This is one amazing tune I can’t hold back sharing with you all and it is coming from Klef Sounds veteran music producer “Samklef” in his new single titled “Nepa Don Bring Light” featuring “Grafton Records” frontman “Mr 2kay” produced by “Samklef”. Download enjoy!!!
Before stepping your feet on the Nigerian soil or ever claim being a Nigerian these are 95 amazing facts about the country. Some of this facts are strange but true…..
1. Nigeria, with a 2013 estimated population of 174,507,539 is the most populous Black nation and the 7th most populated nation in the entire world, trailing after—from least to
most—Pakistan, Brazil, Indonesia, USA, India and China (1.3bn).
2. Nigerians are 1/5th the total population of Black Africa.
3. Nigeria, with 521 languages has the fourth most in the world. This includes 510 living languages, two second languages without native speakers and 9 extinct languages.
4. The Portuguese reached Nigeria in 1472. In 1880 the British began conquering Nigeria’s south. The north was conquered by 1903.
5. Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian Nobel laureate. He wrote ‘Telephone Conversation!’
6. With a net worth of $16.1bn, Nigeria’s Aliko Dangote is the richest Black person in the world.
7. Yoruba and their bloodlines worldwide have the highest rate of twinning (having twins) in the world.
8. The 2006 Census found Nigerians to be the highest educated ethnic or racial group in America.
9.Travel Visa was not required to travel to the UK
10. The Northern knot, Arewa insignia has Christian origins, investigation by Ibraheem A. Waziri revealed. It is adapted from the Church Celtic knot.
11. Pre-tribalism: Malam Umaru Altine, a northern Fulani man was the first elected Mayor of Enugu, in the east, and was even re-elected for a second term.
12. Pre-tribalism: John Umoru, from Etsako in today’s Edo State (Western region) was elected for the House of Assembly to represent Port Harcourt in the Eastern Nigerian House of Assembly.
13. The Colonial Cantonments Proclamation of 1914 established ‘foreign quarters,’ ‘Sabon Gari,’ institutionalizing the Sabon Garuruwa
system of ‘foreigner’ residential segregation in Nigeria.
14. Crispin Curtis Adeniyi-Jones (1876-1957) who the street in Ikeja, ‘Adeniyi-Jones’ was named after, was a medical director from Sierra Leone (a Saro). As a co-founder of NNDP, he
won one of the Lagos 3 legislative council seats in 1923 and represented Nigerians for 15 yrs.
15. Saros was the name given to 19th and 20th century ‘Creole’ African literati migrants from Sierra Leone.
16. Amaros was the name for repatriated Brazilian and Cuban slaves; the ‘Aguda’ people of Lagos today. This Brazilian community includes deportees of the brave “Malê Revolt” in Portugal.
17. British colonization was not all ‘happy trade,’ but involved brutal terror against non-cooperation and stiff opposition. Captain Lord Esme Gordon Lenox, ‘With The West African Frontier Force,’ describes: “…we stormed
down to Amassana, which was a town
supposed to be friendly and fined them 25 goats and 20 chickens for non-assistance, then returned to Agbeni and burned half…October 1st was spent in continuance of yesterdays incendiraism by burning every town or farm we could see. I shudder to think
of how many houses we have destroyed in these two days. On our way back to Egbbeddi in the afternoon we passed by Sabagreia and told our old friend Chief Ijor that most likely we should burn down Sabagreia the next day…”
18. Nigeria’s population was just 16 million in 1911. It is projected to hit 444 million by 2050, surpassing the US and becoming the 4th largest in the world.
19. The population of Lagos today is more than the total population of all Eastern states combined.
20. Lagos’ population in 1872 was 60,000. By 2015 it will be the third largest city in the entire world.
21. Nigeria’s north (719,000 sq. km), occupies 80% of Nigeria’s land mass. In size it is four times the South.
22. 1st republic Aviation Minister, Chief Mbazulike Amaechi hid former South African President, Nelson Mandela, for six months in Nigeria to evade his arrest by the apartheid regime.
23. Gangsta: In 1984 under the disciplinary Buhari/Idiagbon government, there was a sophisticated attempt to kidnap and repatriate ex-civilian regime minister of transport, Umaru Dikko from the UK, anesthetized in a freight crate, for the embezzlement of $1bn under the Shagari regime.
24. Valor: Part of the ‘Forgotten Army,’ Nigerians volunteered to fight with the allied forces among the 81st and 82nd West African Divisions, in the Second World War.
25. The Adubi war in 1918 was a major uprising by 30,000 Abeokuta Ebga warriors against the colonial government for colonization, taxation and slave labor. One British was
killed and rail and telegraph lines destroyed. The British rewarded their soldiers with medals for quelling the uprising. Awape Adediran a Molashin/ Kingmaker was imprisoned for his active involvement.
26. Activist Mrs. Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti travelled widely, including to the Eastern bloc (Hungary, USSR and China where she met Mao Zedong). These interactions angered Nigeria, Britain and America. America called her a communist and refused her a U.S. Visa.
27. Mrs. Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti, legendary Fela’s mother, was one of the delegates that negotiated Nigeria’s independence in Britain.
28. According to Lord Luggard, there were 25,000 Qur’anic schools with about 250,000 pupils in the north.
29. Sardauna of Sokoto said he preferred foreign workers to Igbo’s because he felt Igbo’s are domineering. This was while Nigeria existed as regions with regional administrations.
30. Kaduna Nzeogwu killed Sardauna in Nigeria’s first military coup.
31. In 1966, a mischievous Igbo owned bakery allegedly made a loaf of bread with a label that depicted Nzeogwu as the Saint in the ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ medieval tale, killing Sardauna, the ‘dragon,’ this labeled
bread provoked deadly anti-Igbo riots.
32. Idrîs Aloma (1571-1603) King of Kanem-Bornu went on pilgrimage and came across firearms. He brought some guns back, along with Turks to train his army on how to use them.
33. Travel Visa was not required to travel to the United Kingdom in 1975.
34. A brand new car sold for N2000 in 1975. A ticket to London was less than N100 in 1975.
35. In 1976, 75 kobo exchanged for one British Pound and 60 kobo for one US dollar.
36. During the Shagari administration in 1985, N7 was exchanging for one dollar.
37. Nigeria took its first loan from the World Bank in 1977.
38. Obasanjo’s first term and Babangida’s regime oversaw the weakening of the naira.
39. General Buhari and Idiagbon rejected IMF demands that Nigeria devalue its currency.
40. Babangida’s coup in 1985 was invaluable to the colonialists suspected to have been in support as it led to Nigeria accepting SAP restrictions, loans and crippling foreign monetary conditions.
41. Nigeria has 5 of the 10 richest pastors in the entire world, with net worth’s according to Forbes, from $10-150 million. They are Pastors, David Oyedepo, E. A. Adeboye, Chris
Oyakhilome, Mathew Ashimolowo and
Temitope Joshua.
42. Nigeria has the 4th highest number of poor, living under a dollar a day in the entire world. 100 million are ‘destitute’ according to figures from the NBS (National Bureau of Statistics).
43. Nigeria, the 3rd biggest economy in Africa is 160th out of 177 countries in HDI (Human Development Index).
44. Nigeria has the highest paid legislators in the entire world.
45. Based on amount squandered, of an income of $81 billion per year, Nigeria is the most corrupt nation in the world.
46. The nation with the most defrauded people, aka ‘mugus,’ in history, is Nigeria. Successive administrations continue to loot a greater percentage of the nation’s wealth, running in hundreds of billions of dollars.
47. Nigeria in 2013 was rated the worst country to be born based on welfare and prosperity projection.
48. Aliko Dangote funded Presidents Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan’s 4th republic campaigns. Buhari rejected funding from Dangote.
49. Usman dan Fodio (1754–1817) was trained in classical Islamic science, philosophy and theology and wrote over 100 books on society, culture, religion, governance and politics. He could only declare Jihad when he
was made leader in Gudu {In Islam you can only declare Jihad if you are an official Muslim leader}.
50. The Borno Empire rejected Dan Fodio’s colonization jihad. Al-Hajj Muhammad al-Amîn ibn Muhammad al-Kânemî not only militarily defended his Empire, but also did so by religious, theological, legal and political debates, challenging why a Muslim Empire
should colonize another.
51. Kano history has it that a great warrior princess Magajiya Maimuna led her cavalry from Zaria to conquer Kumbwada.
52. Kumbwada in Kano today is ruled by Queen Hajiya Haidzatu Ahmed, who presides over up to half a million subjects. A throne curse which makes men sick and die, keeps males
off the throne. {Sadly, the woman ruled Kumbwada is the least funded chiefdom in Nigeria}.
53. Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) is Nigeria’s leading trade partner in Africa.
54. There are several Nigerian officials in the government of English speaking The Gambia.
55. There is a Nigerian origin, Yoruba chief in Accra. Chief Brimah is the only foreign Chief with a seat in the Ghanaian traditional council.
56. Cross River State: The Ejagham (Ekoi) people in the Southeast are believed to have originated the Nsibidi (Nsibiri) writing system which later spread to the Efik, Igbo, Ibibio,
Efut, Banyang and Annag peoples.
57. Discovered in 1928, Nigeria’s western region hosts West Africa’s oldest civilization; the Nok civilization which flourished between 1000 BC
and 300 BC. {Nok sculptures recently went on display disappointingly in Germany (not Africa).}
58. Finished in 1460 the Benin Iya or moat is a historic world defense wonder. Spanning 1,200 kilometers with walls as high as 18 metres, it is the world’s largest archeological structure.
59. Sungbo’s Eredo in Ogun state (6°49′N, 3°56′E) is a 100 mile system of up to 70 ft trenches and walls around Ijebu-Ode. It’s Queen, Bilkisu Sungbo has been attributed to
the Biblical Queen Sheeba (Queen Bilkis in Quran).
60. Lord Lugard estimated in 1904 that there were 170 walled towns still in existence in the whole of just the Kano province of northern Nigeria. He described Kano: ‘Commercial emporium of the western Sudan.’ Of its wall, he said, ‘I have never seen, nor even imagined, anything like it in Africa.’
61. Osun: Queen Luwo, the twenty-first Ooni (ruler) of Ile-Ife paved the streets with quartz pebbles—and broken pottery, in 1000AD. The architecture had decorations that originated
from Ancient America.
62. Borno: The capital city of Kanem-Borno, Ngazargamu, was one of the largest cities in 1658 AD; the metropolis housed “about quarter of a million people” and had 660 well
planned, wide and unbending streets.
63. In 1246 AD the Kanemi of Borno created a sensation in Tunisia when he sent a gift of a giraffe to Al-Mustapha, king of Tunis.
64. Sokoto: Two-story buildings with
constructions glazed with tsoluwa, (laterite gravel), 10 mile circumference city walls, some as high as 20 feet, is how 16th century Surame, a Sokoto metropolis created by empire ruler, Muhammadu Kanta Sarkin Kebbi, was. UNESCO describes Surame as “one of the wonders of human history, creativity and ingenuity.”
65. Kano: In 1851, this city, one of the largest in Africa, made 10 million sandal pairs and 5 million hides for export.
66. Kebbi: Nigeria’s Sorko Sea lords of Kebbi state, made ships (Kanta) which were used for far away expeditions, including the 1311AD, 2000 ship, famous voyage of Songhai Empire’s Mansa Abubakari II to the America’s, decades before Columbus.
67. Yobe: The oldest discovered boat in Africa, and 3rd oldest on the world, the 8500 yr old Dufuna canoe was discovered by a Fulani herdsman in 1987 in Dufuna village, Fune LGA.
68. Ondo: Confusing evolution scientists, the 13,000 yr old Iwo-Eleru cave skull, the oldest human fossil remains found in West Africa, has ‘ancient’ (140,000 yr old Laetoli)
features, yet lived in more modern times.
69. Benin Kingdom: The high quality and highly sophisticated bronze work of the Benin Kingdom dating as far back as the 13th century is a world wonder. Great works in iron, wood, ivory, and terra cotta products
also highlight the empire’s history.
70. Benin Kingdom: Lourenco Pinto, captain of a ship that carried missionaries to Warri in 1619, described Benin kingdom, ‘Great Benin
where the king resides is larger than Lisbon, all the streets run straight and as far as the eyes can see….’
71. Akwa Ibom: King Jaja of Opobo (1821–1891) founded Opobo city-state in 1867 and shipped palm oil to Britain independently of British middle men.
72. Ancient Greeks appear to have Nigerian roots as supported by the Benin Haplogroup or Haplogroup 19. According to Jide Uwechia, ‘The Benin Haplotype (which originates from
Nigeria, West Africa) accounts for HbS
associated chromosomes in Sicily Northern Greece.’
73. Ilorin’s Oba Afonja utilized Fulani warriors to help rebel against the Oyo Empire. The warriors after defeating Oyo took over Ilorin and Sheikh Alimi, their leader became the first Emir.
74. Much of north Nigeria was part of the Songhai Empire. Muhammad Kanta annexed Kebbi and other states between 1512 and 1517.
75. The Obasanjo military regime converted Nigeria from a Parliamentary system to a Presidential system of government.
76. Much of traditional pre-colonial Nigeria operated a parliamentary form of government. The council of elders could make or impeach the King.
77. General Johnson Thomas Umurakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi on 24 May 1966, with Decree No. 34, dissolved Nigeria’s regions, creating provinces. He unified Regional Public Services
under a single Commission. Riots were
provoked in Kano and mutiny in Abeokuta; eventually there was a coup.
78. In 1967 Gowon split the four regions into 12 states.
79. Gowon’s Decree No. 8 of 1967 after the Aburi conference restored Nigeria as a confederacy.
80. Late President Murtala Muhammed’s dad, Pam Azatus Iyok was from Dogon-Gaba, near Vom in Plateau state, Nigeria’s Middle Belt.
Pam became a Muslim and married Ramat from Kano. Murtala Muhammed’s wife, Hafsat Ajoke was a Yoruba lady.
81. Ex- President Yakubu Gowon from Jos state (Middle Belt) is a Christian. General Obasanjo was his Army chief who helped him defeat the Biafra attempted secession from 1967-1970.
82. Nigeria has been ruled for 30 years by Christians (25 years if Azikiwe is excluded).
83. Mujahid Asari Dokubo, the leader of the southern Movement for Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and the most vocal enemy of the north, is a Muslim.
84. Nigeria is not roughly divided between a Muslim north and a Christian South. The far north, east and far south do have concentrations, but the rest of the nation defies such demarcations.
85. In the Southwest, Osun, Lagos, Ondo and Oyo have a higher population of Muslims than Christians according to counts. Benue, Nasarawa and Plateau in the north have Christian majorities.
86. According to the Senate joint committee, Nigeria’s chief terrorist leader, Abubakar Shekau is not a Nigerian; he hails from Niger republic. {Shekau is believed by security
services to be deceased.}
87. According to current demographics, after Hausa-Fulani (29%), Yoruba (21%), Igbo (18%) and Ijaw (10%) comes Kanuri (4%) and then Ibibio (3.5%) and Tiv (2.5%).
88. Not really a northern caucus, but it was late M. K. O. Abiola that orchestrated and sponsored the Buhari /Idiagbon coup and then again the Babangida coup overthrow of
Buhari. –Shagari memoir, “Beckoned to
Serve;” Babangida, “Karl Maier – Midnight in Nigeria.” (Max Siollun)
89. The leading caucus is basically a childhood friendship: President Obasanjo was childhood friends with President Babangida, President
Abacha and Commander Danjuma.
90. President Babangida was childhood friends with President Abdulsalam.
91. President Obasanjo graduated Abdulsalam who later became President and went on to hand over power to democratically arranged
President Obasanjo.
92. Under the Presidential system, Nigerians have had 7 years total Northern rule and 11+ years Southern rule.
93. Total civilian rule, Parliamentary and Presidential, Nigeria has had 12 years Northern and 11+ years Southern rule.
94. 6 coups is the highest number of any nation in Africa. Nigeria along with Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Uganda and Mauritania are the nations with 6 coups.
95. The Biafra war included a ‘Mid West invasion.’ The Midwest was either a battle field or in Biafra’s sights—Dr. Nowamagbe A. Omoigui
The rapper had been honored by MTV with the Video Vanguard Award, with his award presented to him by Taylor Swift.
In his award speech, Kanye was very serious, talking about his art and awards. He then ended the speech with: “I have decided in 2020 to run for president.”
Read the full speech and watch the video below.
Bro. Bro! Listen to the kids.
Jeremy, I gotta put it down for a second. It’s beautiful. Jeremy Scott designed.
First of all, thank you, Taylor, for being so gracious in giving me this award this evening. Thank you. And I often think back to the first day I met you, also. You know, I think about when I’m in the grocery store with my daughter, and I have a really great conversation about fresh juice at the — you know? And at the end, they say, “Oh, you’re not that bad after all.” And like, I think about it sometimes, like, it crosses my mind a little bit like when I go to the baseball game and, like, 60,000 people boo me. It crosses my mind a little bit. Just — [applause]
I think if I had to do it all again, what would I have done? Would I have worn a leather shirt? Would I have drank a half a bottle of Hennessy and gave the rest of it to the audience? Yeah, I know y’all drink that bottle too. If I had a daughter at that time, would I have went on stage and grabbed the mic from someone else’s?
