I was driving my outer space rocket ship into the Magoo Cluster when I sighted a band of scintillating green floating in space. I pulled up alongside and slowed down to sub-atomic transport-drive rate. I looked out the passenger window and it was then I saw them.

Leprechauns.

They wore belts on their hats and they wore belts on their shoes. Belts were everywhere. It was horrible. Just horrible. The felt-green of their tall hats, the bright green sateen of their vests, the grass-green of their woolly coats and they had shiny green pants on. It made a cloud of lambent green against the matte black and sparkling white stars of space. I can see them still, their little leprechaun faces frozen in bewilderment, the occasional clump of reddish bristles on the chin, one with a burnished copper frying pan, another with a penny-whistle, still another, holding a lollipop, all of them turning in a grisly underwater ballet, all floating slowly away from where the hatch must have blown on their little leprechaun space rocket.

They will float away on exactly the same trajectory as they had begun on, drifting further from one another. Some would be claimed by the gravity of planets, would burn up on reentry, perhaps a small carbonized piece of skull all that remained to strike the planet’s surface. Others would perhaps fall into the fiery well of a star, vaporized, dissembled by the ferocious chemistry of the stellar engine. But most, most will float forever, slowly turning, off into the fathomless eternity of space, further and further into the unending icy darkness, further and further from their fellows.

Solitary dead leprechaun spacemen drifting eternally out into the horrible vacancy of the intergalactic night.

Wales, because, let’s face facts, it’s kind of weird, has two symbols, aside from the red dragon. They are the leek (not a typo) and the daffodil, both of which are worn on this day. The daffodil often blooms on or near St. Davy’s Day.

In honor and imitation of Dewi Sant, may you ram a wad of daffodil-impregnated leeks in your trousers, as was the custom at the time. Today, everyone is Welsh. Ha ha. I’m kidding. What are we, Irish? Those fucking people, am I right? I kid. I kid ’cause I love. We have fun.

Sometimes a jump-off area is just that, a place to provision or transfer to your real destination. But sometimes it’s a destination in itself, one that is glossed over by travelers intent on getting the journey over with so the trip can begin. Nairobi is one of the latter places. Inauspiciously founded where two train lines met in a marsh, it has transitioned into a fascinating, and under-appreciated city.

In addition to being one more stop on the way to Kenya’s wildlife Edens, most prominently, the Maasai Mara, it has another strike against it for most visitors. It’s a big, dirty, loud city of almost 4 million people. Compared to lions and wildebeest in the boonies, what could it offer? Well, in my eight days there, I’d have to say people, food, nightclubs, shopping and day trips that rival journeys to the country’s more far flung and celebrated areas.

Let’s start with food. Because the Kenyans certainly do. Nairobi seems to be a metropolis of Jewish mothers. You will be plied with an absolute ton of food no matter where you go and it’s generally somewhere between good and great.

Of course, it’s very popular to stress the many diseases a Western traveler can get in Kenya, from typhoid to river blindness, and counsel the avoidance of all water and practically all food. Although common sense is, well, sensible, germophobic avoidance will not save you if your luck is bad, but it will ruin your trip. I drank (and brushed my teeth) with bottled water and did not eat off street carts, but otherwise, I behaved as I did at home.

Food

The first, and most remarkable, place we ate was the Olepolos Country Club in the Ngong Hills 25 miles from Nairobi’s city center. The phrase “country club” does not mean in Kenya what it does in the U.S. It is more like the grounds of a winery. A central cookhouse served a number of pavilions scattered along an outcrop that looked down over the boma of the Maasai herdsmen and the wild, dry Navajolands-like landscape of acacia and thorn trees scattered through the rift. In fact, the Maasai themselves reminded me of American Indians, connected to the land, with an enduring connection to their ancestral beliefs, herders, with beautiful crafts and, frankly, a bit objectified by Kenyans and foreigners alike.

For about $60 dollars, we had enough food for six people and an actual garbage bag full of food to take home. Olepolos specializes in “nyama choma,” or traditional grilled meat, eaten with ugali, a corn meal bread that resembled Ethiopian injera, but in wad form instead of sheet. You pinched some off and used it to grab the meat. Our meat was goat. I had never had it before and liked it. But what I liked the most I was the most surprised by.

