Author Archive

Getting High With Piracy on the Seas

By Dean Farisian • Feb 7th, 2010 • Category: Logs

So, you look to the sea. Oddly enough you ain’t ever eaten fish, certainly not the swimming sea-going type, having goats all at your bidding for your entire life. But there is this vast thing on the horizon, a big blue undulating mass, beckoning you. You can stick some wood in it and get happiness – which is sort of similar to a goat, but just a little more complex.



Ripping off locals: a handy guide

By Dean Farisian • Sep 18th, 2009 • Category: Logs

You’ve all done it before, been there done that, gotten bored, got the “mzungu” t-shirt and picked a few tourist pockets yourself while hanging out in the African market. Hey, things do go both ways in these places, damned straight, and it’s worth your while to understand that the local yokels can be hosed out of their money just as effectively to them as they do it to you. My good old friend George W. Bush used to call this a “pre-emptive strike” or something to that effect, but I just call it by that good old fashioned British English word, pragmatism.



Profit from your poaching like the experts do

By Dean Farisian • Jun 7th, 2009 • Category: Logs

Dean PhotoMaking money on the arse-end of Africa.

Leopards and dreadlocks just don’t mix, and I remember once out in the parklands an elephant sneaking up on a few of us cheap-like-free hostel travellers: it could have easily gored us all. An inconvenient truth for sure.



Travelling on the Chicken Bus When You’re Hideously Obese

By Dean Farisian • Oct 10th, 2008 • Category: Logs

Touring lessons for our modern age.
I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but hell I will be. I’m damned sure if you’re in front of the computer often you’ve gained a few pounds in between pints of ale or gallons of ice cream, a few burgers, the occasional full-pig barbeque, dozens of hot dogs, and [...]



Book Review: Bradt Congo by Sean Rorison

By Dean Farisian • Apr 4th, 2008 • Category: Books

PBs’ very own crackpot, the inimitable Dean Farisian, reviews the latest offering from the Bradt Guides collection – The Bradt Travelguide to The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)



Society Sucks, So Get Lost

By Dean Farisian • Feb 13th, 2008 • Category: Logs

Building Your Own Mountain Hideout: A Step By Step Guide
Way back in the day I was really enamored with all this society bullshit, this pushing and pulling, this tugging to reach higher plateaus of existence, schmoozing and smooching the stars and shagging random married women at film festivals; ah, it was the life, sipping champagne [...]



Kidnapping Children For Fun and Profit

By Dean Farisian • Dec 4th, 2007 • Category: Logs, The Politics

Lessons from the French school.
Back in the day there was a guy called Chad, and also a country, somewhere down there in the dirty sands of Africa, where a bunch of those little kiddies ran around playing and screaming and falling over stuff and sometimes even picking up guns to kill each other -