Falling Fruit

It's that time of year again.  There's a crash like a bomb dropping or maybe it's just one of the neighborhood cats in heat... nope, it's a falling mango!  You can tell by the distinctive roll down the tin, followed by a >thunk<.  By and large this is a good thing.  It means at almost any time of day, and especially after rain storms, you can walk outside and grab a grapefruit or mango.  My personal favorite is the grapefruit.  I pretty well mango'd myself out last year.  But the mango still tastes good.  The only down side is the high possibility of being killed by falling fruit every time you walk out the door.

technorati tags:Africa, Gambia, Food

Blogged with Flock

American 2004 Election Fraud?

Here's the article in Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen/1

From article:

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of datathat supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman.''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher wherethere were Republican governors, higher in states with greaterproportions of African-American communities and higher in states wherethere were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strongindicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterlyignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''

And for all of that it is so apparent to me from here that the U.S. system works better than most... for instance I feel free to type this.  I wonder with Bush's popularity so low right now whether these types of arguments will finally be able to make some headway.

Here's an upcoming book mentioned in the article with more detail that is supposed to come out soon (or maybe already did):

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count by Freeman

technorati tags:Politics, Election, USA, Fraud

Blogged with Flock

The rains have come...

So, the rainy season is now upon us.  The reasons I know this is that:

• The roof leaks in two places, luckily not above the batteries (zap!).
  
• Colleen's back fence blew down (check her blog when she gets around to it).
• The lock on our door froze up because of the wood expansion, so when I got home me and the neighbors had to break our way into the house. This involved a very heavy steel ladder, and cutting of screen.  Luckily once I took the lock apart I was able to find the problem, it'd been a bit sticky anyway.
  
• My counterpart got his car stuck in a muddy puddle on the way to work.
• Most of the roads have large holes running down the middle of them where streams have formed (you say - I know dirt roads... but in many places the holes form on the sides, here they are in the middle because the drainage isn't setup correctly).
• Most of all: my umbrella no longer seems like such a silly thing sitting there in the corner.

Side note: I just got a new web browser, flock that makes it pretty easy to blog.  So maybe I'll get better... probably not though.

technorati tags:Africa, Gambia, Rain

Where is The Gambia?

Here are a selection of maps showing where The Gambia is.


Where The Gambia is in Africa.


The Gambia

All maps courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin and are in the Public Domain.