Intro
Aiight as I promised Cham, I dedicate this Corper post about getting kicked out of Camp to her. Oh and I sincerely apologize for the name, it is one of those jokes that seems funny only when you think about it.

Nightus Interruptus (Day 19)
One of the things Nigerian Universities are known for is the activities of its cults. The NYSC is aware of this and thus bans all cult activities when in camp. A few members of a couple of cults disregarded this and fortunately or unfortunately depending on your view were shown that in some things that the lagos camp, the most permissive camp, was as strict as the rest. These young men had the unfortunate distinction to be the first people to be decamped that I had heard about. The event marred what had been a fun day. The endurance trek started at seven instead of five, this is naij after all and it was a fun three hours of catching trips and cracking jokes after which there was an impromptu party on the parade ground. More allowi meant mammy was rocking all day and apart from the cultist interlude was generally fun. That interlude pushed people up to the football field where the bonfire night was to take place. This was interrupted at 12:30 by one of the nastiest thunderstorms we've experienced since camp started. I went up to the hostels to wait out the damn thing and as it finally ended at three there was no point and thus what startef out as one of the more fun days at camp petered out to a disappointing nothing.

Unnecessary Qualification
First thing is that apparently all the decamp thing with the cultistists was for show as someone said that in the end they let them register at the Secretariat. The endurance trek wasn't really one as we were only out for three hours. My cousin in Kano went for the whole day pretty much. The man'o'war guys kept chasing corpers out of the random small stores on the way. The less said about the bonfire night part the better. Anyway I got some gist for y'all tomorrow or wednesday bout my recent encounters with okadas. Laters.

Today has been kinda wierd, I have no deadlineable (yeah it's not a word, so what) work to do, but I have some stuff that will be due in a couple of weeks. If I were feeling hyper productive I would have started on it, but I am already kind of mad that INEC took away my five day weekend and so I am against productivity in general today. None of the Nigerian bloggers on my reader have updated (slackers), and so I did the whole sports / gen news / finance thing all day. Anyway flaky dropped her first comment on my blog, which normally would have gotten a generic, though insightful (shameless plug for me), thank you reply on my comment page, but today I rocked on over to her site. I even left a comment. Funny thing was that the comment page was still open a while later, and I clicked on the post page by accident. It was kinda bizzare, cos 36's comment was exactly the same as mine with practically the same wording. It's wierd cus this is not the normal "You are great" identical comment that we tend to do on blogs, but some random job advice stuff. I wonder if it was concious on her part. I suppose I could go to her blog and ask her but where is the fun in that?

To end this post I have decided to look for trouble. I want to know what people think about the question that proved to me that premarital sex is not the same as fornication. "If a girl is raped before she is married did she commit the sin of fornication?"

So the elections have com and gone, except for Thursday where certain states will probably have the day off to vote in certain elections. As Lagos is one of those states, and Friday is my general community development (part of NYSC) my weekend will begin tomorrow.

Well this post is not to gloat about the necessary days, though a co-worker has suggested that we may need another day off before Thursday to reflect on our choices for these serious elections for the Congress.

So this post (as a not insignificant number of my posts are) is kinda inspired by mona. So some random unproductive day a couple of weeks ago I was talking to mona on msn. It was a long arse conversation and meandered about quite a bit. Anyway we came to the subject of her toasters (her word not mine) and she was complaining about this guy she gave her number to that calls her four times practically every night .

This scenario is a classic example of when good subliminals go bad and it is a beauty. It has all the hallmarks. 1. A number given innocently in a club. 2. The first phone call. 3. The ignored phone calls. 4. The inadvertently picked call (usually private number). 5. The bullshit excuse. (Repeat from 3 ad infinitum).

Most girls I know get annoyed when guys don’t get the hint. They think it forces them to either chest it hoping he’ll get the hint eventually, or be bitches and spell it out (why this makes them bitches I don't know). See I on the other hand love it when my friends (and perversely girls I’m with) complain about it. Cos u see, girls have got us guys pretty well trained when it comes to deciphering their subliminals and sometimes u resent having to become a mind reader. I mean seeing a guy that comes along and needs to be hit over with a brick for anything to sink in sends a warm glow through me. Not just cos it makes girls appreciate us guys who actually bother to try not to bug girls who are not into us, but also because it is pretty damn funny to watch too. Aiight I’m done.

