Category: annoying people

Done (a sad rant)

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Forgive me. Bit of a moan incoming.

When April comes around this year, it’ll mean that for 20 of the last 24 months, we’ll have had building work happening on our doorstep. Not literally our doorstep, obviously. Our actual doorstep is perfectly functional, but rather small and ordinary. 20 months of building work on that would be both excessive and completely unnecessary.

But much of life over the last two years Chez 6000 has been accompanied by the sound of drilling, banging and angle grinding from the house next door and the house just across the road.

And I’m actually done with it now.

Just tired of it. Weary. Fed up. All the appropriate synonyms.

I know that building work has to be done sometimes, and I know that it is often, by nature, rather noisy. I’ve just had enough of it constantly being noisy around me.

And let’s not just leave it at the noise, because while that is very, very irritating, it’s far from the only issue which local building work brings with it. Driving is near impossible, the road is a veritable vehicular assault course of poorly parked bakkies. The tea breaks and lunchtimes spent on the grass verges generate a highly annoying amount of litter. Annoying because it’s sheer laziness, given that the builders have to walk right past a bin on the driveway on their way back into work.

And then there’s the petty crime. What used to be a very safe neighbourhood just isn’t at the moment. You need to double check all your gates, doors and windows. Repeatedly.
Anything metal will disappear from the outside of your property. Your recycling bags will be opened and ransacked and then left for the South Easter to do its job spreading stuff all over the driveway and road.

One neighbour remarked:

With so many builders around, petty crime is bound to happen.

Which might be true, but is also an pretty crap way of shrugging your shoulders and just accepting it.

Well, not on my watch, you bastards. Try me*.

But is the end in sight?

Possibly. I mean, they’ll run out of stuff to build in the end, won’t they? But I can’t see anything slowing down or finishing up in the next few months. And as I might have alluded to above, I’m really rather pissed off with the whole situation already.

.

* …again, because you’ve already nicked the letterbox off our front wall.

Upload

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Great news: TLC have decided to upload the new series of Mock The Week onto YouTube.

You can find it here.

Not so great news: You need to be in the UK to watch it.

Of course, there are many ways of being in the UK when you’re not actually in the UK, and so that’s not too much of a problem.

And I’ll also be using some of those techniques to enjoy the Winter Olympics over the next couple of weeks, given that our national broadcaster can’t afford it and the local Sports TV service has decided not to buy any rights either.

But that’s reasonable, because it’s only the cold places and the big countries that pay for that sort of thing, right?
Well, if I lived in Curacao or Afghanistan, I could watch.
Micronesia, Ghana and Guinea-Bissau are all broadcasting them, as are Yemen and South Sudan.

Cold. Big. Nope.

In fact, it seems like SA is just about the only place on the planet that is not showing any Olympics.

And so local residents will have to rely on the Olympics YouTube channel (not great) or digitally fly to some other place (like Yemen) to watch.

Which is absolutely ridiculous in 2026.

Why don’t the City do more?

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People are always whining about the various levels of Government in this country. Actually, in any country. No-one is happy. We’ve said this on here before.

But alleged mis-management and poor prioritising aside, this City could do more if it didn’t have to stop occasionally to address shit like this:

Seriaas?

Yes… er… “Seriaas”:

City authorities are warning the public about spreading fake news regarding 500 green anacondas actively living and breeding in Zeekoevlei Nature Reserve after a news alert claimed its existence.

The news alert, which was shared widely on social media, made claims that more than 500 green anacondas were actively living and breeding in Zeekoevlei Nature Reserve. It further stated that the City of Cape Town had declared a state of emergency around the vlei and that access to the reserve was restricted.

A vlei is a lake, for my foreign readers. And a Zeekoe is a hippo. So “Zeekoevlei” means “Hippo Lake”. Of course, there are no hippos in Zeekoevlei, though. No, they live right next door in Rondevlei (“Round Lake”) and they occasionally wander into the suburbs.

What there also aren’t any of in Zeekoevlei (or Rondevlei) is Green Anacondas.

There aren’t even any Green Anacondas in South Africa.
There certainly aren’t 500 in a lake in the middle of the Cape Flats.

But as we’ve seen in other cases, people share first and (probably then don’t even) think later. Here, the consequences are less serious. No-one’s child is going to die of measles (or get eaten by a Green Anaconda, because there aren’t any of them). But the message remains the same. Because despite the authorities having to debunk what is – even to the untrained eye – complete bullshit, there will be people who believed it, and there will be people who will still believe it.

Meanwhile, Eddie Andrews, the City’s Deputy Mayco Mayoral Committee Member for Spatial Planning and Environment, a man who probably spends a good deal of his day just saying his job title, now has to waste even more precious and valuable time writing statements like the one on the link above, meaning less time for Spatial Planning and Environment duties. Statements which most people shouldn’t have to read, but which many people will not read – or will completely ignore – anyway.

