, maybe, or if they have a private jet in the back yard. They do not leave their bodies at night to attend secret meetings in China, Dubai, India, underwater, or wherever your local witch tells you they are spending their evenings these days. Even if they could (in the same way that Santa Claus, complete with sledge and reindeer, could), why bother leave a warm bed when you can conveniently Skype?


Myth 3: Witches Control Lightning
….and lightning conductors freak them out real bad, right? Otherwise lightning strikes wouldn’t have decreased since Benjamin Franklin got inspired. Check any honest report these days about lightning strikes to see where the victim was at the time of the incident: herding cattle out in the plain, fixing his satellite dish on the rooftop…etc. Lightning mostly strikes a high and positively charged point and if you are it during a storm, then you are…err… toast. No flesh and blood creature has the power to manipulate this powerful force of nature.

Think someone can control this?

Myth 4: Witches can morph into animals
Oh, come on! I didn’t even fall for this one back when I was in Grade 2 watching Visionaries on telly. Its like someone coming over and trying to convince me that Santa exists after all! People do not turn into animals; that would be like making a mockery of the Genesis account (to the Swedes, that’s a story found in the Bible).

Ok, before you go out and start fooling around with things you don’t understand, let me make one thing clear. Magic practitioners do exist, a pretty nasty lot if you’ll ever find one. However, their main power lies in deceit: trying to make themselves look much more powerful than they really are.

So there, I’ve done my part.

P.S: Please ignore the Google ads on this particular post ('love spells', 'voodoo spells', 'gifted psychic'?....purleeeease!)

A Puzzling Pentecostal Experience

I wont pretend I know why a lot of people do the things they do in their churches. Funny enough, it seems as though lot of people themselves are not sure why they do the things they do in their own churches either.

This thought came to me when I remembered, for no apparent reason, a certain quirky experience I had on one particular Pentecostal All Night Prayer meeting. How I ended up in there is a long story; involving heated debates, a round of church tours and a dog eared paperback Bible – I might tell you about it someday.

The fact remains that on this chilly night, at around at around 11 p.m, I found myself seated in a rented lecture theatre, trying my best to listen to what a pastor down on the podium was saying.
Then, I started feeling drowsy. Once or twice, I jerked my head up in the comical manner of one fighting a losing battle against sleep. I did try concentrating on the sermon, but I guess I tried too hard…because the next thing I knew, after the briefest of blackouts, was the pastor pointing in my direction and everyone in the hall looking at me. He was calling me up front.

Let me make it clear at this point that I had attended this event strictly as an observer. Earlier during the night, I had seen this pastor guy do a lot of alarming stuff on the stage; like getting into screaming matches with troubled souls to scare the hell…I mean demons out of them, going around praying and granting instant salvation to anyone who felt they needed saving, and slaying a lot of people down with…um…the Holy Spirit.

For one good hour, people all over had been swooning, gracefully falling into the waiting hands of the assistants. Others screamed and writhed on the ground as demons were yanked out of them, and still yet, others erupted into an ecstatic chattering of some exotic, but vocabulary limited new language that only I, and few other individuals, seemed to be ignorant of.

It was all very entertaining…but only from a distance. I had absolutely no intention of becoming part of it. So when the pastor called me up front, I stubbornly stayed seated.

Obviously, the kind and considerate Christian brothers around me couldn’t just stand by and watch a dear lost soul remain unsaved. I was given encouraging glances by the people in the crowd. I did try to ignore them, but then one of the pastor’s assistants actually came over to usher me down to the stage. Being an awfully bashful guy, I decided to end the awkward stand off and go along.

I braced myself for the unexpected as the pastor put a hand on my forehead and started praying over me, probably with the intention of driving out the demon of sleep that had so shamelessly taken me over at such a pious event. Or maybe he simply wanted to give me a healthy wallop of the Holy Spirit, strong enough to topple me over and have me end up talking funny. Given the choice, I’d take option B.

As my type of luck would have it, there was an option C I hadn’t accounted for.

See, the hand on my forehead started pushing me. To prevent myself from overbalancing and falling, I naturally started stepping backwards. The insistent pastor would have none of it so he kept pushing my head back. My sense of equilibrium would have none of it either, so it kept moving me backward to keep me from falling.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed two of the pastor’s assistants expectantly hovering near me (waiting for the point I would head for the ground, of course).

It must have been a comical sight to the honest on looker: the pastor, hand on my head, shouting and hurling insults ‘in the name of Jesus’ at whatever he wanted to come out of me….and me stubbornly retreating backwards as if I was desperate to have what was in me stay in me. I could imagine those in the crowd pitifully shaking their heads and saying to each other, ‘Strong demon, that.’

The circus came to a climax when the back of my feet came to the stairs. Therein I faced another dilemma: should I continue my backward retreat by climbing the stairs, or should I finally give up and let the pastor push me over into the waiting hands of the attendants?

