More on our ARS

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The sun has shone upon Cape Town this week. And about time too. the four cold fronts which swept through last week gave us floods, gales, thunder and hail. Miserable.
I await the figures for the number of caprine casualties with a heavy heart. Regular readers of this site will be all too aware that these gentle creatures are more susceptible to inclement weather than other more hardy livestock and I know of a herd of cattle lost in the floods and at least two donkeys which were blown away in the high winds.

The weather even halted work on the new stadium for the 2010 World Cup. That in itself is pretty unusual as they have been working from dawn til dusk (and beyond) in order to keep ahead of schedule. Here’s a magnificent picture of how they were getting along before rain stopped play. I think you can see from this aerial shot why the Metropolitan golf course now has a par of just 17 rather than 70. Look on the bright side, guys – at least you can get back to the clubhouse bar more quickly now!


Looking the other way (we call it “east”), towards the city centre, you can see the proximity of the stadium to the Waterfront (which is next to the marina) and Cape Town CBD. Other points to note are the nearest shop selling alcohol (red roof, right-hand side) and the nearest MacDonalds (green roof, dead centre, between building site and roundabout)*. It’s comforting to think that they consider the workers’ needs when they site this sort of massive project.

There are, in fact, still a few legal challenges – mainly from the “mean green” environmental lobby – to be overcome before stadium gets official planning permission.
Now, I know what you’re thinking and yes, you’re right – they’ve actually done a teeny-weeny bit of work already. Hell, even I can remember when all this was fields – it was only 4 months ago! It’s ok, they were given special permission to start. It seems unlikely that work will be halted at the eleventh hour (well, actually, looking at those pictures, it’s more like the fourteenth hour now, isn’t it?) but this being South Africa, one can never rule it out.

All in all, it’s an amazing sight and there’s already a great deal of interest from various corporate sponsors as to who will run the stadium post 2010. Whoever does so is going to have control of one of the most remarkable structures in one of the most beautiful locations in the world.
All they’ve really done so far is dug the foundations and yet already it’s been described as the southern hemisphere’s Wembley.


Let’s just hope that doesn’t mean that is going to take 7 years to build…

*My place of work is also on this picture. I work in a big yellow castle (Yes, seriously I do) (No, it’s not an inflatable bouncy castle) – I’ll give a prize to whoever can find it first.

Taking Shorty to the WBHS

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One of the more mundane tasks I do from time to time in my line of work is to travel to another lab nearby and collect specimens for our experiments. This basically involves tipping infected sputum from 240 tubes into… er… 240 more tubes.

I’m sure Lizzy M and the other tutors on my Masters course would be proud to see my agile scientific mind being utilised so thoroughly. It’s not exactly rocket science. That would involve boosters, liquified gases and exciting roaring noises, none of which I have the luxury of enjoying.


I do, however, get to listen to Heart 104.9 – which claims to be “The Soul of Cape Town” – while I’m there, blasting out the latest sounds via a tinny clock radio in the corner. It’s not my kind of music. In fact, most of it seems to be about how some bloke is going to take “Shorty” “to the VIP” and what “Shorty” is going to do for him in return. Presumably, the “Shorty” in question, isn’t Danny DeVito. The thought of him rewarding Notorious LARD for entry into the back room of some LA nightclub is just not appealing. Well, not to me anyway.My own little Shorty, all 75cm and 11.4kg of him (that’s slightly taller, but much lighter than Danny DeVito) continues to be frustrated by the chilly winter weather. He knows that there’s mud to be eaten on Wynberg Boys High School field and he knows that he’s the toddler for the job. We had a great time chasing geese and ibissess.. ibiss’s.. ibii.. an ibis (x2) up there last week.

. .Rugger?  Boy  Guilty
More pics here.

He’s not the only one that’s fed up with winter now.
In between the dry and sunny (but chilly) days came yesterday. Grey, moody, windy and a bit wet.
A bit like Michael Douglas, but without the Welsh tart on its arm.
Not really that bad, but enough for the organisers to postpone our football match in case we got a bit cold and damp. Pathetic. If we called off games for weather like that in the UK, we’d never kick a damn ball.