You know, this arena tomorrow, it’s gonna be a completely different set-up. Some concert, something like that. This stage will be gone. After that night, the stage is gone, but the effect that it had on people remains. The — [applause] The problem was the contradiction. The contradiction is I do fight for artists, but in that fight, I somehow… what’s disrespectful to artists, I — I didn’t know how to say the right thing, the perfect thing. [sighs] I sat at the Grammys and saw Justin Timberlake and Cee-Lo lose. Gnarls Barkley and the FutureLove/Sexy Back album. And bro, Justin, I ain’t trying to put you on blast, but I saw that man in tears, bro. You know. And I was thinking, “He deserved to win Album of the Year.”
And this small box that we are as the entertainers of the evening. [Applause] How could you explain that? Sometimes, I feel like, you know, all this shit they run about beef and all that, sometimes I feel like I died for the artists’ opinion, for artists to be able to have an opinion after they were successful. [Applause] I’m not no politician, bro. And look at that. You know how many times MTV ran that footage again? Because it got them more ratings? You know how many times they announced Taylor was gonna give me the award, because it got them more ratings? [Applause]
Listen to the kids, bro! [Applause]
I still don’t understand awards shows. I don’t understand how they get five people who worked their entire life, one, sold records, sold concert tickets, to come, stand on the carpet, and for the first time in their life be judged on a chopping block and have the opportunity to be considered a loser. I don’t understand it, bro! I don’t understand when the biggest album, or the biggest video — I’m conflicted, bro! I just wanted people to like me more. But fuck that, bro! [Applause]
2015! I will die for the art, for what I believe in. And the art ain’t always gonna be polite. Y’all might be thinking right now, I wonder, did he smoke some before he came out here? The answer is, yes, I rolled up a little something. I knocked the edge off. [Applause]
I don’t know what’s gonna happen tonight. I don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow, bro. But all I can say to my artists, my fellow artists: just worry how you feel at the time, man. Just worry about how you feel, and don’t never — you know what I’m saying? I’m confident. I believe in myself. We the Millennials, bro. This is a new — this is a new mentality. We not gonna control our kids with brands. We not gonna teach low self esteem and hate to our kids. We gonna teach our kids that they can be something! We gonna teach our kids that they can stand up for theyself. We gonna teach our kids to believe in themselves. If my grandfather was here right now, he would not let me back down! [Rolling applause]
I don’t know what I’m gonna lose after this. It don’t matter, though, because it ain’t about me. It’s about ideas, bro. New ideas! People with ideas! People who believe in truth!
And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided, in 2020, to run for president. [Applause]
Source: 360nobs
The ongoing probe of the immediate past administration by President Muhammadu Buhari is to beam its searchlight on the alleged purchase of three mobile stages, costing $6.9m, by former President Goodluck Jonathan and two of his officials, a Presidency source has said.
According to a document, which was obtained from the Presidency on Saturday, the deal, which is now a subject of investigation, was allegedly carried out by Jonathan; his Chief Security Officer, Mr. Gordon Obuah; and former Minister of Petroleum, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke.
The fund was said to have been withdrawn from one of the numerous accounts of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
The $6.9m (about N1.37bn) was said to have been withdrawn for the purpose of buying three pieces of 40-feet mobile stages for use by Jonathan during mass public speaking events.
According to the document, apart from the fact that the sum for the stages was “incredibly inflated”, there is currently no evidence that the stages were bought since the money was withdrawn.
The document read, “While the cost of mobile stages ranges in sizes and designs, only outlandish rock star musicians in Europe and the US spend hundreds of thousands on their huge stages way bigger than the 40-feet stages.
“Even then, those musicians and superstars would not pay over $2m per stage, according to industry sources.
“The process of procurement of the three mobile stages was neither known to extant Nigerian laws and due process regulations nor were the offices of the Auditor-General and the Accountant-General in the know, according to the investigators.”
It added that the phony purchase was carried out late 2011, a few months after Jonathan won the presidential election for a full term after having completed the term of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua.
Jonathan’s CSO was said to have initiated a memo to the former President on October 17, 2011, asking for the purchase of three mobile stages.
He was reported to have written in that memo to Jonathan that memo referred to “my earlier discussion with Your Excellency on the security implication of your public appearances and your subsequent directive on the need to procure a secured presidential platform.”
The Presidency source said on the same day, without any financial advice or purchase order reviews, the former President approved the request to buy the three stages and minuted the memo to the then Minister for Petroleum Resources.
In his minute, Jonathan was said to have written, “We have discussed this, please deal.”
According to the document, on the same October 17, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Administrative Matters, Mr. Matt Aikhionbere, did another letter on the strength of the President’s approval requesting the minister to take action on the request to purchase the stages for $6.9m.
It added, “By the next month, an NNPC payment voucher, number 3840336, was already in place, revealing that the money was released.
“NNPC directed that the money be taken from one of its accounts in New York CITIBANK with sort code CITIUS 33, and Routing number 021000089.
“It was first routed from the US bank to an NNPC account in Zenith Bank account number 5000026593, Maitama branch in Abuja, from where the money was sent to a private account.
“The sum of $6.9m was then credited to a Sterling Bank account of one J. Marine Logistics Limited, Abuja, a company investigators said was registered by Obuah.
“The CSO himself, according to investigators, has not been able to show proof of the purchase and his memo irked his bosses at the SSS that he took the initiative to write requesting for the stages, an action which officials said was way above his pay grade.”
The document added that it was not the duty or responsibility of the CSO to make the determination on that purchase as he was meant to have informed the service, which will then review the situation and act accordingly.
It added that the $6.9miilion in question was promptly paid on Nov. 29, 2011 into a private account belonging to the former CSO.
“The former President approved the procurement of the mobile platforms without due process and bypassing the Procurement Act; neither was there an appropriation in the 2011 budget for such facility,” the document quoted investigators as saying.
It added that neither the then Minister of Finance nor the Director-General of the Budget Office was aware of the deal.
“Investigators say this is just one of the several instances, where the Jonathan administration used secret NNPC accounts to fund many questionable projects and for alleged personal financial aggrandisement.
“Already, the CSO has been questioned over his role and activities in the Jonathan Presidency. It will be recalled that he was arrested, detained, questioned and later released.
Attempts to get the National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party, Chief Olisa Metuh, to react to the allegation against the former President did not succeed as calls to his mobile telephone did not go through.
He had yet to respond to an SMS sent to his mobile phone as of the time of filing this report.
Source: PUNCHNG.
Singer, D’Banj has revealed his only regret at 35 years of age.
The singer was speaking to Saturday Beats said,
“While growing up, there were some goals I set for myself and at 35; I have accomplished most of them.
Sadly, I have not accomplished the primary goals. The main one is marriage.
By now, I thought I would have been married. I had always thought I would have a child before the age of 30. That fantasy did not become a reality because I wanted to strengthen my brand.
I wanted to be sure that I was on the right path career-wise because as a
kid, you need to crawl before you can walk and eventually run. I wanted to be sure I surpass all boundaries and reach a certain stage where I can
easily balance my work and family.
That is the main reason why I am not married.”
He added that apart from marriage, the other regret he has is not having a Grammy award.
“Apart from marriage, one other thing I desire to have is the Grammy but that is already in the pipeline and it would be acquired soon.
I didn’t know I would meet Kanye West while I was dreaming big as a child. But I dreamt that I would go places and people would hear my song all over the world.
I also dreamt that Caucasians would dance to my music. I dreamt I would top music charts across the world and all that has happened. I have dreamt of performing in front of thousands of people on a global stage and I have achieved that. For all these I am
grateful to God,”
Source: Akpraise
After premiering her latest movie, ‘Dark’ at Silverbird Cinemas on Saturday August 28th, Rukky Sanda spoke at length, career and other
things at large.
With her fingers in a lot of pies, Rukky says she has multiple personalities that take care of all
her businesses.
‘I’m an interior designer, scriptwriter,
actress, director and producer, and
I’ve been doing this for about 10
years now. I think I’m just different at
different times. It’s a blessing
actually.
I love writing and listening to stories.
I also love being involved in every
aspect of my movies; I can edit and
do a couple of other things. I don’t
like being ignorant about any part of
movie production.’ She veered into
movie production after appearing in
only three movies, and we wanted to
know why.
She answers, ‘For me, it was more of a business decision, because at that time, it wasn’t like actresses were being paid well. I’ve always been
a business person, and I wanted to invest in the business aspect of Nollywood. I acted in my first
movie in 2004, and I produced my first film in 2005.’
