Groot Trek

This website is working again, how amusing.

But I have moved on...

STPC Press Release

It’s that time of year again... time for The Silvery Tay Poetry Competition, which celebrates deplorable verse and is dedicated to the Affectionate Remembrance of William McGonagall, Poet Laureate of the Silvery Tay, also known as Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant of Burma.

Hopefully, Mr James Clarke of the Stoep Talk Organisation (which owns The Star newspaper) will be our celebrity judge again this year. Not only is Mr Clarke an expert of Pomes, he is also venerably fit for duty, being the heroic L*E*A*D*E*R of the Tour De Farce. He looks lovely in Lycra, too, and if you run out and buy a copy of his book Blazing Saddles, you can photostat all the pics and prestik them up on your walls, as I have done.

Click, friend, and enter! (but don’t click today. This link is not working yet. Technicians are attending to a technical thingy and will have it technified before the 1st of November, latest, if they value their lives)

Putting legs on snakes

There’s engineered cats for allergic pet owners, there’s growing human organs in pigs, for transplants. New cows bred to produce skim milk for making skinny lattes to be sipped by golems draped over chic chairs in Coffee Shops. It’s Oryx and Crake*, for real. Chimerae - released from the realm of myth, now available in a lab near you – initially part goat, part sheep but now part rat or rabbit, part human. Ethical dilemmas (how outmoded, surely. Why don’t they just save some time and have done with the lip service?) notwithstanding, they say Important Medical Breakthroughs are being made with the help of these creatures. I say, screw your important medical and probably largely cosmetic breakthroughs. If you can make coherent communities and social consciences and decent homes and literacy and renewable power and jobs and effective governments and a rethink about the holiness of unlimited human fecundity in your stinking labs, then I’ll be impressed.

We are so enraptured by our fantastical ideals of ‘freedom’ that we kick and scream at the idea that the way forward from here involves a vigorous pruning of many so-called freedoms. We have invented ludicrous rights for ourselves, our civilisation as it is right now is an adolescent, who is sure that it knows everything and has nothing more to learn, will not suffer anyone telling it what to do and is motivated entirely by urges which override even its innate survival mechanisms.

Malcolm Gladwell, commenting on Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, said, “…societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death…”

That’s what we’re doing, only we’re not just an isolated society on Easter Island. We are the whole world and this is the only island we have. Nobody needs to tell us this - we actually know it and we carry on regardless.

*Novel by Margaret Atwood, about what happens when science takes over from where religion left off. Sort of.

Emission omission

Africa Geographic magazine made a valiant attempt at putting all the official climate change info (the basics of it anyway) into one accessible place, being their August 2007 edition.

Then, extraordinarily, they all but cancelled the effort out with advertising. I understand that advertising in magazines is a necessary evil but this is incredibly frustrating – “Flight Centre goes Green”? Please. But the biggest liberty was taken by a double page advertorial about how marvelous and environmentally responsible Sasol is.

We all know about fossil fuels and their dastardliness. There’s a hierarchy of demons here just like anywhere else, and oil only comes third. Second comes coal, and in first place is coal-to-liquids, which is Sasol. In a magazine dedicated entirely to this issue of anthropogenic climate change, I can’t understand why there is not even one little panel of text which zeroes in on coal-to-liquids. I lie. I can understand perfectly.

Know the enemy

Some people have said that we can save the world without economic sacrifice. You have to be either naïve or calculating to be able to make that claim with a straight face. Others, like Planktos Inc., go further by saying that we can actually get rich saving the world, and they want to show us how. The Planktos investor schpiel goes: “You should own global-warming stocks... At worst, you'll make a profit. At best, you'll make a profit and help save the world. That sound OK to you?” and “Go Green. Get Rich”, and so on. They are carbon sharks, and their game is indulgences.

Planktos is the company that recently set out on a geoengineering expedition to sprinkle iron hematite dust onto the open ocean not far from the Galapagos, in hopes of causing an algae bloom that will mop up lots of CO2, while also helping to feed the starving plankton which in turn feed the starving fishies. They will spin the escapade like this: We have mopped up lots of CO2, see? We’ll carry on doing it so that you can pay us money and take that flight/buy that SUV with a clear conscience. You emit, we remit.

Schemes like this are what all globally committed commercial greeners are wearing this season. Planktos has a PR blog, where you can read about all sorts of green sexiness, like the wonders of biodiesel and how the Holy See is now carbon neutral thanks to them.

Entities like Planktos have cut straight into a rich seam of pale green mainstream and the public is lapping it up, but it doesn’t help in any real way. It only helps to confuse people and encourage extra consumption. On the oxymoronic subject of ‘eco-consumerism’, from an article by George Monbiot:
“There is an inherent conflict between the aspirational lifestyle journalism which makes readers feel better about themselves and sells country kitchens and the central demand of environmentalism: that we should consume less.”