First, the roasted intestines. I am not an intestines guy. Menudo puts me to flight. But the crisp, grilled goat intestines had the most flavor of all the offerings. Except one. Now, Kenyans will laugh if you say you’ve eaten nyama choma, but they will double-over if you tell them you’ve eaten matura. And they’ll pass out if you tell them you loved it. I loved it.

Matura is a nasty looking, incredibly flavorful blood sausage with a rather tough skin, absolutely peppered with mystery ingredients. Eat it. It’s unbelievably good. If we had only had matura, I would have had to have been hauled off on a stretcher. Vegetable dishes included spinach and kachumbari – a tomato, hot pepper and onion salad.

Another large group of us descended on the teppanyaki tables at Furusato on Peponi Road. The walled grounds of Furusato are pregnant with jacaranda and other blooming tropical trees and flowers. A wandering patio leads out into the garden. But inside four large tables have grills built into them. Don’t think Benihana. This is much less knife-ringing and much more cooking. You wouldn’t think palm-sized portions of fish, meat and vegetables could put a big man under, but it can and did. The flavors were subtle and complimentary and the dishes were hot, never taking more than six seconds between the grill and your place setting.
The restaurant has a more traditional sit-down menu, a vegetarian menu and a full sushi bar.

With over 100,000 Indian Kenyans, a community that’s been part of the country for well over a century, there is some excellent Indian food to be had. I even had Indian food in a mall food court that was great. But our night out took us to Open House, a relative newcomer on the scene that is popular with Africans of Indian origin.

The restaurant is cozy, with a saffron-colored interior and pleasant staff. The cuisine touches on the basics of the subcontinent, from the north to the south, featuring dhals, breads and curries.

An African bureau chief for a major newspaper told me that Kenyans have a good handle on customer service, compared to other African countries. They’re pleasant without being toadying and they have a genuine devotion to making your experience good. That said, service can be irregular. It’s a matter of process, not resentment. So, relax. After all, you’re in Africa. Where you gotta go you’re in such a hurry?

Nightlife and shopping

Kenyans are very confident, social people by and large. Although you find all kinds in all places, you tend not to find a surfeit of sleazy opportunists in Nairobi’s nightclubs. The sleazy opportunists, of both sexes and all proclivities, you are much more likely to find in the bars of hotel catering to foreigners.

Instead, in most nightclubs, you find people intent on having a good time – drinking, talking and dancing. If you want to hang out and have a beer or talk and socialize within your group, you’ll be left alone. But if you want to talk, dance or drink with others, you won’t find a lot of obstacles.

We went to Galileo, a bar in the Westlands area which has a long front porch, grills to the side of the parking lot and a high tech, white and neon disco inside. It’s easier earlier in the evening to take a table on the deck and talk over a Tusker or a cocktail, and that’s what we did. People watching is excellent as it overlooks the walkway to the entrance. The weather rarely drives you inside as long as you have a roof overhead, so enjoying the evening breeze is part of the fun.

Another time, we chose the high-toned, glass and chrome vibe of the Club Lounge, on the seventh floor of the Sankara Hotel, also in Westlands. With a high-tech movable bottle rack that slides around the glass-topped bar and the view of Nairobi from the upper floors, it’s a much more elegant experience. But the payoff is that it is a much more generic one as well. You could be in Antwerp or L.A., Mexico City or Berlin. Still, if a little stillness and quiet is what you’re after, it’ll do fine.

Kenya has a wealth of fine handicrafts, many made by the Maasai. The best places in Nairobi to shop for them are the Westlands Market, a collection of independently run stalls, and the Maasai Market, a weekly market that springs up on each Tuesday in the Central Business District park and median areas.

At the Westlands Market I picked up two kikoy cloths and a Maasai wrap for about $40. Kikoy means “shawl” and the cloths are usually three interwoven colors. The two I found were salmon, orange and cherry colored and deep blue, chocolate and bronze colored. The Maasai wrap are much bigger and look sort of like a striped, more colorful and thinner Pendleton blanket. They tend to be red in the main.

Additional handicrafts include dark hardwood carvings, banana-skin collages and beading.

Haggling is par for the course in both places. The rule of thumb is to halve the quoted price and come up to three-quarters. The important thing is to simply be aware of how much you’re willing to spend.

