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17:00
From: Kikuyumoja's realm
Read This Entry & More At Kikuyumoja's realm
What you see here is my more or less successful attempt at making Daifuku-Mochi - “a Japanese confection consisting of a small round mochi (glutinous rice cake) stuffed with sweet filling, most commonly anko, sweetened red bean paste made from azuki beans.”
You know I’d found Mochi from Taiwan on sale at an Asia Shop in Seville, Spain the other day and was wondering why it isn’t sold in Germany as well (the red bean paste is sold though).
I used to make Mochi myself as a child - don’t ask me what kind of mochi that was (Japanese name for it?), but basically I would just mix glutinous rice flour with water, literally pound it until it becomes a homogeneous mixture and then form small balls which would then be thrown into boiling water. Once they’ve changed their colour from white to semi-transparent and floating on top, they’re ready. Just leave them to cool off and then dip them into a mixture of soja bean flour & sugar.
Note to myself: this is one of those recipes where Mr and Mrs Calories will come during the night and pull out their sewing kit to work on your clothes. Bad.
Anyways, this time I tried a Daifuku recipe I’d found on the net and mixed 150ml of glutinous rice (flour) with 150ml of water, stirr it in a heated pot until it changes its colour and then let it cool down. After cooling, form little balls (~ hush puppies) and fill them with red bean paste. Didn’t work out that well. I will stick to my old method in future and mix everything once it’s still cold, then boil it et voilá. There’s nothing more sticky than glutinous rice…
(Talking about calories, the current schedule is 2x/week running and 1x/week swimming - how plausible is this disclaimer btw? :-).
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15:52
From: Kikuyumoja's realm
Read This Entry & More At Kikuyumoja's realm
There are those maps out there which are based on statistical data - assumed, accumulated and unproven figures that may indicate a certain trend and/or just show what the situation has been when the data was collected.
When we look at today’s map of Firefox 3 downloads worldwide in just 24 hours (for a world record):
…I really wonder what ppl will say about this in future, and also how many organizations will take THIS as a basis for their future planing on the availability of internet access, the spread of alternative internet browsers (such as the Firefox 3 suite) and what kind of internet-saturation (?) it takes to actively participate in such a call for a world record (read: the request to download FF3 on this particular day was imho promoted through the blogosphere? If so, it could be a nice indicator for the blogosphere).
However - 8,9 million downloads in just one day are just impressive!
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14:13
From: You Missed This
Read This Entry & More At You Missed This
Zimbabweans go back to the polls next week to either apologize and re-elect one Robert Bob Mugabe after a first round THRASHING or confirm Morgan Tsvangirai as their new leader. But comrade Bob together with the army have both vowed never to concede the presidency to anybody no matter the election outcome. That sounds quite familiar, doesn't it? Yes, Africa is still populated by DINOSAURS who think of their countries as personal property with their names gracing the title deed. Mugabe grossly underestimated the power of a fatigued and battered citizenry. They showed him dust by voting Tsvangirai in the first round of voting and no amount of historic vote rigging for a whole historic month would turn the tables. That has left Mugabe to perfect what he knows best. Zimbabwe is suffocating under INTIMIDATION and brutality meted out to any perceived and real opposition sympathizers. Grandmothers are paying with their head and limbs should their grandchildren be suspected not to be ZANU-PF compliant. Industrious Kenyans envy Zimbabweans for their civility. In fact Kenya would have registered the magical 10+% growth rate this year if they didn’t protest last year’s FLAWED POLLS. You only need to conveniently forget the Zimbabwe analogue of where we would have been were we to give room for a re-run. We had our home bred Simba Makoni wiping and salivating for the spoils. But again Mugabe is just learning the ropes albeit devoid of our style and sophistication in delivering FRAUD and DECEPTION. Why employ Moi's terror tactics when you can top up with zeroes? Bob only needed the creative mind to add the zeroes truncated from the Zimbabwean dollar to the vote's tally and he would be home and dry without the pain of spewing threats. Tested, proven Kenyan script So Zimbabweans may be going through HELL on earth with inflation figures that bust computer’s memory BUT we better learn CIVILITY from them. What is more, better have peace with nothing to eat rather than bloodying your hands to reclaim a country from the grasp of her owners. We leave in interesting times where selective application of logic reigns supreme with eyes singularly trained on feathering our nests. Well, Robert Mugabe is many things to many people. We have Kenyans who will selectively praise him for standing for the colonialists oblivious of the pre-historic battering he is visiting on his his country and her people. The Kenyan version of patriotism is truly unique. Zimbabwe may have been the last African state to get independence but Mugabe is doing very well in accelerating the speed to MISRULE like his local comrade. Revolutions the world over germinate from the seed of readiness to die for what you believe in. Deciding whether Zimbabweans are cowards or civilized is to trivialize a grave matter. I only pray that Mugabe doesn’t live to sink Zimbabwe after June 27. But with Kenyan tested and proven script before him that prayer is akin to selling ice cream to an Eskimo. May God save us from our tormentors for leaders? Sneak preview of the last week's raw notes: "Indeed it is quite likely that it was the subject of puzzled gossip within the August house where most burly politicians prefer sexual encounters with underage girls picked up mostly along Nairobi's notorious red light district of Koinange street. Most would have wondered what Kones was doing smitten by this over 40 Kalenjin woman when there were so many young and willing girls hanging around daily at the legislators' favourite street of sin in Nairobi..." - Get your Kumekucha raw notes.
