Category: annoying people

Wrong side

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It does rather look like South Africa is cementing itself on the wrong side of the whole Russia/Ukraine thing. For clarity, I am aware that there are many different viewpoints on the conflict, but I’m using the term “the wrong side” because the side SA is landing on is not the side that I agree with, and when I look at the people who do agree with it (Tinfoilers, Republicans, Trumpies, Racists, Tankies, Antivaxxers, and “Tyranny” users), then I am wholly convinced that I am on the right side.

SA is making sure that they end up on the other side – the wrong side. And they’re about to help make history for all the wrong reasons by hosting the Russian Navy (and the Chinese Navy) while Russia attempts to launch the first ever hypersonic missile:

The Zircon, sometimes translated as Tsirkon, is a hypersonic missile, a class being furiously developed by China, France, and the United States among others. With speeds that Russia claims can hit Mach 9, the weapon could be effectively unstoppable if correctly deployed…

Not good.

I have to break off here and wonder if Business Insider is actually a serious news source though, with lines like this:

That sounds like an unfunny line from this blog. (An oxymoron, I know.)

How far can a Zirkon/Tsirkon go?

If the claimed range of the Zirkon is accurate, such a capital ship could be destroyed by an enemy as far away as Durban is from Cape Town.

To be fair, if it were launched from Cape Town and it hit Durban (it would take less than 7 minutes to get there), it might tidy the place up a bit.

But look, this is serious business, and it’s not great, but we’re not alone in our (soon to be more than) tacit support of Putin:

And I recognise the history and imperialism, but I really don’t see the difference between that and the current stealthy colonisation of Africa by China and Russia.

If the joint exercise were in Cape waters, I’d be there waving my Ukrainian flag. But it’s in Durban, and don’t want to get sick, so I’m feeling ashamed from a distance instead.

Sponsoring Spurs

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Your questions answered? I doubt it.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media this week, as it was revealed that SA Tourism – the body charged with promoting and marketing South Africa to the rest of the world as a tourist destination – is/was/are/might be planning to spend close to R1 billion on sponsoring Tottenham Hotspur FC.

“How can you be spending this money when our country is in such a state?”
“Why not spend this money on fixing Eskom?”
“Why must it be a foreign football team? We have plenty of our own who need that money!”

Now, I’m not an expert on marketing – unlike all of the experts on Twitter – but I do understand the basics: namely that you spend some money on telling people about a product or service that you offer, with the intent that enough of those people then buy that product or service to make more money than you spent on telling them about the product or service.

So in this case, a billion Rands outlay with the intention that sponsoring Spurs will bring in more than a billion Rands in tourist revenue.

And I think that rough outline kind of answers the first question above. The plan is to spend some money in order to make more money, and that more money will benefit the country more.

And as the second question points out, the country needs to be fixed. Ignoring the point above, in which we would get more money back (and more), how much would that R1 billion help to fix Eskom and get rid of our loadshedding once and for all? Figures as to how much Eskom needs to work properly again do vary, but this number came up more than once:

This R1 billion amounts to less than 0.1% of that. I’m not saying it’s not a lot of money – it is – but I am saying that giving it to Eskom won’t make any difference whatsoever to loadshedding.
Nothing. Nada. Zippo. Dololo.
You will be urinating it away into the strong southeaster, which is turning our inefficient wind turbines

It wouldn’t even pay off 2% of the R52 billion that Eskom is owed just by South African municipalities.

Oh, and why not sponsor a local football team? Because close to no-one watches South Africa football. Not at the stadiums, not on the TV. You need people to see your marketing message, or it won’t work. And then those people who do watch South African football are South Africans, so they know all about South Africa, but they have no money to spend on coming to South Africa.

I guess my problem with the way this story was broken was twofold.

Firstly, that tourism is South Africa is one of our very few recent success stories. And whatever SA Tourism has been doing to get things going again after the disastrous pandemic seems to have been working, e.g.:

or:

And, before any of this Spurs stuff emerged, we were already being told that we needed to do something more to get people to come here rather than other African destinations:

So it does rather seem that people are having a go at SA Tourism, for… well… just doing their job.

