Category: politics

The trouble with spam

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Love it or hate it – and let’s face it, we all hate it – spam is here to stay. 14.5 billion email messages a day. That’s more than four Viagra offers for every man on this planet. Each. Every day. Some of us don’t need that assistance. Really.
And it’s an issue on blogs as well. Here on 6000 miles…, our ratio of trashy nonsense (“Spam”) to real comments (affectionately known as “Ham”) is around 7:1. That means we’re up to 40,000 spam comments on here over the last three and bit years since we moved over to WordPress. Ouch.

But that’s nothing when you look at the Dihlabeng Local Municipality site. It fades into absolute obscurity when you consider this post, describing the make-up of the municipal council. It’s been there for just over 6 months and has attracted over 640,000 spam comments, many of them advertising exciting-sounding sexual deviance of one sort or another.

But has no-one noticed? How do you miss three and a half thousand comments each day on one post on your site?

I’m actually hoping that no-one does notice. I reckon by mid-May, the council post will hit a million spam hits. I’m going to suggest that they throw a party and maybe invite some of those nice girls that they’ve been linking to.

Commendable?

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Oh dear.

Hot on the heels of the ANCYL and ANC sushi statements comes a press release from the ANC Women’s League (not about sushi – they’ve covered that already). No, this one is on the altogether more serious matter of a man arrested for allegedly killing his two wives in Chalumna.

And that makes the unfortunate spelling mistake all the more hilarious/tragic:

Hmm. Not great.

What more must they do?

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The dry-run of the dry-run for tomorrow’s Opening of Parliament and the State of the Nation Address was last night.

Having two dry-runs means that any problems discovered in the first dry-run can be ironed out in the second dry-run and any problems discovered in the second dry-run might be ironed out by the time the real thing happens on Thursday. Any problems on that day will likely be due to reaction to Zuma’s job forecasts.
It’s hard to drive when your eyes are full of tears (joy, despair, gas).

And despite a widespread media campaign, people still rang into radio stations, besieged twitter and probably moved to Perth because of the inevitable traffic congestion in the CBD.
That’s not a problem to me. What is a problem to me is when they put on their best whiny voice and trot out that line:

Why didn’t they tell us about this?

Because the simple answer is that they did. It’s been in the Cape Times (albeit with poor maths therein) and the Cape Argus. I’m told that even the Daily Voice mentioned it, but no-one believes their stuff anyway.

But I don’t read the papers

It’s been on Kfm, it’s been on Cape Talk, it’s been on Heart.

I only listen to CDs in my car

It was on those HUGE new dot-matrix signs which are all over this corner of the Province.

I was too busy chatting on my cellphone to look at the signs

Some local blogs even gave you the details as part of their public service covenant.

So what more must they do to get this information through to you?

Employ scantily-clad midgets  to go door-to-door to inform everyone in the Western Cape?
Get planes to sky-write the details over the Mother City (South Easter permitting)?
Or just tattoo it on your forehead so when you look in the mirror each morning, you’ll remember? Forever.

What I find odd is that the tiniest bit of bad press about anything in Cape Town or South Africa makes its way through the gossip grapevine via word of mouth, SMS, twitter and – more often – email and Facebook, yet helpful information like this just never seems to get through, no matter the best efforts of mice and men to put it out there.
What exactly does that say about the State of the Nation?

So – let’s have one more go for those of you at the back.

There will be more disruption on the this evening (Wednesday) and tomorrow (Thursday) evening.
Here are the full details.

Now stop moaning and get back underneath your rock.

Road Closures for the Opening of Parliament 2011

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Yes folks, it’s that time of year again when Parliament finally comes back to work after the summer break (noting that the rest of us have been back at least 5 weeks already) and JZ stands up and tells us how many jobs he intends to create this year.
Then we can all laugh heartily as millions are retrenched across the nation.

Again.

Anyway, the upshot of all these festivities is mild traffic chaos in Cape Town for a few days as they practice driving from JZ’s place to town and back on Tuesday and Wednesday and then actually do drive from JZ’s place to town and back on Thursday.
If you plan to be anywhere near the City Bowl or the M3 on these days, it’s very likely that this will affect you.

Fortunately, we at 6000 miles… are ready, willing and able to pass this information on to you so that you don’t find yourself stuck in horrendous snarl-ups over the next few days – just click the link below.

Road closures for the Opening of Parliament 2011

I’m playing football in town on Thursday night, so I’ll need to work out an alternative route that evening.

It’s either that or catch a lift down with Mr Zuma.
We at 6000 miles… have some high-powered connections – that’s where the difference comes.

Hat-tip to the Hipless Chilean

Now Ehrenreich targets “racist fires”

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After his extraordinary claims that the new Cape Town cycle lanes were racist:

Cosatu is outraged that the DA in the Western Cape and the City of Cape Town prioritises bicycle lanes for the white wealthy citizens, while poorer communities on the Cape Flats are subjected to over-crowded and unsafe public transport

Cosatu provincial secretary Tony Ehrenreich has now gone even further, suggesting that wildfires in the peninsular “are only found in well off, white neighbourhoods”.

This follows last night’s huge blaze at Oudekraal between Camps Bay and Llandudno: two of Cape Town’s most exclusive suburbs. Ehrenreich stated:

Take a look at the Oudekraal fire yesterday. If we consider the location of that fire and we extrapolate it to the wider metropole, then it is clear to see that 100% of the veldfires in the Cape Town area are in or close to wealthy white areas. This is an appalling disparity and Cosatu is outraged that the DA in the Western Cape and the City of Cape Town prioritises wildfires to these areas while  poorer communities on the Cape Flats aren’t subjected to any fires at all.

Ehrenreich backed up his statistics by indicating that when considering the Oudekraal blaze, it could clearly be noted that there were no fires in areas such as Khayelitsha or Grassy Park – and this despite the fact that the latter was really very grassy and could have gone up at any time.

The Oudekraal fire was only in Oudekraal – in our view, the evidence is conclusive.

This dichotomy only existed, said Ehrenreich, so that the Provincial and Municipal DA could use fire-fighting equipment and personnel in these areas to “impress their white voters”:

They’ve got a shiny new helicopter and they want to show it off

When asked if he could provide any further examples of Provincial monies being used in supposedly racist ways, Ehrenreich was quick to point out that Cosatu had evidence that more than 98% of the Western Cape Provincial paper budget was spent on white paper.
Asked if Cosatu had looked into the stationery budgets of other (ANC-led) Provincial governments, he accused the reporter of trying to change the subject and then said that the interview had to end as he had to attend an(other) appointment at a local private hospital.