Boldly shrill ... http://www.correntewire.com/node/11682/atom/feed 2008-05-31T05:07:18-04:00 http://www.correntewire.com/bad_luck_all_around 2008-05-31T05:07:18-04:00 2008-05-31T05:07:18-04:00 danps

I spent two years in Tanzania teaching secondary school math as a Peace Corps volunteer. The only Swahili left in my head is greetings and curses (one of the latter is substantially more offensive than anything we've come up with in English) along with a few memorable phrases. One phrase is "bahati mbaya" which literally translates as "bad luck." The reason it's memorable is because it was also used to describe completely predictable bad outcomes. If you started drawing a bath, for some reason left the house for a few hours and came back to a flooded living area...bahati mbaya. It is a wonderfully diplomatic way to avoid saying, wow was that stupid. It is in that spirit that I write: This is the bahati mbaya President.

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