And that seems unfair. What did these same people think of the way that SA Tourism spent their marketing budget last year? Or the year before? Or didn’t they even know that SA Tourism was a thing? Did they really imagine that people found their way on board flights to Cape Town and Joburg thanks to a lucky throw at a map on a dartboard?
This seems a naïve idea for everyone who clearly knows everything about tourism marketing.

A lot of people on Twitter said that the Arsenal “VISIT RWANDA” campaign didn’t work, but Rwanda is making more from tourism than ever before, and the fact that so many commentators were able to go straight to that campaign and draw parallels does suggest that (whether or not they had visited Rwanda), some sort of message had clearly got through.

But there is always a deep distrust of any agency spending public money in South Africa. Which brings me to the second problem: that the Daily Maverick immediately framed this deal as being secretive and dodgy. And yes, that taps nicely into the narrative and it’s certainly got tongues wagging, but again: how did the DM feel about previous expenditure from this department? Why single this out as being an issue? Is it because of the size of the deal? Because football is big business. And Premier League football is the biggest of the lot:

The 20 Premier League clubs collectively spent €830 million ($900 million) in the winter transfer window, which is more than triple the combined spending of the Italian Serie A, Spain’s La Liga, the German Bundesliga and French Ligue 1. That brings the Premier League’s total spending this season to almost €3.1 billion ($3.4 billion), shattering the previous spending record of €2.2 billion ($2.4 billion) set in the 2017/18 season.

And:

The Premier League is the most-watched sports league in the world, broadcast in 212 territories to 643 million homes and a potential TV audience of 4.7 billion.

More than 40% of the UK population watch Premier League football. That’s a lot of prospective tourists seeing the “Come to South Africa” message. And while I don’t expect them all to turn up, it wouldn’t take many for SA Tourism to break even.

And yet, the Daily Maverick could only interview one unnamed tourism expert who said:

And were apparently unable to find anyone who thought it was a good idea.

But then again, perhaps the Daily Maverick’s concerns were valid, given that they now seem to have found a (somewhat tenuous) link between the interim CFO of SA Tourism and an agency that was mentioned in the presentation about the potential deal.

The wording seems deliberately terrible. The language used is carefully crafted to make a story. And yet, the timeline doesn’t really fit, even reading the Daily Maverick’s version of events, and there seems to be quite a degree of overreach – the main link appears to be that the interim CFO did some tax work for the agency in question in the past – he had nothing to do with the Spurs deal except (bizarrely) apparently their using his laptop to present the Powerpoint which was “obtained” by the Daily Maverick earlier in the week, but then people only read the headline, not the story, and so now the whole deal is clearly corrupt.

And maybe it is. After all, everything else here seems to be. And all the social media experts say it must be and that it’s money wasted and, and, and…

Eish.

Living in SA is tiring.

That’s not a bird

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Each of the wines at the Constantia Uitsig (approximately pronounced “Ate-Suck”) (we were there recently) just down the road comes with an associated bird.
This goes for the wines made from their homegrown grapes, e.g.:

…and the ones made from grapes that are grown elsewhere and then blended and bottled at the vineyard e.g.:

Why? Well, it demonstrates their green credentials:

Everyone working on the farm embodies a strong ethos of taking good care of animals, and everyone understands the importance of the wildlife on the farm. Constantia Uitsig is home to a wide array of indigenous birds and animals. For this reason, we have chosen to use the birds found on the farm to represent our wines, with each wine having its own bird representing it.

Bit gimmicky, perhaps, but I have no problem with wine farmers looking after the environment as much as is possible (given that they are growing grapes). I mean, let’s face it: they could be doing all this without considering the environment at all. And that would be less good.

I do have a bit of an issue with their choice of bird for the Sémillon*, though. That’s because they’ve gone for the Orange-breasted Mousebird.

And that doesn’t exist.

But not only is it on the tasting notes:

It’s also on the website:

And then they’ve doubly doubled-down on the “Show Me The Bird**” click through:

Argh!

The bird in question is, of course, and Orange-breasted Sunbird (Anthobaphes violacea).

Here’s one having a bath in our back garden:

The plants in the background? No idea. I just do birds.