Overnight

There are three dozen parks and reserves in Kenya. So if you’d like to see wildlife, you don’t have to travel that far. To do a quick overnighter and still see more Wild Kingdom-style animals than you could imagine, you can do what we did and head for Lake Nakuru.

A national park about 100 miles northwest of Nairobi, Nakuru, which is also a bird sanctuary, assaults the senses with an initial splash and squawk of flamingos, pelicans and cormorants. Millions of the birds can be seen smudging the shores of the alkaline lake. I found the pelicans to be the most interesting and disconcerting, big pinkish leathern looking monsters coming in for slow landings in a way that could not fail to evoke pterodactyls.

You can take the thirty-mile game drive around the lake in your own vehicle, but I would advise against it. The track is often unclear and the animals can be belligerent. We took a pop-top van with a driver who knew his stuff.

A small list of the animals we saw on the three-hour drive includes water buffalo, cattle egrets, Rothschild’s giraffes, white rhinos, hammerkops, guinea fowl, blue-breasted rollers, waterbuck, impala, Thomson’s gazelles and zebras. Not seen on the day we went were the big cats and pythons.

We stayed in the old colonial Great Rift Valley Lodge, on the way to Nakuru. The grounds consisted of the main lodge, the scattered attendant buildings, including an open breakfast pavilion and a series of condos ranged in great crescents a quarter-mile from the lodge. There is also a golf course. While walking to breakfast I saw a half dozen of Kenya’s famous distance runners training in the 7,000-foot elevation.

Unfortunately, the rooms did not have windows that could be opened, air conditioning or fans. The phones did not function and there was no functional Internet. Not every place is the same, even these days. You get the sense of being far from home at Nakuru. But whereas the Internet may not have worked, getting up before dawn and listening to the birds and other animals come awake in the surrounding savannah beats easy access to MSNBC.com. With a stick.

Next time we’ll stay at the Sarova Lion Hill Lodge in the park itself. We stopped there for lunch after the drive and the airy, green heights, matter-of-fact elegance and good food exerted a powerful claim on our imagination.

While in Nairobi, we stayed at the Southern Sun Mayfair, formerly known as the Holiday Inn. Don’t let its immediate history fool you. It’s a rambling colonial complex with leather furniture and local art in the common areas. The rooms are clean and well kept, with ceiling fans and space to sprawl out a bit. But the biggest pulls are the extensive gardens with the loudest frogs imaginable hiding in the reeds around the flowing ponds. To go from the hot, dusty street to the garden is magical after a long day.

The poolside bar, with its pavilions and peaked roofs, is relaxing as well, though never silent, with the birds waking up and settling down with the sun. We saw African hawks landing on the conference room’s roof several times, miraculously leaving the scrappy but sweet house cats who lounge around the pool alone. Food is available at the bar but also at the surreally Olde West-themed Golden Spur Restaurant, part of an unlikely South African chain.

Destination

Every place is a destination and Nairobi more than most. With excellent food, lovely people as interested in your world as they are in their own, cultures, wildlife and vistas within easy drive and merchants selling beautiful things that you’d actually want to buy for prices you could actually pay, Nairobi deserves to be more of an on-purpose destination than it is.

It is well worth traveling to Nairobi for its own sake. But even if you’re only stopping over, on your way to a distant park, a safari, or an assignment with an NGO, take the time to get to know it. As our driver, Johnson, said, “You see all the people? Here in Nairobi they are always going somewhere, always doing something, always moving fast.” The energy is infectious especially since, for every dozen hurrying people, you always see a couple hailing one another, stopping to talk, turning aside for some coffee or tea. Model yourself on Nairobians and you won’t go wrong.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Olepolos Country Club
Olepolos Road, Kiserian
+254 716 737423 ?

Furusato Japanese Restaurant
Peponi Road, Nairobi
+254 20 3748506 ?

