Dyson Handheld Vacuums: C+

Okay, it is still better than any other handheld vacuum. But:

1. Gryroscopic force twists your hand clockwise slowly, and the lightweight nozzle turns too; then, one corrects for this, and the lightweight nozzle does not twist back with a turn of the wrist: the sensation is like trying to pick up an olive with a toothpick attached to an andiron.

2. The trigger pinches the trigger finger. Until one learns to adjust, and hold the trigger in a funny way, one has a sharp red line and discomfort each and every time one uses the thing.

3. The Dyson Handheld can run with the latch open: watch out, dust and debris gets accelerated all over the room.

4. Originally the Dyson Car Vac, now, it is not. Where's the lighter-plug gone to? Did it short out someone's Mercedes?

Mr. Dyson, did you actually design this thing? What does "design" mean? Or, as I suspect, did you make the innards and farm out the handheld to others to "design"?

Fox an' the Fliies

An Afrikaner University which staffs a South African history journal made the mistake of asking me to review C. v. O.'s Fox an' the Fliies (I want to avoid searches), in a review essay. ("Or, a group review --" Me: "No, I'll do it.")

Anyway here is the last comment from the referee, who looked at my revisions:

> But more importantly,
> the author must still discuss the substantive,
> wide-ranging historiographical issues raised by the
> book: these, as my initial response indicated, would
> include the Atlantic World, late 19th century
> globalisation, gender and race, criminality, and
> identity, amongst others.

This is supposed to be in the conclusion of the essay.

[Addendum: I hear now it is going forward as is . . .]

Future Projects

Clownface.

Mukoma Ngugi

Said something very smart in an interview. That Africa got democracy as an abstraction, without the material in it. They didn't get the civic institutions and cross-regional alliances that underpin it. It's like a map of roads and towns which do not yet exist.