I took option two, closed my eyes and was gingerly but swiftly lowered to the ground by expert hands. I felt the team around me move away then, having finished with me. A job very well done.

Ok: So there I was, sprawled on the ground, supposedly in a semi-conscious state, after having a particularly strong demon ousted out of me. The problem with this scenario was that I was fully conscious, feeling as fine as I was before the show, definitely not feeling as if something had been removed from or imparted to me…and left with two concurrent lines of thought running through my mind.

No, thats not me. Just a similar event.

The first line of thought, oddly enough, was that I was getting my jacket dirty. See, I had recently gave it a good scrubbing over the past weekend, now the white stripes were all going to get mucked up. I was worried that I might have to wash it a second time before I could put it on again. Why this thought seemed important to me at the time still puzzles me.

The second line of thought presented a more immediate problem to be dealt with. How the hell was I supposed to know how long I should stay down there? If I got up too early, everybody, including the pastor might think that the dose he gave me fell short of being sufficient, and might decide to add a little more. Now, I didn't want any more of whatever he had done to me. At the same time, I didn’t want to spend too much time down on the floor either….I mean…ever tried pretending you are unconscious on a cold hard dirty floor in your favorite clean jacket in a room full of curious peering faces? Darn uncomfortable.

Fortunately, I started hearing some commotion in another part of the hall. With the hope that everyone’s attention had surely shifted from me to there, I silently got up and returned to my seat.
Ten minutes later, after deciding the all night should be a half night for me, I was tucked in my warm soft clean blankets and dreamily wondering what that had been all about. Not just my experience, of course, but the whole screaming and falling and chaotic speaking in Guatemalean and the deliberate pushing me over to make me fall.
I did ask a lot of people about it afterwards, but I got conflicting answers, a general lack of conviction and glaring holes in the explanations given to me. This led me to my own conclusion which I still maintain today: that an awfully lot of people don’t have an inkling as to why they do the things they do in their own churches.

My Random Ramblings on Zimbabwean Sport

I am a Zimbabwean guy who doesn’t like sport. A lot of Zimbabweans would see at least two things wrong with that simple statement. First of all I am a guy: I should love sport. Second of all, I am Zimbabwean: I should love sport.

A friend of mine says this guy
 looks familiar - I mean c'mon!

Zimbabwe is a sporting nation. It loves its soccer, its cricket, its tennis…and the like. I have come to notice, however, that any other sport that is not soccer gains an audience only as a means of whiling up the time until the next big match arrives. Whenever there is something huge going on in the game of soccer, the nation kind o’ goes somewhere in-between fanatical and outright nuts.

And it doesn’t have to be local soccer either. Some individuals know the welfare of international soccer teams better than their own families.

A guy can, for instance, name the whole line up of a team in the Spanish Premier league, plus the players on the bench, the players out on injury, as well as the name of the guy who got dropped out of the final lineup because he was found the night before in a compromising position.

I find that scary, and that is one good reason I do not go for soccer. Everyone is an expert and I could never keep up. This usually left me feeling all ignorant and stupid. So I came up with a simple mantra: if you can’t join them, ignore them. If I show complete disinterest, then nobody would expect me to know anything. Perfect.

I have nothing against tennis though. Infact, I love it! For one thing, Zimbabwe has a very colorful tennis history. From way back in the 1950’s, this country’s been making waves on the international scene up until a couple of years ago.

For another, I had a chance to learn how to play it a little: it was a breeze! All I had to do was concentrate on not losing the ball in the bushes some 100 meters away from the court. Any idiot could do that. Later on, I could manage to make the ball mostly go where I wanted it to go (that is, any place over the net and hopefully not over the court fence). For a little while I actually thought I could be the next black Black.

And there is one more reason I love this game: the only tennis injury I know is harmlessly called ‘Pulling a Hamstring’. I don’t know what or where a hamstring is, or how you can pull it, but it doesn’t sound all that bad. Soccer has a much wider, and a much more uncomfortable vocabulary to describe injuries.

I do have a lot against the game of cricket. Actually, I don’t even think it should be called a sport. See, a solemn event taking a dozen or so men dressed entirely in white a number of days to play, complete with tea and lunch breaks, should be re-categorized as a religious festival….along the lines of Easter, Ramadan and Hanukkah.

I find test cricket long and boring. I guess a lot of people did too, which is why they must have introduced One Day Internationals back in 1971. Still, the game insisted on being boring so they introduced 20/20 cricket in 2003, which lasts a much more humane 3 and a half hours.

I suggest they further cut that down to just about an hour – then you’ll see some real action! And maybe, just maybe players can actually lose weight whilst playing the game.

I am a Zimbabwean guy who doesn’t like sport. I don’t care how many things you see wrong with that statement, but I’m quite cool with it. True, I might miss out on all the ‘thrills’ fans supposedly experience during games, but I also plainly remember being the only one with a hefty appetite, and a good night’s sleep after some not too fascinating sporting events!

Getting a Pet? Get Creative!

