So perhaps I’m a little biased when it comes to 3canal. After all, they’ve been CFR’s official house band since 2005, and the bond is especially strong around where Carnival is concerned.
Caribbean Free Radio’s very first podcast was recorded in 3canal’s offices amidst the madness of Carnival Friday 2005, and last year 3canal and I teamed up to record the cut+clear carnival podcast, a six-part series examining various themes relating to the evolution of Trinidad and Tobago’s national festival.
We’d planned a reprise this year, but my work schedule and Haiti post-earthquake visit got in the way. So, as a substitute of sorts, 3canal passed me a recording they did for a local radio station previewing their 2010 Carnival show and releases. You can listen to it using the player below:
If you haven’t yet seen the 3canal Jam-It Show, I’d suggest you do so, and soon, as it runs only till Saturday (February 13). Since their move from the Little Carib Theatre to Queen’s Hall a few years ago, 3canal’s shows have been uniformly spectacular, especially in terms of the visual and musical production; but the 3canal Jam-It Show brings the theatrical aspects that made the Little Carib shows so delightful and special back to centre stage, making for a terrific—and terrifically funny—production.
Diehard PNM supporters should make an extra-special effort to attend!
The message has already been conveyed to family members and close friends that, given the state of the personal coffers and the fact that most of us have too many material possessions anyway, they should be looking elsewhere this season for Christmas presents of the corporeal kind. A certain development taking place on the Trinidadian retail scene this coming Saturday (December 19), however, is seriously threatening to make me rethink my position. Needless to say, this pisses me off royally.
You’ll find more details on the upsetting event at the Alice Yard blog. Which should tell you everything—what successful retailer in Trinidad has a blog?
The sort of annoyingly attractive object likely to be on sale at Alice Yard on Saturday
My Ghanaian blogger friend Mac-Jordan Degadjor, who so graciously showed me around during my visit to Accra in October, has been given the chance to go to Copenhagen to cover the UN climate change talks there this month. He’s received a stipend from Denmark, but it isn’t sufficient to cover the entire cost of the trip. So a few of us have got together to raise funds for Mac-J.
Mac-Jordan at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, this past October
At the time of posting we’ve raised US$290 of the $1,200 he needs, so only $910 to go now. Would you please consider helping out by donating via the ChipIn widget above? (If that doesn’t work, try the ChipIn page). Anyone with a credit card can donate.
For the past ten days my brother C*POP and my almost-brother Walt have been following Trinidad and Tobago recording artists Maximus Dan, Jah Melody and Marlon Asher as the three tour various cities in Europe. C*POP and Walt have been sending frequent updates, photos and videos which they’ve been posting at the Beach House Entertainment Facebook page. This video, the fourth in the series, is
a montage of scenes of the T&T Entertainment Co contingent leaving Berlin, arriving in Oslo, the June 3 show The Source Club in Oslo featuring Marlon Asher and Jah Melody, and the deejays who rushed to record dubplates with the two artists the day after
I also think it’s the best of the series yet. See the complete set of Europe tour videos here.
Had I not left Trinidad yesterday to attend the We Media Miami conference, I would have been prancing in the streets dressed as a cow, as these beautiful images by Nikipedia demonstrate. Ah well.
It was only after reading the commentRenata left at Flickr that it occurred to me to look into the science behind why I felt compelled to take a photo of the full moon last night: at this time of year (though more so in October) the moon is at its perigee, or closest approach to earth, and therefore appears larger and brighter.
J9 will probably also be wondering if this photo was taken with her 18-250mm lens, which I took for a test run yesterday. She’ll be happy to know it was.
One web site I’ve been checking regularly for information on this year’s US election race is Voices without Votes. I checked in at the site after After Barack Obama announced his choice of Joe Biden as a running mate and also after Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Today and tomorrow, I’ll be keeping an eye on Voices without Votes to get the buzz on the speeches by Hillary and Bill Clinton, and next week I’ll be following the commentary there about the Republican National Convention. And yes, I, too, was wondering what had got into reggaeton star Daddy Yankee, so was interested to hear what his compatriots thought about his endorsement of John McCain.
