Why is there so little crime in Iceland

Posted on

Instagram has this tricky question covered.

Because it could be because of the amazing actions of this lot.

Or it could be for another reason:

Sadly, plenty of words rhyme with “Misdaad”, which perhaps goes some way to explaining the somewhat out of control crime situation, locally.
Other question: Can my blogging software handle the letter “Ash” in the middle of “glæpur”?

Apparently so. I’ll be checking on some other Icelandic alphabetical vagaries (including “the five lost letters of the English language“) in the near future.

But they’re trapped

Posted on

I’ve got a cold and I’m feeling rubbish. So just a quickie today.

This post, from a local estate agency in Struisbaai, scene of some terrible flooding over the weekend.

Of course I get it. Positivity, and a sales pitch of just what this place can offer.

But hang on…

It’s not like these people could have gone anywhere else if they’d wanted to. The whole town is still cut off from the rest of SA thanks to the only road out of the place being flooded (it’s the one pictured on yesterday’s post).

So by all means flock to the harbour and revel in the sunshine. You can’t check out and you can certainly never leave.

Until maybe tomorrow.

There’s always Juan

Posted on

As the biggest floods in living memory hit the Agulhas Plain…

…and farmers try desperately to save their livestock and livelihoods by appealing to the community to come out with small boats and help rescue drowning sheep…

Group member (in the truest sense of the word) Juan Otto shared this:

Basically translated:

“You counted them. Poor planning if you ask me (no-one did), [they] knew what was coming.”

In a world that needs far fewer Juan Ottos, don’t be a Juan Otto.

He might be thinking that it was poor planning. You might think the same. And you were both free to voice that opinion, but he chose to and you didn’t. Well done, you.

The bar here is so low that it’s a tripping hazard in hell, but great news: you’re not a twat.

A quick skim of Juan’s timeline reveals – aside from his cell phone number: oops! – the inevitable plaasmoorde links, a love of Steve Hofmeyr, Toyotas, guns and sea fishing, a deep hatred of Jacob Zuma (fair enough), a 2017 post claiming that the Russian nuclear deal had gone through (it never did), and an unhealthy obsession with sharing news of arrests for abalone poaching.
All with a lovely underlying theme of thinly veiled you-know-what.

Amazing. All the usual boxes ticked. I was shocked.

The fact that the warning was upped from a Level 6 to a Level 9 merely hours before the storm hit can’t have helped the farmers. Not that we should blame the meteorologists. These sorts of low pressure areas are volatile and unpredictable and their effects can be extremely localised.

As for the community, they apparently turned out in their numbers to help the two farms worst affected. I haven’t seen a count yet (which will likely upset Juan), but it seems like at least hundreds of animals were saved.

Well done, Struisbaai.
(Not you, Juan.)

Gloomy

Posted on

I mean, we were warned. And that Level 6 warning was upped to a Level 9(!) for the Overberg.

But that was the one of the biggest, wettest storms to hit the Western Cape in the (almost) 20 years that I have lived here. Cape Town was bad (really bad), but a bit further south and east was worse.

Bredasdorp is completely cut off, as are Struisbaai, Arniston and Elim. But that doesn’t make a lot of difference, given that Cape Town to Caledon seems to be impossibly impassable as well. We were planning to go out to Agulhas this coming weekend, but now that all clearly depends on how quickly stuff drains down there.

The N2 has disappeared a bit at Bot River.

The road to Struisbaai

The road to Bredasdorp

Even the alternative routes around these problem areas are closed. Stormsvlei, Napier, Stanford – all no through roads at the moment.

Nearer home, as the weather gradually began to improve, we headed down to the V&A Waterfront, where I took this in the somewhat gloomy light.

No Galaxy A33 5G here. This was taken with an actual camera.

Sunshine tomorrow, we are told. We need it.