Maybe if we called him L-Mac?

She called me a pansy, because I told her I own a volume of Louis MacNeice. And I laughed.

Because that is ludicrous: How can I be a pansy? I am Ernest Fucking Bazanye, for crizzy! But I do reside round her little finger, so I am not going to belabour the point.

 

Onward in time: some circumstance led three Whitney Houston  MP3s into my home. Is It Just the Lonely Talking Again, You're Still My Man and I Know Him So Well.

 

I could start listing all the Wu Tang, Fela Kuti, Miles Davis, Royce 5 9, Hendrix, Chemical Brothers, Jigga, and mad guitar I usually listen to during the week, but the thing is, I was there listening to someone power-ballading "Is it just the lonely talking again" and enjoying it.

I could list all the hard music but it would just sound like a case of the pansy doth protest too much.

 

And now, a break:

 

Tumtumtum TWISH!  http://bazanye.wordpress.com  GabbaBANG!

 

And back.

 

 

NERD'S EYE VIEW CONT'D

 

So I was on Kampala Road in my shorts, looking misguided. It is at times like this that the most irrational fears rear heads. I used to be a secondary school teacher. A few years ago. The kids I taught should be in university now. What if one or more of them are frolicking about town right now and they see me? You know how university students are: they are very fashion-conscious. Their whole life is a catwalk. And you know how former students are: they are very vengeful. If my former students saw me looking stupid on the streets, they would, in all probability, stop the car, run out, point at me and laugh out loud.

 

I quelled those fears though, with simple logic. Come on. Like any of those dimwits would make it to university.

 

That's when a voice right behind me said, "Eschoose me, sir."

I responded as anyone would under such circumstances. By saying "Oh shit".

 

I turned round, fully expecting to see one of the ex-students draped head to toe in something classy like Dolce or Gabana. Maybe even both. I was trying out approaches for dealing with this. Part of my mind was weighing "Listen, I can explain" against "What are you doing gallivanting around town? Don't you have anything constructive to do?"

 

Fortunately, I did not need to employ either manoeuvre. It was not a former student. It was a tiny boy in oversized sunglasses jerking his thumb in the direction of a Celica parked a few feet away. "Eschoose me sir. Dat man he want to talk to you."

In the car was the fellow I had come to town to meet. Isaac.

 

He gave the little boy a thousand bob note for delivering the message and me, and the boy scurried off to wherever he came from.

 

"Street kids are dressing stylishly these days," I said to Isaac, as the boy and his sunglasses disappeared.

He reached over and opened the passenger door, saying, when he saw my shorts, "You should borrow a leaf from them."

 

I got in the car and he asked where the Worm was.

"The full story is, he is stuck at home because all his clothes, except the pyjamas he spent the night in, are on the wire, having been washed this morning by the cleaning lady."

"Why would she wash all his clothes and leave him nothing to wear?" Isaac asked.

"That is a question we plan to raise with her on our next meeting."

"This is no good." Isaac shook his head in disappointment. "This completely throws plans out of equilibrium. The Worm's presence is vital for this programme to succeed. We must fetch him."

"Will your programme succeed if the Worm is present in his pyjamas?"

"I will lend him some clothes of mine. Let's go get him." And off we drove. Isaac thinking deeply about his plan, me thinking deeper: what plan was this that would have one party in shorts, the other in borrowed clothes and only one of us looking decent?

 

---

Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.

Something transcendent

A phenomenon. This man was larger than his height and weight. This man was history.

P.S. I don't think I am coming back to blogger. From the looks of things. I like Wordpress. It is bright and roomy and comfy. Like the better parts of Bweyogerere.

Come and see..

http://bazanye.wordpress.com

---

Celebrity Endorsement Time

Yo, Ram John Holder, better known as Porkpie from the eighties sitcom Desmond, what have you got there in your Celebrity Blog Endorsement Bag?

 

RJH: I have a lotta links, kid. Check this out:

 

Samali, Sam, Chocofudge, Aseu, Willieboy, S.A.G.E., QueenB, Feather, Leo's Darling, Dukesy…

 

Baz: Ram John Holder, is that the Second Generation of X-Men, or the elements of a burgeoning bloglosphere?

 

RJH: Click the links and find out, boy!

 

 

Okay. I shall. By the way, would you mind giving us one more Celebrity Endorsement?

 

What's that?

 

My more convenient blog location. 

 

Oh, that? http://bazanye.wordpress.com.

 

Faya.  You may go back to Brixton now.

---

Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.

Nerds Eye View (and I got another crib)

I am not chucking blogger, it is just that it takes too long to get logged. Even from the Café. And as I always say, "I have things to do and people to see. This money ain't gonna make itself." I am a busy man. I can't be there there.

 

I also hate that I cannot comment as much as I want to.

 

And I have a lot to get off my fingers. I need to type and I need to blog. I am arrghing, so to speak.

