BMW driver proud to be last Koeberg lane cutter

As the new ramp from the M5 North onto the N1 North was opened this morning, with it ended an years-old tradition for many Capetonians – the opportunity to cut-in to the queuing traffic at Koeberg Interchange.

In a press release announcing the opening, a city spokeswoman stated:

The question, much posed in the local media and at parties, as to whether you would describe yourself as a “cutter” or a “queuer” is now no longer valid. The opening of this new ramp will end a great deal of animosity from those who queue, who have endured a great deal of ridicule from the cutting fraternity. This will reduce the negative energy during rush hour and make Cape Town an even nicer place to be: there’s also a wonderful view of Table Mountain from the new bridge.
Drivers will now be able to sail freely through this bottleneck and continue their journey towards Canal Walk and the Boerewors Curtain without delay. Motorists should stay left if they wish to join the N1 North, take the middle lane if they are heading for the city and choose the right lane for the M5 to Milnerton or just for old time’s sake.

The honour of being the final cutter was taken by Chantelle Wessels, a sales manager from Durbanville: a moment caught on the newly-installed Freeway Management System (FMS) cameras at the junction:

I are proud to be the one who is taking this honour. I think I can like to claim it not just for me, but for all the sales managers and aggressive type-A personality go-getters everywhere, and also for all BMW drivers – especially those with CY number plates.
We don’t have the time to hang around in these queues like sheep. We are needing to go out and make money in order to gaudily furnish our Tuscan-style mansions.  Only this morning, I have sold 2 boxes of folded paper towels and some hand cleanser: that sale wouldn’t have happened until 4 minutes later if I hadn’t cut into the queue.

However, Lester Swart – a former queuer – says he will miss the people cutting into the N1-bound traffic:

Yes, I will miss it. It gave me a challenge on the way to work: defending my place in the queue. There’s a great degree of skill involved: it’s clutch control and passive aggressiveness together that goes into pretending to be unaware of a vehicle on your left hand side trying to slip into the line of cars in front of you and blocking it. I would always count it as a big success when I stopped them getting directly in front of me and forced them to join the line a few cars ahead instead.
Now that opportunity for satisfaction has gone. I will miss it, yes.

But overall, the response to the new ramp and bridge was positive. With the city promising that it would cut up to 8 minutes off journeys to the Northern suburbs, many commuters said that they would prefer to spend their up to 8 minutes extra time anywhere but Bellville and were looking forward to up to an extra 8 minutes in bed each morning.

I’m not dead…

“He says he’s not dead!”

So begins the dialogue in Scene 2 of Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. That’s a British comedy film, full of utterly ridiculous scenarios – like a bloke who’s not dead being taken away because some relative thinks he knows better.

Some say that, even by Monty Python standards, it’s a little too far-fetched.
They’ve obviously never been to the Eastern Cape:

 A 50-year-old South African man woke up inside a mortuary over the weekend and screamed to be let out – scaring away attendants who thought he was a ghost.
His family presumed he was dead when they could not wake him on Saturday night and contacted a private morgue in a rural village in the Eastern Cape.

He spent almost 24 hours inside the morgue, the region’s health department spokesman told the Sapa news agency.
The two attendants later returned and called for an ambulance.

The man – whose identity has been withheld – was treated in hospital for dehydration.

“Doctors put him under observation and concluded he was stable,” Eastern Cape health spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said.
“He did not need further treatment.”

It’s another feather in the cap for South Africa’s image abroad, with this being the second most read story on the BBC News site today. Yes – even despite all that “other stuff” going on.
That said, this is the Eastern Cape we’re talking about. It is a little backward, even by SA standards.
I mean…  have you been to PE?

Meh – everyone’s an expert, aren’t they:

“We need to [get] the message across to all South Africans that it is very wrong for them to conclude on their own that a person has died,” Kupelo said.

Perhaps there should have been a bit more “Oh, I can’t take him like that – it’s against regulations” before our hero ended up in the morgue.

Iceland whale tourism idea is brilliant

Iceland. Land of ice. And volcanoes. And financial ruin (like everywhere else these days). And puffins.

They’ve come up with another gem of an idea to attract visitors to their lump of rock: Whale watching – with a twist.
You get to eat what you see.

Watching and hunting whales “work perfectly together” in a look-and-cook combo of tourism and gastronomy, Iceland’s Whale Commissioner said on Thursday at the global whaling forum.
“Many of the tourists that go on whale watching tours go to restaurants afterwards to taste whale meat,” said Tomas Heider, speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in the British Channel Islands.

Iceland have a “Whale Commissioner”. That’s brilliant. And so is his idea, despite what others may say:

Many countries in the 89-nation IWC, especially in South America, argue that potential income from tourism far outstrips the value of commercial whaling, and that the two do not mix well.
But in Iceland, Heider insists, the industries feed off each other.
“Even though we have been increasing our whaling in recent years, the tourists are streaming in numbers to Iceland and going to whale watching tours like never before,” he said. “It works perfectly together.”

Of course, we’d never, ever, ever think of doing something so vulgar in South Africa, would we?

Unless of course you’ve ever been to Oudtshoorn, the self-proclaimed “Ostrich Capital of the World”, where you can see, feed, ride and then eat the local birdlife.

