Things Fall Apart

Join me if you will for a short series - variations on a theme: Things Fall Apart.

It's about a state of mind and a culture. So far there have been musings on literature, from Chinua Achebe's novel to Joseph Conrad, Yeats, Evelyn Waugh and others. There's been music, poetry, history, coups, affairs, politics, strange bedfellows, technology, identity theft, terrorism, nostalgia, hard-boiled noir, lighthearted farce and boycotts. Looking ahead perhaps we'll deal with food, movies, cartoons, photography or more sedate topics. The starting place, as ever, is Africa, yet I find myself somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, writing a cultural history of our times. I hope some of it might be up your alley. In any case welcome. (see series index)

1. School of Hard Knocks

It was June, we were at the History department at Berkeley. The Girlfriend was filling out paperwork in anticipation of the next year's Great Move West and pondering the academic life teaching history (Africa! Science!). Tabitha was filling us in on the department, campus life, class sizes and how the program was structured. Truth be told there was a lot of trepidation and the small talk wasn't coming easily. Then I looked around seeking comfort from the surrounding books and, my goodness, noticed the magazines. I was so excited to find myself in an office that had a copy of Africa Report magazine from 1966. It was the issue written after the coup that overthrew Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, something I had been searching for for the last 6 years. Duly effusive after my find, I really started to chat her up; Africa was on my mind and the questions poured forth. We warmed to each other in short order.

Eventually I asked about the background of the students who come to study African history at the university.

What has changed, she said, is that these days the average student would have read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe whereas previously it would have been Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (or say Joyce Cary's Mr Johnson if they had a British background).

It seemed to me that a little milestone had been reached with her anecdotal testimony of Achebe winning out over Conrad in the memorability sweepstakes. Our man Achebe must surely be smiling at the response to his first novel written almost 50 years ago. Indeed it is apt that sub-Saharan Africa is also verging on 50 years of a post-colonial experience (in my native Ghana, preparations are underway for next year's 50th independence day celebrations).

The school of hard knocks that was Africa's colonial experience, and indeed the image of Africa itself, is now being perceived through the words of an African. The headline leaped out to me:

Things Fall Apart Beats Heart of Darkness

This is bittersweet news and progress of a sort. Beyond the purely literary however, the question remains:

Should Africans be content with Things Fall Apart? And if so, is the message of Brand Africa simply a celebration of the hard knock life?

As a participant in the ongoing narrative, I almost never pause to ponder the storyline. When I do manage to reflect on it, I get little comfort from the muddled headlines. Heads down and at a remove, I seek instead a sense of normalcy and to contribute to the occasional bite-sized triumph. After all, who knows which of the current grand plots will be tomorrow's conventional wisdom? Finally also, I wonder who is writing today's script and where they stand on the matter. I hope my exploration will provide one perspective.

The sign reads "Sweet! From Candy to Condos". The old candy factory in East Cambridge is being "repurposed" into luxury condominiums.

The Things Fall Apart Series

Cultural observations and social interplay

Things Fall Apart

• School of Hard Knocks
  Reading a new headline for Africa.
• Identity Theft
  "Wake up one day / They say you're a bomber"
  The perils of a fragile center.
• Africa, 1966
  Looking back at a pivotal year in African history in order to look forward.
• Voices Inside (Things Fall Apart)
  Changing the perspective. An appreciation of Chinua Achebe's take on Things Fall Apart, with a Donny Hathaway connection thrown in for good measure.
• Heart of Darkness
  "This Congo is a region of the mind."
  Burnt-out cases journey down the river: Joseph Conrad's tale and its influence on the literature and iconography of Africa - from Graham Greene to Evelyn Waugh, through Abdulrazak Gurnah, Francis Ford Coppola and more.
• Frisson de Folksonomie
  "I have a crush. There, I finally said it. I feel better already... I can no longer stand this conflicted life..."
  "Affairs" in social bookmarking, literature and music.
• Angola
  "When two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers" — Angolan proverb.
  A dossier, or rather a B-movie, featuring Jonas Savimbi, Ronald Reagan and other special guests.
• Huhudious (or Silly Season)
  Illustrating The B-movie Theory
• Ode to Betty Brown
  Yes, that was Betty Brown, self-effacing even in her obituary.
• Structural Adjustments
  The trade deficit of unanswered questions
• June 4th
  The Coup Drill. Stand up and be counted.
• Herd Immunity
  The phantom thread of greed lies at the heart of the matter
• Open House
  A full frontal stare
• The Bad Seed
  Suborn was his favorite verb
• Internal Exile
  They made the best of things

Social Living

Social Living is the best

• The Books of Nima
  The full Ghanaian experience straight from the slums of Nima.
• Dilemmas
  An examination question.
• Ghana vrs USA
  The African Nation and The American Dream.
• The Busia Papers
  A legacy of conversational politics.
• Bags and Stamps
  Ghana must go: The mementos of exiled souls.
• Wist
  On indigo moods.
• Poetry as Cultural Memory
  Notes on Ghana's philosophy of survival
• The Mosquito Principle
  Mosquitos don't discriminate. Some pandemic toli.
• Uncle Mike
  A man in full, in loco parentis.
  Revolutionary justice and a balance sheet of the affairs of man.
• Social Studies
  Enrichment lessons from the home school of hard knocks
• Shell Games (Part I. Shame Cultures)
  A brief cultural history... of shame
• Nuts and Bolts
  A folktale
• Another Zoom Funeral
  Tradition is not poverty
• Dela
  A surfeit of grief will tax even the most hardened observer
• The Necessity of Permanent Outrage
  Parental guidance
• The Searcher and other Dirges
  The original toli monger
• Disturbing Tranquility
  This rogue civility
• The Laws of Grief
  All houses are grief houses, it all depends on one's time frame
• Dislocation
  Underlying condition
• Ellipses
  The art of easing
• The Least of Us
  Caution, take heed
• Gee
  We talked properly
• Liminal
  Subsurface, unseen
• The Memorial Lectures
  Sphinx modalities

The Comfort Suite

I need relief

• Mind the Gap
• Comfort Food and Rare Groove
• Friends Today, Enemies Tomorrow
• Articles of Faith
• Dancing in the Dark
• African Ceremonies
  Things come together

The Rough Beast

Who is writing the script?