Open House Restaurant
Ground Floor, Centro House, Nairobi
+254 20 4445903

Galileo
Mombasa Road, Nairobi
+254 20 3746718

Club Lounge
Sankara Hotel
Woodvale Grove, Nairobi
+254 20 4208000

http://www.sankara.com/

Great Rift Valley Lodge
Moi North Lake Road
Lake Naivasha National Park
Naivasha
+254 20 4446651

http://www.heritage-eastafrica.com/golf-resort/grvl/

Lake Nakuru National Park
Nakuru, Rift Valley Province
+254 20 2664071

http://www.kws.org/parks/parks_reserves/LNNP.html

Sarova Lion Hill Game Lodge
Lake Nakuru National Park
+254 0202315139/0202316931

http://www.sarovahotels.com/lionhill/

Southern Sun Mayfair
Parklands Road, Nairobi
+254 20 3688000

http://www.southernsun.com/hotels/nairobi/pages/overview.aspx

Last night I wrote a story for the Daily Dot on a crowdsourcing experiment by the S. Daniel Abraham Center called Is Peace Possible. My editor  elected to take out most of the section in which I register, quite forcefully, my opinion on the nature of online discourse surrounding the Israel-Palestine problem. I think that was the right route to go in terms of calming the post down from high dudgeon. But I do feel strongly about what I said, so I’m posting it here, on my personal blog.

Goldman noted that the tenor of the comments on Jodi Rudoren’s Facebook page, where the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief posted a link to the map, were contentious. One might say, more baldly, that they instantaneously fell lock-step into the same tedious script recited whenever any aspect of the Israel-Palestine issue is mentioned online.

This is a topic which is fraught at the best of times, but at the worst is regarded as a convenient stage for posturing and chest-thumping by people with no more investment in either the state of Israel or the future of the Palestinians than in the Kentucky Derby or a furry convention. 

The conceptual laziness, self-aggrandizing puffery, abstraction and self-absorption which flow from the hate-porn which indulgent intellects create from even the most anodyne experiments in solving this awful and persistent conflict are enough to make anyone on even a nodding acquaintance with intellectual honesty hit flush on the whole disgusting mess.

And that’s, perhaps literally, a Goddamned shame.

In honor of Hannukah and Christmas, I offer you this holiday-themed poem by the great American poet Bob Folder. Like we have done, you may well wish to make it a permanent part of your family’s winter celebrations.

The Dancy Dance

I in all my lucky days
Have never danced inside my pants
Have never danced a dancie dance
Inside my little pantsie pants.

I in all the spooky fruit
That spun so slowly in my sleep
Have never dared to lift the sheet
And take a little peekie peek.

But every monstrous shake-n-bake
That launched a dump-truck in the lake
Baked a little cakie cake
And popped a toad until it spake.

In all those lucky daisy days
Of dancing in my pantsie pants
And taking leave of common sense
I danced myself a dancie dance

Photo credit

Praise this poetical monster, the magician Chaucer,
Over the crude and caterwauling dotards
Who, insolent and annoying, amble fattishly,
Blocking past from future possibility.

They twitter on, their work an endless proem,
Lacking the poignant misery of a poem;
The only thing they agree on is altercation,
The pinhead’s angel-like enumeration,

Or worse, they fashion melancholic proverbs
on womanhood, or praise the jolliness of poppets
In notes of maudlin intellectuality,
Each unconvincing word said superstitiously.

No, every fleshy dalliance should be praised,
Wantonly outshine the Milky Way,
An ablution, each nymph narcotic, never sluttish,
Her femininity earthy, my enchantress;
Each good-night be Valentine’s day.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico García Lorca is one of my favorite poets. I even followed his ghost to his city, Granada, Spain. There, I lived with my wife and a guitarist friend, in a cave in the Gypsy part of town Lorca visited so often while he lived, the Sacromonte.

On the occasion of his birthday, here is my translation of his poem, “La Guitarra,” which was used by Yale Prof. María Rosa Menocal in her lecture and monograph, “Poetry As An Act of History.” (She is also the author of the extraordinary book, “The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Christians, and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain,” which I recommend without reservation.)

The photograph above came from a post in The Volunteer, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade website, on new evidence as to the possible location of Lorca’s murdered body. He was murdered by fascist thugs during the Spanish Civil War.

