Yuletide Pilferer, present

Homecoming Challenges

On my return from Cape Town in early September, I was informed that the keypad on our antiquated door entry system had become sticky. You could not guarantee getting the code in after an umpteenth number of tries before having to go around the back of the building to gain access to the apartment block.

Worse for me was being already pressed by the time I got to the door, promising myself that I only had a few more steps before I wet myself. Many an unfortunate mishap of bladder incontinence occurred as a personal event when you were close enough to home, before the public saw something amiss, without any knowledge of the backstory.

Temporary Solutions

The keypad will not be replaced, as the parts are impossible to reorder. Instead, we have a temporary fix, along with facial recognition entry systems installed at other entry points in the village. Our village consists of six residential apartment blocks.

Meanwhile, new closed-circuit television cameras with motion sensors have been installed in the foyers. There is a possibility that I have become the local Mr Bean, making faces and sticking my tongue out at the camera as it follows my every movement.

I have been tempted to jump around a bit until the mechanism just breaks. It is all recorded, and it is only a matter of time before my well-mannered mannerisms are published as the prankish exuberance of a lovely man.

The Porch Pirate Incident

We also had our own episode of a daring and returning porch pirate tailgating other residents or using subterfuge to gain access to our mailroom and making off with deliveries that could have been Christmas presents.

The resolution quality of the cameras is commendable. He, a well-spoken man with an Irish accent and dressed well enough to blend into the setting of our village community, had the sheer luck of being captured on camera and in the act.

Then the presents in his presence presented an opportunity, but his heretofore free Christmas presents lost him his freedom, as he was marked present before a magistrate and is presently resenting his luck in a police cell.

When you have a pretty face, you had better not resort to petty crime. Whatever other deeds are caught on camera might be shared on the village WhatsApp group that I joined long after everyone had had a good laugh at his expense. I was only a decade late to take my seat at the showing of the Yuletide Pilferer.

The price of not forgetting

Mind what you show

A while ago, I saw something both unusual and attractive in a face online, and did wonder who it was. I was gripped by curiosity but unaware of the tools at my fingertips to satisfy it.

In one of those events of one thing leading to another online, I happened upon PimEyes, a website that thralls the Internet for image similarities, it uses a form of Artificial Intelligence and for the free product, it is good.

I did find the face and just the other pictures and URLs you could not visit on the free version was revelatory. Let's just say you do not want to put pictures online on sites and profiles that could leave you compromised.

That it out of face

The same happened with a chap with totally enviable model looks, I found out where he took his modelling pictures from one of the URL results, but some other pictures were in flagrante dilecto, giving full expression to his sexual proclivities.

The prude in me did wonder how such a beautiful man could be up to such naughtiness. Even in my wildest years, my nudity never included a face, which must be a law, a rule never to be broken regardless of your state of sobriety, except where that is your clear intention.

It’s somewhere online

However, more pertinent was the impression of the Internet never forgetting, when a website I used for a core part of work research went offline months ago.

As I needed information only it could provide, in simplicity, I found the Wayback Machine, a website that does a sweep of the Internet, it periodically captures literally anything published online, it is an internet archiving resource. I was back in my element for the recall of an essential service.

My blog started in December 2003, hosted by a local company in Scotland that I thought I was supporting until they decided they found no more pleasure in hosting blogs in mid-2010. The harsher lesson was they used proprietary tools which made it impossible to migrate my blog to another hosting provider.

We were given 18 months to do whatever we could to get our content off before the hosting facility closed down in 2012. It took a good few weeks to copy each of the over 1,500 blogs to another location, but I lost the images, internal links, and interactions in comments.

Publish and be damned

Imagine, 13 years later, I plugged my old URL in the Wayback Machine and up came captures from 2003 to 2012, including comments.

All was not lost, just somewhere, if you knew where to find it. That is both a solution and a problem, how you can find what you thought you had lost, but worse still is what others can find that you had totally forgotten, you had done.

When Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington was being blackmailed to be left out of the saucy memoirs of his mistress Harriette Wilson, he retorted, “Publish and be damned.” The publisher Joseph Stockdale did publish, but retribution came through others who ruined him with libel suits.

To many of us, there is probably no fear of libel or defamation, just the unfortunate situation of someone being able to dig up something from the past and make it relevant to the present, at a point of ascendancy, that you might have to relinquish an honour, an accolade, or a position in ignominy.

Think about what you post or court controversy at your peril.

Thought Picnic: Time in motion

The mystery of time

Time is a continuum of sometimes unfathomable multi-dimensional ramifications. Time in its passing and what it archives into the annals of memory, time in its present and the moments we are given to cherish, time in its congruence demanding correctness for our modernity not to descend into chaos, and time in its coming; the future we cannot predict further than a second from hence that we plan for, sometimes anticipate and use expectation and hope to arrive at.

It comes to mind that from the past, 11 years ago, I lost a dear friend, Dick van Galen Last, the passage of time does not make the sense of loss less felt. Beyond the acceptance that he is gone, there are recollections of friendship and things we did together.

