week in review

this week kylie and i continued on the project she started with her mom and painted our old office/new bedroom.
we are happy with the colour and the feel of the room. i remember learning in psych 1000 that the best colour for a baby room is yellow, and laughing at the thought of painting any room such an odd colour. we've come a long way... baby.

after a miserably rainy 2 weeks the sun has returned to the fraser valley. on the first fully sunny day we ventured to our favourite beach to double our vitamin D dose using the reflective properties of the fraser river.
kylie is pretty quick on the trigger and captured niko in a number of athletic and akimbo poses.

blue skies after rain means the mountains have regained their picturesque snowcapped glory.
we were able to enjoy views of these peaks while bathing niko. here is niko repulsing my attempt at a second scrubdown.


in musical news, after some time primarily immersed in the soft sounds of ann vriend and jose gonzalez and the harder vibes of matt good and the dandy warhols i have recently returned to hip hop and techno to feed my inner metronome.

i found "kings of salone" from sierra leone a few days ago and this song powered me up vedder mountain yesterday (swollen members narrated the downhill after a conversation with our friend dan about their street cred in the US):





you can download the whole mixtape here.

if i am going to touch on the subject of african rap, then i have to share with you the song that dominated the auralscape of east africa while we were there in 2007. a tanzanian rap with a chorus that loosely translates as "what's up? - it's all good" and acts as an easy primer for swahili slang greetings.



being able to sing the chorus of this song went a long way towards establishing street cred with the locals. greeting any young person on the street in zanzibar would quickly lead to an exchange such as:

happo vipi?
happo sawa

mambo vipi?
mambo poa

habari yako?
sawa sawa, na wewe?
mzuri sana bwana

if i could successfully navigate this far into the conversation in the correct order the young person with whom i was conversing would almost invariably start laughing and say:
chizi chizi kama ndizi

which translates loosely as "crazy crazy like a banana"

at this point i would be out of my language depth and we would both start laughing... i love swahili and i enjoy the laid back drawn out friendly greetings. typing this out has made me miss africa (dont tell kylie).


finally an interesting factoid from the world of tiger woods. i hesitate to wade into the media bonanza surrounding his trumpeted fall from grace, however i found this point illustrative of both the degree of tiger's saturation of mass media and the vocabulary of the majority media consumer. yesterday woods released his reactive media statement, the first line of which reads "I have let my family down and i regret those transgressions with all of my heart". the number one google search yesterday was for the definition of "transgression".