One Direction in Cape Town

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Today’s the day, tonight’s the night. One Direction madness has taken over the Mother City as everyone looks forward to seeing the Famous Five Four on stage later. I surrendered my tickets -in exchange for a reasonable sum of money – to someone who actually wanted to go, so I’m going to miss out on all the excitement in Green Point. Still, being just 11.21km from the Stadium (as the crow flies, and providing it avoids Devils Peak), I’m going to have to take extra care of the beagle this evening: it has very sensitive hearing, you know?

For those of you who are joining me in not being there this evening, here’s just a taste of what we’re missing.

Those voices. That confidence. That chorus! Such power.

If you are going along – have fun.
I’m almost sad to say I’m not going to be there. Almost.

Google Maps Pac-man

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For a limited time only: Play pac-man on your local streets:

Go to Google Maps, find yourself an area with lots of roads (Cape Town CBD will do nicely), and look for the big Pac-Man icon on the bottom left:

pman

At which point you zoom in to street level and Strand Street et al become your feeding grounds:

pman2

Control Pac-man with the cursor keys, eat the blobs and look out for the ghosts. What? Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know you’d played it before.

Apparently this is an April Fool’s ‘Eater Egg’ from Google, so it won’t be around forever. So go play now.
(Hint: use dual carriageways to avoid being eaten)

Near-miss probe begins

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Remember the Three German Warships Off Struisbaai? The Three German Warships that weren’t really doing anything very sinister? That was, until they tried to blow up a fishing boat with 10 people on board later that evening.

These things happen.

Captain Jaco Theunissen, spokesman for the SA Navy’s joint operations division, said on Saturday: “The South African National Defence Force acknowledges that the unfortunate incident that was reported on in the Cape Times on Friday, March 27 did take place.”

The navy has said warnings about naval exercises are sent out as navigation warnings on radio and to all fishing clubs and harbours. Day has said he got no warning.

To be fair to the Three German Warships, it’s actually unclear whether it was one of them or their SA Navy counterparts which fired the shots.

Fishing boat skipper, Anthony Day (perhaps understandably), isn’t happy though:

“…no one from the navy has contacted me. It is very disturbing that you can nearly take someone’s life away and you don’t even contact them.
I understand they don’t want legal implications, but if I shot at someone in the street, I would be locked up, and here nothing happens.”

Fair point, but if you fired a dual-purpose 62-caliber, 76-millimeter gun manufactured by OTO Melara at someone in the street, there would be other questions to be asked as well, like “Where on earth did you get that massive gun from?” and “Wasn’t there a house at the end of this road – you know – where that heap of smouldering rubble is now?”

And then, yes, you’d be locked up.

Seriously though, this was an unbelievably careless incident, which could have had huge implications and led to loss of life, and thus it needs proper, thorough investigation by someone senior in the naval hierarchy. I guess that means they’ll be bringing in the big guns.

Again.

Second Language London

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I know – another London post. But this is interesting and kind of fun: a tube map with the second most common languages (after English, innit) spoken at each stop.

Tube map14FINAL_opt

You’ll need to click it to make it bigger.

A few things struck me immediately: the huge number of Bengali speakers in East London (the size of the dots relates to the percentage of speakers of that language). Perhaps unsurprisingly,Bengali is the second most spkoen language in London overall.
Also, the way that the groups stick together: that brown diagnonal of Lithuanians in the South East, equally, the dark orange of Punjabi in the South West and the light pink of Gujarati in the North West.

Afrikaans makes an impact too – in dark green, right at the top of the Northern line: Colindale, Burnt Oak and Edgware.

UPDATE: A beagle-eyed reader on Facebook notes that I may have got my Romanian and Afrikaans mixed up. This is always hapeening to me and has led to many unfortunate incidents here in SA (although, they are nothing, NOTHING! compared to my struggles on that recent trip to Bucharest).
A more detailed look at the map reveals that she’s almost certainly correct.

Two points arise from this:

1. The linguistic diversity of London is such that the researchers ran out of different colours to use, and
2. Well, where’s the Afrikaans then?

It took me a while, but I got there in the end – the penultimate stop eastbound on the central line: Theydon Bois. No, I’d never heard of it before, either, but I’m not sure how I’d missed it, given that it’s THE major large residential village of choice at the junction of the M11 and M25. Claim to fame-tastic.

[/UPDATE]

When I knew Saffas in London, it was all Acton and Putney – now replaced by Arabic and French. There are a lot of French speakers in London, which, as the cartographers point out, might include French speakers from North and Central Africa as well, although:

Since London is now the sixth biggest French city and has a resident member of the National Assembly to represent expatriates, it is a fair bet that many are from France

Linguistic diversity is rampant too:

Around Turnpike Lane 16 languages are spoken by more than one per cent of the population, topped by Polish at 6.7 per cent.

More details here.