Segou is the second-largest town in Mali, and with around 100,000 people is much smaller than Bamako. It was the capital of Mali when it was occupied by the French, and the colonial mansions they lived in are carefully preserved so everyone will remember. We arrived in the early afternoon, took a short nap, and then walked around town as it got cooler.

We took a walk in the afternoon along the Niger River in Segou. We were mobbed of course, by people wanting to sell us things. After they thinned out a bit, other people more driven by curiosity came up and looked at us as we looked at them.

Pots for sale.

Lettuce.

You have to pay attention to the fabrics people are wearing in all these pictures.

Fishermen on a pirogue in the Niger.

Sorting out a fishing net.

Boy on a wall.

Chicken.

This is universal.

We ate lately in a restaurant in Pismo Beach, California. This restaurant was pretty clearly the place where you take your family for birthdays. Lots of ranching memorabilia on the walls. And at least five birthdays while we finished our steaks with Justin and Arlette. But the funny thing is: they weren't singing the Happy Birthday song. They had some home grown happy birthday chant that I've never heard anywhere but that one place. I'm going to guess that ASSCLAP, the American Society of Succubi, Corporations, Litigators, Artists, and Performers, had contacted that restaurant and reminded them that "Happy Birthday" is Under Copyright, and that every time they sang the song, they needed to pay a dime to some layabout degenerate scion who had never lifted a finger to do anything but deposit royalty checks in his whole life. And the restaurant had said, perhaps there is an alternative. "Happy Birthday" is a horrible annoying song and if ASSCLAP kills it by the rigorous enforcement of the property fetish, it will give an opportunity for a thousand composers and mythmakers to develop successor rituals, some of which are bound to be better than Happy Birthday, which after all only dates to the 1930's and is awful. This is a paradox of the ownership approximation to the control and distribution of goods. What does the Wutang Clan want? fame? money? for their music to be loved? If there were no piracy, I guarantee you that no person in the entire country of Mali would ever have heard of the Wutang Clan, let alone written their name on a wall. It takes a certain market momentum to persuade a starving person to part with most of a month's income (that's what a $15 CD represents when the per capita annual income is of the order of $200 per year) for some foreign griot to entertain you for 75 minutes, when your grandmother can supply hours of different songs for free.

This is tree bark which has been cut away. The city fathers try to discourage this because it wrecks the tree, but our guides told us it had medicinal value. It may be an intellectual property issue with the Swiss multinational that owns the genome of the tree, having bought it from the same guys who sold Manhattan, but I've done enough paragraphs on that. I think this is a Shea Tree, Butyrospermum parkii. The Shea Tree is valuable for its oil, called Shea Butter, and its suggestive Linnaean name. You can see why they wouldn't want you hacking the bark up.

This woman was making traditional mudcloth. But she isn't wearing mudcloth. It's too expensive. The fabrics she is wearing come from China, or possibly Nigeria.

Here's a mudcloth we bought in Djenne, hanging on the wall of my office at Digidesign. It was filled with C++ symbols, and seemed especially appropriate.

The bottoms of these mango trees, and all trees in Africa, are at precisely the level of the reach of a goat.

On to Mopti