PS. See I was done when my reader (just got it, and am loving the thing) informed me that Cham just updated before I posted this. I skimmed, and guess who just suffered from a case of "when good subliminals go bad." I think the lady doth protest too much. Laters

Intro
Aiight so Corper is back with a bang. It's pretty cool that the return to form (consistency wise anyway) of this blogging exercise starts with one of the best entries I ever wrote in the Sunday Corper series. Yes I know how modest of me. Anyway I don't want to spoil it, and so all I will say is enjoy!

Gunshots, Goals & Allowi (Day 18)
So three unrelated things happened today but each on its own was important. The first is that my team lost the football finals on penalties. As much as it pains me to say it, it was probably a deserved result. The second involved the robbery of the Mobil two minutes up the road by guys with automatic weapons. The robbery took place just after the game. With the first gunshots while some people were still trying to figure out if it was a banger or gunshot, others were laid flat on the ground. Once the gunshots became more pronounced we all bailed from the football field to the hostels. I'm sure a few relationships were damaged by the mad dash. Well a man was also caught jumping into the compound but it turned out he was running from the robbery and wasn't a part of it. The third thing concerns the mammy market. If one had gone round mammy at the start of every week, one would have been able to chart the decline of attendance as money ran low and other things like eating became more important. Not so yesterday. Yesterday the first thousand or so people got their allowi, or allowance, and mammy bore the full force of that event. For the first time the chicken and chips place ran out, and even the regular canteens did so as well. It took me like five or six stops at different places to find food for the girl I was with. Still as tomorrow is the endurance trek things ended sharply at 9:45 and we were bustled off to bed. I expect more of the same tomorrow as more people are freed from the shackles of camp poverty.

Unnecessary Qualification
The one thing I realized I did not mention, was that we initially thought that the armed robbers knew that the allowi had been delivered and they were coming to steal it. Think about it N8,500 for 3000+ corpers is a lot of money, bout N25 mil. RIP to the two people who died at the Mr. Biggs in the Mobil. On a happier note, mammy went mad that night. When I say there was no food in mammy it is not an exaggeration or a figure of speech. I'm sure tons of people blew their eight-five before they left camp. Oh and the most annoying thing about reproducing what you have written before is that u keep wanting to edit. Well I said I wouldn't edit, but there was a shell that almost made me break my rule. If u r really bored, u can look for it. Laters.

On Saturday 14 2007, I exercised one of the more important civic duties for the first time in my life; I voted in a general election. I was obviously too young to vote in the June 12 election (though by some pictures I’ve seen from last Saturday maybe not), my passport was not the right color to vote in any of the six major elections that have taken place in the two countries I live in during my stay abroad. I still remember the look of horror that turned to a look of indifference when I told my civic minded colleagues that I was not voting. Granted they clearly did not know me, cos they should have realized that someone with an accent like mine had no business voting anyway.

Anyway so I woke up on Saturday morning around 8am and called to find out if those INEC officials had set up the polling booth in the place where I registered. As you have heard from all the coverage, INEC was rarely available at 8am anywhere. Unlike some people in some parts of the country I did not feel the need to burn things (maybe the flaw was in me), rather I waited until around 11 when INEC did show up (well to be honest, I waited at home until someone called me to tell me they had arrived).

The journey down Mobolaji Bank Anthony Way was a trip into Seven Days Later, when the guy wakes up and wanders around the empty London streets. I think I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the people clustered around one of the bus stops that served as a polling booth, it was that disorienting. As I neared GRA, I saw another polling booth, this one deserted with a foreign (read white) observer talking with an INEC official. When I get to my polling booth, in front of a hospital offering dialysis services, there were five people there. One of whom got reprimanded by a police officer acting as an enforcer for telling her friend not to place her thumb print in more than one space. The funny thing was that as I got my left thumb and index finger liberally doused with the indelible ink that would provide evidence of my civic responsibility met (“vote early and often” not being the slogan of this particular election) I realized that not only had I not decided who I was going to vote for. I did not even know who was running in the state assembly elections.

The “Obanikoro Family Values” picture non-withstanding the only advantage I could see of voting for him was that Lagos would benefit from closer ties with the Federal Government. This advantage became a negative when Obasanjo came to Lagos and basically threatened Lagos if we did not vote PDP. I’m sorry that doesn’t work for me.

