Reluctant Nomad

All is well with me

2007-05-29T15:00:00.000+01:00

I am around, I am fine and there isn’t anything preventing me from blogging apart from lack of interest.

Nothing dramatic has happened in the past few weeks (although Queen’s Day celebrations were a real eye-opener!) but there has been more than enough material to blog enough had I had the urge. While I’m not obliged to blog, it really has been very remiss of me to completely ignore the comments on my blog and several emails that have expressed concern about my ‘disappearance’. Blame it on lethargy, bad manners or something completely different. But, whatever the reason, it’s no excuse for completely disappearing and not reassuring worried readers that all is well with me. For that I do need to apologise.

Sorry!

I owe two people (Terri and Angel) my responses to being tagged by them so when I do get to blogging again, my responses will be given top priority. Until then, I’ll probably be rather quiet.

Kryptonite really exists!

2007-04-24T07:16:00.000+01:00

Not that I need to tell you this, but, according to Wikipedia, kryptonite is a fictional element from the Superman comic book series. The element, usually shown as having been created from the remains of Superman's native planet of Krypton, generally has detrimental effects on Superman. The name "kryptonite" covers a variety of forms of the element, but usually refers to the most common "green" form.

Researchers of the Rio Tinto mining group have found that the mineral actually exists!

After its discovery, the researchers enlisted the help of Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum:

'Towards the end of my research,' says Dr Stanley, 'I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula, sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide , and was amazed to discover that same scientific name written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns'.

'The new mineral does not contain fluorine and is white rather than green, but in all other respects the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite. We will have to be careful with it - we wouldn't want to deprive Earth of its most famous superhero!'

Read reports here and here. Although kryptonite's discovery has only just been reported, I was impressed to see that Wikipedia had already been updated with the information:

In April of 2007, scientists found traces of a mineral matching the chemical composition of kryptonite, in a mine in Serbia. The mineral found does not contain fluorine and does not emit a green colour, instead it is white and emits a pinkish glow when exposed to ultraviolet rays. Nevertheless, the mineral is essentially kryptonite. It will formally have the name of Jadarite, named after the Serbian town where the mine is located. Most importantly, the mineral is harmless and has no known dangerous or toxic properties.

Now that kryptonite is no longer fictional, will I get to find my Superman?

Today is Four-twenty

2007-04-20T17:17:00.000+01:00

Not heard of the term before? Nor had I until today. My son told me about it - he heard about it for the first time yesterday.

From Wikipedia: 4:20 or 4/20 (pronounced four-twenty) is a term used in North America as a discreet way to refer to cannabis and, by extension, a way to identify oneself with cannabis culture. Phrases such as "420 friendly" sometimes appear in roommate advertisements, indicating that the current occupants are tolerant of cannabis users.

And this site tells me that Hitler was born on this day in 1889.

Father and son stuff – teach him properly

2007-04-19T13:02:00.000+01:00

Read part 1 here.

A couple of hours after he arrived here, I took my son for his first stroll around Amsterdam. He was overwhelmed. A rush of new sights and sounds engulfed him. The sensory overload was obvious - his eyes shone like those of a kid in the proverbial candy store It’s not his first trip overseas but it is the first time he’s had an adult’s freedom in a European city. Not just any European city, either. This was Amsterdam! He’d seen several coffee shops when we’d taken the tram to my flat from Central Station but we didn’t see one for at least 5 minutes once we started our stroll.

‘Where’re the coffee shops?’ he asked.

I pointed out the first one we passed. ‘Let’s go in,’ he said.

‘No, not yet, there’re lots of them around. Later.’

At that stage, I was still pondering the quandary of whether having a joint with him was cool or not. He was definitely going to have one at some stage, probably sooner rather than later. Perhaps I’d go in with him and have a drink while he had his first legal puff? Or we’d just go in, have a look then walk out again?

As we got closer and closer to Walletjes (the red light district), we saw more and more of them. If anything, delaying the moment when we finally entered one, was definitely uncool. I saw one that also served alcohol. In we went.
Read more..

Father and son stuff - cool or uncool?

2007-04-18T09:09:00.000+01:00

Having not been around my son for most of the past 5 years, I’ve missed out on most of his ‘coming of age’ events. You know, important things like when he first got pissed. I don’t know when that happened. Probably several years before the time when he and his friends redecorated the kitchen, sitting room and front lawn with pools of their vomit. I may not have been there but I heard all the gory details. Has he lost his virginity? I’ve no idea. But he’s the sort of kid who’d let his parents know. Perhaps not actually volunteer the information but he’d readily discuss it if asked. I do, however, know his tastes in music (evolving) and clothes (unchanged) of the past few years.

