Category: learning curve

Constantia Food & Wine Festival

Posted on

I’m tired. This afternoon brought with it much activity and when your right leg is incapable of much activity, you take the strain. Thus, I am strained, and was it really worth it?

The Constantia Food and Wine Festival promised much, but delivered little. It was poorly organised, poorly stocked (many places had run out of food by 5pm) and very expensive (R360 for the family to get in). The kids’ section was underwhelming, there were too few toilets and the queues for everything were ridiculous.

Thankfully, the company was good and the wine (and the beer, although Keg King ran out of some of that as well) was excellent. But we soon realised that it was too irritating to have to wait in line for ages just to get 25ml of red in the bottom of your glass, so we bought bottles and avoided the crowds – and the exhibitors. Which isn’t how it should be.

So this one will go down as being remembered for the views, the booze and the queues for the loos.

As a learning experience, it worked. We’ll save our time and money next time around.

Clarification: Mark from Keg King says (via twitter) that he never ran out of beer. But when I went to buy beer from him, I was told of my first two choices (of four on offer): “We don’t have any of that”.
I’m happy to clarify here that they hadn’t sold out of those beers, they just didn’t have any of them.

Danger! Common Sense Ahead!

Posted on

And we’re applying it to social media.

Yeah. Exactly!

Yesterday’s big news of Margaret Thatcher’s death was not entirely unexpected given her recent health issues, and nor was the mixed response to her passing. Much like Marmite, you either loved her or you hated her, but is there (or was there) really no room for any middle ground?

This article from Willard Foxton in the Telegraph shows us that social media forced us to see other people’s opinions which might differ widely from our own and reminds us that any form of unerring adulation or hatred here is probably rather ill-conceived.

The nail is pretty much hit on the head with this:

Surveying yesterday’s social media hysteria, the conclusion I draw is this: anyone who loved Margaret Thatcher as the perfect PM and is unwilling to accept any criticism of her, or anyone who thinks she was pure evil, like a medieval peasant recalling a folk memory of a tyrant king, is either disingenuous, ill-informed or a bit thick.

And often all three.

This could be applied to many (any?) other individual, situation or event as well. And probably should be.

Striped things

Posted on

The tigers weren’t the only striped things we saw at Vredenheim last week:

image

I spotted this wasp and there were also these zebras:

image

The difference being (aside from the size and the taste, obviously), that one set of stripes is to make potential predators more aware of the animal and the other is to make them less aware of the animal.

All of which brought me to thinking why we have potentially unnoticeable zebra crossings on our roads and not the far more obvious wasp crossings?

Is it really any wonder that the rules surrounding these road markings are so poorly observed when we choose to deliberately camouflage them?

Recorded

Posted on

Recorded for posterity and future meteorological reference: today was the day that winter hit Cape Town.
Big time.

I attempted to repel it with Milk Stout and red wine, but I fear that the battle may be already lost. At least until late September.
Still, I’ll continue to fight the good fight with all the decent alcoholic weaponry at my disposal, just in case I can preserve our precious summer a little longer.

Sheffield is my planet

Posted on

This is… odd. But strangely interesting and rather revealing too.

It’s an autocomplete map of the UK – what Google thinks you’re about to ask when you put in “Manchester is…” or “People from Birmingham are…”. This shows us the stereotype of each city in the UK:

enhanced-buzz-wide-12918-1364222093-11

Of the places I’ve lived, Sheffield is my planet (ok), Newcastle is a hole (I disagree) and Oxford is hellish (it had its moments).

Have a look around, but a couple of highlights include “Swansea is the graveyard of ambition” (allegedly a Dylan Thomas line), “Worcester is the Paris of the ’80s” (apparently a T-shirt slogan from Worcester, Massachusetts) and, in the words of Hugh MacDiarmid, “Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream”.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Cape Town has the disappointingly predictable responses, “Cape Town is it safe” and “Cape Town is a racist city” – the latter just like Aberdeen. Maybe it’s something to do with granite.

As for the title of this post, Sheffield is my planet is revealed to be a city council initiative to combat climate change.
How exciting.