Zimbabweans might be a very creative people but when it comes to the issue of choosing pets, the creativity grinds to a halt and makes a quick getaway out the window. I mean seriously, just how many households have anything else other than the same light brown mangy (whatever species it’s called) kind of dog in their yard?

I am not an animal expert, but I sure as hell know there are a whole lot more options out there that can easily replace the darn dog. I have two suggestions:

A personal favorite is the cat. This might not go down well with lot of Zimbos who choose to associate the cat with the dark elements of the world. A cat, especially when black, screams ‘witchcraft!’ To me though, a cat screams ‘Supercool!’

The essence of cool

I love this guy for a number of reasons. First of all, you do not own a cat: he owns you. Now this is not as bad as it sounds: it simply means that you will need him more than he will need you. He owns the house: weaving through the rooms, sleeping on the sofa, chilling on the roof. He can sleep all day and stay out late.

This dude pretty much takes care of himself.You are expected to feed him, but if you don’t, he survives anyway. He's also smart enough to maintain a strict routine on personal hygiene (something even some humans cant manage to do).  Oh, he also catches mice, and his nine lives can come in handy when you don’t want to worry about any living creature falling off the roof or something.

Contrast this coolness with the dog. The dog is like one big baby. He constantly wants your attention even when you really want to just chill out and be left alone. He even makes you feel guilty for going out the yard to throw out the trash when you leave him inside. Ignore him, and he sulks. He spends a good part of the day running around, or wanting to run around, and chasing around his own tail. I mean, how cool can you be if you find entertainment in sticking your head out the window of a moving car, sticking out your tongue out, and proceeding to grin sheepishly?

The second animal is the cow. I’m not joking, and don’t look at me with that strange questioning stare until I argue my case. First of all, I am not the only one who thinks this a great idea. Let me just give you three fans for this viewpoint:-

Bill Bryson: "To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect."

The Hindus: Get into India and you will see 30% of the world’s cows in this place. These guys exchange cows as gifts, build bull shrines and generally love to have them around. In fact, there are more cows in India than America has dogs and cats combined. The only problem is that the Hindus leave out the killing and eating part, which I consider to be the most fun part of keeping a cow.

Isn't she just cute?

The Maasai Tribe: These guys are from somewhere in East Africa. They love cows so much that their tradition has a simple rule that neatly takes care of any cow procurement complexities – ‘All Cows on Earth Belong to the Maasai Tribe as God Given Property.’ Now that’s cow obsession!

If all these guys think the cow can be a great pet, well, why not us? Of course you will need a shovel to deal with all the dung on your verandah, flower bed and lawn. But let it not deter you, because all that dung can be used as bio fuel such that you never have to worry about ZESA woes again. Perfect.

So guys, give the poor light brown mangy (whatever species it’s called) dog a break and try out the alternatives. Well, you don’t necessarily have to take my suggestions (though I consider them to be pretty good and creative), you can try out your own as long as you dont resort to the poor brown mutt.

Saved From the Snares of the Internet!

A research I read recently found out that the average teenager now spends some 7 hours glued to digital devices; through iMacs and iPods and iPhones and iPads in the great North iAmerica.

Just after reading that article, I came across a story on Yahoo News about a mother who violently shook her baby because the infant’s crying was disturbing her session on Facebook. She was playing Farmville, and apparently concluded that tending to digital sheep, cows and cabbages was more important than taking care of the baby. The baby died.

Just...memories, now.

As you can see, the darn western world’s gone nuts because of the internet, and the rest of the world is quickly following in its footsteps.

It is in view of this sobering fact that our trusty monopolistic telecoms provider, Econet Wireless, decided to step in and protect us from these shocking world developments. Their method is simple: hiking internet tariffs so much as to make any decent internet surfing impractical.

For instance, a 5 Megabyte bundle of data will cost you $2, and expires the same day you purchase it; 100MB will cost you $30; 200MB costs $50 and 1Gigabyte will cost you an arm and a leg.

A friend of mine went for the $30 package for his data line; four days later, the system was crying out for more…and he hadn’t even changed his Facebook photo yet, let alone actually download anything.

Funny thing: this same company kept promising a while back that the messy digging they did all over our nice roads to lay cables would bring a faster and much cheaper internet to the ordinary Zimbabwean.

I guess they were just saying.

This kind of reminds me of the ‘Big Bang Theory’…you know, big company acting all inefficient and arrogant especially because there is no competition to keep the bully in check.

I’ve heard of two companies called Africom and Powertel, but it seems their coverage is still too minuscule to speak of. Then there is Telecel which seemed very promising (since it’s backed by a giant Egyptian company) – that is, until they postponed their 3G introduction from September 2010 (that’s last month!) to sometime next year. As for NetOne….NetOne…well, I don’t know anything about NetOne. Info, anybody?

So fellow Zimbabweans, I am pleased to announce that you are relatively safe from the corrupting influence of the internet, unless you have an awfully lot of cash to burn. There is no way you are going to be spending 7+ hours killing all of your social life through internet addiction.