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12:04
From: The Displaced African
Read This Entry & More At The Displaced African
Three Part Article
This weekend I will be taking a trip and will have some time to think and reflect, so I thought I would ask y’all to help me reflect.
Part one: What Do You Want to Read?
As I approach article number 150, and readership continues to slowly climb, I thought I would take some time out to ask you all what you want to read. So, leave a comment or email me privately by clicking on the “email the author” link at the bottom of the article and let me know what articles you would like to read?
Don’t let the limits of logic impede you, if you can imagine it and you want to read it, let me know about it. It might be something that I have wanted to do all along
Part two: What Have Been Your Favorite Articles So Far?
Again, leave a comment or email me, but please let me know which one or two or three or 7 articles have you liked from this blog so far?
Part three: Ways I Can Improve this Blog?
Even a sentence answering any of these 3 questions would be great but ideally, a paragraph or two or seven. Remember, I started this blog with the intent of doing some good, so help me serve you better.
Be blessed and bless others,
Mwangi
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9:15
From: Black Looks
Read This Entry & More At Black Looks
The Chinese in South Africa have won their case to be designated “Black” showing us how arbitrary racial categories are. Lucky them, under apartheid they were able to take advantage of not being “Black” (they were coloured” - slightly up in the racial chain) and now they can take advantage of being “Black” and go [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "switching race and other pessimisms", url: "http://www.blacklooks.org/2008/06/switching_race_and_other_pessimisms.html" });
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8:04
From: Kenya Imagine
Read This Entry & More At Kenya Imagine
We have been very busy over the last couple of months working on changes on kenya imagine. The new site is now up and ready for you. Apart from regular articles from wananchi like you, there are several new features. These include: - Separate Magazines with great articles written by you: Politics, Economics, Money (personal finance), Technology and Science, Culture, and Society. Please continue submitting articles, and if you haven't already go ahead and do so. We have something for everyone!
- Art Gallery-- We would like to develop this into a fully fledged online art gallery where artists can display their paintings, drawings, etc.
- Patrick Gathara-- in-house cartoonist.
- Kwangu-- this is your space to network and create relationships with other kI users.
- Personal Blogs/Diaries that are not edited. Create your own! The best blog will be featured everyday on the homepage increasing your readership.
- Groups-These will be created by you, and you can join any existing ones that you please. A group can be private or public.
- Traveler-- a diary with reviews on places in Kenya and around the world.
- Classifieds: This section will also be user-generated. Are you offering services? Know of a job opening? Register with us and share the information with our readers.
- What we are reading: This is the editors' del.icio.us page.
- Papers and Documents: You can upload resumes, long papers and pdfs here to share with others
Once again, thanks to everyone for visiting us-- for articles, and comments. Karibu. Please drop me a line if you have any questions. nekessa@kenyaimagine.com Nekessa for kenyaImagine
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5:00
From: Marian's Blog
Read This Entry & More At Marian's Blog
Time for our annual Black American commemoration of Juneteenth. June 19, 1865 is celebrated by Black Americans as the date when our ancestors in the deep South and West (Texas) finally got word of the Emancipation Proclamation. On paper it...
