Work in Progress

A Rowbory family blog from Nigeria

The Highland Clearances Revisited

Growing up in 1990s post-industrial Scotland, the harrowing narrative of the Highland clearances was evoked time and again as a metanarrative to explain (or excuse?) the pitiful state of the nation. I remember the none-too-subtle play The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil being performed (rather well) at the High School of Glasgow. …

Scottish Small-mindedness Syndrome

Abstract / Executive Summary Scotland has suffered a catastrophic loss of influence over the last century which seems to have led to a wide-spread cultural phenomenon of small-mindedness which promises to drag this formerly-proud nation ever downward. It corrupts family life, education, society at large and the ‘national church’.

Glossy open source project opened

For those interested in the Glossy project and who might want to contribute ideas and submit improvements, there’s now a project on bitbucket. Thanks for Milt Jones and others for suggestions. There’s more that could be done, but I don’t have time at the moment to work on it. I’ll try to put together ideas for …

Big Picture Story Bible 16: Jesus Restores God’s Place

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsz9gxnG8O4″ title=”Rebekah%20reads%20the%20Big%20Picture%20Story%20Bible%20chapter%2016%20(just%20the%20end)” ratio=”4:3″ autohide=”1″]

Buttbuttination: The Clbuttic mistake

It’s not new news, but it always tickles Julie and me to evoke the memory of naive profanity filters that produce the following: President Abraham Lincoln was buttbuttinated by an armed buttailant after a life devoted to the reform of the US consbreastution. In case you haven’t come across it or want to reread the …

Vimeo oembed fix for WordPress (again!)

Either Vimeo or WordPress has changed something, but oembeds weren’t working for me with Vimeo. Some helpful people had produced patches in the form of plugins but they didn’t work either. However, they very nearly did. Here’s my corrected version of the plugin. /* Plugin Name: Vimeo oembed hotfix Plugin URI: Description: Enable https vimeo …

I think I’ll SayMore

Why can millions of people can happily speak languages that they can’t easily write? How do pioneer writers develop a natural written style for their language? How can mother-tongue speakers take responsibility for recording and carefully archiving some of the precious songs, stories, speeches, teachings and other communication from their languages? How do we transcribe …

Reading the News in Nigeria

One of the fun things about the English language is the abuse that it can (and does) take, whether at home or abroad. And in my nook of ‘abroad’ it would appear that my mother-tongue has been shamelessly hijacked and forced to do all kinds of uncharacteristic things. So, just for fun, here are some …

Roger Blench’s website mirrored for Nigerian users

Some linguists in Nigeria have been unable to access Roger Blench’s website at the address www.roger-blench.info This seems to affect Multilinks users more than MTN or Glo users. So for anyone struggling to access the site, I have set up a mirroring service which would appear to work well. Use this address: http://rb.rowbory.co.uk The front …

Glossy updated for 64-bit systems

The glossy tool for displaying Paratext lexicons nicely has been updated to handle 64-bit Windows systems. If it doesn’t seem to work on Internet Explorer, there may be security warnings to confirm. Firefox may be easier to use.