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OK so I owe my readership an apology for not posting in over a month. In particular I would like to extend my condolences to those of my readers who have yet to discover the magic of RSS and think the only way to read a blog is to navigate to the page in Internet Explorer and furiously press F5 until the content is updated. I find it hard to believe that people like you still exist in the modern world, but my google analytics user statistics do not lie. Do you not know about internet syndication, or are you just boycotting the technology? Have you not heard of it? Are you, perhaps, reading this blog through a time warp circa early 2004*?

But it gets worse, oh my dedicated audience of click-refreshers; the truth is that this whole Africa experiment has basically run its course. By means of explanation, I'm back in the United States, Chicago to be specific, and I'm probably not going to be returning to Africa in the foreseeable future. My final engagement with the developing world and the industry that develops it ended March 31st, and there is a precisely 0% chance that I will return to that profession. I had some good times, I learned quite a bit, and in fact it was a very good run, all told, but as many readers noted by the increasingly negative and desperate overtones in the prose, it was getting time for me to return home.

That's the bad news; the good news is that I got into journalism school at Columbia, matriculating in the fall, so you will hopefully be seeing some of my writing in print form very soon. (Ha ha get it? "Print"? It will be on the internet.) I can't guarantee it will be about Africa specifically, but since I'm in the investigative journalism program I'm hoping to do something akin to my Chad-Cameroon pipeline post-mortem (here), which remains the most viewed of all my posts. In fact I think it was probably that post that secured my admission to the school in the first place, since my application essays were sort of "eh", and my plans to hack into my college's transcript database and change my grades, like Matthew Broderick in WarGames, were foiled when I spelled a purple Fanta on my computer keyboard.

What I'm trying to say here is that the blog is entering another dormant period. This might last for a while, quite a while in fact, but I won't pronounce it dead, not yet. Cuz I've still got a couple of ideas for future SOA posts banging around among the various lottery balls in the plastic air chamber of my skull; maybe we'll all get lucky someday soon and another post will pop out the little slot at the top. A beautiful girl from your local news channel will read off the number; check your ticket to see if it's a match.


*If so, a few pieces of advice from the future: 1) Even if you max out all your credit cards donating to moveon.org, Howard Dean will still not be elected President. It's just not our turn this year. 2008 will blow your socks off, though. 2) Sell your house and immediately invest all the proceeds in Apple Computers. I know that sounds like some advice more appropriate to 1984 than 2004 but you gotta trust me on this one. 3) (This is sort of related to 2) You can probably hold off on buying a smart phone for a couple years.