Other suggestions for geoengineering include artificially dimming the atmosphere by creating particulate (or mechanical) shields, to mimic the effects of things like volcanic eruptions which temporarily prevent some solar energy from reaching earth’s surface and cause cooling. Even if these hypothetical fixes were in fact more than just the scientific equivalent of throwing custard pies at the sky and yelling, “Ha! Take THAT, atmosphere!”, the thing is that unless emissions are drastically cut anyway then the more emissions build up the more “shields” we will have to create…

There can be no business as usual without serious consequences for life as we know it. That’s not the so-called good life as we privileged few know it, that’s the actual livingness of life for thousands of species including us (also including Bigosaurus full-tilt-growth-is-god-almighty Moneyrex, as immune as it thinks it is). Unless we do some joined up thinking immediately and get ready to take the economic sacrifices on the chin, then decades from now hindsight will miserably tell us that the only way we could have mitigated the effects of our greenhouse emissions would have been to have drastically cut the emissions themselves at whatever material costs, while we still had time to do so. Pity we can’t just catch a wake up right now, today, this minute. One very far off future day, of course, when we’re a puzzling layer in some future civilisation’s fossil record, it won’t matter at all.

Gavin Schmidt has a good analogy for all this:

“Think of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean. Under normal circumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat could be overturned by a rogue wave. But now one of the passengers has decided to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone suggests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another passenger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counterbalance the first passenger and indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational resources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn't be able to guarantee absolute stability, and indeed, since the system is untested it might make things worse.

So is the answer to a known and increasing human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down?”


George Monbiot on Eco Junk: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/24/eco-junk/

Gavin Schmidt bio http://www.giss.nasa.gov/~gavin/
Planktos Inc http://planktos.com/
Planktos Blog http://www.planktos.blogspot.com/

The original Fe experiment: http://www.rsnz.org/education/alpha/alpha106/alpha-106.htm
(Well, does it work or doesn’t it? Help or harm? No-one seems to have an answer. I have looked and looked, and there are as many fors as there are againsts)

Don't tell him (edited)

I’m a bit brain dead at the moment. I feel as though someone has injected formaldehyde into my head. Maybe the posting of those Black Eyed Peas lyrics a couple of posts ago has started to kick in. As someone said (Nietzsche? And if, as I found out the other day, you pronounce ‘segues’ as ‘seg-ways’, then how on earth do you properly pronounce ‘Nietzsche’? Have I even spelled it right? And is it ‘spelt’ or is it ‘spelled’?), “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
If it’s temporary, then I don’t know how long it will last but I have to post something in the meantime because I owe it to my six readers. That’s you guys. If it’s permanent, well then, hello wondrous oblivion, where have you been all this time?

So, what to post? People often post pictures of their pets, or of their new cellphone, or of their car. Hmm. I’ve already posted pics of my pets. I know - I’ll post Ray Hartley’s cat pet pic(http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/hartley/). The caption is, “Someone should tell him”:

But I don't think they should, because he looks very contented.

I don’t have a new cellphone, sorry. Here are two pics of my car though, one with the paint (http://paquarium.blogspot.com/2007/06/dear-diary.html ) and one with the snow. For such a young and innocent little car, it’s seen some life eh?

Lark and Stardust

If a meteorite had landed on that pub, at the gig I was at somewhere in Pretoria a couple of months ago, I would not have cared or even noticed. For two whole hours and a bit I didn’t have a single thought about carbon sharks, nuclear waste, marketing or any other type of rape, pillage and plunder. Lark, live, did it. They’re great on CD too, but this band is at its best live. Having somehow survived Oppikoppi, they’ll be back in GP at Carfax on the 24th of this month. My elder daughter is their Number One Fan, so luckily I’ll be able to take her with me as a buffer, or a Buffy, ‘cos Carfax isn’t exactly home away from home for me. I get psychedelic when I can’t quite identify the species around the watering hole, so psychedelic that I start identifying with unidentifiables and then all hell breaks loose because I get sudden urges to do things like start wearing black lipstick or death-metal hoodies, or pierce my eyebrow, or say “dude”. It’s alarming and just won’t do anymore. I’ll be forty in less than half a year and I really don’t want to do any more metamorphasising. I know this is heresy but I think comfort zones are a good thing and I want to be a proper old lady like my gran one day, with sensible shoes, silver hair in a bun and a mauve twinset.
The Radium’s got Soaks and Estate Agents and Okes and things, no alarms and no surprises you know? Nothing to aspire to. Very comfy. The worst that can happen at the Radium is that I’ll sing. But Carfax? Elder daughter’s a drummer, see, so if anything sidles up persuasively in a death-metal hoody (or whatever they wear there) and says, “Dude…”, then she can fend it off. She’s taller than me, which helps, and her drumsticks can double as stakes. Ha ha.
Lark is demanding and very loud and schitzophrenic, and brilliant. Lark is not warm and fuzzy (although a quarter of it is actually Fuzzy, on bass, sometimes double bass nogal), not comfortable, and doesn’t invite you to put your feet up and have coffee. It might be a portal of some sort, it sounds like a hall of mirror doors, and the diva from The 5th Element lives behind one of them.

Stardust the movie is coming soon to a theatre near you, but read the book first if you can. The blurb says something about it being a fairytale for grownups, and I suppose maybe it is but I resent that description although my brain’s too tired at the moment to explain why. Some of the main bookshops have it in stock, and all of the comic shops do, so it’s pretty easy to get hold of. There are Big Names in the movie, does that mean it’ll be a good movie though? It’s bound to piss a few rabid fans off as these things do, but on the whole I’m almost prepared to bet the farm that it’ll be a great escape.