Next week’s game is an early kick off, which will allow the team to head off to Newlands immediately after the final whistle to see some “real” football – Pele, Eto’o, Gullit, Radebe and a myriad of other international stars in the 90 minutes for Mandela exhibition match.
Let’s hope they don’t cancel everything there because of a bit of drizzle on the breeze…

The Big South African Crime Post

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This post won Runner-Up in the 2008 SA Blog Awards BEST POST category.

Wow. What a week.
We had the arbitration panel’s report on the Tevez affair, we had the new crime stats released in South Africa and I actually managed to play a game of football for the first time in almost three months, the last of which goes some way towards explaining the bruise on my arse. Some way, not by any means all.
It was inflicted by a stoutly-built Slavic dwarf. Seriously. I’m still not sure how he reached.

As for the Tevez scandal, I’m not going to start on here about that. First off, I’d have to try and explain it, which is going to be time-consuming and suitably subjective. Then, by the time I upload this, everything will all be out of date. And, by the time you read it in 2009, they’ll probably still be bickering over some minor legal technicality. It’s time that football authorities clamped down on the things that are ruining our beautiful game. Those things would include dodgy transfer deals, Sheffield wednesday and stocky Bulgarian midgets.

Which leaves us with the hot potato, the thorny apple, the… the… pokey fishcake – whatever – that is South Africa and crime. Woo.
OK. For starters – South Africa has a big problem with crime.
There. I said it. Whoever that was at the back who suggested I wouldn’t say it was wrong.
You people who deny that there’s a problem, get with the programme. There is. Believe it, because it’s true.
And some of it is on the increase. Although equally, some of it is on the decrease too.
The stats show that South Africa remains one of the most violent societies on earth – the figures are shocking. People pay their taxes and they are right to expect more to be done to reduce rates of crime in the country.

That said, while the stories in the newspapers may make grim reading, the majority of us carry on with our lives without being directly or personally affected by crime. According to the latest figures, 40 in every 100,000 people will be murdered in SA each year, but lest we forget, that still leaves 99,960 who won’t be. I’d love them to be better, but for me, those odds (equating to 2,500-1) are still pretty good. Let’s face it, would you really bet on a horse that was a 2,500-1 outsider and expect to win? No. Because that’s what odds are all about – indicating the probability of something actually occurring. Moreover, by being sensible and avoiding situations and places where you might put yourself in danger, you can lower that risk still further. You can’t do that with your horse.

There’s another more sinister side to this issue as well – race.
Because of the ongoing inequalities in many areas of South African life, there is a perception that the majority of crime victims are white.
Not true. By far the majority of crime victims are black. But the average white person is more likely to have a computer, internet access, education to be able to write to their local newspaper and so forth than their black counterpart. So we do hear an awful lot from them.
It’s just another way that the press exaggerates the public perception of crime in this country. Yes, the power of the press can be an important tool in bringing about change in society, but sadly, the current hysteria is counter-productive and the perception of the situation is actually far worse than the situation itself.
In addition, there really isn’t the need for the hysteria that the extremely vocal minority exhibit on online forums etc. Many of those seem to be ex-pat South Africans desperate to run their country down, perhaps in order to justify their decision to move away. That move was their decision and it’s their right to be allowed to make that choice. But while they tell the world about how dangerous South Africa is from their new homes thousands of miles away, we live here and we’d like to set the record straight.Do come to South Africa. Do behave sensibly as you would on holiday anywhere else in the world.
Don’t wave your iPod around in downtown Cape Town – it might get nicked. As it might in downtown New York, Amsterdam or Sydney.
Don’t wander round Nyanga on your own late at night. Or Harlem. Or the Manor Estate in Sheffield.
And really, don’t expect to be shot or mugged as you get off the plane – that’s just paranoia – you’ll be sadly disappointed and you’ll look proper stupid doing your ninja stealth moves along the air-bridge for no reason whatsoever.