• Recent Non-Specific General Threats
  Homelands and security.
• The Game of The Rough Beast
  The strange architecture of misdirection.
• The Great Game
  Cultural interplay.
• By Way of Ionesco
  On words intended to obscure.
• A Resource Action
  You've been surplussed / That was the word used
• Render / Rendition
  Color-coded threat / Stress position
• The Wages of Thermidor
  The dreadnought weight of revolutionary justice
• Bloodbath, South Carolina
  The legacies of men
• Uneasy Phrases
  A preemptive laundering of conscience and reputation scrubbing
• Truth and Reconciliation
  Inconvenient truths, and that modern saying, entanglement
• The Toli Theme
  Things come together
• Talk True
  Talk. Talk True
• Playground Education
  Appalled frankly
• Identification Haircut
  our depraved champion

Fallen Angels

• Excellent Discussions
  The minutiae of collateral damage.
• On George W. Bush
  A meditation on knowledge and ignorance.
• A plagiarism in plaid
  The Reporter and her ambition / Plaid bags and plagiarism
• Of No Fixed Abode
  Enemy combatants / Collateral damage
• Africa, 1999
  Get to know your local strongman.
• Africa 1989
  Structural adjustments.
• He of The Little Green Book
  A legacy of blood and sin.
• Legacies (Munhango to Kennebunkport)
  The legacy remains contested
• The Justice and The Secretary
  A folktale of nether capitalism
• The Corruption Tango
  A Touch of Sleaze
• The Conqueror's Catechism
  It was written

Doctor Simbo

• Close Encounters
  The wages of political violence in Ghana
• To Make the Road Fearful
  Reading cautionary tales at the Special Court
• Naming Conventions
  The names of the wicked

Soul Insurance

1. Ananse and the Chief's Scribe
2. Enter the Claims Adjuster
3. An Audience with the Linguist
4. Pity the Mink
5. Short Sale
6. Excessive Liabilities
7. Premiums Due
8. Soul Insurance, a playlist
9. Indemnity Provisions
10. Full Circle
11. Enforcement Actions
12. The Die is Cast

South Africa, 1994

• Heidelberg Tavern Massacre
• Bound Together
• First Responder

The Bulsa Way

• Running Away
• Near the Weeping Trees

The Boycott Day Trinity

And the Lord said unto them: Boycott!

• A Nine Dollar Vibe
• Husbanding the Blogcritics Commons
• Boycott and The Gospel of Toli

Things Fall Apart - the photo essay

Things Fall Apart - The Playlists

File under: life, Africa, literature, culture, perception, observation, interplay, image, Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, Heart Of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, essay, series, Ghana, toli

Comfort Food and Rare Groove

I was recently re-reading Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa by Fran Osseo-Asare - a book I've been meaning to review since it came out last year. Briefly, it's nothing less than a comprehensive overview of the culture and history of food in Africa. It covers the continent, dipping into all the regional flavours. There's lots of historical insight about the types of ingredients used, the crops, animals, fisheries etc. It's one of those books you can open at any page and find lots of to chew on (pun intended, tongue in cheek etc). Most culinary books concentrate on recipes but this goes beyond that into the cultural and social significance of food (from who prepares it, traditions surrounding it, special meals etc). Anyway I'll return to it at length shortly, shall we say that it deserves a fuller digestion. I'm rather concerned in this note with rare groove.

As normally occurs when matters literary and gastronomical coincide, my salivary glands began to do their thing after barely 5 minutes of reading. Much like that recent article on street food in Ghana, my immediate reaction was to think of smells, sounds and kitchens. Oh the smells! As my mouth started watering, my mind started wandering and I was thinking about Auntie Becky's roadside kelewele (fried ripe plantains) in North Labone which is the first place I head to when I land in Accra. Auntie Becky has been cooking outside a house for thirty odd years and has a devoted and international following. Indeed she married the owner of the house which is one way of romancing I suppose - Like Water For Chocolate as they say. The marriage got her the hookup to household gas replacing the previous charcoal fires... In any case, my lunch companions were 20 minutes away thus to distract the incipient hunger pangs, I dipped into my musical library and compiled the following menu of comfort food and rare groove. Hope you enjoy it.

A Hungry Playlist (Listen here)

Chef's Specials

• Common - The Food
• Herbie Hancock - Cooking Session
• Stephanie Mills - Ain't No Cookin'
• Amadou & Mariam - Sénégal Fast Food
• Omar - Confection (ft Mica Paris)
  (see also Tasty Morsel for bite-sized portions)
• Horace Silver - Cookin' At The Continental
• Charles Wright - Cooking Session
• Goodie Mob - Soul Food
• Miles Davis - Steamin'
  (Note: album sized, you may substitute Miles Davis - Cookin' if you prefer)

Snacks

• Charlie Parker - Salt Peanuts
• James Brown - Mother Popcorn

Main Course

• Charles Mingus - Eat That Chicken
• Anthony Hamilton - Cornbread, Fish & Collard Greens
• Kruder & Dorfmeister - Lamb, Trans Fatty Acid
• Booker T & The MG's - My Sweet Potato
• Jimmy Smith - Pork Chop
• Musical Youth - Pass The Dutchie
• Cannonball Adderley - Afro-Spanish Omlet
• Dwele - Flapjacks
• Freddie Hubbard - Cold Turkey
• Kenny Burrell - Chitlins Con Carne
• Lee Morgan - Cornbread
• Roy Hargrove - Greens At The Chicken Shack
• James Brown - The Chicken
• Soul Runners - Grits 'N' Corn Bread
• Miles Davis - Fishermen, Strawberry and Devil Crab
• King Curtis - Memphis Soul Stew
• Ohio Players - Jive Turkey
• Jimmy Smith - Back At The Chicken Shack
• Prince - Starfish and Coffee
• Main Source - Live at the Barbeque
• MC Serch ft Chubb Rock, Nas - Back To The Grill
• Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - Crab Man
• Meshell NdegeOcello - Oysters
• Rufus Thomas - Funky Hot Grits
• The Meters - Chicken Strut

Dessert

• Sade - Cherry Pie
• Dexter Gordon - Cheese Cake
• Herbie Hancock - Watermelon Man
• Mtume - Juicy Fruit
• Duke Ellington - Arabesque Cookie
  (from the Nutcracker Suite no less)
• Charlie Parker - Scrapple From the Apple
• Charles Mingus - Song With Orange
• Dave Bruebeck - Tangerine
• Hugh Masekela - Strawberries
• The Time - Ice Cream Castles
• Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
  (also available Cassandra Wilson or Nina Simone style)
• Wendy & Lisa - Fruit At the Bottom
• Erykah Badu - Appletree
• The Brothers Johnson - Strawberry Letter 23
• Prince - Raspberry Beret
• Amel Larrieux - Berries and Cream

Secret Ingredients

• Loose Ends - A Little Spice
• Lizz Wright - Salt
• Booker T & The MG's - Green Onions
• The Time - Chili Sauce
• Lou Donaldson - Nice 'N' Greasy
• Marlena Shaw - Spice of Life
• D'Angelo - Chicken Grease
• Count Basie - Honeysuckle Rose
• Booker T & The MG's - Soul Dressing

Sweets

• D'Angelo - Brown Sugar
• Cassandra Wilson - Tupelo Honey
• Kool & The Gang - Chocolate Butter Milk
• Cameo - Candy
• Nina Simone - I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl
• Jill Scott - Honey Molasses
• Johnny Hammond - Los Conquistadores Chocolates
• Bob Marley - Guava Jelly
• Lo-Key - Sweet On You
• A Tribe Called Quest - Butter
• Parliament - Chocolate City
• Beres Hammond - Sugar You Want
• Ohio Players - Sweet Sticky Thing