Sometimes I wonder if we could indeed turn back time if there is anything we would have done so differently for other outcomes. It is wishful but best left as is, an alternate universe can be anything, the same, worse or better, sticking to what you know is not so much the absence of adventure but a calculated risk erring on the side of safety.

The time is now

In the present, you are occupied with thoughts stretching into the recesses of time in all directions, you might catch yourself daydreaming. Realities cascading on themselves in the mind that you are left in awe at the capacity of the mind to imagine and project.

Out of this are issues of life and maybe death, you never know, but each breath is a blessing of the living and the joy of living. Then you think of the current pandemic that takes essential breath away, there is much suffering to escape from, and this is the time to be free from it.

Correcting for the time

For correctness, I remember an essential piece of information that would have been quite pertinent that I ignored. When I was trying to fix my network yesterday, my NETGEAR Nighthawk X6 R8000 router was stuck in the past, it was not synchronising with the current time, I was reading my birthday the 21^st of December 2020 on its clock. The stock firmware just could not communicate with any time source.

Blog - Technical: A whole weekend networking

Whilst the router appeared to work with this underlying discrepancy on the older hub, on the new hub it might have presented an issue as it was synchronised with a correct and external time source indicating over a month ahead of my router.

Time and time again

There are many systems that will fail to communicate or operate if time is not synchronised and there are slim tolerances for time differences especially when it comes to the Global Positioning System (GPS) which uses satellites. Authentication systems also rely upon synchronised time, the absence of which might suggest a cyberattack, an unauthorised intrusion or a security breach.

Installing the 3^rd-party firmware on my router immediately allowed it to synchronise with a European time source and it might have been the fundamental issue all along, but we had a fully working solution at the end of the day. The future is ahead, each second creeping relentlessly into a place that at once becomes the present and then the past. Further ahead we build for a place to be different, beautiful, and happy, hopefully with someone who makes it all memorable and matter.

Thought Picnic: They are never dead in dreams

We are touched at all times

In conveying my sympathises at the passing of a loved one, I strive for a form of words that hope to give comfort and succour in addressing irreparable loss. Part of the cycle of life is in the record of the birth, the living, and the death of people interweaving generations and leaving their marks in the lives of the persons they have impacted.

Impact on an individual basis is fundamentally significant from a miscarriage in the short existence of foetus to the passing of a matriarch or patriarch wizen with age as eras turn to epochs of history and genealogy. Grief is an expression that lives in our humanity.

When I condole in words to the effect that in the passing of someone, they have passed in the memories and recollections of experiences, fondness, and love, things we remember of them that are now forever crystallised in reminiscences, I believe there is some truth in that sentiment.

In dreams and memories

On my blog, I remember anniversaries and birthdays, I write tributes, maybe not so much eulogies. There are many things I do not understand, of what might be or not be of the afterlife, I do sometimes wonder if in my passing something of an eternal consciousness that could be a remnant of my lived existence can review the things said of me. I would not know if the people dear to me that I have lost can read of my fondness for them, even for those I failed to cherish enough until they were gone.

The Yoruba would eulogise the dead and rather than decline into the fortuitousness of the termination of life, we move on to another phase and of the dead, we look to meet in dreams or bump into them in places where our minds are given to the suggestion that a reincarnation has placed our loved one in another place.

Resurrecting utter discomfort

I sometimes wonder about what would have happened to the people of Jerusalem who experience the resurrection of the dead from their tombs when the earthquake struck at the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. It probably would not have been a comforting sight to suddenly see a known dead relative alive and interacting with you.

⁵¹ Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, ⁵² and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; ⁵³ and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. [Matthew 27:51-53]

It remains a mystery for which there might be a revelation in due course. I have dreams and many of them are vivid, the recesses of my mind folding the landscapes of times past into the tapestry of the present continuous.

Dream a little dream

I create a theatre of dramatis personae who have never met in life making conversation and interacting in my dreams. A subconscious part of me recognises these people are no more alive, but in my dreams, I can live the impossible and not be overwhelmed by the incredible.

Maybe, the things we do for the dead are not essentially for the dead but are part of the coping mechanisms of the living. We who remain need to manage the complexities of the presence and the absence of those who were integral to our life experiences. We may not have our transfiguration moments, but when Jesus brought Moses and Elijah into the sight of Peter, James, and John, you knew that the stuff of dreams is an exposition that is not bounded by the strictures of time, manner, or space. [Wikipedia – the Transfiguration of Jesus]

Our dearly departed and not really gone, they remain alive in the fond memories we have of them. That is also a celebration of their lives in us.

Nigeria: Finding an accommodation for ourselves

Dreaming of the unreal

As Nigerians, we have perfected the art of analysis paralysis to the point of proffering solutions that are forgivably idealistic but have no semblance of realism or practicability in the light of prevailing circumstances.

