Tag: newlands

Sherlock Holmes has entered the chat

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The London-based, Victorian detective is famed as being one of the greatest sleuths of all time, but I think that he might finally have met his match, just 138 years after he first appeared in A Study in Scarlet.

Sure, Holmes may have worked out that The Hound Of The Baskervilles was just a dog painted with phosphorous. He might have deduced that Jefferson Hope killed Drebber and Stangerson, but he would surely have been flummoxed by some of the modern mysteries that plague us today.

Thankfully, I have found someone on Reddit. Someone who shall remain nameless: let’s call them No-Entrance4253 (because that’s their name on Reddit), who has not only asked a question, but then formed their own possible hypothesis as to what might be going on.

Look at that. Just look at it. Wow.

The human mind does not get any more brilliantly analytical than this.

Holmes might have had his:

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

but No-Entrance4253 left the impossible right out of this. No-Entrance4253 then completely disregarded the improbable and went straight for the jugular of truth. There’s no water in my house in Newlands. There is a burst water main in Newlands. Could these two things be connected? YES, THEY COULD.

You can’t be sure, though. You can’t just dive in and assume that correlation is causation. So just add the word “maybe” into that second statement. Play it safe.

The only way to really convince the audience, which is collectively fawning over your mental abilities, is to post on the Cape Town subreddit and see what people say. Sherlock Holmes never had this sort of luxury: he had to put a Classified Advertisement in The Times of London, looking for some sort of validation. It took days to get a response, maybe even weeks.

No-Entrance4253 immediately got several responses, amazingly absolutely none of them taking the piss (I was sitting on my hands).

Incredible.

Tune into 6000 miles… again tomorrow, as we watch local Reddit user LilywhiteFormat271 take on one of the biggest mathematical questions that humanity has ever faced, and come up with a shocking answer of… 4.

Patina

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Boys Dinner with the MBCC last night and we headed out for steak.

Steak, as discussed with the Tall Accountant en route, is one of those things that’s  easy to do well (no pun intended), but for precisely that reason, is difficult to excel at. There are lots of very good steak places, but there are very few excellent steak places, because cook it right and it’s about as good as it can get.

Or so we thought.

Patina had been recommended to us by several friends. And all of them said that it was an excellent steak place. The expectations bar had been set high, and we went in ready to be wowed or  disappointed.

It was a wow.

I’ve eaten a lot of steak in my life. Add the other 175+ years (eina) of experience around the table and you have a veritable panel of steak expertise. And yet it was widely agreed that this was the best that any of us have ever tasted.

That’s not to say that previous excellent steak places haven’t also been excellent. Barristers remains a favourite – I’ve never had a bad steak there in my n (or more) visits. But this was something else. I enjoyed a 300g fillet with chunky chips (others raved about the risotto) and a blue cheese sauce, A couple of sides of onion rings completed the main course picture and I banged in a stonking Affogato for good measure.

The food was amazing, the wine was great, they have Stella Artois on tap and the service (Wilfred from Malawi – “He’s a Lilongwe from home”) was perfect.

It’s not cheap, mind. And if you’re going to charge those sort of prices, you need to back it up with a very special experience. Patina did that and more. Quite incredible, and now my new go-to steak house.

This was not a paid review. I had a good night and I think you deserve one too. You should go here.

Patina
35 Dean St, Newlands, Cape Town
021 823 9739

Cricket pics

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Suffice to say, while we watched the Women’s T20 get abadoned, my fears for last night’s cricket being a washout were thankfully unfounded.

Newlands was cool, but picture perfect for the evening.

Although this image was a far cry from scenes just a couple of hours earlier.

It was a good night for the kids’ first cricket match, and it was topped off by a last ball win for SA which has obviously set the expectation bar far too high for any future visits to Newlands or any other sporting venue. (It’s worth noting that Alex’s first ever football match finished 7-0.)

Cricket’s very laid back, even when it’s very exciting.
There was plenty of opportunity to take photos. Go look.

Solve a drought

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While water restrictions continue to make little or no difference to our water situation (mainly because no-one takes any notice of them), I may have come up with a plan to sort out our water crisis.

Those readers who have stuck with 6000 miles… through thick and thin (mainly thin) may recall that I also came up with a plan to sort the country’s electricity crisis way back in 2008. Yikes.

Sod the Government, the captains of industry and the so-called experts countrywide who all say that there is no quick fix. I think they’re blinkered. If everyone builds their own little power station, we’ll be sorted.
As far as I can remember from my physics lessons at school, all you have to do is make steam (water + heat), turn a turbine and Bob’s your uncle.
For your average Southern Suburber, with a pool (water) and a braai (heat), that’s surely not such a big ask.
Apart from the turbine bit.

That actually worked for a while. Until my wife found out.

There are easier ways to solve the drought. Just let me buy tickets for a cricket match.

I’m not a huge fan of cricket (sidenote to self: huge fan = potential wind shortage solution), but I do like live sport and so I thought I’d make a plan waaaaay in advance of… well… of today, and buy some cricket tickets for the kids and I. Mrs 6000 had other plans for this weekend, so I only needed three. And that was a good thing, because tickets for cricket are not cheap. They’re between 5 and 10 times the price of going and watching a football match.
But then, this is an international cricket match.
But then, they’re more than twice the price of watching an international football match.

I digress. Often.

I bought the expensive tickets, for a cricket match in the middle of February, in the middle of summer, in the middle of a drought.

Can you guess what the weather was like this week in Cape Town? Yep. It was lovely. Temperatures in the mid-thirties. Cloudless skies.
And can you guess what the weather is going to be like in Cape Town next week? Yep. You’re not wrong. Gorgeous. Temperatures in the high twenties. Wall to wall sunshine.

And, dear reader, can you guess what the weather is like in Cape Town today? The day of the expensive cricket match. The first cricket match I’ve ever bought tickets for. The first cricket match my kids have ever been to?

Grey. Wet. Chilly. Miserable.

FML.

On the positive side, it did rain today, meaning that there will be no need for anyone to water their gardens tomorrow (Saturday being one of the days you’re allowed an hour of watering). And that gave me an idea.
If you can donate enough money for me to buy expensive tickets to expensive international cricket matches on a regular basis, I think that we can basically guarantee enough rain to replenish our currently understocked local dams (42% full this week).

You can try this crazy scheme by donating some money to my cause. Just leave me a comment below and I’ll be in touch to give you payment details.

Give it a go. But give it a go soon, remembering that there’s a T20 match between SA and Australia on Wednesday 9th March. Yet another opportunity to sit on a damp grass slope and watch an empty field standing in the rain.