Stairway to Heaven

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The kids were anxious to get to the beach this morning after last weekend’s stupifying temperatures and who were we to deny them, despite the fact it was only 18°C under dreary English grey skies?
Clovelly was the beach of choice and Alex’s latest pastime of digging a really big hole in the sand began in earnest, while Kristen’s favourite role as dog-spotter was equally successful. Mum was busy being buried as Dad went off to snap some of the urban ugliness in this otherwise beautiful spot.

It seems so out of place. Look beyond this nastiness and there is the Silvermine Nature Reserve. Turn around and you’ve got a stunning view down the False Bay coast via Fishhoek to Simonstown and beyond towards Cape Point. But the railway is a thin scar that runs right the way along the coast from Muizenberg to Simonstown.
From the train, the view of the beach is spectacular; from the beach, the view of the train less so.

I can do science, me

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Being a scientist myself, I was delighted that Alex’s school was running a science week this week. He’s learnt lots, from the water cycle, through to dissolving salt via something or other with yeast. The finale of the week was today’s Mad Scientist Day, where all the kids came dressed as… well… Mad Scientists.
It was a novelty for him, but to be honest, nothing short of a normal day for me.

Alex is now hugely enthusiastic about science, but that’s only because no-one has told him about the long hours and lousy wages yet.

Pizza Confusion

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I’m confused. It does happen from time to time, usually over unimportant things like political history and tax regulations.
And that happens to the best of us, doesn’t it, Julius? 

But this time, it’s altogether more serious. I am confused about pizza.

There are several different sorts of pizza eaters and several different types of pizza to go with them.
The pizza snobs will insist on an olive wood-fired, traditional Umbrian-style oven, built from terracotta tiles recycled from Julius Caesar’s bathroom and a pizza base rolled on the inner thigh of one of Silvio Berlusconi’s hand-maidens.
These are the sort of people that like rocket on their pizza.  Because there’s nothing better than making posh cheese on toast and then chucking some raw dandelion leaves on top before you eat it.

Then there are the pizza slobs. These are the people that will even accept pizza from Scooters, despite that company’s preference for speed rather than classiness, their lack of accuracy in putting the correct ingredients on the round dough bit, the fact that they (possibly) cook their wares in a 650W Pick ‘n’ Pay microwave recycled from Julius Malema’s kitchen and roll their pizza bases on the inner thigh of Jessie Duarte.
Still – you know what you’re getting when you order. And you’ll be tucking into your food while the snobs are still checking a lengthy paper trail concerning the authenticity of the flour, picking weeds in the back garden and fainting from hunger.

In the middle is the happy medium: Butler’s Pizza. Look, it’s not larney, but it’s far from the doughy trash of other delivery services. “Just nice”, some would say. Seth Rotherham, he of 2oceansvibe and snarly jail face fame, has long been a fan of Butler’s and thus, they have recently introduced a new pizza to their range: The Rotherham.

The Rotherham: Bacon, Feta, Salami, Half Mozzarella, Thin Base

Am I the only one bewildered by this bizarre pizza design?
If, as has been previously described, pizza is actually just posh cheese on toast, then why remove half the cheese and half the toast?

“Hmm – I’ll take one ‘The Rotherham’, please.
And I’d like some watered down beer and half a tub of ice cream to go with it.
Actually – while I’m waiting – do you have any Ricoffy?”

A hypothetical situation, obviously, as Butler’s are delivery only. But you (might) get my point.

On the plus side, Butler’s have introduced a real pizza at the same time: The Meaty Foursome, which actually has nothing to do with Jacob Zuma’s polygamous relationships, but is what carnivores such as myself have been crying out for for quite some time now.
It’s almost perfection. If they’d just added Bombay chillies they could have just called it The 6000.

But they didn’t.  So they can’t.

High & mighty prawn in town (just)

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Yes folks, it’s that time of year again when the months training done by cyclists on the local roads – free-wheeling through red robots, riding thirteen abreast, not bothering to buy lights, cycling along the freeways etc etc – come to fruition as they get some roads closed for a little while and then get to complain about the heat and the wind for the next six months.

But this year is slightly different, as the self-proclaimed God of cycling and n times Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong is in town.
Cue desperate fawning from all and sundry in the cycling community (all of whom are on first name terms with Lance Armstrong)  and the new regulation that we must all worship Lance Armstrong because he did all that without getting caught using drugs – not like today’s cheats.

Lance Armstrong arrived last night in Cape Town and wasted no time is slagging off the local immigration officials because he didn’t have two blank pages in his passport (a fairly regular entry requirement for many countries around the world) and thus Home Affairs refused him entry.
Fair play, I would have thought, but Lance Armstrong wasn’t happy.
“Don’t you know who I am?” he might well have said. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. But if I had have been there, I would have guessed that he was someone that didn’t know even the basics of traveling abroad.

However, this tweet:

@LanceArmstrong Well, made it in to SA. Not the friendliest welcome I’ve ever received but we’ve all seen immigration officers like that. #posterboymaterial

has divided the nation.

Yep – Lance Armstrong had a go at passport control because they were following rather basic guidelines. And that brought out his sickeningly sycophantic fans in a tirade of anti-Home Affairs abuse. This in turn caused a backlash of people who think Lance Armstrong is actually rather ordinary who pointed out that only a egotistic twat would turn up at passport control with a full passport and then blame someone else. I think I was one of them.

Aki Anastasiou risks the wrath of the cycling mafia with his suggestion that Lance Armstrong owes South Africans an apology. But I’m in full agreement. Whether he meant it or not, he’s come over as arrogant and hugely self-important – and damn rude about a guy who was just doing his job.

There’s a more serious side to this though. Lance Armstrong has 2,500,000 followers on twitter and much like Stephen Fry, can’t pretend he doesn’t recognise the power and significance of what he shares. When he blames someone else (specifically SA Immigration, in this case) for an error that he made, it reflects badly on this country. And until he apologises (to the same audience), no amount of cheesily-posed photos on Chapman’s Peak Drive are going to swing the damage that he has done to SA’s reputation amongst his sadly brain-washed devotees.