That particular attack came while research into False Bay’s shark population was underway and, of course, there were immediate and vociferous allegations that the two were linked, although this was later rubbished by independent experts. However, the surfing community is still generally unhappy about humans dumping blood into the sea because that attracts sharks which then allegedly eat the surfers. You can see this unhappiness here, with quotes such as:

I don’t like the idea of chumming. 20 years ago, we never saw a shark at Muizenberg. Now we see them regularly.

and:

…anything that brings sharks closer to humans isn’t good.

It seems that surfers are obviously concerned about the danger of shark attacks. Who knew?

All of which brings me back to that Cape Times article today. Aside from a few stats on the shark-spotter programme, it also mentioned some natural chumming:

An injured pygmy sperm whale beached itself at Surfers Corner in Muizenberg on Saturday and the red warning flag was kept up to caution the public that its blood could attract the presence of sharks.
The red flag indicates a recent sighting and a high shark alert.

And how did the surfers react?

hundreds of surfers remained in the water to take advantage of good waves.

So really, how bothered are surfers about chumming? Not much, it seems, when a DYING WHALE FULL OF SHARK ATTRACTANT is spewing its load into False Bay right next to their Mecca, they just carry on surfing.
Why on earth would they do that? Let’s ask an expert, surfer Gary Kleynhans, who was there on Saturday:

The surf is cooking! I understand the shark spotter programme is a safety measure and I appreciate that. But if surfers want to go surfing, they will.

I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and it seems to me that when a bloke chucks a bucket full of blood into the sea, that will attract great whites, but if a whale beaches and releases a whaleful of blood into the sea, that won’t.

Especially if the surf is “cooking”.

Am I alone is seeing a slight dichotomy here?

Nope. Vladimir is all tucked in there. And thank goodness, if the rumours of his immense statue are to be believed. Apparently, “Once you go Red, you never go back.” Or maybe it was all propaganda.

I’m not publishing the JZ picture on here, not because I disagree with it being painted, drawn, whatever, but because I really have no compulsion to have a stylised image of Mr Zuma’s parts on my blog. If you want to see “it”, then pop over to this M&G story on the subject.

But come now, it’s just another big fuss over nothing. In protesting, the ANC have now ensured that the Streisand Effect is in full force and the 99.99% of the nation that was wholly unaware that a picture of the President with his fly down even existed are now marvelling at… at… Murray’s work.
It’s fantastic publicity for Murray and for the Goodman Gallery for what, to me, resembles a GCSE art project (but with a willy). If the artist is trying to portray a message with his work – and apparently he is – it’s been thoroughly lost in the rumpus around JZ’s bits being on display. If you want to send a message through art, maybe go back to throwing loo rolls into trees.

Meanwhile, the “freedom of speech” brigade are out in force again, citing Constitutional rights as they always do when this sort of thing happens. And, of course, they are right: Murray is well within his rights to illustrate the genitals of anyone he wants.
But I would love it if despite the fact that Brett Murray had the right to paint JZ’s genitals, he chose not to. Just because you’re allowed to do it, just because it’s your right, it doesn’t mean that you have to. And yes, the ANC has its knickers (not depicted) in a knot over this and it’s all awfully silly, but there really was no need to have done it in the first place. Except to earn the fat fee that some stupid overseas buyer has paid for it, I suppose.
Meh. Brett should head off and find something else to do that actually benefits the country.

As for Jacob – if he didn’t want the picture painted, he should never have agreed to pose for it.

Because:

Greater Manchester Police are investigating a scam in which victims were conned into handing over hundreds of pounds for a bag of potatoes.

The story, which I spotted on BBC News, using the keywords “Manchester”, “Potato” and “Scam”, leaves us tantalisingly short on detail.

Police say at least four people have been approached by two men offering to sell them a laptop or iPhone.

One man paid up to £1,400 and walked away with a rucksack full of potatoes. Other victims received bottles of soft drinks.

Crime, and being a victim of crime, is a terrible thing. It’s in no way a thing to be ridiculed.

Except perhaps, when instead of getting an iPhone for his hard earned £1,400, the victim walks off with a rucksack full of potatoes. Which, it should be noted, would be equally good at displaying Flash content.

How can this have occurred? I can only imagine that there was some sort of hypnotism involved.

You are feeling sleepy…
You are feeling restful and sleepy…
When I click my fingers, you will awaken and believe that this rucksack full of potatoes is an iPhone worth £1,400.

And then, when they get home and the spell wears off, they have to go down to their local police station and report that they thought they were buying an iPhone, but actually, they ended up with a rucksack full of potatoes. And the police have got to keep a straight face. Jeez.

Still, it could be worse, I suppose. They could have ended up with a handful of Blackberry.

Always good to see someone managing to deal with apparent food-poisoning long enough to have fun with her friends.

Please note Melinda’s (almost) immediate response to her error: “VERTICAL!! I meant vertical!”.

Of course you did, love.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Public Protector stated:

Ms Madonsela stated her concern to colleagues that there had been no incoming requests from the DA for her to investigate any government department, government minister, government linked company or parastatal for almost 24 hours.
This is an unusual situation and had worried Ms Madonsela as the DA contributes over 95% of the investigative work for our office. On the DA’s insistence, we have investigated the Health Department, E-tolling (twice), SAPS Building Leases, Sicelo Shiceka, Richard Mdluli, Jacob Zuma (thirteen times), Susan Shabangu, Oilgate, Bheki Cele and the POIB.
And that’s just off the top of my head. Which they have asked for an investigation into as well.
They submitted no request for any investigation into Minister of Labour Nelisiwe Mildred Oliphant, however, they then submitted a request for an investigation as to why there had been no request for an investigation into Ms Oliphant.

