Skip to main content

And then there were three

Image
By
In a surprising bit of good news, another volunteer is moving in to the nearest village, the one recently vacated by a married couple. It'll be nice to have someone that close again, hopefully we can manage to keep each other company all the way to the end of service. Apparently she was having some troubles in her old village and having this one right there was the perfect option, as Peace Corps wouldn't have to go and develop an entirely new site—especially in that I could vouch for this one's quality; Peace Corps' record on site development in South Africa is spotty at best. They certainly didn't do even a cursory inspection of mine.

In other news, my fan just died, which is devastating for my sanity. It is unseasonably hot already (today we hit 37 C) and I am just bathed in sweat anytime I'm in my room during the day. It's probably because I refused a fan offered me by Justin during his recent departure as "I already have one." I may not believe in Jesus, but I could probably manage some supernatural entity that exists only to punish the smug and make people look like fools.
Labels:

Comments

  1. thesixkillerlibrarianOctober 7, 2010 at 1:32 PM

    although i'm happy for you, my little sis is gone and now there is only one "my side." b doesn't count cause she never stays during the weekend.

    ReplyDelete
  2. RyanOctober 7, 2010 at 2:13 PM

    Well, you're just going to have to come visit, especially now that your sis has a sick crib with plenty of space. Everybody wins.

    ReplyDelete
  3. thesixkillerlibrarianOctober 7, 2010 at 3:06 PM

    donezo. anytime? or do i need to pre-arrange

    ReplyDelete
  4. RyanOctober 8, 2010 at 2:03 AM

    I suppose you'll want to at least wait until she's moved in :) We'll have to consult, but I'm sure a simple heads-up will suffice.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more

The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

By
Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe
2 comments
Read more