Nick Wadhams

Hallelujah

Just purchased a new toy: a Worldspace satellite radio. Suddenly, the curtains have been spread wide and the windows thrown open. We have shed the shackles of BBC and fled to the sanctuary of National Public Radio.

Now I don't mean any disrespect to my friends from Britain and pretty much everywhere else on the planet, but NPR is just so much better than the BBC World that it's embarrassing.

My primary beef: After two years of listening, I just can't bear the BBC's take on the United States. It's sneering, holier-than-thou and just plain old tiring.

This morning, for example, BBC World featured a guy in Texas who supports teachers' right to carry guns in school. Allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons is a pretty miserable idea in my opinion. But the interviewer's snickering condescension made me sympathize with the poor guy. That's some feat.

If you just listened to BBC World, you'd think the only things that mattered in the U.S. were guns. I think Brits are appalled but secretly fascinated by the 2nd Amendment. Curiously, a few weeks ago, the BBC's Ross Atkins went to the U.S. and recorded himself firing a gun. I guess the whole thing was supposed to highlight Americans' weird love of guns, but Ross was clearly enjoying himself, too.

It's almost as if British journalists in particular can't resist getting their jabs in at the United States (cough) from time to time. I won't get into my theories about the psychology behind it (Blair poodle fury, jealousy over our superior television programming, etc) and I don't disagree with the sentiment much of the time, but for some reason it wakens the dormant patriot in me. Weird.

I'll probably flip on BBC World from time to time for Africa news. But for everything else... I'm coming home, mama, I'm coming home.

Africa's Spending

The New York Times has an interesting graphic on worldwide use of discretionary income. Methodology is not included, so it's tough to know how they grappled with the flaws of African nations' financial data. Still, only three African countries _ Egypt, South Africa and Nigeria _ spend enough to be mentioned.

Advertising Madness

Some dubious advertising on television here have made me wonder if lax consumer law is allowing foreign companies to make claims that they would never get away with making somewhere else. Of course there's the usual insinuation that you're a lousy person (usually mother) if you don't buy a particular product, but a few claims seem so absurd that less stringent regulation has to be a factor.

Take, for example, Colgate toothpaste. It claims to have "liquid calcium" that gets to those hard-to-reach areas between teeth. Liquid calcium? What the hell is liquid calcium?

Dettol soap claims to form a protective barrier around its loyal users, who would be more exposed to bacteria with other soaps. And then there's the laundry detergent that purports to reach those notorious 10 stain-prone areas of a shirt better than other detergents (the stain-prone areas include the front of the shirt and the collar). 

The most egregious that I've seen is for Pampers diapers. Pampers claims that its diapers hold wetness for an impressive 12 hours. According to Pampers, this incredible absorbency allows your baby to sleep longer at night, which in turn makes him fresh in the morning and more ready to learn, which in turn makes him smarter. So, the claim _ baldly stated, not insinuated _ is that Pampers make your baby smarter.

I wonder what scientific evidence Pampers has to back up that claim. To say nothing of the fact that no baby is going to sleep for 12 hours anyway because a) few humans sleep for 12 hours at a stretch; b) it will get hungry; and c) its diaper will fill up with crap as well as "wetness" (absorbency is irrelevant when it comes to crap).

Slap Happy

President Mwai Kibaki's wife slapped a man in a rather public place a little while back, and something about the way it was reported seemed interesting.

The story was this: At an Independence Day event attended by Kibaki and his wife Lucy, the master of ceremonies referred to Lucy Kibaki as "first lady Mama Lucy Wambui," a slip that will no doubt haunt him to the end of his days.

That's because Mary Wambui is Kibaki's other wife, a woman who is widely known but never referred to as such.

Security agents hustled the MC off stage and then collected all the film from journalists who recorded the slap. Kibaki’s government didn’t want Lucy’s antics all over the news during election time, and he does not address the issue of “Mary Wambui,” even though she is reported to live well in a guarded compound north of Nairobi, has said before that she's Kibaki's wife, and gave birth to a daughter who says Kibaki is her father.