But did she actually make money from that
movie?
She smiles wryly in response, ‘As a
matter of fact, I still have people owing me till date. Some of the people I worked with even went
behind my back to mass dub and sell the movies.’
On the lessons she has learnt, she talks like someone who has walked through the valley of the shadow of death and survived. With a bold
face she says, ‘In the beginning, it was more of a business decision to just make money, but now, I’ve grown into it, and I actually have a passion for the art of movie production; I just want to make a
difference with my movies. Then, I had very little knowledge about production, but now, I’m more of a
professional.’
Many would believe that she had a rich family member somewhere who ‘dashed’ her the money she used in producing her first movie, considering her inexperience at the time. She doesn’t agree with that assertion, and she wastes no time in countering it. In her words, ‘Before I got into Nollywood, I was already doing business.
I used to sell stuff, so I had my
money to put into it, and my mum
supported me with a loan. She
collected her money back though, so
there was no sentiment attached. I
won’t say it was easy starting out
because I spent about N3m in making my first movie, and that was quite a lot in 2005.
I don’t actually get Executive Producers for my movies; I
do that myself. Not like I don’t believe in going all out to source for funds, but it’s just not my thing. I had
someone once who wanted to sponsor my movie, and we did that. But before the movie came out, they were already on my neck asking for their money. I had to return it to them after we finished filming; we had not even finished editing then. I told them I’ll give them their money back, but that they wouldn’t get any credit on the movie. Ever since, I only produce movies if it’s convenient for me.’
So we wouldn’t think she’s just guess-working her way to the top, she informs us that she has
taken a directing course in Houston, USA, as well as a Visual Effects course, but she’s also quick to add that she’s still learning every day.
The tattoo-loving actress is known to be blunt and she speaks about that side of herself:
‘I believe in expressing myself; always stating my point, and sticking to what I believe in. People may read different meanings to it, but at
the end of the day, I can only be myself; I can’t try to be someone else, or back-up what I don’t
believe in. I wasn’t brought up like that. It has brought me here so far, and I love me.’
But has being blunt ever got her into trouble?
She enthuses, ‘I don’t get into trouble. If I say anything anywhere, I will stand by it. I’m not the
kind of girl who believes in gossip, or idle chatter. If I have anything to say, I say it and move on. If you have any problem with it, come and tell me.’
On reports that she once claimed to be half-Ghanaian, Rukky sets the records straight. ‘I think that was when I went to Ghana for the first
time, and I was with some colleagues. We were just messing around and I think Yvonne Nelson told me something in Ghana that could be translated to what I tweeted at the time. It wasn’t anything serious; I don’t know why people take little things serious.’
On her new movie, Dark, she talks about it like a mother whose child is going to school for the first time; the excitement is palpable.
‘It’s extremely different from the regular movies we see out there. It’s about a woman who lost her baby
during childbirth, and she actually believed it was the fault of the doctor, so she planned to kill the
doctor’s child in return. Usually, I always call everybody I want to feature in my movies before I
start writing, so I try to think about how they fit into the roles. When I had the idea for this movie, I
thought about Van Vicker, and I told him that I wanted to write a movie for him, and I also asked
if he would be free to shoot at a certain time.
He was like it’s different, and that he was ready to do it. I love to write romantic movies. That is empowering to women, and generally makes women happy, but Dark is a very serious movie; a
lot was involved. It’s about family, pain, and a mother’s bond to her child. It sounds the same, but
it’s different because it has a twist to it.’
She speaks more on the cast and their shared experience while on set, ‘Monalisa Chinda played
the Doctor, while Van Vicker was her husband. I acted as the obsessed woman which is something
I’ve never done before. I also had two buff cops in the persons of Bolanle Ninolowo and IK Ogbonna.
There was also this amazing new child actor called Demarion Young who played Van’s son. It really
took us a long time to get the perfect child for the movie, because we don’t have a lot of child actors in Nigeria.
We held several auditions before we
could get the perfect person. The boy is so good, and he delivered
his lines perfectly. He also looks so
much like Van that I had to ask Van if he doesn’t have any child in Nigeria. My set is always fun and lively, and we needed it to be that way on this particular movie because the film is so serious. I had the best cast obviously.’
Dwelling on her sense of fashion, Rukky says she can never be caught wearing anything that doesn’t look good on her. She further defines
fashion thus, ‘It means expressing yourself, and being comfortable in your own skin. I can never leave home without my sunglasses though, and the most I’ve ever spent on them is about a thousand Dollars. But when it comes to what I can spend the most on in general, that’s bags and they’re ridiculously expensive.’
On how long it takes her to get dressed for events, she says, ‘It takes me just about 30minutes to an hour if I’m not in a hurry, and if I’m
pressed for time, I just wear whatever and go.’
All work and no love makes Rukky a robot, so we want to know what qualities her dream man should possess, and she sums it up with the
following words:
‘He must be an amazing person
with a good heart, and he should also have a sense of humour, as well as do everything I say.
I like people that make me happy.’
On how she balances stardom with other aspects of her life, she quips, ‘I’m a very private person, and the only place you can ever get to see
me is on Instagram and Snapchat because I don’tbreally go out. People don’t really know much about
me, and most of what is written about me out there are false. I advise celebs to live a private life, and
not to put too much information about themselves out there.’
For the legion of men out there who dream to make her their woman, she refused to state whether she’s in a relationship or not, but as regards marriage, she says, ‘By God’s grace, I’ll get married soon.’
Rukky Sanda was speaking with Vanguard’s reporter Tofarati Ige
Source: Yabaleftonline
Chocolate City Rapper, Ice Prince’s Girlfriend, Maima has got to be one of the most beautiful women dating a Nigerian celebrity.
The flawless goddess off her beautiful look as she rocked a new weave and it got us drooling
over her gorgeous looks and we couldn’t help but to share the photos.
Check on it.
After reading this mind blowing article I couldn’t just keep it to myself so I decided to share with you my blog readers, so that you too can gain a whole lot fr4om this article just like I did. Thanks to Nicholas Epley for writing this.
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
One of the biggest barriers to understanding others is excessive egocentrism. You can’t see into the mind of others because you can’t get over yourself. You can’t overcome your own experiences, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, knowledge, and visual perspective to recognize that others may view the world differently. Copernicus may have removed the Earth from the center of the universe, but every person on this planet is still at the center of his or her own universe.
One consequence of being at the center of your own universe is that it’s easy to overestimate your importance in it, both for better and for worse. Consider a classic psychology experiment that asked married couples to report how much each of them was personally responsible for a variety of household activities. These included relatively desirable tasks, like cleaning the house, making breakfast, and resolving conflicts, but also undesirable actions, like messing up the house, irritating their spouse, and causing arguments. Husbands and wives were separated from each other and then asked to indicate, out of the total amount for each activity, what percentage they were personally responsible for. The researchers then simply added the spouses’ estimates together for each item. Logically, this sum cannot exceed 100 percent. If I claim that I make breakfast 80 percent of the time and my wife claims that she makes breakfast 60 percent of the time, then our kids are apparently eating breakfast 140 percent of the time. Not possible, even for the fattest families. But psychologically, if I can think of the times I made breakfast more easily than the times my wife made breakfast, then by extrapolation, there will be a lot of reportedly overstuffed families out there.
This is exactly what the results showed. The couples’ estimates, when added together, significantly exceeded 100 percent. Surely you’ve experienced this self-centeredness before. It’s even made its way into jokes. Here’s one: What’s a woman’s definition of barbecue? Answer: You bought the groceries, washed the lettuce, chopped the tomatoes, diced the onions, marinated the meat, and cleaned everything up, but he “made the dinner.”
Don’t get too smug. The really interesting result is that researchers find more consistent evidence for overclaiming, albeit to a lesser extent, for negative activities as well. In this experiment, spouses tended to claim more responsibility than is logically possible even for activities like causing arguments that occur between the two of you. Being self-centered also means being uniquely aware of your faults and shortcomings, knowing when you needled your spouse after a tough day at work or broke the dishes and scuttled them into the trash can before anyone else noticed. It’s harder to notice your spouse’s bad intentions or unhandy dish work.
Consider participating in what I think is one of the most liberating experiments ever conducted—the Barry Manilow experiment.
This finding can be surprising. When researchers asked married couples to predict how much responsibility their partner would claim for positive and negative activities, they found very cynical predictions but again found very self-centered overclaiming. Spouses tended to assume that their partner would vainly accept credit for all of the desirable activities in their marriage but deflect blame for the undesirable activities. In fact, partners were again egocentric, tending to claim more responsibility than is logically possible for all activities, positive as well as negative. It’s not hard to imagine how both overclaiming and overly cynical assumptions about overclaiming can lead to unwarranted discord in almost any relationship.