I heard all the “don’t waste your votes” arguments that people were spouting with regards to Fashola and Agbaje, and dismissed them as unnecessarily elitist. It didn’t hold water when the Republicans were saying it with regards to Perot in’92, and when the Democrats were saying it about Nader in ’00. The fact that most of the Fashola stuff I was hearing was “the other main guy is worse” basically put me off voting for him despite the fact that I thought he was going to win.

Yes I voted for Jimi Agbaje, even though I knew he was going to lose. I saw the debates and was not really impressed with him, but I also heard him on the radio and I read his campaign book about his ideas for Lagos (unlike Fashola and Obanikoro, his was a book as opposed to a pamphlet). I decided that someone who was willing to run only on the strength of his ideas deserved to have a good showing in the race. Some people will call it elitist, but I decided that it was worth my vote. Which also meant that I also voted for his party in the state house election, it turned out to be a woman named Folake Phillips. Still don’t know anything about her. Anyway Agbaje came a respectable third, in Lagos which has continued to be mainly unscathed by the post election wahala that is plaguing some other states in Nigeria.

Lagos started coming to life at about 6:30pm, with some people testing the waters as early as 4pm. Lagos was subdued, which as anyone who knows Lagos will tell you, it very rare. Still people were going stir-crazy at home judging by the fact that Londoners was packed at around 7, and was even fuller three hours later when I was ready to bounce. I suppose not surprisingly I was the only one of the people I rolled with that even registered not to talk of voted. I am really getting tired of the whole they will steal our votes nonsense. I’m sorry the winner of Lagos got 800,000 votes. LAGOS! The megacity of over 10 million people was won with 800,000 votes.

On a final note, I actually think that the whole mass attempt to disenfranchise is a good thing rather than a bad thing. Granted it is twisty but look at it this way, if they could do the whole old ballot stuffing as usual thing they wouldn’t care about who voted. However they are not able to, (at least not as easily) and so they are having to deprive voters of their rights in order to influence results. In contrast to the 2003 elections (from what I have heard and read); progress. Anyway, even for me this is a long post, and so I’m done.

Intro
Aiight Corper is back after a little break. It was going to just be about the Variety Night competition but life happened and other stuff got in the way. Anyway it's pretty entertaining, though the title seems more clever when I thought about it than it does now.

A Variety of Accidents (Day 17)
One of the things about camp is that though the guys and girls stay in the same hostel their quarters are segregated. The main entrance to the female hostel was until today manned by two police women. One was dismissed for trying to steal a corper's handset and the other for practically throwing a corper down the stairs and sending her into convulsions. It was this second incident that occured today and almost led to a riot. After the camp commandant failed to calm the crowd, it fell to the state coordinator to do so. The later part of the night from 12 to 7 in the morning was taken by the variety night. What it is is a night of competitions mainly for Mr. Macho and Ms. NYSC interspersed with performances. Like most things in this camp it was sponsored by Guinness. It was fun, I spent most of my time at the beer crates that G gave to my platoon and hitting on the Ms. NYSC contestants in my platoon. For some reason my platoon seemed to have more crates than most. Also the competition was definitely wierd or at least the question phase was. Asking "what does OAU stand for" and "who was the vp in the second civilian regime" in the same round. The girl who actually won was hot but also was one who needed a lot of makeup to prove that this was so. The Mr. Macho had probably the least muscular body of the contestants but he was far and away the most charismatic one. He also got the meaning of OPEC wrong. Oh well, one can't have everything.

Unnecessary Qualification
We heard a little later in the week that the girl turned out to be fine. Just after that according to some of the girls, the two female officers got their jobs back. I actually left out the funniest thing about the night, there were two girls left after they announced the first runner up and so there was a lot of jubliating that was premature. Aiight I'm done. I'll put up my now stale election stuff sometime during the week.

Aiight so I just thought I'd let you know that I'm officially a blog celebrity. It's not just something I decided by my 6 0r 7 comments per post. So I'm not claiming anything that wasn't given to me. I am now a blog celebrity because I got my first hate induced anonymous comment. I feel like Sally Field when she won that oscar

You love me, You really love me.

So if you feel that I am now aloof, and too cool for the world, it is because I am a celebrity and that is how I am expected to act. Responding to other people's comments is now beneath me, and blog stalking is now a thing of the past. It is now all about ME.

Now for those of you who will claim that I am making this up, well I am going to do you a favor. I am going to print the comment below and give you the link to the post.

