Kenya dig it?

First of all, I take no credit at all for that awful pun. One of the others found t-shirts with that slogan and an outline of the country. And I suspect that we'll get them. Sigh.

But, it is indeed official: KENYA & TANZANIA FOR EASTER BREAK! Woot! We leave on April 1 and come back to London on April 16. Tour info here: Kenya and Tanzania Adventure. This is going to be awesome. And I bought more travel guides! Heck, I even got an extra one (Spain) because they were 2 for 3! I think few things will make me happier than deals on Rough Guides. I think I should be their spokesperson. Also, I want a bulk buying discount. I'll take another photo of my shelf sometime; it's obscene. Or maybe funny.

In other news, I need to go do my reading, but I did promise a quick note on the essay that I turned in (under great duress) last week. I felt quite clever, however, and will be quite happy if the idea in my head managed to come out correctly on paper. Basically, my question asked whether there were essential values in human rights and whether those values had changed over time. I said yes to the values and no to the changing over time, because human rights (as we think of them today (and this part involved a tangent on Maslow)) have only existed for 60 years. We (human rights people) don't have a real history, so we've found the values that we think are essential and looked for their promotion in the past. These things weren't human rights at the time because such things didn't exist. And the values have remained the same because they're our values, not those of the Stoics or the Social Contractarians. Did that make sense? This was an incredibly difficult paper to write because a) I haven't written anything serious for a long time (em, since my thesis), b) I haven't really written philosophy since high school, and c) this was just an incredibly difficult paper to organize and grasp well enough to start/structure a paper. Anyway, I think it works better when I don't have to be all formal. Sadly, though, best friend + hard paper to write = less fun for both Joyce and best friend. But we did make it to Stonehenge and Salisbury. Yay! And Ladysmith Black Mambazo is coming to London in May (I think May)!