Coming (going?) soon…

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I was making plans for a Heritage Day braai on Wednesday, but honestly, what’s the point when the world is going to end tomorrow?

And it’s a South African pastor who has predicted it:

“The rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not,” exclaimed Pastor Joshua Mhlakela. “God took me to see the future… and there in heaven, in the throne room, I see Jesus sitting… and I could hear him very loud and clear saying, ‘I am coming soon.’”

It sounds like maybe Mhlakela got there just after Mrs God had shouted that dinner was ready or something, I don’t know.

But much like all the other times that the world has been ending for religious (rather than thermonuclear war) reasons, this also won’t happen and there will be some quick goalpost moving, some pathetic explanation trotted out for the pathetically gullible, and we’ll all move on again – until next time.

Just remember to get your loyalty card stamped.

Of course, not only has organised religion been deeply involved in this sort of nonsense for many years, this time, it’s also all been fuelled and amplified by that highest of intellectual forums: TikTok.

Obviously, if it does happen (which it clearly won’t), I’m going to look a bit silly, but that’s a chance that I am willing to take. And if you look at what the Bible says will precede the big day (and you’re willing to tweak the words a bit and put a bit of spin on it), then you can absolutely see why some people genuinely think that Pastor Mhlakela might have got it spot on. War, famine, earthquakes (at a stretch) and widespread abandonment of the church.

And actually, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. We humans do seem to be insistent on destroying the planet (and each other) as best we can. You can see why the Big Guy Upstairs might choose now to pull the plug.

But honestly, if all the insufferable Christians get beamed up, maybe the world would be a better place.

And if we can stretch it out to Wednesday, then I can paraphrase Matthew 24:40-42:

“Two men will be braai’ing together in the garden; one will be taken, the other left. Two women will be sorting the salads inside; one will be taken, the other left. So you, too, must keep watch! For you don’t know what time your Lord is coming, and whether He’s going to arrive late with a whole frozen spatchcocked chicken.”

The worst braai guest.

See you tomorrow. And see you Wednesday, too.
Really, I will.

Useful map

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Not sure why you would ever need it, but if you ever did, then here it is:

Basically, a handy guide to which country you would end up in if you left the UK (or Ireland) and went straight North, South, East or West.

I might have to do one of these for SA.  I know that if you head straight out from Suiderstrand, you end up in Uruguay. And if you head south from anywhere, you end up in Antarctica.

The East coast needs some work though.

The Carrier

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This is a post about a rather unsettling piece of artwork I saw on the internet today.

But first, since we’re talking about carriers (the title is the name of the artwork), let me just document the demise of a couple of birds that I know about in Agulhas over the last two days. Both from avian influenza, one a Cape Gannet (species listed as Vulnerable) and one an African penguin (species listed as Critically Endangered). Two deaths is bad, but it’s not a lot to go on scientifically. However, AI (the virus not the annoying computer thing all over Facebook) is rife in South Africa at the moment. Are these discoveries just unfortunate chance or is this a sign of a bigger problem on the way?

Watch this space, I guess.

But then the artwork thing. And this is not AI in any sense of the acronym.

A hyper-realistic sculpture from Australian (but born in Sierra Leone) artist Patricia Piccinini. It’s… yeah. It’s this:

Created in 2012 as part of her Curious Affection exhibition, it’s a bit odd and a bit disturbing, but then so is a lot of her other work. I’m really not sure what to read into this, so I went and found someone that (thought they) did:

It seems the carrier and woman are connected in some way, physically but also emotionally, therein lies the conflict. Perched up high, she looks comfortable and content to rely on his assistance, yet what is their relationship, why is he carrying her, is it an equal partnership, or is he just performing a service? We can wonder if the carrier is the next step in post-human technology, his life seems perfectly engineered to the task he performs, and it is feasible that he is happily self-employed.

It’s a lot to take from an odd ape carrying a woman in a frock, but it’s far more than I was able to get from it. So fair enough.

But this isn’t an unusual piece from Piccinini. Her work regularly drags DNA across species boundaries:

Her Madonnas are not clothed for piety but brazen and naked, half-ape, bristling with hair. Babies in swaddling have adult faces and snouts. Nature’s expected laws of delineation – defining scales from skin, bones from feathers, sacs from follicles – are collapsed, all rules rewritten.

Thank goodness she wasn’t set loose on anything for Canberra’s centenary celebrations in 2013. She’d probably have come up with a giant 100ft hot air balloon called the SkyWhale with eight pendulous breasts and a friendly face. Ha.

I’m sorry… she did what? It had… ten… ten pendulous breasts. Oh, OK then.

Of course it did.

What’s uncanny about Piccinini’s work is not that an artist’s mind can conjure such creatures. It’s that the finesse of their detail make every variegated body that she crafts seem suddenly possible.

Amazing skill, but actually I don’t want them to “seem suddenly possible”.
Really not my thing. Properly odd and yes, deeply unsettling.

Sleep well this evening, won’t you?

US (no) Vaccine News

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There’s plenty going on in the world of the anti-vaxxers over in that weird place, with Florida rolling back the years to the happier times of diphtheria, polio and chicken pox because of [checks notes] “slavery”.

Right.

And then a couple of days later, a voice of reason piped up with this line:

“I think those vaccines should be used. Otherwise, some people are going to catch it and they are going to endanger other people.”

And that voice of reason was [checks notes] [checks notes again] [and again]… er… it was Donald Trump.

What?

At a White House event, the president added: “You have vaccines that work. They just pure and simple work. They’re not controversial at all, and I think those vaccines should be used.”

He went on to say, “The polio vaccine I think is amazing. A lot of people think that Covid is amazing. When you don’t have controversy at all, I think people should take it.”

What?

I’m so confused right now.

Thankfully(?), he reverted to type a 4 days later, amplifying a post from anti-vaxxer and [wow, there’s a lot of note checking to be done today, sorry] vaccine advisor to the Department of Health, David Grier.

Trump posted an undated video clip on Truth Social of anti-vaccine activists Mark and David Geier discussing thimerosal in vaccines with the text on the clipped video reading: ‘They’re ALL poison. Every. Single. One.’ David Geier has been leading an inquiry within the Department of Health and Human Services, at the direction of Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., into debunked assertions of a link between vaccines and autism.

Yes, David Grier that you read about here.

David Geier has written several papers on the alleged dangers of vaccines in causing developmental disorders in children, several of them funded by the non-profit Institute of Chronic Illnesses (ICI), Inc.

The CEO of the Institute of Chronic Illnesses (ICI), Inc. is one David Grier.

Everywhere else in America rolling back the years to happier time when kids died from measles. And the latest hotspot is Chicago. And the best bit about the latest patient in Chicago – an unvaccinated 4 year old – is that they had recently travelled through O’Hare Airport, which handles almost 300,000 passengers a day.

The public might have been exposed on Thursday, September 11 at O’Hare International Airport, at terminal 5 between the hours of about 7:30 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Fantastic news. It’s proper Outbreak stuff. But with less Ebola.

Elsewhere in the States, dyslexic anti-vaxxers are being blamed for a serious of attacks on beauty salons…

It’s a rubbish joke, but I still laughed, because otherwise, I’d still be crying.