Category: this is south africa

Ban #SlideTheCity? No.

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OK. Long story short:

  1. There’s an event coming up this summer in SA called “Slide The City”.
  2. It makes use of some really long (300m+) inflatable slides for people to slide down streets in various cities.
  3. It uses water to make the slides slippy.
  4. We don’t have huge amounts of water in SA right now.

If you look at the facts above, then Slide The City (STC) – while still sounding like a whole lot of fun – doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, does it? And that’s why there are not one but two online petitions calling for it to be banned. I’m not helping you out by linking to them, but I will share the fact that one of them is called: Stop the City of Cape Town From Allowing Slide the City Events During a National Water Crisis. All the facts, all in one catchy title. Perfection.

Except that Cape Town and South Africa have issues with potable water. And STC doesn’t use any potable water. Here’s city spokesperson Priya Reddy:

“Non-potable spring water is being provided. Forty kilolitres charged at the applicable tariff will be transported to the organisers’ holding pool by tanker. Treatment of the spring water will be performed by the organisers on site.

We applaud the public’s rightful concern over the prospect of wasteful consumption of our most precious resource, but would like to assure them that the use of drinking water for this event was never contemplated.”

40 kilolitres isn’t actaully a lot of water, either. It’s about what one average household uses in a month. I’m not saying that we should waste 40 kilolitres just for the sake of it, but I can’t help but think that there might be better ways of saving water than going lumbering after a single event in Cape Town.
A single event which re-circulates its water so as not to waste any, and then gives it back at the end of the day:

In Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nelspruit, Knysna, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth, the water is put through the filtration system and then put into tankers and delivered to the municipality to be used where they need it most.

Could it… could it really be that someone hasn’t actually done any homework before launching an online petition?
Could it?

As someone wise commented earlier:


Still, online lynch mobs petitions can sometimes carry a disproportionate amount of weight, so maybe the City of Cape Town will take note. Once they’ve removed the large plank from their own eye, that is:

Fullscreen capture 2015-11-10 110658 AM.bmp   Fullscreen capture 2015-11-10 110802 AM.bmp   Fullscreen capture 2015-11-10 110742 AM.bmp
Just a sample of their twitter feed this morning. And I’d happily wager that any of these burst water pipes wasted more water than any Slide The City event.

Not that I am suggesting the just because water is being wasted somewhere, that makes it ok to waste more. Not at all. In fact, the fact that so much water is being lost to burst pipes and naughty people should encourage each of us to use water more sparingly.

But going after Slide The City, who are providing entertainment for literally thousands of people at a very, very limited cost to the environment? I’m sorry, but that just smacks of an ill-informed, cheap points scoring exercise.

Disclaimer: 6000 miles… has no affiliation with Slide The City. I just wish people would actually think before they sign online petitions.

UPDATE: Slide The City duly cancelled.

Tattoo

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Not the inky mess on your skin, nor the 2002 hit-making pseudo-lesbian singing duo from Russia, but The Cape Town Military Tattoo, which is happening this week at the Castle (not technically a castle) of Good Hope in the city centre.

There will be instrumental numbers, dances, silent drills, gun-runs and more. There will also be guns and cannons firing, which is only going to serve to annoy the anti-Guy Fawkes brigade yet further. And there’s Diwali this week as well. Blimey.
Wait til they hear about Vishnu and Shiva’s plans to hold a thunderstorm at some point. Pets be going mad, yo.

But if previous experience has any lessons for us, they are that it will surely cause confusion and dismay. Previously, we’ve had rumours of invasion (really? who would bother, honestly?), terrorist acts and petrochemical disasters. No. Just some army people having some fun with guns.
So yes, expect noise in the Cape Town CBD twixt 8 and 10pm Wednesday to Saturday and feel free to point people this way if they are confused, frightened, bewildered or just terminally stupid.

I’m not going along, but you still can, with this handy link ticketing maestros Computicket, who are selling them off at R125 to R250 per person.

#HelloJetman

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This is stunning.

Long-term readers of this blog will know my fondness for A380s (see my Lufthansa album and my BA post). They’re just so cuddlable and aeronautically impressive.
Other, more recent readers will have noted that I have done a lot of travelling to and from the UK over the last 12 months. All of those trips have been on Emirates, and they have not put a single foot wrong on any of the 28-odd flights I’ve done with them. I even enjoyed a spell in the A380 Business Class lounge on my last flight. Olives, bar snacks and Bloody Marys – a posh pub at 35,000 ft. A bizarre experience.
And then they released that Jennifer Aniston advert, but I still liked them.

But how amazing is this?

Here are a few numbers:

Cruising at just 4,000 feet (“just” for the plane, that’s pretty high for flying people) the trio flew in two holding patterns while a fourth object in the sky (the film crew in a helicopter) kept distance 1,000 feet above. The A380 couldn’t be more different from the jet wings worn by the pilots though. The Emirates craft pumps out 70,000 pounds of thrust per engine with a max speed of 490 knots, making the wearable-wing’s 88 pounds and 170 knots seem like a mild breeze in comparison.

