With Mrs 6000 away in Jo’burg, little K-pu decided to literally throw her toys out of the cot at 3:10am this morning. We didn’t get back to sleep.
I’m pretty knackered, as you might imagine, hence this completely inappropriate quota photo of her back in November 2008.
The sort of wholly unjustified behaviour she demonstrated last night is really not typical of her and I wanted to be angry, but one quick cuddle and my annoyance was put firmly on the back burner.
Damn you, Mother Nature.
I had some business down on the Waterfront this lunchtime and my visit happened to coincide with the 2oceansvibe live webcast from Bob Skinstad’s cell in the Barrow Court.
In case you’ve been living under a stone for the past few days, let me explain.
Ex-Springbok rugby player Bob Skinstad has locked himself up for a week to raise funds for his charity, the bobsforgood Foundation. bobsforgood is all about putting shoes on the feet of the 7 million South African children who go to school each day without shoes. That’s 14 million shoes. (I can like to be good at maths.)
So, as the poster says:
Today you can help our local sports hero, Bob Skinstad and his bobsforgood Foundation raise ‘bail’ money that will be used to put school shoes on the feet of underprivileged children across South Africa.
And they’re right – you can. Like this:
I also grabbed a few shots of the infamous Seth Rotherham hard at work in the cell with Bob. Seth is shorter than you might imagine. And he’s not very tall either.
He was mainly busy leaping about from laptop to laptop, presumably sating the needs of Cape Town and South Africa (not to mention the not inconsiderable international contingent) to ‘live the holiday’.
At one point, he obviously detected the scent of another blogger and uttered a low growling sound – I guess it was a territorial thing.
Shoppers all around the mall stopped and there was a moment of worrying silence as he glared straight at me. Somewhere, a pin clattered to the floor. But just then a chick in a short skirt wandered past and his attention wandered off with her.
The mall breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Perhaps, Highlander-style, there can be only one, but there was to be no fight today (and just as well for Seth, since I am known to be pretty amazing with my sword and he was stuck in faux prison cell anyway) and two of the more famous names in Cape Town blogging lived to fight another day.
As recompense for the brief stalking and in recognition of a good cause, 6000 miles… has donated R250 to the bobsforgood foundation and we urge our readers to help make a difference as well.
That’s actually another big fat 6000 miles… lie. I haven’t.
But I did see some blokes who had.
We popped out to Gordons Bay – the current stamping ground of 6000 miles… regular Gordon (as in Bay) for child-induced chaos at the Spur, followed by an invigorating walk along the beach.
The weather was peachy, the scenery was stunning and the company was great.
All in all a lovely afternoon then.
Photos are on flickr (where else would I put them?).
Tomorrow: Valentine’s Day. I’m not worried – I can do romantic, me.
How any rugby fan could possibly ever complain about vuvuzelas after yesterday’s inaugural rugby match at the Cape Town Stadium is beyond me. At least they make you realise that you’re at a major sporting event.
As for yesterday, I have experienced more atmosphere on the moon. Not personally, obviously, but my good friend Buzz Aldrin assures me that it was one long party while they were up there, although bodily functions were a little difficult to perform.
What a sterile occasion. Sure, rugby fans can drink a lot, but they are seemingly almost completely silent during big games. 40,000 of them, mainly white, quiet as mice for large periods of the game. When the stadium announcer has to organise and then continually propagate a Mexican Wave, then you know that something’s not quite right.
In fact, the biggest cheer of the day was for Emperor of the Western Cape, Helen Zille and ineffectual City Mayor, Dan Plato, who entered the field pre-game to a bizarre Medieval-style regal trumpet fanfare, then gave overtly political speeches about how great it was to have a stadium, frequently interrupted by sycophantic and raptuous applause.
Quite where those speeches were for the football a couple of weeks back is beyond me, although every cynical bone in my body (and I have a few) is screaming something about the “wrong audience”.
Bryan Habana also got a huge ovation when he came out in the first half for a bit of a warm up. Later in the match, he came on for 20 minutes and didn’t touch the ball once. Obviously, he would have scored loads of tries if he had touched it though, because he’s Bryan Habana.
For those of you that don’t follow me on twitter, my son was horribly ill on Friday night and Saturday morning and wasn’t allowed to go to the match (Doctor’s orders). Both he and I were hugely disappointed. (Our plans for Saturday morning will also have to be rearranged). So he didn’t pass his World Cup readiness test.
The Stadium, on the other hand, did (I think). Yes – there were traffic issues on the way into town – mainly thanks to the disco effect traffic lights at Buitengracht and Western Boulevard – and yes, our seats were removed to make way for a TV camera position. But we got there in plenty of time and we were swiftly apologised to by Sail-StadeFrance staff and escorted to the VIP section to watch the game. Nice.
I haven’t heard much public opinion on the organisation for this event, but I certainly didn’t see any major problems. The traffic on the way out was amazing – 29 minutes from leaving our seats to getting home to Kenilworth. It regularly takes longer than that to get home from the rugby at Newlands, which is less than a quarter of the distance.
The stadium is looking superb, and despite the breezy conditions outside, was very sheltered within – no problems for the kickers. The pitch looked great and the players certainly seemed to enjoy the day. Even the Boland team, who were beaten 47-13. All in all, it seemed like a great success and who knows if it will help WPRU to do the sensible thing and move from Newlands.
If they do, they’ll need to import some more excitable fans, though.
Cape Town Rugby Festival set on flickr.
I have just noticed that I have a total of 3,000 items on my flickr. Cue the celebrations.
This image of Alex “doing magic” (his words when he saw the photo) yesterday evening was amongst the upload that got me to 3,000 items.
Statpr0n: Of the 3,000 items, 22 are videos and 2,978 are photos, of which about 4 are actually quite good.