You are not going to be killing your babies anytime soon either.

Postscript: Econet  has slashed its mobile internet prices. 5Mb now costs a dollar, 100Mb $20 and 200Mb is now $40. A gig will still cost you an arm and a leg though. Looking forward to more price slashes and moral corruption as the competition heats up!

Of Elusive Shona Words: Kudada

Is your use of Shona vocabulary myopic?
Then take the following free advice!

I have grown to hate that word: Kudada. I used to understand it way back when it used to mean what it’s supposed to mean: arrogant, pompous, proud, contemptuous, bigheaded...etc. But somehow, the uses of the word seem to have glided to mean some other things too: things like forgetful, rich, misunderstood, shy…etc.

Shona (my mother tongue. Also my father’s tongue) is a beautifully diverse language. Nothing is quite as beautiful as hearing someone skillfully bring rich words together to form a well expressed statement. Leonard Zhakata used to do that. Most people these days don’t. They have lost the art of the language; they just compromise it.

I won’t delve into the details of how the language has been compromised (that would need a website the size of Wikipedia and a pride of professionals manning it). I’ll just focus on one word: Kudada (also known as kuvhaira in other parts of the country).


I grew up with the word: thanks to my being myopic (literally). Before I started wearing glasses, the whole word was one huge colorful blur. People didn’t have faces: I’d try to distinguish them through voices, posture and the clothes they wore. Sometimes through smell.

Now imagine one blur coming over to you and saying something like: ‘We met 5 years ago at Mai Nga’s wedding and we talked for like 10 whole minutes, remember me?’ Of course I don’t, you were a blur then, you are still a blur now. The disappointed stranger shakes his head: ‘Inga waa Kudada.’

This experience also frequently happens to those with a short memory. It is a crime not to remember some one who remembers you. All those people with a good memory take it for granted so much that they assume everybody has a photographic mind. Forget someone, and you are immediately branded as some one ariKudada. Simple.

And suppose you are shy, you know, a particularly bashful person. Most people dread having to stand up on a stage and address a crowd. Now, for this type of shy person, his or her whole life is a stage. The simple social etiquette of, say, entering a room full of relatives and greeting each and every person with the correct titles (such as tete, sekuru, mainini) is a torturous experience. People don’t know such introverts exist, so if you are one and you stumble in, or try to avoid, such a situation, they simply dismiss you with 'ariKudada'.

Another scenario: suppose you get lucky and become rich. Now, there is nothing wrong with having money in itself: but rest assured, that also means you are going to come across this word in reference to you quite a lot.

For instance, when you are driving around in your brand new wheels, you are supposed to spot each and every person you have ever known on the road, and depending on the situation, do at least one of the following: hoot and wave; stop the car for a chat; kusiya mari yedrink or; offer the person a ride. Failure to do so: uriKudada.

I used to have this friend of mine who was not too familiar with the Shona culture. He came across a friend of a friend, a lady. Now, they had never seen each other before, just a casual chat on the phone, so he didn’t give her the warm greeting she must have expected. She carelessly commented: Indava Kudada? As soon as she turned a corner, he totally flipped. He thought he statement was the Shona equivalent of someone saying to your face: ‘You are freaking arrogant!’ Poor guy, especially considering the extreme lengths he would go to exercise great humility.

My free advice: fix any mental myopia you might have and stop throwing this word, and other equivalents, all over the place. You’re only traumatizing individuals who might already be battling to fit in into this crazy world. Instead, reserve it for the arrogant, pompous, proud, contemptuous and bigheaded bastards who truly deserve it!

What You Should Really Be Reading These Days (Part 2)

 This is a sequel. I split one article into two beacause I know scrolling down a page a long time kind of gets boring when you are surfing the internet. And African Movies split one movie into four installments so this is no big deal. 

To all those who didnt get to read the previous installment, I just decided to answer one of life's great questions: what you should really be reading these days. The answer (...drumrolls...) is Humor. Of course it is.

Oh, I am not putting this down because these authors paid me to do so (I wish!) but because these guys really rock.

Mary Roach

Any lady that can make me laugh deserves my outmost respect. This lady makes me roll on the ground silly. She takes everyday situations and spins them into brilliant anectodes. In her owns words: “Mary finds humor in strange places. Also, her car keys.” Ed is her husband, by the way. The quotes:-

“Ed is the most levelheaded person I know. You could take one of the carpenter's levels from Aisle 5 and place it on his head and the little bubble will always be right there in the middle.”
~
“Ed decreed we were to buy only free-range organic chickens. Ed would put them in the shopping cart. I'd look at the price and take them out. ‘Are we eating them, or putting them through college?’”
~
“My waist, I realized one day in a dressing room, has completely disappeared beneath my rib cage, which now rests directly on my hips. I'm exhibiting continental drift in reverse.”

