Rant

Kenya, Rants

If you own a restaurant or store and you’re planning to sell cold drinks, Coca Cola will give you a free refrigerator. I guess it’s a good deal but there’s one condition: you can only stock Coca Cola products in the fridge. Sure, Coca Cola’s product line includes something for everyone (even water, Dasani!), but don’t even think about sticking a 7-up or a left-over hamburger in there, man! I’ve been paying attention for a few weeks now and I can’t remember seeing this rule violated. Certainly, the little store at our college has a small fridge and you’d never catch us stocking it with anything but Coca Cola products. The same goes for all the cafes I frequent in Tala.

I wonder what the consequence is if you get caught with an Alvaro (soda from East African Breweries), a Red Bull, or a 7-up in your Coca Cola fridge? Who knows, but it cracks me up to think about the plethora of laws broken every day all over Kenya. To name a few:

  • Urinating in public (possibly even on the “No Peeing” sign)
  • Littering! (usually next to the “Keep Kenya Clean” sign)
  • Smoking in public (yes, it’s illegal)
  • Carrying extra passengers in matatus (public transport vehicles)
  • Bribing police

It’s pretty comical, but is the Coca Cola man really that scary? Could an encounter with the big, bad Coca Cola man be worse than a fine for peeing on a wall? What about being sent to jail for stealing (or worse, mob justice)?

Miscellaneous

I guess it’s not really a “problem,” but I usually find interesting/strange things to read on Wikipedia. For instance, I stumbled upon this gem the other day while doing some casual reading about the universe:

“…the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are approaching one another at a speed of 100 to 140 kilometers per second (62-87 miles/s.; 223,200-313,200mph). The impact is predicted to occur in about 2.5 billion years.”

So our galaxy, the Milky Way, is going to collide with another galaxy. Another fun fact about the Milky Way is its diameter: comprising 200-400 billion stars, the Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years wide. If you convert that to miles it’s 587,849,981,000,000,000, a number so big I don’t even know what to call it (what comes after “trillion?”).

A fish-eye mosaic of the Milky Way arching at a high inclination across the night sky
A fish-eye mosaic of the Milky Way arching at a high inclination across the night sky

I was so excited when I read this in the computer lab so I was sharing it with the students seated around me, and then another teacher asked me, “And you believe all that?” Yes, I do! I’m not a physicist or an astronomer but even if the numbers are wrong, maybe plus or minus a few zeros, it’s still awesome!

Now it’s your turn to go click around Wikipedia for a few hours, you’re bound to find something that is awesome; there is something for everyone! As this hilarious comic from xkcd.com points out, that’s the problem with Wikipedia:

The problem with Wikipedia
The problem with Wikipedia