Ria Bacon: editor & writer
Linguist with wanderlust,
From the hills of New Guinea to the halls of the Sorbonne,
From the beaches of Bassam to the fields of Friesland,
From the catacombs of Rome to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.
From the heather of the Veluwe to the dust of Dakar ...
Currently resident in the Land of Sea with a small tribe of kids and Mr B.
FYI
Stet means "Let it stand" and is used by editors to indicate that the original text should be left untouched.
...in Arcadia ego is a pun on a painting by Poussin.
Contact Ria[dot]Bacon[at]gmail.com
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Today is the most important national holiday in Senegal, Tabaski, the Wolof word for the Festival of the Sheep, known elsewhere in the Muslim world as Aïd-el-Kebir. It is a celebration of an event that is also important to Jews and Christians, that is, the sacrifice by Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic) of his eldest son. If you recall the story, Abraham, aged 80, was still childless, and so promised God/Allah that he would sacrifice his firstborn if He would grant him a child.
(Don’t interrupt. I know it doesn’t make sense.)
A single child is born, Ismael. Years later, God reminds Abraham of his promise. Abraham is a man of his word and so prepares to sacrifice his son to God. At the moment Abraham’s knifeblade touches Ismael’s throat, the Angel Gabriel does a quick switcheroo and in the place of the child, puts a ram, whose throat is promptly slit.
As a reminder of Abraham’s act of faith, Muslims reenact the sacrifice of the sheep each year. Every head of the family (male, of course), is obliged to provide a sheep for his family. The obligation is not enshrined in the Koran, rather it is a social pressure to “keep up with the Jones’”, or the Dioufs, perhaps, here in Senegal.
 With the cheapest, scrawniest sheep costing about 2 weeks’ pay for many people (50,000 FCFA or 75 euros), I asked an acquaintance of modest means why he didn’t just buy a leg.
“Ah,” he sighed. “It’s not for us, the adults. It’s for the children. They can’t show their face at school if their father didn’t have a sheep for Tabaski.”
So 2000 years after the sacrifice of the son by the father over a point of honour, today’s fathers have to sacrifice themselves, often running themselves into debt for the rest of the year, in order to preserve their children’s honour. Sweet irony.
Of course, such subtleties are lost on the sheep. For him the story ends the same way.
I lost a job last week.
It was a 30-page translation on children’s rights, a subject I’ve worked on regularly since summer. It would have been a straightforward job, and although in Senegal I accept fees at half my regular rates elsewhere, the amount would have nicely rounded out the end-of-the-month finances (translation: bring us back to zero).
So what went wrong?
It was a classic example of the warning that my old boss in Rome used to have pinned to her noticeboard:
A lack of planning on your part
does not justify an emergency on my part.
I was first called about the job on Thursday 20 November. The document was for a high-level meeting and the deadline was the start of the meeting, Tuesday 2 December. As usual, I asked for a copy of the document, to assess the length and complexity of the job.
First problem: the document would not be ready until Monday 25 November because the author was still working on it. Par for the course, I thought. But there would still be enough time to turn it around.
Monday. No news.
Tuesday. Nothing. I call. The document had just arrived. I got a copy, gave it the once over and sent back my pro forma and deadline: Next Monday, 1 December. This was accepted. However, I was asked not to start work until the Director approved the contract. So I waited.
Wednesday, I call. The Director had not yet given approval and was in a meeting. Worse still, they had just realized that they needed to get the document printed before the meeting … So could I not return the translation by Friday? No, was my reply. No sooner than Monday.
*grumble* *sigh* was the reaction.
Can I get started? I asked. No, we need to wait until the afternoon for the green light.
18:30 Wednesday, I call. Director still in meeting.
20:00 Wednesday, I receive an email asking me to be patient.
10:00 Thursday, I reply saying that with less than two working days remaining, it was no longer possible for me to meet my deadline and that in consequence I was withdrawing my offer.
10:03 Thursday, I receive a call telling me to start work.
Surprised, I asked, “Didn’t you receive my email?”
“What email? Ahh … oh … I see. But we were counting on you!”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see why I should have to work through the weekend because you didn’t plan this better.”
*click*
She actually had the nerve to hang up on me!
Mr B, ever understanding, suggested the poor woman had been about to burst into tears.
Maybe so, but it was her own fault. The meeting must have been scheduled months before. There should have been a plan of what needed to be done by what date, and it should have been monitored. Instead each person in the chain let their delivery dates slip by, maybe just a few days here or a week there, but no one paid attention until they realized the meeting was fast approaching. And then they expect the final members of the chain to pull up all the slack and bring the schedule back on track?
I don’t think so.
I’m a professional. Treat me with some r.e.s.e.p.c.t. (sic)
After spending a few days in the north of Senegal, I returned to Dakar to find one of my sites had been hacked. Each page of my photoblog, Ria Galleria, had a long list of ads and links above my own photo posts. The ads were all related to travel, which is preferable to zoophilia, although the centred alignment was crime enough, typographically speaking.
