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Some grandparents will not be part of the 2020 Canada Day and 4 th  of July family BBQ because of COVID-19.  They are called high risk so they are quarantined in their rooms in old age homes to prevent them from spreading the virus or catching it. Most families will include them in the festivities by talking to them over Skype, if grandparents are tech savvy. Families will also send video clips of toddlers falling all over the place or using ice cream as facial foundation. The electronic images will make them happy and sad. You can come up with creative ways of showing grandparents that they are not forgotten. It’s just the pandemic, that is making it difficult to follow family tradition and fetch them for the backyard BBQ. FIX THEM PLATES You already know what your family will eat Canada Day. Put some of that food on a plate, cover it with foil and drop it off at the old age home. Text your parents that you will leave something for them at the front desk.  What is a plate? It’s food,

Don’t forget to hug a tree tomorrow. It is just as important as the last minute shopping for Canada Day. Hug a tree? Yes, but shopping first. It will be very unique this year, so head to the grocery early today, to avoid the six feet apart lines and wait for grocery trolleys/carts. Someone fetches them from the car park and wipes them down to kill any devious COVID-19, before releasing them to new masked customers. Holidays like Canada Day and 4 th  of July revolve around food at a table, on the grass, beach or - for rich folks - on a boat. The table might be hard to find this year, if families decide to go to the public park for picnics. Why?  The six feet or two meters apart rule, for one. Parks like The Forks in Winnipeg are well-organized. They have tables spaced out two meters already.  Hug a tree? If you plan to take your chances and still go to a public park, you better get there early to hug a tree. Someone in your family must be responsible for securing one. This will be a dif

Supporters. Photo Credit: online pic. Undocumented Americans will continue to be the trump card in the next presidential election on 3 November 2020, because they own the name ‘America’.  By undocumented I don’t mean people who live in the U.S. without legal papers, but closet voters who carry Black Lives Matter placards during the day and vote Trump on their computers at night. Some of them are responsible for the empty seats in Tulsa Oklahoma during the Trump rally in June, that was supposed to be the mother of future rallies. Much as they support the sitting president, nameless voters took the health of the nation into consideration, the health of the world in fact because COVID-19 is a classless society. It affects royalty (Prince Charles), heads of state (Boris Johnson), movie stars (Tom Hanks) and comedians (D.L. Hugley).  Nameless Trump supporters therefore decided to avoid the rally, but Democrats should not interpret that as a direct deposit in their bank account. It’s all abo

Books published by established houses also have major editing errors like self published books.  That is why authors should prepare storyboards like old school filmmakers. They made a rough sketch of what every scene will look like: wide angle shot, medium shot, close up or over the shoulder shot, before they said lights, camera, action!  The author’s storyboard will concentrate on characters. It is assumed that self published books are sloppy because authors wear  many hats, and have a cash flow problem that make them approve publishing prematurely. Not necessarily. Errors also slip through the cracks in books from established publishing houses. Here’s one example. “Sixteen years ago, after his wife and unborn son had been killed in that car crash ……” Page 109 . Nikki looked at him . “What about the baby?” “She died too.”  Page 132 . Dilemma. Was the unborn child a boy or a girl? I think girl was the author’s initial preference because later on, the father says he wished they had give

  I respect pod casters because I’m not stress resistant. I can only take a milligram of stress. A kilo will probably kill me. I regard pod casts as mini movies because there are so many things to take care of, to make a podcast happen. I imagine they are stressful because podcast hosts usually wear so many hats: producer, director, cinematographer, sound, lighting, artistic director, computer editor, the whole pizza. I won’t go into podcast configuration because I know zilch about the technology that makes podcast record and broadcast, but I know what I would stress about because pod casts are movies. I would worry about the following: l   Pre-production : What? A big WHAT? Content for this week’s podcast. What will it be? Securing guests, merchandise, podcast support tools, clothes, make-up etc. l   Production (shooting) : no guests. What happened to this expert I was going to interview? He was supposed to be on standby at this desk or garage waiting for my green light? O.K. he’s the

'It's a boy. It's a girl.' It is new life, an occasion of great joy all over the world, especially for mothers, because some women die in childbirth. In Omo Ijebu , one of my favourite Yoruba movies, the woman died after giving birth in a strange land. The little girl survived.  COVID-19 has shifted focus. We monitor its numbers: so many died in long term care homes, so many died after travel, so many died in Italy and U.S., so many health care workers died and so on. There’s also new life, as women give birth, as we speak. This piece was prompted by a local hospital that mentions the other side of COVID-19: kids born during this traumatic time.  ‘Babies will continue to be born during this pandemic,’  a quote from a fund raising flyer for the St. Boniface Hospital Foundation, in Canada. New means a perpetuation of the present. That is why we associate New Year’s eve with balloons, fireworks, popping champagne and dancing. Kids born on that day usually make headlines an