As consistent as self-centered overclaiming in marriages may be, it’s likely to be even stronger outside of them, as work groups and teams get larger. In a marriage, overcoming egocentrism requires thinking of only one other person. That’s not too hard. But as a group’s size increases, the number of others you could be overlooking also increase, and so, too, do the consequences of being egocentric.
Consider an experiment Eugene Caruso, Max Bazerman, and I conducted with 699 Harvard MBA students. These students worked together in the same study groups for the entire two years of their MBA program, doing everything involved with their coursework together. The groups generally ranged from four to nine students. We asked some of these MBA students to report what percentage of the group’s total work they personally contributed. We found that the amount of overclaiming increased as the size of the group increased. Groups of four or less look relatively reasonable, claiming more responsibility than is logically possible, but at least being in the vicinity of 100 percent.
As the number of group members increase, however, their judgments get increasingly unhinged from reality. By the time you get to groups of eight, these MBAs were claiming nearly 140 percent productivity! This brings new meaning to overachieving.
The important point is to relax a bit when others don’t seem to appreciate you as much as you think they should. The mistake may be a product of egocentrism in your own head rather than others’ indifference.
On Self-Centered Stage
Thinking that others should give you more credit than they actually do is just a small part of our larger egocentric tendencies. At extreme levels, self-centered thinking can lead to paranoia, a belief that others are thinking about you, talking about you, and paying attention to you when they are not. That sounds crazy because it is, and yet all of us are prone to momentary bouts of craziness in the right circumstances. “People are insanely self-conscious,” Elaine Miller told The New York Times. Miller is the author of the popular interior decorating blog Decorno, explaining the care socialites take to convey just the right image to others with their interior decorating. “People act like they’re always being watched. Even their house is a performance.”
We’ve all been there at one time or another. Maybe you slipped on an icy sidewalk and were hurt more by the pain of embarrassment than the pain of the fall? Or said something stupid in a meeting and were certain that everyone was ridiculing you afterward in whispers? Or forgot the name of a new but important acquaintance and felt mortally embarrassed? All of the world may indeed be a stage, and it’s easy to feel that we’re at the center of it. Not only can this lead us to overestimate our impact in the world, it can even lead us to overestimate the extent to which others are noticing our very existence.
Consider participating in what I think is one of the most liberating experiments ever conducted—the Barry Manilow experiment. Here, researchers recruited unknowing undergraduates to participate in what they believed was a standard psychology experiment. Imagine you are one of them. When you arrive at the lab, the experimenter leads you down the hallway into a small room, shuts the door behind you, and asks you to “put on this T-shirt as part of the experiment.” You unfurl it before you and there, in all of its glory, is a shirt emblazoned with a large picture of Barry Manilow. You might be a big fan, but most people are not. Even fans might be a bit reluctant to bare their enthusiasm in a full-frontal exposure.
But you go along anyway, put on the T-shirt, and follow the experimenter back down the hallway; she leads you into a room where other participants are already sitting (none, of course, wearing a Manilow shirt). The experimenter explains that you’re running a bit late but you can still participate anyway. So you slink into your chair, at which point the experimenter appears to have a change of heart, apologizes, and says that it’s really too late and that you’ll need to do this experiment another time. She then leads you out of the room.
Here comes the most important part. The experimenter tells you that the experiment is actually now over and asks you to estimate the number of people in the room who would be able to identify the person on your shirt. While you are outside the room, the experimenter asks the other people sitting in the room to identify who was on your shirt. Those wearing the shirt estimated that nearly 50 percent would notice their Manilow shirt when, in fact, only 23 percent actually did. Even in small groups, the social spotlight does not shine on us nearly as brightly as we think.
The point here is that few of us are quite the celebrity that our own experience suggests we might be; nor are we under as much careful scrutiny from others as we might expect. Early on in Casablanca, Peter Lorre learns this lesson the hard way when he looks to Humphrey Bogart for some recognition, saying, “You despise me, don’t you?” Bogart replies, “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.” I think we would all benefit from having our own Casablanca moment.
The Eyes of Experts
Your own beliefs serve as a lens for understanding what others are likely to believe, as well as how strongly they are likely to believe it. But your mind contains multitudes, and beliefs are not the only lens that can alter your perceptions. Knowledge can also do it. For example, read the following sentence:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT
OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY
COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
Now please go back and count how many f’s appeared in that sentence. This is important. I’ll wait for you.
How many did you find? More than you can count on one hand? If not, then we have just confirmed that you are a terrific reader but a terrible counter. Try it again. Look harder. I’ll be patient.
Found all six yet? Don’t forget that “of” has an f in it.
See them all now? Most people who read this sentence fail to spot all six of the f’s on their first pass. Instead, most see only three. Why so few? This example has nothing to do with your beliefs and everything to do with your knowledge. Your expertise with English blinds you from seeing some of the letters. You know how to read so well that you can hear the sounds of the letters as you read over them. From your expert perspective, every time you see the word “of” you hear a v rather than an f and, therefore, miss it. This is why first graders are more likely to find all six in this task than fifth graders, and why young children are likely to do better on this than you did as well. Your expert ears are clouding your vision.
This example illustrates what psychologists refer to as the curse of knowledge, another textbook example of the lens problem. Knowledge is a curse because once you have it, you can’t imagine what it’s like not to possess it. You’ve seen other people cursed many times. For instance, while on vacation, have you ever tried to get driving directions from a local? Or talked to an IT person who can’t explain how to operate your computer without using impenetrable computer science jargon? In one experiment, expert cell phone users predicted it would take a novice, on average, only thirteen minutes to learn how to use a new cell phone. It actually took novices, on average, 32 minutes.
Twitter does not allow others to understand your perspective. It only allows others to confirm how stupid they already think you are.
The lens of expertise works like a microscope, allowing you to notice subtle details that a novice might not catch but also sharpening your focus in a way that can allow you to miss the bigger picture and make it difficult to understand a novice’s perspective. Trying to correct this lens first requires becoming aware of its influence. The problem is that it’s hard to know when you are being affected by your own expertise and when you are not. Consider what is probably the most famous dissertation experiment in the history of psychology: Elizabeth Newton’s “tapping study.” In this experiment, carried out with pairs of subjects, one volunteer in each pair was randomly assigned to be the “tapper” and the other the listener.
Tappers received a list of 25 songs well known to them, including “America the Beautiful” and “Rock Around the Clock.” Tappers were asked to pick out three songs and then tap out each one for the listener, while they sat back-to-back. Tappers then estimated the likelihood that listeners would identify each tune correctly, and listeners tried to identify each one. The results were striking. Tappers estimated that listeners would identify the song correctly, on average, 50 percent of the time. In fact, listeners guessed correctly only 2.5 percent of the time.
It’s now easy to understand the gap between tappers and listeners. The tappers were relative experts, being very familiar with the song they were tapping out and hearing it in their own minds while doing so. The listeners, however, were privy to none of this orchestration; instead, they heard only the equivalent of musical Morse code. The important point is that the tappers were simply unable to appreciate how the rich music in their mind’s stereo would sound to a listener hearing it through their finger’s speakers.
None of us communicate by tapping alone, but the lens problem affects anyone who has unique knowledge of anything: the boss who understands a proposal inside out and is trying to convey the ideas to new clients, the inventor who knows precisely why her invention is so important speaking to impatient venture capitalists, or the coworker who is “just teasing” a new hire who knows nothing of the teaser’s friendly intentions. The expert’s problem is assuming that what’s so clear in his or her own mind is more obvious to others than it actually is.
Blankish States, E-Mail, and God
The problem of expertise is one of many examples of mistakes that come from projecting our own minds onto others: assuming that others know, think, believe, or feel as we do ourselves. Of course, we do not project ourselves onto others completely. We do so in some situations more than in others, and we project more onto some minds than others. The less we know about the mind of another, the more we use our own to fill in the blanks. Conservatives and liberals don’t know what the “average” person thinks, or how people who didn’t vote would have voted, and so they rely more on what they think themselves. Ask conservatives and liberals what their neighbor thinks, what their parent thinks, or what their spouse thinks and you are likely to see much less egocentrism. The lens problem therefore becomes larger as other minds become more unknown.
Understanding this allows you to explain, simultaneously, the problem with e-mail and the problem with God.