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3:33
From: Rants, Raves & Reviews
Read This Entry & More At Rants, Raves & Reviews
So... I came across an interesting little tidbit in the Business Daily (18 June 2008)... But problems started emerging early this year when the NSE 20 Index fell sharply and the weakly capitalised brokers could not keep up with the teeming and lading game. What exactly is "teeming and lading" - in relation to stockbroking? And it continues... That is how Nyaga Stockbrokers, Francis Drummond and a few others got into much trouble. 1. Its is Drummond Investment Bank not Francis Drummond... 2. Hmm... I though it was Franchis Thuo & Co that was in hot water... 3. Isn't DIB/FD owed a copious apology? 4. Will this error remain frozen in cyberspace when I google Drummond? Well... surprise, surprise... BD has been nominated for the Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards (DABRA). Well, I don't think Drummond IB was among those who voted for BD...
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1:04
From: Cock And Bull
Read This Entry & More At Cock And Bull
A few years ago, we traveled for a funeral of a relative to the agricultural town of Nyahururu in the Rift Valley. When we left Nairobi, it was bone dry but when we reached Nyahururu, it was pouring with rain and that is how we ended up in the sticky mud. When the bus that was at the head of the convoy got stuck, we all came to a standstill and the only alternative was for us to push it from the quagmire.
Initially, just a few men were deployed to push the bus, and it seemed like they were not doing any good. After a while, several more joined them and still the bus would not bulge. Soon after the rest of us stepped into the rain to try and help the already soaked men in order to save the day. Still the bus would not bulge and its back wheels skidded in place while throwing mud at our clean clothes as if in protest. But we continued pushing and pushing until we all got exhausted and could push no more.
It was while we were in this broken state that someone looked under the bus and realized that there was a stone that was lodged firmly in front of one of the front wheels. The stone was frustrating all our efforts to make the bus move forward and it was embarrassing that no one had bothered to look before. After the stone was removed, the bus was able to move almost without being pushed.
This incident set me thinking about life; how we sometimes struggle so much with pushing when what we really need is to remove the obstacles that prevent us from going forward. Someone said that in every life, we can identify a single thing that if we change will enable us to succeed in ways that we had not imagined before. In Christian circles, I believe that this is referred to as a breakthrough. Take some time and look through your life, identify the single most important obstacle that you need to remove, and you will realize that instead of needing 10 of you in order to push through a day, you might just need yourself.
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0:52
From: REBECCA WANJIKU'S BLOG
Read This Entry & More At REBECCA WANJIKU'S BLOG
Investing in Safaricom was supposed to be easy, a matter of buying shares in Kenya’s most profitable company and getting refunds for shares not allocated. It was well known that it was going to be oversubscribed.
It started with controversy over government’s decision to offload the shares and whether it was right. It was a campaign tool, and some people were urged not to buy the shares but the boycott call was later retracted.
Then the IPO kicked off, long queues and endless advertisements of how our lives are going to change. Yes, it is good that we get to own shares but at what cost?
The allocations did not justify the hype. Queue a whole day, get a loan from the bank at 15% per annum interest, and then get allocated 420 shares. But again, those who feel the allocations are low should buy now that they are floated.
Then the next scene in the drama is the refunds. Brokers holding the money, Safaricom pointing fingers at unscrupulous brokers, CBK acknowledging the problem, asking the Capital Markets Authority to intervene and the CMA is just silent, how much more drama do we need.
It was argued that the IPO will benefit the ordinary person but now the only thing I see is the people trying to get their refunds to pay off the loans and the high interest rates and others sitting back waiting for the chaos to end before making the claims.
Ends
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0:40
From: Cock And Bull
Read This Entry & More At Cock And Bull
I am sure you have heard it being said that everything happens to us for a reason and that all things work for the best. However, when we look at the negative things that happen in our lives, we might be left wondering what good could possibly come from those things.
Take for example an undesirable habit that a person has struggled with for a long time. You will bear me witness that when it comes to these habits, we sometimes feel like captives and it might even seem like God Himself has refused to turn us lose from our chains. But then when one steps away from the problem and looks at it objectively he might begin to see a totally different picture.
Take a moment to look at a habit that you want to change without judging it as right or wrong. You will realize that in the moments when the habit is ruling your life, it takes over almost all your resources so that it may be played out. You will notice is that the habit demands perfection and it is done with incredible planning in the mind such that when it starts to execute, the body runs in automatic with very little input from you. If you have heard personal development gurus talk about visualizing, concentration, drive, efficiency, emotions, and such kind of things then you realize that you apply them all very successfully in feeding the habit.
