Archive for May, 2009
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]
I’m going to leave current events alone for a week. Not for lack of news, but because the smaller things in life need our attention, too.
This week, let’s take a lighthearted look at a few expressions that make Bislama such a delightful language. Before we do, though, I must apologise to native Bislama speakers: I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already know. Nonetheless, it’s sometimes useful to record such trifles for posterity.
Because of its impoverished vocabulary, Bislama relies heavily on metaphor, imagery and euphemism. The pictures it paints are remarkably vivid and often frankly indecent, generating wild laughter among the interlocutors. Propriety dictates that I leave out the most scandalous of them….
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Originally published at the Scriptorum. You can comment here or there.
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Saturday, May 30th, 2009
AUCKLAND, N.Z.—Tactics employed by Australia and New Zealand to push Pacific Island countries into signing a free trade agreement are a form of “contemporary colonization,” said academic and respected analyst on Pacific Island affairs, Professor …
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Saturday, May 30th, 2009
[This week's Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]
NOTE: In a small place such as Vanuatu, it often happens that one has to wear a number of different hats. I work as an IT consultant, offering advice and information to clients in the private, public and civil society sectors. I am also a writer and photographer. I volunteer some of my time to help with local IT projects, and I serve as interim secretary of the Vanuatu IT Users Society. This column is written under those auspices, but from time to time my professional work bleeds into the area of advocacy and awareness-raising. In cases where I have a professional involvement or interest in a particular issue, I will make that clear within the text of the column.
No writer is free from bias. This is especially true of columnists. While I make every effort to ensure that any facts and statements appearing in this space are properly corroborated, I reserve the right to interpret them according to my own experience, judgement and insight. It’s my job to have an opinion. Unless I state otherwise, the views expressed here are my own.
Knowledge is power. </p>
Everyone knows that expression, and many of us have to grapple with its practical implications every day. When we’re tracking down the person who knows how a particular thing works, digging through arcane data in order to become the person who knows, or whether we’re trying to pry special knowledge loose from a reluctant source, we find ourselves operating in an economy of scarcity.
When we trade in knowledge, we also rely on its scarcity to determine its value. If we have a juicy piece of gossip about someone, we don’t tell it to everyone and their dog. Instead, we parse our words and choose our confidants carefully, sometimes teasing them with partial revelation.
Let’s reformulate that initial statement, then:
Scarce knowledge is power.
If we follow the logic of that sentence, we are prone to conclude that widespread knowledge is therefore valueless. In the cash economy, if there’s too much money floating around, we experience inflation. Dollars lose their value because everyone has them. This has led some barstool philosophers to conclude that opinions, too, are of little value because ‘everyone’s got one.’
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Originally published at the Scriptorum. You can comment here or there.
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Thursday, May 28th, 2009
A) That’s Madame Governor General to you, missie.
B) It could have been worse. Nunavut’s greatest delicacy is rotted, slightly fermented walrus meet. The penis is considered the best part.
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Monday, May 25th, 2009
(www.Economist.com) Britain’s legislature needs a vigorous cleansing; but now is not the time to redesign government.OVER the past century, the British have lost a lot—their empire, their military might, their economic leadership and even their sen…
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Sunday, May 24th, 2009
I ran into Peter Walker and Jo Dorras, the founders of Wan Smolbag Theatre company, in town yesterday. They stopped and thanked me for the review I wrote about 40 Dei, their latest stage production. As she turned to leave, Jo said, “Nobody’s ever written that kind of a review on us before.”
Public commentators in Vanuatu don’t write nearly often enough about Wan Smolbag. Even when they do, their description of the work and its effect tend to fit them into the ‘development NGO’ straitjacket. That’s not entirely inaccurate, of course; Smolbag is a development NGO. But such descriptions are incomplete.
Woefully so, in my opinion. Once understood, the reasons for this misperception explain a great deal about the failures of many formal development programmes. (That’s programmes, mind you, not projects. But that’s an essay for another day.) The problem, ultimately, is our human incapacity to quantify, or even adequately to analyse, certain cultural inputs.
