Ghost Ship

This is just bizarre. This unflagged, unnamed ship drifted at the end of April into the waters off the easternmost point of Barbados. A local fisherman alerted authorities and they found 11 bodies. The men, it emerges, were the remainder of some 50 Senegalese who had boarded the vessel in the Cape Verde islands, to get smuggled into Spain.

The Guardian has a story out about it today, but there's good coverage in the Barbados Nation as well.

Floating Grave

This retired sea captain is an interesting guy.

They found a note on one of them and then the families started calling.

Here's the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, dunno why this made me think of it.

Desmond Dekker 1941-2006

I came to consciuosness in Kingsotn, Jamaica, at the age of three and what a strange thing that was! I won’t go through all the odd bits of memory but I will mention one: I remember that the two women domestic helpers used to amuse themselves by getting me and my brother to dance for them. The song they liked us to dance to was “Jamaica Ska” by Desmond Dekker. I remember only two other songs from our time in that house: “Tears on My Pillow” and “My Boy Lollipop.”

My parents bought a house when I was about five, up in Red Hills. I have memories of songs that are totally bound up with life in that house. If I think of the songs I think of the house and vice versa. The songs were “Sammy Dead” and “Shine Eye Gal.” A year or so later another song somehow defined the atmospehere of life, a song called “Carry Go Bring Come.”

My brother and I liked to sing “Sammy Dead.” Just thinking of the words somehow makes me remember glimpses of the things that I saw for the first time, they are the soundtrack of a mythic, magical Jamaica.

“Sammy Dead” and “Carry Go Bring Come,” “I’m in a Dancing Mood,” and so many others were songs of the great Desmond Dekker.

Now that I have this boring job I get through the time and stay awake by listening to Caribbean radio on the Net. I listen to a Jamaican talk show hosted by a guy named Wilmot “Mutty” Perkins who has had the show for years. Now that it’s on the Internet Jamaicans call in from all over. The last time I was listening I heard an older Jamaican man call from Vancouver. The subject of the conversation was the Jamaican environment which is being destroyed at an alarming rate. This caller, with the old drawly leisurely upper class Jamaican accent, talked of missing home. “It was sweet there, you know.”

It was. And if you want to hear how sweet it was you listen to Desmond Dekker. Dekker was so resourceful in making use of the many threads that make up Jamaican English, his songs should really be considered historical documents. The poetry of Jamaica’s language lives in his songs in a way that it doesn’t live anywhere else.

“Sammy Dead,” like a lot of his songs, is a country song.

Sammy plant piece of corn dung a gully
And it bear till it kill poor Sammy.
Sammy dead, Sammy dead, Sammy dead-oh.

A no tief Sammy tief mek dem kill him
But a grudgeful, im too grudgeful mek dem kill him.”

In “Carry Go Bring Come” which swept the country, we heard the voice of righteous reggae for the first time. “Carry Go Bring Come” is a sort of noun phrase describing a scandalmonger and troublemaker.

This carry go bring come, my dear, bring misery;
This carry go bring come my dear, bring misery.
You are going from home to home making disturbances
Time you stopped fooling yourself, you old Jezebel.

The meek shall inherit the earth, you old Jezebel
You need no light to see you’re making disturbances.
It’s better to build a home in Mount Zion high
Instead of heaping oppression upon an innocent man.

Time will tell on you, you old Jezebel
How long shall the wicked reign over my people?

There is no other way to account for some songs except pure delight in the poetry and comedy of Jamaican speech, as in “Mother Pepper.”

Haul up you mouth and give me pass, Mother Pepper.
Stand and look at your mouth, it big as the Gulf of Mexico.
And if some one say red, see ya gal,
you deh right deh.
Like when dem say “fire under moos-moos tale and him think of cold breeze”
....

Gal what make you so hot
And your foot dry like fe rat bat
You hot like fire breaking a dish
And your neck favor cutlass fish...