I’d especially welcome comments on this post; from those in SA, those with an SA connection and those with a passing interest since they started reading this brilliant blog – what do you hear about SA in your country? Please take time to indicate which category (if any) you fall into – just for interest’s sake. 

Keep safe, wherever you are.

Comments from this post on ballacorkish.net (my old site) can be read here.
 
 

 

Weather woes

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While the weather here in Cape Town has been pretty miserable of late – a succession of cold fronts bringing wind, rain, more wind and more rain to the peninsular, life is no better in the UK.

Of course, it’s summer there, so they’d be expecting rain. Add that to the fact that Wimbledon starts today and it was the Glastonbury festival this weekend and you could have predicted precipitation.

That said, I don’t think many people expected it quite as bad as it was.
For example, check out this picture snipped from the BBC News website earlier today:


Bassey: grounded
That’s right. The weather in the UK is so bloody awful right now that they had to ground Dame Shirley Bassey.
Apparently, there were worries that she would drift away like a giant zepplin. Extra cable had to be brought in from Poland to tether her securely to terra firma.

“This unprecedented action was taken due to the inclement conditions,” said a spokesperson for the singer, “Usually, we allow her to fly throughout the summer, before locking her away in a hanger near Cardiff for the winter months. But we had no choice but to ground her due to the heavy rain and strong winds. We hope to have her flying again before the end of the month.”

Da Lowdown

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As my virally-ravaged body continues to exude mucus at an alarming rate, I felt it was time to update the site once again. This is mainly because, although my symptoms have shown a mild improvement since yesterday, I’m still far from convinced that I’ll make it through to the end of the week.


I have already been forced to miss two football matches, one international rugby game and one father’s day, while the pharmacists of Cape Town now greet me happily by my first name and offer less then reasonable credit terms for the myriad of their products I have been utilising. At one point, I was taking 22 times my RDA of vitamin C. My kidneys were extremely unhappy about this and it seemingly made precisely bugger-all difference to my immune system. I cut down when my hastily calculated risk/benefit analysis on the back of a tissue box revealed that the vitamin C would allow me to live for approximately 3 more days than if I wasn’t taking it.3 more days of snot, coughing and generally feeling like crap?
No, thank you.

So, aside from generating bucketloads of phlegm, what have I been up to?
On the technology front, I have discovered Audacity and have been playing around with that. Now all I need is a nice OpenSource video editor and I’m sorted. Anyone?
My music listening on the now infamous rattly iPod has been almost exclusively Send Away The Tigers by the Manic Street Preachers, which is dangerously happy by their somewhat melancholy standards, but with guitar work echoing back to Generation Terrorists and The Holy Bible (the Manics’ album not the book, which, although not an avid reader, I believe contains virtually no guitar work).


The public sector workers strike continues – just. A whole one bloke in the picket line outside the hospital this morning, which was rather amusing. He was toyi-toying, but mainly just to keep warm, I think. Note: solo toyi-toying is really funny to watch.
Anyway, according to the Allister Charles of the NEHAWU Union in this morning’s Cape Times:

Our demand is still at 10%, there’s no doubt about that. But the question nationally is: are we going to accept or should we fight until we reach 8%? That’s for you to decide.

Is it just me or does he have it all wrong? Isn’t he supposed to be fighting for a bigger percentage increase? Keep fighting, Allister and you’ll owe them money.
Once you’ve settled that little issue, we can chat about the R50 you owe me. What’s that, you say? You actually owe me R75? I thought it was R100. R125? Really? [continues until I’m a millionaire]…

One last bit of good news. While I may be slightly behind in updating my 2010 flickr pictures, South Africa is exceeding its obligations, as Sepp Blatter found out on his visit this week. Awesome stuff, even if he can’t pronounce Phumzile’s name. Lots of people struggle with that though.That’ll be all for now then – consider yourself informed.