inaugural ball

Well, ok, this is it.

This seemed a better option than trying to remember the email address of everyone I've ever known in order to clog their inboxes with photos of god knows what. So here it is: BlogTswana.
I hope no one kicks my ass over the name. For those not already in the loop: prefixes that indicate the class to which a noun belongs are a major feature of Setswana, a language spoken by a large portion of Botswana's population. So, for example, setswana is the language, Botswana is the place, etc. Then there's the mining partnership between DeBeers and the Government of Botswana, known as Debswana. There's a pharmaceutical distributor called Medswana. It simply goes on, and on... Inevitably, given my taste for horrible puns, my personal nickname for my dissertation project became Betswana.

I don't think it means anything. There's no class of nouns of which I know that begins with be-. But knowing my luck, it'll turn out to mean something in the neighborhood of 'your momma wears combat boots'. Either that, or it will be taken as some kind of incitement to Tswana ethnic nationalism.

(Wow, wikipedia has a short and problematic description for everything...)

Anyway, this is just an opening salvo. I'll save adventures in Cape Town and an explanation of what the hell I'm doing in Botswana for later.