Rashard Mendenhall and the Fate of A Cockroach

“…how many generations would it take before we cockroaches could be trained to walk in columns?” – King Cockroach in “Fate of A Cockroach”

Tewfik al Hakim’s three-act play, Fate of A Cockroach, is basically about the preoccupation of a man with the determination of a cockroach who endlessly climbs up the side of a bathtub only to fall back in.

In a country where being politically correct is the order of the day; where people go on air (radio, Television, Internet) to apologize for expressing an opinion that later rubbed some people the wrong way, and where people would rather “keep their mouth shut and just play ball”,  we seem to be endlessly preoccupied with a determination to prove that we, the United States of America are a model of civility and “moral high-ground” only to fall back on our primordial instincts when we get emotional over negative events. Continue reading

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Paradise Lost? Obama and Realpolitik

So he just couldn’t resist being a macho president dropping some tomahawks on another dictator. In the midst of the threat of a government shutdown, two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and many states on the verge of laying off teachers and crowding more kids into classrooms, our “messiah” chose to spends billions of dollars in another meaningless intervention in the internal affairs of another Arab country. Continue reading

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Another ‘World’ Nonsense

The San Fransisco Giants, a U.S. baseball team just won the country’s baseball national championship and we certainly congratulate them, but it rubs me the wrong way whenever I hear the word ‘World’ added to that championship. What country or team did they play against? The Texas Rangers – another U.S. team. How about getting to the finals, did they play a team from Europe, Africa, Asia or Latin America? No. The U.S. baseball league is an All-American (specifically, the U.S.) affair. So where does all this ‘World’ nonsense come into play. Continue reading

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The Theory of ‘Cardiovascular Endurance’

This past Sunday, Washington Redskins Football coach Mike Shanahan benched his Pro Bowl quarterback Donovan McNabb in the last two minutes of an NFL game with the Detroit Lions. The coach accused McNabb of  “lacking the cardiovascular endurance” to finish the game. Continue reading

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Happy Independence Day, Nigeria!

It’s been fifty years since Nigeria threw off the shackles of colonialism and it’s been a rough fifty years. While there has been some progress in a lot of fronts, it hurts to see the inability of the country’s leaders to harness the vast natural and human resources this unique country has been blessed with.

Here’s a poem written by a Nigerian to celebrate the last fifty years:

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, NIGERIA!

I have enormous tracts of land and vast volumes of water, but cannot feed myself.
So I spend $1 billion to import rice and another $2 billion on milk.
I produce rice, but don’t eat it; I have millions of cows but no milk.
I am 50, please celebrate me. Continue reading

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