Beverages

• Fela Kuti - Water No Get Enemy
• Jimmy Mcgriff - Blue Juice
• E.T. Mensah & The Tempos - Tea Samba
• The Roots - Water
• Thelonious Monk - Tea For Two
• Kelis - Suga Honey Iced Tea
• Duke Ellington - Chocolate Shake
• The Manhattan Project - Old Wine, New Bottles
• Duke Ellington - Sugar Rum Cherry
• UB40 - Red Red Wine
• Tha Alkaholiks - Only When I'm Drunk
• Tony Rich Project - Red Wine
• Snoop Doggy Dogg - Gin and Juice
• Busta Rhymes - Pass The Courvoisier
• Bennie Maupin - Water Torture
• Lester Young And Oscar Peterson - Tea For Two

Supplements

• Baby Cham - Vitamin S (Fiesta Riddim)
• Booker T & The MG's - 'Mo Onions

Liner Notes

• Do not listen to this playlist on an empty stomach or you may have a case of jazz-funk Water Torture ala Bennie Maupin.
• On matters of etiquette, feel free to use your hands when partaking of toli comfort food, remember though that it is best to use only one hand unless it's chicken or ribs of course. The only other advice you'll need is Musical Youth's, namely "Pass The Dutchie 'Pon The Left Hand Side".
• Surpisingly there isn't much else on food culture and, no, Charles Mingus' The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife doesn't count. Neither does Scratch's hilarious 3 Barstools Away, might I add.
• From the evidence of this playlist, it is clear that the chicken came before the egg. The earthy music I tend to listen to tends to celebrate our hens more than their eggs, other than the one Afro-Spanish omelette, the chickens rule the roost. (I discarded Disjam's Softboiled for being imprecise. The Time's The Bird, The Roots' Duck Down and Bob Marley's Three Little Birds were disqualified for the same imprecision).
• Prince's Starfish and Coffee comes with "Maple Syrup And Jam, A Butterscotch Cloud, A Tangerine, A Side Order Of Ham", he is a special one. His Sticky Wicked collaboration with Chaka Khan and Miles Davis is only available on the adult menu as is R Kelly's Chocolate Factory, positive id is required. Oscar Peterson's The Honeydripper is discounted for reasons of messiness.
• Of course I've noted before that eating people is wrong thus with a track like Miles Davis's Fishermen, Strawberry and Devil Crab, you don't get the fishermen. Sorry, but I believe in truth in advertising. I omitted The Coup's Fat Cats, Bigger Fish out of similar cultural sensitivity.
• Surprisingly for a playlist heavy on soul food, there aren't too many stews, gumbo or fish on the menu and unfortunately we're out of soup in the toli kitchen; as Troop would have it "I'm Not Soupped". You might also ask, where's the beef, goat or black sheep? The answer is that my musical collection isn't that extensive.
• The artist historically most concerned with food is strangely unrepresented in this food playlist. Jill Scott punctuates almost every song with lyrics about grits, collard greens and the like yet it's only Honey Molasses that I'm highlighting. However her Family Reunion song about barbecues deserves an honorary mention as does Joy and Pain by Maze featuring Frankie Beverly which comes with most backyard grills.
• Memphis's finest band Booker T and the MG.s contribute the most tracks to the menu and no wonder, they live in a melting pot.
• An update: as pointed out in the comments, I completely missed a meal and it is rather Louis Jordan and his Tympany 5 that take the cake. Well that's what happens if you have Five Guys Named Moe, I suppose.

Yesterday, after lunch of course, I listened to this almost 6 hour multi-course meal and it all fits together remarkably well, a balanced diet of soul, jazz and funk (metaphor overload: "a cornucopia of extra-sensory nuggets"). It put me in an anticipatory mood for dinner which I wolfed down voraciously - gusto was written all over my face. There's a lot of humour in all the music since food culture is mostly celebatory - the funniest track being Mingus' Eat that Chicken - what a chorus. I've been told that my musical obsession is far out, or as Eric Dolphy would have put it, I'm Out to Lunch but bear with me and, above all, enjoy your meal. As always menu suggestions are welcome.

See also: "We Eat First With Our Eyes" her take on Ghanaian Cuisine. In my case, I eat first with my ears.

Comfort Food and Rare Groove, a playlist

File under: music, obsession, food, whimsy, culture, soul, jazz, funk, jazz-funk, reggae, Africa, Ghana, memory, chicken, comfort, Comfort Suite, toli

Version Hell

In the beginning we called it "CoolCodename". But that was then... That was before fate stepped in. A one-act play...

[Demosthenes is lying on his chaise longue, eating grapes, he appears to have been in this state of lassitude for a long time. Ctesiphon enters stage right in a hurry, he appears dishevelled.]

Demosthenes: [between munches] So what's bothering you, Ctesiphon? Software got you down?

Ctesiphon: The software's no problem, it's the naming thing. Those Gods are capricious beasts.

Demosthenes: [puzzled look]

Ctesiphon: I mean its the version thing. It's the fact that there is no longer an XYZ 2.5, it's now ABC 2.5.

[he continues, gesticulating wildly]

Did you know that the ABC 2.5.1 stream into which I've checked in 8 bugs was renamed on Wednesday to be the ABC 2.6 stream?

Demosthenes: Slow down a little, let me get it straight. There's a 2.5.1?

Ctesiphon: Slow down? Demo, 2.5 was last month's story, it's all 2.5.1 these days. And 2.6 of course. Yes. Well...

[slowly now, pausing to collect himself]

The ABC 2.5.1 project was renamed to ABC 2.6 after people like myself had been checking things into it for weeks. Ergo, post-facto crapulum.

Demosthenes: Hmmm. Ipso facto absurdum.

Ctesiphon: Greek not Latin, where's your classics, you anachronistic orator. This means that I have to recreate all my activities and redo the check-ins into whatever project is now supposed to be ABC 2.5.1.

Demosthenes: But I heard from the Oracle that the latest thing was XYZ 2.5, I mean JKL 2.5.

Ctesiphon: Rebranding they call it, that's the thing with Delphic Oracles... [pauses] Then they pretend that we were always calling it ABC 2.5 and not XYZ 2.5 and that we were always calling it JKL 2.5 and not CoolCodename. But that's a seperate issue. Don't get me started.

[he starts pacing up and down the stage, suggest crackling thunder in the background as he enumerates each point]

What gets me steamed is that

1. They only told us now (Friday night) that the ABC 2.5.1 stream is open for submissions, and
2. All submissions are due by Sunday, and
3. The ABC 2.5.1 stream is now the ABC 2.6 stream, and
4. The place to check in the ABC 2.5.1 fix is the old XYZ 2.5 stream which was not renamed to ABC 2.5.1
5. And... oh forget it, who knows what the ABC stream is for....

Thus when I check in for ABC 2.5.1, I have to remember not to use the streams I had created, named ABC 2.5.1, but rather the old stream called XYZ 2.5. Reductio ad absurdum.

Demosthenes: [After winking at the audience] But I just read this week's scrolls, it was all about 2.6. What's going on, Ctsey?

[Ctesiphon becomes manic as he replies, perhaps his toga starts coming loose]

Ctesiphon: Which 2.6, I ask? Which 2.6, Demo? Let's not mention that we are going to have a new release of XYZ. They only tell you later. As you know XYZ 2.6 is based on CoolCodename, I mean JKL 2.5, but they'll be wanting some of the fixes from ABC 2.5.1.

