As the late Art Buchwald would have been happy to tell you, Hollywood’s accounting practices tend to be garbled at best, and borderline criminal at worst. Studio bean counters are masters of obfuscation and misdirection, with a knack for making blockbusters seem like middling hits, and profitable B-movies appear like money losers. Figuring out how [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Nigeria'
Cashed Out
February 11th, 2010 · 5 Comments
A few days back, we touched on the challenges of undermining one’s enemy by counterfeiting his currency. Today we’d like to shift the focus to another tactic of fiscal warfare: issuing a new currency upon seceding from a national union. We all know the Confederacy did it back in the day, but it has become [...]
Nollywood Blues
June 22nd, 2009 · No Comments
Color us surprised to learn that Nigeria recently overtook the United States as the world’s second-leading producer of movies, behind only India. True, the vast majority of Nollywood’s “major productions” are straight-to-video affairs, but that’s to be expected in a nation where cheap DVD players reign and movie theaters are scarce. Yet the nature of [...]
Tags:crime·intellectual property·movies·Nigeria·Nollywood·Yoruba
Rough Trade in the Delta
June 9th, 2009 · No Comments
Royal Dutch Shell’s decision to settle with the family of executed activist Ken Saro-Wiwa reminded us of this disturbringly prescient piece from a decade ago. It’s an account of all the dirty dealings that surround Nigeria’s oil wealth, and how oil companies and Big Men manage to keep enriching themselves despite frequent grassroots protests (or [...]
Esperanto of an Earlier Age
June 3rd, 2009 · No Comments
In our all-too-fleeting free time, we’ve been researching the development of Nigerian Pidgin (primarily so we can better understand the comedic stylings of Basketmouth). This exploration recently led us to another mash-up language: Solomon Islands Pijin, which shares some English influence but not much else with its Nigerian cousin. According to a leading Pijin scholar, [...]
Tags:Beach-la-mar·language·Nigeria·pidgin·pijin·Solomon Islands
Light Rail in Lagos
March 18th, 2009 · No Comments
After a lengthy bidding process, the two-line Lagos Rail Mass Transit project is set to break ground in September. This comes on the heels of the successful revamp of the city’s bus service, which now carries 180,000 passengers per day. Can the rail project ever come to fruition in a city as chaotic (and chronically [...]
Nigerian Dupe, Technological Laggard
February 25th, 2009 · No Comments
The most troubling part about this story is not that Nigerian e-scammers were likely able to wheedle a few pounds out of Jack Straw’s pals and constituents (who really should have known better, given the con artists’ straight-out-of-Lagos grammar and syntax). No, what’ll keep me up tonight is that fact that Britain’s former Foreign Secretary, [...]
Tags:Britain·crime·information technology·Jack Straw·Nigeria
Ali Kwara, Thief Catcher
February 10th, 2009 · 1 Comment
I was researching the arms trade the other day when I came across this amazing tale from Nigeria. It involves a fisherman-turned-arms-smuggler, who was ensnared not by the police, but rather by a celebrated vigilante named Alhaji Ali Kwara. Turns out that Mr. Kwara has been a rather busy man of late, personally arresting ten [...]
