SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: Welcome to London

It was just the other day on these pages, The Manchester Derby , when I admitted that hell would first freeze over before I wished any kind of good luck to Sir Alex Ferguson’s orphans. 

 

 

Well, hell must have hit absolute zero and come tomorrow, instead of dancing with the stars on the Bridge, I will be making a death Tango with the Devil. 

  (Stay with me earthlings. I deal with intelligent beings and I know you know that we are only talking football here. Yes?)...

 London hosts two important matches tomorrow and I will share my two cents on both of them below in no particular order of importance. The matches start within 10 minutes of each other from around 15:20 GMT.

Suffice to say, I’m a Gunner, born and bred, and my heart bleeds for Arsenal...

CHELSEA VS MAN-U: A Tango with the Devil

I had hoped this day would never come. A day when we would be required to keep our guns safely in the holsters for the Devils’ sake. You see, we Gooners never walk alone but when it comes to looking for partners to walk with, the Devils don’t even come close. But come this Saturday, we shall be sitting tight hoping that their recent form will manifest at the Bridge.

Allow me to crunch the numbers a bit...

 The next 6 points stand between Chelsea and the League Trophy. And the gods of football found it within their humour licence to line up two sworn enemies to stand between The Blues and the trophy.  We must now make a pact with the Devils to see if the league can be thrown back into a three horse race. 

 

 

(Poor Pellegrini; the way Liverpool are sniffing at their tail, even a Wenger finish is not a guarantee anymore).

We shall be pulling a Betrayal in the City tomorrow at the Bridge. You see, The Blues are our London cousins and they used to look up to us a few years back before petro-dollars found their way into the EPL and made them arrogant. Way before the Special One was fished in by the Russian tycoon, shown the door then fished back again as the Happy One, Chelsea were always our younger cousins.

Why must we dine with the Devil tomorrow? The Tyranny of Numbers come to play. If Manchester United walk away with the 3 points and Arsenal does the same the next weekend, then Chelsea’s lead will be slashed significantly. Their morale will dip significantly giving the remaining smaller teams they will be facing a real chance of dismantling them too. Arsenal in the meantime will continue with their stellar performance and have the coveted EPL trophy within grasp... 

Do you have any idea what this means for Professor Wenger?

 Every grand scheme has a caveat and here is ours. The gods must ensure the trophy comes to London. Where in London is the only headache we are seeking the Devils’ indulgence to solve but to London it must come. It’s Our Time to Eat

It is not the season for the Red Devils to start dusting their trophy cabinet yet. We just hope and pray that they can amass all the fire power from hell and burn the Bridge down for us tomorrow.

THE FA SEMI-FINAL: The Royals Must Die

Even as we count on our enemies to inflict pain and damage at the Bridge, Saturday night will also see us work to defend our territory. There is a way we play in the FA as if our very lives depend on it and for good reasons. It is the trophy that brought the almost decade-long drought to an end and stopped the ridicule of our empty trophy cabinet...

 It is the cup that will also put us in the orbit to History once again with a win. We are currently tied at the Top of FA Cup Success at 11 wins with...(yep you guessed it right)...the Red Devils. A full FA set will definitely shush our enemies who tend to think that our players are only good at making money while theirs make history...

First things first though...

 We have to get past Reading tomorrow and we are hoping Wembley will be another walk in the park. Forget the 12 goals thriller in the Capital One Cup in October 2012 when we lured the boys to the slaughter house with a 4-0 head start in less than 40 minutes then came back and showed them ‘who’s their daddy’ with a 5-7 at Madejski. We hope to dismiss them quickly back to their Madeski wakasomee huko this time round... 

 

 (So their ancestors in all wisdom thought of naming their team READING and their Stadium MADEJSKI? Who does that?!)... 

 Well I guess their first Reading lesson tomorrow will be “No sooner had professor Wenger shouted fire, than we were gunned down.”

Look at the prof. at the top over there.

He sure does look good at the top don't you agree?

It should have been me Up there?..Touche, cry me a river

 Tomorrow We Ride

#147: The Math of Infinity

I would tell you that I love you tonight
But I know that I’ve got time on my side
Where you goin'? Why you leavin' so soon?
Is there somewhere else that’s better for you?

What is [life] if you’re not here with me?
What is [life] if it’s not guaranteed?
What is [life] if it just ups and leaves?
What is [life] if you're not here no more?
What is [life] if you’re not really sure?
What is [life]? What is [life]?

Tell myself I wouldn't cry when you're gone
But I know it's easier said than done
Look at me, look at me choked up now
Try to tell you but it won't come out

What is [life] if you’re not here with me?
What is [life] if it’s not guaranteed?
What is [life] if it just ups and leaves?
What is [life] if you're not here no more?
What is [life] if you’re not really sure?
What is [life] if it just ups and goes?