Now, given that Smolbag has been working with the softer tools of drama, dialogue, understanding and community awareness for twenty years, they’ve got the issue pretty well sussed. At least innately. If there are still tensions between what they want to do and what donors are willing to fund, they’re manageable, and it must be said that, from top to bottom, Smolbag staff know what they’re about. They’re are as good at demonstrating the value of their work to donors, partners and the public as anyone I’ve encountered in a couple of decades of part- and full-time advocacy work.
But the preceding is really just a digression – I need to say a few things about Wan Smolbag as an artistic institution, and the only way to get there is to indulge in a deliberate bit of hand-waving that runs the risk of belittling the dozens of non-theatrical activities they manage. There’s a small mountain of data out there expressing in very finite terms just how effective this group is.
My point, I guess, is that no matter how good that makes them – and they are very good indeed – there’s more to it than that. And that’s what I want to write about today.
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Originally published at the Scriptorum. You can comment here or there.
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Sunday, May 24th, 2009
The president of the Vanuatu National Council of Women says police are investigating the cause of a fire which destroyed the VNCW guest house on Sunday evening.Manina Pakete says it is suspected that the fire began with a candle used by residents in th…
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Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
ABOUT THIS SHOW: 40 Dei plays at Wan Smolbag Haos in Tagabe on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The show starts at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are 50 vatu for adults, students and children. Because of its popularity, attendees should arrive at least one hour before show time to be guaranteed seating.
The thematic heart of 40 Dei (40 Days), Wan Smolbag’s powerful new play, is the story of Jesus’ 40 days of suffering and temptation in the desert. With Satan constantly at his side, Jesus fasted, contemplated and steadfastly resisted the Devil’s threats and inducements. Even in the extremities of suffering, he accepted his humanity, refusing assistance either from above or below.
As the New Testament tells it, Jesus embarked on this pilgrimage of suffering immediately after his baptism. It was, in a sense, his preparation to enter into the world. We first meet Matthew, the protagonist in Jo Dorras’ stark, deeply probing script, as he emerges from his own moral desert, a wasted youth of faithlessness, drinking and violence.
Lying on the roadside, bloody, filthy, half-clothed, Matthew presents a repulsive figure. Only Lei, a pastor’s daughter, sees him for what he is – a lost soul. Ignoring imprecations to leave this filth, this ‘doti blong taon’ where he lies, she instead recalls the parable of the Good Samaritan to her father.
Matthew awakes from his stupor to a vision of love – a beautiful young woman beside him, joyous music and light emerging from a nearby chapel. He is transformed, and decides at that moment to leave his errant past behind, to seek redemption and salvation.
But as with Jesus in the desert, the Devil is always at his side. And Matthew is human, all too human. Beset by difficulties, he tries to navigate the narrow passage between hypocritical moral rectitude and the nihilistic, hopeless existence of his young friends.
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Originally published at the Scriptorum. You can comment here or there.
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Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
Long time no see. How’s it hanging?
Listen, I’ve been running MS Word on WINE for a little while now, but since I moved from my old Crossover Office installation to a ‘pure’ (i.e. Ubuntu default) WINE, all the applications now open maximised. I find this (more than) a little gratuitous on my 1680×1050 screen.
Google and grepping obvious keywords haven’t helped so far.
Please tell me how to make it stop.
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Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
[This week's Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on contract to assist the Interim Telecommunications Regulator in conducting a consultation seeking public input on how best to manage Vanuatu’s .vu domain in a pluralistic, healthy commercial ISP market.
A fair amount of technical information necessarily goes into such discussions, and you can read more about that on the Regulator’s website.
The issue of managing Vanuatu’s national domain affects us all. It’s not sufficient for a bunch of geeks to get together and decide everything; we need to make sure everyone in Vanuatu has a clear idea what’s happening.
To that end, I’ve dug through a number of older columns on the subject of what a domain is, how it should work, and what it all means to Internet users in Vanuatu.
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Originally published at the Scriptorum. You can comment here or there.
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