[louder]

So this Saturday, after I finish merging my work into ABC 2.5.1 in the old XYZ 2.5 streams, I'll have to find the new streams for JKL 2.6, whatever they are named, because they won't do automatic merges. Then I have to diff the 2.5.1 code against the JKL 2.6 base (I mean the XYZ 2.6 base) and take only those changes that are in ABC 2.5.1 and hand-merge them.

[Even louder and faster]

But of course, they made some security fixes for that Trojan issue in JKL and so the security model has changed because the SMB market you aren't guaranteed to be using DBO instead it's XBO or SBO. And of course, there is no machine to test any of this stuff whether ABC, XYZ or JKL. Come to think of it, I've only ever tested my patch on a old build of ABC 2.5 that was using DBO, I never tested with...

Demosthenes: All right, all right... [winking again at audience then patting Ctesiphon on the back]

You better get some sleep, sounds like you've got a busy weekend ahead of you.

Ctesiphon: That Sisyphus had it good, the boulder always rolled down the same hill.

[Demosthenes walks him out stage right. Comes back alone, pours himself a goblet of wine, sips it and sighs... looks straight at the audience.]

Demosthenes: That's the thing about managing engineers, you've got to tolerate all this background noise. [Picks up a grape and sits down]

[Curtain falls.]

Note: the foregoing is a work of fiction, any resemblance to actual persons or products is entirely coincidental. Your mileage may vary. Always fasten your seatbelts when on a chariot. Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear. Do not drink and drive.

Further reading

• "Also, as widely expected, the version formerly code-named 'Office 12' will be known as Office 2007 when it ships in the second half of this year."
• Calling Things By Their Names
• Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
• Chimera by John Barth

Soundtrack for this dialogue

• UB40 - Version Girl
• Mica Paris - I'd Hate To Love You

Playwright's Note

A number of people have been reading themselves or their products into my little tale of version whiplash and confusion and I've even been asked to decode ABCs and JKLs. I rather thought the point was that the three letter acronyms didn't matter and indeed will change without notice until something sticks in the market place (ESB, SOA etc)

I will admit that almost all the lines of dialog sounded vaguely familiar to some, "verbatim" was what a friend said. But really, it's just fiction...

Still one might well construct a parallel universe in which CoolCodename might be "Portal" or "Workplace". Lotus Workplace (LWP) might become IBM Workplace and then might morph into Workplace Collaboration Services (WCS) for a while. Product managers might get the idea to attack the SMB market and turn a "lightweight" WCS into a CoolCodename-d PortalX which might in turn become Workplace Services Express (WSE) and then you might need to get version so-and-so out for... Well you get the picture.

It's all Greek to me.

See also: Version Hell Revisited

File under: naming, technology, software, absurd, versioning, branding, process, programming, life, humour, toli

Wiz's Flowers

The painting is titled Floral Arrangement. The artist is Wiz, or Wisdom Kudowor, one of Ghana's most famous living artists (another profile). As his reputation has grown, he no longer comes cheap (e.g. you're likely to read "please contact us for the price"). Our parents are lucky to have known him when he was down-and-out and managed to snag a few originals. Even back in 1998, when I started trying to buy a few paintings, Wiz's creations were far beyond my budget. He has a great eye and a distinctive style. We are luckly to be able to peruse online galleries to sample some of his work. These days it's increasingly abstract and there's less of the curvaceous eye candy of yore.

I recently read Jo Ellen Fair's article on The Creation of Valentine's Day in Accra, Ghana. It's a fair piece although it doesn't get much beyond a sketch of an argument about "globalization + nascent middle-class + commercial imperative = Valentine's Day". One wishes she dug deeper into the cultural underpinnings and was a bit more historical. Still one shouldn't complain, she has pointed out a phenomenon that has taken place in the past 15 years. I certainly can't remember Valentine's Day being a big deal growing up. From all accounts, these days the streets of Accra are a confusion of red on the 14th of February and the hype leading up to the day is even more pervasive than in the commercial West. I guess we all want to belong to the global village. The women in Wiz's Floral Arrangement, with their flowing and sheer decorations struck me as in tune with the spirit of the moment.

Soundtrack for this joint

• Wayne Shorter - Wild Flower Lyrical saxophone and hard bop from one of jazz's great artists and composers off his masterpiece album, Speak No Evil

File under: Ghana, art, culture, globalization, commerce, Wiz, Africa, toli

Mind The Gap

I've been thinking about gaps. Gaps, you know: the gap between the elevator and the floor, the gap between the train and the platform, the space between teeth, the length of time since I last wrote on my blog etc. You know, those kinds of gaps. There must be a word to describe the slightly unreasonable fear of dropping one's keys into those infinitesimal gaps of the world. The sudden tightening of the chest, the patting of the pocket (you still have it don't you?), imagining the badge slipping out of your hand and falling down that shaft, the internal debate about whether to put the badge into your pocket or hold it, and the speculation about whether you'll drop it as you put it in the pocket... Of course it would figure that I dropped my wedding ring down one of these gaps last night.

I was on the bus, walked up the stairs leading to the back section and prepared to sit down. The glove came off and the ring flew into the proverbial gap under the seats in the lower section.

Arrgh!

As gaps go, it was not as bad as the aforementioned elevator gap. Still it was awkward, you simply couldn't reach it. I could see the little glint of gold but the space was barely wide enough for a finger, let alone a hand to pick up the matrimonial memento.

So it was like an episode of MacGyver - quick what tools do I have that might do the job? The pen was too short. You tried it anyway. The notebooks wouldn't do. No ruler in sight. Let's see, let's try the ethernet cable. That was long enough but not stiff enough. You can touch it. Yes. No. Oops you pushed it further away. Damn.

After 5 minutes of this, you start talking to yourself

"Wedding ring... Idiot... Argh... Aaarggh... Arrrrgh"

The man sitting on the other side of the aisle has been noticing your distress. You turn to him and ask a question that you realize sounds like a mating ritual of sorts or dialogue from some awful film:

"Do you have anything long?"

Confusion reigns... Then you mumble the phrase again:

"Wedding ring... dropped..."

A look of recognition appears on his face, he's been there before: the realm of the unforgivable. He looks into his bag, a pencil comes out. If a pen didn't work, why would a pencil? Still you're desperate... You promptly drop the pencil under the seat... [obscenity].. You turn around looking hopeless... Try the cable again? There's a word for this: impotence.

"Never mind."

Somehow he has fashioned a two pen contraption which he hands over. He's also rolling up a magazine or something and scurries to the front.

Much better: you can reach. But can you grab? Tilt it and hook. Nope. The pens are bending. Meanwhile the troops are rallying as the bus goes on its merry way, people wanting to take up the seats in front of me wonder what was going on. I can't imagine how ghetto I must look, I see "wild haired maniac concern" in their faces... "Wedding ring" calms them down. Now it's entertainment on the commute home. Some even try to help.