The lyrics above are from the American Musical Drama Series currently ruling television ratings: EMPIRE. The series premier opens with Veronika Bozeman’s struggling to put some soul into the above lyrics when recording the song What is Love. 

  
After two unsuccessful attempts, Lucious walks into the recording booth and (coincidentally at the 00:01:47  time stamp) asks her to go back to when her brother was shot and she was asked to go identify his body...

I made my way recently to the Freedom Corner section of Uhuru Park to mourn and pay homage to the 147 young lives lost in the Garissa Terror attack. I couldn’t help thinking back to these lyrics and the emotions they conjure (only replacing the word LOVE with LIFE).

 While a lot has been said and done to mourn these departed souls, We can go deeper and really reflect on what their lives meant. What our lives mean and whether death in its essence is a finality. 

The social media fraternity refused to let 147 be dismissed casually as another number with #147NotJustANumber. Vigils and memorial concerts have been held both locally and abroad in solidarity with the families of the departed, the injured and the country as a whole. 

We must not forget them. We must not forget that we are at war with dark forces. Our enemies are smart, well equipped, informed and determined to go to any lengths to have their way. We must meet them and eliminate them with an equal if not better zeal and determination. 
  
The 147 souls were young and still in the process of figuring out their future. Personally, I am lost between mourning their deaths and celebrating their short lives. But I am a believer in infinity...

Once conceived, we all embark on an infinite journey…

 There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.  0.1, 0.11, 0.12…0.99999…A bigger infinite set between 0 and 2 and an ever bigger one between say 0 and 100… Some infinities are bigger than others infinities.

On that fateful morning, 147 for us ceased to be just a number.  It marked the beginning of the math of infinity.

Each of the 147 probably had a parent or two.

They had X siblings each maybe

Each had 1 or 2 or 3 or4 grandparents

An X number of aunts and uncles

An X number of cousins

Spouses and fiancés

An X number of comrades

An X number of friends

40 million plus fellow countrymen and women…

We can’t fully comprehend what each individual life lost that day meant to so many others left behind. There is no end (and probably even no beginning) to the math of infinity.

It is what we do with our infinities (BIG or small) that counts. The yardstick of quality is all the same whether you live to be a day old…an year old…twenty years or 100. Infinity is imprinted and enshrined in the lives you encounter and touch. 


 
 



It is the little joys you share with your loved ones. The discipline to not leave for tomorrow that which you can do today. The ability to free your soul of any hate or revenge. The motivation to live each day as if it was your last.

We pray and condole with the bereaved. Let them cherish the small infinities they shared with the 147 departed souls. 
 
We must all be vigilant and play a role to make our country safer. The government is us. Let us all govern the security dockets in our surrounding.

And because none of us knows neither the time nor the hour of our own departure, let our lives speak so beautifully to all who we love and cherish so that when our time comes, there will be a forever within the infinity we shall have shared… 

Casual Bites, Wine and Onyis Martin’s Exhibition

‘Art is a lie that brings us closer to the truth’. It was the great Spanish painter Pablo Picasso who invoked this almost a century ago.  There was nothing untruthful though about the artistic display on Thursday the 9^th of April as we, the art lovers, converged at the Casual Bite in Westlands in the evening for an exhibition by Onyis Martin.

Onyis Martin describes his work as conceptual. You draw a meaning from his work based on your own life experiences. Beauty lying in the eye of the beholder kind of art. He uses mixed media and his work has a 3D feel to it that helps to utilize not only the sense of sight but also that of touch.

 
 The beautiful paintings had the predominant imagery of a bicycle (creatively embossed on the canvas using stove wick), shadows and a single vertical wick at the centre of the canvas with a knot on the upper end.

I can try hard to paint a picture here of what the multi-talented Onyis wishes to accomplish through his paintings but I am well aware that I won’t do much justice to his well thought of and executed medium. So allow me to quote a paragraph from his Biography

“Through his paintings, Onyis leads us into his own cultural world, a world in which the sacred and the profane constantly mingle, in which worship and domestic life are one and the same, in which every gesture has a pre-established purpose and in which everything has a meaning. Within that culture, everything is determined in advance; everything that occurs in the present can be explained in terms of the past and has to be ritualized so as to be integrated into everyday life, which is itself a ritual. As we walk into his paintings, we have to look deep into our own souls for it awakens sensations and feelings, which we, caught up as we are in an inhuman[e] and artificial world, thought were lost forever.”

Well, imagine such poetic beauty collected from contemporary subject matter and beautifully translated with paint on canvas and, like a neurosurgeon on an operating table, you will have managed to pick a piece of Onyis’s brain... 

