What are your jeans doing today?

[pomata]

^woman.......

[beatle]

"wonder woman

[gramps]

Wunderbar.

[MHP]

Wonderwall

[beatle]

wallpaper .....

[almostnice]

beatle as a wallpaper?

nice idea but i reckon my wife would complain...

more suiteable would be a large beatle-poster for the kids room,i am sure they would love it.

[beatle]

lol..and we´re back to the spandex body suit super hero outfit*** no wait - ur kids are into denim as well, right ??

[almostnice]

they are,but the dont realize.

well,do they have a choice?

[riff]

[beatle]

riff just saved me...bug poster is so much better for ur kids...

[The gent]

I bunked off down the English coast again yesterday - so far east my phone was picking up texts via France.

Didn't want to spam with many more photos as I think I've posted similar ones before. Also, shockingly, I only drank ginger beer. But the sunset on the way back was beautiful - must be all that volcanic ash from Iceland.

Hey paul , is that East Sussex ? it's look like , I used to live in Hasting .

[riff]

riff just saved me...bug poster is so much better for ur kids...

Oh no, not so easy... I think Markus should get a pic of you - in a Beatle!

[Paul T]

Hey paul , is that East Sussex ? it's look like , I used to live in Hasting .

East Sussex is beautiful, and I have a friend just moved to Hastings... this was WHitstable, though.

[amnesiac]

I spent this weekend in Soho with one of my good friends. We stayed at her uncle's place (A building over from BiG). I'm also taking her to buy her first pair of raw denim tomorrow (Expect another post). Here's the label outside of the building.

Then, we hopped on the subway (obligatory denim shot/waywt)

Went to the Yankees game and had awesome seats, third baseline 11 rows back. Took way to many pictures too count, so i'll just show a few.

And now the old stadium, or what's left of it

Then, on the way back went to Fat Beats to pick up some music, on Record Store Day of course. Had DJ Element spinning while we were there, Von Pea and 88 keys both made appearances throughout the day.

Then we went to another record store for a bit

Went to a Tapas bar for dinner, but the camera died before we got there. More pictures to come tomorrow

[thomass]

Continuing planting paver stones creating a little walkway.

LVC '44s doin' work!

lunch time!

finished!

[therelativity]

waxed the billykirk wallet

hangdry

thai food fair - love the guy's tshirt

a nice afternoon coffee + magazine

inspired by the beer-tshirt guy, cooked some seafood with beer in

Have a great weekend, everyone!

[ThisSunday]

My usual from the diner

Apartment hunting. Can't imagine living by the railroad & the elevated subway

Saw Jose James at the Hiro Ballroom

Late night craving

Also stopped by KFC to get the Fat Bastard sandwich

[Deadramones]

lovely wallet, therelativity.

[ranonranonarat]

yes, that is one lovely wallet i say.

[almostnice]

better post this now before Paul T makes me look like a boring old fart,with his usually unbeatable sunday-adventure.

the wife had to work,so it was my part to entertain the kids today.went to a streetfest thats taking part every year in our neighbourhood.

ready to spread the terror...

...that was until we met the unavoidable Patagonians,torturing us with their sound of shock and awe.

my son was so shocked,he blacked out immediately

the unavoidable currywurst

the unavoidable merry-go-round

this bar perfected the musical terror by replacing the whole band with robots

riding a Harley is no apology for dressing like shit,douchebags!

after lots of bratwurst,pancakes and numerous sweets (and no beers,what do you think! as a father you have to be a good example.)

it was time head back home,but not without doing a last pic,following my daughters demand to proudly showing her HMs:

[Paul T]

Congrats on surviving the Patagonians.... that takes fortitude. The sound of pan pipes makes me want to commit murder.

[Deadramones]

Short and simple.

Wondering what possessed me to take a course in predicate logic, happily allowing sufu to distract me (including taking waywt snaps to excuse the lack of denim content in this post!) and waiting for this place to finish being built a couple of miles away. Any day now...

[almostnice]

Paul,a panflute alone is a deadly weapon,but in combination with a powerful amplifier,playing "El condor pasa.."

thats coming close to mass-slaughter!

[roy6]

Don't you have Southpark in Germany? Pan flute bands protect us from giant killer Guinea pigs. Be grateful.

[beatle]

Oh no, not so easy... I think Markus should get a pic of you - in a Beatle!

does it have to be a Beatle ??

[The gent]

East Sussex is beautiful, and I have a friend just moved to Hastings... this was WHitstable, though.

Yeah i do really appreciate this region , even if in the beggining as a french/spanish I didn't really appreciate british seaside , but i do missing england.

[dkatz]

Wed through Fri of last week (sorry, not today...) I spent in Gulu doing more survey pretesting.

Fortunately this time I actually managed to get the survey formatted the night before leaving, so I didn't have to set up office in the bus. I did, however, have to get up, pack, get to the office to print a couple copies of the survey then get to the bus by 8am, after about 10 hours of sleep in 2 days (and I need my 8 hours).

I got on the Post bus (runs mail around the country, so fortunately runs on time) at 8am, read a bit about election drama (Museveni lookin' for a way to discredit Busigye... again, Otuno blaming Musevni of feeding Joseph Kony and the LRA money to keep them existing as a convenient political enemy...), then discovered that the back row of the bus was empty. Sacked the fuck out for a solid 3 hours. Pretty sure it saved my life.

