Category: in the news

It never was the pineapple juice

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It’s been a couple of years since this headline amazed the world:

Amazed us because I think it’s fair to say that pineapple juice was the odds-on favourite to be the cause of the Cowdenbeath mystery puddle.

Well. At that time, at least.

Of course, that was quickly proven not to be the case at all, and we were all left feeling rather foolish and embarrassed for ever thinking that it was. Personally speaking, I learnt a lot from the whole episode, and I certainly won’t be rushing to pin the blame for unexpectedly appearing small pools of liquid on tropical juices in future.
And that was a lesson that was recently backed up by the infamous Guava Pond incident in Caledon.

Never again.

Wet one

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The big cold front which was expected to drop in at about 9pm this evening has – according to the word on the street* – already hit Hout Bay.

It’s horrible here

were the exact words that were used, prompting me to immediately type (and then tactfully delete) my reply:

I know. What’s the weather like?

And I do know.

But looking over that way, it does look as if the apocalypse might finally – mercifully – be upon us.

Thus, tonight will be full on Wuthering Heights stuff. Elemental. Cold, windy and wet, with Catherine’s ghost knocking on the window up to 50mm of rain forecast in the next 24 hours. And there’s another 50 on the way early next week.

This isn’t unusual for Cape Town in late autumn, but it is rather unpleasant. The draining effect of the cold, dreary weather is exacerbated by loadshedding, and in turn exacerbates it right back by increasing demand for more heating and light. In addition (of course), solar panels don’t help at all when there’s no sun, so backup batteries are charged from the grid (when it’s on) and that adds to demand and… er… exacerbates loadshedding.

A recipe for misery.

Except of course that every cloud (and I’m looking specifically about those ones rapidly approaching from the South Atlantic) has a silver lining. It wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have any water at all in this corner of the continent, and we’d do well to remember the stress that little episode caused.

If (and it is always an if) the forecasts are correct, then we could be looking at anything up to 8 or maybe even 10% added to the dams by this time next week.

So always look on the bright side of life (unless you’re in one of those 4½ hour slots of darkness, during which time, there is no bright available).

* a Whatsapp message from the horse-riding instructor.

Hotter days are getting hotter, quicker

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More evidence of climate change, this time in North West Europe, where extremely hot days are getting hotter more quickly than hot days are getting hotter. And we’re already well aware that the hot days are getting hotter.

Now work from the University of Oxford suggests that extremely hot days are getting hotter faster than hot days are getting hotter. More than twice as fast, in fact.

This graph and the news that goes with it will come as little surprise to those who read this post last year. There was a similar graph there:

…with that mental little red dot top right, showing just how extreme the extremely hot days were in Sheffield last July.

And it’s all Spain’s fault. Well, when isn’t it?

Because Spain is warming faster than North-West Europe, this means that air carried in from this region is ever more extreme relative to the ambient air in North-West Europe. The hottest days of 2022, for instance, were driven by a plume of hot air carried north from Spain.

I don’t have any answers for this trend. I’m just here pointing out that it’s yet more evidence that these sort of trends exist. Being aware of this is a good first step in either doing something or nothing about it. The study’s author says:

‘These findings underline the fact that the UK and neighbouring countries are already experiencing the effects of climate change, and that last year’s heatwave was not a fluke. Policy makers urgently need to adapt their infrastructure and health systems to cope with the impacts of higher temperatures.’

Ah, yes. Let’s get the politicians to do something about it.

That’ll work.

Of course, there will be some people who will read this and go “pfft” or make some such noise, because they don’t believe that climate change exists. They don’t need to come and talk to me. They need to talk to someone on their own level of expertise, like the guys in Oxford who are presenting these data, because obviously, they are also experts in recording and analysing near earth temperatures over north-western Europe for the past 60 years.

That’s why they are all also physical scientists at one of the world’s most prestigious universities.

What’s the plan here?

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South Africa is once again demonstrating its neutrality over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This comes just a few days after it was revealed that SA had been following a non-partisan approach by supplying arms and ammunition to Russia.

Now we’ve sent the head of the SANDF (the SA armed forces) to Russia to “visit educational institutions of the ground forces and enterprises of the military-industrial complex” there and “further increase cooperation between ground forces in various fields”.

Thank goodness we’re not taking sides here.

It’s not like we can afford to be doing this. The Rand is tanking already because of loadshedding and the arms shipments row. To add fuel to the fire right now seems both deliberately provocative and deliberately stupid.

South African bilateral trade with Russia amounts to around $1.3 billion. In comparison, bilateral trade with the UK is $10.1 billion, the US is around $17 billion and the EU over $30 billion. To risk all of that for Vlad’s pocket change means that there’s clearly something else happening behind the scenes. Is that something SA owes Russia? Or is it something the Ramaphosa owes Putin?
Because we can talk all day long about how much we abhor the colonial West and and all that they stand for, but that talk is cheap when we are still doing 50x more trade with them each year than we are with Mother Russia. And that’s a lot of money we simply can’t afford to lose.

Maybe the idea is to just run what’s left of the country into the ground before they get voted out at the next election. Or maybe this is actually an election strategy: a vote winner. The anti-imperialists will go for it, of course, but it remains to be seen how the incoming hyper-inflation will attract any normal person to vote for the ANC.

So… what is the plan here? Because I’m equally mystified and concerned.

Done with Wrexham

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Well done Wrexham on promotion to League Two from the National League.

Promotion is great. I know.

What’s less good is the weird wall-to-wall media coverage of your promotion. Because, let’s face it, while it’s big for you – you can only beat who is put in front of you – I’m no way belittling it when I say that it’s not actually that big a deal for the rest of the world.

Stockport County and Sutton United didn’t have the national broadcaster sharing live images of their promotion parades when they achieved similar feats in recent years. But then they didn’t have a genial, Hollywood film star as their co-owner, did they? And that’s the difficult bit for Wrexham fans to accept: it’s really not about their rather mediocre team. No-one actually cares about the football. It’s all about Ryan Reynolds.

And I’m sure he’s a lovely guy, and the work he’s done at money he’s put into the club is amazing. But they’ve won the National League, not the Champions League. One wonders how far down the fawning media would be prepared to go, had he taken over an even lower league club. Would we still have cameras there for each and every game if he’d plumped for Walton and Hersham in the Isthmian League Division One South Central, for example?

Sadly, probably.

I thought that I was alone in feeling this way about Wrexham. I thought that maybe I was seeing more about them because we have recent history when we knocked them out of the FA Cup earlier this year in those rather bad tempered fourth round games. Maybe Google looked at all the Wrexham references on the Sheffield United pages that I was reading and thought I needed to see more. (I really didn’t.)

But apparently, not:

And it seems that they feel the same way that I do about all this:

There are some quotes on the link above from people who feel differently, but they’re from Wrexham fans, (one of whom even uses the word “bandwagon”), and who wouldn’t want to enjoy seeing pictures all over the press of their team celebrating?

I don’t think that English football (yes, I know they’re Welsh, but…) needs that sort of celebrity nonsense. Save it for the MLS and the Saudi Leagues. And make our football leagues all about the football rather than the non-footballing personalities in the backroom.

I do understand that this isn’t going away any time soon, although I obviously wish it would.
But if you – like me – thought that you were the only person feeling this way about the inordinate number of undeserved column inches and TV news pixels being devoted to Wrexham Ryan, well, you’re really not.