News 24, never known for the quality of its commenters (well, not the good quality, anyway) hits a new low with this gem:
I can’t.
From this story, I felt it needed recording for posterity.
Category: from your comments
No Apologies
Yes, yes. I know that I have been rather brief of late. The number of emails telling me to “write something decent” has increased even above its usual mailbox-crashing level, while the number of readers has plummeted to previously unplumbed depths.
The reason for the latter, of course, is that you’re all on holiday, out of routine, and suddenly have many better things to do with your time. 6000 miles… may be preferably (just) to editing that thing the boss told you to edit or poking an Excel spreadsheet, but it simply doesn’t compare to sinking a ice cold Black Label in the sun.
And I know this, because I just sank an ice cold Black Label in the sun and it was far better than writing this post.
Look, I’m having a break from work at the moment, but I feel the need to keep delivering on the blog, despite the fact that currently I’m more often sitting in the sun and sinking Black Labels.
If you don’t like what you are reading on the blog at the moment, then please feel free to ask for a full refund. Normal service will be resumed after the holiday period. In the meantime, expect more quota photos from the Southern Tip; of sunsets and Black Labels being sunk.
Because I’m on holiday, and I make no apologies for that.
That secret space plane and why my holiday in Borneo is now in doubt
Thanks to a comment by Craig Gibbs (Thanks, Craig), we can now see what the secret (I think they may have missed something here) space plane which everyone in the Western Cape thought was coming to probe us on Tuesday evening.
Of course, this is it in daylight, not jettisoning fuel. It looks completely different at night, above Cape Town, squirting kerosene and hydrogen peroxide into the upper atmosphere. I can personally vouch for this.
This from the initial launch of the X-37B, back in 2010:
The craft was recently completed and has a 4.5 meter wingspan with a length of 8.9 meters. It comes equipped with kerosene and hydrogen peroxide fuel tanks, an experimental bay, a large navigation “brain”, and likely other more secret components.What’s it doing in space? Your guess is as good as anyone else’s. And guesses tend to range from “deploying spy satellites” to “maintaining spy satellites”.
I’m no expert on top secret military hardware, but if they want to keep it a bit more secret than it is, it’s probably best not to release photos of it on a runway, nor attract the attention of several thousand confused South Africans on a Tuesday night.
Meanwhile, in unconnected news, Professor Anna Nekaris at Oxford Brookes University have found a nocturnal primate in Borneo which can kill you with toxin from its elbow. Wait? What? But yes:
“The slow loris might look like a harmless, big-eyed Ewok from a scene in Star Wars, but the animal is actually one of the only poisonous mammals in the world. Its toxin can cause death in humans through anaphylactic shock. Unknowing humans should stay clear of the toxin, which is released from nears its elbows. When threatened, the loris takes the toxin into its mouth and mixes it with saliva.”
I would imagine that knowing humans would also do well to keep their distance. Especially if it starts licking its elbow, not matter how entertaining it would be to watch it try. Fortunately, I’m now a knowing human, and I have thus cancelled my plans to holiday in the rain forests of Borneo, at night.
You’d probably be wise to do the same.
Crustal evolution assistance
Ooh – incoming email:
Dear 6000,
I am a geology student from the UK and I am looking for some assistance with a project on the geology of Table Mountain. Since you mentioned this subject in a post recently
[I did? Oh yes. I did. – Ed.] and you are based in Cape Town, I wondered if you might be able to help me out.
Specifically, I am looking for a photograph showing the effect of cross-cutting faults separating multiple peaks of Table Mountain Group sandstone on an eroded granite basement together with some indication of the proximity of this phenomenon to the Western Seaboard of the Cape Peninsula.
I really hope you can help.
Best regards,
Steve Green.
Woo. Toughie. You’re asking for a lot of detail in one photo there, Steve.
Fortunately, I have scoured the 6000 miles… photo archives and found the perfect image for your project, detailing everything you require.
There you are Steve, I hope it meets your needs.
a-ha’s “Take On Me”, played by North Korean accordion group
Incoming from Jacques:
In case you’ve never encountered this.
I’m told by a friend-of-a-friend on FB that: “Apparently a member of a-ha went there (cant remember why) and took a CD. Within three days the group came up with this arrangement. They had no sheet music or anything other than the CD to work off.”
Obviously, I haven’t encountered this. If I had encountered this, it would have been all over the blog the day that I encountered it. Just like it is today, which is the first day I have encountered it.
Brilliant. It’s on accordions, it’s in North Korea, there’s an austere painting and some fake sunflowers behind them and the guy on the right (as we’re looking) can’t stop swaying. And then it ends, abruptly. And there’s no applause.
In my mind, there can be no better example of an 1980’s hit played by a quintet on instruments of the bellows-driven, free-
What I can’t understand is why it only has 5,000 views in the three days that it has been on YouTube. This has every single element of the perfect viral video: we’re obviously just in the incubation phase right now. All of us now have the duty to spread the disease as widely as possible. Admit it, another piece of your life’s jigsaw clicked into place the moment you watched this – what gives you the right to deny others that experience? Who made you god?
Go – click the share button. Spread the wealth.
Thanks Jacques
UPDATE: (via @ColinMac7 on twitter)
alas, not every Norwegian is a member of AHA, and there has been more than a million YT hits tinyurl.com/73yfjuh
So it’s a Morten Traavik (and not Morten Harket) that took the CD to North Korea. And there’s the full story (and an epic photo of him) on the BBC page via that link.