Riding across Africa on a motorcycle

OK, I'm officially jealous.

I've done a lot of adventure travel in my day but I've been outclassed as an adventure traveler by an old friend of mine.

Thomas Tomczyk has just started out on a motorcycle tour of Africa, starting in South Africa and passing through 22 countries before ending up in Spain.

He says that he's past the stage of travel for travel's sake (I know the feeling) and so he's set up Africa Heart Beat, an online project to showcase various innovative NGOs he meets on the way. I've already blogged about his project here for Gadling, as well as the array of gear he's taking along to keep in touch with his Facebook page, his blog, and his YouTube channel.

Thomas is a professional writer and photographer, so you can expect some good stuff coming out of Africa for the next eight months.

I'm looking forward to hearing his insights on such projects as an AIDS theater group in Botswana, and a Muslim-Christian vocational center in Mali. I'm also hatching a plan to meet him in May or June of 2010, probably in Niger, Mauritania, or Western Sahara. Stay tuned. . .

¡Viva Presidente Hussein!

Today I'm off to a big inaugeration party at one of Madrid's posh hotels. I'm very happy that Julián will grow up thinking there's nothing strange about a black man being president of the most powerful country in the world. Barack Hussein Obama will be the first president he remembers. I'm glad he's too young to remember Bush!

To celebrate the occasion, I've created a new Facebook group called "President Hussein" and other Cool Names. This is a semi-serious group advocating tolerance of unusual names. Feel free to join. The description is below.

"When people hear the name 'Hussein' they tend to think of a pot-bellied Middle Eastern dictator. Well, there are millions of people named Hussein and most of them are pretty cool. One just became president of the United States, despite being hounded by certain media outlets about his middle name.
"This is a group to get rid of the stigma of foreign-sounding names. You don't have to be a Democrat to join (I'm not), you just have to be able to hear a foreign-sounding name and realize it doesn't sound foreign somewhere else in the world.
"By the way, my middle name is Geldard. Bet you haven't heard that one before!"

Facebook Culture

As I said in my last post, I've joined Facebook. It's an interesting little world. I've already hooked up with a lot of my old Tucson crowd, now spread over several states and a couple of countries. I've even had a few of my blog readers request to be my friends! So it's fun.

One thing I've noticed though is that it's all very frivolous. "Well yeah," you say, "It's a social networking site, what did you expect?" OK, I expected it to be a bit light, but I didn't expect people to be spending real money to send their friends virtual balloons and birthday cakes. I mean come on.

But is it really so frivolous? In her excellent book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, anthropologist Kate Fox says that all this social networking, texting, and twittering is important for its very frivolity. It replaces the day-to-day casual interaction our species got from millennia living in villages or wandering in tribes. Now we live in sprawling suburbs or impersonal cities, and we don't get the friendly "Hello, looks like we're in for rain" that we exchanged with the farmer two fields over, or the semi-concerned "Is your mother over her lumbago?" from the second-cousin-twice-removed at the village well.

Apparantly we need that, and it only took a generation without it before modern civilization found a way to replace it.

But I'm still not paying good money for virtual puppies.

I'm On Facebook!

Sorry I haven't posted for a few days but last Friday I got the page proofs for Outlaw Tales of Missouri and I've been busy going through them. It goes to press next month and should be available by March. Page proofs are the last chance to catch any errors before going to press, so I've been reading them carefully.

I've also been slacking off with that great 21st century timewaster--Facebook. You can find me at Sean McLachlan, Network: Spain. There's a tool that you can use to invite everyone on your email account's address list but I'm not going to use it. You have to give them your password! They say they don't sell your name to mailing lists and automatically delete your password. I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe that. If I haven't added you (or don't know you) feel free to send a friend request. This is probably the only way that my Arizona, Missouri, London, and Madrid circles of friends are ever going to meet.