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These three pics were taken in Hermanus. The last one is at Hemel En Aarde dam, the middle one at Kwaaiwater, and the top one taken from the cliffs just west of there – the dark blob in the water is a Southern Right Whale, just the top ten percent of him, about forty (maybe less) metres away. I get so beside myself with this that I can’t take proper pictures, and so I missed the rest of him. Nearby was a mother and her calf, they were just moseying around contentedly. Further out in the bay about a dozen others were leaping clear out of the water, and slapping their tails, and generally showing off as though they knew we were watching. Which, of course, they did. How do you know that a whale knows you’re there? If you’re standing on a cliff with a whale in the sea below you, and he rolls so that one great eye looks directly at you, you know that he knows. It’s nothing short of awesome, and it makes this silly world we live in seem irrelevant.
Apart from the whales, the sheer beauty of everything within a three hundred kilometer radius lets you know you’re somewhere special. There’s a valley here, called Hemel En Aarde (Heaven And Earth), and that’s exactly what you get. Who could ask for more?
I am completely in love with Hermanus. I will live there, soon. I’m doing everything in my power to make this happen. I’ve decided this, and once I decide something it’s practically carved in stone. I don’t decide things very often, something has to be monumental before I decide on it so hear ye, hear ye: I will live in Hermanus. I will grow old there, happily. Mark me.
I am a very bad blogger. Sometimes, I even forget I have a blog. Today, I remembered, and shuffled over to see if it was still there. It was. Is. Bugger. Did I write all this? How is it that I have time to write this much waffle? And it’s not like I didn’t ask myself, at the beginning, when a blog seemed like an exciting sort of thing to do, how is it that people have so much time to write such waffle? So I knew what I was in for.
But really, what’s this all about? It isn’t real writing or anything and I don’t think anyone thinks it is. At the top end I suppose it’s all about traffic, and the point of it is probably equally divided between peppy popularity and product placement. But down here at the pond-scum end, it’s just us little amoebas whiffling away about whatnot. And haven’t we figured it out by now: the internet is not real life and 99% of the people who live there are not real people? Yes, of course we have. We watch the next generation blissing out on some myspace hallucination, and we know they’ll grow out of it. Or will they? It’s different now. Mind you, all old people say that, when they don’t feel like getting their heads around whatever new thing.
Doug Shaw loves me. He said so. And not just any old Doug Shaw either, but Doug Shaw Prime. THE Doug Shaw! Not just Doug Shaw the arch villain, or Doug Shaw the mad professor, or Doug Shaw the trapeze artist; but Doug Shaw Himself. Doug Shaw loves me because I mentioned his name so many times, a couple of posts back. So this is how it works, eh? Mention someone’s name enough times and they find your blog, just like that. And then they either love you or they hate you. Doug Shaw loves me, Mandy De Waal hates me: 50/50 odds, not bad… Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman. Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman...Tori Amos…
So, Doug Shaw Prime, thank you for solving the Doug Shaw mystery. I’d leave a grateful comment on your blog but I can’t, it won’t let me. I’m not going to push it by hacking either , not because I can’t (he-he), it’s just that I’m dead scared of that half-a-cow corpse you have in your freezer…
Dear readers (all three of you :-) ): you can see the corpse for yourselves by going to http://revdj.livejournal.com/ and scrolling down a bit.
But, seriously: are people googling themselves or something? ‘Cos, how does this work? What are the chances of you stumbling across your name mentioned on one of a zillion piddly blogs, just by accident? If I google myself I don’t get anything at all. I am unfamous. Infamous would be more interesting and probably quite lucrative. But I’m not going to go there because I still have living relatives and there’d be hell to pay.
