Saturday, April 26, 2008

Burger King: Have it your Way


"An ordinary day at VEG CITY Airport: a well-trained team of pickles make sure that only the freshbest vegetables enter the city..."

After I ate my favorite lunch of cheeseburgers I put the placemat in my pocket without really looking at it. At home i took it out and gave it a better look ...

... and I'm really glad i'm not an onion at Burger King

Click picture to see full story.

Skullfish



Boy, people put up all kind of lines, shapes and colors in public space. Once you get an eye for it, you'll keep peeping the walls, fences, rainpipes and networkboxes for more streetart.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Language skills

Does technology empowering or damaging our language skills? (question by Litoz)

My grandmother used to manually grind coffee with a mechanical coffee grinder. My mother plugged in an electronic device to crush her beans. And i buy vacuum wrapped grinds in the supermarket.

Main point: the ways of preparing have changed over the generations, but i still drink coffee and got a hang for it. I guess the same applies to computer mediated language skills. You adapt skills and preferences to the changing techniques that makes things possible. When you live around computers, you use computers to communicate. When you live in the mud, you write with sticks in clay.

In all ways you communicate to your needs and facilities. There's no good or bad here. But some old timers who cannot reach beyond their time frame may sure think that not to be able to write in the mud is a hindering disability.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

European slave trade

Screenpunk's found a new way for typing English hubba. Try to answer questions on Yahoo! Answers.

What do you think might have happened on the African continent if the European slave trade had not taken place?
(question by Danaii)

Interesting question, but not much i guess. Liberia wouldn't exist, being founded as a freed slave state.

The major historical problem for Africa is European countries colonizing it and splitting up tribal territories in artificial nation states. So forcing all kind of tribes to live in new political unities not by their own choice. Hence the bloodshed in Rwanda, or more recent in Nigeria.

The necessity of de-tribalization is one of the main underlying issues in contemporary African politics.