Tuesday ephemera

Lots of interesting stuff* around today, so rather than lots of little posts, one all-encompassing behemoth containing all you need to know.

BEWARE THE MONKEY MAN! A baboon has been kicked out of his troop near Bredasdorp, according to Cape Agulhas Municipality:

Please note that a male baboon was kicked out of his troop and is roaming the edges of Bredasdorp town. He may enter the residential areas and the public is warned to be careful and not approach or agitate the baboon. The Municipality is working with Cape Nature to resolve the matter.

Which is all well and good (unless he breaks into your place and poos on the kitchen counter again), but if you run the Afrikaans version through Google Translate, you get this:

There is a monkey man roaming the town limits of Bredasdorp and it is feared that he moved into the neighbourhoods. He appears by his pack kicked. The public is warned not to confront the monkey man and stay away from him.

And I think that’s the way that all official CAM press announcements should be made from now on.

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY! Captain Kirk watches Miley Cyrus’ MTV VMAs performance:

Brilliant! (via @DrRousseau)

BLOODY ELK! A gang of angry drunken elk barred a man from entering his home in suburban Stockholm on Tuesday, leaving the frightened homeowner no choice but to call police for help.

“They can be really dangerous. They become fearless. Instead of backing away when a person approaches, they move toward you. They may even take a run at you.” The incident involved four adult elk and one calf, Näverberg explained, all of whom were intoxicated after having eaten fermented apples that had fallen from the homeowner’s apple tree.

Worth clicking through just for the photo.

LONDON SKYSCRAPER IS SOLAR DEATH RAY! London’s Walkie-Talkie building’s mirrored frontage is focusing the sun’s rays onto the street below and melting cars and bikes. Seriously.

melt

On the plus side, it seems to keep the elks away, and they could makes some cash from it:

Dr James Keaveney of the University of Durham’s Atomic and Molecular Physics department said it appeared to be an inherent flaw in the building: “It’s a concave shape so it’s going to have a focussing [sic] effect on the light that is reflected from it.
There’s a power station in Spain that works on this principle. They have an array of mirrors that focusses [sic] light into a central pillar –?if it’s 60°C you could get solar panels and get some energy out of it.”

UPDATE: Some funny tweets on this here.

FIT FOR A KING! Well, a Prince anyway. A Saudi Prince has bought a 50% stake in The Mighty Red And White Wizzzzzzzaaaaaards:

A member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, Prince Abdullah bin Mosaad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, has bought a 50 per cent stake in Sheffield United’s parent company for £1, The Star can reveal.
In return the 47-year-old has agreed to provide “substantial new capital” designed to help the club return to the Premier League “as quickly as possible.”
Plc chairman Kevin McCabe refused to reveal the exact sums of money involved but recently described them as being a potential “game-changer.’

What could possibly go wrong? Premiership Champions by 2016*.

*T&Cs apply

Gareth Bale broke my Excel

Almost, anyway.
These numbers are very, very big:

Gareth Bale’s reported salary at Real Madrid, converted into ZAR:

per year: R248,820,000 (= 1 Nkandla)
per month: R19,140,000
per week: R4,785,000
per day: R683,569
per hour: R32,538
per minute: R542
per second: R9.03

What people are forgetting is that this is all pre-tax. The poor boy is actually really going to struggle.

Source: UK newspapers, exchange rate at £1 = R15.95, as per Google this morning.

Laura Palmer: Bastille to tour SA

Not had any music on the blog for a while. It’s all been writing and pictures. We need some music.
And here it is.

This one just seemed appropriate, with Bastille SA tour dates in Kirstenbosch in Cape Town and Emmarentia Dam in Joburg just announced for January 2014 and with me being a huge fan of Twin Peaks.
(that latter one being a bit tenuous, I know)

1157408_573957469327486_111908773_n

Tickets: Cape Town | Johannesburg

Look Both Ways

With the sudden end to the appalling weather, we took the opportunity to get down to Tokai Forest and work off some cabin fever.
Beneath the pine trees the ground was fairly dry and firm, but further down there was still pretty of evidence of flooding on the lower lying ground.

Wet and muddy, we found ourselves the end of the unfinished, unused Lismore Avenue road bridge over the M3 and I couldn’t resist clambering up and having a quick look up top.

image

Looking North (above) and South (below)

image
It wasn’t particularly pleasant up there – lots of broken glass and drug paraphernalia lying around, low walls and plenty of exposed metalwork to trip over.
That said, I will head back up there with a proper camera and get some better shots sometime. And I will find out why there’s an unfinished, unused bridge going over the M3 near Tokai. (Although, Cape Town is known for its unfinished bridges, of course.)

There’s no business like snow business

This blog isn’t, as I have been forced to point out several times, my job. For me, it’s a hobby, it’s mostly enjoyable and it allows me to speak my mind when no-one else will listen. Quite regularly, no-one listens on here either, but that’s not the point. When people do listen, it’s also provided opportunities to meet and engage (digitally, at least) with a huge number of interesting people in many different places, with many different viewpoints. I like that.

Also, it doesn’t provide much income – there are google ads dotted around (up top and to your right) and occasionally, people get in touch wanting paid links or sponsored posts. I can choose to be very selective with these, because I know that the blog isn’t my source of income, and I’ll always tell you if I am endorsing a product in exchange for cold, hard cash of course.
It doesn’t happen very often, but if it does no harm, why would I not want to earn a bit of beer money?

Anyway, the thing is that it’s always nice to see how many people come and visit the blog and it’s always interesting to see what they read. But yesterday, things went a bit mad.

I thought that could see it coming, with Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s “will we get snow?” posts (here and here), doing brisk business, for want of a better term. But I had no idea what was going to happen this morning, when I posted a couple of screenshots from the webcam at the Upper Cableway Station just before 7.

A couple of influential retweets and Facebook shares, a mention or two on local radio, some decent SEO and suddenly:

bang.

Totes ridic. Put simply, it was the biggest day this blog has ever seen, in all of its 7½ year history. And not “only just” either. I got over 10 times the average daily traffic and more than 3 times greater than the previous best ever. And I thought that was big. Which it was.

Before yesterday.

For just a few hours, I was almost a bit 2oceansvibey. All that remains now is to see how many (if any) of those lovely people are going to come back and see me again or not – and if there’s enough money in the kitty for a beer at the end of the month. Which is today.

Your following options once again, should you have missed them before: facebook, twitter, rss