Thoughts in Brownian motion

Aka Random thoughts.

1. I want a break from work and yet I can't have it. I don't like the arrangement of having to work all through the holidays except on December 24 and 25. I want to have a sleep in weekend and an island holiday.

2. I have a feeling that the Serulanda Foundation will have their way inspite of the weirdness of their practices, and with the full participation of our M7. While the president instituted a comission of inquiry months ago, his government has at the same time been commissioning the investors and organising the legal framework under which the Lake Victoria Free Trade Zone will operate.

3. Reading about surrogate mothers in newspapers and the Internet is one thing, but knowing somebody who actually went through it is quite another thing. It hit me like a big block of ice when I heard that the beautiful young relative who had gone abroad for about a year, had actually gone to be a surro for her older sis. I should be touched by the whole giving thing, but instead I still feel chilled. I don't know why.

4. At what age do children learn to demand the bigger portion of everything? And where do they learn that if they screamed and kicked long enough you will eventually give in? Who teaches them to resort to endless nibbling especially when the cookie has become no more than the size of a pea? Is this an attempt to prolong the life of the swiftly diminishing cookie?

5. So on Tuesday last week Museveni and the LRA representative Nyekorach Matsanga meet and we are told the president agreed to talk to Kony one on one (on phone, by the way). Then on Sunday this week a joint Uganda-Congo-South Sudan force bombards the LRA hideout in Garamba. How interesting. Now if this is the same Matsanga who early this year reportedly wrote a letter to Museveni urging him to carry out swift military action against Kony, then I think the Tuesday meeting was about talking to Kony in the language of the gun.

Awards that are not necesarily awe inspiring

This is Navio of Klear Kut receiving his Pearl of Africa Music Award for best Hip Hop something from the Commander of the Land Forces Maj. Gen. Katumba Wamala.


All good. But the PAM Award trophy is not all that, I am just saying. I have nothing against the spirit of the awards but that trophy is not inspiring at all. At first you would imagine they would have something shaped like Africa or if that was too hard, like a pearl. Wait. Maybe 'pearl' is what the organizers told the craftsman to make, just that he understood pearl to be a rare gem and came up with a diamond shape. That is my working theory.
Anyway, there have since beeen other groups stampeding to start their own 'Awadi' (In the last month alone, there have been adverts for Volunteer awards, Real Estate awards, just to mention the most intriguing for me) ceremonies. Not bad. However, there is going to be trouble if the organisers are too lazy to deviate from that glass triangular shaped trophy.



For instance, the winners of the 2008 MTN Kampala Marathon received fantastic trophies. Check them out.


Can you seen the glass thingy with the pointy end? If there was a sudden earth tremour, or someone bumped into one of these winners, or the dais went wobbly, would their eyes escape being poked?

Okay. Now at the inaugural Uganda film industry awards guess what inspired the trophy. Well as you can see, the prismic thingy showed up here too, albeit with a stylish looking stand.
Although there were a couple of variations, like this one here below.

The pointy apex was slashed off. Or the craftsman ran out of material too late. Or he had an idea of who would get this particular trophy and wanted to keep the old man safe from the deadly sharp point.

I hope these trophies come with a small text in the corner:

Fragile, Handle with care: If that thing dropped from a significant height, you can be saying goodbye to your prized symbol of progress.

Slippery, handle with dry hands: Oh, Oh, imagine that Katumba Wamala's hands were sweaty and with all the Clere Lotion he used, the Pam Award trophy slipped off his fingers, just before Navio received.

Keep out of reach of children. The sharp apex looks dangerous enough to be used in slaying the cat. And worse could happen, God forbid.

Then imagine that you won in all three contests then your mantelpiece would really be something to look at (not).
I’m sure it certainly beats receiving those infamous wooden ‘shields’, but if they want to continue employing the same bored glass cutter, why not venture into other shapes and better etch work?
Better still, what is so wrong with giving the job to a few sculptors, say at Makerere University, to do a serious job?

In other news:

Overheard on Power FM in the voice of Ben Mwine: They are a dime and a dozen to come across.

(And he was not even saying that THEY are many. Just the opposite.)

Monday's smiley moon

By now you have already discussed and discussed the 'smiley' moon that showed in our skies on Monday night.

Anyway, when Jupiter and Venus came that close to the crescent moon, I was only too eager to try and photograph the spectacle. I have no fancy lens to my simple camera. I should have known the results would be awful.

The first try gave terrible results:

So, Mr. Adam offered to help me and he got this:

I politely snatched the camera back and got this one:

The right 'eye' in the smiley is barely visible but it's there. You can see it if you squint, squeeze your eyes near shut, put your nose on the screen or use a magnifying glass.