We made a lunch stop at Houw Hoek Inn today and while in the play area, the kids saved a couple of toads that had fallen into the pit beneath the ground level trampoline.
They were surrounded by the desiccated bodies of their brethren (the toads, not the kids), and thus seemed very happy to be released safely down by the river there.
As the year comes to an end and the holiday season kicks off in South Africa, so 6000 miles… will be cutting down (mostly) on the verbiage for a short while. Family time, sunny beaches and braai’ing will take precedence over blogging for a couple of weeks.
That doesn’t mean that you should wander off though. And thus, as some sort of retainer, I’ll continue to post each day on here, just to keep things ticking over and to make those in the freezing North jealous. There will just be fewer words and more pictures. Like a Tumblr, but better. Think of it as going back to your childhood and learning to read again.
Jérôme Vadon’s Problem Solving v3.0 takes national stereotyping to a new and hilarious level.
Very clever. Find him on Facebook here.
A wonderful piece here by Richard Poplak on the parody twitter account of the new star in the shambles that was the Memorial for Madiba in Johannesburg on Tuesday. We’ve moved on from Selfiegate, forgotten that Zuma got booed and, having completely ignored Mandela himself, we’re now looking at the seemingly ever more bizarre and inconceivable story of the fake interpreter. I didn’t really agree with Richard’s first piece on the Memorial, but this is gospel:
The Memorial Signer holds the only flashlight in the midnight dark of the rabbit hole. Follow him, my friends, and no other. For he leads us to the only truth worth hearing: there are no truths at all worth hearing.
Such parody accounts only really work for a short while – infamy is transient – but while they do, it’s an opportunity to have a smile during what has otherwise been a pretty crappy week for South Africa.
Things we shouldn’t forget about: Nkandla and the fact that Jacob Zuma allegedly just signed the Protection of State Information Act 41 of 2013 “Secrecy Bill” while we were all looking the other way (c.f. Jo Moore’s “A Good Day To Bury Bad News” Memo of 2001).
UPDATE: And @MemorialSigner ties it all together wonderfully:
[redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [censored] #POSIB
— MemorialSigner (@MemorialSigner) December 12, 2013
Lending strength to Poplak’s assertion that he was the only sane person on that stage on Tuesday.
UPDATE 2: Yes, as Jacques points out below, the SA Media has us all of a tizz by wrongly announcing that the POSIB had been signed into law. (And thus providing an excellent case for greater regulation of the media. Well done.)
After this from yesterday, an overtly politically biased, but timely reminder that a snapshot is exactly that: merely an image of a single moment in time which might not be representative of the mood and feeling of the rest of that particular day.
Some interesting photographs here, which the writer feels were deliberately ignored by the “conservative news outlets”, who apparently “manufactured a controversy about an AFP photo of President Barack Obama shooting a selfie with Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt”.
My answer – while accepting that yes, it was a snapshot, a single moment (see above) – if you don’t want news outlets to make a meal out of the US President (and others) taking a selfie at a memorial ceremony, then maybe the US President (and others) shouldn’t be taking a selfie at a memorial ceremony. Don’t give them the ammunition in the first place.
Simples.