Category: this is south africa

Just an image

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You’ve had almost 1000 words over the last couple of days, on subjects as diverse as a local sign and a local sign. Thank goodness Thursday’s post wasn’t also about a local sign. That would show a distinct lack of imagination on my part.

Awkward.

Anyway, it’s trying my keyboard and probably your patience, too.
So here’s something shorter and less signeseque.

It’s a different view of Beau Constantia, Constantia Glen and across the Cape Flats from several (or more) metres above Constantia Nek. See it better presented here.

We had a great time at Constantia Glen last weekend, with good friends, good views and superb wine.
The rest of the weekend was fun too – here are the photos.

I have questions, Kirstenbosch

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Another day, another local sign.

This one is outside Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, a place very close to my heart – I actually got married to the long-suffering Mrs 6000 there. So I’m not writing this lightly.

Texas (UK)?

Let’s not beat about the bush here: Texas is not in the UK.

Texas is nearly three times the size of the UK.
Texas would swamp the UK.
Texas is not in the UK.

I asked 100 individuals which country Texas was in* and 99 of them knew that it was in the USA. The other one was a beagle, and you can’t really expect a beagle to know that sort of thing. But then, who knows: maybe the sign was done by a beagle? What they lack in geographical nous, they surely make up for with their sign-writing abilities.

I do understand that as a National Botanical Garden, Kirstenbosch is obviously more about horticulture than geography. But still, publicly displaying this sort of inaccuracy is – at best – embarrassing.

And at worst…? Well, it’s not even the worst bit of the sign.

What sort of repugnant nonsense are you planning on serving in your restaurant on New Year’s Eve?
Literally no-one wants to bring in the New Year with cool fish soup. We’re all well aware of the results of boiling a fish anyway: it’s mingy. It’s absolutely the worst way of cooking fish that exists. That’s why normal people advocate frying or grilling fish, with a touch of lemon or garlic butter, (add seasoning to taste).

Also, why goldfish? How bizarre. Is this the latest hipster fad or something? I also felt that it might be ecologically unsound, so I checked the SASSI lists, but goldfish isn’t even mentioned. That’s because you don’t eat goldfish, you look at them. Serving goldfish soup is the start of a slippery slope. What next? Sautéed hagfish? Parrotfish bisque? Ugh.

You simply don’t need to do this. Play to your strengths. Just do plants.
That’s what you’re good at. Plants. Do that.

But maybe I’ve got this all wrong. Again.
Maybe this isn’t a meal at all, but rather just a spectacle. How very cruel.

We’re all well aware that the average goldfish is able to survive in a range of temperatures, from near freezing right up to 30ºC. But 30ºC is merely warm. However, ‘Hot Water” would suggest something well in excess of that. And while the goldfish may be able to briefly tolerate this higher temperature environment, the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water will decline as the temperature increases, meaning that the goldfish will struggle to breathe and eventually die or be cooked. Or both.

It’ll probably make a horrible whining noise as it expires. Goldfish usually do in my experience (Rocking The Daisies, 2013).

For your information, I will be reporting this sign to the SPCA and the Two Oceans Aquarium. I would also have reported it to some local geographical society or other, but I literally couldn’t find one that still existed. Maybe that’s what’s behind the Texas (UK) debacle.

Please, Kirstenbosch. Don’t put the anyone through such unnecessary cruelty. Let’s go into 2018 on a high note (and I don’t mean the last squeals of an expiring Goldfish). There’s enough to see and do in Kirstenbosch. You don’t need gimmicks like this.

Please reconsider.

 

* obviously, I didn’t really do this. I have a full-time job. 

Poor Chalkboard

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Here’s an image of the A-frame chalkboard outside a popular ice cream parlour in Claremont, Cape Town.

Ja. As you may have guessed, I have a few issues with it.

Let’s break it down into two handy statements, shall we?

Coffee as warm as a firefly’s nose.

Firefly is the common name for the Lampyridae family of insects in the beetle order Coleoptera. They’re called fireflies (or lightning bugs) because they use bioluminescence to attract mates at twilight:

The enzyme luciferase acts on the luciferin, in the presence of magnesium ions, ATP and oxygen to produce light.

All of which is biologically amazing, visually incredible and weirdly somehow rather romantic. But the reaction doesn’t yield any significant heat, and it certainly doesn’t happen in their noses (they don’t even have noses).