If you think about it, you might realize that many of our most spectacular successes in life are achieved in actualizing bad habits. You perhaps know that a guy who really has to smoke at 2 am in the morning will smoke one way or another. The craving will result with him driving to the mall at that hour, something that he might not do if another person’s life depended on it.
People overcome great obstacles in order to succeed in fulfilling bad habits. If a person who finds it difficult to lift a finger to do anything useful at work looks at himself in both situations, he might realize that his ability to act is intact, and that he just needs motivation in order to be effective. What if he was to isolate the motivation for performing the destructive habit and import it into a pursuing a constructive habit?
I suppose that the challenge is for us to find the reason so that we can give our circumstances meaning. If we see bad habits as a constant reminder of just how good we are as planners and how efficient and focused we can be, then we might even begin to understand why God stands aside and lets us prove these qualities that are mandatory to success to ourselves over and over again. Just think, if a person isolates the motivation for performing a destructive habit and imports it into pursuing a constructive habit, then he or she will have turned weakness into strength and will most probably have changed his life for good.
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0:39
From: You Missed This
Read This Entry & More At You Missed This
Kumekucha Exclusive This blog has always had a tradition of publishing what others will not touch, and doing so without fear. This is one of the reasons for the events of the last one month or so where the life of the founder of this blog has been threatened. The story you are about to read illustrates more than any other that I have written in recent times, how the politics stinks in our beloved country. Last week, Chris received an anonymous email dossier and on perusing it, asked me to cross check the facts since I am on the ground and he is not. Not only did the dossier turn out to be accurate but I was able to dig up additional information that just amazed me and most of which cannot be included here. The anonymous person who sent the original dossier said in his email; “Chris, this is too hot even for your raw notes.” That assessment too turned out to be accurate. However Chris has bitten the bullet and reproduced the dossier in full in this week’s raw notes. In this article I will attempt to highlight a few facts from that sizzling hot dossier. In the recent past in this forum various readers have tried to suggest that the private lives of people in public office and those who seek public office should NOT be investigated let alone written about. This is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my long years in journalism. Indeed it is one of the reasons why the country is in the serious crisis it is in today. Kenyans have fallen into a pit of insanity because we keep on electing the same kind of leaders (without putting them under a microscope) and then we sit back and expect different results. How absurd. In many cases we even repeatedly send the same old “relics” who were in parliament when Senator Barack Obama was being born believing their “long stories” about bringing change this time round. This is not even laughable it is simply a tragedy. The founder of this blog has been a consistent supporter of Esther Passaris for a very long time however he too agrees that we cannot ignore the truth for the sake of saving face for utterances or writings of the past. Today we tell Kenyans that although the current MP elect for Embakassi is a weird choice that the long suffering constituents are bound to deeply regret electing as he continues to make court appearances, Ms Passaris too has her own serious problems that clearly make her inappropriate for any public office, anywhere. Ms Passaris’ extremely long list of lovers which reads like a who is who in Kenyan high society and politics is the first stop of the dossier and clearly illustrates what kind of character we are dealing with here. Instructively an interesting thread runs through most of that list and includes mostly powerful persons who were in a position to make certain decisions in her favour. Admittedly a woman’s past lovers is no big deal and many readers here may feel offended about that last paragraph. But what about the following suit that is still in court; Esther Passaris with Pius Ngugi in Monaco In her suit-which is still in court-Passaris claims that Pius Mbugua Ngugi had not only deceived her into having three children with him but had also backtracked on a promise to marry her. While Passaris says she had cohabited with Ngugi at Spring Valley in Nairobi since 1992,the latter denies promising to divorce his wife and marry her. Ngugi is alleged to have misrepresented himself in 1993 to Passaris that he was divorced from his traditionally wedded wife. Passaris claims Ngugi took her for a leisure trip to France's Monaco in August 1995 and repeatedly told her he was going to marry her and that he had been divorced for a decade. Ngugi allegedly made Passaris believe he had a vasectomy operation and induced her to stop using birth control pills resulting in the conception and birth of three children. The law makes it perilous to analyze a case that is still in court, so I leave you to make your own deductions about that. But one thing that can be said here is that Ms Passaris biggest mistake which will haunt her for years to come was to embarrass Mr Pius Ngugi (her former come-we-stay lover) by filing the case above. Not only is the man one of the