I honestly can’t tell you what some of these things mean: that is, “your neck favor cutlass fish” means your neck looks like a cutlass fish, but what that looks like I don’t know. The accusation that a woman’s legs (“foot” here is the plural of legs) are dry and “ashy” or “scaly” is common enough, but who ever thought of comparing it to the legs of a rat bat? (A “bat” is a moth, and a “rat bat” is a bat, by the way.) The bit about the “moos-moos” tail is clearly an old proverb, but what type of animal a moos-moos is I do not know. But a proverb like that can go back all the way into slavery days. You might think that this is Dekker’s idiosyncratic poetry, but the thing is that growing up in Jamaica I heard people talk this way. At the height of a bout of invective the speaker would just take off, and these strange images would come in. A helper we had named Adina, when I was about 13, was always producing stuff like this, usually when she was abusing the gardner, a man of the most angelic patience.

“Hippopotamus” is in that same vein.

You old hypocrite
You old hippopattymus
You no fe gwaan so
You no fe galang so
You too croomoogin, wicked and bad-minded, conniving

His songs chronicled the rise of the “Rude Boy” culture in Kingston, its sense of style, for instance, how it ate up movies for their style, the fascination in the shanty towns with 007, with Ocean’s 11, the strange enduring life that these fictional characters (even Fu Manchu!) took on in the imaginationof the Rude Boys. It was the dawn of a whole culture that is still with us, and he was there, first, original. He sang about the plight of the poor first, he sang in patois first, he was the first reggae performer to go international, with "Israelites."

He didn’t just use vernacular, he used the language of the King James Bible that was and is, for many Jamaican people, the idiom of high moral speech.

“Honor your mother and your father that your days may be long in the land,” he sang.

In “Israelites,” he isn’t just quoting the grand style, he’s writing it, mixing it with patois in the way that the two idioms are mixed, and he is already drawing on the new sound that Rastafarianism had brought to reggae.

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed
Oh, the Israelites....

Shut dem a tear up trousers a go,.
I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde...

The Rasta influence on his style is also present in “Ah It Mek,” an irresistible song that only Dekker could have written, with almost perfectly incomprehensible lyrics. I listen to them, and I catch bits, but haven’t the remotest idea of what they are all supposed to fit together into. (“Ah It Mek” means “That’s the reason”)

People loved Dekker’s music, because it was truthful and funny and righteous. It seemed that everyone was singing those songs. They were so intimate, so familiar, so much a part of the actual life we saw and lived. I think that it was his very Jamaicanness that made him seem dated after Bob Marley became popular. The same Rude Boys, who were setting fashion in so many ways, outgrew his basically homegrown style, it's country roots. The Rude Boys were busy getting ruder. But Dekker was there first, and he was everybody’s musician. I sent my mother a CD of some of his music and, for all that she is a snob, she went all sappy remembering those sweet days when everybody -- little boys on the street, civil servants, maids, high court judges --danced to these songs. I do not remember anybody being against Desmond Dekker. I remember people in my own family being against Bob Marley: one of my uncles, who was an officer in the Jamaica Defense Force, took “I Shot the Sheriff” personally. For a lot of Jamaica's middle and upper classes, it was comfortable to simply regard people like Peter Tosh and Bob Marley as not really existing. But Desmond Dekker you could love, even though he was singing about the same things.

To my mind Dekker was a much more inventive songwriter than Bob Marley, he got more of the facets of Jamaican life, more variety, more voices into his music. And there was a genuine sweetness and optimism. You knew it was getting bad in Jamaica when the film The Harder They Come, opens with Dekkers “You Can Get It If You Really Want” (written by Jimmy Cliff, sung by Dekker) -- the irony, as the movie went on relentlessly to illustrate, was that you couldn’t. That irony was already everywhere, Desmond Dekker had already moved to England, and sweetness in Jamaican life would be a lot more scarce.

Dreaming of Groundhogs

Holey, Holey, Holey

"Journalism is a priestly vocation," said a teacher of journalism from a certain prestigious Graduate School of Journalism with which I have some acquaintance, let's call Combluia shall we?.

This is something to ponder. Please excuse me for a while, I must go and ponder.

[Several minutes pass. Sound of flushing.]

Well. I've pondered.

1) If journalism is a priestly vocation then that means a certain section of New York's Upper West Side must be Vatican City. Seems reasonable enough.

2) The priests of this particular church like to recall, with fond irony, their wild days in the anti-Vietnam war era, when they were sowing their journalistic wild oats with all sorts of pranks, and learning their craft. They thereby also establish their liberal street cred, and, as a bonus, establish the principle that anybody who criticizes them from a "further left" position (it's a crude label but work with me) is -- unlike the mature priest at the podium -- an irresponsible deluded loon who hasn't quite grown up.