Read it and weep

Having failed so miserably at getting down to the Cape Town Book Fair in order to flock about the shins of the most important literary figure to emerge from Kenilworth or the world in the last four hundred years or ever, I feel as though I may not have tried hard enough. My little stack of dogeared copies of The De Villiers Code and Texas glowers at me from the bookshelf, unautographed and reproachful. Indelibly marked by this account of abuse at the distracted hands of Spud’s minions, my mind is all but gone with grief. Read it, and weep with me. The light shineth in the darkness, brothers and sisters, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. Must Mr Eaton cut off his ear, I ask you? What will it take???

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=312087&area=/columnist__tom_eaton/

The Loony Bin

US Patent 5827173 is a “Prenatal audio communication device”. The mind boggles, and one fears for any prenate unfortunate enough to be enwombed by a woman who would even consider using such a thing:

“A prenatal audio communication device has a receiving chamber which accepts sound waves for transmission through a flexible tube to a megaphone secured against the abdomen of a pregnant woman so as to transfer sound waves from an external source with which the chamber is juxtaposed to a position proximate the ears of the baby in the womb. Means is connected to the megaphone for encircling the pregnant woman and securing the megaphone outlet port against her abdomen. Preferably, the inlet port has a perimeter contoured to be snugly juxtaposed about the mouth of a typical adult. A curved lip extends along the inlet port perimeter to form a continuous seal between the chamber and the face of the user, to increase the comfort level of the user when the chamber is pressed against the face and to make a single chamber more universally usable with a variety of sound wave source shapes and sizes. Preferably, the securing means is an at least partially elastically stretchable strap which connects to D-ring type members disposed on opposite sides of the megaphone.”

Second RSS Awards

And the Platinum Pustule for Really Stupid Song goes to The Black Eyed Peas.

Reputed to be “one of the most popular hit singles in history”, the song is called My Humps. It’s also probably one of the most complained-about songs in history so unfortunately we’re not breaking any new ground here. Most recently parodied by Alanis Morrissette as an April fool joke, you can find her version plus the original on any one of a dozen video hosting sites, if you feel like clubbing some brain cells to death.

I can barely bring myself to put these lyrics in here, partly because they make my mind so numb I can hardly remember how to copypaste, and partly because they might act like google fly paper and then, well, there goes the neighbourhood. A sample, nevertheless:

My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump.
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
my lovin' got you
She's got me spendin'.
(Oh) Spendin' all your money on me and spending time on me.
She's got me spendin'.
(Oh) Spendin' all your money on me, up on me, on me.

…and so on.

I wish they’d invent a pill for radio intolerance, because it puts a person at a terrible disadvantage. I think if I could hum along to songs about girls who feel wretched about cheatin’ on their guy and feel they may as well be puttin’ a gun to his head but they really just can’t help it, I could quite enjoy life. That’s Rihanna, and she takes runner up for her song “Unfaithful”.

LyricBlokka TM, get it now at these fine stores. I’d be in there like a shot.

Nominations for the next Awards welcome. To qualify, songs must have actual lyrics but needn’t be current hits.

SNAFU

Our Christian churches, perhaps in some sort of partnership with our media, are having a bumper year, with key questions flitting clunkily about like flower fairies with little lead boots on. There was the tricky: “Does Satan really exist?” and there were also some questions which had wafty answers like, and I quote but I can’t remember who: “Well, you know, the bible doesn’t prohibit actual gayness, rather just the practice of it.”
Then of course, there were the reams of questions surrounding Our Lady of the Blinding Ray in Benoni.

But our rainbow of Christianity isn’t yet as plump with permitted political colourants, flavourants and emulsifiers as it is in other places - Utah for instance - so by contrast our theological angst is quite quaint. Here’s an example of what they’ve had on their minds over there:

“Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan's influence on illegal immigrants…

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants "hate American people …are determined to destroy Christian America, and there is nothing they won't do." He also said that illegal aliens were in control of the media, and working with Democrats. At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. "by self invasion."

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/220065/4/

Quinquereme of Rubber Duck

A few years ago, a ship accidentally tipped into the ocean its cargo of little rubber ducks and frogs, originally destined for bathtubs across America. It was reported in newspapers that flotillas of the toys had been seen cheerfully navigating the high seas and making the most of their serendipitous liberation, some putting to shore along the way and others pressing on. I think about them often, and wonder: are some of them still out there, startling brawny oil rig men or being spat out by disgusted whales? What would a sunbleached, travel-weary but still valiantly bobbing rubber bath toy have to say, if it were interviewed?

Renovating

Mundus vult decipi (?)

The terribly wicked and utterly delightful Mr. Eaton points his singular sword at the “mawble-and-porms-brigade”:

“If only they knew how they looked, how the fantasy is exploded every time the true, representative driver of the SUV goes out on her errands: the tiny Stepford wife, ring-encrusted fingers spread desperately around the gigantic tiller, stringy tanning-bed-purple arms fighting the power-steering, her dulled eyes half-closed in that permanent expression of moronic disdain the rich reserve for when they are forced to mingle with the less rich.”

