Category: annoying people

Will I watch?

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Yes, I will, as I have previously described. But I can’t say I’m very excited about it.

I’m well aware of the human rights abuses and general nastiness of the Qatari regime, but my not switching on the TV for Morocco v Croatia isn’t going to make any difference to how that Government feels about homosexuality. And it was abundantly clear from the very start that this was just a massive, corrupt spend on reputation laundering; an attempt which I think has already backfired massively. Realistically, how many people who previously hadn’t considered Qatar as a potential destination for business or pleasure (no, not those sorts of pleasure – naughty!) are now looking at the nation in a more favourable light?

Exactly.

It’s all a massive f-up and the only good bit about any of it is the football, so I’ll watch that.
However – like Musa Okwonga – it will be without my usual enthusiasm:

After all, a World Cup is something to be celebrated: at its best it is a global event where, for all its excess, society somehow seems to move forward. Witness, for example, the beautifully-curated 2010 tournament in South Africa, which allowed the hosts to take centre stage in hearts and minds across the planet. Or the 2002 World Cup, superbly organised by Japan and South Korea, which saw Brazil win in a style that was true to football’s loftiest aesthetic ideals.

Sadly, though, the last three World Cups – Brazil, Russia and now Qatar – have in succession managed to perform a sort of asset-stripping of the soul of this competition, tearing away much of its sheen and leaving us with its basic elements: that is to say, a well-run series of games that is available to whoever may be the highest bidder.

But, yes. I’ll still be watching.

Although, if I believed in spooky signs from the netherworld, there’s loadshedding right when it’s kicking off. Which could either been seen as a bit of a hint, or could be just because we have loadshedding several times a day, and one (or more) of them was always going to coincide with some of the matches.

You decide.

All over for the bluebird?

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It’s the beginning of the end
The car went up the hill and disappeared around the bend
Ask anyone, they’ll tell you that
It’s these times that it tends
To start to break in half, to start to fall apart
Hold on to your heart

It seems that being a bit of an arse to your staff isn’t the best way to be a boss. I think that this is fairly well understood, but sometimes, people get too detached from reality to remember these sorts of things, and so they persist in their being a bit of an arse to their staff, and things break.

It’s been a hilarious rollercoaster ride of fanciful allegations (most of which then turned out to be true), and subsequent backtrackery since the Loud Mouth Space Wanker bought Twitter, and immediately tried to change things that didn’t need changing, just to show what power he could wield.

That’s not to say that some things didn’t need changing. Twitter used to be great, but had more recently become a cesspool of misinformation, insults, hatred and division. Pretty much a metaphor for the rest of the world, but concentrated into one small app, so that the nastiness could really be amplified.

When Musk took it over, the only people smiling about it were the right-wing, anti-vax Trump fans. And that was a pretty good indication of where it was heading. But that was just on the surface. Beneath the crusty exterior, Elon was… well… being an arse to his staff. But apparently, there’s only so much boss arsery that staff are willing to take:

Who knew? Well, even I did: just check out the first sentence of this post.

So, is this the end for Twitter? To be honest, I’d been using it less and less over the past few years. But I’ll still miss it.
Maybe it’s for the best, given the direction it was clearly about to take. Of course, Musk doesn’t think so, but the replies to his tweet are exactly the reason that I’ll miss Twitter so much when it chooses (or I choose) to give up completely.

There are still many, many interesting, erudite, important, humorous and entertaining people on the app, and still plenty of useful information, from valid local and international sources, and it’s sad that those informal bonds and communities seem likely to die the death now.

Everyone is bailing (see Titanic and Old Testament references above) for other places, and yes, I am there (see the link at the top of the sidebar), but I’m really not sure I’m ready to start over with the 13+ years of building things up again. Maybe.

Still, if all else fails, this place will always* be here.

* T&Cs apply

It’s been a day

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I am not a fan of shopping, but I had to do some shopping this morning. Thankfully, I managed to get through the ordeal with minimal fuss, but I’m sure that if there was anyone observing (I doubt that there was), then there was no doubting the displeasure with which I did so.

Anyway, that’s done for another few months.

And once the Boy Wonder is back from his evening activities in about an hour (via Uber Dad), I shall be heading the bed asap. I am knackered. A combination of exercise, age, shopping and just… stuff.

Still, at least I’m still very much alive, apparently unlike Afrikaans.

That latter comment prompting Afrikaans speakers all over… er… South Africa to roll out the #1vandie44 hashtag. (No idea what it means: I’m not one of the 44.)
I love everyone commenting on the language in that piece though, basically saying that yes, Afrikaans pretty much still alive, and then reminding us that (bad thing) it was the language of oppression during Apartheid and (good thing?) it’s really useful for insulting people.

A fairly simplistic binary view of things, but for me (and millions of others), the former probably just about outweighs the latter.

No. Just no.

