I agree with the Eskom Man

As everyone living and travelling in SA knows, we are having some trouble with our power supply. We’ve grown so fast that the grid cannot cope, no-one seems to have predicted it, and then there’s the trouble with that bolt (?) at Koeberg. We are helpless as babies, of course, plugged into and completely dependent on the matrix, and people sit around gnashing teeth and rending garments waiting for the power to come back on. The boss of Eskom got really upset in a boardroom recently, where there were wraparound windows with all the crisp Cape Town daylight anybody could possibly need for a meeting pouring in, and where every electric light in the room blazed nonetheless. “Turn them OFF!” he raged. He mentioned that we’re greedy and excessive and we’re part of the problem, and I completely agreed with him. Many didn’t, including David Bullard, who went on to pen a sarcastic and indignant paragraph berating the man for urging us all to be less wasteful. The gist of his angst is that THEY (meaning whoever is in charge of anything at any given time. My kids say that Chuck Norris is THEY) are incompetent gits and THEY’RE making excuses and THEY have a duty and THEY’RE failing us.
But I still agree with the Eskom Man. We DO have to learn how to use less. If only we had a global Mao-type entity to initiate a re-education programme of some sort to this effect, with really steep penalties like execution or something for failure to comply. We won’t do it ourselves, by choice, so someone’s going to have to dictate it.

I got Tagged. Huh? I’m usually about three light years behind any given current development but it made me feel kind of important, in a sad little way. Tagged? By Toutatis, What does this mean?!? It must be a Marketing Ploy! But no, it’s one of those circulatory pass it on things. This one doesn’t seem to come with dire warnings about what will happen to you if you don’t pass it on, so there isn’t any fun in not-passing-it-along-on-purpose-just-to-see-if-the-terrible-things-happen. May as well pass it on then… Thank you, David.

Four jobs I've had:

Window Dresser
Waitress
Illustrator
Starship Navigator (at school they called it “tends to daydream”)

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Pi
Life Aquatic
Finding Nemo
Galaxy Quest

Four places I've lived:

Blantyre, Malawi
Chirimba, Malawi
Johannesburg, S.A.
Cape Town, S.A.

Four TV shows I love:

Star Trek
Voorblad
Going Nowhere Slowly
Fawlty Towers

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven't seen:

Highly regarded and recommended by the general TV-addicted public? I don’t even want to know.

Four of my favourite dishes:

Noodle soup
Toast with peanut butter
Macaroni cheese
Bread & butter pudding

Four sites I visit daily:

- not online daily, but most frequently I visit:
neilgaiman.com
hereinmyhead.com
a couple of blogs: do they count as sites?
bizcommunity.com (out of a sado-masochistic compulsion to observe Marketing People in their natural habitat, and also to amuse myself by irritating them as much as possible with pernickety comments. They are very easily irritated and sometimes I have nothing better to do when my brain gets empty. Which is sad, sad, sad I know but we all have our vices)

Four places I've been on holiday:

Zimbabwe
Mozambique
Botswana
England

Four albums I can't live without:

Tori Amos, Scarlett’s Walk
Loreena McKennit, The Mask and Mirror
Zakir Hussain, Making Music
Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley

Four places I'd rather be right now:

Navigating a Starship
Sitting on the shady bench overlooking Diana’s Eco Shrine in Hogsback
Reading a book on the stoep of one of the beachfront cottages in Keurboomstrand
Having an ice-cold whatever’s-going at midday in the dark, cool Waenhuis in Nieu Bethesda after walking the dust roads on a particularly dry, hot and windy day.

Four other people I’m tagging:

Dio
Owen
Neil :-)
Desmond Tutu