In case there was any confusion over whether or not Africa was fucked up beyond comprehension, the inflation rate in Zimbabwe has now reached 231,000,000 %. An inflation rate, or anything, of that magnitude is literally beyond comprehension, as in, I have no idea what that even means. Prices must be doubling every couple of seconds; by the time one can even take money out of their pocket to pay for something, the price would have already gone up. 231,000,000 isn't a number, it's a concept, like light years; I have no frame of reference for what 231 million of anything even is. Which is more surprising, the 100-Billion-Dollar Bill, or the presence of food in Africa?

A chronological list of headlines on NewZimbabwe.com, which hails itself as "The best Zimbabwe news site on the world wide web," tells the story as it unfolded:

January. 2007: Zimbabwe's inflation hits 1,593%
March, 2007: RBZ rolls out $5 000 and $50 000 note
April, 2007: Zimbabwe's inflation races to 3,714 percent
August, 2007: Zimbabwe's inflation rockets to 7,634%
August, 2007: RBZ unveils $200,000 dollar bill
September, 2007: Zimbabwe's inflation doubles to 14,850%
October, 2007: How Zimbabwe Lost Control of Inflation

Flash forward and move on to the international press as I assume the NewZimbabwe.com staff has starved to death:

May, 2008: Zimbabwe Inflation Now Over 1 Million Percent (Boston.com)
August, 2008: Zimbabwe Inflation Hits 11,200,000 Percent (CNN.com)
October, 2008: Zimbabwe Inflation Hits 231 Million Percent (Telegraph)

Using the international language of dance to woo allies in Africa, President Bush is enacting a new strategy in order to help heal America’s wounded reputation abroad. Watch as our Commander-in-Chief shakes it at a political gathering yesterday with Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

Sirak Sabahat is cute, but he's no Paul Newman: Two of the stars of "Live and Become"Exodus is practically a sixth book of Moses for many American Jews, but we can probably all agree that its vision of Israel could use an update. I’m not even talking about the film’s depiction of Israeli Arabs (all both of them) – I just mean that Israel’s modern population consists of people whose parents fled continents other than Europe. So when The New York Times says Live and Become, an Israeli epic about an African immigrant, “aspires to be something like a contemporary Exodus from an outsider’s point of view,” that sounds like a good thing.

Unfortunately, the Times isn’t convinced – a shame not only because we could use some good Ethiopian Jewish stories, but also because the movie LOOKS really excellent. Its hero is a Sudanese boy whose mother, in a desperate attempt to help him escape their refugee camp, sneaks him onto an Israel-bound plane of Ethiopian Jews. The boy, now called Shlomo, gets adopted by a French-Israeli couple and grows up as a black Jew, facing casual racism and ongoing questions about his Jewish identity.

On Rotten Tomatoes the film garnered an average rating of 84 out of 100 from an audience of mostly international reviewers, which gives me hope because I really want to like this movie. But it’s hard to get past details like this:

Armand Amar’s score, a wailing pastiche of Middle Eastern and Western styles, helps evoke his suffering and longing, but it is both annoyingly repetitive and, like Shlomo’s monologues to the moon, mawkish.

Monologues to the moon? Really? Maybe for now we should stick to Paul Newman.

There’s an article in today’s New York Times about how the current situation is probably worse than the current situation in Darfur.
Somalia: needs some aid

United Nations officials said the recent round of plagues, natural and man-made, coupled with the residual chaos that has consumed Somalia for more than a decade, have put the country on the brink of famine. In the worst-hit areas, like Afgooye, recent surveys indicate the malnutrition rate is 19 percent, compared with about 13 percent in Darfur; 15 percent is considered the emergency threshold.

The officials, in making the comparison, were not trying to diminish the problems in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have died from violence and disease since 2003. But they said they were concerned that the crisis here was increasingly urgent.

Unlike Darfur, where the suffering is being eased by a billion-dollar aid operation and more than 10,000 aid workers, Somalia is still considered mostly a no-go zone. Just last week, a Somali aid worker and a guard were shot to death at an aid distribution center in Afgooye. United Nations officials estimate that total emergency aid is under $200 million, partly because it is so difficult just getting food into the country.

Full story

Almost all the cab drivers in Nashville are Somalian, so I’ve learned a lot about Somalia in the past year or so, and though my friends in yellow cars swear it’s a wonderful country, it sounds pretty shitty right about now. Of course it’s incredibly important to keep lobbying for more aid and intervention in Darfur, but it looks like there’s just as much work to be done in Somalia. To help out, consider donating to the International Medical Corp’s Somalian effort, or you can contact the American Jewish World Service, who have a huge Save Darfur campaign, and ask them to give some attention and resources to Somalia, too. And it never hurts to contact your Senator and let him or her know what’s bugging you about foreign policy.