 The evening was not short of networking opportunities as the art lovers mingled freely with wine glasses in hand and bitings laid out on every table. The new Director of the Italian Institute of Culture, Ms Francesca Chiesa,graced the occasion in the company of several other Italian art enthusiasts.  

It is also only right to mention Luca Berardi, who was the ‘oldest’ art lover of the evening at 11 years of age.

 The young man, himself an upcoming author and an animal rights crusader, was quite a delight and already knows what he wants to do with his life. You can check him out on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook as well as on www.yarhkenya.blogspot.com  

Such a beautiful outing wouldn’t have been complete without some music to our ears. As the guests settled down from the exhibition, some poetry and music was in order.

 

First on stage to dispense a dose of poetic justice was Mtheto Hara with a piece he had specifically written for Onyis’ exhibition. 

He breathed more life to the paintings as only he can, then quickly settled back to his traditional theme of choice: LOVE.

 

Then came the soft-spoken but powerful Kelvin Kaesa who opened with an emotional and beautiful poetic tribute to the Garissa Terror Victims. There was strength and healing power in that particular performance.

Next was Winnie Kamau with four songs on relationship hurdles and forgiveness. We were warned against being concerned much with the speck in our brother’s eye at the expense of the log in our own before we joined her in a rendition of the ever redeeming Redemption Song by Bob Marley.

Steve and Alfred of Yabadoo Kenya closed the entertainment chapter. 

Their first song Lifestyle was all about what we want while my favourite, Gaucho was about this over-protective girlfriend. Bus Station and Umenishika ka Gava are also part of their creative production.

Two intensive hours of food for the body, mind and soul were brought to a close with a word of appreciation from Giorgio Berardi, the Project Manager at CEFA. 

The whole evening was made a success by facilitation from this wonderful institution that has endeavoured to give training opportunities and exposure to artists from multiple disciplines through a two-year journey. All the artists of the night are beneficiaries. The project has the support of the European Union, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and the Arts, the Italian Institute of Culture, Alliance Française, and Goethe Institute.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF Humphrey Odero www.oderophotoz.blogspot.com

The Manchester Derby: A Tale of One Village

The last time our beloved Arsenal was at this position at this time of the PL, Bahati had not yet struck luck, Kaka Sungura was still hunting for rabbits in some Eastlando thickets,Vera was still a black girl, Chelsea had no real fans and most of the Kardashian girls were still virgins. It was so long ago. So before all yee devils out there start calling it a big deal NOT, allow us some bragging rights. We have earned them. It is a BIG deal. London is poised for Gold and Silver and the rest of you can fight it out to see who lands the Bronze and who gets the Wenger.

 With the Community Shield safely in the Cabinet (eeee...a minute of silence please for ‘those’ teams whose trophy cabinets have started gathering dust)... and an FA defence a wink away, a Champions League slot behind our London brothers is definitely worth every dime.  We are gun blazing for sure and if you believe otherwise,  well the devil is a liar.

But this blog was not about us today. Today our focus shifts to an old neighbourhood in Manchester where the villagers meet their noisy neighbours.

A tale of one village, two shitties.

                                                                                                          

   

If it was my prayer, I’d ask the gods of football to divide the spoils and have each get a mkate nusu. But maybe the gods want to up the stakes. Maybe it’s everything or nothing and in that case, I will join Lupita in donning Nairobi Blue.  I don’t care about the mathematics involved or any tyranny of numbers analysis. When the Red Devils are involved, I’m blonde in as far as reasoning is concerned. I want to wallow in their predicament whether that screws us mathematically or not. And I have my reasons. For instance, when Venus does not qualify for the US Open or Wimbledon, she does not go to the match and cheer on Maria Sharapova at the expense of her sister Venus. So when the Red Devils sat tightly on their asses and celebrated when Monaco jujud us out of the Champions League as the only representatives from the Queens land, we caught feelings. So our pact is intact; they can burn us from hell wherever whenever and we shall gun down their ego at every opportunity.  Tonight is one such night.

So a draw will be good but a defeat for the devils will be even better.  The previous weekend not withstanding, I’m sure the stern Pellegrini can get his mojo back and beat Louise the Gal. But if the match on the pitch gets boring, we can hope for some sideshows on the dugout just like when the gum-chewing Scottish knight got a thorough Italian Job both on pitch and off pitch in 2012. Remember this drama?

SAF moves to the Italian and says

 

SAF moves to the Italian and says...

 

 SAF invokes the mother.

The Italian throws it right back at him.

The Good Sir walks over and makes a threat and the Italian dares him

 
 

It's almost a fist fight

The Italian silences him some more

And walks away the happy one.