Joshua Treviño, who also blogs as Tacitus, put up a piece on his personal blog last week about squiring actress Ashley Judd around South Africa on some humanitarian mission. Very funny, but his previous employer saw it and started making grumbly noises about something or other with the implied threat of a lawsuit, so Joshua took the post down.
I had clipped this part of it, intending to link to the piece:
Now, let me remind the reader that we were in bloody Africa. There are many lovely things about Africa, and especially about South Africa. Still, continent-wide, the standard for a good day there is pretty set:# Do I own nothing?
# Is my flesh rotting?
# Do I have to sleep near or on feces?If you can answer no to all three questions, you have had a good day in Africa!
I feel somewhat qualified to comment on this, having spent two years in Bamako, Mali in West Africa (my father, an accountant at CN Rail, was lent out to CIDA for one of their foreign-aid projects). Apart from the bugs, I loved it; but let me tell you, there's a lot of truth in those questions.
Update: Will the wonders of the Internets never cease? Someone copied Joshua's post and put it up on Free Republic. Read all about his encounter with the vacuous Ms. Judd here.
(It might just be my browser, but the piece, at least as it appears on FR, is lousy with this -- Ó -- character replacing quotation marks.)