Explaining a stolen lunchbox

Summer season news madness

I can only find amusement in what has become a sad tragedy of hysteria that lacks scientific proof but feeds the lynch mob in causing the death of innocent people.

Being the summer season, the newswires are usually bereft of useful intelligent news that anything can be spruced up as news. In the West, that really fetches true, however, in Nigeria, some things can be stranger than fiction.

Only yesterday, my friend in African Shirts lamented the fact that the new Superman was a bit less than a man, having a slightly reduced bulge, especially if you have been assaulted before the watershed with Linford Christie’s lunch-box doing the 100 metre dash, you would know what I mean.

There’s a coal in my pocket

I remember when I was in Nigeria, we were caught in a frenzy that required all men to put a piece of coal in their pockets to prevent the unfortunate loss of their manhood.

Somehow, rumour and some information dispersion mechanism that beggars belief spreads the view that if you rub off on a stranger, your manhood would shrivel into nothingness.

The fact is, I have never seen any real proof of anyone who has a manhood of any significance before the event, then show that his manhood has been a victim of involuntary and violable shrinkage.

However, all you have to do is grab your crouch and scream, better wail, pointing your finger at a hapless passer-by who forgot to say his prayers and that person is attacked and finished off long before someone with more than two grey cells warming up each other seeks the evidence of an alleged penile miniaturisation.

To really look at this matter, after the man has been murdered by the mob, there usually is no Aha! Moment, like dip into his pockets and produce that stolen piece of hardware.

Exposé on the lickle womble

Closer to the truth, I would surmise, the accuser has had a encounter where his endowment might have been one of the dramatis personnel of the nursery rhyme – this little piggie which went wee apart from the fact that it was a wee bit on the rather wee side.

How better to explain the lack of that aspect of male chauvinistic self-assuredness exemplified in the myth of James Brown’s sex-machine if you cannot rue the day you lost your manhood?

Reference

Mob kills lecturer over alleged theft of manhood – this site does not keep permanent links to its news items – this link might change after the 27^th of July 2006.

How in God's name, did this happen?

This media circus should stop

My sleep was constantly interrupted as the news came from the West Virginia coal mine disaster, the search for 13 lost men changed constantly as the troughs and crests of a roller coaster ride.

There was such a baying for news as the networks analysed, cross-referenced and reported rumour with incomplete information which suggested one man had died, and then there were 12 survivors and just now, only one survivor in a critical condition.

In fact, one really wonders what to believe as the news developed that the mine was unsafe and critical safety issues prevented some from working at certain times.

All the while, hope and despair wrestled with the truth and reality as we were told the survivors who would be brought by the church; ironically, one can say to be buried of course, because someone must have known the whole truth rather than a twelfth of the truth.

Miscommunication unrehearsed

The problem here is, whilst is it dastardly unconscionable and beneath contempt that people’s anxiety was tugged at with devilish mockery, the need to address news conferences and report progress even where there was no information is becoming the bane of our civilisation.

One suggestion indicates that mobile phones helped spread incomplete information as eavesdropping and rumour coupled with the loud shouts of joy from the control centre spread a wildfire fire of terminological inexactitudes (lies).

First is hardly best

The quest to get there first with the news; first from the first witness or non-witness is just not good for our humanity as we viewed this globally.

The first report race means that not enough checks and are made of information received before it is relayed.

It is difficult to say for sure who should take the blame for this kind of media frenzy; from the news producers to the news consumers.

Business as usual

As we mourn the loss of 12 lives, the company may just go on because it is almost impossible to re-skill miners and there is a business to run, life just goes on as our humanity dissolves into the need to be fed by the work of our hands.

Life goes on at the expense of those who have been cheated of the joy of good news because checks and balances were not put in place to crosscheck what had been heard.

“Miracles do happen” as the Governor did say, but sometimes the man-made miracle is not the event itself but the gluttonous hunger and unquenchable thirst of the technology needed to deliver the news.

Beyond this disaster some lawyer is probably already preparing a brief for a class action suit against many that would not include the news networks.

We have not heard the last of this stuff yet and it is only day 4 of 2006.

How in God’s name, did this happen?