6000 – Page 759

Airportraits

Posted on October 20, 2016October 20, 2016

When I caught a glimpse of this project yesterday evening, I immediately knew what today’s blog post was going to be.

Mike Kelley (for it is his wot the project is) has spent a lot of time photographing aircraft and possibly even more time on Photoshop, adding them all to these images (Heathrow T5 and Schiphol – behold the KLMitude). Yes, obviously it’s photoshopped – I don’t think they’d allow quite that many flights to take off simultaneously. That said, it does appear that they have all successfully avoided each other, so this may be a good way of preventing runway congestion and subsequent delays. Certainly worth looking into.

There are a lot more photos in this series, from places as diverse as LA and Tokyo. And there are other series too with some amazing images. An interesting one is Architechture of Iceland (click through from the link above). Who goes to Iceland to photograph the architecture?
Well, it turns out that Mike Kelley does, and he does it damn well.

Go see.

Level 3 Water Restrictions For Cape Town

Posted on October 18, 2016October 18, 2016

Yep. “Just” 11 months after putting the Level 2 water restrictions in place, and with a disappointingly dry winter behind us, the City’s Mayco has approved the implementation of Level 3 restrictions from 1st November 2016. That’s because you and I haven’t saved enough water this year.
Victim-blaming hat on:

Cape Town residents as a whole did not achieve the consistent 10% reduction in water use that was mandated from 1 January 2016. If we continue to use water as we did on Level 2 restrictions over the coming summer months, the dams are at risk of falling to 15% by the end of the summer period. Following on, if we experience poor rainfall next rainy season, we could find our dams at approximately 50% this time next year.

The dam levels have slipped slightly again this week – their second successive weekly fall, and although it’s not by much, it’s still not by much the wrong way. Unless something dramatic happens, our “high” at the end of winter will have been a worrying 62.5%.

Chez 6000, we’ve already been washing with a bucket on the shower floor to collect the “spare” grey water, which then goes on the garden each morning. But apparently it’s simply not been enough.
“SO MANY BUCKETS THOUGH!!!!” he wailed.

In basic terms, what these means is that the more water you use, the more you will pay – at higher tariffs too, but if you can reduce your usage by 20%, you should pay no more than you are already paying (but for less water, obviously).
Oh – and there are some other really important additional new rules too:

– Watering/irrigation (with drinking water from municipal supply) of gardens, lawns, flower beds and other plants, vegetable gardens, sports fields, parks and other open spaces is allowed only if using a bucket or watering container. No use of hosepipes or automatic sprinkler systems is allowed.
– Cars and boats may only be washed with water from buckets.
– Manual topping up of swimming pools is allowed only if pools are fitted with a pool cover. No automatic top-up systems are allowed.
– No portable play pools are permitted to be used.

What remains to be seen is whether any of this will be policed or whether the city will simply rely on those higher bills to deter excessive water usage. Since that approach evidently didn’t work on the Level 2 restrictions, I wonder if they will actually be doing something about people not obeying the rules this summer?

At the elephant park

Posted on October 18, 2016October 24, 2016

Mrs 6000 recently made a trip to the Knysna Elephant Park in… well… near Knysna. Among the activities on offer there are watching the elephants, feeding the elephants, riding the elephants and photographing the…

er… zebras?

Yes, they have zebras there too. Mrs 6000 took many amazing photos of the elephants too, and I will be uploading them to Flickr. [UPDATE: Done! Here.] But this striking (previously variegated) image of these four chaps jumped out as an immediate favourite of mine, and that’s why it’s up here first.

Related: it’s quite nice to have Mrs 6000 home again.

Destroying Donald Trump

Posted on October 17, 2016November 2, 2016

I’m no fan of Donald Trump.

Just putting that up there nice and clear before the hate mail starts coming in. “Don’t @ me”. Save your pixels; save your bandwidth.

I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton either, mind. I think she’s a dreadful woman and a terrible excuse for a politician; one who has just got very lucky in who she’s been put up against in this ridiculously binary race for (one of) the most powerful positions on the planet. Hobson’s choice. Take Trump out of the equation and compare HRC with anyone else out there, and you’ll see what I mean.

Except it seems that you can’t take Donald Trump out of the equation. He’s undestroyable. So many have tried – look:

Some yellow cartoon people:

Evening TV show host “Jon” Oliver:

Evening TV show host Stephen Colbert:

Er… Evening TV show host Bill Maher:

Evening TV show host Seth Myers:

Actual Evening TV show Last Week Tonight:

A rapper:

An old actor:

A Scottish author of kids books:

Drone-bomber in chief and current President of the USA, AND “a Nicaraguan-born American Republican strategist and political commentator for various news outlets” – bilingually nogal!:

An American actress, author, poet, and film director:

Hillary’s husband, briefly:

Barack’s wife, emotionally:An entire social media platform:Another rapper:Another evening TV show host (after analyzing and explaining):Author, philosopher, and neuroscientist Sam Harris:And a previous reality show “star”:

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. This outpouring of enthusiastic (yet apparently utterly futile) attempted destruction by showbiz stars and other public figures is interesting and – depending on your political and/or moral standpoint, I guess – very worthy, but perhaps tells us more about the hyperbole of modern media than anything else.

Because even though Donald Trump has been “destroyed” countless times (and not least by his own big mouth and seemingly unending stream of stupid comments), he’s still just three or four points behind Clinton at this point.

Let’s face it – look at his completely unprepared, slipshod campaign, lurching from one disaster to the next and you’ll see that there’s no-one more surprised than Donald Trump that he’s actually got this far.

And, as we’ve mentioned above, given that Clinton is an utterly horrendous proposition and the American public are a bit daft, you’d be wise not to write off Donald just yet. Because if he’s still going after this guy had a go:

…then you know that he’s still got every chance of winning next month’s election.

[Deity] help us all.