However now that I'm a celebrity, I am thinking that I am a D-List celebrity and I want to be an
A-List celebrity like a few of the other bloggers (celebrity is so hard work!). So please help me out here, I think I need at least twenty anonymous rants a week. I want to be able to make people faint by commenting on their blog. I think I've earned it.

PS. The comment courtesy of Anonymous 9.50 am (s/he rose early too, so that makes me extra celebrity like)

And as is usually the case you nigerians are fuking fools. All you believe in and abide by are LIES. Delusions of grandeur. So, when an authentic individual that doesnt go about throwing airs all over the place and relates to the commoners is in your midst, you underestimate their prowess..Koro is mos def a gorilla gangsta, just because he can take it from the streets to the senate and back again doesnt imply local champion as you warped minded kolo-mentized nitwits would have it. It implies authenticity. Dare I say transparency. For the record, "I" am surprisingly disgusted by most of your uninformed, albeit purportedly enlightened assumptions. Perhaps you should do your research

PPS. The reason why "I" is in quotes is cos I said that some people have certain assumptions about Obanikoro. Though I am now a celebrity and have no need to reply, I have decided to be gracious. I do not know Obanikoro from Adam, I returned to Nigeria after ten years abroad, all I know about him is what I have heard since I have been back. So when I say people I mean people, and if you got the irony in the post you would know that I was actually mocking the asumptions of the "people". I would go on, but I'm a celebrity.

PPPS. It seems that Uzo was right about the reason for the public holidays, or at least her view is the majority view. I would admit I'm wrong, but I'm a celebrity.

You, yes you reading this, I know you want to be me, but I'm a celebrity (you know I don't think that is ever going to grow old). Laters.

Aiight I know I said I love naij for all it's public holidays but now its getting embarassing. After the three day week of last week, we now are working two days this week. Why you innocently ask? Cos thursday and friday have been declared public holidays to prepare for the first set of elections on saturday.

Anyway that was off topic. So this is my question, or rather in first draft it was a question and now it is a statement. Anyway please finish this statement in the way that feels most natural to you.

I am running around outside butt naked because...

I know, u are like WTF but I am curious to see what people feel are acceptable reasons to run around naked. Cos thinking about my friend got me thinking about college, and there was a lot of naked running in college. Oh and it is a must that every comment must start with the phrase like my (true) answer to the question:

I am running around butt naked cos I lost a game really badly and this was the penalty.

You don't have to have run around naked to play, but it helps. Laters.

Random Intro
Aiight so I recently found out that Easter Monday is the day for a lot of wedding related stuff, cos I was at an engagement and at an introduction yesterday. Someone needs to explain to me the logic of introductions in absentia one more time (I'm not quite getting it yet). Anyway that's why Corper did not appear yesterday. So rather than move it to tuesday, I'll just leave it for next week.

Post
So I started thinking about this topic cos of one of my friends from college. He's made it big as a writer in New York, his book has even been optioned by a movie production company. You know amebos like me, I wanted to know what the reviewers thought of the book. Most reviews were good, but some were bad. However some of the ones that were bad, and the some of the comments on those were pretty vicious. They were more on the whole, "how does a preppy arse kid get a book deal of that size, and why is he being talked about as the greatest thing to hit literary fiction in recent times" (if you care that much you can actually find out what school I went to). Anyway it struck me again that people really get worked up about other people's successes. I don't get it. I've never been able to begrudge people their successes. I was probably the only one of my close group of friends that did not get "the dream job" after college but I honestly never resented any of them. Same thing with all of my friends from postgrad. Don't get me wrong I'm hella ambitious, but other people succeeding, and doing it faster than me does not bother me. I suppose it is one of those areas that I'm being too logical again, but I don't see why someone elses earned success should bother me.

Random Outro
One of the things I have noticed from blog stalking this past couple of weeks is that we "educated Nigerian bloggers / commenters" can't seem to have an argument without it getting personal, and also people don't really disagree with authors on their blogs, especially when the blog is a personal one. Though I suppose the two points are very related and there could even be a causal link in there. Aiight I'm done