There are no Green Anacondas in Zeekoevlei.

No-one should have to be telling you this.

Frustrating, Infuriating, Embarrassing

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The whole situation regarding childhood vaccinations and childhood illnesses continues to worsen. And not just in the USA, where there are obvious reasons for the problems.

Measles is one of the most contagious viruses on the planet, and it’s estimated that the measles vaccine saved around 60 MILLION lives in the first 24 years of this century alone.

But all that is changing: and because measles is so very contagious, it’s changing fast. We had control over this terrible disease which maims and kills young children. No more.

On January 23, 2026, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced six European countries lost their measles elimination status: Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. Canada lost its elimination status late last year. This means measles is no longer a random event in these countries; it’s endemic and freely flowing.

First World Countries! It’s embarrassing.

So millions of lives saved, sure. But equally, millions in danger again now. And it’s just so infuriating, because we have spent so many years on fighting this, so much money, time and effort on trying to make a positive difference, and we actually did it. We were winning.

And then some knobheads wrote some stuff on Facebook and it all started to unravel.

If those knobheads were scientists, microbiologists, vaccinologists, then I’d consider that maybe they had a point. But they’re not. They have no experience of science, experimentation, research or anything like that. Of course, they have their own areas of expertise, but imagine if you went into their place of work and told them that everything that they were doing was wrong, corrupt or dangerous? Imagine if you pretended that you knew more than them about hairdressing or plumbing or bricklaying, even though they’d been doing it for 20+ years, and you’d never even tried it?

They’d rightfully tell you to F off. Yet, for some reason, they’re all experts when it comes to vaccines.

It’s happening locally too. Diphtheria – DIPHTHERIA! – a proper, old school, medieval disease has killed 19 people in the last few months in South Africa. And with a current mortality rate of 21%. That, as the locals say, is pretty hectic, bru.

Yeah. That one really slipped beneath the radar.
It’s completely and utterly preventable. Those people could still be alive. No suffering, no illness, no grieving families. But…

Vaccination gaps appear to be a key driver of vulnerability. Among children aged 12 years and younger who fell ill, several were unvaccinated or had not received booster doses, while others had only completed part of the infant immunisation schedule. The report stresses that protection depends not only on early childhood vaccination but also on booster doses later in life.

The South African healthcare system may have its problems, but access to childhood immunisation really isn’t one of them. You can’t pin this one on them – this is all about the parents making poor decisions based on what they have seen on social media.

How can we stop it? I don’t know.
The lack of trust in the the healthcare systems and industry shows no sign of going away, and the unbridled misinformation spewing forth from social media and the US Government is, if anything, increasing.

At a personal level, get vaccinated. And get your kids vaccinated. There’s no excuse for your kid getting diphtheria: we immunise at 6 weeks old. And in SA, we give our first measles vaccination at 6 months. If your country doesn’t, then given the current situation, it might even be sensible to talk to your doctor and discuss early vaccination.

Choose wisely. Make sensibly informed decisions.

Doctors spend several years of their lives learning how best to look after your health. Amazingly, despite your alleged innate knowledge of your own body, they do know what’s best for you. The do have the expertise and the knowledge to make good decisions for your well-being.

The car mechanic up the road might be great with engines, but honestly, he knows fuck all about the benefits of vaccinations. Don’t believe what he says, unless it’s about spark plugs.

Oh – and if I didn’t mention it enough earlier – get vaccinated. And get your kids vaccinated.

Just a quickie, Southern Suburbs people.

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I had cause to phone for an ambulance for one of the residents in our neighbourhood yesterday. It was a serious situation. Literally life and death stuff.

The first number I tried was Netcare911. They are arguably the best known private ambulance company in SA, and theirs is the number that you have etched onto the front of your brain at times like these.

I don’t want to go too deeply into this, but while they repeatedly promised that they were sending a vehicle – nothing ever turned up. And calling them back became something of a farce as they asked repeatedly for the medical aid details (company, number, dependents etc etc) of the patient, when the patient was very, very much not in a condition to tell them.

Then as we called again, (because there was still no sign of an ambulance), using the reference number they had given us, they thought that we were in Gqeberha. That’s a city about 1000km east of here (there’s actually very little 1000km west of here).

That’s when we gave up on them and called ER24 on 084 124. Fifteen minutes later, the medical team arrived, stabilised the patient and headed off to hospital.

We’ve chatted about this to a few people since and there have been a lot of remarks that Cape Town, and Southern Suburbs especially, are now rather poorly covered by Netcare. So, what I’m saying here is to put the number 084 124 into your phone now, in case you ever need medical help in a hurry.

Not an ad. Just a heads up that just because you know the company name, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to turn up and do the job. And while sometimes that can be annoying, sometimes it could literally be fatal.

Much like the Wilderness Search And Rescue number, this is one to put into your phone NOW.

And – of course – hope that you never have to use it.