Not just a river in Egypt…

It seems that there is an element of denial in the national psyche over here after South Africa lost in the semi-final of the ICC Champions Trophy to England yesterday. Now, I don’t want to harp on about this, although the self-flagellation amongst the locals shows no sign of abating, so it’s obviously still relevant (and raw).

But there was this on the IOL news website:

crickTry, if you can, to ignore the formatting issues and look at those options. Because the blame game must be played.

Might I suggest a fifth option though (even though there’s blatantly not even room for that fourth one)?

How about “England“?

Maybe it wasn’t the best SA cricket performance ever, but then, maybe they weren’t actually allowed to play well. I mean, perish the thought that the opposition were actually better than them. We could never admit that though, could we?

Come to think of it, where is the story here? The Proteas lost to a better team, a team that is above them in the ICC rankings, a team that played better cricket than they did yesterday. ‘Choking’ (in this context, rather than a buxom celebrity cook context) is when you lose a game that you were expected to win – or you lose from a winning position. That didn’t happen here.

Oh – and Dale Steyn was injured, you say? – well, we’ll be sure to make a footnote in the history books for you.

Shark encounter

A few days ago, I posted this about tracking sharks off the West Coast of the Isle of Man.

Well, last night, some people popped out in kayaks to… well, to have a kayak, I guess and they saw a shark close up.
Like – really close up:

Blog IMG_5463

Blog IMG_5499

More amazing photos via that link.

Remember that this is a Basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) – a completely harmless* plankton eater, so these guys are completely safe. Not like if you were out surfing in False Bay and you saw a fin that close. Briefly.

* unless you’re a plankton.

Giorgio

Hot on the heels of the 6000 miles… Album of the Year 2013 post, herewith a really good remix of one of the tracks from one of the contenders, Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories:

[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/orphicbass/daft-punk-giorgio-by-moroder[/soundcloud]

Evidently, it’s an eminently remixable album, as proven by the overwhelming response to a Soundcloud search: you could literally spend days and days on there. And then you could accidentally stumble across some Pet Shop Boys remixes and then you’d be there for another week or so.

But that would be very naughty, because you have better things to do, like filing, completing that spreadsheet and wondering if Jenny from Accounts wants to pop out for sushi this evening.

Or whatever it is that you office people do.

Also, have a listen to this one.