Category: that’s a bit mad

Brolly issue

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Amazing. Here I am wondering what to blog about today and then it drops into my lap onto my screen, courtesy of News24 commenter Krolie, who took full advantage of an article on the wintery weather (which missed Cape Town almost completely) to vent his or her spleen over a long-standing issue which has clearly caused a lot of pent up frustration:

For the past 20 years I each year bought an umbrella in the hope that THIS time it will do what it is supposed to, but alas, if you exit the door and there is something just stronger than a breeze, your umbrella takes another shape whipping the other way round and well, your next best hope is for a bit of water to use this useless object as a boat of sorts.
Anybody else find an umbrella pretty useless in the WC in the middle of winter? CT is well known for people hugging lampposts, even grabbing towards the closest human zipping past you as if hell bent to win a marthon.
Yip, even your rainjacket ends up not being so protective as it is renowned to do – whipping up and down and all over the place, including the clothes you’re wearing underneath. You might as well put your clothes in a packet, tie it to your body and streak down Adderley Steet, because wet you will be to the skin, no matter what you do. At least you’t hopefully have some dry clothes at the end of your “flight”.

Just wondering what the use is of a umbrella/brolly really is in this kind of weather…

Is Krolie mad? Einstein thinks so:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

When May comes around, and Krolie heads for the local umbrella shop, is there not some small hint, some glimmer of a memory that when s/he is doing is utterly pointless and has been proven so on many separate occasions over the previous two decades?

I have to say too, that it appears some degree of artistic licence has been employed here. I have never hugged a lamppost in Cape Town – there are always too many posters on them for one’s arms to get a firm grip – nor have I ever grabbed the closest human to me. The latter is an extremely dangerous means of protecting one’s self from the rain anyway. South Africans know how to fight off muggers and you’re more than likely to find yourself lying in a pool of blood, not water, with your brolly stuck somewhere where the sun don’t shine (that’s PE this week).

So people, do not buy an umbrella in the misguided hope it will keep you dry in Cape Town’s wind. And do not streak down Adderley Street. It’s not clever, and in these sort of meteorological conditions, it certainly won’t be big either.

A call to action

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Last night, in Cecilia Forest, in Cape Town, 7 trees, died, from the, cold. The soil that they are planted in drops to -60 at night. There are 130 trees left.

Today, this website, 6000 miles…,  will make sure that every single tree in the forest has a blanket. Once we have enough money for that forest, we will move on to the next one and not stop until we have exhausted our resources.

This is not a goal or a wish or a hope. This will happen. Possibly anyway: have you seen the size of some of those trees? Pretty tall order. Pretty tall trees.

You can help in one of two ways. But whatever you do, you mustn’t do both. You can make a donation based on the number, of commas, I used, in the first sentence of, this post. Donations should be made to my private bank account, and may well eventually be used for the purchase of tarpaulins to wrap up trees.

The second is simply by spreading the word.

Right now, the ‘Social Media World Forum Africa’ has finished in Cape Town, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to annoy people by using the hashtag: #smwf. God knows they’ve annoyed the rest of us with it enough this week. The conference was full of people, from the corporate world, with money, and commas.

We’re going to get their attention for a while. If you can, please choose one (or several) of the following tweets and keep tweeting them. Flood them. As long as you include the #smwf hashtag, they’ll see it, and it won’t even be called spam. Probably. All you have to do is copy and paste one (or all) of the following into twitter.

___________

Last night 7 trees died of the cold in Cecilia Forest. Can you help? #smwf http://u3.co.za/xl
__________

Is it warm where you are? Wood burning stove? Trees are dying, please help. http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

Trees can’t ask for help because they don’t have mouths, so I’m asking for them, please read: http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

Wouldn’t a good use of social media be to help the trees dying of the cold this winter? http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

You want people using social media to like you? Be nice. Help the trees dying of the cold this winter – http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
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How much money did your company make last year? Not being nosy, just asking. http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
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Dear Social Media World Conference, can you spare a moment and some money for a Douglas Fir that might die tonight? http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

Thank you,

Me

PS. This message won’t disappear once we’re done.

===================================================

With apologies to I wrote this for you.

On a more serious note, if you wish to donate to the Cape of Good Hope SPCA, their banking details are:

Bank: Standard
Branch: Constantia
Branch Code: 051001
Acc no: 063 002 167
Acc name: Cape of Good Hope SPCA

Please fax a copy of your deposit slip together with your name and address details to Frances Dorer on 021 705 2127 or email dbadmin@spca-ct.co.za so that they can send you your tax certificate.

Stay warm, peeps.

Insurance Guy forgets how to drive…

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Got to travel 87km? Of course you have – we’ve all done it at some point in our lives. We jump into our cars or – if we’re living somewhere with public transport – we jump on a bus or a train.
It’ll probably take about an hour, generally speaking.

Not the Insurance Guy though. He, along with several thousand other nutters athletes, plans to run this distance, starting out at Durban City Hall and finishing at the Pietermaritzburg Cricket Oval.

Yes folks, this is the Comrades Marathon, which at 52 miles, is actually two marathons, back to back or as I prefer it: end to end.
I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and that’s like running the 2Oceans Half Marathon four times.

Why anyone would want to run 87km in this day and age when there are perfectly viable alternatives is beyond me. As is the actual act of running 87km, incidentally.
The worst bit for me would be running all that way and then realising that I had ended up in Pietermaritzburg. Nightmare.

In the same vein, perhaps a better analogy for those of us in die Wes-Kaap is to consider running from Cape Town to Somerset West. Then once you get there, you realise that it’s Somerset West and you decide to head back to the CBD. On foot.

87km. Eighty Seven.

But putting the sheer insanity aside, we at 6000 miles… are only too aware how much planning, training, time and effort has gone into this, not just by the Insurance Guy but by his family as well.
And so, we’d like to wish him all the best in his quest to get from Durban to PMB on his feet.

You can track his run LIVE here – his number is 44634.

Forza. Sterkte. Fara á það.

Brahms did not torture and murder cats for sport

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Logging on to teh interwebs for the first time in a few days brought some laughs on an otherwise cold and grey Monday morning, the best of them being this line:

Brahms did not torture and murder cats for sport. Wagner, who had musical differences with Brahms, and who was an utter shit, made the story up.

From here, which links to here and the all important evidence for the quote above, here, stating:

Author’s research reveals calumny that for 100 years defamed German composer was the malicious gossip of ‘notoriously bitchy’ Wagner.

If there had been a Hello or an OK magazine back in the mid-19th century, one can only imagine that these allegations of cat torture and notorious bitchiness would have been regular front page news.

Amazing. I’ve certainly learnt some stuff this morning already.