Category: this is south africa

There’s a lesson here…

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I’ve enthused about Getwine on the blog before, most notably here and here.

For those of you who missed those posts or have simply forgotten what I wrote about, here’s what Getwine says Getwine is:

GETWINE is a South African Wine Portal which allows you to easily buy superb South African wine online and have it delivered to your door.

What they don’t say in that tagline is that those wines are often heavily (or more) discounted. This puts really good wine into the occasionally desperate clutches of us normal people.

But not just us normal people. Abnormal people as well:

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Yes, that’s a Getwine delivery going to a motor yacht on the Waterfront. The motor yacht in question is the Vava II. I’m not saying that it’s fancy or anything, but it’s owned by Swiss-Italian biotech entrepreneur Ernesto Bertarelli and cost £100,000,000. OK, it is fancy. There, I said it.

I’m no expert, but I’d wager that Ernesto wouldn’t exactly struggle to buy basically any South African wine (or vineyard) he wanted. He could even check the grapes out in person by using the helicopter that sits atop his big boat.

But no, Ernesto (or his people) chose to buy discounted wine from Getwine.

Firstly, let’s not for a moment suggest that this isn’t a big vote of confidence in Getwine’s offerings and service. And big congratulations to them. Local boyz dun good.
I’m guessing that Ernesto picked up some hints and tips from a local blog and simply went from there.

But secondly, is this an example of how people with lots of money (and Ernesto does have an awful lot of money), get and keep lots of money? By not splurging on the simple things in life, when there’s an equally good – and more reasonably priced – alternative. (Obviously, I don’t count his 97 metre long yacht in this “no splurge” category.)

Is there a lesson for us financially mere mortals here? I think that there probably is.
And will we listen? No. Of course not.

Allegedly, Vava II is on her way to somewhere that’s not Cape Town at some point today. You can live the Playboy lifestyle vicariously through Ernesto via Marinetraffic by following Vava II’s progress here.

UPDATE: See the comment below by Getwine with all the details.

ISS pass tonight

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My ISS Detector app has detected that the ISS will be passing over tonight. Over Cape Town, that is.
It’ll be passing over a lot of the rest of the world as well of course, but it’s the Cape Town bit that I’m going to be looking out for.

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Here’s a quick screenshot from my phone, showing a few details.

As you will note, the pass begins near Uranus just before… I’m sorry? Is there something you find amusing about that? Honestly, grow up.
Anyway, you’ll need to look North West towards Uranus at… STOP SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!

You’ll need to look North West at 7:58 this evening, and you should see a bright white dot racing South East across the sky. You won’t need a telescope, binoculars or a magnifying glass. You won’t miss it: it’ll be the brightest object up there. And the only one that’s moving at 8km/second.
Take your kids out and show them before bedtime, and let’s hold thumbs for a cloudless evening.

For the nerds out there, I use RunaR’s ISS Detector app (actually, I have the Pro version at R29, but the free version does most everything you need), and it’s really good for alerting you to interesting stuff in the sky.

Red

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This afternoon was dominated by two of my favourite red wines.

First, a near impromptu outing to Constantia Glen led to one (or more) glasses of their Five blend:

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And then, having come home and lit the braai, it seemed a shame not to keep the high quality red wine theme going.
Thus, the contents of a bottle of my very favourite wine of all, Neethlingshof’s The Caracal found its way into my glass (bit by bit).

They didn’t stay there for ever so long…

This was a good afternoon.

BTS Aquarium Tour

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We did a Behind The Scenes tour at the aquarium today. Regular readers will recall that we have done this before. Well, this morning, we did it again.

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This was a photo I took before the tour – it’s a Tube Anenome. The photos from the actual tour, which was excellent and included a quick view into the new (but currently empty) 1,500,000 litre exhibit, will follow in due course.

UPDATE: As promised, here they are.

Scary animals ruin Waterfront

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Not quite. But almost.

Incoming from the Two Oceans Aquarium (where we’re going on Saturday) – there’s been an invasion of isopods.

Isopods refer to a group of crustaceans that include terrestrial and aquatic species like woodlice and rock lice. Some isopods eat decaying plant and animal matter, others graze on food particles from the water around them, a few are predators, and some are internal or external parasites.

Also, my dodgy Latin says they all have the same number of feet. Or something.

Nice.

You can go and have a look at the photos of this rather extraordinary “bloom” on the link above. there are an awful lot of them (Isopods, not photos). It’s fascinating, but apparently it does cause some issues for the aquarium:

Much of the water for our exhibits is from the harbour surrounding our building, and we’ve had to shut down our intake pipes. Once all the isopods die off – also as a result of oxygen deprivation – they will sink to the bottom. Then, once oxygen levels go back up (because there are fewer organisms in the water using this oxygen now) the dead isopod bodies will start decomposing like mad. This will cause an ammonia spike in the water, making the water toxic to the animals in our exhibits and so still not suitable for our use. We will be keeping the Aquarium’s life-support system on a closed system until the water quality returns to normal.

I’m not sure how long the aquarium can keep their life-support systems off, but if it’s anything like the Starship Enterprise (spoiler: it’s not), then I don’t think it’s very long at all before the guy in the red shirt suffocates. Hopefully this won’t be the case at the aquarium, because it would be nice to not have to step over dead bodies as we’re having a look round on the weekend.