blacksnextdoor

Sunday has arrived and very quickly!  It all happens so fast lately, this dizzying, close your eyes and hold on tight life.

Can’t believe I’ve made it this far.

Am kind of wishing it would stop and let me off though. Really sick of everything — and this last past week was horrific with excessive closed door meetings and colleagues suddenly, sheepishly cleaning out their desks and scampering out of the office for the final time.

“Downsizing has begun,” was how one of the twits in management tried to control the bleeding during yet another meeting after the third desk in our New York office had been vacated. “Much greater numbers of staff have been let go in Europe and South America,” he reassured…

Couldn’t even hear the rest. Am drowning in bills this month more than any other. House taxes.  Heating costs and thousands of dollars in school tuition due. Have no idea where it’s coming from.

Worse yet, tomorrow morning at 7 AM, I check into the hospital for a procedure that’s not quite surgical – no cutting – but will leave me in a great deal of pain afterwards. Morphine pump, pain killers. Recovery time uncertain. Two weeks? A month?

Champagne, anyone? Life is mah-ve-lous? N’est pas?

Since I’m on a complaint roll, I’ll also throw it out there that there’s a blogger that’s been heavily incorporating whatever she can from my blog into her blog. Can’t believe how irreverent she is. Whatever she can steal she does.

First came across her blog in September. Like a lot of blogs, it had a couple of old postings that could’ve been written by anyone and an oddly ungrammatical bio where she pitched herself as a writer for hire. Wouldn’t have known about it at all if I hadn’t first received an email from her where she mentioned she was adding me to her blog roll. Didn’t see any commonality between the two of us.  She was another black woman blogger. That was it.

Then periodically noticed she was pillaging my site for ideas on how to develop her own and I won’t elaborate any further on what a shady opportunist she is but, it’s disgusting the lack of respect she’s showing for another writer’s intellectual property.

For the record, obviously I’m against compulsively protecting everything I write or I wouldn’t be throwing my stuff up on the internet for free every week. But when you tap into other blogs for your own content, especially when you’re trying to monetize your site which she evidently is,  you kill the other site, the writer, the capacity for free exchange.

This is the way of corporations. They exploit the most natural things that human beings do, re-package them for profit and worse yet, claim exclusive rights over whatever they ultimately stole.

Most of us are familiar with how Phytopharm took the Hoodia plant that the Kung Bushmen of the Kalhari have used for thousands of years to suppress their appetites – and patented it as a cure for obesity. See this interview with Mariam Mayet at http://www.allafrica.com/stories/200804110619.html for more…

Anyway, Phytopharm sold “their innovative new drug”  to Pfizer for a whopping sum.

Many millions in fact, never including the Bushmen who did the research and development for it in the equation.

Last I heard, the humble Bushmen were still negotiating for ‘benefit sharing’ with the pharma giants of the world.

Suddenly reminded of something my Moroccan friend, Abduillah, said once: The antelope and the lion don’t drink from the same water.

But alas, as there’s less and less space that more and more of us share, they do Abduillah.

Perhaps the answer is that the antelope bring an Uzi.

May everyone who follows Blacks Next Door, have a better week than I will.