Let’s tackle the big one first: e-mail. Much of what we communicate to others depends not only on what we say but on how we say it. The same comment about one’s “nice hair,” “great question,” or “brilliant idea” can be taken as a compliment or an insult, depending on the tone of your voice or the smirk on your face. None of this subtlety makes it into your in-box. Although it’s not as bad as tapping out a novel in Morse code, text-based mediums like e-mail and Twitter nevertheless communicate the content of what is said but little of the subtle context of how it is said, making them considerably more ambiguous and open to egocentric influences than face-to-face communication.
Consider an experiment that highlights the lens problem in such ambiguous communication. My collaborators and I asked one group of volunteers to write two different sentences about 10 topics, one intended to be serious and one intended to be sarcastic. The topics were whatever came to Justin Kruger (my collaborator) and me while brainstorming in Justin’s office—things like food, cars, California, dating, and movies. We then asked each of our volunteers to convey these messages to another person in the experiment. In one condition, they sent the message via e-mail; in the other, they spoke it over the telephone. Our senders predicted that they could communicate just as well via e-mail as they could over the phone (roughly 80 percent accuracy in both cases). Those actually receiving the messages, however, could understand the speaker’s intention only when the communication was clear (that is, when the speaker was on the phone). With e-mail, the receivers were no more accurate than you’d expect from a coin flip.
The problem for our volunteers was that they knew whether their message was meant to be sincere or sarcastic. So when they said, “Blues Brothers 2000—now, there’s a sequel,” they could hear the sarcasm dripping from their voice regardless of whether they were actually using their voice or typing with their fingers. Those receiving the message, of course, could hear the sarcasm only through the speaker’s voice and heard nothing from the speaker’s fingers.
Not only was the ambiguity in the text unclear to the senders, it was unclear to the receivers as well. At the end of the experiment, we asked the receivers to guess how many of the items they had interpreted correctly. They thought they had done a superb job, interpreting nine out of 10 of the sentences correctly, regardless of whether the communication had been over the phone or by e-mail. Here you can see why ambiguous mediums like e-mail and texting and Twitter are such fertile ground for misunderstanding. People using ambiguous mediums think they are communicating clearly because they know what they mean to say, receivers are unable to get this meaning accurately but are certain that they have interpreted the message accurately, and both are amazed that the other side can be so stupid.
We could not tell the difference in overall neural activity between people reasoning about their own beliefs versus God’s beliefs.
As the context in which you’re trying to understand another mind becomes more ambiguous, the influence of your own perspective increases. If you really want to understand your coworker or competitor or children, don’t rely on modern mediums of communication that give you only a modern Rorschach test about the mind of another person. Twitter does not allow others to understand your deep thoughts and broad perspective. It only allows others to confirm how stupid they already think you are.
Now to the other problem: God. Just as the medium through which you communicate can be more or less ambiguous, so, too, can the target you’re reasoning about. You do not need to rely on your own beliefs to know that Barack Obama is liberal and George W. Bush is conservative. Both express their beliefs loud and clear, they are identified with liberal and conservative parties, and other people can tell you that they are, respectively, liberal and conservative. Their beliefs are relatively obvious. So, too, with your spouse, your friends, your kids, and your neighbors, who can respond to questions you ask them. Even the general public can answer opinion polls. But the less willing or able others are to give you a piece of their minds, the more their minds become a blank slate onto which you project your own.
Enter God. Believers consult few figures more often than God when it comes to weighty measures, from moral issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and martyrdom to personal issues, such as career planning or dating choices. The problem is that God doesn’t answer opinion polls, and the books that supposedly report God’s beliefs are notoriously open to interpretation. Many of the world’s wars are still fought over what God apparently does or does not want, fueled by the sense of having God on one’s own side. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” Lincoln noted during his second inaugural address, at the height of the Civil War, “and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, lest we be not judged.” Sadly, few people have Lincoln’s gift of self-reflection. Did Jesus believe that small government or big government would more effectively help the poor? Does religion condemn gay marriage or condone it? Does God want you to get that mortgage? Does God want you to be rich? Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, once told a reporter that he was just a banker “doing God’s work.” I believe that this assessment is open to debate.
Like any belief, these beliefs about God surely come from multiple sources. On some issues, the religious position is clear and one’s own beliefs are unlikely to play any role. Religion creates beliefs, after all. But where there is wiggle room, God may become another example of the lens problem, created in one’s own image. Many have suggested this hypothesis. Xenophanes, a sixth century B.C. Greek philosopher, was the first person to describe anthropomorphism; he noted how Greek gods invariably had flowing hair and fair skin, whereas African gods had curly hair and dark skin. As Darwin put it, humans interpreting religious experiences “would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the same love of vengeance, or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves feel.” Bob Dylan even put the sentiment to music, in the song “With God on Our Side.” But understanding the lens problem suggests an even more specific prediction than these generalities. If religious agents are more ambiguous than other people, then believers might be even more egocentric when reasoning about God’s beliefs than when reasoning about other people’s beliefs. Other people agree with me, but God is really on my side.
Several pieces of evidence support this possibility, at least within monotheistic conceptions of God. In surveys, my collaborators and I have consistently found a stronger correlation between people’s own beliefs and their predictions of God’s beliefs than with their predictions about other people’s beliefs. From attitudes on abortion to support for same-sex marriage or the death penalty, Judeo-Christian believers’ own attitudes match what they think God believes much more closely than what they think other people believe. These are consistent results, but they’re nothing more than correlations. The opposite causal direction is also completely plausible: people come to believe what they think their God believes.
More compelling evidence comes from a neuroimaging experiment. We asked volunteers to report their own beliefs, God’s beliefs, and the average American’s beliefs on a wide variety of social issues while they were lying on their backs in an fMRI scanner. We found some clear distinctions. Major differences in neural activity emerged when people reasoned about their own beliefs and the average American’s beliefs. We found the very same pattern of differences when people reasoned about God’s beliefs versus the average American’s beliefs. But the most amazing result of all was that we could not tell the difference in overall neural activity between people reasoning about their own beliefs versus God’s beliefs. In the scanner, reasoning about God’s beliefs looked the same as reasoning about one’s own beliefs.
The most compelling evidence, however, comes from experiments in which we manipulated people’s own beliefs and measured how it affected what people think God and others believe. In one, we showed volunteers persuasive arguments either in favor of affirmative action. The arguments worked: those who read the pro–affirmative action information became more in favor, whereas those who read the anti–affirmative action arguments became more opposed. More important, our manipulation moved our volunteers’ estimates of God’s beliefs in lockstep with their own, whereas estimates of other people’s beliefs were unaffected by the arguments the volunteers read. Creating God in one’s own image, indeed.
If God is a moral compass, then the compass seems prone to pointing believers in whatever direction they are already facing. There’s nothing magical about God in this regard, just something ambiguous. When legislators speak of the Founding Fathers’ intentions while interpreting the Constitution or politicians talk about what “the people” want, you are likely witnessing an act of divination that tells you more about the speaker’s own beliefs than their target’s beliefs. The injunction here is not for more cynicism when listening to others but, rather, for more humility when it seems that other people, gods, founding fathers, or legal teams are, in fact, on your side. When others’ minds are unknown, the mind you imagine is based heavily on your own.
Nicholas Epley is the John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was awarded the 2011 Distinguished Scientific Aware for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. His book, Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want, won the 2015 Book Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
SOURCE: NAUTILUS.US
Last February, 59-year-old Ned Overend, aka “The Lung,” aka “Deadly Nedly,” won the first National Fatbike Championships, held in Ogden, Utah. Fat Bike Nats isn’t exactly the Tour de France, but it’s no charity ride, either. Overend had to compete against a field of much younger pros, including former national mountain bike champion Travis Brown, 46, on a tough 19-mile course.
It’s tempting to dismiss Overend as a genetic freak, an outlier who defies comparison with the rest of us. He has dominated nearly every sport he’s entered since the early ’90s, from cross-country mountain bike racing to off-road triathlon. But even among the genetically gifted—and many elite athletes are—Overend is unique in his competitive longevity. Which is the reason he’s also one of the dozen or so athletes spotlighted in Joe Friel’s latest book, Fast After 50 (Velo Press), part of a growing library devoted to salt-and-pepper chargers past (and occasionally well past) the half-century mark.
I recently spent a few weeks immersed in Fast After 50, along with a few other books on the topic, including Margaret Webb’s Older, Faster, Stronger, Lee Bergquist’s Second Wind, and Bill Gifford’s excellent and entertaining Spring Chicken. My interest was both professional and personal. I was staring down the gun barrel at 50, the ominous milestone, just a year and change away. Should I prepare to surrender to backgammon and bocce, or was there still hope for my lifelong addiction to biking, skiing, climbing, and other outdoor activities and races?