There’s a difference between a coffee shop and a Coffee Shop. In a Coffee Shop, you’ll get high-concept, applied to a hundred franchised outlets nationwide (or thousands, worldwide). The overwrought menu will feature high-octane shooters with porno names, novelty ‘coffees’ and power smoothies, frou-frou fusion folly on twenty different types of stale bread slapped together according to the formula by underpaid high-turnaround staff. There is no owner, there’s a holding company. The manager will not be able to change the CD because there isn’t one, there’s a permanent shuffle of twenty prescribed popular trax. The rows of jars on the counter are décor, filled with coordinated coloured water. If you ask for Marmite toast they won’t have it. The patrons will be posers. They’ll click their fingers at the waitress impatiently. They’ll be networking, networking, networking. Many of them will have sunglasses on top of their heads. They’ll be loudly animated and will check to make sure everyone else has noticed how happening they are. You will not be allowed to ignore them.
By contrast, a coffee shop will serve real coffee, and you can ask the owner to change the CD if Eros Ramazotti’s annoying you. A coffee shop is where you can spend the space between the time and, unless a large table of lost Coffee Shop creatures has wandered in, which seldom happens, you can even spend it in peace. The décor is as invisible as good typography. If there’s a row of jars on the counter, they’re full of macaroni, or pickles, or tips for the kitchen staff. You’re assured of human kindness in a coffee shop, and of a menu which might be full of typos and amusing spelling but offers things that nourish, and that you can recognize. You’ll get honest sandwiches at a coffee shop and you can always get Marmite toast. If they’ve run out of Marmite they’ll trot down to the Spar and get some. Your fellow patrons will be people. They’ll greet the waitress warmly. They’ll be reading tabloids/Tolstoy/Time, or writing lists/letters-to-the-editor/literature, or chatting face to face. Or they’ll be playing backgammon, or agonizing over the lotto numbers. By and large, they’ll keep their business to themselves. You can eavesdrop if you want to.
So the coffee shop which used to be my home away from home is gone. One day it was there, and the next it was covered in paper which said, exciting new Coffee Shop opening soon. Sure enough, some weeks later, there was a Coffee Shop, where my coffee shop used to be.
This coffee shop thing is a symptom of a world gone Meta.
So is Wikipedia. I’ve been troubled by Wikipedia for a good long while now. I tell kids to stay away from it. But why? They ask. I stop just short of answering: because it’s the devil*, and say instead: because it’s often not accurate.
But it’s worse than that. Wikipedia is The Borg. And more direly even, it’s the Borg without a Queen.
Don’t get me wrong. In some ways I admire the The Borg (and I love dinner-time conversations that become incendiary when someone suggests that the solution to humankind’s angst could be to just go Borg), but everyone knows that there must be a Queen. Without one, the hive-mind disintegrates into useless units of hapless confusion. There are people who have found Wikipedia entries about themselves that range from wishful thinking to downright false, and after they’ve gone in and corrected the entry, they return to find that some kind soul has incorrected it back again. That’s the thing about popular opinion and the way it becomes canon, despite reality. The aggregate wins.
It also seems lately that Wikipedia and Google have some sort of galactic domination arrangement. I used to get a good variety of results on a Google search, from academe to news to popular opinion and all sorts of psychedelic stuff in-between, and I could more or less make my own mind up as to whose information I would get the most benefit from. These days, I have to sort through the first three pages of search results with a fine-toothed comb to get something that’s not Wiki. There’s a lot to be said for keeping information in context, and for keeping sources intact. When everything’s flattened out by aggregate, you get muddy puddles in isolation, with no paths leading to and from. When it comes to plain old information anyhow, I want a meritocracy. With Wikipedia, how do I know if the person telling me a thing is qualified to tell it?** And if all information is to become cast in this type of format in the future, as some people think it will be, what will there be to compare it against? There are whispers in certain circles, predictions of the imminent birth of artificial intelligence from deep within the womb of Google itself… who’d have thought? We thought it would be humanoid at least, didn’t we? Nuts and bolts, with an operator’s manual and an Off Button maybe – but humanoid. Or caninoid, or whatever. Reassuringly recognizable anyhow.
Wikipedia as AI’s 2-IC… I don’t even want to think about it. Not today. I’ll think about it tomorrow. Rhett, oh Rhett.