Commissioned by Thomson Reuters, one of Global Voices‘ long-standing sponsors, and run by a team of Global Voices contributors and friends headed by Bahraini Amira Al-Hussaini, Voices without Votes tracks what bloggers the world over (including the Caribbean) are saying about this election race that has so transfixed the world, providing a critical counterpoint to the reporting in the mainstream media.
I’ve just donated some money, so I can vouch for the fact that the service works, and offers several options for payment, including credit cards and PayPal. And what’s even nicer is that a band of Kenyan bloggers will be directly involved in the purchase and distribution of the supplies. According to Juliana, “on Thursday the 17th of January the bloggers in Nairobi will meet at the mamamikes office, assist in purchasing all the items and delivering them to the Red Cross.”
Over at Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, David Sasaki has just announced the latest round of Rising Voices grant recipients. Among them is the Rising Voices project’s first Caribbean grantee: “Diary of an Inmate”, a Jamaica-based project which will attempt to counter the veneration of badboys and gang leaders by training prison inmates to blog and podcast. The project’s founder, Kevin Wallen, who has been doing exemplary work among inmates in Jamaica’s penal institutions through an organisation called (Students Expressing Truth), outlined the project as follows:
Through blogging, inmates will be able to tell their stories. They will be able to paint a realistic picture of life behind bars and the consequences of crime. Currently, Jamaica’s music and media idolize the ‘badman’ or ’shotta’ and portray as role models those who have been incarcerated. Many of our youths now think that prison is a ‘cool’ place to be, until they themselves are faced with the harsh truth. The Diary of an Inmate blog will allow all Jamaicans to learn about the realities of Jamaica’s overcrowded prison system with the hope that this will counteract the false ideas implanted by the media.
Congrats to Kevin and the “Diary of an Inmate” project. I look forward to seeing the results of this interesting experiment. And to the rest of you potential Caribbean applicants: what are you waiting on?
(9:52pm Barcelona time) Pictured above, my cabin in the Yotel at Gatwick airport, and also the reason I still feel vaguely human after having spent most of last night on a plane and been shaken out of REM sleep at the equivalent of 2am Trinidad time to disembark.
I knew nothing of the Yotel’s existence until, having been told by EasyJet that I couldn’t check in for my flight to Barcelona six hours ahead of time, I was wandering around that odd zone in Gatwick that accommodates both arrivals and departures looking for somewhere to park myself and my bags and came upon a poster advertising short-term accommodation starting at £25 for four hours. This sounded way too reasonable by London standards (a pre-packaged Coronation Chicken sandwich in Boots runs you about £25 these days), but as I still had five hours and 55 minutes to kill I figured I’d at least take a look at this Yotel thing.
Within minutes of arriving in the Yotel’s vestibule, which, bathed in a soft purplish glow, reminded me of cross between a space ship and an ultra-modern medical dispensary, Julien, the pleasant young front desk clerk who turned out be from Martinique, had checked me in and dispatched a member of the cleaning staff to prepare my cabin. While I was waiting, Julien told me that Yotels are being planned for Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol.
The Yotel’s cabins are a study in the judicious use of space–if you’re carrying extra-large suitcases you’d be better of leaving them with the left luggage service. A narrow passage separates a padded cubicle containing an elevated bed from a glass-walled stall with shower, sink and toilet. Should you require a work desk, a pull-down table and folding stool are provided, as is both wired and wifi internet access. The bed linen was impeccable and the mattress struck the perfect balance between firmness and give. Once I’d changed into sleepwear, pulled down the blinds in the cabin door window and turned off the lights, it took me no time to fall into a coma-grade sleep.
A few hours later my PDA alarm told me it was time to get up and deal with EasyJet. My body didn’t want to co-operate, but I promised it that if it did, it would be rewarded with a warm Yotel shower.
I’m willing to bet that this will be the best £25 I spend this entire trip.