3) The priest of journalism learned from learning his craft to be serious -- or at any rate, to take himself seriously. The priest will tell the story of the old geezer who taught him his craft. Safely dead and unable to sue for slander.

4) Objectivity, the doctrinal core of all we do, is hwat makes U.S. journalism so every special. The best best bestest in the world in fact. American journalists thought of it first. No one had ever had that idea before. It is an idea unique to U.S. journalism -- it is the one sacred special mystery! The Europeans, they do not understand this objectivity, this subtle thing, this spiritual discipline. It demands sacrifice.

5) At this point the priest will illustrate the high tariff that objectivity exacts from the souls of its followers.The journalist is a Promethean, tragic figure, who fetches back the objective news at the risk sometimes of having his own guts ripped out. (O! Tragic hero journalist!) To illustrate this point the priest of the church of journalism will tell a story or two. At least one of them, strike me blind if I lie, will feature 1) a starving African orphan or 2) the parent of three children who died in a fire. What? You are against orphans? I might have guessed.

6) Anybody who questions either 1) the idea of objectivity or 2) the execution of it by the priesthood is a Rube. there are rubes of the Right, and there are the shrill and uncivil Rubes of the Left, who act like rejected lovers. "I never said I was interested in a committed relationship! They're crazy!" Which, coming from a friendly toothless old ex-radical is a great comfort.
And futhermore, he explains, if we let these Rubes take have their way with us, we'll end up like Europe (Just the newspaper business, not to worry -- he's not threatening us with single-payer healthcare or the metric system). This rabble of Phillistine hecklers, who cannot enter upon what it is to objectively know in the priestly way, will leave us as backward, news-wise, as the English with their BBC or the Germans with their Reuters. Benighted.
The priest of journalism draws himself up really tall and says, "Did you know that the New York Times has a Corrections page?" Yes. If the crime victim's wife's name is misspelled, or the city councilman's dinner was placed at the wrong restaurant, or the name of the TV actor's high school is incorrect, the Times will rush to correct the error. Objectivity barely acknowledges any other kind of error. That requires a higher order of reasoning only permitted to the choicest few, the holiest.

7) But, winding down, the journalistic priest is optimistic about the future, notwithstanding his shrill, uncivil. categorically irrelevant critics. He's optimistic because all these fresh new students keep showing up. New people, not like those old critical people. And -- here he must beg your indulgence -- his own kid is showing signs of journalistic talent and enterprise. Here you may expect a long anecdote about the kid's latest project. The boy will go far. I dunno, I feel sure of it.

You know, this reminds me of something I saw in the minutes of the Santa Rosa City Council. A man, one of the public comment regulars, got up and told the council that the reason he was not making as much sense as he usually did was that his brain had fallen out through a hole in the back of his head.
Obviously, this man's brain had not fallen out of the back of his head.
If it had, he would have sounded like a priest of journalism.

Would You Like Fries With That?

I'm sorry but you all will have to listen to me whine about this from time to time. You can't be everywhere and do everything, of course, but I would like to be in St. Kitts right now for one reason: there is a story there that is just calling out to me. It is not calling out to the best part of my character. But still it is calling. Just as I now have the dogbloggy "Red Sofa Series" and the Mysterious West, so you will have to submit from time to time to the "I Wish I Was Writing News In the Caribbean" series.

I’m getting to this story a bit late, as it is now going on a month old, but the repercussions will be felt for a while.

Here’s yer journalistic lede:

Thousands of digital photographs featuring local men and women in a variety of sexual activities on the tables of the Why Not sandwich shop, are now circulating around the Federation since their discovery by the landlord of the property where the bar was located. The proprietor of Why Not, Lorenzo Green, was murdered along with his wife last December.

Dr. Charles Warner, Shadow Minister of Health and Social Security (i.e., the one who did not win a seat in the last election) wrote a commentary in the opposition People’s Action Movement (PAM) newspaper. I cite this commentary, plus, later on, a couple of women who were in them, and even the Prime Minister’s press secretary chimes in, mainly to make it clear that there is no dispute about the existence of these photographs. The commentary sounds really loopy but it is one of the more sensible statements I have read on this:

It is good to know that there are people in the Federation who are interested in more than the display of reproductive organs and other aspects of the human anatomy.  For all those who dwell in the kingdom of misunderstanding, what people do in private is really their own business.  However, when those activities can affect the general and unsuspecting public it is clearly a very different issue.
 