*What is the devil? Fundamentally, it’s things that scare us. It’s also things we don’t understand, and things that threaten to displace us, and things we can’t be bothered to investigate further. It’s the tokoloshe under your bed, it’s over here, it’s out there. It’s different things to different people and usually boils down to fear. So Wikipedia is not the devil, then. But maybe Google is.
**With apologies to The Cosmic Cabman, who does actually write good stuff for Wikipedia. If you wrote it, Dio, I’ll ratify it without question. This is flagrant cronyism of course, which excludes me from ever being considered by a lucid panel of experts for the post of Wiki Queen. Actually, Afrikaans Wikipedia is at this point probably a really reliable source of info, if only because the online community is small and cozy enough (by web standards anyhow) that everyone knows someone so credentials can be cross-checked… and anyone writing an inferior article risks have his biltong confiscated…
I’ve become Tom Eaton’s Number One fan, I hope he feels honoured.
Regarding his book, The De Villiers Code, some silly interviewer asked him: “As a South African writer / storyteller did you set out to write a story South Africans will recognise as their own?”
My Tom answered: “No. I set out to write a story that South Africans would recognise as Dan Brown's. Stephen Fry described The Da Vinci Code as ‘complete loose-stool-water’ and ‘arse-gravy of the very worst kind’, and while I think he may have been a little charitable, he was going in the right direction. It's not the gullibility of people that offends me. I'm also not a religious person, so I don't get worked up over the arrogance of assuming that 600 pages of drivel by a write-by-numbers typist can reveal what 2 000 years of scholarship couldn't. What I really mind, though, is that his excremental writing goes unchallenged. You wouldn't let a stranger stand in your living room for hours on end, shovelling faeces down your shirt while he screamed, ‘You're a moron!’ So why would you let Dan Brown do it?”
(The whole interview’s at http://www.litnet.co.za/ricochet/homebru_tom_eaton.asp )
The De Villiers Code is one of the most wickedly funny things I have read in a long time, but there’s a catch: you have to read The Da Vinci Code first. You’ll need one of those protective pointy silver foil hats that they wear in the movie Signs; it might help to stop your brains from leaking out your ears, but it must be done. I did it, and look, I’m still fine aren’t I?
At a Star Trek thing I was at last year there was an individual going by the name of Doug Shaw. He said that he was a writer of books on economics, and was busily speed reading (both of which habits I associate with psychopathic conditions) through a huge book (the kind you could use as a weapon) on the History of Western Philosophy. He had a tense, unhinged charisma and a scar on his cheek and struck me as being someone on whom I could loosely base one of the villains in a story that I'm working on. So who was this person? I embarked on an epic google, but it turned out that trying to find a specific doug shaw is tricky. There are hundreds of them. They even have a collective website, dougshaw.com. But then, if I were a real villain, I might also purposefully choose a name that allowed me to get lost in the crowd.
I finally found one with genuine villain potential. A MENSA member with a scheme for every occasion; a rampant capitalist whispering into the ear of politicians, offering the planet up for sale in so many ways; the host of strange pay-at-the-door parties and then: the piece de resistance – some sort of rabid underground religious evangelist. ACME Evil Genius! Absolutely perfect! I don’t even care if he’s not the right doug shaw! So, Doug Shaw, if you’re reading this (no, the other doug shaw. No, not that one, the other one… ) I hope you don’t mind too much. It’s a compliment.Verily, my friends (and VERILY, my enemies!!!), I have risen up in the world. I have been quoted and also shamelessly flattered in a real article by a real editor lady: http://www.women24.com/Women24/Columnists/Article/0,7173,12-147_9791,00.htmlThe article is all about silliness, and how it’s okay to be silly, and about how silliness can actually save the world. I am vindicated, and newly galvanised to the promotion of the Great Way of Silly. From now on, this blog will be nothing but silly, silly, silly!