After some frantic searching, I learned that I had been hit by a php injection, which is not the latest form of synthetic drug abuse but rather a hack that places a line of malicious code at the top of all the php files on your server. Given that my blogging software, WordPress, is built on php, this was a serious problem.
How did it get there? Probably through some security weakness in my outdated version of WordPress (or possibly an associated plugin). Updating is an obsession at WordPress, annoyingly so at times, but plain stupid to ignore for as long as I have. My excuse was that I could not rely on stable power supply long enough to undertake such a laborious process of synchronizing hundreds of files.
This hack attack was the push I needed to upgrade. I started with Ria Galleria, using a fully automatic update by SimpleScripts. It was simple, but it lost lots of tags and all the links to the photos — a pretty basic flaw for a photoblog. Still, I was happy that I had the basic setup back, and will re-upload the photos as and when.
More daunting was this four-year-old blog. Mon œuvre! ;-)
I decided to do the upgrade manually, and, several hours later, it’s up and running. For you, dear reader, there is very little difference from the previous version. If only you could see behind the screen … gone is the linoleum and the bakelite cabinet; now all is cool whites and a single pulsing red LCD atop a burnished titanium cube.
Actually there are a million tabs, tags, options and other delightful distractions to fiddle with. I won’t have any time left to write anything.
I mentioned that you would not notice anything different after the upgrade; that’s not true. As with my previous upgrade (two years ago, oops), some things don’t make it through to the other side. Last time it was the Ultimate Tag Warrior, a plugin that was as heroic as it sounds; this time it was my AudioScrobbler, which showed you what I’d been listening to. It seems the developer got fed up with working on it.
So now I have to write out what I’m listening to: Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie – Dark Eyes
Now it’s Eddie Palmieri – La Verdad. Next Goldfrapp – Utopia (New Ears Mix) … Phew … there’s got to be another scrobbler out there. [UPDATE: fixed -- see sidebar]
On the plus side, the upgrade means I can use some new eye candy, such as this:
So much sexier than the static tag cloud I had before.
Wrap-up at five after midnight: I was hit, knocked down, got back up, dusted myself off, walked away looking better than before … and yet … I have a lingering fear that something is still lurking in a database somewhere, ready to strike again.
The reaction anticipated in my previous post was swift and effective … actually it was glossy.
I had expected a different reaction — crude spray scribble, as had been done (by the PPK sprayers?) to the “NOUVEAU PARTI” graffiti, perhaps, or a riposte in words — but this whiteout is so … thorough and professional.
I wonder who did it.
I wonder too why the only PPK graffiti to be covered up, out of the dozens, if not hundreds, of examples around the city, are those I photographed and posted yesterday.
Is there a link?
Sssh! Do you think someone out there is actually reading what I write?
On the same day that the leader of the National Assembly, Macky Sall, was voted out of office, a rash of graffiti appeared around Dakar — just three cryptic letters: PPK.
Fortunately, one sprayer had had the time, or the couilles, to write out the meaning: Pourquoi pas Karim (why not Karim).
The Karim is President Wade’s son, currently head of the planning organization of the Islamic Conference (ANOCI) held in Dakar last March, and reckoned by many to be the heir to his father’s position as president. Of course, this being a democracy, the president cannot simply drop his son into his shoes. No, it isn’t simple … it requires Machiavellian cunning of the highest degree.
Take the case of Macky Sall: number 2 in the president’s party, loyal promoter of presidential projects, leader of the National Assembly … and one of the best placed persons to stand at the next presidential election. Thus he became to be seen primarily as a threat to the dynastic ambitions of the Wades. When Sall dared to call Karim Wade to the National Assembly to clarify the finances of ANOCI, he triggered a chain reaction lasting 12 months that led finally to his eviction as leader of the Assembly. The ANOCI finances remain as opaque as they ever were. In contrast, the law has been changed regarding the duration of the post of leader of the Assembly from five years to one year, with retroactive force. The result was that Sall was out of office as soon as the vote was passed last Sunday.
Get that — the national law has been changed in order to put the fix on one of your most faithful party members, and merely to advance the career of your son. But yes it was done democratically, voted by the party of both Wade and Sall, the party that dominates the Assembly as a result of the boycott of the legislative elections by opposition parties last year …
I can’t help marvelling at the mix of cunning and tragedy in this affair: for cunning, Wade could write a new chapter in Machiavelli’s The Prince; tragedy in that there is a sense of an inevitable convergence of chickens coming home to roost, some time soon.
P.S. As an editor, I was struck by the lack of a question mark after, “Pourquoi pas Karim”. Then I realized that it was not a question, but rather a defiant assertion. I’m curious to see if there will be a reaction in graffiti.
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With the cheapest, scrawniest sheep costing about 2 weeks’ pay for many people (50,000 FCFA or 75 euros), I asked an acquaintance of modest means why he didn’t just buy a leg.
If I may give a hint for the next badly planned job; take the job and charge weekend fees. For me that would be double rate.