Establishments that want to be engaged in these activities must not be in anyway mixing juices.  It is one thing to have a pinocolada but the customer must be truly afforded the chance to have it virgin or non-virgin.  The customer must also be sure that the hands mixing his drinks are not performing gynecological mixing or proctologic examinations, glove free [I’ll just mention here that I, myself, stopped ordering sandwiches there when I saw the boy behind the counter picking his nose -- little imagining that the place was even more orificial than that! -k].
 
If the Ministry of Health ever wanted proof of what people are saying goes on in some bars and establishments in this country, they have all the proof required.  The Ministry of Health must now make sure that areas for dancing and exhibitionism are kept away from those designed for dining.  There are clearly other potential problems apart from rodents.  Patrons must not be getting hemoglobin when they expect Heinz or Grace tomato ketchup.

What I like about the Candidate for West Bassterre’s prose is that it isn’t mealy-mouthed. It is beyond the merely explicit: he keeps dipping that broad brush of his into bodily fluids.

Nevertheless, he has some observations with which no right-thinking person can disagree:

Once again, especially for those of the kingdom of misunderstanding, this is not a call for the Ministry of legal affairs to do anything because everybody knows that the Ministry will not do anything.  It cannot turn a blind eye to its friends and supporters while penalizing others.  Both the proprietor and participants of such establishments should be dealt with legally.  The participants are knowingly engaging in acts that could be detriment to public health.  Genetalia and hamburgers are not to be on the same table.  Protological examinations should not be done on dining tables and when they are done gloved hands are employed.

He alludes to the prevailing belief in the country that women travel about the region -- to St. Kitts and Nevis in this instance, to engage in prostitution. Nevis, it is widely believed, has a lot of Dominican prostitutes (but no Nevisian ones). St. Kitts has Dominican women, believed to be prostitutes, and Guyanese ones as well. There was a brief blip of a scandal in St. Kitts when I was there, involving a hotel next to a gas station -- a hotel where no tourists or anyone, to my knowledge, ever stayed and where the word was several Guyanese prostitutes, specially imported, were staying for the pleasure of people connected to government. The owner wouldn’t talk to me, and a lot of dust was thrown in my face on that one, I never did get to the bottom of it.
 

When these activities are intermingled especially in the context of HIV and related diseases the consumers health is clearly in jeopardy.  Diseases such as hepatitis and typhoid can all be spread through this callous and negligent behaviour.  Many people know that women from other Caribbean countries came here for certain activities.  Some of these places are known for certain endemics diseases, e.g., malaria.  In the quest to satisfy the groin and the eyes there might be the creation of the opening for problems to be avoided.

Sex on restaurant tables? Girls gone wild? It’s those disease-ridden foreign women (read: Dominicans and Guyanese), bringing their malaria with them. (Malaria, he knows perfectly well, is not a sexually transmitted disease; it is a FTD -- that is, a Foreigner Transmitted Disease.) But of course the women in the pictures were not all foreigners.

Some commentators to the SKN List don’t blame foreign women, but foreign culture:

The Foreign Media is At Fault. The government needs to censor. All this Thuggism In Foreign Culture That They Think Is Soo Cool.. Look at the mentality of these young women and men today. Education is what is needed also...

...

OH ME LORD! NOW I CANT SHOW OFF MY VIRGIN COUNTRY ANYMORE HERE IN NY/NJ  LIKE I USED TO!  AMERICANISM IS ALL OVER THE CARIBBEAN NOW IF EVEN SIMPLE DEAD STKITTS IN DIS TOO, LORD ALMIGHTY!!!  RS

The women in the photos were Kittitian women, some of whom were later interviewed on the radio and in at least one local paper. This is a report from a SKN lister of one interview with two women who were in the photos. What strikes me is not that they have so much foreign culture as that they have so little! They really don’t understand much about what they were experiencing or doing, and yet they clearly think themselves quite the sophisticates. The sad thing is that the people on this list, the yakking classes. will believe that it is overexposure to foreign culture and not underexposure to any culture that causes the problem. I’m glad these women aren’t ashamed, but I’d like them to have had a clue about what they were doing. Engagements have been broken off, and at least one woman has been fired from a respectable job as a result of the photos. Not one man will lose his job over this, I am sure.