Fireflies produce a “cold light”, with no infrared or ultraviolet frequencies. This chemically produced light from the lower abdomen may be yellow, green, or pale red.

Not “warm” then. And certainly not hot (71ºC – 85ºC), which is the temperature I generally like my coffee to be.

Mmmm.

And then that second statement:

Ice cream as cold as a polar bear’s toes.

I have some bad news for patrons of this particular ice cream parlour. Ice cream is best served at around -12ºC, while polar bears’ toes (such as they even exist) are maintained at a decent 37ºC, just like the rest of their body.

Polar bears are mammals, brilliantly adapted to their habitat in the Arctic. They have blubber and thick, air-filled fur, which allows them to survive in the sub-zero temperatures in the polar region. Their paws are no exception to this. If they were not kept at 37ºC, the polar bear would get frostbite, which without prompt surgical and antibiotic treatment, would likely develop into gangrene and septicaemia, and inevitable death.

There’s also an additional problem. Polar bears’ toes are smelly. They stink. This is due to prominent sweat glands on their paws, and the fact that that the bears use their feet to tread urine into the ground and ice. It’s simple scent communication, but it’s really not something that I want my ice cream to be associated with.

So. Nice rhyme, but wholly inaccurate. Very poor.
Let’s sort that it for them:

Coffee as warm as the current ambient conditions at The Creamery.
Ice cream served at body temperature, with a slight smell of sweat and wee.

That kinda works, and I bet that brings the customers flocking in.

Thank me later.

80kmm

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Road accidents claimed over 14,000 lives in South Africa last year, and almost 15% of those deaths were blamed solely on speed. Now, you might think that I would therefore be advocating for lower speed limits, but I’m not. That’s because no-one in South Africa obeys the current speed limits anyway. And then, if they do get caught speeding, no-one pays their fines. So there’s no respect for the law, because there’s limited enforcement of that law and very limited risk of ever having to answer for your naughtiness.
But we all still like to complain about the taxis, don’t we? Where are the police (funded by your traffic fines) when you need them?
Well, you didn’t pay, so they don’t exist.

But I digress. Often.

Given the appalling record of South African drivers and speeding, this seems like a very bad idea indeed:

Now, I know that m usually refers to metre, but that doesn’t make any sense here. So m must refer to some length of time. We’d expect speed limits to be given in the traditional metric kilometres per hour (kph), but since hour begins with h, so we must therefore reasonably assume that m here is minute.

So 80km per minute (kps). I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and that’s 4,800kph or 2,983mph.
Just under Mach 4. 3.89 times the speed of sound. Woosh.

This appears to be awfully fast to me. Especially given the warnings about the somewhat wriggly nature of the road ahead, and that koppie standing pretty much straight on if you miss the right-hander ahead, because you were going a bit quickly or something.
Or because you sneezed. Because when you sneeze, your eyes close for about half a second. If you’re driving at 80kph, you’ll travel 11.1m with your eyes closed. If you’re driving at 80kps, you’ll travel (a rather prophetic?) 666 metres completely blind. Mind out for that obstacle you haven’t even seen in the distance yet.

4,800kph. That’s eight times faster than the world’s quickest dragster over a standard ¼ mile course. On the one hand, that was from a standing start, and there will clearly be no requirement for that here. But on the other, there were no corners for the driver to negotiate, and he was going 8 times slower than drivers on this road will be, so he didn’t die.

Thankfully, 4,800kph is still less than half the speed of a Saturn V rocket, so you could probably expect to die a quick and fiery death by being completely obliterated on that hillside and without actually leaving earth’s orbit. Small mercies, silver linings and all that.

Drive safely, folks.

Dr Doolittle

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You know what? I’ve always wondered what would happen:

If I conferred with our furry friends, man to animal
Think of the amazing repartee.
If I could walk with the animals, talk with the animals
Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals
And they could talk to meeeeeeeeee…… [Jazz Hands to fade]

But look no further, young Padawan, because now there’s a animal communication course that you can do. It’s in Port Elizabeth, so enough said really, but then there’s a redeeming feature in that the Facebook ad has a Boston Terrier and a telephone receiver on it, so it must be good, right?

