Category Archives: Africa

Shame Day: The Boko Haram Kidnappings (and the reasons I postponed reporting it)

Posted on May 6, 2014 by | Leave a comment

I’m currently living with my in-laws. At our house John and I almost never watch the news, but living with them means that most evenings I take in at least an hour or two of current events. For weeks I’ve been listening to CNN run flight simulations to try and guess where the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went. I’ve also seen hours of footage from the South Korean ferry accident, including the gut-wrenching clips of the young kids saying goodbye to their parents. Despite all of that it was only recently that I heard the first report of the group of girls kidnapped in Nigeria.

It’s possible that I just wasn’t watching at the right time, or that it wasn’t featured on Western news stations over the past few weeks because of attempts by the Nigerian government to downplay the situation. I’m definitely not saying that the case hasn’t been reported at all, since African and international media were reporting on this case long before we were over here. Continue reading →

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Posted in Africa, Islam, news

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Fame Day: May Day

Posted on April 30, 2014 by | 1 comment

Today’s post comes to you on what is perhaps one of my most favorite days of the year: May Day.

No, not that one-

There we go.

That’s right comrades, pinkos, and fellow travelers! Today’s post marks not only the celebration of revolution and the working class across the globe but further touches off the first annual month-of-May celebration of all things leftist! Continue reading →

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Posted in Africa, Asia, Europe, Fame Day, government, money, morality, news, politics, Youth

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Culture War Correspondence: Cultural Sensitivity

Posted on April 23, 2014 by | 1 comment

GORDON: Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening. Our topic for tonight comes to us from the distant country of Sri Lanka, where a British woman has been deported for transgressing local standards of cultural and religious sensitivity… as a result of having a tattoo of Buddha on her arm…


KAT: Wow. Remind me to get my tattoo removed.

GORDON: You sport the Buddha on yourself?

KAT: Nah, it’s all just wishful thinking. I’m far too broke to have any ink.

(On textbooks)

Continue reading →

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Posted in Africa, America, Asia, bizarreness, Culture War Correspondence

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Generational Time Zones

Posted on April 7, 2014 by | 2 comments

You’ll notice, readers, that this post was published exactly at 9:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. This is partly because I want to avoid Evan’s routine beatings as punishment for tardiness, and mostly because you, as an overwhelmingly Western audience, expect everything to be exactly on time.

Now if you were all mostly from Bolivia, or Syria, or Morocco, or Thailand, chances are that you wouldn’t care so much. After all, 9:00 in the morning is really more of an approximation than anything else, right?

Taken from a rather insightful infographic on the differences between Eastern and Western cultures.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Africa, America, Asia, bizarreness, business, Europe, technology, Youth

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I was a Voluntourist

Posted on March 22, 2014 by | 5 comments
In an article that started trending recently, “The Problem with Little White Girls“, blogger Pippa Biddle shares about her experience doing short term aid in Tanzania. While her group of private school kids had flown in to build a library for an orphanage, they were actually terrible at construction:

“Each night the men had to take down the structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we would be unaware of our failure… It would have been more cost effective, stimulative of the local economy, and efficient for the orphanage to take our money and hire locals to do the work, but there we were trying to build straight walls without a level…”

Biddle goes on to ask her reader to reconsider short-term aid. Continue reading →

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Posted in Africa, Christianity, communication, money

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Shame Day: The Portrayal of Christians in Popular Media

Posted on February 11, 2014 by | 10 comments

I’ve ragged on Christians and Christianity alike, both in practice and doctrine, and I’ve never felt unjustified in doing so.  Nevertheless, and for all its issues, it really can’t be denied that in the past 20 to 30 years the religion’s really gotten the short end of the stick. In the interest of equity to all, we’re going to spend some time hashing out some of the more popular portrayals of Christians and explaining why they’re unfair, inaccurate, or even just plain spiteful.

I. Christians as One Group

Evan’s already covered the topic of how we’re drifting further and further away from a common cultural understanding- especially when it comes to religion. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but it is starting to have some negative effects.

There was an episode of Weeds (gah- there’s hours of my life I’ll never get back) depicting the creation of this megachurch in the suburb that the show was (at first, anyways) largely centered on satirizing. And that’s fair; these things do exist, and usually in the wealthier, WASPier neighborhoods of this nation. And that was all fine and well until the episode where the zealous church-goers started speaking in tongues.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Africa, America, Asia, Christianity, Europe, film, history, media, morality, religion, science, sex, television

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