Sign Him Up!

After last night’s dreadful, dire, downright emboeressing Bafana Bafana performance at Cape Town Stadium, I’m not sure I want to mention Norway, but I’m going to anyway. Here’s a Norwegian doing something with balls that only Titak Elyounounssi managed in 90 minutes of the worst football I can remember seeing in years – kicking them accurately to other people and sticking them neatly and skilfully between some posts:

The Norwegian in question is Harvard Rugland and unsurprisingly, the New York Jets American Football team is very interested in getting him to come and play for them.

At a time when people are increasingly taking to social media to showcase their talent, Rugland might be on the verge of going from viral-video-of-the-week to pro athlete. “I never would have thought it would come to this,” he said during a recent phone interview from his home in southern Norway. “I put the film up mostly for friends and family. But as it turns out, there were a lot more people who liked it. It’s overwhelming.” Must be, for someone whose only previous experience with football was the European soccer version, and who has only a sketchy familiarity with the rules of the American game. Living in Aalgaard, a town with less than 10,000 people, he started kicking for fun about a year ago after his local soccer club shut down and he needed another outlet.

Rugland went over to the US for training and trials in November and has been invited back for further evaluation in March this year.

UPDATE: The music is The State of Massachusetts by, appropriately enough, Dropkick Murphys – YouTube.

Cool Flight

It was an emotional time for family 6000 yesterday afternoon, as we said goodbye to Grandma and Granddad, who were (well, are, actually) flying back to the UK via Dubai. Checking on their check in though, I spotted this:

DSC_0053

Yes, at 2330 yesterday evening, you could get a flight from Cape Town to Amsterdam or… Antarctica.
Who knew?

Better make sure you get on the right plane to avoid confusion though:

Hey. Shomething ish not right. Why ish dare sho much shnow at Schipol?
Where are the buildingsh? And where did doze penguinsh come from?

The whole destination thing is a bit vague, and since the total area of Antarctica is 14,000,000km², you might find yourself some distance from the bit of Antarctica you actually want to be in, but on the plus side, at least you’re virtually guaranteed a daylight landing.

Beautiful phone, beautiful city

As these things do, my “new” Sony Xperia T smartphone – the flagship of the Xperia range – has been superseded by the new flagship of the Xperia range, the Xperia Z. It is an absolutely beautiful device, and the advert is filmed in Cape Town, which (obviously) is also absolutely beautiful.
Together, these two facts make it unavoidable blog fodder:

To be honest, aside from a slightly larger screen (not something I wanted anyway) and a couple of video enhancements on the Z, it does appear that there’s not an awful lot to choose between the two handsets, and thus I remain very happy with my phone.

UPDATE: Dammit. Just seen that it has 2GB RAM. OK, that’s quite a lot to choose. But I still remain very happy with my phone.
*seethes quietly*

In terms of units sold, Sony certainly isn’t Samsung just yet, but once users onto the fact that it keeps producing really, really good top-end mobile hardware like this, surely its market share will deservedly increase.

Three times nothing is still nothing…

I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations again.

During January – November 2012 (remember back then?), I was stopped a total of zero times in roadblocks in and around Cape Town. But hey, I’m an individual case with a propensity to stay home with my family on Saturday nights, so maybe that – while demonstrating that if I had been doing anything naughty on the roads (which I wasn’t), I would have got away with it – is actually fine.

Then, early last month, we were informed in an interview by Robin Carlisle, MEC for Transport in the Western Cape, on a local radio station that motorists were “three times more likely” to be stopped in a roadblock in the province during the “holiday season”. During that “holiday season”, I racked up well over 2,000km on the roads of the Western Cape. I was stopped a total of zero times.

Those rudimentary mathematicians among you will have already done the sums (or read the title of the post) and worked out, like me, that Robin was absolutely right.
The upshot of his worryingly accurate prediction has been a 6% increase in the number of deaths on the Western Cape roads during December, something Robin refers to as “disheartening”.

I’m well aware that the issues of drink driving, dangerous driving, cellphone use and not using seatbelts should be negated by sensible and responsible individual choices. Sadly, we also all know that that’s not going to happen.

But that aside, as we have mentioned many times before, it’s all very well for the authorities to go making these promises and commitments, but unless they’re actually going to back them up with solid action, things are not going to improve.