Eventually it was teamwork that did the trick. I, from the seat in front, reaching back with with a rolled-up FedEx envelope, managed at length to push the ring closer. The guy from behind managed a flick with the borrowed knitting needle. And the knitwear girl on the side caught the prodigal ring which she delicately handed over to Your Gratefulness.

We had lost a couple of pens in our endeavours but there was a collective sigh of relief. It was 15 minutes of my life, I had long missed my stop, but not to worry. Another bus story to add to the toli tales.

The parting words of my Good Samaritan helper:

"I don't think you should tell her about this".

---

Improbable gap drops seem to run in the family believe it or not...

A few months ago, just after my wedding, I was heading home with my parents to give them a quick peek at my apartment before they caught the flight home. There was the sight of the slender rectangular mass making its remarkable flight out of my dad's jacket pocket as we stepped out of the train, arching its way through the closing doors and angling itself down the barely 3 inch wide gap.

First, assesment: what was that? Was it the passport or the plane ticket? The train pulled out of the station and we inspected. Luckily no, it was the address book; but were the traveller's checks in it? Uh-oh.

I instinctively primed myself to jump down onto the tracks to recover it. The parents intervened and held me back. They didn't need to say anything, I could hear their thoughts:

Thirtysomething and still got no sense. Hasn't he heard about the third rail? For god's sake, the sign is right there in front of him. Heard about electricity?

So, well, let's ask the station guy. You walk over and knock on the door. He's dispensing tokens. You wait.

"Ahh... Excuse me... Um... Uhh... Ah... My father dropped his address book onto the tracks... Could you?... help?"

"And?"

"Umm... could you?"

The thick Boston accent.

"It's... electrified... You can't go down there sir... Don't go down there!...
Book!"

Eventually:

"I'll have to call the inspector... There's no knowing where he is... I can't pick up your book."

He obviously wants you to give up. So:

"Umm... ahem... Could you? Thanks."

You walk away quickly. You've tried your best.

A few minutes later, he comes out of his box. "The inspector is on his way..." Still he wants to see it for himself. Again the disbelief, he keeps repeating:

"A book? A book?"

He bends down and sees it and looks at us, shakes his head and walks back muttering to himself. You don't need to hear it:

"You're making me disrupt rush hour traffic for a book? [obscenity] tourists"

You want to protest that you're a local, but keep quiet.

In the end it was simple, after 5 minutes or so, the incoming train stopped at the mouth of the tunnel. The inspector stepped out and onto the tracks. A little crowd of onlookers had gathered.

He very deliberately walked down the length of the station in the middle of the tracks. When he reached our level, there was a little skip and he bent down to pick the address book up and handed it up to me. I handed it to my father. The inspector turned around and walked back down the tracks, exchanging a look with the station guy. We, in turn, all walked off. Not a word was said until we got out of the station. Then we burst out laughing:

"A book? A book?"

So if your commute was disrupted one autumn afternoon, perhaps it was because of some improbable toli.

As I started recounting last night's mishap and the words "wedding ring" were uttered, The Wife's words were very direct:

"I don't want to hear about this."

There was a murderous edge to her voice, and who can blame her. I should never have brought it up and to think I was even warned about it.

I should have minded the gap.

Mind the Gap, a Playlist

A soundtrack for this joint... (spotify version)

First a couple from Sting and company, The Police being the greatest Ska band to masquerade as rock stars.

• The Police - Wrapped Around Your Finger
• The Police - I Can't Stand Losing You

Next a trio of songs about falling, these fall on the soul side of things.

• Omar - Fallin'
  With lots of voices in the background, a portrait of a descent into madness. A very soulful confection from one of my favourite singers off the excellent This Is Not A Love Song album.
• Finley Quaye - Falling
  Why are mournful and lyrical moods still danceable when done reggae style?
• Alicia Keys - Falling
  "I keep on falling"

Finally one can't discuss gaps without referring to Charlie Wilson's voice (prototype for Aaron Hall, R Kelly and beyond) and the playful funk of these masters. Thus we'll end with

• The Gap Band - You Dropped A Bomb On Me

File under: life, bus, story, improbable, mishap, whimsy, accident, Cambridge, Comfort Suite, toli

Inflation Calypso

Mr Minister Playboy
You better seek to cut all the prices down

(chorus x 2)
Prices soaring higher and higher
I guess that they are going to reach the moon

That's What I Call The Inflation Calypso

E.T. Mensah & The Tempos - Inflation Calypso

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that the US economy isn't in good shape, what with fiscal looting, cronyism, and the evident impact of high energy prices. E.T. Mensah, singing in the colonial Gold Coast 50 years ago, simply stated his observation in two sentences and let the lilting (and mournful) music speak for itself. A few years later, independence came and the Governor-General returned to England... A calypso is not quite the blues, and the current moment is not quite a recession, still I figured I'd add some verses to his song, a few observations from my lowly vantage point.

Homeowners in northeast US have been told to expect spectacular increases in heating costs this winter - a doubling or tripling in some cases. Even those rustic types who use firewood instead of oil or natural gas have found that their costs have increased 60 to 70 percent (after all, you need diesel to transport several tonnes of wood blocks). As someone who rents and who lives in an apartment complex, I've typically been shielded from these costs. I learnt a dear lesson a while back and always check that heat and hot water are included in the rent. You can hardly escape it though when conversations with everyone around you degenerate into the shrinking pocketbook song.

There's inflation in these here lands...

I don't own a car, being a public transport afficionado, but even I am not immune to the chorus of petroleum despair. During my honeymoon roadtrip, I rented an SUV which turned out to not to be a particularly fuel-efficient specimen even for the genre. This was a replacement for the sedan I had reserved which on inspection was suffused with the overpowering odour of green chilis. The previous driver must have been transporting vegetables or something; the green chili is the symbol of New Mexico but that was taking it too far. But back to the subject, each time I had to fill the car up (and this was a shockingly frequent occurrence), I was appropriately shocked and awed at the dent that this was putting on my finances. Of course it's nothing like filling up in Europe but I was feeling the literal impact of Dubya's Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina in my wallet.

I'll skip over the heart attack that is the annual almost-doubling of health insurance costs. Health care in the US is what it is and all corporations are shifting the burden of insane costs to employees - if indeed they do provide health insurance. But one wonders how sustainable this is. This is the time of year when the next year's benefits package is rolled out in corporate America and it comes with a certain dread as befits the seasonal gremlins of Halloween. When people with dependants anecdotally speak of 450% increases over 3 years, that starts to resonate.

Still the most painful indicator of inflation was the discovery that the washer and dryer in the communal laundry room in the basement of my building now require 2 extra quarters. The price of dealing with one load of laundry has gone from $2.50 to $3. A 20% increase in price at a point when wages are essentially stagnant.

Now don't get me wrong, I make a decent living and don't have children so my belt-tightening should be relatively shallow. But the fact remains that

If you run out of quarters,
You don't get to tumble-dry.
With wet laundry on the line,
You can sing the inflation calypso.