You strike an SUV, you strike a rock

im in ur internetz stealin ur time

The internet (ahem, beg pardon, the internets), as we know, is/are (a) very strange place/s. There’s google of course, which is strange. I was at a thing once, around ‘99, where there was a man we’ll call Andrew who hunkered about in a chalky circle, throwing plastic replica bones, while talking about the way forward and paradigms and core relationships and innovation. Occasionally he’d mention the word "Google". Milling about in the shadows (actually, it was a flouro-lit conference room so there were no shadows but you know what I mean), the casually dressed suits on this fun team-building exercise chewed on the ends of their cellular network branded goodie bag pens.
“What’s a google?” they worried amongst themselves. A man with a smear of sticky purple ink bleeding down into his branded golf shirt collar tried to leave the room traditionally, but the door had been bolted from the outside so he threw himself out of a window.

“So basically,” said Andrew, after he’d given everyone a go with the bones, and got them to sing shosholoza while standing on their heads and juggling raisins with their eyebrows, “At the end of the day what we’re saying here is that a paradigm shift in leveraging relationships within core markets focuses on innovation and strategic removal of impediments to the implementation of the blah rhubarb. And remember, Google. Thank you.”

Apart from one lady who ended up with a raisin lodged in her sinuses, it was the Google bit that stuck most firmly. Google is like that glue they use to stick promo CDs onto magazines, which sticks to everything else too and your skin in particular. You sit there at the coffee shop with the magazine wrapper and a little sugar packet siliconed to your fingertips, fluttering away like a crazy person. Even if you manage to lose the paper bits, you’ll retain the glue and it looks like snot. You flap at it feebly, you try rubbing it off onto the underneath of the table, it ends up on your chin. The people sitting at the next table will ask to be moved.

You can hardly do anything online without Google. It’s the people’s gateway to the universe. You can feel at home and put your feet up on it, whether you’re into Scrapbooking or S&M. And it can sell more stuff than any other entity in history. Andrew, if you’re still out there, if no-one’s slipped nightshade in your Red Bull or defenestrated you yet then of course you know this: You were right and I wish I’d bought shares.

Anyhow, heaven help us, now there’s Lolcode. I don’t know what it does but I think this is what it is: a programming language based on IRC-speak, engrish game-speak, texting-speak, snowclones (‘catch-structures’ like, “To X, or not to X”) and lolcats. Lolcats are those cutesy photos of cats with pidgin captions, e.g., “o hai. i make u cookie but i eated it,” which go round and round and round in places like myspace (and your inbox if you’re careless enough to have given your email address to a nitwit).

I’ve posted before about Making Light, how entertaining it can be. In a recent open thread, they did some literature in sort of lolcode. The ritual deployment of This Is Just To Say is in there, naturally. There’s some Chaucer and Shakespeare, there’s all three parts of The Lord Of The Rings, how could there not be, and lots more. I once promised to keep this blog silly, so this makes up for any lapses in silly that might have occurred - Here’s Pride and Prejudice:

Rich man can has girl.

Bngli: i can has dance?
J4N3: k
l12: i can has dance too?
DarC: no u ugly go way
l12: LOLz
Bngli: BRB

MrC0lnz: l12 i can has heart?
l12: no gway
Chrltt: u can has me
MrC0lnz: K BRB

Wikm: IM IN UR TOWN SEDUCIN UR DAUTERS
lyd14: o hai

DarC: i can has heart?
l12: no gway u rude

l12: IM IN UR PEMBERLEY ADMIRIN UR STUFF
DarC: hai
l12: OMG thought u were AFK!!1!

J4N3: OMG lyd14 & Wikm BFF
l12: WTF?
lyd14: i can has wikm, k?
Wikm: i can has $$$? LOL
DarC: k

Bngli: hai, back. i can has heart?
J4N3: k lol
DarC: back
l12: thx 4 ur help
DarC: i can has heart?
l12: k lol

If you are far enough gone to have liked that, that is if you are ROTFLYAO, then here's a whole anthology, to distract you from your work for the next two days at least. Scroll down to comments #119, 120 and 130 for LOR. “Is one ringtone enough to rule them all?”

All your silly are belong to us.

:-) kthxbye

Dear Diary

They were repainting the roof of my local Spar yesterday. A freshly opened 20L tin of terracotta paint fell from the roof and bounced off my tiny shiny pretty pearly silver two-week-old Yaris as I pulled into the parking bay, about three seconds after I had mused on how lucky I had been to get one right by the entrance. Damn you Asphaltia, daughter of Satan, Succubus, Whore of Babylon.

Various men with glinting murderous eyes gathered round the startlingly novel cowhide-jackrussel paint job, and hungrily offered to pummel the young roof painter, as though I looked incapable of it. I declined and laughed and took the hand of poor Jaques, the painter, who had come down from the roof and was crying real tears and shaking from top to bottom, because in that moment I could see clearly, in slow motion even, and I was just so happy for him that I’m not a murderous man. If you’re going to spill roof paint all over a brand new car, and you have a choice as to which car, pick mine ok? I tried to explain to Jaques how he should see this like winning the lotto - that what happened was quite literally once in a lifetime ‘cos it’s my first brand new car and I won’t ever have another. He must have misunderstood because he went even paler, sobbed even louder, edged towards the group of murderous men and tried to take cover in their midst.

The dent in the roof from the tin is like an exclamation mark. Serves me right I suppose, for getting all inexplicably fond of and vain about a stupid car. I don’t even like cars. Let this be a lesson to me.