A friend recently failed the Scientologist's personality test. This is unfortunate, as I was hoping for a contact on the inside. I don't know any practicing Scientologists but I know people who claim to have escaped Scientology, and they're reluctant to discuss it - they seem a bit embarrassed and a bit broke, and one gets the feeling they'd rather just forget about it altogether. I'd very much like to know more about the interesting Scientology story regarding the alien ruler Xenu who fixed the overpopulation problem on his 76 planets by bringing millions of people in for a tax inspection, then drugging them and shipping them off to earth (presumably unpopulated at the time), where he had them stacked around volcanos before nuking the volcanos. The way I understand it is that most personality problems experienced by people today can be attributed to the fact that the lost souls of those unfortunate nuked aliens attach themselves to humans, clinging desparately to some vestige of existence and causing all kinds of schitzophrenic glitches in the average human's matrix.
Of course, this might just be a story made up by anti-Scientologists to discredit the religion itself. I don't know. One of the most interesting things about this church is the vehemence of its opposition. Something which is so hated by outsiders must surely be hiding great truths. Or not.I wonder, if my friend made a substantial enough donation to the church, maybe they'd ignore the failed personality test and let him in. He can infiltrate, and we'll be able to see if all these stories are true. I mean, if I could prove that I had thousands of anguished alien souls hanging onto my aura, it would explain a LOT.
...tell me your favourite song, you go ahead let your hair down...
This blog began as a medium through which I could stay in touch with friends and family all over the globe and in particular, with my sister B who was living with us at the time. That’s funny, hold on, let me check that… Yes it’s true: so I could stay in touch with B although we lived on the same property, in the same house in fact. It didn’t work quite the way I’d planned – I thought I’d make chatty, newsy day-in-the-life type entries. Looking back at the blog I’m laughing at all the concrete evidence of best laid plans coming to ruin…
But I don’t think I could stay in touch with my own pinky finger, quite frankly, because I have too many Fishies. Fishies are those bubbles that some people have in their heads. They go, “plook, plook” in the silvery depths and mostly it’s like Chinese torture, although sometimes, on really lucky days, it’s like an epiphany, or Christmas-tree lights. Some people have Nebulas, which are pretty much the same thing, just more sophisticated. I always felt odd because of them, and never fitted very well anywhere, least of all in my own real life, until I discovered Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” some years ago. The character Delirium, who often trails a flock of bobbing rainbow-fish balloon-things and seldom makes sense in the traditional meaning of the word, was a revelation to me because I already knew her so well. I felt a bit better about my own fishies after I met Delirium because although she’s odd she’s basically a good person. When I discovered much later that Neil and Tori Amos were friends, and that Del was partly based on Tori, the world began to make a whole lot more sense to me, non-traditionally of course but nevertheless.
Anyhow, this is to say, I’m sorry about all the Fishies. There are a handful of people in this world who I love too, too much for words, among them: Ray; my Terrifical Teenage Daughters; Mom and Dad; B; Weez; Mom Joss; Nu; Dio; Migi; Choz; Alli Cat… if you’re reading this, guys – thanks for putting up with me.
A while ago, after reading up about carbon trading, I wrote something about our planet being able to withstand the ravages of human nature, that for all our delusions of grandeur we could never actually destroy it as such. Destroy environments conducive to the wellbeing of our species and others, sure, but not destroy the actual planet. Well, I was wrong. It IS possible. See http://qntm.org/destroy
! A request has been made to this blog. It comes from none other than a Compliance Officer (Resistance is futile). So: One of Two, also known as Nu, having been mightily impressed by our (patent pending) mouse-over-and-waft Sniff-n-Sneeze© plugin, asked that we develop a mouse-over-and-spell-check gizmo for the comment box. It seems she’s been unable to access the Natural Comment nano-betaframe thingy itself because of blogger-VS-word cut/paste (ERROR!!!DINGDING!!!FATAL:ERROR!!!! put your hands on your head and drop your cookie settings now:ERROR!!!) non-compliancy Issue no: 73.9. You know the one. Ok, fine, we’ll see what we can do but personally I think that this is just a terrible excuse - we geeks (hehe) know the error’s actually to do with her Sink Notification Socket. Thingy. And the way she always forgets to charge her Svchost Antimatter Modulator – I mean really, it’s no wonder.
