Anecdotal evidence

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This has no scientific evidence to back it up, hence the title. Although some people just trot out these things and pretend they’re gospel.

Not me. I have nothing more than my undocumented observations and general gut feeling on these.

  1. Egyptian Geese are taking over Cape Town. Also, Sacred Ibises (Ibii?) are on the increase, while the drab, but lovable Hadeda is getting harder to find. And hear.
  2. Sticking with the nature thing, there are fewer Christmas Beetles around every year.
  3. Cars: Audi is the new BMW when it comes to driving like a cock.
  4. And CF is the new CY when it comes to someone being 5cm from your back bumper on the N2. (Although CY drivers are still uniformly stupid foolish* and dangerous.)
  5. There’s traffic on the roads in Cape Town all day now, too. I witnessed this change in Sheffield as well. You can’t get anywhere quickly by car any more, at any time.
  6. But still, never use Main Road to go anywhere if you don’t have to. It’s always slower than any given alternative.

It strikes me that the above post makes me sound like a grumpy old man, but I’m only ever two of those things at any given time. And I’m not actually complaining about any of these things, I’m merely documenting them.

How else is Cape Town changing? What differences have you noticed (but have absolutely no evidence for)?

 

* revised my adjective at the request of @anib, an unashamed CY driver.

Signal Hill Fire timelapse

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Incoming from @TheLifeOfByron on twitter – his timelapse of the fire on Signal Hill this morning:

Well done to the fire crews who (finally) attended (Byron was struggling to get in touch with them):


…and got this under control.
And thanks to Byron for capturing it in such a creative way.

Kayak love

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Not the canoe boat thing. No, I’m talking about the website and especially the app.

Kayak isn’t new. Even I have been using it for years. I don’t travel overseas often, but when I do, it’s indispensable and thus, it remains one of my favourite apps.

You can use it to book cheap flights and hotels, but then travelstart is probably the best local option for that. You can use it to track flights, but you’d probably want to go down the flightradar24 route for that.

So why Kayak? Because its biggest strength is that it is particularly brilliant at compiling your itinerary, and it has a genius way of doing it. Each time you get a confirmation email from your airline, your car hire place, your ferry, your hotel or your train company (or whatever), simply forward it to kayak and they put everything together in a handy little virtual pack for you.
You can see the bare bones of this at a glance (flight numbers, times etc) and then with a single click, you can get the detail (seat numbers etc). It even stores the original email for you to refer back to if you need to.
Oh – and you can share the itinerary, either as a read-only or a collaborative editable file.

So simple. So brilliant.

One last thing – a really nice touch on the latest update is the app background changing to a photo of your destination. Suddenly, I’ve got Tinsley Viaduct and those infamous cooling towers on my phone and it’s piquing my excitement to head to the frozen North.

Loadshedding EP

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Once again, it’s dark. Well, it’s not, because it’s light, but if it were dark, it would be dark. Yes, we’re being loadshod once again.

There was plenty of warning this time around and yet some people still seem to be confused, despite the best efforts of the City Council and Eskom to keep them informed. These individuals then react with anger. It’s proof that you simply can’t legislate for stupid people, I guess.

Me? I react with creativity. It’s been a while now since I’ve written any music and I’ve decided that I’m going to write an EP with loadshedding as my muse.
It’s early days, but already, there are song titles forming in my mind. I sense that a mixture of genres will ensure mass appeal.

The folk classic: Peggy, Don’t You Open The Fridge
The rock ballad: I Never Knew I Wanted Coffee (Until The Power Went Out)
The electronic dance piece: Generator X (Dubstop Remix)
The boy band pop hit: Solar, So Good
Some hip hop: Crap Traffic –  It’s A Four Way Stop Thing.
Oh, and obviously a death metal tune about Eternal Night, or something.

Like I say, this is just the bare bones. Now I’m going to hang some riffs and one (or more) soaring vocals on them.

You’re probably going to love it.