 

So I followed my heroes jmataachi and Petes mama to another site.

 

Ah. http://bazanye.wordpress.com That's more like it.

 

Now, as I was saying, Nerd's Eye View continues….

 

 

 

 

 

He had wanted to fire Crooked Paul for a long time. Mostly because he was a very lousy worker. Paul (we didn't know he was crooked then) told us he was in senior three, though we were convinced he was at the very least twenty years old. He did not discuss his age, but didn't dispute the charge, when leveled against him, that he was a little bit old for O'level class. He explained, in a tiny, plaintive voice, that he had only himself in this world and that is why he went around the neighbourhood on weekends cleaning houses. It was so that he could pay his way through school and get an education.

 

I was convinced. He needed to make money housekeeping, we had housekeeping that needed doing, I didn't see any problem, only a solution. The Worm was not too keen at first. "Shouldn't a cleaning lady be, I don't know, a lady?"

 

"It's the new millenium, Worm. Gender equality. Anything a woman can do, so can a man."

 

Paul was finally contracted. The Worm's consent was secured when he discovered that rather than call Paul a maid, he could call him a valet, and life improved considerably when you could speak of having you own valet.

 

We soon found out why Paul was such a bargain. He was always late and sometimes didn't show up at all. His mopping and sweeping sometimes left the impression that if you had just blown at the dust then spat on the floor you would have achieved better results. He favoured the dip-once-squeeze-twice-rinse-now-that's-it technique when it came to laundry and often returned our clothes with the stains still intact. And his ironing was pathetic. He could actually make the clothes look more crinkled than before he began. The Worm grumbled bitterly when he would find himself ironing his clothes again after Paul was through and gone. I remember the argument.

 

"The guy needs the money! You can't just fire him because you're too pompy to iron your own clothes!"

"He is ripping us off!"

"He needs to pay his school fees! Look, do it as a kindness; send out some good karma. Let it be said of The Worm that he was a sarcastic, self-centered and vain bastard but his life wasn't entirely useless, for he once did a good deed. He ironed his own pants so that Paul could have an education."

"Mordecai, have you ever seen Paul's handwriting? He left a note the other day and I tell you it was not inspiring. The man is barely literate. Senior three? I was forced to conclude that whatever education they are giving him, its quality can only be adequately described by a person who has had his head immersed in a sewage pit. I mean to say, of course, that it is shit. So we are paying for shit service, so Paul can pay for shit education!"

 

Eventually we agreed to put Paul on probation. And he did show improvement, knowing that he was in danger. We shouldn't have. Are you familiar with the phrase "term egenda"?

Knowing that they will be out of the teachers' and prefects' jurisdiction in a few short days, naughty schoolboys go on rampage at the close of the term, vandalising, stealing, bullying etc. Sure that they are going to lose upcoming elections, bad governments loot and pilfer as much as they can before they get booted out of office. And Paul, knowing how his probation would end, also began to do his own term egenda.

 

There is a hardcover Wole Soyinka book that The Worm likes to bring out and place on the bookshelf to impress select visitors. One day it fell out of Paul's shirt as he was leaving. Suddenly we came to understand why so many books and CDs and magazines had been turning up missing over the past couple of weeks.

 

Paul said he was only borrowing it, and we said, of course you were, goodbye and have a good life. We didn't pursue the matter beyond firing him. Me, because of my sympathetic soul, Worm, because he was just stymied by the twisted nature of the crime. "The guy who decides to steal a book by the man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature can barely read! Words, fittingly, fail me."

---

Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.

Nerd's Eye View. By Mordecai. (This was a long long long long time ago)

On April the seventh I found myself standing in the middle of Kampala Road with no trousers on.

Instead (to stave off any alarm on your part) I was wearing  shorts; khakhi, with dozens of pockets on them. Casual menswear of this kind was fashionable at the time: clothing which came with a pocket per inch of cloth.

 

The situation was created by the new charwoman, Caldonia, an absolutely crazy chick with marbles every place but where they should be. The Worm and I had had her for three weeks now. She would come in on Saturday, dust, sweep, mop and wash what we told her to dust, sweep, mop and wash, then she would flit off into the sunset with her money and a smile. Don't know what got into her this week, however. This week, while The Worm slept and I watched TV, Caldonia hurricaned her way through the residence, cleaning and mopping with lethal vigour. I should have sensed something was wrong when she lifted the carpet and began to scrub underneath it, but Adam Sandler was saying something really cool on M-Net so that didn't happen.

 

At some point, about the time Winona Ryder was confessing to Sandler that she really didn't mean to hurt him, and that if he gave her another chance she would blah blah yadda yadda-- Come on, I don't watch romantic comedies for the romance. Quit yapping and do something funny!-- at around that point, Caldonia announced that we did not have enough detergent.