As the title indicates, this blog was inspired by cinema, but graduated to general commentary about book reviews, politics, immigration, being broke, gender, everything.  It also has lessons for those interested in the language isi-Zulu. Its umbilical cord is buried in the mountains, valleys, waterfalls and rivers of  KwaZulu, in South Africa.  Today’s lesson is about listening, something that is in short supply at home, workplace and corridors of government. Listen is la-le-la  in Zulu. You say the first part like lull, the second like lamb and the last like lull. La-le-la . Listen, is a song Beyonce sang in Dreamgirls , directed by Bill Condon. Deena, her character recorded it in the studio, while Curtis (Jamie Foxx), her lover and selfish manager looked on. Quite a sad song actually, how people live together but are clueless about each other.  ENGLISH ZULU All of you listen. Lalelani. Lalelani, a boy’s name. There’s a reason why they gave the baby that name. Maybe somebody in the fa

Thinking outside the box. Do they teach it in business school, or concentrate on the mission and vision framed on the wall in corporate offices, two things even top management doesn’t understand? COVID-19 is here, wrecking havoc in office towers, business districts and people’s income. There’s no easy solution for survival but thinking outside the box can be the solution. Most businesses are trying that option, but it is within the COVID-19 directive like six feet apart and wiping shopping trolleys/carts and everything else that can be sanitized. WINNIPEG MANITOBA CANADA One Canadian business called The Forks thought outside the box. It is the pulse of the city because it has everything families need for relaxation: the river with the fabulous geese gliding along, boat trips, bakery, restaurants, coffee shops, book shops and a unique bar called THE COMMON, which mints money because of its bustling trade. Then COVID-19 happened. The Common thought outside the box. 1.   They moved seatin

More kids wish to be sports stars than doctors. Basketball for example. It’s either they love the game or because they dream of having their names on sneakers. Simply put, they want to be millionaires. COVID-19 might change NBA contracts. Having your name on a pair of footwear means you’re good. You are on top of your game. That is why Nike, Adidas and other brands put your name on a pair of sneakers.  It’s good business, money in the bank. Fans will buy them because of the name. You will get a cut of course, because you are in the hall of fame, basketball fame. Most little boys want to play in the NBA for that fame and fortune.   The fortune part might be cut in half because of COVID-19. NBA games are about people packed arm to arm on uncomfortable seats and loving it. Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, makes a profit if Raptors fans buy all 19,800 seats.  The United Center in Chicago loves season ticket holders and other fans that buy the 21,000 seats in the house. Jim Dolan, New York Knic

What is a Song? Singer Khalid,  song Can we just talk. The COVID-19 stay at home made us do things we haven’t done in a while, like listening to the radio. We seldom do it anymore because we have radio apps that give us radio stations from all over the world. Listening to the radio without head phones has been a joy. I had forgotten that I can do many things around here while listening to the radio. I’m not a hostage, like watching television or screening online movies. What I find enjoyable the most though, are the songs, especially songs about journeys, songs that explain who what why where and when, songs like Memories by Maroon 5 and Khalid’s Can’t We Just Talk ?   Memories . Somebody is at a bar and reminisces about yesterday and today, people he lost on the way and the hurt. Oh! the hurt. I wonder why we remember the pain and not the good times. That’s human nature I guess. ‘everybody hurts sometimes everybody hurts someday .’ It’s just a song but why does it reminds me of my own

The potency of the human mind is at its peak and glory in toddlers and their experiments: trying out things, falling down then come up with a fresh strategy on how to climb that chair or push their own stroller. The mind is like manual driving. You have the clutch, five gears, break pads and a round thing called the steering wheel. How you press the clutch and change gears depends on road conditions, something my driving instructor in Toronto Ontario, drummed into me until I got my licence. We have burnt that licence to drive through mountains, valleys and life’s icy streets because we have Yahoo or Google. It is quite disturbing in group discussions at work, church and wellness circles. Before COVID-19, we belonged to certain spaces that we felt could empower us academically, professionally or health-wise. For some group members, such spaces are the only forum where they have a voice, because of oppressive home fronts. It is therefore debilitating to see cellphones used as mouthpieces

Pic: Nonqaba waka Msimang Military generals are having sleepless nights .  COVID-19, and worldwide ‘I can’t breathe’  protests, against the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police threaten to incinerate the word ‘enemy’. Who is the enemy if the virus transcends physical and ideological borders and equally kills people in New York and Beijing? George Floyd was an African American, so why did New Zealand attract all those people to protest his death?   COVID-19 has masked the world. Pic: Nonqaba waka Msimang Nurses nurse patients back to health. Farmers grow food. The military protects what it regards as its own and kills enemies. Enemies are people who don’t look like military commanders, eat like them, raise kids like them or worship like them. Killing is their job description. That is what the military does, although presidents and prime ministers never use the word ‘kill’ when they justify attacking another country. Their speeches are peppered with words like patriotism, defenc

Businesses of all shapes and sizes are dealing with social distancing and the writing is already on the wall, less money coming in. However, social distancing affects them differently depending on the nature of the business. Hotels for example. Hotels are a shoulder to shoulder business right from tour buses full of out of town visitors, check in at the front desk, taking the elevator to the six floor, and meeting at the hotel bar in the evening. Tour bus or not, front desk is always a hive of activity because other guests arrive in their cars or are delivered by cabs. How do hotels accommodate the six feet or two meters requirement?  Do they renovate reception areas to factor in the six feet? Will that guarantee more guests? Renovation is not a solution right now, coming back after COVID-19 stopped operations three months ago. Some minor renovations can take place, if hotels monitor what is happening in other businesses. Food stores, drugstores and bakeries have installed shields to m