The horrible thing is that this is the two-facedness of Caribbean culture, one of the things that really hurts the societies there: the denial of the reality of what people actually do. This denial is all to the advantage of the men. A man can talk about his "virgin country" where in the afternoons businessmen troll past the high school to pick up girls, where I met a women who ducked a court appearance with the man who molested her 12-year-old daughter because he gave her a year's free rent and the police inspector covering the case said it was something that occurred commonly, where one of my reporters at the paper where I worked started modeling lingerie at a bar on Friday nights and then was lap dancing a few weeks later - dumber than a turnip that one was. And where all of this sort of thing was regarded by the girls involved as their best chance for getting ahead. This was the traditional way. The "modeling" was a new thing. My reporter skipped work to go on "modeling" gigs, I don't ever remember her skipping a modeling gig to go to court, because I went to court when she wasn't there. (I really wanted to get rid of her, not because of the modeling, but because she was so goddam stupid -- but for reasons beyond my control I couldn't.)

....heard two of the girls tonight on Sugar City Roc with Val Thomas, and they weren't ashamed.  One goes by the name of "Superstar", and another just answered to being called #2.  Superstar, said that she was influenced by an American television show.  She said that she awakes in the night just to watch a show called, "Girls gone Wild".  She also said that in America women does these things all the time and they are still celebrities.

She said that she was on Fort  street, when some girl came up to her and asked if she wanted to have some fun, because it was her party.  She said she went, and she knew exactly what she was doing, but others were there doing much worse than her.  When the host asked her if she wanted to take calls, her response was, "Bring on the Paparazzi".  Want to bet she will do it again and probably done this sort of thing before?

While #2 said that she knows that her body looks good and she wanted to see what it looked like, she took the pictures but never went back to get them. A who she trying to fool? [Kittitian syntax - k] She also said that she knows that her body is the temple of the Lord, so I guess he approved.   It sounded like she was the one who worked at National Bank and got fired.  She said that her mother was embarrassed, but know what?  she seems as if she will do it again.

Here's the kicker, the host Val Thomas, said he knows of it happening in many places in the Federation.  I have this suspicion that the BET Soundstage on Fort Street, is doing similar things, probably have dancers etc.  Three floors of entertainment?

One woman claimed in an interview with one of the local papers that she had been given the date rape drug and doesn’t remember anything.

The BET Soundstage is a new club that opened up on Fort Street since I was there. The bar/sandwich shop where these photos were taken is the Why Not Bar, across the street,l now closed since its owner, Lorenzo Green, and his wife were murdered at their home in St. Kitts last December.

Fort Street is Basseterre's very short main drag, just about four short short small-island city blocks. In other words, it is less than half a mile long. Cayon Street, which crosses Basseterre from East to West, is the top end of it, and the bottom end of it is the Bay Road, just below the splendid building that houses the Historical Society, and fronting the sea. The Circus is a circle with one of those old Victorian-colonial clocks in the center of it. On jouvert morning all the bands will come to the Circus at daybreak and then take several tours around town, always passing back through the Circus. The “nice” part of Fort Street, the part for the cruise ship tourists and the well-to-do, is the lower part. The upper half, away from the water, is more local. Still nicer than most of Basseterre but definitely more local. Green’s Why Not bar and sandwich shop was right at this boundary between the upper and lower halves of Fort Street.

Green had opened this bar before Frigate Bay became fashionable, and for a long time (before I went to St. Kitts) it was the night spot. But by the time I was there it was no longer the place to start an evening, though you might end an evening there if you just didn't want to go to bed -- it was one of the last places to close. You would start an evening in Frigate Bay or at Stonewalls, which totally outclassed Why Not? It had become a rather dreary place, somehow it is associated in my mind with something on TV that nobody was watching except one drunk at the bar who was arguing with Green about it. At the back of the bar, I remember, Green kept a laptop computer that was always on. It seemed really incongruous there, and, I learned, it had a shady history all of its own.

The bar was connected by a little passage to the sandwich shop, which was only open during the day.

In December Green and his wife were murdered, there was a spate of murders and shootings in St. Kitts, and people were very shocked. Because he was a real somebody there, a person whom everybody knew, a grown man and not one of these little gangster boys. Someone shot him to death and stabbed and shot his wife. He died on the spot, his wife died in emergency.