Maybe it’s just because of my Somalian friends, but I feel like it’s time to make some noise for 19 percent of Somalians who are too weak to do much of anything.

So I understand that “practically” could formally mean “in practical terms”; however the most common definition is certainly “virtually; almost” (OED) -and in this sense, this small panel from the Africa exhibit of the Field Museum in Chicago is pretty much unacceptable.

Rest easy, however, dear reader: the Field is making up for this by restocking Egyptian tomb sites… right here in Chicago!

Meanwhile, the itinerant Darwin exhibits is kind of sucky (one of the books that goes with it, however, is excellent). It pretty much follows a biographical format, with highlights in each explanatory signs in big red capital letters; and if there’s one thing that you will remember from the exhib as you walk out, it’s that Darwin really didn’t like school that much. (I think this is part of an annoying plan to make us understand that geniuses, truly, could be any of us. Thus, about Einstein: “Those of us who are parents can take heart that he was no Einstein when he was a kid.” Well, actually, he must have been, unless you have some serious problems with personal identity.)

The whole exhibit is pretty much plunged in the dark. This is probably to emphasise the dramatic quality of all the Darwin memorabilia. Actually, replica of memorabilia, really. There’s a couple of live amphibians, though. The most annoying part of the exhibition is that it stops before what even a first-year biology textbook would give you -but it does so in the same tone. There are a few videos of dry academics in silly and/or old-fashioned clothes making sure their body language (or absence thereof) is putting the audience to sleep while discussing the finer points of what scientific method is and why religion and science shouldn’t interfere with each other.

Why is this of any importance, you will ask? Well, if you’ve got any interest in defeating the latest baloney from the Creationist/Intelligent Design ranks, lately embodied in a very expensive and technologically enhanced “museum,” (see a nice article about this in print) it’s about time to cry out loud for a more effective design of scientific vulgarization displays.

Interestingly enough, the exhibition next door at the field, on Ancient Americas, seems to achieve this much more effectively than the Darwin show. (Is it because it seems to me privately funded throughout?) It may be ridiculous, but at least the signs engage the audience (and particularly the children, which should definitely be targeted if one wants to ensure that the next generation isn’t as mislead as the current one) by the simple use of the pronoun “you” and by more interactive displays and activities at children’s height.

Of course, what we really need is not just for museum exhibitions to be more engaging and more convincing; albeit to remain competitive in the international arena, the U.S. needs to reform its science curriculum (truism). And despite the optimism of some, the sad truth is that academia is perhaps one of the places most refractory to evidence-based advancements, although the research behind those usually originates within academia itself. I personally think that this will eventually prove to be its demise. My bet usually includes the progressive disappearance of literature-based “humanities” departments within the next 75 years. Anybody willing to wager?

• Stephanie Nolen's 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa affirms the prevalence and urgency of the virus in light of corrupt, AIDS-denying governments. The Guardian writes, "This is a call to arms, to a battle that we should all have been fighting for a very long time." [Guardian Unlimited]
• Kaui Hart Hemmings's debut novel of a patriarch's privleged Hawaiian life--speedboats and beachclubs and alcoholism--torn apart by a terrible accident and gripping middle age. [The New Yorker]
• Brooklyn resident Susanna Moore's new novel The Big Girls takes place in a women's prison and describes sexual torture, but this author's sunny, bobo life is anything but dark. [The New York Times]
• In The Price of Fire, independent journalist Ben Dangl writes of Bolivia from the time of the indigenous uprisings against Spanish rule through the Evo Morales administration's first year in office. [Z Magazine]
• In Leonard Michaels's newly collected stories--"part of that astonishing flowering of American Jewish writing that includes Bellow, Malamud, Mailer and Roth"--sex and betrayal in traditional short-story form give way to an "urban pastoral prose poem" and a collage-like list story of the author's immigrant family and concentration camps. [The Nation]

George Bush was quite deliberate in picking last week as the time to announce his vast expansion of US HIV/AIDS relief efforts in Africa. It was all about social pressure. With the G8 summit coming up this week, most of the member states had so far failed to fulfill their promises to Africa made at the historic 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles. Most of us expected that they would now at least act to mitigate any appearance that they were poorer global citizens than the neoliberal Evangelical war chimp. That being Bush.

But no. It appears that all the G8 states other than the UK and the US will be slinking back home without meeting their promises, and without even discussing the issue in this week's sessions.

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