Busy, busy social life. Two nights out in a row. Tonight being the second of them. I know, right?
Thankfully, there’s a weekend coming up so I’ll have time to recover.
In the meantime, I’m playing a quick game of Get The Blog Post Done this afternoon, between sorting the household chores, cooking dinner for the kids (who aren’t coming along this evening), and horseriding (not me).
The local building work (as mentioned here) is continuing apace, but there are surely only so many angles that you can grind, right? How are they still cutting stuff all day, every day? Today, we have added chainsawage, with a local tree surgeon butcher on site. There is no subtlety or delicacy about what’s going on. I’ve questioned this approach before here, but I still don’t have any answers or understanding.
Each to their own. Sadly.
I’m about to do some chopping as well, but that’s carrots for the horses, and not decades-old trees.
This one might go better, because out of all of the candidates that will be standing in all of those elections – only one man seems to have the right idea about delivering a solid, vote-winning policy:
For too long, political parties have happily stood by and watched as crime was legal. No-one has done anything about it.
Careful now, says Nick Delehanty. Down with this sort of thing.
It’s about time that someone raised their head above the parapet and stood for what’s right. Nick Delehanty has done that. Make Crime Illegal.
I’m not sure how many votes he got last time around, but with policies like this, on June 7th I can certainly see those numbers Dublin.
So sings Stuart Braithwaite in Belle & Sebastian’s 2010 hit… er… I Want The World To Stop as he laments the mundanity of modern life, the all too rapid passing of time, and the moments that are now but memories.
I’m not sure whether he means the spinning of the planet or the orbiting of the planet around the sun, but it doesn’t really matter. Either would be absolutely catastrophic.
Let’s be very clear right now: Stopping the world would be a terrible thing to do.
And because of that, whatever your personal reasons for this – even if it is the melancholic and introspective desire to relive fleeting reminiscences – we should probably avoid doing it.
The world only works because it’s moving, both round and round, and round and round the sun.
If you stop the spinning, in a best case scenario in which this is done gradually, one side of the earth would be constantly facing the sun and the other would be constantly… not. Humans, animals, plants, and indeed THE EARTH wasn’t made for this. While the hot side would be extremely uncomfortable until everything eventually died from being too hot, the cold side would likely die more quickly, with no sunlight to keep plants alive and the animals warm. I’m giving us a few weeks or maybe a couple of months at best before we’re all gone. Joy.
Of course, if you instantly stop the world spinning, bad things will happen a lot more quickly. At the poles, you might be fine for a short while, but anywhere else, you’re immediately in a lot of trouble. Stuff at the equator is moving at about 1,670 kilometres per hour (1,037 mph). Bringing that to an abrupt halt would be like a driver putting on the brakes in a car and you getting held back by your seatbelt as your inertia wants you to keep moving forward. The problem is that everything on earth isn’t wearing a seatbelt and it’s braking from anything up to [checks notes] about 1,670 kilometres per hour (1,037 mph). Basically, everything – including humans (and including Belle & Sebastian) – will be wiped off the face of the planet.
Anything left even vaguely unscathed will then be subject to the constant (but brief) summer or winter situation described above.
And it’s really not much better if we take Stuart’s words to mean the orbit of the earth around the sun.
Again, if we stopped immediately, inertia would come into play again and we’d all be hurled off the face of the planet (or into the face of the planet, depending on which side we happened to be on when the stopping thing happened). We’re doing 108,000kph (67,000 mph) through space, so we’re all moving at about 30km each second. Stop the world immediately (this would take a ridiculous amount of energy, but hey, I’m not the one that wrote the song) and within one second, your body will want to be 30km from where it is now: that could be 30km towards the sky, sideways across the face of the earth, or it could be 30km into the earth. Sadly, you’re only really about 0.0015km above the earth, so the remaining 29.9985km will just be substituted by your body being driven into the now stationary planet at just under 108,000kph.
Ouch.
And if it the world gradually stopped? Well, we’re lucky enough to be treading a very fine line in terms of the livability of our orbit. Even our closest neighbours – Venus and Mars – are far too hot and far too cold respectively to support life. And it’s that distance from the sun and the gentle tug-of-war between our orbit and the gravitational pull of the big yellow thing that keeps us there. Take away the orbit element of that equation and we plunge into a fiery death like one team has left go of the rope.