~
“A married couple can best be defined as a unit of people whose sleep habits are carefully engineered to keep each other awake.”
~
My eye bags, I noticed the other day while shopping with my friend, had ceased to be an anatomical feature and were approaching the status of an actual piece of luggage.
~
“My father was English, so gardening, I've long assumed, is in my blood, along with gin and fryer grease and a fondness for long, tedious war movies.”
~
“A family is a collection of people who share the same genes but can't agree on a place to pull over for lunch.”
~
“The French kiss each other twice, perhaps because no one else will.”
~
“I watch sports the way a dog will watch TV: I'm attracted by the motion and color, but no actual comprehension is taking place.
~
“A word about Valentine's Day. This was originally a holiday for a god who protected shepherds' flocks from the wolves outside Rome. I don't know how we got from livestock surveillance to romantic love, but if I had to tender a guess I'd say it had something to do with the Hallmark company. We really have to watch these guys, because soon we're going to find ourselves sending cards for Plumbers and Steamfitters Day ("You bring a special kind of caring to our water-serviced area ...")." 

Mike Gayle
Then there is Mike Gayle. This guy is fantastic: he writes about the things you always experience and always think about but didn’t know you experience or think about until you read it from him. Best of all, he doesn’t write space science, he does romance…and not the out of this world 'knight in shining armor and damsel in distress' kind of romance. No, only the kind of romance you are most likely to be familiar with. Try this:-

“Sometimes I really felt sorry for Mel—her life would've been so much better if she'd fallen in love with someone normal.
Instead she fell in love with me and had been paying for that mistake ever since.”
~

"I'm fine, Mum, honest." It was nice to be fussed over like this. To know that there was someone in the world who, no matter whether you were a convicted homicidal maniac, a porn baron or crack addict, would love you unconditionally.”
~
"'Am I your boyfriend?' is the kind of question a nine-year-old asks another nine-year-old. It had no place in a sophisticated relationship. I knew the rules -- I was meant to be cool and relaxed, laid-back and casual. At first maybe we'd 'see' each other (which meant that she'd still 'see' other people), then maybe we'd date (which would mean that she wouldn't see other people even though she might want to), and then finally we'd be boyfriend and girlfriend (by which time she wouldn't want to see other people because she'd be happy with me)."
~
"I wondered what I'd done to deserve her and after a number of minutes concluded that I'd done nothing whatsoever. She was in my life without reason. She was there in spite of myself. Good things could happen to not-so-bad people."
~
"Deep down, I always liked to believe that I knew things wouldn't work out between us. Nothing could have been that perfect unless it had its premiere on terrestrial television."
~
“Being seduced was a nice idea, but she really had no need to go to all this effort. When it came to Mel—who was beautiful in a wonderfully understated kind of way —Easy was indeed my first, last and middle name”.
~
“I love toast. I really do. Toast is just about the best food there is. You take a slice of humble white bread (never brown) and you put it in a toaster (What is it? It's a toaster! What does it do? It makes toast!) and a few minutes later you have a hot nutritious meal. You can put any foodstuff handy from the fridge on top of it and it will pretty much always taste fan-bloody-tastic. Toast, I thought, as two slices popped up, makes a whole lot more sense than chocolate bars.”
~
“At that moment, sitting there in my flat, with the will to do anything at all almost crushed out of my body, I realised that I'd finally found out what it was like to be bored.”
~
“She got over me straight away, which really hurt. She got on with her life as if I was a minor interruption.”

Awesome stuff. You know, these guys didn’t just write quotes, they also wrote a whole lot of books as well (Oh, hold, these quotes came from the books. Silly me). If you can get your hands on these books, I guarantee you will find them unputdownable. 

When you eventually do get tired of humor and you are in need of more serious stuff, grab yourself the Bible. Just don’t do politics.

You Are Turning Into Your Dad, And There Is Nothing You Can Do to Stop It

Ever watched The Matrix? Well, in this movie, there is this guy who has gotten tired of living in the real world and fighting AI machines. He wants to get back into the fake world created by the machines, where people happily live without knowing there is a war against machines going on. One thing this guy said at the end of a conversation caught my attention: ‘Ignorance is bliss.’

A scene from The Matrix. Taking the Blue Pill meant choosing
to stay ignorant, Red Pill meant getting enlightened.
If you read on this article,  you are taking the Red Pill.

He was right. Living in ignorance can be nice: it allows you to hide from the nasty things in life and blissfully pretend they don’t exist.

Sadly, disillusioning people from their ignorant state is sometimes necessary for human development to take place, which is why I felt it necessary to inform all unsuspecting youths out there that they are turning into their parents…and there’s absolutely nothing they can do to stop it.

This piece of enlightenment came to me this other lazy Sunday afternoon. I was playing one of Zimbabwe’s greatest musicians. Leonard “Musorowenyoka’ Dembo. The expertise of the music itself, spiced with a little bit of nostalgia, made me end up blissfully vocalizing Wapindwa Nei in full and carefree earnestness.

