I woke up this morning to balloons, a birthday bouquet, and a cup of coffee. Life is good. I got email greetings from a bunch of folks including one from the cleaning chick and another funny one from Joshie. This afternoon I will have Gambino’s gourmet birthday cake. Tonite I am going to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. When I lived in Austin as an undergrad, my roommate (coincidentally, her name was Ruth) told me that she heard Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, which was a Texas-based chain, was named after Ruth’s husband (or maybe her son…) who ran the steakhouse and then died, so Ruth kept the name in honor of him. Once, I mentioned this to Tracy who pshawed at me and told me Ruth was from New Orleans. So I looked it up on the web today and found out that not only was Tracy right, but Ruth would NEVER name a restaurant after her husband, since the restaurant was developed as a divorce project — another displaced homemaker making good. Go Ruth!
Shoutout to Shashak Jain from LSU Public Administration who sent me a compliment on my website.
Shoutout to Sasha N. from USF who took a bunch of WMST courses with me when I was there. I haven’t heard from him in years. He ran into my name while surfing and sent me an email. I need to email him back, though. I surfed to see if I could find his website, but I couldn’t. Instead, though, I found a cool article quoting him about my pop culture class from the USF Oracle, dated back in 1997. I had forgotten about this article. God I’m old.
Shoutout to another Nigerian friend, Engineer Ali Razak. Ali Razak is an amazing man. He has two jobs in two completely different countries on opposite sides of the continent. Eng. Ali Razak works as the Director of Project Implementation at the Department of Mining Resources in Pretoria, South Africa. He also works as a contract reviewer at the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing in Lagos, Nigeria. Impressive credentials. More impressive travel time. He must be a workaholic. That must be why he carelessly posted confidential information to a public bulletin board. Bless his heart. He needs a vacation.
Incidentally, speaking of where Ali Razak lives, begging is so bad in Lagos, that one newspaper article called it “Nigeria’s ‘New Millennia’ Begging Business.” No wonder Eng. Ali Razak wants to leave Nigeria and move to Pretoria! South Africa, however, isn’t much better. In South Africa, they test teenagers’ (both female AND male) virginity following old Zulu customs and then give them certificates if they pass the test. I think virginity certificates would be really successful here in the US, at least for the junior high crowd. Sorry for the digression.
I’m sure there’s more I need to catch up on, but it can wait until another day.
