Category: that’s a bit mad

One Job

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I’m still away taking photographs, and hopefully, I’m doing a better job at my one job than the India power company contractors who did… well… they did this:

This image was taking in August 2025, and – by the look of the grass around its base – had been there for a while then.

BIG NEWS: IT’S STILL THERE!

“Couldn’t be shifted immediately”? “Immediately”? It’s been there for almost a year!
Does “immediately” mean something different in India? Is this like “Now” in South Africa?

Amazingly, this being India with its many vehicular perils and… mmm… “somewhat iffy” road safety record, it’s incredible that the pole hasn’t been hit, flattened, and taken home for firewood several times over already.

If ever there was a time and place for BRO to step in, this is clearly it.

Deaf ears

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I mentioned before about how delighted I was at everyone’s refusal to step in and help bail Donald “Orange Arsehole” Trump out of the mess that he’s got himself, his country, and now the entire world into. My thoughts were mainly around Europe in that post, but news has come in that he is now throwing his toys out of the playpen because Japan are allegedly withholding their secret weapon and won’t commit to sending it… er… him to the Middle East.

The thing is, life and politics and the internet are now just so weird, and Trump is so epically stupid, that you could actually imagine this might have been a genuine request and that he is genuinely upset about it being denied. He’s probably still pissed off that King Kong didn’t somehow prevent 9/11.

Which is exactly why we find ourselves in this whole horrific situation (Trump’s stupidity, not the big ape/World Trade Center thing).

Just in case…?

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It’s been a busy day, and things are only likely to get busier from here. There’s some parenting to be done and then a football match to play.

And so – just in case I don’t find the time to put pixel to screen a little later – here’s a lovely little cartoon I was sent recently.

I make no apologies for sharing this. It’s simple, harmless, extremely corny fun.

And right now, I need to go and find boots and a kit so that I can be prepared for this evening’s – thankfully cooler than last week (it’s 29oC today) – match.

Laters!

Project Anchor?

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Rhyming slang for this guy?

Oh dear. Where to begin?

Well, firstly – obviously – this is nonsense.
And secondly, Mark Farnell is clearly a complete and utter Project Anchor.

7 seconds without gravity would be bad, so it’s a good job that it’s simply not going to happen. That’s because NASA might do all that space and science stuff, but critically (for the purposes of this post, at least) they don’t control gravity. And even if you gave them $89 billion – which would be pretty noticeable, given that their total annual budget is about $24 billion – they still couldn’t control gravity.

Also, just because there’s no gravity for 7.3 seconds, doesn’t mean that “everything not secured will rise”. That’s not how physics works (which NASA also doesn’t control). People, vehicles and animals will just remain right where they are – on the floor. Newton told us this way back in the 1600s. Mark Farnell has had 350 years to learn elementary school science, and has failed.

As seconds pass, objects will float 15-20 metres into the air.

Again, no. Absolutely not. But now Mark is putting a (metric) figure on it. And so we can calculate that these objects are somehow allegedly accelerating upwards, at about 2.5ms-2 – so gravity hasn’t just stopped: it’s reversed. But it’s also apparently only reversed to about a quarter of the actual speed of real gravity.
No-one is going to slam into any ceiling. A gentle bump at best, and only if they were already moving that way when the “gravitational anomaly” takes place.

Which they weren’t, and which it won’t.

In fact, given just how horrific the effects of this incident sound, 40-60 million casualties – or just 0.6% of the world’s population – seems like a incredibly small number, given that half the planet will be upside down at that time and will surely just… fall off. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

Look, this is clearly nonsense, but hey – let’s park it and come back to it on August 12th 2026. I can just warn you again to be really careful at whatever you’re up to at 14:33 UTC (15:33 BST, 16:33 CAT), and then we can all laugh at Mark (again) at 14:34 UTC (15:34 BST, 16:34 CAT).

Oh, and hey: you can only begin to guess what the rest of his timeline is like…

Let’s do this again

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14 years on, and we haven’t learned a thing.

We’re supposed to be grown-ups. Adults. And yet, at 6pm this evening, we’ll head out onto the pitch for another potentially epic 5-a-side football game against some other supposed adults.

Nothing wrong with that, you might think – if you aren’t in Cape Town, that is, because if you are in Cape Town then you know very well that there’s something very wrong with it – because it’s rather warm out.

Really actually quite warm already.
Almost bordering on hot, one could argue.

And, as I alluded to above, there’s history here. And it really isn’t pretty.

It was horrible. One of the worst footballing experiences of my life. Within 2 minutes of running around, I was gasping, drenched through with sweat, and feeling dizzy and nauseous. These, even by Cape Town standards, were extreme conditions. The ball wasn’t even flying through the air properly. I felt truly awful.
Some sort of sense of self-preservation should probably have kicked in here. But it didn’t. And so, with a couple of breaks, we continued to toil for an hour. What utter, utter idiots.

We all (mostly) remember (some of) that day.
I think my therapist called it PTSD: Phenomenal Temperature, Stupid Decision.

And it’s already 6 degrees warmer today than it was back on that day in February 2012.

Common sense says that they call the games off this evening. At best, it’s going to be extremely unpleasant, at worst, it could actually be dangerous. But they probably won’t. And that being the case, common sense says that we should forfeit the game. But that’s absolutely not how we roll, and I grudgingly have to respect our determination. Even though we’re clearly being very daft here.

I really wouldn’t recommend such bravado though.
To coin Wilfred Owen:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro manus mori.

The game is still going ahead as I write this.

See you on the other side, I guess.
And yes, you can choose any meaning of that phrase that seems fit.