- That American Airlines (AA) does not suck on every, single level. After delaying my flight out of JFK on Monday (fuel leaking into the a/c of the original aircraft, (unionised?) crew claiming illness as a result) and causing me to miss my connection out of Miami, I received an e-mail this morning from AA customer service apologising abjectly for the screw-up and offering me 5,000 bonus miles. This doesn’t quite make up for the fact that the meal vouchers they gave me could only be used at the hotel where they put me up, and where US$15 covers the cost of a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee, but it’s better than nothing. Now that I have enough miles for a reward ticket, I guess I’ll be forced to break my vow of never flying AA again.
- That there’s another pilgrimage to Mecca besides the Hajj. (Thanks to Amira for this one, or rather to Amira’s mother, who’s Umrah-ing in Mecca as we speak).
Those who check in on my Flickr page would have noticed (some of with great relief, I’m sure) that I’d sort of burned out on the bird photography. Thing is, there are just so many ways to shoot a Blue Gray Tanager.
Here in Tobago, however, I’ve become obsessed with the several varieties of hummingbird that frequent my uncle’s bird feeder. Capturing good photos of these hyperactive creatures poses an entirely new set of challenges, some of which — patience? — I’m pleasantly surprised at my willingness to embrace. I’ve also noticed that they have really short legs.
Pictured above is one of two (or three, if you count the orange shawl someone handed to me, just like that, in a restaurant last night) delightful gifts I received yesterday.
José Gregorio joins Babe the Blue Ox and others in one of my own personal pantheons — that comprising lovely and unusual gifts given to me by close friends.
I’ve been getting a real kick lately out of photographing birds in my garden. Almost every morning I position myself behind the breeze blocks in the laundry room to see who shows up for his/her share of the fruit on the makeshift bird-feeder next to the water tank.
One of the folks at the breakfast table this morning was this Bare-Eyed Thrush (Turdus nudigenis). My growing collection of bird photos is here.
Doing the laundry this morning, a flash of yellow caught my eye through the breeze blocks. It was the subject of this photo, alighting on the fence. I ran for my camera, hoping he would stay put for a few minutes, and, miraculously, he did.
I don’t know much about birds. The fact that I even recognise this one as a yellow oriole is largely because of that Nestlé promotion the bookmann wrote about back in January. But being able to look out of my laundry room and see one of these is one of the many small reasons I remain in this place.
In an e-mail I had from him recently, Marvin — who became a Stanford Digital Vision Fellow last year — tells me he’s been working on a project called Robotics Stimul-I, which will use LEGO robotics workshops to motivate children in Jamaica’s inner city communities to increase their literacy and numeracy. This coming July he’ll be launching a six-month pilot in Kingston, which will also offer workshops in filmmaking, photography and music. He’ll also be preparing a team to compete in the 2007 World Robotics Olympiad in Taipei, Taiwan in November.
Marvin’s work excites me not only because the teaching of science and math are two seriously deficient areas in the Caribbean education system, and because I feel that educators in this region are routinely failing to connect with the ways that children in the 21st century learn. It excites me as well for the very basic reason outlined here by Ethan:
Marvin sees a very stark choice for the youth he’s working with – they exercise their minds through robotics or other forms of creative expression, or there’s a good chance they’ll end up trapped in the violence that surrounds them.
So take a look at Marvin’s video. And a side note to Machel, just in case he and his crew decide to get copyright-happy on me for running a video that uses one of his tracks: “We Not Givin’ Up” is the perfect soundtrack for this programme. You should be proud they used it.
Typograph is a standards compliant theme with a JQuery powered tabbed sidebar box and an ad under the first post on the index page. This theme has no images and is purely based on CSS elements and typography. Ideal for future customization. Typograph was styled "from the ground up" on a highly customized version of the Sandbox theme.
Designed by Morten Rand-Hendriksen - designer, information philosopher and author based out of Burnaby, BC.
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Photo of 3canal by Jeffrey Chock