I was doing it exactly the way my dad used to do it.

Now, I don’t think there is anything wrong with turning into something like your dad, or mom if you are a girl…unless of course he or she is a convicted dangerous criminal, a pedophile, or makes African Movies for a living.

A lot of people would object though. They got this impression that their parents are totally unhip. I wont argue that case, my point is that no matter how ‘unhip’ they might be, you are going to end up mostly like them.

LEONARD DEMBO - Admit it, this guy was great!

It’s a biological law, as certain as the fact that I am a perfectly ordinary blogger living in Zimbabwe. This transformation comes around early adulthood where you go through a gentle morphing into the very parents you do not want to become but with little resistance to the process mostly because you chose to ignore that it is happening, you do not know it is happening, or you are indifferent to its happening and prefer to ride the wave.

You behavioral traits start to change. You don’t go out partying with friends as much as you used to. Suddenly, there are less urban grooves in your playlist, and the number of Mtukudzi tracks starts becoming suspiciously bigger. Akon tracks are being replaced by Luther Vandross, the 20 Seconds to Mars tracks by Rascal Flatts. The teenage years of screaming for attention start fading away: your clothes become less baggy (if you are a guy) and less tight (if you are a girl).

This is the indication that the Becoming Your Parents syndrome is taking over. You can chose to fight it (and inevitably lose), or you can chose to embrace it or ignore it and just ride the wave. The second option is less stressful. I think Leonard Dembo was one hell of a singer.

The Bee Question and Why I Am Glad to be Zimbabwean

We don’t believe in evolution in Zimbabwe…well, most of us anyway. Zimbabwe prides itself in being a Christian nation on Sunday (The jury is still out on whether this status applies to the other days of the week).

Since we are taught a little bit of man of how man used to be ape in Form 1, and the fact that I read around a lot, I am aware that there are a lot of people who still believe in evolution out there. If you are one such person, I need you to answer for me the Bee Question.

I came up with this question at church when the guy giving the talk was explaining how bees gather nectar and unwittingly pollinate flowers in the process. He was saying this proves that God is mighty intelligent to make things work like that.

You see, bees travel from flower to flower collecting nectar so they can make honey with it. The bee might think itself actually clever, getting all this nectar for free and not having to pay anything for it. Little does it know that the flower has the last laugh: it's actually using the hairy body of the bee to transport pollen to other flowers so that cross-pollination occurs, and propagation of the species continues.

Now there is one hell of a dilemma for the atheistic evolutionist. What made the bee grow all hairy so that it could collect nectar? Did the bee wish it upon itself so that it could keep the flowers around? Kind of ridiculous, the bee has a brain the size of a …well…of a bee so it doesn’t give a damn. It doesn’t even know how to and how not to give a damn. And even if it could give a damn, it could hardly wish hair to grow on itself much in the same way you can’t wish to sprout wings and have your kid’s kid’s kid’s kid eventually skipping the kombi to actually fly to school.

Maybe the flower made the bee grow hairs to ensure its own survival. That could make sense: the flower makes nectar and makes itself all colourful to attract the bee. Then it makes hairs grow on the bee so that the bee collects pollen to leave on the next plant it goes to.

Oh wait…a flower doesn’t have a brain.

There is one more option I hadn’t mentioned which evolutionists seem to use to solve all their problems – blind chance. A series of mindless accidents over a long period of time eventually created the intricate bee-flower relationship. Let me quote Douglas Adams:

‘There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.’

That’s much more likely to happen.

Thank heavens I'm Zimbabwean - I don't have to answer the Bee Question. We are a Christian nation. I just wish this Christianity was evident on more days than Sunday though.

What You Should Really Be Reading These Days

No, not politics. Its too depressing, and nothing ever seems to change in that arena. Not scientific breakthroughs either, everything's always changing. In a few years time, there is going to be scientific  breakthroughs to disprove today's scientific breakthroughs.

You should be reading humour instead. There are certain authors who always lift me up no matter how rainy the day gets. This article has two of them.

I can only give you a few quotes, otherwise I'd get sued.

Douglas Adams

Now this guy was just plain nuts. He died in 2001, and the normal thing the family should have done was donate the whole of his grey mass to scientists. They probably didn’t (which is just as well, I guess, because they probably wouldn’t have figured out what made him tick anyway). My favourite Douglas Adams quotes:

"I'm so great even I get tongue-tied talking to myself."
~

"I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis."

~

Marvin, my favourite character in some of Douglas Adams books

"To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
~

"The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." 

~

"Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys outside and they want to discuss this script for 'Hamlet' they've worked out." 

~

"His mouth started to speak, but his brain decided it hadn't got anything to say yet and shut it again. His brain then started to contend with the problem of what his eyes told it they were looking at, but in doing so relinquished control of the mouth which promptly fell open again. Once more gathering up the jaw, his brain lost control of his left hand which then wandered around in an aimless fashion. For a second or so the brain tried to catch the left hand without letting go of the mouth and simultaneously tried to think about what was buried in the ice, which is probably why the legs went and Arthur dropped restfully to the ground." 