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It’s the last day of real football today, before we go into this weird, unwanted Qatar World Cup break for the next month or so. Look, I will be watching – because it’s football – but I don’t think that I’ve ever been more disengaged and uninterested in any World Cup in my whole life. And I was only 8 months old for one of them.

Actually, the break could not have come at a better time for Sheffield United, as we might be able to get a few players back from injury while they aren’t playing thirteen matches a week to fit the tournament in. And the injury list is long: Daniel Jebbison, Jack O’Connell, Jayden Bogle, Max Lowe, Oli McBurnie, Rhian Brewster, Rhys Norrington-Davies (who should be on a plane to Qatar with the Welsh squad), Sander Berge, Tommy Doyle, Jack Robinson, Anel Ahmedhodzic and John Fleck. That’s more than an entire first team unavailable because they are broken. We started yesterday’s game with an academy player in midfield, and two more on the bench, and even then we had to add an extra goalkeeper to make up the numbers. Carnage.

(Still won, though.)

So that’s the only positive for me, but that doesn’t stop the constant stream of businesses and organisations trying to make me be interested. The latest one of those is Facebook. And they are very clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel with this nonsense:

Which team will have more corners? wut?

This assumes that a) I am interested in the World Cup, b) I am interested in England v Iran, c) I am interested in how many corners each team will get, and d) my extensive footballing acumen would allow me to predict such a meaningless statistic anyway.

But hey, Joãozin Albuquerque and 5.8M others are playing…

I have no idea who Joãozin Albuquerque is, by the way.

If you’re watching a World Cup (or any other) game just to see who gets the most corners, you’re either part of a match-fixing cartel or you’re doing football all wrong. Both of which do kind of fit with the whole Qatar 2022 vibe, but that’s really beside the point.

Just stop trying to make this happen. It’s not going to happen. Leave me alone.

The Top 3 Worst Loadshedding Slots

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Yes, all of loadshedding is annoying, but as George Orwell once stated:

Some slots are more annoying than others.

An amazingly prescient (and suspiciously specific) man.

Anyone who has experienced rolling blackouts will be in agreement with this and, since several (or more) of the Northern Hemisphere countries are about to give it a go, I thought I’d warn my readers up there about which slots are really going to get their blood boiling (on a hand-lit gas stove, rather than in a kettle, obviously).

Here in SA, our loadshedding slots last for two hours followed by a half hour (dis)grace period for the power to be reinstated. And you might get anywhere between zero and four of these each day, depending on just how scarily precarious our power system is. These slots can – and do – strike at any time, day or night. But some are more irritating than others. Here are the three worst slots for two hours(+) of loadshedding.

At number 3 is 22:00 – 00:30.

Look, you could treat this as being a good opportunity to just go to bed early and get some more sleep. But there’s a reason that you wanted to stay up past 10pm. Maybe it was to do some stuff or – more likely – watch some football. During the summer months here, this slot sits right across all the midweek football matches from Mud Island, and is very frustrating for this reason alone. And then also for several others.

Moving up on second base behind Nicholas van Whats-his-face (applause if you can place that lyric without the use of Ask Jeeves or some such) is 06:00 – 08:30.

Because there is nothing nice about waking up in darkness and having to make tea and coffee, do the packed lunch run, get the kids out of bed and off to school, and get the beagle fed in darkness. Obviously, with the sun rising at about 5:30 here at the moment, the irritation is a little bit mitigated, but overall, this remains almost the most annoying couple of hours of power cuttery.

But.

THE MOST ANNOYING LOADSHEDDING SLOT IS [drum roll] …

20:00 – 22:30

Yep. I said it. Look at the smug bastard, sitting right in the middle of your primetime evening enjoyment.
Your happy time of the day. Ruined.

First off, the 8pm start time is a complete git. No matter what time of the year, this will be dark in Cape Town. Even in summer (just). So no escaping without lighting of some sort. Candles, oil lamps, battery LEDs, they all work: it’s just a shlep to have to carry them around with you wherever you go.
Baie frustrasie.
It’s not like 8pm is an acceptable time to just give up on a normal day and go to bed. It’s too early. You’re not 10 years old any more. Your knees have been reminding you of that for a while now.

And then, look at what time it finishes. 10:30pm. What are you supposed to do then? That’s the sort of time you actually do want to think about going to bed, but now you’ve got two hours of missed stuff to catch up on. And even if you were going to stay up for the footy (see above), you’ve missed some (or more) of the game.

This particular loadshedding slot was the devised by Beelzebub Himself, and sent to test us to our very limits. And it did, just yesterday evening. Flipping annoying. Almost so completely infuriating that you’re willing to forgive all the other slots.

Almost.

Anyway, you might have your own opinions on this, but they’re probably not as valid as mine, so I’ll stick with my reasoning and conclusions above unless you can come up with something quite remarkable to support your case. And then probably after that, as well.