Captain-Postman Pete said he’d tried to look at this blog but suddenly everything went all funny on his keyboard. So he tried to blame me for dropping some or other virus on him. Oh puh-leeez, come on. Pff. Like, I don’t have better things to do than script viruses all day long and fling them at non-geek friends and family. People like us (us geeks, you know) must just take a deep breath and count to ten, I suppose. So in the interests of the sanity of geeks (like me) everywhere, I have added to the FAQ. Sigh.
FAQ continued:
7. Why does my computer wig out when I look at/try to post comments to your blog?
Either a.) You're technologically challenged and should not be allowed within a 10 Km radius of any computer or b.) You have some heavy internet karma.
I can't help if the answer's a, but if it's b I can't help.
So try this: Go into the garden and find a portable-sized rock. Talk to the rock, let it absorb your frustrations. Feel the power of the rock. Respectfully pick the rock up and carry it to where your computer is. Place the rock gently on the desk near the computer. Now, while wearing a red knitted hat with a bobble on top (like the ones they wear in the movie "The Life Aquatic") inside which you have hidden a moth's wing, a blue marble and a flat penlight battery, sit down in front of your computer and switch it on. When the desktop appears (or, when it doesn’t – like if after waiting for over an hour all you get is a black screen with an ominous dos prompt instead of a desktop, for instance), put your right hand upon the rock while addressing the machine thus: "you bloody bastard computer, don't mess with me or I'll hit you with this rock." Then, phone a geek and request an emergency consultation. While waiting for him, keep your hand on the rock and your eyes on the monitor, scowling dangerously. When the geek arrives, have him look at the computer, but all the while, do not let go of the rock. The geek should have the problem sorted in no time, because in my experience too-big-for-their-boots computers always respond very well to geeks when there is a primed rock handy. This is a seriously dark and deep binary magick, you understand, so while you are performing this entire ritual it might also be an idea to have a shaman (or other intermediary) available, to intercept any demons which might want to take advantage of a rip in the fabric of spacetime.
If this fails (because nothing is perfect), then try seeing the loss of all your stuff (treasured letters form far-flung friends and family, for example; or your entire portfolio) as being a wonderful opportunity to start afresh. No, really. For heaven’s sake, stop crying. And next time, back up.
I often carry on about my computer getting dragged into black holes but this time it really did. Apart from trees falling down on phone lines and stuff… long story but the short of it is that I now have a new phone line and a new computer too. Not sure if I’m glad because I must admit that not having a computer or a phone line did free me up for other pursuits, like painting with real paint; reading real books; writing with real pens etc - not that I pursued any of them besides the reading but I did have good intentions. Anyhow, alas/alack, now I’m binary bound and shackled once more.
This laptop takes a little getting used to. It doesn’t have the patina that my old monster had. Doesn’t make the same comfortably familiar Cranking Victorian Machinery noises, like an old and rusty (but faithful) robot-dog called up out of its basket for a spot of reluctant cat-chasing. But it’s okay. It will do.
I was amazed to find that famous people have been leaving entertaining comments on this blog in my absence – ok, one semi-famous person anyhow. See “Poet as Hired Gun”. I had thought that this blog was fairly innocuous and a bit boring, with at most about five occasional readers, but it just goes to show. This month it was Mandy De Waal, she-poet who runs with wild horses (?) in the Magaliesberg, and still manages to hold up a well paid day-job too. Mandy doesn’t do garrets, and is ‘empowering’ other ‘poets’ to follow suit. There is a lot of Added Value in it.
Here is a comment posted by Gwen Watkins to Mandy’s original article about poetry and business, which can be found at http://www.biz-community.com/Article.aspx?c=18&l=196&ai=9575
“The concept of using poets to pursue a political agenda is hardly new, nor the idea of persuading workers that "imaginative" ideas will in any way set them free.