It’s not an advert for Emirates per se, although it obviously incorporates quite a big bit of their hardware. Neither does it seem to be an ad for Dubai. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what it is an advert for. It might not even be an advert for anything. I’m almost getting the feeling that they just did it because they could for no actual monetary gain.
And that’s pretty cool.

Yes. More of this sort of thing please.

Fireworks Night Tips

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I love Guy Fawkes Night and I love these tips to make it EVEN BETTER from Michael Spicer, via The Poke:

fireworks_tips3

fireworks_tips8

I await, with some dismay, the traditional plethora of comments and complaints from pet owners, who presumably weren’t aware of the 5th November before buying their dogs, cats, children etc.

Self-googling hippie takes offence after 6½ years

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Trigger warnings: Whale Death, Middle Earth Dwellers

Something of a record, this one. Elephantine-memoried readers will remember this post from June 2009, in which I passed comment on the Kommetjie ceremony to honour the 55 pilot whales which were daft enough to beach themselves and then got shot by local authorities because they weren’t stretchy enough (or something).

Well, Chief Shaman and all-round resident of the Dark Lands Beyond The Lentil Curtain, Shelley Ruth Wyndham, was googling herself over the weekend (Halloween actually, but I’m sure this was just a coincidence) and found that she had been mentioned in that 2009 post. Presumably, the goblins in Noordhoek who archive the internet using quills and parchment so that the “magic shiny screen” doesn’t scare people in Misty Cliffs have finally got around to documenting 2009.
Well done them.

It seems that Shelley disputes the report that I used when writing up the post, and instead suggests that we read her version. I did, and it’s quite funny. Here’s how she begins:

Thank you all my loved ones, colleagues, those adversaries and my friends all of whom have helped me become who I am today, to know who I am and who I am not as I continue to awaken myself, like us all, growing, evolving and continually finding my place in all of Creation. Aho.

A ho? Unfortunate spelling error there.
But she continues, and she’s not alone. She’s brought the rest of the Loony Toons Crew too:

I am Shelley Ruth Wyndham; I am a Shamanic Healer Teacher. I stand here together with fellow Earth-walkers Sean Caulfield, a Shamanic Artist and Drummer; Kate Ann Spreckley, a Spiritual Healer Teacher; Mandy Scanlen business entrepreneur, Change Facilitator and Project Manager and Jennifer Godwin Registered Professional Nurse and Reiki Master. We five people walk the Good Red Road together.

The Good Red Road is the Deep South version of Blue Route, I think. It was originally going to be called the Yellow Brick Road, but they had to change their plans after a copyright claim by the estate of the late L. Frank Baum.

Anyway, despite the nasty little “Earth-walkers” dig at the recently-deceased whales, who, as they’d comprehensively indicated, are fatally incapable of “Earth-walking”, she expects us to respect her message:

I have been trained and guided by ancient indigenous teachings steeped in the wisdom this world needs to remember. Although I speak in ways which are coloured by Native American principles, from the First Nation People’s of the Americas, I speak a Universal message of Universal principles that needs to be respected.

Well, I would have respected the Universal message, but sadly, I was having trouble waking my consciousness and aligning my spirit that day. My chi was totally off – probably brandy related, I’m guessing.

So, what did I miss?

Whale carries the history of Mother Earth.

Heavy, man. Have you seen the Encyclopaedia Britannica? No wonder whales are so big. No wonder they are so difficult to push off a beach. If they were a bit more evolved, they could stick it all on a Micro SD card. Simples.

Whale medicine teaches that sound frequencies can bring up records of ancient knowledge from within us human beings and teaches us to use the sounds and frequencies to balance our emotional bodies and heal our physical forms and ways.

Presumably, this is like when that orthopod did an ultrasound on my ankle? Weirdly, I do recall several records of ancient knowledge flashing before my eyes. That could just have been intense pain though.

Seek the whale song from within you; in this way each of us will enable connections to be made to the ancient ones, to the ancient aspects of ourselves, on a deep cellular level for all humans to remember.

Aho! A-ha! Now cellular communications, I do know about. You’re talking about G-protein coupled receptors, receptor tyrosine kinases, and ion channel receptors? And all this can be triggered by the whale song within me? I never knew. Actually, I never even knew I had whale song within me at all, let alone it’s triggering ability on trans-membrane receptors.
Whales (which are mammals, not fish), are chock-full of whale song, though. Their cellular receptors must be firing all over the place. No wonder they get sommer distracted and swim into beaches. It’s like the tannie driving on her cellphone and crashing into the parked car.
Thus, perhaps a little less whale song (using your cellphone while driving) might result in fewer whale beachings (cellphone related road traffic accidents).

I can like to be the king of the analogy.

But, all jesting aside, I thank Shelley Ruth Wyndham for her rather tardy, but very welcome interaction with us here at 6000 miles…. And thus, I think it’s only fair that we leave the final words to her, as she (finally) signs off her June 2009 speech.

Each of us is a key, today this is a door, let us walk through this door together and be the change that is needed in this world so that we have a thriving, balanced, sustainable future for all life here.

WE ARE ONE.

Mitakuye Oyasin
Aho
Four Winds

(Yeah, ok “Four Winds”, but let’s face it, mainly a strong to gale force South Easter most of the time.)