787 lands at Troll

In other aircraft news, a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner has become the first 787 and the largest plane ever to land at the Troll Research Station in Antarctica.

This flight came from Cape Town and was carrying supplies and scientific equipment for the Norwegian Polar Institute Base there. And as I write, the aircraft above has just left SA airspace on its way back up to Oslo.

Cape Town is the easiest airport to use for trips to Troll, it being “just” 4350km straight down across the Southern Ocean to the ice runway there, and at this time of year, there are regular flights heading out there from a plethora of different nations. Russia and Iceland being two of the more recent ones I have spotted.

There’s a really good article on FlightRadar24 about how Troll operates here.

And a reminder that you shouldn’t visit Antarctica.
And a further reminder that you can’t afford to anyway.

What the hell is going on, is it Chemtrials ?

Chemtrials? Is that what they do to see if Chemtrails are going to work?

UCT is partnering with NASA who (perhaps unsurprisingly) have some really amazing scientific equipment, in order to survey and map out the incredible biodiversity of the Western Cape.

They’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, as this July 2021 story attests:

And then, when it was closer to the six week period mentioned in the article, there was plenty in the local news about it. From NASA, from the Daily Maverick, from Times Live, from News24, and other local sites.

But that hasn’t stopped the tinfoil hat brigade from assuming that they’re here looking for gas (it’s ok, we know where the gas is already) or controlling the weather (?!?) or doing “Chemtrials”. Ugh:

“Specifically Mossel Bay”, she states, then showing all of the places that they flew, which very specifically doesn’t include Mossel Bay.

“Need to see if their planes were flying in GP [Gauteng Province] before the hail,” she adds, referencing a recent hailstorm in Johannesburg, before not doing anything about actually looking to see if their planes were flying there at any time. Which they weren’t, and which she could have looked up on any flight tracking system, since this not exactly hush-hush classified NASA mission is being shared across all of those platforms.
Of course, their planes are residing at a clandestine underground villains’ lair on the tarmac at Cape Town International Airport.

It’s like the worst top secret mission ever.

@_iduchess above describes herself as “a critical thinker” (actual lol), but despite the multitude of replies on her tweet telling her about the joint UCT/NASA collaboration, she is doubling down on the tinfoilery.
Oh, and she’s anti-vax as well.

Same whatsapp group, every time.

And then there was this dream [screenshot here] that our erstwhile “critical thinker” shared, and then declared:

“Many people have been having dreams lately but as always umlungu [white people] will say “it’s climate change” and the sheep will believe umlungu over us.”

Ah yes, the casual racism slips in. We’d been missing that, and:

“The dream clearly states that the Melikans are not here for a good cause but rather for their own depopulation agenda ..”

Of course they are, dearie. Now, here’s a nice cup of tea and your evening medication.

But there is one thing that you can see from her “is it Chemtrials ?” tweet, and that is that her “news” comes from Tiktok – see the screenshots she shares. This seems an unusual place for a critical thinker to obtain high quality knowledge and information, but as recent surveys have shown, more and more young adults are getting their news from that app, and that’s quite worrying, mainly because it’s often absolutely full of shit like we can see above.

There is a school of thought that says that the loonies have always been there; it’s just that they never had a platform before, so we never noticed. But the problem is that they have clearly found a platform now, and they’re still loonies.

What can we do about this, given that these people will also likely base their election choices on what they read there? I’ve said this sort of thing before, but it really does belittle the democratic process when someone who believes in “Chemtrials” has the same voting rights as a sensible human being.

Eish.

Warning lights

This was me this morning (well, apart from the “really fast” bit), waking up after my first gym session in 3 weeks.

But yesterday went well, and so I did the same in the heat again this morning in an attempt to reinforce some sort of dominance over what is left of my musculature. Managing the post-Covid tachycardia carefully (several emergency phone calls would have been made if I hadn’t switched that feature on my watch off), I eventually managed a few decent uphill kilometres on the static bike and several (or more) weights. And then into the pool for a desperately needed cool down on what is definitely the hottest day of the summer season thus far.

And it all feels ok. A bit hurty, but good hurty, rather than damaged hurty. Tomorrow morning will be another test, but I’m pleasantly surprised at how well things have gone thus far.

Football next Tuesday is the aim, but that seems quite a long way off at the moment.
Still – let’s see. Onward and upward.

The Safety Dance

I’d never heard this song before I moved to SA. Apparently, it did ok in the UK, making it to No.6 in the charts for a week, but it was a big hit here: the only official chart worldwide where it got to Number 1.

They were Men Without Hats, and your 1982 Disney Prince protagonist here is Canadian Ivan Doroschuk, This song was their one hit, so much so that their website these days is safetydance.com, because yes, they’re still releasing music 41 years on from that morris dancing escapade above.

Here they are now, Ivan at the front, his brother Colin on the left, Sho Murray on the right, and Colin’s daughter Sahara Slone in the silver skirt and the boots.

Sadly, their current tour, running until March next year, fails to make it to South Africa. And Djibouti also misses out again.

Hopeless

It’s been a weekend filled with local violence, the occasional threat against Cape Town schoolchildren, more of the usual disinformation and misinformation and more of the usual hyperbole and histrionics.

Unsurprisingly, social media has been a particularly unpleasant place to be, with a complete lack of tolerance throughout, and no willingness or effort to listen to anything that anyone on “the other side” has to say.
Ebola has nothing on the replies and threads that follow just about any article of comment on the situation in Israel and Gaza.

If there were such a thing as Biohazard Level 5, this would be it.

Reasonably, I wanted away from real life for a few minutes. I thought that I would find solace in the Daily Challenge on Geoguessr. And indeed, I seemed to have found it when I was unceremoniously – but happily – dumped in some semi-rural backwater in Pennsylvania. Peace. Tranquility. Half a world away from all those problems.

And then I turned myself around and found a glorious metaphor for the world at the moment:

Could it have been put any better? Sadly not.

Anyway, once we were done with that, I was popped into a forest in South East Latvia, which was much less telling about the general worldwide state of things.

And thus, much nicer.