Pathos

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Pathos:

Ludovico Einaudi announced his 2025 album The Summer Portraits back in early October last year. And as an artist who has released many new-age, modern classical albums, it’s clear that he had read the room with this particular track from the release.

The album was written in summer in Italy, and while The Summer Portraits is generally uplifting, and tries to pull the listener out of the doldrums…

The new project is inspired partially by the musician’s childhood in Torino. “I always considered Torino a place I would never go back to live. It was very grey, very industrial – I felt like I was in a cage,” Einaudi says in a press statement. “It’s a strange place, very poetic in a way. The soul of the people is more hidden. They don’t show things off – you have to find the dynamism inside yourself…”

…Pathos very much acknowledges the starting place of that journey.

And that follows along with the findings of the World Happiness Report, which came out at the end of the last month. People are generally less happy. This snapshot was taken just before November last year (before the US Election), and the US (24) and the UK (23) were already at their lowest ever positions.

This graph shows a very basic “Life Evaluation” perception score for a few nations, where 10 is the best that your life could be, and 0 is the worst. I’ve included the score for Finland and Afghanistan – the top and bottom rated countries in the study.

I’ve also included Ukraine, who are just behind SA, despite having their country invaded by the murderous forces of a despotic, nuclear-capable regime right on their doorstep.

We don’t have the same issue with Botswana.

Yet.

It will be interesting, given the… er… somewhat “extreme” new US government and its wide-reaching policies, what next year’s results will look like.

Assuming we’re still here, of course.

This is 100% true

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I know. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

In this day and age, finding something which is entirely accurate, verifiable and genuine is as scarce as hens’ teeth. And yet, I can absolutely vouch for this being all of those things (the accurate, verifiable and genuine ones, not the teeth).

Yes, it’s a very simple graph, but it’s completely correct.

Memories of the 51 up from town: the stop at the top of Church Street, just by the Thornton’s and the back door of Awkward Square. Racing up stairs, wiping the condensation on the windows from the rain-soaked passengers so you could see the grey clouds and puddles out of the front, and then being King of the Bus for the 20 minutes home.

Magic.

I’m just sad that my kids never got to experience it. Still, if and when they go traveling – as the graph points out – they will still get that same rush as adults that we used to get when we were young.

Halcyon days.

Suddenly, Eurasian Chaffinch

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Yep. Exactly what the title says.

I was taking photos of horses in Hout Bay this afternoon when I spotted this little guy in the pine tree above me.

These birds are actually invasives in Cape Town, one of several species introduced by Cecil John Rhodes in his attempts to anglicise South Africa.

Interestingly, while many of his efforts died out very quickly and some are near ubiquitous today, the Chaffinch falls somewhere in the middle, and 130 years after its introduction, is still only found in Cape Town’s Southern Suburbs.

Like Hout Bay.

On Tariffs

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I’m not an economist. But I know some people who are.
And they don’t seem very impressed with Trump’s tariff plans:

Oof. But I am a scientist, so I know how a graph should look, and perhaps more importantly, how it shouldn’t look. That there isn’t a good look. If this was a patient, they’d be on their way to ICU.

$2 trillion gone in less than half an hour. Poof!

You can say many things about Trump (and people do), but you can’t knock his power. Even 80s magician David Copperfield is impressed, and he made the Statue of Liberty disappear.
Trump is just making money vanish. Well, that and actual Liberty.

Still, you can’t argue that these things haven’t been well thought out. There’s clearly been a lot of planning that’s gone on here. The penguins of the Heard and McDonald Islands are finally paying the price for their frankly heinous 20% import tariffs on American goods. Famed for exporting Elephant Seal Oil as recently as… er… 1877, it seems like the infamous H&McDI Stock Exchange would be in all sort of bother if it actually existed.

No-one has lived there for decades, but these tariffs mean that if anyone ever does live there again, they won’t be exporting much to the US.

Elsewhere, the EU (including France) gets a tariff of 20%, but Réunion (part of France and therefore also part of the EU) gets hit with 37%. But of course, French Guiana, Mayotte and Martinique (each part of France and therefore also part of the EU) get a 10% tariff on their exports to the US.

Réunion has had it too easy for too long.

The big losers in this whole thing is everyone. But if I were to be more specific, it would be St Pierre & Miquelon. This isn’t a French overseas territory: it’s a French Overseas Collective – Collectivité d’Outre-Mer.
But because of… er… reasons, their exports to the US will be charged an additional 50%. That’ll teach them for being to close (geographically, not necessarily politically) to Greenland.

Only local boys Lesotho (as far as I can see) manages to match the heady height of a 50% tariff, so Southern African

diamonds, garments, wool, power equipment and bedding

markets will be hit. And it looks like the mokorotlo won’t be part of the New York Spring 2026 Collections anymore.

It’s the clear attention to detail that makes me think that maybe these tariffs might well have been devised by a troop of circus monkeys who have been blindfolded and then instructed to throw various coloured darts at a world map.

I’m just impressed that there was anyone in America who was able to work out which countries the darts hit.

Birds raise their middle finger to humankind

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Finger? Feather. Mmm.

There can’t be many more clear and obvious ways in which one species defiantly tells another: “GFY”, than what crows are doing to humans in parts of Europe.

And it’s even more amusing because it comes down to humans trying to tell crows exactly the same thing – and failing.

It seems that crows in Scotland, Belgium and the Netherlands have now been observed building their nests using birdspikes. Yes. This stuff:

…designed for the sole purpose of keeping birds off places where humans don’t want them, now repurposed (by those very same birds) as building material for their homes.

Incredible.

Untidy, but incredible.

When I’ve been over on Robben Island, doing beach cleanups, one of the saddest sights is the Kelp Gull nests made almost entirely out of waste plastic and fishing gear. So the idea of birds using manmade stuff isn’t new to me. But them using stuff that man made to keep birds off things is pretty special.

Many birds are known to use human-made elements in their nests. In fact, 176 different species have been documented nest building with synthetic materials, according to another study published this week in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Yet the birds in the Dutch study are exceptional for having taken something so purposefully built to minimize their presence and using it to rear the next generation.

In South Africa a few years back, these thing suddenly became very popular:

And they are irritating – even to humans. But I knew that their days were numbered when I saw a Red Winged Starling (Onychognathus morio) sitting on one and enjoying the spinning effect.

At the time, I thought that was amazing – and quite amusing – but it’s got nothing on the European crows.

Birds 1-0 Humans.