I suppose I might have to accept that I am not as frivolous as I thought I was, cos I only managed to do 1 not serious post this week excluding Corper. However when like me, you blog on what happens to catch your fancy things do not go according to plan. Anyway the thing that caught my eye most was an article I read on the bbc website. It is about slavery in Nigeria. They labeled the domestic service industry as it is mainly practiced Nigeria as slavery. You know the practice of taking young boys and girls into your house and feeding, clothing, and educating them in exchange for domestic service. See that is the ideal model in Nigeria however it is subject to a lot of abuse. So the BBC just labeled the entire thing slavery and left it at that. In a sense it is people trafficking going to villages and gathering up young people but then again so is corporate recruitment if you think about it. The difference is in the way it is done, and the effects it has. The more I think about it, the more I try not to think about it cos I do not like the conclusions I am coming to. It’s like this, since most of the trafficking of kids does result in abuse should we ban it? From a child labour perspective it should be banned, but things do not fit in to the nice easy boxes that we want them to especially in naij. There are quite a number of people that have benefited from the system and what happens to the next generation of children who could benefit if the system is scrapped. Anyway, read the article and tell me what you think?

One of the maddest things about V/I is the sharwama at Marokane on Idowu Taylor. I rediscovered the place on Saturday when we stopped by after drinks, and I am telling you they put crack in those things. I stopped by on my way from work yesterday cos I needed my fix. In fact I’m craving right now. I think I blame my crush, cos it was her idea to stop there in the first place. As expected, despite hanging out with her almost the entire weekend, I stayed strong and did not do the whole “by the way…” thing. I think I came close on the drive back home, but I started talking about random stuff and the moment passed. This is why crushes you don’t act on are annoying, there is no closure. Anyway this is not a relationship theory post, though since we are on the topic of those posts, I did get another disparaging comment on How to Block a Babe in two calls. Everyone says that the post is very calculating, but all I thought I said was "make sure the girl knows you like her", "don’t disturb her if she doesn’t like you", and "know what she wants if she does like you and try to give her that". I think it is common sense, but you'll be surprised how many guys manage to prove that common sense is not common.

So back to Marokane, I went to satisfy my craving last night and while I was there I saw the sixteenth birthday show on MTV. This one was for the son of a black record executive. For the twenty minutes I was there, I basically stared in shock at the screen. The kid got half a million dollars for his birthday party. The kid had a coming to America theme party, with Rhianna as his princess. The funniest part was when the dude sat on a throne and had his friends walk down a red carpet to him and kiss his hand, before collecting the IV for the party. I was kinda confused that his friends actually put up with it, cos if the guy was naija, and he tried that, the first thing you would hear was “eh rush eh” as soon as he sat down on the throne. The weirdest thing about that episode was that, the kid could have been anything, white, black, Hispanic whatever, and you wouldn’t have had any trouble believing it. I suppose that it provides more evidence for the theory that money is just as or more important than race in determining identity. Anyway I really enjoyed the sharwama sha.

In other news, last week I worked four days, this week I am working three, and next week I am working four. All I can say is that I love living in a country that loves public holidays as much as Naij does. Laters.

Intro
Aiight so here we are again with your regular monday fix. This one actually has at least one piece of actionable advice. Hopefully after people read this, they'll stop accusing me of being not frivolous. Cos I so am. Anyway, day 16 awaits.

Corper Nation (Day 16)
I'm now officially a corper. I have completed all righteousness as far as NYSC is concerned.I have signed the Book of Life, submitted my ID card, handed in my eval form and am wearing the proper id code tag around my neck. Oh this is another critical piece of advice; do not stress about the book of life. When you get to camp you'll see people fighting to sign a big book resist the temptation to join them. I signed mine in five minutes and I know some people who stood in line for five hours. There are some points one doesn't have to belabour, nuff said. Basically today was the same as Monday but the one difference is that more guys are starting to look for after camp runs. I got in on the act adding two numbers to my ever growing list. Basically u've gotta be sharp, use every thing you got, money, game, yanks, jand becasue this camp is a leveller. Corpers of the world unite! On a final note this is the worst nite at the stand. Well tomorrow is the variety night with Ms. NYSC and all that. Who knows maybe I'll find another girl to add to my list.

Unnecessary Qualification
Well the code tag lasted all of one day and then my ID number plate was back in my pouch. Yep, remember those waist pouches that used to be all the rage in the early nineties, well the NYSC program is single handedly keeping the manufacturers in business. Cos we all rocked the stturves. I cannot stress how important it is not to stress about the book of life. Oh and for those of you that are planning to serve, there will come a time when some one will charge you N20 per staple. It is your duty not to attempt to slap them. It is a lot harder when they charge you per line of tip-ex but I believe you can do it. Laters.