Intellectuals...

It may seem a wee bit far fetched but if you feel me on this, then just hi-five yourself for me. Isn't it true that all intellectuals have a few loose nuts in their heads? Indulge me for a moment;

Q1. Alexander Graham Bell decided to invent the telephone because....

- there was an incessant ringing in his ears?

- the running messenger was becoming a pain in the neck?

- there was a sudden urgent need for telephone communication ans the onus fell upon him?

Q2. Sir Isaac Newton thought it a good idea to waste a pretty long period of time sitting under an apple tree waiting for an apple to fall in order that he prove the existence of the force of gravity. Had he never seen something fall down before or had he never noticed that all the things ever thrown upwards, never quite stayed up there and came back to earth promptly?

Q3. The mother of all...Benjamin Franklin decided that the had to prove that there was electric current in lightning strikes. He decided to fly a kite in a thunder storm; as if this was not enough, he put a key on the end of the kite to improve conductivity. Where was he at the end of that 'brilliant' experiment?...Need I say more

Tremore-tised!

So it’s been a pretty while hasn’t it? Well I’m back and its bumper harvest for you, article wise. So here goes…
I never thought I’d be ever writing this but dumb as it may sound, do the math:
What do you get when you add traumatised to a public living in fear of earth tremors? Well try tremor-tised on for size. In the last four weeks, Kenya has been hit by a series of tremors, some big some small and some fictional (but that’s a story for another day!). I’m not quite sure of the number of tremors that were experienced, but by around Thursday 19th of July, there had been about eight tremors, four of which I had felt. This is not an “I felt the tremors!” moment though, no! It’s a moment to put a few things in perspective. Though we lie on the Rift Valley, Kenya is fortunate not to experience much earthquake activity; so it was quite a shock when the tremors began to frequently rock the country and quite frequently they did. One actually has the audacity to get up to 6.0 on the Richter, so it was quite the scary experience.
Bearing all this in mind and the earthquake history of the country, it would be rather expected that mass hysteria be the absolute reaction of the Kenyan public. Some of the reactions however were ridiculous; I recall one lady being interviewed on news and she said that her workplace building had swayed in the tremors and she was feeling unsafe and thus was going home to recuperate; fair enough, but it was 8.15 a.m.! She should have just said she needed an excuse to go home. We also had ‘experts’ saying Kenya was being punished for her sinners and thus everyone had to repent their sins before the ‘big one’ hit; funny, I thought nobody could predict an earthquake, even scientifically!?>?@ Funny thing is Kenyans actually believed our ‘experts’ and actually were seen to say so on national television.
Well what to say, turns out some mountain in Tanzania (next door country) was having a tummy upset and just needed to belch out some lava and that would be it; and it did. Too bad they didn’t stop, turns out there was one more but it’s been pretty quiet ever since. I guess you can’t fault those Kenyans for being tremor-tised!