And that little “mouse”/”sun” difference might not seem like a big thing, but what this bird isn’t is an Orange-breasted Mousebird.

Look, they are clearly going to get away with it (and have been doing for the past n years), because their visitors mainly come from overseas, they don’t know about birds, and no-one is as nerdy as me. But this is just wrong. I could point it out to them, but they’d likely come back with something like:

“Well, yes, you’re right, but our visitors mainly come from overseas, they don’t know about birds, and no-one is as nerdy as you.”

Which are all fair points.

But it’s just wrong, and if they were to do a survey of their local bird population, then they’d find that their Orange-breasted Mousebird numbers were dramatically low. Like… zero.

Can something be described as extinct if it never even existed in the first place? I don’t think so.

As ever, I don’t expect anything to come of this blog post. But it does feel good to have got it off my chest.

Which is not orange.

* For the record, I have no issue with the wine, which is lovely.
** New York wineries must never use this approach.

Still at it.

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As Elmo Rusk continues to break Twitter, into an entirely unusable platform, he’s invited back some of the crap that was previously removed from the site. We all know about Trump, but more locally, Piers Corbyn’s cringey singing partner and all around anti-vax wanker, Nick Hudson, has also been granted leave to return.

Twitter has been going downhill for a good long while, but it was still better without the Hudson family’s biggest embarrassment, beardy-weirdy Nick.

But – probably amazed by the success of the nonsense that they have made up and have peddled thus far – those pesky anti-vaxxers are still at it, and they’re getting bolder and more brazen with every given day. We’ve now returned to stuff like depopulation programmes, 5G nanochips (see below), “spike shedding”, graphene oxide and – a particular bugbear to someone that’s been working with [checks notes] viruses for 20+ years – the fact that [checks notes again] viruses don’t actually exist.

And indeed, why would you stop if you are a narcissist with a pathological need for acknowledgement for likes and retweets and all you have to do to get satisfaction is to fabricate some nonsense* and your disciples will feed your needs, lap it up and even demand more.

It’s a sad, sad situation. And it’s getting more and more absurd.

But much as the government really doesn’t want to track you via the “5G chips in your vaccine” or the Covid app on your phone, because you’re actually rather dull and insignificant, if you’re really gullible to believe stuff like this:

… then like Dr Janaway says, you’re probably not really “dangerous” enough to have to be controlled.

More seriously though, the polarisation of society via social media is now very clearly out of control. Maybe that was already the case on January 6th 2022, but I see it each and every day (that I bother to log on). People just don’t think for themselves anymore. And the unscrupulous, batty individuals on whom they are relying for news, information, leadership and opinion are fully taking advantage of that.

It’s not a good thing.

* earlier today it was about “masks being impregnated with bacteria and fungi to cause respiratory illness”, which is a right bummer for those of us who have to wear them each and every day in the lab to protect us from [checks note yet again] er… respiratory illness.

The race

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Lots to get done today, as we finally settle into the routine of the New Year, several (or more) days after most people have. But I also want to watch some football, so it’s been a case of racing around getting jobs done while there’s some electricity, and leaving the other non-electrical stuff until the power is out.

Talking of, there was this tweet, which has set social media ablaze:

Mpho Makwana being the Chairperson of the Eskom board.

As a rule of thumb, you can multiply the stage of loadshedding by two to work out the approximate number of hours you’ll be without power each day. What seems to be being suggested here is that we’ll be without power for four to six hours every day for until 2025.

And while I get the supposed “benefit” of the “predictability” aspect, even if this is implemented, there’s absolutely no guarantee that there won’t be higher stages than 2 or 3 at any time. And we just don’t know when those will be, because we can’t predict them. And that does kind of rule out the above “benefit”, almost immediately.

It seemingly also removes any actual benefit of lower stages of loadshedding being a possibility.

But this was just a tweet of an alleged quote made at a news conference (foolishly, too: no-one will remember a damn thing of the other important messages from the 2+ hour session), and there are plenty of ifs, buts and maybes to work through before it actually happens – if it ever does.
What it doesn’t say is this:

But then journalist Denene isn’t going to get her clicks without pretending that it does.

Let’s wait and see what happens.