While all the books were informative, and even inspirational, chronicling many aging athletes who still excelled at their respective sports, Friel’s was the only one dedicated to mapping out a plan of action. A few years ago, Friel, 71, author of the classic Training Bible series and one of the most respected figures in endurance coaching, noticed that his own power on the bike was fading. His training group, which varied from young to old, routinely started dropping him on climbs, which had been rare in the past. Compelled to see if science offered any solutions, he dove into the research literature, which was limited but enlightening. Were there ways to beat time, the ultimate foe?
The news, it turns out, is good and bad. Good, because, yes, there are ways to fight the fade. Even if you can’t quite turn back the clock, you can actually slow it considerably and maintain a high level of performance deep into your sunset years. The bad news is that senescence—aging—remains, for now at least, inexorable, and effectively battling it requires diligence and work.
Friel lays out the science before launching into his trademark blueprint for sustaining, and even improving, high-end performance through your 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond. The main factors that conspire against you are declining aerobic capacity, more body fat, shrinking muscles, and decreased mobility—the four horsemen of the fitness apocalypse, deterioration that accelerates as you get older.
Friel ballparks nurture’s percentage at 60 to 70 percent. Let’s pause to consider this. If you buy Friel’s assessment, and you probably should because few people have been more involved in the study and application of exercise physiology than he has, he’s telling you that as much as 70 percent of your athletic power after turning 50 remains under your control. Have you heard better news today?
But how do you remain the same badass you’ve always been? How do you unleash your inner Ned?
Friel believes the key lies in intensity—that is, consistently jacking your heart rate into the upper echelons of its potential peak. Yet intensity is typically one of the first things to vanish from your workouts, maybe even your races, when you hit middle age. That’s because many athletes drift into long, slow distance (LSD), not because they are no longer capable of redlining, but because this type of training feels less taxing. But all those intervals you did in college? You never should have stopped. If anything, they become more vital as you get older.
“Training with an emphasis on high-intensity intervals has been my preferred method of preparing for races throughout my career,” Overend writes in Fast After 50. “I’ve learned that by reducing volume, I’m more rested for high-intensity sessions, and by being rested I can push myself harder during the intervals.”
Friel holds up a classic study from the 1970s led by Michael Pollock at the Institute of Aerobics Research in Dallas, Texas, that looked at 24 competitive masters runners between the ages of 42 and 59. During the initial ten-year analysis, 13 of the runners ceased competing, though they continued to run long, slow distance as training. The other 11 continued to race at high intensity. While both groups put in about the same weekly mileage, the high-intensity runners saw their VO2 max drop a mere 1.6 percent, compared to the LSD group, whose VO2 max dropped a striking 12 percent. Recent longitudinal studies further support these findings.
“Intensity” is another way to describe a kind of stress that prompts adaptive physiological changes. The idea of using exposure to stress as a way to improve athletic performance—or at least not lose it—also comes up in Gifford’s Spring Chicken when he introduces us to a chemical engineer from California named Todd Becker, aka the “world’s toughest nerd.”
Becker runs a health and fitness blog called Getting Stronger and is an outspoken proponent of “hormesis”—a fancy term of Greek origin describing the stress-adaptation process. Becker is bullish on cold-water plunges, fasted workouts, weightlifting, sprinting, and other ways to nudge the body further to prompt positive adaptations. As Gifford points out, this is similar to the way vaccines work: Inject small doses of a virus into a host, which in turn generates the antibodies to protect you from the virus.
Delivering managed doses of stress followed by a well-managed recovery period, goes the theory, builds you back up stronger. Also known as periodization, this is the art and science behind almost all athletic training. It’s certainly a recurring theme in all of the books in my survey, which echo a common refrain: “Use it or lose it,” with one twist. Don’t just use it—push it.
If all this insistence on charging harder and exposing yourself to intense bouts of stress sounds scary, particularly in light of several recent stories about heart damage and even sudden death among endurance athletes, those fears are understandable but possibly irrational. Obviously, anyone (no matter their age) just starting on a training program should screen for preexisting conditions and clear things with their doctor. But the perception that high-intensity training is dangerous is overblown.
Friel spends the second half of Fast After 50 dishing the nuts and bolts to help you develop your own program. It’s worth noting here that he is writing primarily to experienced athletes chasing PRs into grandparenthood (or hoping the PRs won’t slip too far in the rearview mirror); this is not a fitness book for beginners, although committed newbies could certainly develop a training program based on the ideas here.
Fans of Friel’s Training Bible series will be familiar with the strategy: Set a goal such as a race or other objective where performance matters, and build a periodized training schedule to peak at the right time. This is the framework for staying fast, and Friel provides plenty of guidance for sorting out the specific training details that work for you. Finding the sweet spot between too little and too much is individualized but highly rewarding. Maintaining intensity is central, but it involves a lot more than hill repeats. You’ll also need to:
“Recent research … strongly suggests that we need more [protein] as we age,” writes Friel. How much depends on myriad factors, which Friel gets into in his book. The general takeaway is to spread protein intake throughout the day, since the body is limited in how much protein it can process per meal.
“Sleep is definitely the key to better performance with aging,” writes Friel. How much? “If you’re using an alarm clock to wake up, you’re not getting enough.”
If active recovery involves light activity—a short bike ride, an easy run—after a race or hard training session, passive recovery is doing basically nothing at all. Friel suggests weaving in more passive recovery as you age. Active recovery may still play a role, but you might find that taking a day (or two) completely off is even more beneficial. There may even be ways to enhance your passive recovery with things like compression tights, cold-water immersion, pneumatic sleeves, and massage.
Training hard at middle age and beyond can be fraught with risk, as anyone who’s felt their back go sproing during a hard workout will tell you. Injuries heal more slowly as you get older, and that downtime can be tough. “Moderation and consistency” are the best way to ensure longevity and success, counsels Friel.
When all this is over, the economic crisis will take lasting form in the American consciousness as a video montage. The images are already familiar: traders gaping in horror at the Stock Exchange … Paulson testifying before Congress … A foreclosure notice tacked onto a front-porch door … Obama selling the bailout … The Chrysler headquarters posted for sale on Craigslist (well, not really, not yet). It is as easy to envision this string of images as it is to conjure a mental highlight reel of the visual iconography of the Great Depression: the Dust Bowl photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, newsreel clips of bread lines and Hooverville shacks–and all of it set to the sound of Rudy Vallee singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” What, then, will play on the soundtrack of the montage of the current crisis? What is the music of our meltdown?
Last time around, popular culture moved a bit more slowly than it does in the Tweet era. The Tin Pan Alley composer Jay Gorney and the lyricist Yip Harburg did not write “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” until 1931, two years after Black Thursday. The song was not introduced until 1932, when it was inserted into a gently socio-political Broadway revue called New Americana, and it was not a hit until Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby took it on, in shifts of mode for them both. Vallee’s and Crosby’s records of the same song ended up among the top-ten hits of 1932.
This time, within a few months of the unraveling of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a dozen credible songs have taken up the collapse of the economy or its consequences, and at least twenty lesser efforts have been posted on MySpace and YouTube. “Brother” has a multiplying brood of great-grandchildren, including songs by old rock-and-roll grousers such as Neil Young (“Fork in the Road,” from a new CD with the same title, and “Cough Up the Bucks” from that album), quasi-political hip-hop artists such as Young Jeezy (“The Recession,” from a CD with that title), less-reactionary country singers such as John Rich (“Shuttin’ Detroit Down”), and inveterately cranky indie-rock bands such as The Members (“International Financial Crisis”). Many more songs must be hatching. After all, Neil Young can dominate this terrain for only so long before we hear from Bruce Springsteen, and Young Jeezy cannot lay claim to this (or any) territory for long without an incursion from Kanye West. And where are Ani DiFranco and Billy Bragg when there is a topical song to be written?
Neil Young arrived early by taking short cuts, to use the kind of driving analogy, tossed-off and corny, that is common to the material on Fork in the Road, including the economically themed title song. The record is something of a concept album about car love, biotech, and the recession. Hastily composed and recorded with a ragtag little band in the vein of mid-1970s Crazy Horse, the album reaffirms Young’s devotion to the old hippie precepts of indeliberation and zeal, simultaneously applied. Most of the songs–such as “Behind the Wheel,” “Off the Road,” “Hit the Road”–have interchangeable titles, chords, tunes, and words, and the general idea is to pay tribute (occasionally tempered) to those hoary symbols of American freedom and gluttony, heavy vehicles and highways, while advocating the use of biofuels.