There is much speculation that other DA requests to the Office of the Public Protector, and which were rejected, have not been made public. Rumours suggest that these included the decreasing size of Woolies’ prepared fruit salads, the lack of sunshine in Cape Town last August and the suddenly anatomically-confusing animal designs on Iced Zoo biscuits.

The spokesperson added:

They [the DA] also called for an investigation as to why the Public Protector had investigated the DA-controlled Midvaal municipality, as they never asked us to investigate that. That was a bit of an awkward moment.

However, there was much relief in Ms Madonsela’s office as it turned out that the lack of email requests was because of a Telkom ADSL fault in central Pretoria.

The DA immediately called for the Public Protector to investigate Telkom, by fax.

I mentioned previously that his sense of humour was impressive. And now he’s missed out on the 27 Club, there’s really nothing to die for anyway, is there?

So now we know…

Now, it appears that the Russian youth are at it as well.

According to PetaPixel:

If you’re afraid of heights you may want to look away, and you should certainly never make friends with these daredevil photographers from Russia. We here in the U.S. have memes, young Russian photographers, it seems, have “skywalking”: the newest extremely dangerous photography fad to hit the Internet.

Skywalking basically involves a photographer making his way up to a death-defying height, and snapping a photo that’s meant to give you both a perspective you’ve never seen before, and that feeling like your stomach just made its way into your throat.

And that post links through to Russian photographer Vadim Mahorov’s photoblog, which has an awesome mix of “skywalking” pictures for you to Luke at (geddit?!?) and some great Urbex stuff as well, à la Silent UK.

Prepare to lose PLENTY of time having a look at the rest of the site – it really is full of amazing examples of urban photography.

We’ve all had that cheeky seagull have a pop at our chips or our ice cream, but this time, the boot is on the other tentacle, as a juvenile glaucous-winged gull ends up being lunch for a Giant Pacific Octopus.

The event, witnessed by Ginger Morneau, her husband Ken, and brother Lou Baker at Ogden Point Breakwater in Victoria, British Columbia, is rare, but not unheard of, and is described in full here.

The Giant Pacific Octopus can be seen regularly patrolling the shallows of the shorelines around Victoria. They primarily feed on crustaceans, but are known to occasionally take fish and even birds. Octopi are extremely intelligent animals, and great problem solvers. Although they live only about four years, they can grow to have a span of more than 20 feet and to weigh more than 100 pounds. This one wasn’t that large, but it was still an impressive individual. What was even more impressive, though, was that it had one of its tentacles wrapped around the head of the gull, holding it under water.

It’s likely that the gull may even have been picking and pecking at the octopus before the tables were turned. Bear that in mind next time you’re devouring a supposedly harmless pizza. It may just rear up and bite back. Or… er… not.

Once the gull was drowned and the struggle over, the octopus took its meal back down into the icy depths of the Salish Sea. (Actually, I have no idea how warm it is, but it looks pretty chilly.)

Octopus 1-0 Seagull

Afrikaans rapper Jack Parow says he is “cool” about being led off the stage midway through a concert in Newcastle when his lyrics upset some in the audience, and that he had a “rad time” regardless.

Parow, whose real name is Zander Tyler, was taken off the stage at the Vodacom Winter Festival on Friday night when a group, upset by his lyrics – which included profanities – physically threatened him.

One man nearly jumped on stage, but was pulled back by police called in to help festival organisers with the group.

A war of words erupted on the Newcastle Newspaper’s Facebook page, with people calling Parow a “satan slang (devil snake)” and a “disgrace to the Afrikaans language”.

Now, I can take OR leave Mnr Parow and I can HAPPILY manage without swearing in my music, but seriously now, what were the audience expecting? It’s like turning UP to a Metallica gig and “hoping they don’t play anything too loud”.
I have kids and I try to shelter them from swearing (amongst other things) as much as possible. That MEANS not taking them along to Jack Parow gigs (amongst other things). No matter HOW backward Newcastle is, the allegation that this performance was instrumental in corrupting their youth is a bit OTT.

Parow, unsurprisingly, was unabashed:

Parow said he was singing his song Dans Dans Dans when the microphone was taken from him by an organiser and he was led off stage. He then noticed police trying to calm a few men beside the stage.

“Some people don’t like the swearing. I was singing ‘Dans, dans f***en dans’. This one guy was shouting at me and said: ‘Why are you f***ing swearing?’, but that was funny because he was swearing at me.”

As you will have noted above, all of this has (typically) reared its head on Facebook, WHERE a couple of comments by Anthon von Lisenborgh have captured the imagination of some individuals and INTRODUCED random CAPITALISATION to popular culture:

The biggest IRONY for me is that Jack Parow’s shortened act followed that of Afrikaner Steve Hofmeyr (and whom Anthon comprehensively fails to accuse of being an “Artist of Satan”), a man perhaps BEST known for his racist rants, being divorced by his wife after having “numerous affairs”, assaulting the female editor of a popular gossip magazine and being described by the Deputy CEO of the South African Institute of Race Relations as being a disgrace to South Africa and of using his “not insignificant following to sow anger and hate among young white people”.

When it comes to role models, it would seem that the Afrikaans culture is struggling somewhat, but while Jack Parow CONTINUES to use the F-word (and he will continue to use the F-word) Anthon seems conveniently blinkered to Mr Hofmeyr’s shortcomings.

UPDATE: A bit more on Anthon – he’s written a book: Apocrypha 999 – The Mystery of Solomon and Queen Bilqis of Sheba - and in his author bio (filled with MORE random capitalisation), he includes THE line:

…do with it as you feel fit or do nothing if you want, it is up to you to decide and not me.

Obviously, the same doesn’t apply to concerts in North West Kwa-Zulu Natal.