From The Only In Kenya Files

There is a story "Minister’s PA, bodyguards hurt in crash" in today's Standard that informs us that aides to Minister Martha Karua were injured in a car crash in Kirinyaga.

Only In Kenya where the conventional wisdom has it that nobody ever has an accident that is not set up by one's enemies is it necessary for Minister Karua to say "the accident was normal" which is to say it was an honest-to-God accident with no enemies or uchawi invovled.

(Curiously the State House website lists Minister Karua's martial status as "family person". I am not one for standing on a rooftop and announcing things like marital status to the whole world, but if you are going to do so don't make a mockery of it. When are we going to stop living lies. I wonder what that same site would list for a Catholic priest's marital status.)

A Danish Perspective or What Happened To Tanzania?

I was surfing along, minding my business when out of an orange-colored sky flash! bam! alakazam! this map hit me in my eye* ... a mildly grossly erroneous map of "Kenya" (left) that's prominently featured on a Danish travel website. (For the geographically challenged amongst you the map on the right is an accurate map of the current political boundaries.)

Which makes me wonder...

If they cannot even find Nairobi, or even Kenya for that matter, on a map how on earth will they get you there?

I kind of like the enlarged Kenya -- more space to stretch our legs, but what would our Tanzanian brethren think about this re-partition of our countries?

Have more Danish tourists been going to Tanzania while mistakenly thinking that they are headed to Kenya?

* (Thanks to good old Nat King Cole for those words that are ever so slightly adapted from Orange Colored Sky.)

More Potash: The Good Old Nyayo Days or Roadside Legal Tender

I have spent some time over the last few days (too much time maybe) reading Kenyan blogs, there are some fabulous minds out there...

For the second day in a row I feel compelled to quote from Potash's A Kenyan Urban Narrative ... Gosh, does that mean I am becoming a Potash groupie?

Sometimes I yearn for the good old Nyayo days. When they looted state coffers and pumped the money into the streets. I mean the President bought my mom's bananas at Kinungi. Two bananas for a freshly printed five hundred bill. The bill was so fresh the President hadn't even signed it. But he was a sport, he took out another big fiver and bought a black Bic from Kamanu who just happened to be selling Bics that day. (Well the Chief had asked all the hoodlums to try and look respectable on that day.) The President, without missing a stride signed the bills with the black Bic.

How can you but not just roll on the floor laughing...

What was I thinking?

I had this other blog... until yesterday. I was in Blogger primping and preening the blog, changing and unchanging my profile and all the little thises-and-thats that us bloggers do with webesque alter egos.

Then, out of the blue, I felt that I had just had it with the damn blog. I click on the Settings tab and there it is ... "Delete This Blog" - click and it was gone. Just-Like-That.

Fast forward to today... I sit up with a start. What was I thinking? I frantically search for the "Yes, I screwed up please UNDO that bad decision" button, but alas it was gone. For good.

In a moment of brilliance I rush off to see if the omnipotent Google has at least some pages in its cache. Nothing. Gone.

So a message to all y'all bloggers out there. Hide your blog, stop writing for a week or a decade... but deleting your entire blog without recourse is just not a smart thing.

The worst thing is that I know it is still out there in the ether someplace, I just don't know where. But I just know it will reappear at the most inopportune moment.

My First Potash Experience...

I found a new blog...A Kenyan Urban Narrative. Potash entertains. Such superb writing...

In Kenya the only fellows in constant employ are reverends, brewers and grave diggers. And the Reverend stays one up because he still has a graveside gig and always gets to celebrate a brew during mass.

Thanks for the laughs.

The Mountain