Two of the songs deal explicitly, if simplistically, with the meltdown. In the title song, “Fork in the Road,” Young sings, in his wonderfully preserved screechy whine, “There’s a bailout coming but it’s not for me/It’s for all those creeps watching tickers on TV.” He goes on:
I’m a big rock starMy sales have tankedBut I still got you–thanksDownload thisSounds like shit
In “Cough Up the Bucks,” he sings, at full croak:
Where did all the money go?Where did all the cash flow?Where did all the money go?
He makes a good point. The music does sound like shit, although its unabashed shittiness, its rude willingness to go wrong for good reasons–that is, in service to the whims of its creator and the moment of creation–help to give Fork in the Road (and much of Young’s better work) its bite and its guileless veracity.
Neil Young’s positions on the meltdown amount to puzzlement and bereavement. He does not question the primacy of capital in America or the glory of wealth; he wonders only why he isn’t as rich as he used to be. In setting these thoughts to music, he is carrying on a tradition begun with the first songs to capture the country’s reaction to the Great Depression. One of the biggest hits of 1929 turned out to be Bessie Smith’s record of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” a song composed six years earlier by Jimmie Cox, a second-card singer and comedian in black vaudeville. As Smith sang,
Once I lived the life of a millionaireSpending my money, I didn’t careI carried my friends out for a good timeBuying bootleg liquor, champagne and wineThen I began to fall so lowI didn’t have a friend and no place to go
The sentiment of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” is umbrage at betrayal–not only betrayal by the singer’s good-time friends, but also betrayal by wealth itself, with its promise to keep good times and friends in ample supply. The song was one of the first major crossover hits, and it has become a standard of Tin Pan Alley-style blues, recorded over the years by every blues-loving singer from Alberta Hunter and Big Joe Williams to Eric von Schmidt and Eric Clapton. Among the songs of the Great Depression, it is immeasurably significant, probably more consequential than “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in that it played a major role in establishing blues, music of the black experience, in parity with white music in America.
Indeed, the lasting musical legacy of the Depression is not polemical songs overtly fixed on economic matters, but songs that express in vivid, idiosyncratic, personal terms the discontent of people with little hope–and the most potent of those songs were black, sung by African Americans or by whites imitating blacks, composed by African Americans or by whites drawing heavily from black music. In the year of the crash, Charlie Patton, one of the early masters of Delta blues, made his first recordings for Paramount, and they sold fairly well; the following year, he had a national hit with “High Water Everywhere,” a story-song about the Louisiana flood that suggested the economic storm of the time as well. By 1933, the number-one record of the year was Ethel Waters’s recording of “Stormy Weather” (by the blackest of the white Tin Pan Alley composers, Harold Arlen, with lyrics by Ted Koehler, another white writer who had worked on Cotton Club shows), and versions of the same song by Leo Reisman (a white bandleader) and Duke Ellington were numbers eleven and twelve.
Hip-hop, which deals with lingering issues of racial, social, and economic inequity through caricature and overcompensation, infamously reveling in bravura displays of material conquest and in overweening pride in its own infamy, does not do suffering or despair very well. The Southern rapper Young Jeezy, who recorded The Recession last year, before Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fell, is atypically tentative on this, his third CD. The music is simple and blunt, built around lo-fi synth effects. The title track opens with a sound collage of overlapping bits from financial news broadcasts–“No one’s whispering about the ‘R’ word anymore”; “The government has failed. …” Young Jeezy enters the track in his usual persona of everynigga, rapping about gas prices and not having enough money to buy a bigger truck. In the concerns of his lyrics, he sounds unnervingly like Neil Young. Then comes the chorus, a set of declarations as simple and blunt as the music:
It’s a recession, everybody brokeSo I just came back to give everybody hopeJust looking out for folk, a gift and the whole nineNah, you don’t owe me shit, and youkeep the whole nine
Keep in mind: when read on the page, Young Jeezy’s language, like a lot of rapping, appears considerably more stupid than it feels when it is taken in as it is meant to be, as one element in a soundscape of beat, flow, and attitude. Jeezy’s take on the recession is elementally optimistic, even boosterish. That positivity is of a piece with Jeezy’s vanity. Jeezy makes clear–here and in several other songs on all three of his albums–that he feels a paternal, somewhat demeaning sense of duty to lift his fans’ spirits through the “gift” of his attention, and he acts out of a faith in the self-reliance that helped make him rich and famous. As he sings in “My President,” another topical song on The Recession, “History, Black history, no president ever did shit for me.” Young Jeezy’s self-reliance is such that it has no need for Barack Obama.
Over the past several months, the hard times have prompted hip-hop radio stations to rediscover “Hard Times,” a Ludacris track from his 2003 album, Chicken-n-Beer. It is a loosely woven patchwork song with ragged-edged sections about common struggles of many sorts–a lover departs, the money is low, friends turn away. A plaintive, melancholy song about timeless hardships, its sentiments unspoiled by self-pity, “Hard Times” is a hip-hop inheritor to Charlie Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” a piece of twenty-first-century blues.
Wherever one stands on the music of Young Jeezy and Ludacris, one should not confuse them with the various stunt rappers who have released songs about the economic crisis: Neal Fox, who wrote and performed “F**k the Fed,” and Michael Adams, who did “I Want My Bailout Money.” Both songs are parodies and employ hip-hop for its amenability to caricature; they are the musical equivalent of political cartoons, and what Ludacris is to Charlie Patton, Neal Fox and Michael Adams are to Ray Stevens and Weird Al Yankovic.
Not that there’s anything wrong with a good laugh in bad times, of course. An expression of despair is scarcely the only legitimate artistic response to the experience of despair. In fact, this whole business of considering music in the context of economic upheaval grows unmanageable in scale when one considers the value of sheer entertainment as an escape from hardship. During the height of the Depression, in March 1932, Herbert Hoover called a meeting with Rudy Vallee in the White House, at which Hoover told Vallee that if he could “write a song to drive away the Depression,” he would “rate a medal.” Vallee demurred, instead recording “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” While the song became one of the biggest hits of the year, it was not at the top of the list. The number-one song was Cole Porter’s silky “Night and Day,” in a recording by Fred Astaire, who had sung it that year in Astaire and Rogers’ glimmery, vapid farce, The Gay Divorcee. The number-two and number-three songs were “All of Me” and “Dinah.” In a real sense, every song that provides release during a depressing time is a song of that depression.
On those terms, we could think of any number of contemporary pop hits as meltdown music. The most popular tunes of our day–the Black-Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow,” which is number one as I write, and Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” which is number two–are dance tracks, social music of physical and emotional release, just as “Night and Day” and “All of Me” were in their time. (This is just a coincidence, and I don’t mean to make too much of it, but the biggest hits of the two eras, “Boom Boom Pow” and “Night and Day” have, as the musical hooks of their title phrases, nearly identical three-note figures.) We certainly could think of songs such as “Boom Boom Pow” and “Poker Face” that way; but let’s not.
Instead, let us consider a possibility we cannot yet see. If the events of the Great Depression have bearing on our time as precedent, they demonstrate how the collapse of prevailing economic, political, and social structures–the end of a kind of hegemony–cleared the way for historically disenfranchised people, African Americans and others in the underclasses, to give voice to their discontent in creative forms previously held in disrepute. The Depression brought blues to the pop charts and led to the rise of folk and country music. If new forms (musical or otherwise) emerge from the current meltdown, they might well be ones now held in such low esteem that we cannot begin to take them seriously yet. I do not know what they might be.
For informed counsel, I turned to a colleague whose taste I abhor, and he pointed me to a new genre of intolerable noise constructed either electronically, with computers, or with electrified instruments. Its purpose, he said, is to challenge prevailing standards of normalcy by “sounding as awful as possible.” Its early advocates have given it a name, derived from the rock genre “shoegaze.” It is called “shitgaze.” I tend to doubt that it will blossom to become the dominant music of the coming years, though music critics for publications such as The New Republic felt the same way about blues a hundred years ago. For now, I am kind of tickled by the idea of shitgaze, as much as I am maddened by the sound of it. Maybe Neil Young is onto something. Perhaps the music appropriate to this shitty time should properly sound like shit.
David Hajdu is The New Republic’s music critic.
By David Hajdu
source: THE NEW REPUBLIC
Nobody needs to be told that right now UNG’s frontline act Kida Kudz is putting in a lot of work..
Here’s a brand new single is titled ‘Owo Ni Boyz’ and as the name implies, it depicts and encourages the ‘Hustle’ spirit.
‘Owo Ni Boyz’ was produced by OY Productions & comes right after Kida Kudz released his video for ‘Living Life’ & a freestyle ’12 a.m In IB City’ Download & Enjoy!
Nice tune from LeriQ and Timaya. This song drops off Leriqs Album which he titled ”THE LOST SOUNDS”. Download and enjoy
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