More of the Same

Well, I hope not  I’ve been trying to find one of the recipients of this little letter to no avail. Phil normally answers mail promptly but has disappeared – so, if you get this Phil, it would be nice to hear from you. I did contact Staffs university to try and find you.

The humidity has started late this year – well, for me. Sonali has been fanning herself for months. The mercury this Sunday morning is 32C and the sea breeze is just about to start up. The aircon in the bedroom has been on every night for months. Mrs. Perimenstrual never seems to cool down. It’s always struck me as odd that folks in the UK and in SA hate the weather in February for entirely different reasons.

The year staggers on. Valentines is around the corner, shortly to be followed by Easter. It goes by faster and faster. I have been jacking up my own sites, a process that has taken far longer than I thought – and is still not quite finished. I also have a student for a few weeks. He’s going to go to Canada so I have speeded up his lessons to three a week. He wants to go to Calgary, a town where the winter freezes the flat spots on car tyres.

Life, at least for the moment, has assumed an almost dreamlike state, ambling across time.

Be Gone, Foul PCB

I had an electronics throwout the other day. I had one a year or so ago and got rid of the big Technics hifi and the vinyl setup, all of which were clingwrapped and despatched to the garage loft. This time it was the DVD player, media centre and DVD recorder (the DVD bit of which had long since packed up). It had a hard drive that I could pull nothing off but I took it out anyway – it’s 360GB so can be used as a backup for something.

The whole lot has been replaced by the laptop which plays anything. The media centre wouldn’t play .wmv files for instance and of course, DVDs. Any media that a computer can play, it plays. We’re  down from five remotes to two. And a mouse.

I did take a very brief look at streaming devices such as Chromecast but all they do is stream streaming video. Attached to the laptop is 8TBs of storage so there is always an offline source. Sonali has got stuck into Smartflix with the global Netflix catalogue with the result that she cannot make up her mind and we spend the evening viewing the guide. She tends to settle on Iranian films which are generally very good.

I’m halfway through a History of Islam. There’s so much in it, I’ll watch it again. I saw a copy of the Koran in the library which I will eventually take out. My cousin Pete read Hitler’s Mein Kampf last year and was very impressed by it – with the exception of the Jewish extermination bit (I hope).

The President’s Got No Brains

It’s been a ‘get stuck into Zuma’ couple of days. I see this morning he’s getting flak for his cosy relationship with the Guptas – an über-rich Indian bunch. A bit like the Tories and Google?

If there was any doubt that the pervading assessment of Zuma as being two wives short of a harem it has been dispelled recently. The man’s a devious crook, hiding behind an oafish exterior.

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Still, there is hope …

… the official opposition DA had a rally in Joeys which I thought was very impressive.

There are municipal elections in a few months. The last time, the ANC barely held on to Joburg. After the latest crass stupidity – Nkandla, three ministers of Finance in a week and the consequential loss of investment – we’ll see. The DA has a young, articulate (not illiterate like Zuma) black leader now. Zuma claimed last week the the entire rest of the world would fit into the continent of Africa.

Apparently the reason that the first Minister of Finance – of the three we enjoyed in one week recently – was sacked was the following: El Presidente was allegedly having a scene with the woman currently running SAA into the ground. He is also big buddies with Al Bashir of Sudan who he should have arrested whilst on a visit to SA.

He wanted SAA to run a route to Khartoum – uneconomic on a big scale – and was supported by the woman head of SAA. The – then – Minister of Finance, Nene objected on economic grounds and refused to let the deal go through. And was duly given the boot by the idiot.

… and on the subject of elections …

With the exception of Bernie Sanders, the rest are horrific. Trump at least is milking the widespread distrust of the US government. But as a president?

Trouble at’Dump

I think my days of reloading down there are over. The recycling operation has been outsourced to some bunch who resent pickers like me. I had a little altercation with one of their number who informed me that I had to ask permission to remove anything – with I suspect, a small financial outlay. I will endeavour to establish a modus vivende but I fear it will not work.

Light Relief

Migrants have been getting in the news lately. During the recent xenophobia upsets here in SA, good old Nandos got stuck in straight away. You can’t say that we don’t call a spade a spade. With the continual demands from the more melanotic of our brethren for claims on ‘ancestral’ land, they conveniently forget who was here already when they migrated south in the 18th century.

Sonali was watching a documentary on arranged marriage in India and this old DsTV ad came to mind. I love the father’s expression at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5HLsvwLPpQ

The Reptiles Move

They are getting too big for the toolbox. So, the veg patch under the stoep will be raised  by 3ft and a 6ft by 3ft by 1ft pond set into it. I have bought the filter and pump that will be necessary to keep 500 litres of water clean. I will try the filter out on the existing tank with 200 litres of pea soup. If it will get that clean it will clean anything. The pump I have bought is at least twice as powerful than that required because the turtles are filthy bloody things.

Everything has been drawn out and a rough bill of materials made. I now have to engage someone to do the job. It means laying around 100 blocks, adding three cubic metres of soil and setting up the pond – which I still have to get. I will lay the concrete slabs and do the rest of the top stuff. I think we can keep at least one if not both of the curry leaf trees but the rest of the jungle down there will have to go.

When we built the thing originally in 2004, I could have made that little area the same height as the stoep but as it was destined to be a veg patch, rather keep it out of sight. Which of course suited the monkeys and other noenoes (insect pests).

This is a fairly expensive operation (around R7,000) so will be regarded as an extension to the garden that will also accommodate turtles. The hardest bit of course is to find a local bodger who knows one end of a concrete block from another. There are ‘pond setup specialists’ in Chatsworth and I will make contact but I suspect they will want a fortune for a couple of days work.

I will take another look at the pond in the Pinetown shop next week.

An Untoward Word

Every New Year, thousands of Africans descend on to Durban’s beaches. The beaches are cordoned off to taxis and buses some weeks before. All sorts of tales of defaecation, slaughtering goats, drunkeness and sundry violence emerge. How true they are I don’t know. All the locals keep away from the beaches over this time.

A hapless south coast estate agent complained about the behaviour, calling the perpetrators ‘monkeys’. The predicted shitstorm  duly appeared and she was excoriated and lost her job. She only need have used the word ‘locals’ and everyone would have understood.

Gareth Cliff, a local Idols judge weighed in with a complaint that free speech was under threat. He also lost his job at Idols, duly took legal action and has got his job back – with I would think, a huge payout.

BTW

Huge upgrades at Kyalami…

Pedal Bin Blues

I think you know where this is going.

Some years ago we bought one of those black plastic and chrome bins. Looked fantastic and professional. But, ’twas not to be – Chinajunk all dressed up. The first thing that went was the little foot thingy on the pedal which was just tack welded. Then gradually, over the years, the whole thing has disintegrated – the plastic being real cheap stuff.

Eventually, all that happened when you stood on the ‘punji’ stick that passed as a foot pedal was the that whole bin tipped onto your foot – lid completely intact and unraised. So my last attempt was to add some rubber door blocks as legs. These raised the bin to the point where the operating pin went over centre so you ended up bending down and opening it by hand. The design idea is not bad – just shitty construction.

So, tomorrow, we’re off to Springfield Makro to a) buy 50kgs of palm oil (for soaps and the deep fat fryer) and b) a new bin. There’s also a big plastic shop there we’ll take a look at.

Needless to say, there’s been a wide variety of bits requiring repair and modification over the last weeks.

Right, all of you. I hope that the year is going well for you.

Phil