So, two years ago, being told that he’d been called a ‘wigger’ by a group of Bishops boys when seen at Cavendish Mall with the friends he usually hangs out with didn’t surprise me at all. Style is symbolic of identity. That’s not an absolute truism but, as generalisations go, it’s a good one. Rap and hip-hop are often associated with drug culture. Nowadays, they’re also associated with misogyny and homophobia, things I know he’s not guilty of. Recently, his tastes have veered towards dance music. To some, ecstasy may be a bit passé but, not so many years ago, it was synonymous with dance music. So, do his music tastes say anything about his attitude towards drugs? It’s so easy to generalise and get things horribly wrong.
Read more..

Read part 2 here.

Today's UK Investment Tip

2007-04-16T16:26:00.000+01:00

In the UK, an increase in the cost of postage gets advertised several weeks/months in advance of the price change. First and second class stamps are designated as such, ie the monetary cost is not printed on the stamp. Next time a price change is advertised, buy stamps in bulk before the price change and save handsomely.

The recent increase in first class postage was 2p per stamp. A 1000 pound purchase of stamps would give you a healthy 20 pound return on your investment. Keep them beyond the next increase and the return will be even higher.

Clever, huh?

Now I wonder how long it would take for you to use/sell a 1000 pounds worth of stamps? Mmm... quite a while, I should think. Let me check with my colleague who told me about this scheme, having recently done it himself.

Pin-ta-nel

2007-04-16T12:32:00.000+01:00

Dutch television really isn’t the best. Yes, I know that Endemol (inventors of Big Brother) is Dutch but doesn’t that say it all?

Pin-ta-nel (*).

It’s all panel discussions, game shows, dire pop music (you really have to see and hear it to believe it!) and ads.

Pin-ta-nel.

Not only do the ads go on and on and on, but many of them are way too long. Some of the funny ads are no longer funny by the time they end several long minutes later.

Pin-ta-nel.

British 'yoof' television is bad enough with its weird camera angles and 'yoof' slang – watch Channel 4 over the weekend and the British version of MTV and you’ll know what I mean. The Dutch variety is worse. Pin-ta-nel. It follows a similar format but seems more dependent on overly enthusiastic voices and sentences ending with forced shouts. Pin-ta-nel. You should see the ringtone ads. Pin-ta-nel. Awful. Fucking awful, I tell you! Pin-ta-nel. Pin-ta-nel. Late at night, it’s all bare boobs and pouts luring you to ring premium rate numbers and visit sex sites. Surely no one falls for that stuff?

Pin-ta-nel, pin-ta-nel, pin-ta-nel!! It’s driving me mad!

(*) Dutch web domain (.nl) as said in Dutch: punt (fullstop) en el. Talking of web domains, why is it they some countries don’t have the ‘co’ in their web domains? Instead of dot-co-en-el, here it's dot-en-el. Not that the constant repetition of punt-co-en-el would sound any better, mind you.

I’m surrounded by them!

2007-04-11T16:05:00.000+01:00

The big boss is one, the head of technical writing services is another, as are most of her team. I’m talking about sexual deviants. You know, poofs and dykes.

Although I already have my own personal faghag in the office, no one else 'knew' about me in the office until Sunday when I bumped into the big boss at the Amstel Tavern. He didn’t seem surprised to see me there but if he did wonder if I was a fellow deviant on my entering the place, I’m sure it didn’t take him long to be sure of my credentials as a card-carrying poof. It was one of those nights where the last few hours of it no longer exist. I even lost an item of clothing, my coat, à la 'my favourite jumper'.

I saw him today. He approached me with a huge grin on his face. My grin was probably of the sheepish variety. Apparently, I didn’t do anything too embarrassing although I was seen gyrating oddly. Standing up and on the dance floor, I hasten to add.

Unlike my jumper, my coat hadn’t been kidnapped by an undesirable. I retrieved it last night after my Dutch class.

I’ll probably discover a whole lot more of the fraternity when I attend the monthly GALA get-together at Café Rouge tomorrow evening. My faghag discovered its existence today and emailed me about it. Now I'm their newest member.

For an organisation that tries to be 'inclusive', even allowing hetties to become members, it doesn’t have such an inclusive name. Obviously, GLBTA doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as GALA does, but what about all the B’s and T’s in the organisation?

"Check this out. Amazing!"

2007-04-10T08:20:00.000+01:00

The first entry on Scripting News effectively ushered in the first blog 10 years ago. In the intervening years, these online diaries have been touted as the future of media, labelled "pathetic drivel", and caused court cases, prison sentences and international incidents. But love them or loathe them, bloggers around the world have ensured incredible growth for the medium.(full article here)

Ten years ago, I'd just finished my MBA and was already a very seasoned user of the web. Blogging didn't enter my radar until some three years later when I read an article about blogger.com. I liked the idea, printed the article and put it in my file of 'interesting things', planning to return to it some day. The file gathers dust on top of the bookshelves in Cape Town.