Hopefully the animals are going to put some effort into studying too though, because that’s not how you use a phone, is it?

Enough of my questions though, because the course organisers have a couple of their own:

Have you ever considered the possibility that you and your animal have spiritual agreements to assist each other?

I’m sorry, what?

No. No, I haven’t considered that possibility. Primarily, I feel, because an agreement, you see, is something that both parties have to… er… agree to, and I’m pretty sure that I’d remember entering into some sort of mystical, mutually beneficial pact with the beagle. So no, it’s not a possibility that I have ever considered. Next question please.

Could it be that your animal has valuable information for you and because you have never thought about it, you haven’t spent much effort learning how to communicate more effectively with him or her?

To be honest, there are only a few pieces of valuable information that I’d really require. The winner of the 2:30 on Saturday at Turffontein would be good, a medium to long-term outlook on the currency markets would be even better, and the GPS coordinates for the well that little Tommy has fallen down would certainly assist the people currently out searching for little Tommy.

I digress… I find it highly unlikely that the beagle, an animal so thick that it can’t even recognise its own reflection, would be able to furnish me with any of these important details. Look, it’s very good at knowing where the kitchen is when I’m cooking or making the kids’ packed lunches, so if I ever need to know where the kitchen is, I’m sorted. But to be honest, I’m yet to find any other use for it, and it’s been three years now.
And anyway, it can already communicate: it scratches on the back door when it wants to go outside, and it scratches on the other side of the back door when it wants to come back in. It’s not exactly high level communication, but since we have no spiritual agreement to assist each other in place, it’s about as good as things are ever going to get.

Can this course teach me more? Of course it can.

Learn how you can learn to directly communicate with animals. All living creatures have the ability to think, feel, and communicate although most people have forgotten this. This course teaches how to open up to the messages that animals around us are sending all the time.

This makes your household pet sound like a spy. If the beagle is sending messages all the time, to whom is it sending them? And what do they say? And how is it sending them? And why do the recipients want to know? All of these questions will obviously be answered on the course, but if I were to learn how to tune in or intercept these messages that the beagle is allegedly sending all the time, then at best, I would feel that I was eavesdropping or intruding upon its privacy, and at worse, I would probably want to strangle the treacherous little sod.

It all depends on what it’s been saying. But either way, I see no benefit for anyone here.

In this one day course you will learn inter species communicate with each other and how you can effectively send messages to animals and hear their answers.

I can’t help that if someone is running a course on any sort of communication, they should be able to write in sentences which make sense. This one doesn’t, but what it lacks in basic English, it makes up for by promising some incredible things. Not the “effectively sending messages to animals” bit – that’s not tough to do if you’ve got a shoe on your foot some tasty tidbits to reward their good behaviour with. They soon learn what you’re telling them.

No, but hearing their answers would be amazing. Well, I say that, but the beagle is notoriously good at ignoring any command you give it, so do I really want to hear what it has to say?

Now:
Me: Hey, beagle, come here!
Beagle: [looks up, ignores instruction]

After ‘Beginner animal communication course’:
Me: Hey, beagle, come here!
Beagle: [looks up, ignores instruction] Fuck off.

Again, I see no advantage for myself or the beagle here.

The individual who can like to be presenting this course goes by the stage name ‘Animal Benefits’, and a quick look at their Facebook page yields (along with lonely dogs and depressed horses), this gem from last month:

This smacks of the nonsense spouted during the search for Vienna. And you’re going to pay money to sit in a room with this [           ]* for a whole day? Ugh. You’re the one who’s atrocious.

Look, even this light-hearted, so-called example of alleged animal communication is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to justify eating more chocolate:

[delicate female voice] “Oh, but I cannot feed it to my dog, because chocolate is bad for dogs, so I will just have to have it for myself, no matter if he thinks I am being ‘atrocious’ (yes, he used that word, ‘atrocious’)! OMNOMNOMNOM! Ha ha ha!”

To be fair, I have tried the same thing with the beagle and brandy, but at least I don’t charge idiots a fat fee to come and listen how to I do it.

If you willingly choose to pay real money to go on this course, you’re on your own. There are a million better things that you could do with your hard-earned cash and precious time.

If she locks the door once you’ve sat down, it’s been nice knowing you.

Don’t go near any wells.

 

 

* redacted for legal reasons