OK so now travel through time to mid April. It broke about April 14. The landlord was cleaning out the property and came across all these DVDs, which then began to circulate around the island. Kind of like "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg."

One lister saw evil in the fact that several ministers of government went to Green’s funeral, long before the photos surfaced:

Wendy, there's a reggae song that  contains the following lyrics: "The evil that men do live after them". He also took pictures of fully clad unsuspecting patrons(men)with women lap dancing on them. Come to think of it, that fella was never too far away from that video camera of his.

Wendy, you should have seen all the Labour Ministers at the burial-Condor, Douglas, Astaphan and a couple of the others.
St.Kitts and Nevis)really 'gone een' under New Labour ghul*. Right across from the "Bar of Horrors" is the BET Club, another den of depravity opened under this  New Labour Administration. 

Most Kittitians expected these depravities would flourish under a PAM Government, but New Labour has turned out to be far worse than PAM. The fish always start to stink from the head. Everything Bradshaw fought for is going down the drain real fast. The Great One is rolling in his grave.

*”ghul” is Kittitian patois for “girl”

One Nevisian who lives in Washington and is a great fan of the current (U.S.) administration has not yet found his legs as a shill for All Things Right Wing and Loony, so he keeps himself busy with Nevisian affairs. He reported to the list “for the record” that no ministers of government or “high-ups” were in any of the images, leaving it to be inferred that he had had a good look through the photos. He is quite sure they would never engage in any of this sort of thing because ministers of government go by the title of HONORABLE and that is “not a title they just hand in to anybody who walks in off the street.”

I am sure there is no one from the government in those pictures, even though one member of this government has been immortalized in a calypso for the night when he was caught jumping out the window of a house where his wife definitely did not reside. The calypso accuses half the men in the country of paying women for sex. But only very dim people, in this country, would ever let themselves be caught in photographs such as these. Dim people, I should say, and women in need of a little extra cash, women who do not understand their lack of political power. What will be clear is that whatever cruelties and humiliations result from the discovery and circulation of these images, the women will have the worst of it. And the worst of that is that it will not occur to most of the women to question the state of affairs -- the political tribalism and sexism, for instance -- that ensures this result. Not a word about that aspect of this in the whole 150-plus messages on this thread.

What is not clear is when these photos were supposed to have been taken. I haven’t seen any of them. The Prime Minister’s press secretary, out in the country one day, visited two households of family or friends and found everybody gathered round the computer looking at the pictures.

One local paper, Sun St. Kitts, also reported that some of the women are bringing a lawsuit, but it's not clear to me who they could possibly sue, as the person who shot and owned the images is dead and it's not like he got a bunch of money without giving them a cut.

Not all the comments were silly: one woman wrote in quite sensibly that the participants, if they were all adults, were free to do what they liked by mutual consent. For this she got called all sorts of names, and a long, tedious flame war ensued in which she managed to hold her own so well that her main attacker just yesterday left the list claiming to be “too addicted” to it and in need of a break.

My favorite comment on all this leaves us where we began.

this thing is so low, if one can say anything about it. You could pick up a yeast infection by just having a sandwich at "why not."

Well, why not?

With all these people garpin out their backsides all over the tables patrons used to grub at that establishment, it only leaves one to wonder, now that the pictures are proof positive, if anybody ever found foreign objects like hair in their food. What reason the Proprietors might have given to the complainant, if at all this there was such an occurance?

Boy, ah 'fraid dem... Just when you thought things couldn't get any lower than snake sh**t, this one takes the cake.

Wha dis now, the new no name brand, "yeast encrusted" Dental floss to explain the hair in you food? They probably served up some "land crabs" over there too, for all I would add to this. Any narsieness for de money, eh?

"Why not," watch wey you put you snout..

I have never heard the word “garpin’” before. I don’t know what it means. But I like it.

I have not corrected anybody's spelling except my own. My own mostly.

Gat Dammit

I was preparing a long elaborate linky post about a really bizarre new story out of St. Kitts and my browser crashed mid-post. Now it's midnight and I'm damned if I'll start it again. And you don't want to know how long it has taken me to organize myself to even start on this. Honestly. i can only blame myself. There are lessons to be learned from this experience. I should have learned them already I know I know I know.