~

"It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs." 

~

"He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot." 

~

"Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off." 

~

"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." 

~

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." 

~

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"

Bill Bryson

My first encounter with this guy was a book called Mother Tongue. It talked about the history of the English language and some other crazy stuff about the English language, and it was funny. I don't think any else can talk about the history of the English language and some other stuff about English and still be funny. Excerpts from his numerous works:-

"Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding." 

~

"To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect." 

~

"I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it." 

~

"There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone cacll from the frankly interesting." 

~

"If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like." 

~

"In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: ‘This Door Is Locked for No Reason’." 

~

"At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English."

~

"in my day the principal concerns of university students were sex,smoking dope,rioting and learning.Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available."

I had to split this post into two articles: being well aware of how short the attention span of the internet surfer really is. For the other two authors who really know how to tickle my funnybone, come along with me to What You Should Really Be Reading These Days (Part 2).

In Search of the Facebook Killer!

Once upon a time I got tired of Facebook. I would log on into my account; find absolutely nothing to do, then log out. This would happen like 5 times a day, and I erroneously concluded that despite having 500 million addicts out there, Facebook had become boring.

With this mindset on, and brimming with optimism, I decided to hunt on the internet for another social networking site to waste away my days on: a Facebook killer!

I landed on MySpace, probably because it’s very popular in the US and it’s existed long before Facebook was launched. I loved it at first because it lived up to its name. I could personalize my page a lot and really turn it into…well…my space.

Then it started getting all boring and lonely out there because try as I could, I couldn’t locate any of my friends to connect with. Even sending invitations didn’t seem to help. It seemed nobody else wanted to jump ship like I did. So, I left.

Round about this time, I came across Perfspot. Now these guys seemed to address my problem beautifully. Although I couldn’t find any of my friends there, I could easily make a dozen new friends from all over the world! Flattering, indeed.
Until I discovered I had been a bit to hasty into calling these people friends. Before long, some of these ‘friends’ started displaying some very…um…questionable characteristics. Being your average conservative Zimbabwean, I couldn’t stomach some of the things they had started talking about. I wanted out.

Funny enough, Pefspot wouldn’t let me. It seems as if there is no way to deactivate a Perfspot account even after searching high and low on the internet for any answers. It seems they are so desperate for a high membership base that once they get you, they won’t let you go. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

I stumbled upon Mjoy: a mobile social networking platform originating from Germany. It also doubles up as a free texting service. I was pleasantly surprised to see an awful lot of Zimbos interacting on that platform: which helps to explain why the country’s relatively infant 3G network got congested pretty quickly.

The phone might be ugly, but the mjoy interface is nice!

Mjoy is a lot of fun…mostly because you get to txt for free to any number you like…and there aren’t a lot of things you get for free these days. Ok, there is a catch: you only txt if you have credits, and you accumulate credits by clicking through ads. Well, fair enough: as long as I don’t get to pay anything.

The problem with this site is that it is only accessible on your phone – you can’t access it from your PC. And I still don’t get why this site is overwhelmingly dominated by Nigerians. I don’t hate Nigerians, even if they are the ones who came up with the ‘African Movie’, but they do make posts in a funny, and sometimes hard to understand, type of English.

My social network search also allowed me a brief flirtation with Twitter. Twitter is very popular and I created an account with very high hopes - but it wasn’t that much fun. The whole concept of this site is to ‘follow’ certain people (get to see their Twitter updates) and to be followed by others. I couldn’t decide who to follow, and those I got to follow proved not to be all that engaging. I guess I like getting real information from my friends, and not ‘short bursts of inconsequential information’, which is what Twitter really means.

I think Twitter is for fanatics. I mean, who else would like to get trivial messages like ‘Getting out the house, hot day!’, ‘At work, boring’ or ‘Just had a hefty lunch’ on their account from anyone. I wouldn’t, even if it’s Justin Bieber I’m following. That’s just too much information.

Doubtless, I didn’t exhaust the social networking sites out there…actually, I think I didn’t even scratch the surface. But after having gotten around the world in search of the Facebook killer, I am back where I started: stuck with Facebook.

I still log on to the site, post something completely irrelevant, like a Douglas Adam quote for instance, and then log out….about 2 times a day. It does help to make the hours speed up to 5 o’clock.

The So Typically Zim Concise Guide to Zimbabwe: Situations never to let yourself get into

I noticed that this blog is getting a fair amount of visitors from outside the continent. This gave me an idea: why don’t I act as a tour guide to this beautiful country? With that spirit, I took the liberty of compiling a short list of the situations you should do your best to avoid when you get into Zimbabwe.

