Pink Cupcakes and Black Bosco

Pink Cupcakes and Black Bosco

Last weekend was better than I could have planned.  The 32 kilometer run that turned into 28 km instead still left me buzzing with endorphins for the rest of the day.  Becca was, as usual, a pleasure to meet for dinner.  Sunday's pink cupcakes bake and delivery left me with a smile and reaffirmed that I have amazing women in my life.  (Keep squeezing your boobies, girls!  Not just in October.)  Sunday evening I reconnected with an old friend, and that truly brought me happiness.  As Angela stated it earlier that day, "It's hard to find amazing people, but somehow we do.  And it's like a miracle every time!"

Another small joy that contributed to the culmination of a fabulous weekend was reclining back in my comfy-chair under a throw blanket and reading The Ballad of Black Bosco by Ernest Bazanye.  I mentioned Ernest on my blog once in a post back in 2007.  Keeping up with his blog address can become your new pastime.  But his writing and brilliant social commentary are the treasures at the end of the wild goose chase.

The Ballad of Black Bosco is a pretty impressive novella; it even has it's own facebook page!  According to which, it is about "two Kampala boys.  One becomes famous, the other becomes rich."  Bazanye describes the process of not finding a publisher in true Bazanye wit on his blog:

What does a novelist do when he or she (he in this case) finds himself in a country  where neither Penguin, Random House, Barnes nor Noble ever set foot? Does he fly to America? But he wasn’t given a visa. So does he then not write the novel. That’s what I did. 

Or that’s what I thought. Until the idle typing I had been doing in between bits of actual work at office began to take the shape of a real story and not a blog post, so I just went ahead and wrote it. I had a novel there. 

So, what does a novelist do when he has a novel and Random House, Penguin, Barnes and Noble still haven’t called? He lets the novel gather dust on a C-Drive somewhere.
Actually, I wrote this so long ago, the computer I typed it on is actually junk now. It was in 2007 those prehistoric ends. 

So what does a novelist do when he finds it on a backup CD and thinks, hey, someone might enjoy reading this? 

He puts it up online and says, well, if you want to read it, please take a look. It’s funny. You might like it.

Like it, I did.  

I even highlighted some quotes that left me LOLing and ROFLMAO using my new, nifty Kindle:

• "I knew that voice.  I had to turn the radio up really really loud for that woman I recall.  I remember I had to switch from the BBC to Capital FM to drown her out, and ended up having to listen to Celine Dion for an hour."

• "Al fresco means it is outdoors but there are no flies."

• "Doc asked the hooker on his lap to move her hairweave out of his face for a minute so that he could make his point that it was wicked and vile."

And my personal favouite highlight:

• "Why do we need Ugandans to sound like Americans?  The market for American accents has alredy been cornered.  By Americans."

Bazanye's masterful skill at writing in that horrible Ugandan-style-fake-American accent led me to wonder if he were guilty of penning the finger-nails-down-a-chalk-board irritating script for that ad from our-logo-is-the-colour-piss-after-several-days-of-not-drinking-water-and-you're-super-dehydrated-after-a-night-of-binge-drinking telecom company.

My favourite quotes may not make much sense right now, and that is because they are out of context.  I know.  So take advantage of the free download of The Ballad of Black Bosco and have a laughter-filled read over the weekend.  And as our friends over at The WorkZine say, "After you download and read, please go [to] the Facebook page of Black Bosco here and tell the writer to not make you laugh like that again."