Fast forward another four years and I was introduced to my first blog by Mike. After a brief stint of 'guest-blogging' on his blog, I set up this blog with its first entry entitled 'Test'. And that was that for almost a year when I began blogging in earnest. Sadly, that memorable first entry disappeared into file thirteen.

Eighteen months later, I'm still here, wittering on about nothing despite often wondering why I do it.

Procrastinating by posting

2007-04-05T10:11:00.000+01:00

I’ve got a major deadline to meet today and I just don’t feel like doing the work right now. It’s all about averages (rolling and otherwise) and excesses to do with facility limits and outstandings for related borrowers and outstanding groups. You wouldn’t feel like doing it either, right?

So, being true to my character, I’m procrastinating.

After visiting most of my usual websites, I had a look at my blog stats to see where my visitors have been coming from. Seeing what gets people here via search engines can sometimes be quite amusing. Ages ago, procrastination and boredom even led me to post the results of my analysis of how search engines were reaching me.

Today, I’m going to do the same:

best carrot cake: The best carrot cake recipe in the world
Cheek fucking: The fucking cheek of it!
Little mouse with clogs on: The fucking cheek of it!
How to make your own fleshlight: Build your own fleshlight
List of the best insults: Insults - they just don't make them as they used to
Shaving your balls: Do you shave your balls?
How to shave your balls: Do you shave your balls?
though I don't agree with what a man says, I will defend to the death his right to say it: Will I defend to the death your right to say it?
ts elliot on henry james quote no idea can penetrate it: More classic insults - Artists and writers being bitchy to each other
fleshlight attachments: Build your own fleshlight
Mozambique's flag meaning: Shooting down the flag
"virginia woolf on james joyce": More classic insults - Artists and writers being bitchy to each other
make your own fleshlight: Build your own fleshlight
bitchy insults: More classic insults - Artists and writers being bitchy to each other
jou ma se poes: Jou ma se poes
don't leave the one you love for the one like, quotes: Insults - they just don't make them as they used to
crazy afrikaans insults: Insults - they just don't make them as they used to
The Office TV series Pam big tits: I'm in the closet....
Nottingham Football Hooligans: I fucked a football hooligan
hundert-funf-und-siebziger in-between: I didn't realise I had so many names!
literary insults: More classic insults - Artists and writers being bitchy to each other
interview questions for gay people: Interview questions for Gay Banker
scarface part 2: Scarface - Part 2
Roy Blount Jr Quotes – list: Insults - they just don't make them as they used to
fucking in bed: The fucking cheek of it!
one liner classic insult: Insults - they just don't make them as they used to

Terri recently presented me with a Thinking Blogger award (I have yet to make my presentations). By ‘thinking’, I think she may have meant ‘thinking in the gutter’.

The shattering of a myth

2007-04-05T07:22:00.000+01:00

Over the years, urban legends have circulated about the hotel. It is said that fleeing Portuguese settlers poured liquid cement into the plumbing system, or down the lift shafts.

"Savana"'s investigations, however, show that this is just a colourful myth. (full article here)

I was living in Maputo when that hotel was built. My school wasn't that far away from it and we used to pass it on our way to the Costa do Sol. All the adults I knew loathed the way it dominated the skyline in an area devoid of buildings. All the kids I knew were excited by it - tall buildings were cool!

My family stayed on after the Portuguese fled the country in 1974. I was living in Maxixe by then but often saw the building when in Maputo. And I 'knew' that the building had been sabotaged by the embittered fleeing Portuguese. I last saw it in 1996 when I visited Maputo for the first time in 19 years with my wife.

I told her the story about the cement in the lift shafts.

Now it's gone and with its demise I've learnt that something I believed for so long was completely untrue.

The BBC has a good series of pics showing its last moments or you can see a lot more pics on a blog wholly devoted to its demise.

UPDATE: This story corroborates the truth of the so-called urban myth. What is the real story, I wonder?

My own special SoulCollage

2007-04-04T19:30:00.000+01:00

The lovely, talented Caroline has made me my own special SoulCollage. She's not sure what it means but was thinking about my nomadic state when she made it. I don't know what it means either but my immediate interpretation hinged (unintentional!!) around the half-open door.

It's not fully open as my wanderings are not always enthusiastically embraced, reluctant if you will. You could also say that the jetfighter in South African colours says much the same as it is flying past the mountains instead of towards them. The panels in the closed door are windows to places that differ from the one that the other door opens to. The seascape is one I know. The northern mountainous region is one I don't. Not yet, that is.

