Moorish Art

Tags: andalucia, architecture, moorish, photo, seville, spain

Smegging heck!

So what do I want to blather on about this fine day?

Perhaps the discomforting spectacle of British MP’s of both red and blue hues falling over themselves in the headlong, Jack Straw inspired, rush to attack an already suspended hijabi teaching assistant… nah! not that. (Strange coincidence that the most outspoken government ministers in all of this are in constituencies where the traditional labour vote is in danger of defecting to the BNP next election night)

Or perhaps the sad revelation that a young Bangladeshi woman was driven to an infanticidal suicide by isolation. A kind of isolation, perhaps exacerbated by her in-laws or her inability to speak the language or just the isolation of being an home alone mum, that occurs all too often to Bangladeshi brides coming to this ‘Kingdom of Dreams’.

Or perhaps the depressing news of a Bangladeshi Imam being the subject of an alleged racist attack in his mosque.

Or maybe I could wax lyrical about a genuinely Bangladeshi nobel prize winner and the joy of all his countrymen at this richly deserved recognition of his pioneering work on microcredit, to alleviate poverty throughout the world.

No. What I need to get off my chest is the indecipherablity of the smegging symbols on smegging Smeg cookers. What smeghead of a genius decided to substitute simple words like ‘grill’ and ‘oven’ and ‘fan assisted’ with the oh-so-trendy-at-my-designers-tea-and-cocaine-party hieraglyphs.

I just wonder how many people have starved to death or even burned their houses down in vain attempts to cook a pizza.

Symbols can be frustrating and may even be considered plain wrong but sometimes, just sometimes, ranting against them might not be the most useful way of dealing with things.

Tags: bangladesh, isolation, jackstraw, nobelprize, racism, smeg

The Kingdom of Cards, by Rabindranath Tagore

Back on the Tagore podcast trail but slightly out of sequence — in that this the fifth podcast in the series is actually the sixth story from the collection — but I don’t think he’d mind.

The story is about a young prince who leaves his mother to seek fame and fortune and what occurs when he and his friends wash up on a strange island.

The Kolkatta (Calcutta) raised Tagore wrote a lot of these stories when he was managing the family estates in what is now Bangladesh.

 

 The Kingdom of Cards, by Rabindranath Tagore [23:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Tags: podcast, tagore, thekingdomofcards

Hello World!

Sometimes life has a way of just creeping up on you and grabbing you by the throat which is annoying and requires that you slap it down and set it back on it’s way and at other times it just rushes towards you at full steam, dazzling you in it’s headlights, shattering your ear drums with it’s banshee like shrieking, frightening the bejeezus out of you and then just rolls right over you without so much as a ‘how do you do?’ … which is just plain rude I say.

Anyway, this blog thing has moved so robots, web crawlers and the odd occaisional human being who might happen by may wish to update their links. If so then the blog for bongo vongo now lives at:

http://www.bongovongo.com/wordpress/

the previous link will still work for a month or so.