It would likely take about 8 weeks before we actually hit the surface of the sun – our speed increasing all the time as the gravitational pull got stronger – but happily, we’d all be gone long before then, as we slowly started our approach, falling out of our fragile little habitable zone and being thoroughly cooked on our way down towards certain doom. Lovely.
Look, perhaps I’m taking the lyrics a bit too literally, but wanting the world to stop just seems like a very bad idea. Maybe rather just reflect over some old photos, relive the memories and smile because those moments happened, rather than killing us all in some horrific manner just because you miss some nights out at club 30 years back.
A surprise, yet scheduled, power cut today. For infrastructure maintenance, we’re told. That’s good. Some places don’t get their electricity infrastructure maintained. Like the rest of South Africa, for example. Ostensibly, we’re off for a whole 14 hours. Without warning, nogal. Well, apparently, there was a warning, but we weren’t told about it. And that’s one of the fundamental things about warnings. If you don’t get them, then you are very much unwarned. And so we are quite literally without electricity, without warning.
It’s like getting loadshedding back, which might be good training for next week when everyone thinks we’ll be getting loadshedding back…
An aside for foreign readers: next week is election week here, and it’s widely believed that loadshedding has been done away with for the last 7 weeks in the hope that the voting public will conveniently forget that the current (no pun intended) ruling party can’t even supply the most basic of services. Quite whether this is true or not is up for debate, but it’s an entirely reasonable suggestion. Quite how the electricity grid is being propped up is also a bit of a mystery, but it seems like it’s billions of Rands worth of diesel, some sticky tape, and prayers to several (or more) deities. It’s also completely unsustainable. And furthermore, it’s pointless after the polling stations close on Wednesday evening. Hence the widespread belief that we’ll be back to Stage n very shortly. But I digress. Often.
The council have also chosen the darkest, most miserable day to do the work. Thick black clouds, a cold Westerly breeze, drizzle. If this was Sheffield, I’d look at those clouds and fully expect snow. That’s unlikely to happen though. Still, not only will this inclement weather slow the workers down, it’s also preventing our little home solar setup from helping out with the power situation. We’re only a month away from the winter solstice, and so even if we could see the sun – which is some 151½ million kilometers away anyway – it would only be up for 10 hours and would only drag itself to 35o above the horizon. I’m not an expert on solar power, but we need is closer, higher sun, for longer.
If we’d had some warning (which we didn’t – see above), then I could have pumped up the batteries and lived a near normal life. Instead, we’ve been in deficit since we woke up, and despite my best power-saving efforts, I’m helplessly watching what’s left slowly, inexorably slip away.
I might be tempted to rig up some sort of system so that as the batteries give up completely, they give a comedic beep…beep…beeeeeeeeeeep noise like one might hear in rather less comedic circumstances in a hospital ICU. But then again, I suppose that that would only use more power. Which we don’t have. Because of the power cut.
On the plus side, there has been a delicious lack of angle-grinding and jack-hammery from the nearby building site. This is not going to assist with my waning electricity issues, but it has made it a whole lot quieter while the power runs out.
And it’s clearly the little wins that I’m going to have to focus on today.
Yep. A lettuce. A wholecrisp lettuce. He must be feeling on top of the world. And he absolutely deserves to be, given that he correctly answered– I take exception to their rather discourteous use of the word “guessed” – their very tough riddle, set just a few days previously:
Thank heavens for that clue “it’s food-related”. Indeed, that was probably what tipped a lot of people off as to the correct response. Not many people know what a vegetable is. But what they do know is that it’s food-related. And so once bleach (not food-related) and pilchards (not a vegetable) were ruled out, lettuce was the obvious go-to answer.
Jeez. Times are tough and standards are low. So very low.
Still, I’m eagerly awaiting the next brain teaser – with an appropriately fantastic prize – from Pick n Pay Wellington, but in the meantime, I have just received a phone call informing me that I’ve won a cucumber (“I’m long and green, you eat me as part of a salad. Clue: it’s food-related.”) from the Spar in Robertson.
