The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: africa

  • Learning about Lesotho

    Every once in a while I like to pick an obscure topic and learn about it. I get that from my mother. She would have loved the internet! This time, after a nice chat with my friends Caly and Morgaine (waving hello!) about small countries that we don’t know much about, I remembered that I’ve…

  • Visual Cues

    This, dear readers, is a Shoebill. It’s a stork-like bird that lives in East Africa. It can get up to almost 5 feet tall. Now I don’t know about you, but if I ran into one of these suckers in a dark alley, I’d soil myself. They look angry and aggressive. They look like they…

  • Jessica Jackley: The Most Amazing Woman You’ve Never Met

    I was looking around for amazing people to include in a future blog entry, and I thought to myself, “I wonder who founded Kiva.org? For those of you who have never heard of this wonderful organization, Kiva provides microloans to people all over the world and in turn gets those funds from people all over…

  • The Best of The View from a Drawbridge

    I cannot believe it, but today is the one year anniversary of my blog! What a ride this has been. I’ve managed to post an entry every single day for an entire year. I would have never guessed I’d have this much to talk about. By writing this much I’ve learned a great deal as…

  • Have we Overstayed our Welcome?

    Aw, jeez, I need to stop surfing the internet. I just came across a website called Recent Natural Disasters, and it gives you all the reported disasters all over the world, 24 hours a day. I have a hard enough time avoiding my tendency to anthropomorphize nature, especially when it seems as though the planet…

  • The Pope and Higgs Boson: Too Much God to Digest all at Once?

    So, we have a new Pope. That’s a load off. Not that I’m Catholic, mind you, but I think it’s never a good thing to have a vacancy for the position of God’s representative on earth, do you? He’s from Argentina, he’s chosen the name Francis, and he’s a Jesuit. All of these things are…

  • Where is China, Greenland and the Whole of Africa?

    Since I haven’t been able to afford international travel in the past several years, I travel vicariously by checking out the countries of origin of the people who visit my blog. WordPress is even kind enough to provide a nifty little world map, with the countries that have visited colored in for me. When I…

  • The Destruction of Women

    Today I came across this picture on Facebook.   A friend of mine rightly commented, “And this was before Photoshop.” Women used to aspire to have wasp waists. To heck with breathing, we wanted to be desirable! These contraptions caused deformities in ribs and internal organs, weak muscles, and respiratory problems. It also increased the…