 

"Worm! Nti we need more Omo!" I yelled across the house, passing on the responsibility.

 

Something that sounded like "Tell her we'll get some tomorrow" issued from a half-asleep mouth that was hidden under a pillow in his bedroom. I translated and Caldonia left. I assumed she was resigned to doing the laundry the next day.

 

No. She found a way to do the laundry, even with insufficient Omo. The Worm woke up a half hour after Sandler and Ryder had gone off to live happily ever after and I was still stuck on the couch wondering if anything in the world was worth getting up from this supremely comfy posture for.

 

The Worm was walking in and out of rooms, entering them with anxiety on his face, emerging even more agitated.

 

Finally, when he could no longer cling to the hope that he had been mistaken, he announced his findings. With his hands in the air and a tone approaching a screech, he said, "She's washed everything! Everything! I swear, she took everything that had anything to do with fabric and washed it! Everything!"

 

"Um... wow," was my weak response. I had not yet understood how this came to be such a bad thing.

 

"What am I going to wear!?" Remember that screech that was approaching Worm's voice? It had arrived.

 

"I've got places to go, people to see, things to do!" The Worm continued to moan. At the walls and the

windows because he rightly assumed I wouldn't care.

 

"You know how you're always accusing me of being lazy?" I reminded him.

 

"Yes. The reason for that statement being obvious-- you're one of those people who would rather wait to see if it will go away when they feel an itch because scratching it would be too much of a bother. You haven't moved from that couch all morning, have you?"

 

I left out the part about the pot that woke up at eleven a.m. calling the kettle black and said, "Actually I did. Caldonia wanted to mop under the sofa, but that lies beside the point. What I wanted to say is, this predicament, does it not convince you that there is something to be said for laziness after all? That there is a positive side to being a bum?"

 

"You speak of a positive side. I see none. Illustrate," Worm said, hand on chin.

 

"Well, if Caldonia had been a lazy person, like say, Crooked Paul, you would not be in this situation. You would have lots and lots of unwashed clothes to pick from-- he always left plenty of work undone."

 

Crooked Paul was the dude we had cleaning before Caldonia. We had to let him go. The Worm loved it. "I tell you Mordecai, we are finally men. Real men. Bona fide employers who not only have the powers to fire the subordinates, but who, at last, can boast of having actually deployed these powers. This calls for a drink."

 

He had wanted to fire Crooked Paul for a long time. Mostly because he was a very lousy worker…

---

Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.

Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!

Ugandans don’t care about the environment. Well, you might, but that that mob doesn't. If Ugandans gave a shit, why would we still have a problem with buveeras and why would people still not be using energy saving bulbs, and why would they still be doing their laundry at the lakeside, right next to the sign that asks them not to, and what about that mess called Nakivubo channel? And why are they always encroaching on wetlands? They are encroaching on forests too! And what about all the kasasiro and rubbish heaps everywhere you go? And why is it everyone’s ambition to own a gas-guzzling smoke belching 4-wheel drive?

That riot wasn’t about the environment. I bet if that demo had been peaceful there would have been hawkers making a killing selling mineral water and kabalagala wrapped in buveera at the site.

People don't care about the environment. Poor people just want someone to blame for their lot, and so they blame the rich. Through some twisted reasoning this justifies what we did.

Envy has turned into racism, which has turned into murder.

The beeb

The Monitor.

And Twentyreventh Comrade. You have to read this last one.

Links of fire etc

Everyone who comes within four feet of this young man falls instantly in love. I know. I have only met him once and he has already started kukularing me. He is named Pete and he is now the star of his own blog.

 

 

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a work of startling and exquisite beauty. Mesmerising. It is a series of sort-of parables-- descriptions of cities which are actually descriptions, it turns out, of Kampala city, and transpire in the end to be descriptions of life.

 

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

 

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

 

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

 

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

 

 

 

Finally, I am in a morose mood. So I made another blog. Stuff that I wrote when I was always in a morose mood.

 

 This is the story of an invisible man. A man who attempted an act that is routine and common and has been performed by many, but which, this time, and with this man, went disastrously wrong. In this man, the everyday act of hiding was performed so well that it transformed, through a gradual decent so slow and innocuous that he could not see its progress soon or distinctly enough to stop it until it was too late, into an act of ceasing to exist. I disappeared.

 

 

 

I post by email, because I cannot log on to blogger.com from the Gulag. Now, the email machine is going to put a long and longwinded legal disclaimer at the end of this post, warning you that dire consequences will follow if you look at this message with the wrong type of eye. Ignore it please.

---

o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o
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John Cena Vs Bow Wow

On Sunday yet another Ugandan university got its ass handed to it by a Kenyan institution of higher learning in that uni quiz show on UTV.

 

Mbarara University: Putting the "challenged" in Celtel Africa Challenge.