Then they tell me that the price of stamps will increase next year... Blues or calypso? Bring on the chorus:

Prices soaring higher and higher
I guess that they are going to reach the moon

An inflationary soundtrack

• E.T. Mensah & The Tempos - Inflation Calypso
  The early highlife bands such as E.T. Mensah's Tempos and King Bruce's Black Beats were all about celebrating the good times; the genre is called "high" life after all. But the griot tradition is deeply embedded in West African culture so you couldn't avoid some social commentary and canny dissent. The song is 2 and a 1/2 minutes of mournful saxophone and shifting drums. The lyrics are an economy of wit and the chorus is repeated almost tongue in cheek. Highlife music is said to come from the fusion of Caribbean and African rhythms with a jazz sensibility, thus it was always global in outlook. This is why you'll find many songs designated as calypsos. E.T. Mensah was keenly aware that if the good times ended, there would be little demand for his musical stylings hence here, he sounded the alarm.
• Duke Ellington & Johnny Hodges - Going Up
  From the Side by Side album, this is perhaps a little too festive given the topic. A small combo band swinging and 4 propulsive solos provide a musical feast. The flute that floats around the other instruments almost induces the Duke to effusiveness.
• Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes - Wake Up Everybody
  The Philly Soul of the 70s was always socially conscious, if it wasn't Nixon or Vietnam it was that beast we called inflation. This is a wake up call for everyone sung with righteous indignation by one of the best voices in the cannon.

I would add Gwen Guthrie's Ain't Nothing Going On But the Rent but that I'll save that for a recessionary soundtrack.

File under: inflation, economics, observation, whimsy, USA, highlife, music, Ghana, Africa, toli

Resilience and Adaptability

I continue to mull the question of what drives technology adoption and how that should inform system design. One aspect I've covered in the past is about comprehension and ease of authoring and, on reflection, I will eventually flesh out the paper I outlined: "The importance of syntax in technology adoption".

This note though is about some of the other factors that come into play as expressed in concepts like leverage, robustness, adaptability, transparency and the like. When it comes to implementations of a given technology, things like Postel's law apply and in the marketplace, economists also have a lot to say on the matter.

The following passages seem separated at birth although they refer to different technologies. First, David Reed discussing network protocols.

Read the original TCP papers and so forth. TCP was never "efficient" nor was it intended to be. It was intended to be interoperable. It was an overlay network. It still achieves those goals far better than an "efficient" protocol (especially since efficiency seems to come at a cost - specialization, brittle response outside a narrow set of operating points, etc.).

Resilience and adaptability is far more important than "efficiency". Far too many in the research community are focused on a narrow set of metrics, invented by academics, for academics, merely because they are quantitative... We need more researchers focused on how the cars fit into the human ecology of communications, in particular some ought to be thinking about inventing better metrics for things like adaptability and resilience, which are far more relevant systems properties. Can anyone tell me a defensible measure of adaptability that has been used to rank network performance in the real world?

Adam Bosworth, discussing the lessons learned from the adoption of the web over the past 15 years covers much the same ground.

1. Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex and efficient binary ones. Because there are no barriers to entry, these are ideal...

8. KISS. Keep it (the design) simple and stupid. Complex systems tend to fail. They are hard to tune. They tend not to scale as well...

As I’ve argued before, spreadsheets and SQL and PHP all succeeded precisely because they are simple and stupid — and forgiving.

There's lots to digest here and this is a broad topic. The lesson seems to be about how to approach efficiency and the perils of premature optimization as opposed to interoperability (or at least the axis along which to optimize a system). This just shows the wide reach of the end-to-end principle. Still, on the matter of efficiency, the words used to describe these patterns are revelatory: "resilience" and "adaptability" on the one and a case of "sloppily extensible" and "forgiving" on the other.

Bosworth's use of the word sloppy often gets him into trouble in his advocacy because it is counter-intuitive. Mark Baker, who's keenly aware about marketing matters, augments it and makes the advocacy pitch by calling this Principled Sloppiness: "the principled application of must-ignore style extensibility".

This, it seems, is one of the underrated virtues of the web style. Biologists would label such system properties under the heady label of "evolvability" and bring Darwin into the mix and who can blame them. When you poke around the writings of those who helped design the web architecture and see the same word you know that there is something of value in this notion.

The question for a designer or architect is how to highlight these principles of system design when pitching bean counters (or even fellow technologists) who are often focused on a different narrative. How does one measure adaptability and resilience? And if one could, should the measure come into play in deciding when one should pick XML instead of ASN.1 to take an example trading off readability for binary efficiency (or for those concerned with DOM scripting, what are the tradeoffs between XML instead of JSON as formats for data interchange)?

I wonder how many nascent technologies get discarded before they can prove their worth simply because no one can articulate their worth on the resilience and adaptability axes. The paradox is that these properties of a system are often the most crucial when it comes to adoption. Oh well, software and network engineers haven't gone through their industrial revolution.

So there we have it, a brief stab at identifiying a few suspects in that murder mystery that is Rohit Khare's Who Killed Gopher?. We'll scrutinize the rest of the dinner guests in later notes.

Resilience and Adaptability, a playlist

A resilient soundrack for this joint

• Donald Byrd - Change (Makes You Want To Hustle)
  Hmmm, the hustle factor in technology adoption? Donald Byrd laid it down.
• Levert - Rope A Dope Style
  I preferred the elder Levert (Eddie that is) but son Gerald stayed in the music game having learned the lessons of the Rumble in the Jungle. Rope A Dope is a winning strategy.
• Carleen Anderson - Welcome to Changes
  The premier voice of acid jazz lays it down.
• DJ Krush - Only the Strong Survive
  From Japan's premier turntable artisan and crate-digger, a collaboration with CL Smooth. Why did they market this album as "trip hop"? It's all about evolution.
• Fried - Things Change
  I wonder if New Orleans native, Jonte Short, whose plaintive yet hopeful voice touches my heart everytime I play this song still has a home after that hurricane we called Katrina.
• Roy Ayers - Evolution
  We'll end like we started with some essential jazz funk from the king of vibes.

File under: technology, adoption, resilience, adaptability, sloppiness, strategy, systems, software, networks, design, patterns, web, change, extensibility, evolution, architecture, toli

Kente, Lace and Champagne

Pondering a photo and poem to (belatedly) complete the London's Got Soul Trilogy...

Photographers talk about seeing The Shot, knowing as they press the button that they have captured a great image. I'm not much of a photographer and have only come close to this once, 45 seconds before I took the above photo. As it turned out, it took me that long to find my camera and I missed the shot I wanted when additional people walked into the scene. The occasion was a friend's wedding. Still I think it turned out fine and the sight compelled me to declaim some spontaneous poetry, or doggerel as my friends labeled it.

The first two lines were obvious

Rolling hills of fair Essex
Stately homes and greener pastures

As was the eventual final line

Kente, Lace and Champagne

In between there was what you would expect: musings on the wonder of the Accra style

and Jamestown posturing melded with East London street smarts.

It appeared to me that all were trying to create high society. One can imagine everyone settling for high tea at Fortnum-and-Mason's what with the costumes and the hats on display. And yet these are all normally unprepossessing Londoners who hustle and bustle on crowded buses and the packed cars of the underground. But give them a happy occasion and a fine setting, and they'll be all Ascot top hats and (relatively) stiff upper lips.