Many poets were used by the state or tacitly wrote to please. For as many freedom poets as you can find, I can find those that glorified the state. Even Shakespeare was not above twisting the truth so as not to annoy Queen Elizabeth I – the play Richard III is not in the least accurate but the truth did not set you free in those ‘enlightened’ times – it put you in the Tower of London.
Poetry is about the flight of imagination – it springs from deep and true emotions. It’s something I have done for forty years but never on command. Shaped poetry to achieve an end is no longer poetry and as for praise singing – its very name tells you exactly what its purpose is – propaganda set to rhythm.”
Which was very well said, I thought.
I've decided to put all my grudges aside and be more mature. So, forthwith, I will no longer be mean to Marketing People. I won't make sarcastic blog entries about Marketing People. I won't post any more irritating comments to Bizcommunity. I will live in peace, and let Marketing People live in peace too.This I swear, so help me gods.
A triptych:1 Kieron Dwyer is in big trouble. He subverted Starbucks. After he’s been sued to smithereens, no doubt he’s going straight to hell. Not many can parody a mindset so eloquently, and this thing is a work of art, so damn and sue me - I’m posting it. (For the full story go to http://www.cbldf.org/pr/001130-starbucks.shtml)
2
The people in charge of protecting the interests of the brand integrity of the film Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes™ sent Neil a letter threatening to sue if he does not remove a link to AOTKT’s official website. Not that Neil did ever actually link to that, um, illustrious entity in the first place. Initially, he was amused, thinking it might be some kind of prank by Dadaist Lawyers, but was disappointed to find that it was not. Anyhow, if you have nothing better to do (e.g., if you like watching lawyers make asses of themselves on behalf of people who think too much of themselves; and especially if you hate vegetables), you might want to scuttle off to these urls and be mildly entertained:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/03/mystery-dada-tomato-threats.html
http://www.tomatoesareevil.com/ (links page, although the Link That Caused All The Trouble doesn’t exist. Anymore.)
3
Authors and other artists often use cultural markers to help describe the particular ‘flavour’ of a scene. Some brands get so interwoven with a culture that they become like unto salt for the table. But a couple of the big guys are unhappy about the use of their marks in fiction; worried that overexposure will result in “trademark dilution”. If they get their way, you won’t be able to say the word “Harley” in a story about a biker anymore. And don’t use Nike’s name in vain ok? Or Else. No more free advertising, guys. If you want to advertise McDonalds in your story you’ll have to pay them for the honour.
So instead of writing something like, “In a fit of depressed defiance she ate an entire box of Quality Street,” you’ll have to write, “…she ate an entire box of those assorted toffees and chocolates in various brightly coloured foil and cellophane wrappers; you know - the kind often given by pupils to teachers at the end of a school year.”
“Poets will no longer live outside the fringes of business, but will become increasingly commonplace within the heart of the corporation as cultural decoders, praise singers, mediators between management and labour and as a facilitator for forging a new paradigm for leadership.” - Mandy de Waal
She says this with a straight face. She believes it too, deliriously caught up as she is in the evangelism of Marketing. Mandy has in her trinity: the market as father, brand management as son and ‘poetry’ as holy ghost. One gets the feeling that her holy ghost is her wild card - ‘Poetry’ is just so hot right now.
Thankfully, we can trust genuine poets to evade this new career that Mandy is so excitedly marking out for them, because one of poetry’s many functions is to expose precisely the kind of speech she sells for what it has always been – rhetorical verbiage. Spin and praise-singing by their nature can never claim the edge of poetry’s diamond blade. No deal, Mandy. Whatever you put out in the name of Marketing Almighty won’t really be poetry, and those who devise it won’t be real poets. Deep down, you know this, Mandy.
(Besides, what corporation in its right mind would invite poverty and chaos by admitting a poet to the inner sanctum? And in any case, the vital elixir of attic dust wouldn’t settle well in gleaming boardrooms. You’d have allergic reactions all over the place)
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
