Names

In the neighborhood I grew up in, there was this little girl everybody use to call Under Rose the writer inclusive. later on when I was much older I got to know the name was Anne Rose, up to this day I wonder why I would mistake Anne Rose for Under Rose.

My little boy has a very basic and simple name called Ethan but right from his nanny to the neighbors they have versions of how they call him, others say Esan, Nathan, tithan or Ethannie.

Growing up I have come across weird names like tongologom, kassolo(in one of the local languages meaning male/female genitalia), lwebawo, kammana(in one of the local languages meaning male/female genitalia ), kasutumare.

People with some of these kinds of names, must have gone through a lot of teasing all the way, even in adulthood.

Back in secondary school, the letter 'V' was a jargon for the female genital. since my Christian name begins with letter v, my classmates made sure that whenever the pronounced my surname they would always mention it together with the first letter of my Christian name. The really would have a field day on me, up to this day, when some of them meet me on the streets, the mention my surname and the letter V and laugh.

Just imagine for a dick to have a surname called kassolo. Wonder what some parents are thinking about when naming their children.

Psychologically a rose by any other name can not smell as sweet as a rose.

Y question God?

Many times especially when bad things happen to you, you question God why it is you the bad things are happening to, forgetting that during times of happiness, joy or during times when good things happen to you. You never question God why it is you.

The reality of life is that bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people and vis versa.

Probably because we are all sinners in this world, that we get a portion of both the bad and the good.

It is said God works in mysterious ways, thus there is total no need to question him

BODA BODA etiquette

Most of you will agree with me, the boda boda fellows are amongst the most ill mannered Ugandans.
Right from the way they cause menaces on our roads everyday. Wreck less driving, very insultive and abusive especially to the fairer sex. Well most of our leaders, in a nutshell we would say have got boda boda etiquette.

The way taxpayer’s money is being squandered everyday, it is very alarming this country is no longer going to the dogs but the dogs are coming to this country.

Even Mother Nature feels the pain of divorce

Without mincing any words this is worthy your time, bumped into this over the internet, at first glance it made no sense to me but I went further reading the article, it made a lot of sense thereafter and I thought it is worthy sharing.

As a citizen of the world, in order to make the world a greener planet, it is an obligation to spread the word, as one of the top ten ways to make the planet a greener place.

A research funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station, made an analysis of the environmental impact of divorce.

Below is a list of some of the facts found out by Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University whose analysis of the environmental impact of divorce appears in an online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Divorce can be bad for the environment. In countries around the world divorce rates have been rising, and each time a family dissolves the result is two new households.
"A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household.
More households means more use of three critical resources of land, water and energy.
Households with fewer people are simply not as efficient as those with more people sharing.
A household uses the same amount of heat or air conditioning whether there are two or four people living there. A refrigerator used the same power whether there is one person home or several. Two people living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.
Liu, who researches the relationship of ecology with social sciences, said people seem surprised by his findings at first, and then consider it simple. "A lot of things become simple after the research is done," he said.
Some extra energy or water use may not sound like a big deal, but it adds up.
The United States, for example, had 16.5 million households headed by a divorced person in 2005 and just over 60 million households headed by a married person.
Per person, divorced households spent more per person per month for electricity compared with a married household, as multiple people can be watching the same television, listening to the same radio, cooking on the same stove and or eating under the same lights.
That means some $6.9 billion in extra utility costs per year, Liu calculated, plus an added $3.6 billion for water, in addition to other costs such as land use.
And it isn't just the United States.
Liu looked at 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002.
In the 11, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been a million fewer households using energy and water in these countries.
"People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered," Liu said.
Liu stressed that he isn't condemning divorce: "Some people really need to get divorces." But, he added, "one way to be more environmentally friendly is to live with other people and that will reduce the impact."
Don't get smug, though, married folks, savings also apply to people living together and Shaker communities or even hippie communities would have been even more efficient.
So, what prompts someone to figure out the environmental impact of divorce?
Liu was studying the ecology of areas with declining population and noticed that even where the total number of people was less, the number of households was increasing. He wondered why.
There turned out to be several reasons: divorce, demographic shifts such as people remaining single longer and the demise of multigenerational households.
"I was surprised because the divorce rate actually has been up and down for many years in some of the countries ... but we found the proportion of divorced households has increased rapidly across the globe," he said.
Most parts of this article are adopted from an article by RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer.

Corruption is in our bones

In a clan, society or community, it’s policy makers and opinion leaders who are true representatives of the people. We constantly accuse those who embezzle public funds, forgetting they are mirrors of ourselves.

Even if you replace the thieves, the new crop of cadres will implore new high-tech gimmicks to skim off taxpayers’ money.

Chances are high that they will do worse than the previous set of cadres. Corruption begins with you. You are the very person who entices a police officer into accepting a bribe in order to let you off the hook for a traffic offence and then you claim the Police are the most corrupt.


Published in Uganda's Daily Vision on: Saturday, 20th October, 2007

first day as a blogger

My first post on my blog. Well from the time i got to know about blogs about six years ago, i really never had that much interest despite being an IT professional.
I saw blogs as a journalitic thing. Along the way my perceptions started changing, my reason for having this blog is to explore my writing skills, share my IT skills and general ideologies of life.