Mr Ludwig the Flower Man

Checking in at the Silvery Tay Poetry Competition site today, to see whether there’s any housekeeping needed before I go and do a foolish 3am caution-to-the-wind type of thing like mention it in David Bullard’s comment threads, I found that I must either have forgotten to post the “Short Exceptance Speech” that Melodi Bloggs emailed to Mr Clarke and me; or I did put it in but it got eaten by a passing flock of jubjub birds, which are known to be attracted by bright multicoloured party lights like Melodi. If I forgot, I’m sorry, and if it was eaten, I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did. Well I’ve put it up there now so that’s all right then.

It went like this:

Short Exceptance Speech

Dear Ms Pandora and Mr James Small
It is with great humbility that I accept this onerous award.
I’ve never won anything like this before and I hope it won’t go to my head.
In honour of the honour I will be decorating my second bathroom in the same classical tones as my Pandora’s Poet Laureate certificate of 2007. After which I will be approaching Mr Ludwig (the flower man, not the composter) about having a rose named after myself.
And in the words of the intrepid Jesus, “I’ll be back”.

Yours poetically
Melodi Bloggs

Pandora’s Poet Laureate 2007


Re the housekeeping, I’m relieved to report that none was needed. This is because as yet I have not mentioned the STPC on David Bullard’s blog, of course. I have been sending emails to myself and sticking post-its all over my desk, loo door and kettle, with lists of reasons to remind me why I should not do it. I hope it keeps working.

David Bullard’s Eternal September

I was both amused and alarmed by David Bullard’s column about blogs and bloggers in last week’s Sunday Times. It was all absolutely true, every word, so knowing what lay in store for him I sent some little psychic sachets of sterkte winging through the ethers, for him to keep in his pocket. I hope they’re coming in handy. But why would he want to engage with a not very subtle cabal of nitwits whose collective online oeuvre is concrete proof that some people should not have been allowed to learn reading and writing in the first place? Now he’s gone and nailed his foot to the funnyfarm floor by acquiring a blog of his own. Why would he do that? Like he said this week, “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

It’s not too late, Mr Bullard! Bail out immediately before they eat your brains. No-one is immune, not even you. Don’t feed the baboons for goodness sake. Get some calamine for that nasty rash and take comfort from the fact that they get bored really quickly and will move along any minute now.

But if you must pursue this folly against all advice, may I offer my services as Disemvoweller? You will need one for sure. The beauty of disemvowelling is that it’s not the same as censorship. It’s better. I’ve been dying to try it but have never had the opportunity here, all four of my readers being very well behaved indeed. I will charge you 1 cent per word or part thereof, the reason I have to charge is not because I’m after the money (although I’m anticipating it getting to a point where you offer me a rand a vowel just to keep me on) but because I’m after the job description. I’d quite like to be able to say, “I’m a Professional Disemvoweller” when people ask.

Shibboleths

1.
Doug Shaw Prime did a test to find out what kind of American accent he has. I thought I ought to do it too, so I did, and it said: “New York City. You are most definitely from New York City. Not New Jersey, not Connecticut. If you are from Jersey then you can probably get into New York City in 10 minutes or less.” I found that very interesting.


2.
The Extensis blog had a haiku competition to celebrate the premiere of a hardcore designgeek film called “Helvetica”. While I absolutely do not in any way whatsoever miss my late career*, I did like these haikus. First prize was a limited edition Helvetica fine art poster, which in those circles can be compared to a staunch Catholic winning one of baby Jesus’ milk teeth. My favourite was Christina’s, which won second place:

wedding invite came
they chose brush script mt bold
i give it six months

*only tiny insignificant bits of it, and even then only sometimes.

Girl Stuff

Melodi Bloggs, as you ought to know, was the winner of the Silvery Tay Poetry Competition 2007. She is a beloved friend of mine and I have begun compiling an anthology of her bons mots, gathered from emails and conversations around the edges of board games. Here is a sample:

Melodi Bloggs on ‘Fruition’: “By fruition, do you mean headgear a la Carmen Miranda? I don’t mind going this route, but it’s not strictly Geisha, and I always end up losing my bananas.”

Melodi Bloggs on dating: “My innards are those of a fifteen year old. My outers, sadly not.”

There's a lady, Ellie, who has an eponymous knitting shop in Edenvale. I can remember going there with my Ma when I was a kid. So I coveted my sister's scarf last winter, and not being able to find a similar one anywhere, went to Ellie's in hopes of finding a way to make one for myself - how difficult can it be to make a long thin woolly thing with wispy pompoms on? I found Ellie unchanged, she’s like an ancient china shepherdess. She showed me how to cast on and how to do a lovely lacy dropped-stitch thing, and I asked, "So, do you have a book with, like, stitches and patterns and stuff?" The other customers, most of them magnificent old ladies, each with a life's worth of unpicked things, started laughing and I had an epiphany: This woman IS the book. Well it’s now next winter and I still don’t have my scarf - I never got past knit-two-rows-unpick-three. I miss my granny.