When you mix lace style and kente chic with a London sensibility all that's missing is champagne.

[Update July 7 2020]

I recently recovered my notes on the poem I had written - a kind of covidious dividend, and thought I should share instead of fussing and rewriting them as is my normal wont. Still, I suspect the title is too good and a different piece of toli may emerge later under its banner...

Kente, Lace and Champagne

Rolling hills of fair Essex
Stately homes and greener pastures

They may only see us as their care home cleaners
Invisible workers, some call us your infrastructure

For on weekdays and nights our game faces are firmly fixed
But on such an occasion the ceremonial mask slips

The light shines amidst the grey blandness of exiled time
We escape the torrid zone of the daily bread line

We are royalty back home, our traditions meet modernity
Agona Swedru expatriates dressed here in Jamestown finery

Your fashions were invented in our hometown cradles and pots
You might say cool was a word derived from our plush cloths

In your pursuit of black and all the other forms of gold
Our country chic of shimmering lace hints at our riches untold

Dresses hand sewn by seamtresess with craft and delicacy
We dance in the grand estate and enjoin all in the revelry

These African ceremonies are our relief from immigrant pain
We toast our brethren and sistren with kente, lace and champagne

Miscellany

And while on the topic of champagne and London, I came across this tidbit about the improbable ascendency of British wine in recent international competitions.

Champagne houses eye up English vineyards

From Kent's Isle of Thanel to the Sussex Downs, what began as a rumour, or a bruit as the French might say, may soon become a brut reality.

French champagne houses, impressed by the strong performances of English wines in international competitions, are looking to buy English vineyards.

The French, who have always looked askance at the culinary prowess of their now Channel Tunnel linked neighbours, of course were rather skeptical about this development. But they are nothing if not pragmatic when it comes to money hence they will scope out the competition.

The English reaction to this scrutiny is an interesting blend of stoicism and prickliness.

"Why should we help the French when we are already producing better champagne on our own?" he said. "We have exactly the same soil conditions and thanks to global warming the climate is actually better. The only difference is I'm not allowed to call our wines champagne."

"It's got to be better than growing cauliflower."

"At every English sporting event from Wimbledon to Ascot, we toast the victors with French champagne", he said. "We'll probably be toasting the anniversary of our victory at Trafalgar this summer with French brands too, it really gets my goat."

British wine?

Soundtrack for this note

A short playlist is in order

• Pet Shop Boys - West End Girls
  
  A pop synthesizer tune by the boys of irony for the ultimate city of synthesis and soul, London.
• Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack

Kente, Lace and Champagne, a photo album

File under: London, kente, lace, fashion, style, photo, chic, aesthetic, Ghana, immigration, textiles, poetry, toli

A Wedding

I'm getting married tomorrow so thought I'd share one of my favourite pieces of art in the two spare minutes I could snatch before dealing with last minute arrangements, welcoming family and friends, and the like. I figure I should spread the love around.

This piece is called "No Problem". It's by Lalelani, a young Nigerian artist who works with a blowtorch smelting metal onto wood. I've always told The Girlfriend that this chop bar and lorry park is where I want to take her in lieu of say The Islands. This kind of aesthetic puts a smile on my face and, as you might suspect, I'm all smiles these days.

Those two minutes are up.

Soundtrack: Yellowman getting married

File under: life, happiness, art, toli

Search Parties

A few weeks ago, midway into my recent blogging hiatus, a concerned soul pointed me to The Nonist's public service pamphlet: What everyone should know about blog depression?

Essential reading...

Apparently search parties were summoned and there were mutterings about withdrawal symptoms in comments and in my email inbox. I was even advised to seek help from the cultists (I suspect they are Scientologists but am not sure) who offer stress tests and studiously manufactured empathy in Boston Common.

Suffice to say that "life" intruded a little. Still let's ease back with a brief report on "Some things I learned during my blog break".

• First a truism: if you can't keep food down for 10 days, you will lose a lot of weight.
• It is unwise to have gentlemen's agreements with people who aren't gentlemen. This is especially true if you've previously characterized the people-in-question as "ever-elusive". In possibly-related news, an apartment you were told would be ready in August actually only actually becomes available a month-or-so later. "Or so" being the operative term.
• You can't possibly pack up an apartment you've lived in for 9 years in a day. You can try but you will surely fail.
• It is inadvisable to spend a day inside an apartment whose floors have just been polished to a very high gloss. At best, prolonged exposure to polyutherane fumes will leave you lightheaded and disoriented; at worst... well let's just say that your relationship with consciousness may become quite tenuous.

Still that is picking on just a few trying times, there have also been many highlights in the past few weeks, most notably a little engagement ceremony... matrimony beckons "Real Soon Now".

The stack of toli fragments that need to be completed keeps growing but for now you can call off the search party.

File under: life, toli

Noblesse Oblige

A few quotes that have been helping me get through the past couple of weeks...

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that that so few are offended with it. But, if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent.

— Jonathan Swift - The Battle of the Books

The following struck me forcefully with its unerring similarity to the cadences and content of a Bush speech. The sentiment of course is an extremely diluted sense of noblesse oblige. On the prescience of satirists again...

A sermon delivered to the congregation of the Church of the Holy Monument in Boggington by the Chief Constable.

"I say unto you that unless we maintain the bonds of free enterprise and free endeavour we shall be bounden to do the Devil's work," he announced from the pulpit. "Our business in the world is to augment the goodness that is God's love with the fruition of free enterprise and to put aside those things which the Welfare State handed us on a plate and thus deprived us of the need to which we must pay homage. That need, dear brothers and sisters in God, is to take care of ourselves as individuals and so save the rest of the community doing it out of the taxpayer's pocket.

Only this week , I have been encouraged to see how many Watch Committees and Neigbourhood Watches have been set up to augment that splendid work being done by the Police everywhere and in particular by the men under my command. It is not often that I have a chance or, I might say, the opportunity to do the Lord's work in the way he would have me do, namely, like your goodselves, to encourage others to free themselves from the shackles of passivity and acceptance and to go forth into the world to bring the positive and active blessings of health, wealth and happiness to those less fortunate than ourselves.

This is not to say that we must bow the knee to social need or so-called deprivation. Instead we must make of ourselves and our gifts in business and in wealth whatsoever we can. As the Lord has told me, there are as many numerous spin-offs on the way to Heaven as there are handouts on the slippery road to Hell. It is one thing to give a penny to a beggar: it is another to beg oneself. And so I say to you dear friends, assist the police wherever you can in the prevention of crime and in the pursuit of justice but never forget that the way of righteousness is the way of self-service and not the other way around. And so let us pray."

— Tom Sharpe - The Midden (1996)

The shock of reading Jonathan Swift at his best cannot be discounted. The set up is done with a poker face and the exposition is so skilled that, when you realize just how far out of this world he has taken you, you can only laugh.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasse or a ragout.

— Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burthen to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public.