The Guitar
By Federico García Lorca (La guitarr)
Trans. Curt Hopkins

The cry of the guitar
Begins.
The glasses of dawn
Are shattered.
It is useless
To quiet it.
Impossible
To shut it up.
It weeps monotonously
As water weeps,
As wind weeps
In a snow storm.
It is impossible
To stop it.
It cries for far away
Things.
Sand of the hot south
That begs for white camellias.
It weeps, arrow without a target,
Evening without a morning,
And the first bird
Dead upon the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart gravely wounded
By five swords.

There has been a great deal of tension apparent between the U.S. and China, the former accusing the latter of repeated instances of electronic espionage and the latter fearing the former as an aggressive power in the mold of the Opium War powers.

Well, apparently the distrust between the two countries isn’t as deep as common wisdom says it is or the actors on each side are a bit less strident and uncooperative than they are thought to be, because last year the two countries staged online wargames with each other, according to reporting by the Guardian.

The games were designed “to help prevent a sudden military escalation between the sides if either felt they were being targeted.”

Two wargames have been finished and another is scheduled for next month. They were put together by two think tanks, the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in D.C. and the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing.

The first two exercises involved a Stuxnet-like worm, each side taking turns to be the defending party.

In addition to figuring out how to communicate with one another about this sort of situation, the war games were also an opportunity for each side to say to the other, “If you do something like this, here’s what our reaction will be.”

Jim Lewis, a senior fellow and director at the CSIS, told the Guardian that the Chinese participants were more combative than they would have liked.

“The [Chinese officials] who favour co-operation are not as strong as the people who favour conflict.”

Liquid armor from BAE

The British defense and security company, BAE Systems, has announced “shear thickening liquid.” The name’s no great shakes but apparently, this is a gel that can stop a bullet. The liquid has been designed to provide armor that is much lighter and easier to wear than the traditional Kevlar fabric and ceramic plate outfit that is de rigeur among the world’s armed forces today.

Stewart Penney, head of business development for design and materials at BAE, explained the functioning of the liquid to journalists this way: If you were to stir a container of the liquid armor, you would not feel must resistance at first, but increase the speed and, the faster you stir, the more the resistance builds up.

The particles in the liquid lock together when subjected to a strike. It also spreads the force of the strike across a greater surface area than Kevlar. This reduces the likelihood that a bullet will cause injury and pain. Although traditional armor can keep the wearer’s body from being breached by a projectile, the force must still go somewhere and that is often into the wearer’s body, breaking bones and compressing tissue.

The armor is not science fiction. It cannot simply be spread on the user and stop bullets. (That would be cool, though.) Instead, BAE envisions the shear thickening liquid taking the place of the heavy ceramic plates in a soldier’s kit. This would reduce the weight of a 25-pound flak jacket by half and reduce the temperature of the wearer. The combination would also reduce the wearer’s fatigue substantially.

The company tested 10 layers of Kevlar with shear thickening liquid vest against 31 layers of the fabric without the liquid. At a speed of 300 meters per second, the depth at the strike point was much less in the liquid example than in Kevlar alone.

The next goal for the company is to increase the toughness of the armor using the liquid so that it could stop not just small arms fire but automatic weapons fire from rifles like the AK47.

User interface

The Svalbard Seed Vault, a global biodiversity storehouse for three-quarters of the world’s crop diversity, recently received a new shipment of seeds for 24,000 more species. This brings the hoard stored at the northern Norwegian facility dug out of the Arctic permafrost, to 740,000 seed types in a million-and-a-half samples. This is news, and good news.

But one aspect of it that has fascinated me is how closely the activities of the vault and its partner, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, parallel IT. In the Associated Press’ story on the new delivery, the writer said, “With the shipment from the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, almost its entire collection is now backed up in Svalbard.”

This is an important observation. Because Svalbard isn’t just a place to maintain seedstock. It’s a repository of biological data.

Those of us rolling around in the Internet think of data in bits and bytes. But data comes in all forms, even as the structure of relationships between its parts stays stable. It occurred to me that the data structure surrounding Svalbard could be expressed like this:

Bits=seeds

Packets=deliveries

CPU=land

Memory=Svalbard

What’s the value of thinking of a seed repository in terms of data and data processing? Because Svalbard is not just a hole in the ground with seeds in it. It’s an organic computer devoted to the storage and retrieval of information requisite to the continuance of life itself, to say nothing of the science and culture we have created in our species’ history.