For a Barbarian woman to offer help in a Greek Cypriot woman’s kitchen on Greek Easter (or any other time in fact) is foolish. Maria and Stalla and Thea Eleni will go pale for a moment, exchange panicked glances and then chorus something to the effect that everything’s almost done, ok can you take this spanakopita out to the men? Don’t drop eh?
Yes, I am Barbarian, my compound crime not only to do with not being Greek but also to do with having mostly Viking ancestors (you cannot hide that sort of thing from a Greek), which is as bahrrr-bahrr-ee-yun as it ever gets, with as much emphasis as you can muster on that second syllable. After years of wondering why they still invite you to these gatherings at all, you learn to just be very grateful that they do, and you sit quietly and eat, and eat, and eat, and you don’t argue anymore with Stellios about that dessert with the rose-cordial actually being Turkish. He’s getting on now anyway and doesn’t need the stress. When they send you off at the end of it all with a stack of tinfoiled leftovers enough to last two weeks, you don’t joke, “Do you think I can’t feed my own family or something?” You just say “Thank you,” with relish, and look forward to next year.

An A-C of Things that Might Help

A is for Asphaltia

There is a goddess of parking spaces, apparently. She is called Asphaltia and her invocation goes, “Lady Asphaltia, full of grace, find for me a parking space.” I like it a lot and look forward to more successful parking in future.


B is for Butter-side-up

Caro Jazoni sent me a Vimrod cartoon that said, “If you are worried about having a bad week then post yourself some toast on Monday. Then Tuesday and Wednesday can be spent looking forward to what might come in the post, and then on Thursday the toast will come which will be a treat, and then on Friday it’s the end of the week.”


C is for Cat

Death, and What Comes Next.
English
Afrikaans
Many other useful translations, including Catalonian, here.

All you ever needed to know about Zombies

Over at Making Light, they’re good at grabbing a thing and running with it. They can take a piece of spam and turn it into a couple of days worth of entertaiment. I wonder where they get the time - maybe they actually live inside the internet and their comment threads are like other people’s walking the dog or dusting behind the bookcase.

This particular subthread, which kicks off at comment #53, begins with: “A spammer writes: ‘We will appreciate if you will use the following information to link us back from your web site’. I hope no-one on ML minds, but I’ve been running a Zombies simulation on a 2 Mqbit SQUID using the comment threads here as modelling data. This is not a Vingefied AI system with trapped, sentient copies of the contributors here: the agents modelled are guaranteed soulless empty software shells…”

While I suspect that the stuff re 2 Mqbit SQUID and vingeified AI systems etc was aimed squarely at gaming geeks (because that is the type of alarming language that I’ve come to associate with people of that ilk) and other ML insiders, and therefore not at me, I nevertheless had a lot of fun reading what followed.

They also have what they call a “Ritual deployment of This is Just to Say”, which is always cute. Here’s the Zombie deployment:


This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the brains
that were in
your cranium

and which
you were probably
saving
for grad school

Forgive me
they were delicious
so gray
and so warm

The Sheep Albedo Hypothesis

“Not everybody agrees with the Sheep Albedo Hypothesis. Leading the flock of skeptics is the New Zealand Sheep Farmers Guild. Their spokesman, Steve Ramsturf (no relation) was quoted as saying "Baaah, Humbug. No matter what goes wrong with the world, they're always trying to blame the poor New Zealand Sheep Farmer. First it was the methane belch tax. Now this Albedo thing.”

If you have time to read only one scientifical article today, let it be this one.

Get well Sophie

Sophie the Dachshund slipped a disc. A human slipped disc is dire, but a dachshund slipped disc is hell on earth. Anyone who has ever been in service to one of these impossibly charming dogs will know that the space they take up in one’s life is inversely proportional to their actual size, and when the dachshund is poorly there’s far too much empty space on the couch for her humans to be comfortable rattling around in. So these photos are to help with the cheering up of Sophie’s family and the full recovery of Sophie herself.

1. Angel and Ollie
2. Chloe
3. Rosie

Half of Tom Eaton is Missing!

I speak in my capacity as Tom Eaton’s Number One Fan, and on behalf of all lesser fans, when I say that the Mail & Guardian is a heartless creature. It gave us last Friday’s edition without Viva Gazania and didn’t warn us first. No sky-writing bi-plane, no complimentary gold Lindt bunny by way of apology, no little sample packet of valium stapled on, just a very missing column. Does it have any idea what this does to people? It’s like when you’ve ordered a pizza and they’ve left out the base and the tomato and the capers, and all you get is a mozzarella pancake stuck to the bottom of the box. Or when you’ve gone to get Master and Commander on DVD and get home to find disc 3 of Lost 2 in there instead. Well not exactly like that, because there’s still his cricket column, which is vitally important, but we really need to be forewarned if we’re only getting half of our weekly Tom Eaton.

To cheer myself up a bit I thought I’d transcribe the previous week’s Viva Gazania in here, and was three-quarters of the way through doing that when I discovered that I could just link to it instead, like in the old days. How odd. I remember moaning about it being unfair that one had to subscribe to the M&G in order to access it online. Well, it turns out that I was either hallucinating or being incredibly thick, because it isn’t true now. I don’t know if it ever was. Maybe they’re just messing with my head. Whatever the case, this is a good time to point out that you should not believe everything you read, especially if I wrote it.