 

I was out Sunday night because I had consorting to do, and only got back after the hapless Mbra team was through gazing in bewildered awe at the strange and never-before-seen spectacle before them— the spectacle they were later to learn was called "Knowledge" – and so I didn't actually see them drool onto their red Celtel shirts. But I was informed that the following took place:

 

After they failed one question in a particularly doofus way, the show host, John Sibi-Okumu, who has exemplified grace and poise throughout the series, was so stunned that he dropped his clipboard and said, "You're shitting me, right?"

The Mbra guys thought that was the next question and conferred amongst themselves then they replied, "Pass."

 

This was when John Sibi-Okumu collapsed to the ground and, as they say, ROTFLMAO'd.

 

All composure gone, and with it his distinct BBC accent, Sibi Okumu broke out into his native Luo diction and wailed through convulsions of derisive laughter. "But do I say, Sooerly this educassonal institusson is a decepsson, yaawa. Who is yua dean of studies? Homer Simpson?"

 

We now go to our reporter in the field. Reporter In The Field, what was the final score?

 

RITF: Hi Baz. As you can see behind me, all the Ugandan members of the audience are huddled in one corner. They are planning an ambush. They plan to attack the Mbra students behind the studio after the show so they can administer what they call much-deserved mob justice. The ringleader of the lynch mob, Peter Miles Kanyike, was heard saying earlier, and I quote: "How are people going to believe that we are gifted by nature when our university students behave like they are stuck in a marijuana high? People are are going to believe that the slogan refers only to our genitals and does not apply to our brains." Another audience member replied to this by saying in a deep voice, "One time."

 

Baz: What was the score, kid?

 

RITF: Um… 680 to 70 or something. I think you will have to do like last time and update with the real official score later. Just post what you have now. Ndaba it's just a blog post, it's not like you are practicing journalism here. You can be less than exhaustive.

---

Don't pick lemons.
See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos.

I called Arnold Asaba up and he let me post this

This week I have a special guest. You may remember him if you were literate in the earlier days of the Ugandan press, which is when he was the original Slim Shady: as career misogynist of the Sunday Magazine, his column The Blue Corner tickled and infuriated tens of thousands of... you know what, lemme just post the thing. I found it when I was spring-cleaning my c-drive. The Blue Corner by Arnold Asaba. Originally published in the Sunday Vision something like a bunch of years ago.

A bunch of the guys were talking (I love the sound of that phrase. So poetic!) and the conversation took a strange turn and ended up on a very uncommon subject: sex and violence. Specifically, whether any of us would get into a fight if anyone offended our significant other.

Consensus around the table was that it would "depend". Except in the case of one guy who said, categorically, that there was no way he was going to ever get into a fight.

Why? We asked. His reply: "I am too pretty."

Strangely enough, the discussion did not immediately veer off into the validity of that statement. We resisted the temptation to tell him to stop dreaming, and instead followed—let's call him John's -- statement, on exactly what fighting would depend on.

Not on whether the guy was bigger than him, but on whether his girl has been behaving in a way that is worth being beaten up over.

"If she has been acting funny," he said, "then she is alone."

What exactly did acting funny entail? "You know the way chicks are," he replied. And we understood exactly. You have been suffering the evil eye because of some innocent crack you made about her pot belly, and now she wants you to get thrashed?

Why do women say that they want men to be gentlemanly, to shun our violent instincts and behave civilised, then turn around and ask us to get pummeled on their behalf?

If the aggressor was in the wrong, there would perhaps be a case to argue, but sometimes, it is pure ego on the part of the lady. The guy accidentally bumps into her and spills her drink. He apologises immediately, but she is not satisfied that he means it. She decides that he deserves a blasting.

In the course of this blasting, something rude comes out about the guy. The guy replies with something even ruder about her. And being a guy, his something is definitely going to be ruder than hers.

She loses her mind and fetches you. "This s.o.b. just insulted me!"

If you are John, you ask, "What did he call you?"

"He called me a bitch." It looks like a draw now, but she wants the match to go on.

So you (John) go up to the guy and ask why he saw fit to call your woman a bitch. He explains that it was in response to her calling him an idiot and saying his mother was a malaya. What do you say next?

"Man, you chill her. She's crazy, she loses her mind and says stupid things like that. Forget about it. You just go on with your business."

In doing this, you are looking out for everyone's best interests. Your girl's because you have to take her home, and it won't be safe to drive with blood gushing into your eyes, obscuring your vision. Your own interests, too, because you like your blood to stay inside, not out. The other guy's interests as well, because, even though he is bigger than you, you could still manage to land some blows and cause some damage before he finishes you off. You are being logical and kind, but does the missus realise this? No way. Now both you and the guy are s.o.b.s.

Well, you and the guy now have plenty in common. Your mothers ostensibly share a species, and both your girlfriends are mad at you because you haven't done the manly thing.