richest individuals in the land, but he is also very influential in political circles (names of political contacts with-held here but revealed in Chris’ raw notes). It will not surprise anybody if the said individual and those close to him go out of their way to make sure that only for this single apparently grave error Ms Passaris gets absolutely nowhere. However the most disturbing aspect in this entire sordid affair is how Ms Passaris was able to penetrate the ODM high command so quickly so as to get the nod for the mayoral seat which she would easily have won had her name not been mysteriously omitted from the list of gazetted councilors. Anybody who reads the Passaris dossier will understand why there was never a chance that her name would have been included even if she was the last eligible councilor left in Nairobi. Again she effortlessly got the ODM ticket to run for the Embakassi parliamentary seat recently. This is most disturbing because this woman’s methods of gaining favor are well known and clearly documented in the dossier with numerous witnesses to back it up. Sadly it is bound to be deeply distressing to the millions of Kenyans whose only hope for a future in Kenya is the ODM political party. Now they will have to either bury their heads in the sand and call this post anti-ODM propaganda or face the truth. That truth is that the ODM top brass seems to have a certain weakness that makes it very easy for some members of the fairer sex with dubious pasts to penetrate it and influence important political decisions. Surely, had reason prevailed in the ODM pentagon the much-loved party would not have lost the Embakassi seat to PNU. A seat which had already been delivered to it by the late Hon M. Were. 
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0:33
From: Kenyanentrepreneur.com
Read This Entry & More At Kenyanentrepreneur.com
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9119177348605591059
This is a very poignant documentary on Rwanda and the roots that led to the genocide in 1994. However, it’s more than just about Rwanda. It’s about Africa and it’s about Africa’s history of colonialism, tribalism, poverty and bloodshed.
A few of my own observations from watching this documentary:
The historical grievances of the [...]
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0:00
From: Cock And Bull
Read This Entry & More At Cock And Bull
I heard the story on the day following the one that the Prime Minister had a meal at the Ronalo Restaurant in Nairobi. When I went there for lunch, the restaurant was overflowing with customers, most of who did not look like the regulars and perhaps had just come in because of seeing the joint on TV the previous night. As a result, the sitting space was more squeezed than usual and I happened to share a table with the guy who was telling the story to two of his friends.
The story teller was an expensively dressed huge man with dark spectacles tastefully aligned along his hairline and had that light complexion that makes a black man look dashing, no matter what his looks are. And he had such overbearing flamboyance that right now, I can’t even remember what his two friends looked like. But the story, I cannot forget.
According to him, a guy he knows failed to keep a keen eye on the rising prices of petrol and ended up with an empty tank on the highway at night. The guy then decided that his best option was to walk to the nearest petrol station to get some fuel in a jerry can so that he could revive his car. Unfortunately, the guy was accosted by thugs before he got to the petrol station. The thugs were of a particularly nasty breed since apart from robbing him, they also sodomized him.
At this point, the story teller posed for effect and took a moment to make a call from his cell phone. He must have been talking to a taxi driver because he asked him to pick him up from the restaurant and drop him at the airport so that he could catch a flight to Dubai. With that done, he went back to telling his story to the two listeners who seemed thoroughly impressed either by the story telling skills, or by the fact that they were having lunch with a person who apparently was going to have dinner in a different continent that evening.
Back to the story, the traumatized man somehow managed to make it home where he found his wife and tearfully narrated his ordeal. However, rather than offer sympathy, his wife looked at him squarely and said; “Now you know how it feels like each time you ask me to do that with you!” She then added, “You are wailing and it has happened to you only once…what would you do if it was to be done to you each time one of those men came home drunk?”
We never got to know what the guy’s response was, or what happened after that since the story teller’s phone rang and it turned out that the taxi driver was waiting for him outside the restaurant. He quickly snapped his flipping phone shut, picked up a small travel bag from between his legs, shook the hands of his two friends in a hurry and left them bewildered, just as a waiter came to ask if they needed any more drinks to be added to their tab. It must have been expected by everyone including the waiter that the flamboyant story teller would pay for the drinks and this was just a ploy to ensure that the two would be willing to take the responsibility. You could almost hear their mental calculators being punched ruthlessly as they recalculated their budgets before they grudgingly chipped in to pay the bill.
As I left the restaurant, it occurred to me that the moral of the story was that we should always be capable and willing to give what it is that we demand from others.
Read the complete article at
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