- Here it is: “Boetie Gaan Boardmans Toe”, about Ragnarök; and cucumber slices at the Heilbron Spa. http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=301453&area=/columnist__tom_eaton/

Until recently I had neighbours who are actually living this legend, fervently. They’re gone now, to an encampment somewhere, to sit out their uhuru, time is short they say, and I can’t say I’ll miss them at all because they were… challenging, in many ways. It’s difficult to believe that these people are for real, but I can say from personal experience that they absolutely are. They are as real as the Heilbron Spar, which is deeply depressing. I was googling for news of David Bullard after I heard on the radio that he’d been shot, and among the first of the online ‘articles’ to appear was one from a blog called “Why South Africa Sucks”. It’s manned by someone who calls himself the Uhuru Guru. I’m not sure that Mr Bullard would appreciate being a poster boy for this cause, so I hope he hasn’t noticed.

The Carbon Circus

This is a photograph of Atomic Kitten planting a tree to offset emissions from a concert of theirs. It shows their fans that they are responsible girls who care about nature and stuff. Two companies who currently sell this concept are the Carbon Neutral Company and Climate Care. There are many others besides.

Alex, Christian and Beth have set up a nifty website called cheatneutral to illustrate why the offsets business is an acid trip. They did it so well that I don’t have to say another word. See http://www.cheatneutral.com/

Chips it’s the Russians again

There are many fine things about the Russian nuclear industry. For example, it has plenty of radiant women in it, which is why they have the Miss Atom Beauty Competition, open to any woman aged 18-34 who works in the nuclear sector in Russia or other ex-Soviet states, or is studying nuclear science at university. The most glowing among them wins a mink coat, second prize is diamond jewellery and third, a Swiss watch. You can go along and vote at http://miss2007.nuclear.ru/eng/

Another thing is that the Russian nuclear industry has a waste disposal program, which is commendable. It involves such things as burial of solidified radioactive wastes in concrete burial units or trenches, and injection of untreated low-level liquid wastes into deep underground porous rocks surrounded by layers of clay, etc.
Which is pretty much best practice around the world. According to Anthony F. Earley Jr, “The U.S. is producing 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel each year, with 50,000 metric tons held on site at existing nuclear facilities. While that approach may be inefficient, it is perfectly safe. For example, at our Fermi 2 nuclear plant, used fuel has accumulated in our fuel pool which will reach capacity in 2010. We will build a dry cask storage facility similar to the two other facilities already in place at other Michigan nuclear plants. These facilities can safely store waste for decades.”

Russian investigations of potential geologic repository sites are ongoing.

Back here in SA, our former health minister (and there we were back then, thinking Manto would be a new broom) and current minister of foreign affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, has assured us that Russia will be doing all it can to assist us in our quest for more nuclear energy than we could have conjured up in our most febrile dreams. Wonder if we’ll get to host some of their waste in return for the assistance?

7 out of 10 Americans now believe nuclear energy to be safe, affordable, reliable and clean. The world currently has about 442 nuclear power stations. America needs 50 new ones, China’s adding 63, India’s building 7, Russia has plans for another 42, etc etc...

If it sounds like earth’s about to become one giant nuclear landfill, that’s because it is. But let’s not have any furrowed brows and backward thinking here, because it’s perfectly safe, as Mr Early Jr has said. Be positive. We’re all in this together and for the sake of morale we should not go off and google negative words like “Dounreay” anymore ok? Everyone knows that the Scots are either mad or retarded in any case, and those things won’t happen anywhere else.

Everything’s going to be just fine.

South African Ballet Theatre needs YOU

Koos Kombuis wouldn’t mind if the State Theatre got bulldozed. He said:

“Dis nie asof die Staatsteater my koud laat nie. Ek het sterk gevoelens oor hierdie saak, en dit ontstel my, want ek weet my opinie is onlogies, onfatsoenlik en hoogs aanvegbaar.
Om heeltemal eerlik te wees: ek haat die fokken Staatsteater… om die eenvoudige rede dat dit ’n verskriklike lelike gebou is.”

I could not agree more. The sheer ugliness of the State Theatre is only one of many reasons why, if you’re in Gauteng and plan on going to the ballet this March, but you can only afford one ballet not two, you should choose SABT’s Romeo and Juliet at the Civic Theatre instead of St Petersburg’s Swan Lake at the State Theatre. This is not an advertisement, it’s my duty. The SABT is a hard working company with a big heart and a whole lot of soul, and they need us more than the Russians do. Ballet is not soccer or rugby after all, toemaar, dis orraait, we all have our little things and in any case we don’t mind at all if soccer fans don’t feel like going to the ballet. Or rugby ones even. It’s not that we have anything against rugby fans you know, some of our best friends are… where was I going with this? Oh yes –

So St Petersburg are back for a rerun of their blockbuster swanlake and the tragedy is that the Gauteng leg runs alongside the SABT’s season of Romeo and Juliet. Shame, I don’t think they spitefully planned it like that on purpose. But it will puncture the SABT’s ticket sales because people see the words “Russian” and “Ballet” together on the same page and then it must be holy or something so that’s what they’ll rush off to see.

Well the SABT needs us more. Where the Russian ballet companies are their country’s darlings and want for nothing, we have to set up cake tables to raise funds so our own companies can have refurbished sets. And if someone bequeaths a much needed studio piano, we have to have another cake sale for the moving and tuning of that piano. Not that we mind doing it at all, we do it for love. That our dancers themselves couldn’t afford to shop at these cake sales even if they wanted to, is only a blessing if you look at it wrong way up.