Finally some dude smacked my leg to get up 'cause he wanted to sit down. Jerk.

Refreshed, I turned on some tunes and started reading The Reason for God by Timothy Keller, which a (very Christian) friend mailed to me here. Interesting contrast to the last book I read - The Family by Jeff Sharlett.

At a bus-stop, bought a baggie of peanuts for 500 UGX (~$0.25) from the window of the bus

Got in at around 2:00, met up with a colleague who's based in Gulu and an enumerator, briefed them on the survey and got cracking. The first couple times through the questions with a new enumerator is always a bit rough so it wasn't tooooo interesting. After ~5 hours of pretesting, called it a day and went to beast some (DAMN good) Ethiopian food. Unfortunately I'd forgotten my camera!

Day two. Up at 7.

Bought this shirt here - I have a big boner for linen.

Kampala is basically a gigantic thrift store. You know all those clothes you donate to Salvation Army and the like thinking you're doing good? Well this muzungu says thank you!

Seriously, though, it's an interesting situation, and an excellent example of the double-edged sword that is aid/development: the West ships a fuckton of clothes here for free, microentrepreneurs buy it up for dirt cheap and resell it for slightly-less-dirt cheap - business happens, money circulates, and people are happy. But at the same time, the local textile industry is driven into the ground because even for as cheap as labor and materials are here, they can't compete with free shit from the West.

Aaaaanyway. Off my soap-box, onto a boda-boda to a youth center

Before I saw this picture, I didn't think AIDS was so bad. Now, though...

Waiting for the next respondent

It was interesting to try to pick up language differences between Luganda (predominant in Kampala) and Luo (one of the Northern languages)

Blood drive goin' on over there. Funny how I won't be able to donate blood for (at least) a year when I get back, though, since I've been to a malaria-zone...

These socks make me happy.

Thanks for letting me steal them, Dad!

(and look at that nice African tan my Unlucky belt is getting)

Looked down at some point and realized I'm missing the washer of the rivet on the coin pocket of my Tellasons. Hm.

[dkatz]

Walking back into town after a solid 8 hours of pretesting when the sky opened up and released a rainy fury. Took shelter in an overhang and figured I might as well work on the survey...

(by the way, at this moment I'm flipping back and forth between writing this and modifying the survey... this beast dominates my life lately)

Debriefed until about 10:30pm, walked back to the hotel in the rain. Discovered that the place was locked down tight and the guard was passed OUT... using his gun as a pillow. Dude was out so hard that I actually had to physically shake him to wake him up. Fortunately he had my key. Aaaand back to sleep he went. Way to guard.

Walked into my room and discovered one of the more perplexing situations of my short life:

Why the fuck would you dress a bed... sideways?

Day 3. Up at 7 again. Bleary-eyed mofo up in here.

Those of you who are paying close attention will have noticed that this was the same shirt I wore on Day 1. I don't do well with early-morning packing.

I had this shirt made by a local tailor, of Congolese "kitenge" fabric. Rad!

Revised the survey for a couple hours at Cafe Larem - apparently onwed by some USAid folks

then printed and headed to the youth center for a couple more pretests

Post office

Got a couple more respondents in, then caught a bus back towards Kampala. Unfortunately this one was FULL. Opened a book, put in my headphones, and tried to keep my ass from falling asleep every 5 minutes as I was wedged between two new best friends.

One of whom decided to buy some chickens on the road.

Grabbed some snacks at a bus-stop. Grilled goat meat skewer and a grilled sweet potato for 1000 UGX ($~0.50)

Gulu is a strange place. It's been in the limelight for a while because it's the biggest town in the area of the North where Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army was for a long time kidnapping children to be child-soldiers and generally terrorizing the shit out of the place. Because of that, it's become jammed with NGOs of all varities, though the LRA has significantly diminished in size and threat over the past several years, and relocated to the DRC. There's definitely a higher density of bazungu (non-African folks) than in Kampala, but what's even stranger is that they're all around my age.

And the place is rife with more hints at the problems with the aid/NGO/development world. For instance, there's a significant amount of construction going on - mostly of hotels, and mostly for visiting-for-work bazungu (like yours truly). The problem is that as soon as the area is stable enough and the economy developed enough to support construction projects of this type, the NGOs will start pulling out... let's just call this the "NGO bubble" and move on.

Aaaanyway. Back to the big city.

I spent most of Saturday in meetings, but in between I managed to get myself a haircut! I call it the Bi-Directional Fade: fade up into head-hair and fade down into beard. Hah!

Paging Vinneus- opinions?? How'd my man Ricky do?

I'll try to get a better picture soon.

And no pictures of today, but worked the first half of the day, then played some (AMERICAN) football with some other bazungu, made a fatty smoothie with a homey, aaaaaand back to the survey. Hoping to head East for a few days next week for some more pretesting! Gotta get this mothafucka done by the end of the week...

[beatle]

dkatz - what exactly do you do ?

[almostnice]

great post,dkatz,

always waiting for your updates with great anticipation!