Not sure why you would ever need it, but if you ever did, then here it is:
Basically, a handy guide to which country you would end up in if you left the UK (or Ireland) and went straight North, South, East or West.
I might have to do one of these for SA. I know that if you head straight out from Suiderstrand, you end up in Uruguay. And if you head south from anywhere, you end up in Antarctica.
The East coast needs some work though.
This is a post about a rather unsettling piece of artwork I saw on the internet today.
But first, since we’re talking about carriers (the title is the name of the artwork), let me just document the demise of a couple of birds that I know about in Agulhas over the last two days. Both from avian influenza, one a Cape Gannet (species listed as Vulnerable) and one an African penguin (species listed as Critically Endangered). Two deaths is bad, but it’s not a lot to go on scientifically. However, AI (the virus not the annoying computer thing all over Facebook) is rife in South Africa at the moment. Are these discoveries just unfortunate chance or is this a sign of a bigger problem on the way?
Watch this space, I guess.
But then the artwork thing. And this is not AI in any sense of the acronym.
A hyper-realistic sculpture from Australian (but born in Sierra Leone) artist Patricia Piccinini. It’s… yeah. It’s this:
Created in 2012 as part of her Curious Affection exhibition, it’s a bit odd and a bit disturbing, but then so is a lot of her other work. I’m really not sure what to read into this, so I went and found someone that (thought they) did:
It seems the carrier and woman are connected in some way, physically but also emotionally, therein lies the conflict. Perched up high, she looks comfortable and content to rely on his assistance, yet what is their relationship, why is he carrying her, is it an equal partnership, or is he just performing a service? We can wonder if the carrier is the next step in post-human technology, his life seems perfectly engineered to the task he performs, and it is feasible that he is happily self-employed.
It’s a lot to take from an odd ape carrying a woman in a frock, but it’s far more than I was able to get from it. So fair enough.
But this isn’t an unusual piece from Piccinini. Her work regularly drags DNA across species boundaries:
Her Madonnas are not clothed for piety but brazen and naked, half-ape, bristling with hair. Babies in swaddling have adult faces and snouts. Nature’s expected laws of delineation – defining scales from skin, bones from feathers, sacs from follicles – are collapsed, all rules rewritten.
Thank goodness she wasn’t set loose on anything for Canberra’s centenary celebrations in 2013. She’d probably have come up with a giant 100ft hot air balloon called the SkyWhale with eight pendulous breasts and a friendly face. Ha.
I’m sorry… she did what? It had… ten… ten pendulous breasts. Oh, OK then.
Of course it did.
What’s uncanny about Piccinini’s work is not that an artist’s mind can conjure such creatures. It’s that the finesse of their detail make every variegated body that she crafts seem suddenly possible.
Amazing skill, but actually I don’t want them to “seem suddenly possible”.
Really not my thing. Properly odd and yes, deeply unsettling.
Sleep well this evening, won’t you?
Households in the UK are already settling into a slightly earlier than usual Heating Debate, as in: should they put the central heating on yet?
Earlier than usual because of a bit of a cold snap over there, but whenever it happens, it prompts arguments:
No surprise that Belfast households argue more than any other. They could fight each other over stuff they agree on.
And they do.
But of course, down this end of the world, we’re heading the other way: into hotter times, and the joys of summer.
Except not yet.
So there was absolutely no debate at all when we got home this evening, that the fire was being lit.
Bloody freezing*!
* it’s 11°C
I’m not a social scientist or an economist, but I’ve done enough looking at graphs to see when a graph doesn’t look good. Whether that’s to do with money or infectious diseases, a bad graph always looks… bad.
This isn’t a graph per se (I think that it’s a treemap chart), but it could be a graph if it were presented just slightly differently. But it still looks bad.
Really bad.
How people spend their disposable income is of course completely up to them. But that almost 55% of it goes on any one thing is bad. That almost 55% of it goes on gambling is really bad.
The fact is that when you spend money on anything recreational, you’re know that not going to get anything tangible back. You spend it on the “entertainment”. Gym fees, tickets for sporting events, video games, movie tickets. You spend it on the experience. You know that you’re not seeing that money again.
With gambling, however, you might just get something back. Evidence suggests that you’re unlikely to, especially long term. But that doesn’t stop people trying. In fact, it’s the number one reason that they do gamble:
The worrying bit is that because there is that chance of winning, the outlay on gambling is often overlooked. Because you might get it – or more – back. That’s not happening with a cinema ticket.
But it’s a false premise. South Africans are spending R1.1 TRILLION on gambling every year. And sadly, in the vast majority of cases, it’s money that they can’t afford to lose. This is not a second income stream, no matter how good you think your football knowledge is.
None of those links and none of these graphics make good reading. Gambling apps are now so easy to get hold of and use, and we are surrounded by ads 24/7: on the TV, on the internet, and – of course – at the racecourses, where it’s not unusual to see a horse sponsored by Betway winning a race sponsored by World Sports Betting at a track sponsored by Hollywood Bets.
And yes, I’ve posted occasional ads on here for various betting companies. Hey, gotta make ends meet. But I didn’t know it was this bad. So, while gambling addiction has always been a problem, this flooding of the market with betting apps and the insane 42% per year increase in online betting since Covid means that I won’t be doing that any more. They clearly don’t need my help (although they keep asking for it), and I don’t want to be part of the problem, which is obviously spiraling out of control.
I would say that this problem needs nipping in the bud, but I think we’re well into the flowering stage right now, and no-one is doing anything about it.
I know that I have probably missed the zeitgeist for last night’s lunar eclipse. People have moved on to politics, record-breaking cricket scores and other such nonsense, and so this is clearly old news.
But just for the record, the clouds did clear, making for a good view of the moon (although it cunningly tied to hide). In fact, the only real issue was the wind, which made long exposures rather difficult, and thus getting a photo required some patience, some perseverance and some ISO twiddling.
Still, I’m relatively happy with this shot, and as documentary evidence of what the event looked like from Cape Town… well, it looked like this.
Job done then, and now back to editing horse photos.