Tuesday, March 27, 2007

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

Monday, March 19, 2007

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.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

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/

Monday, March 05, 2007

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.

Friday, March 02, 2007

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.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

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.