Getaway

We’re out of town for a few days (beaglesitter services have been engaged), and while I love the urban environment, I’m very much looking forward to being surrounded by nature, and there’s one thing I really, really won’t miss.

Leaf Blowers.

And – in case you needed to be told – they’re actually absolutely terrible in every way shape and form:

There are many reasons to hate leaf blowers. They are loud and their sole purpose is to over-manicure nature. They disperse debris rather than gathering it, and they kick dust and small particles up into the air.

The world is not worse off if the leaves are left unblown.

The article goes on to lament the additional inefficiencies and detrimental effects of the two-stroke petrol engine. To be fair, our local daily blower is electric, but every morning it’s still right there in your ears for an hour, being annoying and useless, forcing people into poetry:

Leaf Blower

Leaf Blower
Scourge of the suburbs
Nosily moving the street detritus from your bit.
To my bit.
Briefly. For Nature will put it all back again
.

Just now.

No leaf blowing where we’re going. Well, just natural stuff.

I have been assured that there is wifi, so I’m sure I’ll be in touch again tomorrow.

Until then…

It was supposed to be so easy

So goes the song by The Streets, in which our protagonist (it’s Mike Skinner from The Streets) has a simple few tasks to get through one day, but then, much to his dismay, each one goes awry.
And yes, I had a whole list of jobs ahead of taking my daughter horse-riding, ahead of the end of year football dinner this evening, but there was time.

Until things went a little bit wrong. Sudden unexpected washing and ironing. Some packing and shopping (we’re going away tomorrow, but more on that then) and a driving lesson and a trip to the pharmacy and and and…

Probably most worrying of all, the beer supplies for tomorrow’s trip, supposedly being delivered by Pick n Pay’s ASAP service appears to have been taken away by their AWOL service. I have been assured that it will arrive before 3pm. Earlier, they seemed pretty certain that it would arrive by 12pm.
I’d cancel the order, but they’ve very much removed the money from my account already.

It’s fine, I need the extra anxiety.

I’ve done all that I can do now. Camera gear and clothing is packed. The horse-riding is approaching rapidly, and from there it’s a rush back here, a dive through the shower, and an Uber to town for the footy festivities.

And a release from a rather stressful day.

Damn those Imperialist forces!

Just in from serial government clown Fuckile Mballoona [sp.], the Secretary General of the ruling ANC party here in South Africa, this:

He’s been spouting this sort of nonsense for many years now.

And I mean, you never rule anything out in the politics of this country, because it’s like one constant Bob Mortimer story on Would I Lie To You?. It regularly seems completely fanciful and utterly unbelievable, and then it turns out to be absolutely true.

But this one? No.

Come now. The only imperialist and neocolonialist forces with any influence in the upcoming elections are the Russians and the Chinese, and they’re both right behind the ANC. But they’re got their work cut out, given that the actual voting public are fed up with the lack of service delivery, the loadshedding, the rising crime, the cadre deployment, the constant corruption, the dysfunctional state owned enterprises, the poorly-controlled inflation, the plummeting Rand, and the tossers in charge.

Could any (or all) of those be the reasons that the ANC has been singled out as a party that must lose power?

Well, it’s either that or it’s the CIA.

And I know where my money lies on this one.

What the hell is going on, is it Chemtrials ?

Chemtrials? Is that what they do to see if Chemtrails are going to work?

UCT is partnering with NASA who (perhaps unsurprisingly) have some really amazing scientific equipment, in order to survey and map out the incredible biodiversity of the Western Cape.

They’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, as this July 2021 story attests:

And then, when it was closer to the six week period mentioned in the article, there was plenty in the local news about it. From NASA, from the Daily Maverick, from Times Live, from News24, and other local sites.

But that hasn’t stopped the tinfoil hat brigade from assuming that they’re here looking for gas (it’s ok, we know where the gas is already) or controlling the weather (?!?) or doing “Chemtrials”. Ugh:

“Specifically Mossel Bay”, she states, then showing all of the places that they flew, which very specifically doesn’t include Mossel Bay.

“Need to see if their planes were flying in GP [Gauteng Province] before the hail,” she adds, referencing a recent hailstorm in Johannesburg, before not doing anything about actually looking to see if their planes were flying there at any time. Which they weren’t, and which she could have looked up on any flight tracking system, since this not exactly hush-hush classified NASA mission is being shared across all of those platforms.
Of course, their planes are residing at a clandestine underground villains’ lair on the tarmac at Cape Town International Airport.

It’s like the worst top secret mission ever.

@_iduchess above describes herself as “a critical thinker” (actual lol), but despite the multitude of replies on her tweet telling her about the joint UCT/NASA collaboration, she is doubling down on the tinfoilery.
Oh, and she’s anti-vax as well.

Same whatsapp group, every time.

And then there was this dream [screenshot here] that our erstwhile “critical thinker” shared, and then declared:

“Many people have been having dreams lately but as always umlungu [white people] will say “it’s climate change” and the sheep will believe umlungu over us.”

Ah yes, the casual racism slips in. We’d been missing that, and:

“The dream clearly states that the Melikans are not here for a good cause but rather for their own depopulation agenda ..”

Of course they are, dearie. Now, here’s a nice cup of tea and your evening medication.

But there is one thing that you can see from her “is it Chemtrials ?” tweet, and that is that her “news” comes from Tiktok – see the screenshots she shares. This seems an unusual place for a critical thinker to obtain high quality knowledge and information, but as recent surveys have shown, more and more young adults are getting their news from that app, and that’s quite worrying, mainly because it’s often absolutely full of shit like we can see above.

There is a school of thought that says that the loonies have always been there; it’s just that they never had a platform before, so we never noticed. But the problem is that they have clearly found a platform now, and they’re still loonies.

What can we do about this, given that these people will also likely base their election choices on what they read there? I’ve said this sort of thing before, but it really does belittle the democratic process when someone who believes in “Chemtrials” has the same voting rights as a sensible human being.

Eish.

Hopeless

It’s been a weekend filled with local violence, the occasional threat against Cape Town schoolchildren, more of the usual disinformation and misinformation and more of the usual hyperbole and histrionics.

Unsurprisingly, social media has been a particularly unpleasant place to be, with a complete lack of tolerance throughout, and no willingness or effort to listen to anything that anyone on “the other side” has to say.
Ebola has nothing on the replies and threads that follow just about any article of comment on the situation in Israel and Gaza.

If there were such a thing as Biohazard Level 5, this would be it.

Reasonably, I wanted away from real life for a few minutes. I thought that I would find solace in the Daily Challenge on Geoguessr. And indeed, I seemed to have found it when I was unceremoniously – but happily – dumped in some semi-rural backwater in Pennsylvania. Peace. Tranquility. Half a world away from all those problems.

And then I turned myself around and found a glorious metaphor for the world at the moment:

Could it have been put any better? Sadly not.

Anyway, once we were done with that, I was popped into a forest in South East Latvia, which was much less telling about the general worldwide state of things.

And thus, much nicer.