Saturday 1 October 2011

What's cool?

"Still life: hat with banana" an unwitting work of art
You know what's cool?  Ngorongoro, that's cool.  I don't mean the giant caldera, which I posted about here. Though that's cool, to be sure.  I mean the word "Ngorongoro"; I reckon that's as cool a word as the word "Dhaulaghiri", the Nepali name of the 8,000+ metre monster right next to Annapurna, both of which I visited in 1995.  I love that word, it rolls in the mouth and in the mind.
What else is cool is Kenyans.  Africans in many other countries are cool too, of course, but I reckon Kenyans take the cool cake.
And my hat is, by common acclamation, cool.  I'm not going to post a photo of it; I wouldn't want to seem immodest. In any case, attentive readers will note that it's in most photos of me.
And what's the opposite of cool?  Well, David Pineo's Hat. Which they call a "Yarpie" (as in South Efrican) hat. I don't mean to be rude about it, but it's simply not cool.  I'm sorry, but it's the truth.
Unfortunately, in attempting to prove that David's hat is not cool, I took the above photo with my iPhone this morning, and it seems to have turned out an unwitting piece of art, inspired, perhaps, by Matisse.
I might have to concede that this hat, if not yet cool, is nonetheless, in certain contexts, a piece of work, post-modern abstract expressionism.