I trust that anyone commenting negatively on the News24 article or writing an angry letter to the IWC (on recycled paper with a recycled pen) will also be contacting Western Cape Tourism and complaining bitterly about these same heinous practices taking place on our own doorstep.

Disclosure: 6000 eats ostrich most weeks and has also tasted whale meat on two occasions. He was unimpressed.

Pining for nuts

Let it never be said that life here in South Africa is easy. Sure, the weather is ridiculously good, despite this being midwinter, and the views, the expats and the beer are utterly spectacular, but there are always difficulties as well. I’m talking about allegations of corruption in Government, violent strikes in the engineering sector, petrol shortages and the price of pine nuts.

Yes, C Emily Dibb of Muizenburg has written in to everyone’s favourite letters page in the Cape Times and is very upset about how much pine nuts cost here in Mzansi. I feel her views deserve airing  – and indeed comment – here on 6000 miles…

Pining for nuts

On a recent visit to Turkey, I was captivated to find how many of their traditional dishes contain pine nuts; they are an integral part of many of their meat-ball recipes.

From this opening line, we can make several deductions. Firstly, that C Emily Dibb has recently visited Turkey, secondly that she is captivated by the weirdest things and thirdly that many traditional Turkish dishes are meat-ball based. (This last one is a bit of an assumption, but I’m sticking with it.)

I’ve never been to Turkey, but a quick search online reveals that there are many more captivating things in that country than the percentage of local ground beef recipes which contain pine nuts. I found articles on historically varying architecture, bewitchingly fascinating geothermal spas and hugely concerning foreign policy.
I found nothing about meat-balls. Nothing particularly captivating, anyway.

Emily continues:

Hoping to try some of these myself on my return home, I looked for pine nuts in the supermarket, and was staggered to find that they cost nearly R50 for 100g – a shattering R500/kg.

Before we go any further, I must congratulate C Emily Dibb on not using any exclamation marks in that last sentence. This is the mark of a true writer; one who was brought up in the old school when ZOMG! wasn’t an acceptable way of conveying acute surprise and the surcharge on punctuation put it beyond many people’s means.
Because C Emily Dibb is acutely surprised. In fact, as you may have read above, she is staggered, which is two rungs further up the astonishment ladder from acute surprise (just beyond plainly shocked).
Emily C Dibb also demonstrates that she is from the old school of mathematics as well, with that effortless extrapolative calculation to the standard economic unit of pricing, the Rand per Kilo value. I bet she did that in her head. You? You needed a calculator.

But point taken, Emily C Dibb. Pine nuts are expensive.

In Turkey, the pine nuts are produced in Anatolia on estates that grow nothing but the Mediterranean umbrella pine.
Are we missing a good trick here?

These final two lines score highly on the my scale of what an ideal letters page letter should contain, that is, a meaningless fact and an utterly obscure question. These elements have featured widely before, including the sublime:

My house reeks of your cat, and it is very embarrassing.

What is C Emily Dibb proposing here, exactly? That the local agricultural industry move over from its staples of mielies, sugar, grain and grapes and concentrates solely on a niche product from Eurasia in order to bring her recent holiday’s culinary memories closer to being within her financial grasp? Has she really thought this through? Because where would that leave our economy, with particular reference to duties on wines and spirits and export of produce to our neighbouring countries? Is she honestly suggesting that ever last hectare of South Africa’s 146,5224.44km² of arable farmland be devoted to the growing of the Mediterranean umbrella pine?

Sure, that’s enough pine nuts for a great many Turkish meatballs (I was going to do some rudimentary calculations, but the yield of the Mediterranean umbrella pine is hugely variable, as I’m sure you’re aware), but with supply and demand weighted heavily on the supply side of things, the international pine nut market will surely crash and we will be left destitute and economically ruined – even before Julius Malema has had his way. There are no by-products in the Mediterranean umbrella pine, save for, presumably, umbrellas [are you sure? Please check this before we publish – Ed] and we don’t need umbrellas here.

You’ll get your meat-balls. Oh yeah. You’ll get your memories of your holidays with the wrestlers, the architecture and the increasing Syrian refugee problem. You’ll get all of that, C Emily Dibb, and I’m sure you’ll find a myriad of pine nut containing dishes to be captivated by while the country is starving albeit well sheltered from precipitation.

No, C Emily Dibb. I reckon that if you can afford a holiday to Turkey, you can afford fifty bucks for 100g of your beloved and captivating pine nuts. And you can fiddle and fine tune your recipe to use less of this pricey and scarce imported ingredient and get to nibble on as many meaty balls as your heart desires, while not destroying the livelihood of the good farmers of this country with your megalomaniacal, Nazi plan to force them into growing one single, useless (save for addition to traditional Anatolian foodstuffs) crop.

Android is Blowing Everyone Away

That’s not my line up there in the title, it belongs to Business Insider, who published this astounding graph on their site yesterday.

In my line of work, I’m well used to looking at graphs and attempting to observe subtle differences and trends within the data.
This isn’t one of them though, is it?

And while the blue Android line is rising, the green BB is in freefall, which should come as no surprise to anyone. (Least of all anyone who has talked to my wife).