Being in an over crowded kombi on a long distance trip between two…um…strong women: one who just won’t stop indulging in every purchasable food item at all stops along the journey, and another with a restless, noisy child on her lap who screams for all the food items the first lady eats. By the time you get to your destination, you are drowning in bananas, Cascades, oranges, infant screams, mealies, $1 for two creamed biscuits…and the like.

In a queue at the bank right on teacher's pay day. This is the perfect time to start reciting the months of the year in Shona. By the time you get it right, the queue could be noticeably shorter. If you are based in a major city though, you might want to count down from 100 to 1 instead, also in Shona.

Seated on the couch in the evening: happily skipping through TV channels (or alternatively, skipping the long boring extended parts of an ‘African movie’ to get to the crazy exciting parts). Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Well, the thing is, just when you get to your favourite programme, this is just about the time ZESA  decides to pull a fast one on you and leave you in total, electricity-less and extremely frustrated darkness, wishing you hadn't turned on the darn TV in the first place.

Get caught between two rival political parties without a membership card of either. That could be a deadly situation. Now this is a dilemma for people who prefer to remain apolitical for a number of reasons: which might be religious reasons, moral or just the simple use of common sense.

Riding a train. If you a romantic, you might have thought this is a novel way to explore the country. Don’t. The average Zimbabwean railway carriage is older than the ages of all the Zimbabwean cricket team members added up together. You will get to your destination, you just won’t know when.

Attend a soccer match where the home team is bound to get a good whacking…and the team tops the league table….and you are supporting the away team. If you do insist though, then make sure you sit yourself near the exist, and you are fit enough to be able to run very fast.

That concludes my list: which is short enough to prove this is a great country to be in. If you are able to avoid these situations, then guaranteed, you will definitely enjoy your stay in this beautiful country. See you when you get here!

Unwelcome Food For My Thoughts

I stared at the glass of water in my hand, placed in front of me by the waiter, and contemplated my dilemma. I wasn’t supposed to drink that water, that’s according to scientists whom I used to trust enough to know they would only say something like that for my own good.

I am sure everybody knows water is good for you, but apparently not all the time: so say those scientists. I put the glass down. Nutritionists say that drinking cold liquids after or during a meal disturbs digestion.

I don’t consider myself a fussy eater. However, years of going through newspaper articles, internet articles and People Magazine have subconsciously turned me into a paranoiac consumer. They are never short of latest nutritional breakthroughs and ‘expert’ scientific advice on food do’s and donts. I hate scientists for doing that. 

It all started way back when I was little when scientists attacked one favourite delicacy of mine: ishwa. (Would you believe it: in English they call them flying termites: an unimaginative name for food, if you ask me. Way better to call them ‘tasty flying wriggly fatty thingies’ if they couldn’t come up with a proper name). Anyway, after years of being told that they contain healthy proteins, they had to go round and start talking about them being covered with ‘chitin’ which is supposed to give the stomach a hard time during digestion. Now everytime I eat ishwa, I feel the chitin scrapping my tongue, scrapping my throat and scrapping my stomach lining.

I wish these food experts could just make up their minds. For instance, we’ve always been told that chocolate makes you fat. Now this was a good piece of information. All the males of the world could potentially use it to avoid the impromptu dispensing of cash in a supermarket queue to gratify the whining better half. Sadly, researchers had to poke into this brown gooey sweet stuff to discover that it’s not that bad for you after all. It fights heart disease, fights aging, reduces high blood pressure and lowers your cholesterol.

This reminds me of the issue of fats. Since time immemorial, the general consensus has been that fats are nasty. But wait, new research says that there are actually good types that are very healthy for you…as long as you go for whole foods rather than extracted oils. In fact, 20-35% of your calorie intake should come from fats.

Then there is fruits. You can’t possibly go wrong with fruits, right? That’s what I thought until a Manica Post article told me that you shouldn’t have fruit for dessert. I researched the matter further (No, not because I don’t trust this paper of high integrity, but because I wanted to learn more). Additional information revealed that fruits should be taken on an empty stomach, or 20 minutes before another meal. Bothersome info, if you ask me.

Proven: scientists are crazy. They cant come up with lasting nutritional facts. Little wonder most of them still believe that man used to be ape. My advice to avoid Food Statistics and Facts Related Stress Disorder: just eat everything, and eat anything in moderation.

There is a light side to these scientific flip flops however. Not too long ago, I used to hear a lot about the dangers of tea consumption, especially its dehydrating effects. Being a self proclaimed champion tea drinker, I was recently delighted to discover that lots of tea is actually healthy! In fact, a BBC online article actually went as far as out rightly declaring that it’s healthier than your glass of water. It comes with disease fighting flavanoids and teeth cleaning fluoride. And yes, it actually re-hydrates your body, not the other way round.

I sighed, grabbed the cool glass of refreshing water and downed it in one thirsty appreciative gulp. The science can wait for the meantime: I wanted the water. Anyway, a few years from now someone is going to discover that a cold glass of water after a meal actually reduces negative butylated hydroxyanisole molecules, or whatever.