Tante Astou, one of Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s female characters, got sacked from the Koranic school - daara - because she had an attitude. She wanted to understand the verses written in Arabic in her wooden tablet, instead of only reciting and memorizing them, and she also refused to accept the occasional physical punishments by the Marabout. Way to go Astou!

I wanted to add here a clip of the Arabic version of the children’s ABC song called Alif-Baa-Taa but unfortunately it is missing from my archives.  I may have deleted it in my yesterday’s ardour before formatting my laptop. I never really learnt to sing this song myself but I remember it had a funny, somehow nationalist, echo in it. If you know more about the background of this song I would appreciate if you could share it with us all - many thanks in advance!

I had to use my old - unprotected - laptop for some time and the unthinkable happened: my computer was attacked by Worm.VBS.Solow.a.

These things always happen to someone else, not you. For some painful hours I though I had lost all  the work of the past few days, not to mention all the old precious data that I have only in that laptop and from which I cannot remove it. After the first cold sweat, here it was again, that feeling of catharsis lurking! After all, when you lose data you lose data and life goes on… Is it not good from time to time to inventory all that irreplaceable data and properly clean the house? 

As a remedy I downloaded a free trial of a security programme and let it scan my computer, with the following results: 9 viruses and 39 spyware. It’s no news that we are deprived of privacy with the internet but what is more alarming is that this anti-virus programme ”took over” my laptop memory and slowed it down really badly.    

Not only have I experienced a few moments of time vacuum in the near past but I must be also living in a continuous spatial vacuum. I know for instance that the Ethiopian Millennium is only around 100 days away, but repeatedly forget the local holidays. Again I planned my comings and goings for the day supposedly in a very efficient way but my purposefulness was wiped away the minute I stepped out of the tube station: all the offices and shops are closed, it’s a public holiday - again! And you feel like a complete idiot who has just been thrown on Earth from some other dimension…

It’s a little hard to follow the Christian - or Gregorian, to be precise - calendar by simply looking out of the window and by measuring the noise level of the traffic and people, because the neighbourhood where I live is maybe 80% Moslem and everything runs normally except on Fridays. And working at home has this disadvantage (?) of not having the colleagues with big families around and who always know the approaching holidays weeks ahead and schedule their lives accordingly.

Now maybe it’s time to refresh my desktop with a calendar? I will come back soon with a new entry on kronos vs. kairos - two very different ways of looking at or being in time. I have adapted myself to the latter, while it often seems that the rest of the world is forcing us to think in a linear and chronological way…  Oh, and here’s a link to a lot of stuff on time: calendar and time database.

With the kind and patient help of my friend *T* I finally have my Amharic keyboard up and running. I had actually installed the software (Tavultesoft Keyman 6.0) a long time ago  and it worked very well from day one - it was the letter stickers that were the the real challenge. The stickers that I had ordered from the US did not match with the Keyman mapping and I had to cut all those tiny letters out and relocate them on my keyboard. In the end we had around 15 letters in the sticker mat that were not needed at all because the Keyman software functions with a relatively uncomplicated input method of key combinations, i.e. there is no need to have such a large number of letters glued to the shift location on the keys.

Now my laptop keyboard really looks like a script salad with green Arabic and golden Amharic letters. If I ever decide to learn yet another non-Roman script I’ll need a keyboard with extra large keys! It’s time to put this keyboard facility now into practise and send surprise e-mails to my Amharic-speaking friends… they still have to cope with my very elementary written material though. For reference, read Eugene Ionesco’s Lesson and you know what I mean!

Have you already seen the mysterious and fantastic birds, created from discarded objects and recycled materials by the Senegalese artist Mamadou Diedhiou Tall? He is inspired by his home village Niomoune and its migrating birds of all sorts. I saw some of his work in Dakar and they all look so bird-like! 

I’ve noticed recently that his art is being copied by others too - I suppose there’s nothing wrong with the idea of practising your artistic eye and with creating new beautiful things out of trash, only it would be nice if all those apprentices had their own ideas and let the material decide whether the work at hand turns out as a bird, a fish, or something else.

The Birdmaker, a short documentary on the artist by Cheik Darou Seck, is available online here.