Hugely sad news that comedian Sean Lock died this morning. I know that when famous people die, there are always expressions of admiration, but he actually was my favourite comedian still doing the rounds. I loved his often surreal humour and I loved his complete irreverence. I’m gutted.
Whizz through to 1:20 above for Sean’s greatest achievements.
Or the infamous Wrong Number Prank:
Amazing stuff. I’ll miss him.
UPDATE: This piece from Harry Hill, featuring this paragraph:
…is lovely.
Since I can’t do much of anything that requires energy at the moment, I’ve been tidying up some stuff on the computer and the internet. My Flickr page is now looking much neater and tidier, with all the images assigned to groups and albums so that they’re easier to find, enjoy and share. So go and do it!
And I have high hopes that (at least some of) my photos from the Matroosberg and Klein Karoo (remember that pre-covid trip?) will be edited, uploaded and equally well categorised by the end of the day.
Possibly.
In other news, we had a further disaster last night as the recently repaired living room roof, beneath which is the even more recently replaced living room ceiling (literally last Friday), decided to allow another several (or more) litres of water through during the frontal rain in the late evening. Those litres missed the furniture completely, because the furniture isn’t in the living room at the moment, because now that the roof is repaired and the ceiling is replaced, the new floor is being installed.
You know: now that everything is all watertight and stuff? Mmm.
I’m so very, very tired of all this now.
Other things you might also like to know:
Yesterday’s post was very popular. Go and have a look if you haven’t already.
And, this:
Remember when BA brought their A380 over to Cape Town? Just after the Germans had left their towels on the metaphorical sunbeds? [Flickr]
I know that this announcement gives us 2½ months notice, but with SA very much on the UK’s reddest of red lists (and with every good reason right now), I can’t quite understand why BA would be taking this step unless they know something that we don’t – or unless they’re just going to cancel it when nothing new happens, of course.
Watch this space [gestures generally at the sky above Cape Town], I guess.
But this is it virtually finished. I don’t pass through there a lot, but I’ve only ever seen it not existing at all or completely buried in scaffolding:
This is a lot of scaffolding. Now all they need to do is move… er… “launch” the completed structure into the path of the actual road. Livestream above this weekend.
It’s only been a week (note the literal “7 days ago” on the screenshot below) since our occasionally electricity-generating parastatal Eskom proudly, officially added a new big, dirty, coal-fired power station to its big, dirty, coal-fired power station collection:
And it was last night at around 11pm that Unit 4 at Medupi exploded after a hydrogen leak was apparently not dealt with correctly. Hydrogen is used as a coolant [why? Well, see Hydrogen Cools Well, But Safety Is Crucial], some of it leaked and instead of flushing the area with CO2 as per the standard procedure, some air was used at the wrong point and that exploded the place a bit. Here’s Sikonathi Mantshantsha (you may remember him from the proud “it’ll last 50 years” quote just above) again:
“The incident occurred during the activity to displace hydrogen with carbon dioxide and air respectively, for the purposes of finding an external leak. Following the power station preliminary investigation, it appears that while performing this activity air was introduced into the generator at a point where hydrogen was still present in the generator at sufficient quantities to create an explosive mixture, which ignited and resulted in the explosion.”
“It also appears that there was a deviation from the procedure for carrying out this activity.”
Here are some photos: Oops.
I know that it’s deeply uncool (literally) to use coal to make electricity these days, but in South Africa’s defence, two things:
Firstly, coal is plentiful, local, and wonderfully cheap and easy to heap into Mpumalanga power stations, and we simply don’t have the money or the technology for anything else at the moment (shout at me all you want, I get it, but like it or not, you’re going to need a billion* wind farms to match the 4.8GW capacity that each of Kusile or Medupi provides (when they are working), and secondly, two units at Medupi aren’t using any coal at the moment because one has exploded and another has tripped because the one next door exploded.
Another win for the environment.
We’re probably looking at a few more billions of Rands and a couple more years before this 800MW generator is back online, which given our continuing precarious relationship between supply and demand of the sparky stuff, is not good news.
And who knows how long it will last next time? Hopefully a bit longer than a week.
* back of a fag packet calculation
This, from earlier:
“Tour rugby is done. Broken.
There’s no joy in such a technical game any more. All I see are fans, journalists, players and coaches remarking on poor refereeing decisions and deciding which players they feel will need to be suspended for next week because of what was missed in the previous game. Officials daren’t make a call anymore because then someone will make a two hour video about it and use it against them ahead of the next match.
No-one’s talking about any skill or ability or amazing play – it’s all just technical shit and to see who can get the the other side into more trouble. Constant whinging and whining from all concerned. It’s utterly pathetic.”
It’s really sad that the pandemic has ruined the experience of the Lions’ tour to SA. It’s sadder still that whatever cool or exciting vestiges that might be left to be enjoyed are instead being ruined by everyone with any involvement. It’s just brought out the worst in everyone.
Why bother next time?