As they say, Eating People is Wrong. File under: literature, satire, whimsy, observation, perception, humour, quotes, Tom Sharpe, Jonathan Swift, toli

The New Formula

Some more fodder for a pet topic of mine, the new formula.

What gets my juices flowing is thinking about why it is that Crest no longer makes Smooth Mint Gel replacing it with a multitude of junk bundled with Scope mouthwash! I spend hours thinking about why so many companies these days are tinkering with the formula of their products, worsening things just slightly (but calling the result new and improved) and testing the waters to figure out just how cheap they can make things before it has an noticeable impact on the bottom line. Is that just run-of-the-mill capitalism at work or are we at a historical moment?

A year later I've come to grips with the loss of Smooth Mint Gel (although apparently a few toli readers are as peeved as me on the matter) but I continue to see the wider pursuit of the new formula as inexorable even if I am deeply skeptical. Some recent exhibits...

Pantene Pro-V

Pantene Pro-V conditioner has been given the "new and improved" treatment. It was rebranded and relaunched this spring. Now Pantene is marketed at women and it's not one of the things I use myself but I bought a bottle or two a while back as an attempt to make the apartment more congenial to certain parties. As someone with sensitive skin and hair, The Girlfriend Fiancee immediately pointed out the change.

"I don't know what they've done but it's much worse."

Sensible woman, she hoarded up a few bottles of the old formula that she could still find in shops that hadn't worked through their old inventory. As a historian, she made her prediction:

"Trust me, women are very sensitive to these things, it's not going to work."

She remarked a few months later that Pantene has been struggling. I didn't quite believe her at the time but then I've noticed of late when I pass through CVS or Walgreens that there are fire sales on the new conditioner. Pantene seems to be the only brand that is requiring constant discounts in order to move the product. Did a significant proportion of their clientele notice the change and switch to different products? I wonder if this is like the New Coke debacle albeit less publicized? So ladies, do you use Pantene these days? Did you notice this change and are you bothered? Should we be selling Procter & Gamble stock?

Oil of Olay body wash

Exhibit 2 in our "fiddling with what works" indictment is Oil of Olay sensitive skin body wash, something I settled on 6 years ago moving upmarket from bar soap into yuppiehood.

This one hit me just a couple of weeks ago and I want to nip it in the bud. As I reached up to pick up a replacement I noticed that there were 3 versions on the shelf. Hmmm...

1. Olay Complete Body Wash Sensitive Skin Unscented
   the old faithful
2. New Olay Complete Body Wash Sensitive Unscented
   Really?
3. New and Improved Olay Complete Body Wash Sensitive Skin Unscented Moisture
   This comes with a promotional package with some additional goodies to help the introduction.

At first I thought that this was just your garden-variety marketing subterfuge. First they dropped the "skin" in the "new" version, then in the "new and improved" version, the "skin" returned but now it is a matter of "Unscented Moisture".

What, I ask, is the difference between "Unscented" and "Unscented Moisture"?

Well consumer that I am, I tried all 3 and plainly put the "new" and the "new and improved" versions are worse - the latter version is horrible. Indeed I'm considering returning to plain old soap once I've worked my way through the extra bottles of the original formula that I promptly bought.

Luckily my local Walgreens still has to work through its old inventory and it it looks like the new formula hasn't been launched at the online shops (although I've never bought toiletries online).

If you were journalistically inclined and consulted the labels and the listed active ingredients, you would notice that they have been slowly reducing the amount of soybean oil, presumably replacing it with something cheaper. The labeling of such products is mostly a matter of obfuscation but still I noted that in the "new" version it is no longer "Maleated Soybean Oil", it's just "Soybean Oil". Per Google, maleation is the chemical process of forming a maleate, which is an ester or a salt of maleic acid. So perhaps a step in the manufacturing process was eliminated in the intermediate version. It turns out that in the "new and improved" version there is no trace of soybean oil, maleated or not.

Now as an armchair economist I wanted to test out this theory. I went to look at the charts for the price of soybean oil futures to see if there was any pattern I could discern that could account for the slash and burn of my body wash. The price of soybean, like many commodities has been slowly trending up over the past 5 years, I assume due to the ripple effect of higher transportation costs - everything comes back to oil again. However there must have been a huge shock to the system because in 2004 the price more than doubled in barely 6 months from about $16 to $35 per whatever the unit used in these contracts before returning to around $20 by year end. In 2005 the price has been trending higher to $25. Now I don't know what the lead time is for developing a new formula, but my current theory is that a bean counter decided that the volatility in the soybean oil market could no longer be countenanced and hence there was an imperative to tinker with the formula.

As a sidenote, why is it called Oil of Olay in the USA and Oil of Ulay everywhere else in the world? Is there some trademark dispute going on?

Now this is not to say that what we have is the be and end all of capitalism. I have an uncle who works at Dupont who has spent the best part of the past 25 years developing new compounds. Far be it from me to suggest that the world stand still. We have seen how advances in materials like titanium and graphite have changed the game of tennis and cycling to take just a few obvious applications of technological advances.

Belt-tightening sometimes needs to happen but companies often go too far. The crew on a recent United flight informed us that there would no longer be blankets distributed on their flights. Presumably by cutting on the laundry bill some jobs could be saved. But how about this assault on batteries?

The budget airline Ryanair today took its no-frills approach to new heights by banning its staff from charging their mobile phones at work.

In justifying a move likely to underline its Scrooge-like image, Europe's largest discount airline said it did not believe using a mobile phone charger at work was acceptable.

I work in an industry that wouldn't survive if we weren't marketing the new formula daily. Most users would argue that a lot of software could do with some new formula treatment.

But why can't they leave well enough alone? Why do they want to mess with my shower?

I would also mention the Phisoderm debacle, but that episode was too painful and I've managed (at length) to find a replacement. In any case, I should be all set for the next 6 months of showers, but Oil of Olay, I beg. Stop the nonsense.

Have you noticed any products going through the new formula treatment lately? Are they any better?

A Musical coda

The New Formula is the name of the 1992 album by Today. The thing though is that this, their sophomore album, was not as fulfilling or indeed as successful as their self-titled debut.

Producer Gene Griffen had broken up with Teddy Riley, who was the secret ingredient of the New Jack Swing movement and previous producer. Thus a whole cast of new producers was brought in including Dr Freeze fresh off his Bell Biv Devoe heroics. I suppose it's a decent album but I think the titles of the songs tell the ironic tale and quite apropos the advisability of messing with the formula. Stick to your core competency guys.

• Why you get funky on me
  

  Tell me why
  It ain't cool how you treat me
  So different than the way we were

• I Got The Feeling
  

  That you're doing me wrong.
  I got the feeling
  That something's going wrong

Oil of Olay are you listening? Don't you leave me. Why you get funky on me? Tell me why.

See also: Why the Red Delicious No Longer Is for a discussion about the taste of apples. An apple may look red and succulent, but it shouldn't look the same 6 months after it has been harvested.

File under: economics, marketing, whimsy, pantene, Oil of Olay, technology, snake oil, Hard Sell, sales, The New Formula, backlash, soybean, oil, commodities, pricing, Procter & Gamble, strategy, music, Today, New Jack Swing, toli