Go see Romeo and Juliet. Come on, Swan Lake? A wedding story, with lots of technical showing-off, a gullible prince, a villain who looks like a mosquito who thinks he’s Batman, a wildly eccentric plot (I’m going to be in trouble for this blasphemy) and so many quivering feathers that you can’t see the trees for the tutus? Or Romeo and Juliet. A love story, with swashbuckling swordfighting (ok, foppish fencing then, I can’t tell a lie) and a dependably tragic and satisfying ending. Go for it.

If you happen to hate ballet and would rather stick pins in your eyeballs then sorry for putting you through this.

Celebrity Malfunction Resolved

James Clarke agreed to judge the Silvery Tay Poetry Competition!

He has been hailed as a National Treasure and duly showered with thanks, rose petals, and blessings for his fields. You can find out who won here: http://ppomes.blogspot.com/

We expect great things for next year's competition.

Bliksem!

Neil said recently: “Blogger is being grumpy.”
And even more recently he said: “Blogger's just giving me error messages.”

So it’s not just me then. And Neil’s own son works for the great google.

I rest my case, see previous post, and I have hurled some terrible and resounding expletives at them.

One should never swear unless it’s absolutely necessary because the point of swearing is being able to shock people out of their boots when you need to. If you do it all the time there’s no effect at all. I hope blogger is really, really shocked now.

The unbearable coolness of cooler

Nothing’s allowed to be simple.

Blogger has new frilly things, and we must use them whether we like it or not because google’s not letting anyone in anymore unless they’ve converted. We must have the new Cooler Stuff and we must be grateful to the genius boys and girls who spend all their waking hours making blogger a better place, a funner place, a cooler place, a place that rocks harder than myspace, dammit. I wonder if there’s a cool ceiling? What happens if all the cool gets used up? Beyond cool there is cooler, but can there be cool beyond coolest? How would we survive in a world without cool? There was nothing wrong with blogger, it worked fine and it was simple and that is a fact. But it wasn’t cool enough.

I often wonder what would happen if these geniuses turned their supercharged boff-ness to the solving of some of the real problems we face in this century. Anyhow I had a bunch of things to say but I have to take a crash test tour of idiotic Cool Stuff instead and I might use expletives so let me just keep quiet for now.

If I find a nice new colour scheme I might get cheered up though.

Patricia?

Long ago, James Clarke cemented himself properly into the mosaic of my soul’s fountain when he advised (in his Stoep Talk column) on how to deal with telemarketers.

It goes like this: you gather up your best honeyed tones and say something along the lines of, Yes, how wonderful! Could you hold on just a moment while I let the dog in/close the door/turn the radio off? You leave the phone off the hook and go finish your supper. They will hold the line for absolutely ages, I’ve even tested it by going back after 5 minutes and saying, so sorry, don’t go away, be with you in a moment. They’re patient and determined. They will hold. These are genuine people just doing their job of course, at least (surely?) for the most part not the vivisectionists or kitten-drowners we suppose them to be. On a good day one could even imagine that they busy themselves on the other end with embroidery, or sudoku, or emery boards. Fzzzht fzzzht, yes I’m still here yes I’ll hold. It’s nice to be on the power end of that please-hold thing for once, you know? I have whiled away many a pleasant hour like this. If there’s no one else around then I draw the curtains and treat myself to a sort of tiptoe toyi-toyi crossed with an air guitar solo, complete with theatrical soundless guffawing and gesturing with fingers at the receiver, and that’s also quite nice although it isn’t ladylike.

Since I haven’t been able to get hold of Ms Lewis, and since today is supposed to be the day that we find out who the winner of the Silvery Tay Poetry Competition is, I must assume that for some terrible reason she might not be available after all. So if we don't have a winner by midnight tonight I’m going to to ask Mr Clarke to stand in for her, because 1. I don’t think anyone’s ever given him the chance to wear tumbling blonde tresses and nine inch nails before and that’s kind of unfair, 2. He needs to practice the Wearing of the Lycra for the upcoming Tour De Farce in Spain, 3. He knows Pomes and, 4. At worst he could only say no but if he did he’d do it very kindly because he knows who my dad is.

Wish me luck!

P.S. This will of course mean that we might have to wait a couple more days to find out who the winner is.

The Absolute Absurdity of Carbon Dioxide Shortages in SA’s Beverage Industry

Item 1. God Bles Ms Lewis

Oh, frabjous day! The Lovely Ms Lewis is to be the first ever Judge of The Silvery Tay Poetry Competition! Here’s what she said:

“Dear Sivlery Tay
I heard about this on www.blondextenshuns.co.fu, and am delighted to inform you that I would LUV to be the judge on your poem competition. No one's ever asked me me this before and I was beginning to wonder why. In, fact, I'm prepared to put the winning poem to music for my next konsert - A Tribute to Bles - to be held at the Krugersdorp jukskei stadium in March.
Stay in touch.
Lovies
Patricia”

Isn’t that wonderful? I just knew this year was going to be all filled with pink and purple and stars and puppies!


Item 2. Oh, Woe

A pernicious condition of the universe has made it impossible for me and a keyboard, never mind internet access, to be in the same place at the same time for long enough to hit send or publish, for some time now. But I did it I did it, although now I’m off again and it’ll be a good three more weeks ‘till I get my planets back in a row. Then I’ll give a super-sizzling Account of it all. I think.