Author: 6000

Ugh… Cyclists

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Ugh… Cyclists.

When they’re not jumping red lights, riding seventy-four abreast through Kalk Bay every weekend or whining about their morning jaunt being cancelled, they’re defecating in their hands and flinging it at fellow road-users.

Poo flinging? How very Capetonian.

But amazingly, the victim of the attack has come in for criticism after sharing the details of the incident online. Comments included:

“A man had time to pull down his trousers, poo in his hands and lob it at your car..?? Was you stationary..?? Because I’d of drove off the minute he was pulling down his trousers.!!”

Yeah – sorry about the grammar etc. It’s from Gloucester.

And my favourite:

“Anyone with half a brain cell would drive off as soon as the hand cupped to scoop the poop.”

Presumably these people are only aware of best practice here because this has happened to them too?
So there we go, folks. The two expert-recommended stages to commence driving away should you ever find yourself in a similar situation: the pulling down of the trousers and the cupping of the hand to scoop.

Leave it any later than that, and frankly, you’re asking for trouble.

Full story

Pack your trunk – we’re off to Mars

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Vital space exploration news greeted me this morning in the shape of this headline from The Times:

Right. Obviously, besides the single benefit stated above, there are also drawbacks with sending elephants into space. For starters, their somewhat larger mass means that you’re going to need a lot more thrust to get you up to escape velocity and out of the Earth’s gravitational pull. They’re also pretty big in terms of volume, meaning that you’re going to need to increase the size of your spaceship to house them. They eat more, they drink more, they poo more, but perhaps our major concern here should be that we’re clearly ignoring the most important factor to consider in this whole plan: they are elephants.

Yes, elephants are ever so intelligent, but they are still elephants. We’ve all seen how clever and caring they can be on those nature documentaries, but elephants are let down by their inability to communicate in basic human language, let alone carrying out computer programming and complex scientific experimentation. In fact, aside from their alleged cancer-resisting traits (and perhaps their reputation for having really good memories), there’s not an awful lot that supports this frankly very dodgy idea to send elephants to colonise Mars.

And then, what if we were to actually follow through on this and colonise Mars with these pachyderms? It sets a worrying precedent for the future colonisation of other planets with somewhat implausible animals. So what next? Sending ornamental ducks to Jupiter? Hammerhead sharks to Saturn? An anteater to Venus? Presumably we’d have to send some ants as well for that last one. See how complicated it becomes?

No, this is a silly idea and we should stop right now. The elephants won’t mind – they’re very thick-skinned – and it might just save us from the inevitable onset of any immature Richard Gere “gerbils in Uranus” jokes.

Bites

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I cannot wait for this infernal sumer to be over (although if it could hang around/return for my upcoming weekend away, that would also be nice).

Not only have we still had no significant rain, meaning that we are even deeper (no pun intended) in the throes of our water crisis, but this week’s calm, warm days and calm, warm nights have made Cape Town – specifically the bit of Cape Town that is our bedroom – a veritable paradise for mosquitoes. The whiney little shits.

I’ve mentioned before on here the lengths I go to in order to improved Mrs 6000’s life in this regard, but the last couple of nights have been off the scale as far as my sacrifices go. I am covered – covered – in bites. I itch.

Feel free to give me all your anti-mosquito tips and tricks, but please bear in mind that I have tried them all, and I am still trying them all. Tabard, Peaceful Sleep, Pyrethrums, Citronella, Prayer, A Big Fan, The AR15 Assault Rifle: all of them.

This morning, despite having employed each and every strategy I had at my disposal, and having checked and declared the room fully mosquito-free before retiring last night, I killed 9 of the engorged little bastards. All fed on me. Not a mark on my wonderful wife.

And why should tonight be any different? Meaning that by this time tomorrow I will basically just be one big histamine molecule.

Well, there’s something to look forward to. Ugh.

Golf

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Golf. Sport of Kings. Or is that Polo? Whatever, I’m not a fan of golf.
Golf is dull.

Fans of golf – you know who you are – will tell you that it’s not dull. They’ll tell you about that exciting finish to the Ryder Cup in 2012 or some such, and yes, perhaps for that putt, we all held our collective breaths, at least briefly. But it took us four days of repeated five hour games of golf to get there! Dull.

And then there’s the fact that if you want to play some golf, you basically have to schedule most of a day for it. It’s not an hour’s footy, or a 30 minute run round the block. It’s most of a day.
Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Still, I just think that golf is dull. Brian Micklethwait feels slightly more strongly than that:

I still hate and fear golf.

A little more digging (I clicked a link) reveals that it seems to be the same issue with the length of time the whole process takes that’s the root of his hatred and fearfulness:

I remember once having a go at it, when I was at my expensive public school in the middle of the last century.  I still remember hitting one golf ball really sweetly and deciding, right then and there, that I would never do this again, because if I did, there was a definite danger that golf would take over my entire life.  And I wasn’t having that.

Brian does like cricket though, including test cricket, which for me falls into the same “occasionally a really exciting last few minutes but to be fair it took things an awfully long time to get there” category as golf.

The difference is that cricket has noticed this issue and adapted with one dayers and T20s. Horrible for the purists, but key in saving the sport.
Golf, though? Golf has only just agreed to let women be members at its most famous clubs (although they’re not allowed to change there).

So golf is actually old-fashioned, sexist and dull. And it takes ages.

No, thank you.

TBS: BBT

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As predicted, today has been busy. But don’t panic – I’ve got us covered with a gentle melody from [wince] 25 years ago. Yes, it’s the gentle harmonies of The Beautiful South with Bell Bottomed Tear. And I’ve chosen the live version because it features Paul Heaton, Sheffield United fan and ex-pupil at my Infant school*.

Taken from their 1992 album, 0898 Beautiful South (the dialling code representing premium rate phone calls – mainly sex lines – at the time), this was TBS at their peak – the third of their seven Top 10 studio albums, and also featured 36D, We Are Each Other and the brilliant Old Red Eyes Is Back.

At the end of the original video, our selfish male protagonist finds himself on a Mediterranean beach, faced with a number of angry women brandishing baseball bats. Baseballbatophobes will be pleased to hear that there’s no such nastiness in this live version.

* when I say this, I mean that we went to the same infant school. I don’t actually own an infant school or anything.