There is nothing wrong in seeking Nirvana, our own Shangri La, the Utopia of perfection for our country and situation, it is the substance of hope and a possibility but it needs some grounding in what is reasonable and realisable or else we become dreamers and theorists, builders of castles in the air and act as if inebriated to the point of hallucination and delirium.

The burden of the past

On the other end, it is the past and history that holds us back, our memories too keen that we are unable to see change happening before our eyes as a dogmatic sense of permanence in the character and demeanour of others become the unaltered view of the people who might have changed – distrust and negative perceptions becloud our judgement to our detriment of seeing the mildest good in others.

Indeed, there are men that have done unspeakable evil, if there are means to bring them to justice then we should avail ourselves of those means to the fullest extent of the law. What is not proper is to take the law into our own hands and constitute ourselves into a lynching mob of prosecutor, jury and judge – process is the hallmark of a civilised society and the people who inhabit that community.

Beyond the obvious wrongs

I believe that for all the wrong the man is capable of doing, they are also humanly and humanely capable of good either as a nature of their humanity or in expiation for the wrongs done before – it might be difficult to find context, purpose and intent in doing those things, but for whatever good is on offer, it must find some commendation much as the wrong can find excoriation – both are worthy of acknowledgement.

The Good Samaritan in the bible was not a religious man, the religious man passed to the other side of the road, nor was he a pious man, he was just a man who saw a fellow man in need and out of their shared and common humanity he did everything to help the wounded stranger who had no name nor identity apart from the fact that he was just another man in need.

The old cow is smart

We sometimes need to rise above the petty prejudices and dogmatism that blinds us to issues where a pragmatic approach can be as useful as the advice I received long ago to have as much sense as an old cow to eat the hay and leave the baling wire.

Many of our old Nigerian leaders come with a lot of baling wire and very little hay, but the old cow knows the food is the hay and the baling wire is certainly not part of her diet, the cow does not abandon the hay just because it is nicely or crudely baled – that is knowledge, it is wisdom and it is being pragmatic and as humans, we are indeed capable of even better judgement, that comes with discrimination and discernment.

Imperfect people

I have learnt not to totally condemn those of questionable nature and as it were unaudited sources of wealth, we have no systems and processes in place to address those injustices properly, however, that I accept the little good they can bring to their communities does not mean they are totally absolved and rehabilitated, one can elicit the good from the bad in appreciating the multidimensional nature of human beings and that is a good thing.

In the end, for some, pennies from heaven are as valuable as pounds in the pockets of those who do not need the help offered.

Way to go

For a better Nigeria, we might only be able to negotiate returns of some of what was looted by reason of uncompromised leadership that can wield the necessary leverage and use the bully pulpit to make these people amenable to those demands, beyond that, we need strong and independent institutions from here on to tackle the cancer of corrupt enterprise and malfeasance that infests all levels of endeavour in Nigeria.

However, today, thief and chief, sinner and saint, honest and dishonest, honourable and dishonourable, corrupt and incorruptible, unreasonable and reasonable, dogmatic and pragmatic, the rich and the poor, indifferent and concerned, apathetic and sympathetic, religious and nonreligious and every Nigerian will just have to find an accommodation for each other to do what we can to take the country forward.

Thought Picnic: Starting my own story

Many stories to tell

The stories of our lives might be worth telling but you wonder if you are ready to tell stuff that might interest some but shock others more.

Through blogging I have realised that many aspects of my life are in no way ordinary though there are days I wake and wonder why I do not seem to be anywhere near where I ought to be.

The question then becomes where one really should be and in relation to what, measured by whom and to what ends?

Maybe it is just the quest for improvement and perfection, something that compels you to strive to greater things though purpose and aim can so easily become fuzzy.

The many ifs that plague me

As for stories, one should just write what it is, from the beginning and there are many beginnings and many life-changing situations that change your perspectives and also kept you being the same.

Then there are the ifs; the ifs of life; if I had, if I could, if I did, if I heard, if I touched or the negations of all those ifs creating a hydra-headed and hydra-legged river delta of possibilities putting you in parallel universes that take you away from your reality.

The past becomes the story, today becomes the foundation and the future is as deep as you will like it go constrained by certain deeds of the past you hope never catch you too unawares not to have been able to anticipate or regulate.

Not gonna sing that song?

So, my friend thinks I have a story, I know I have a story, I am not sure if I can tell that story because just like Betty Wright’s mother said to her about the song, Tonight is the night [1].

She said, “Uh, I like the music

You know, baby, the melody it’s really nice

But I know you’re not gonna sing that song”

She did sing the song [2] against her mother’s advice and it became one of her biggest records as the story goes.

Many a night has been that night, but maybe not as you might think of it, it was decision time as it was experience time, but one day, I might just write that story and be done with it.

You might like the plot and it might become my biggest story too.

Sources

[1] Betty Wright - Tonight Is The Night Lyrics

[2] YouTube - Betty Wright - Tonight Is The Night