Attributions for the photos Caroline remixed:

patina by Kalense Kid
floating colours and a boat by k-girl
Lake Moraine Banff by ahisgett
wilderness by jaysk
双子の狐 silent observers by uBookworm
Enter by ljpixie75
Flying The Flag by Steve Crane

Thanks, Caroline.

Fretting about my fiets

2007-04-02T21:32:00.000+01:00

What do I usually do on a Saturday night? Get pissed and get laid, right?

No, not last Saturday. Instead, I spent a lot of time looking out of my window. There’s a lot to see out there, not just on a Saturday night. But it’s not something I usually do (read the above implication) unless it’s to see if the ‘Big Banana Shop’ (a rather dodgy name for a perfectly normal delicatessen that sells nothing more unusual than hash lollies) is still open.

I was checking to see if my bike was still where I’d left it.

After cycling home that afternoon, I’d parked it outside my front door, locked its wheel lock and gone upstairs. Perched on its bikestand thingy, out there in the busy street, it looked very vulnerable. Tethering it to something would have made it look far more secure. ‘I really should have bought a chain lock for it,’ said the voice in my head. I’d bought one for my son’s bike, but not one for mine.

As the evening wore on, the number of bikes parked around it dwindled until it stood on its own. Could it look more vulnerable? Yes, it could! I began checking on it every twenty minutes or so. Each time I looked, it was still there. My constant checking made me feel a bit foolish. And then, just after ten, it wasn’t there! My heart filled with panic. ‘I knew it! I knew it!’ shouted the voices in my head. My brain flooded with recriminations, all of them directed at me.

It’s estimated that there are 600 000 bikes in this city of 750 000 people. That’s a fuck of a lot of bikes! Yet still they get stolen. Which explains why you can buy a bike that retails for €150 on street corners for €30. A very tempting discount, I’d say. ‘Don’t do it,’ says every Amsterdammer. ‘It’s bad karma’.

Buying a stolen bike is bad karma? Does anyone actually believe that? Does anyone actually believe in karma, bad or good? Not I, Mister Super Rational Me. No, as tempting as it may have been, I didn’t buy a stolen one. Buying one from a bike shop seemed to be the easiest option. And being easy, that suited me just fine even if it meant paying much more for it. So much for counting my cents and the euros looking after themselves. This time next year, I'll be a millionaire? I don't think so!

Anyway, I rushed downstairs to see. See what, I’m not sure. The thief nonchalantly puffing on a fag as he prepared to mount? Fingerprints left on my door as he supported himself while perpetuating the evil deed? Other incriminating evidence that would lead to his apprehension and the swift return of my bike? I looked towards the canal. Nothing - no sign of it. I looked in the opposite direction. A bike, an omafiets like mine, was parked about five metres from my front door. It was mine! Why the fuck would someone want to move my bike? I moved it back to its previous position and went upstairs again.

My vigil began again.

In between looking out the window every twenty minutes, my ears did their best to pick out bicycle-stealing sounds from the noise of the revellers outside. Roman Polanski’s ‘The Pianist’ was in the DVD player; not the most light-hearted film I’ve seen for a while. I don’t mean any disrespect and I would never presume to suggest that my concern for my bike even remotely approximated the fear of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, but, well, you know...

That after-supper joint had been rather strong.

The more the film engrossed me, the less vigilant I became. By the time it had finished, I’d probably not looked out of the window for over an hour. It wasn’t there again! Fuck, fuck, fuck! The panic returned; a short-lived panic this time. Someone had moved it again. Could someone be trying to scare me deliberately?

Calm down, Alan, it’s just a bike.

My son’s bike was in the hallway so it didn’t need to be chained to anything - I took his chain and chained mine to the railings on the canal. Why hadn’t I done that right from the beginning?

Nominated for two, won one

2007-04-02T15:12:00.000+01:00

Yes, I won an award in this year’s South African Blog Awards! A new category, nogal (*). I’m the first winner of the GLBT category, one of three new categories introduced in this year’s awards.

It feels good to be a winner but it would have felt better had I done better in ‘Best Overseas South African Blog’, a category I won last year. Oh well, win some, lose some.

Congratulations to all the other winners.

(*) An Afrikaans word used in South African English slang as an exclamation - even!

I finally did it!

2007-03-31T18:49:00.000+01:00

No, not THAT. That still has to happen.

So what did I finally do? I went out and bought myself a bike. In fact, I bought two, one for me and one for my son. His has a few gears, not that he needs them on this flat terrain, so it's not a traditional Dutch 'omafiets'.

Mine, however, is.

It's not quite as mouth-watering as the mountain bike I had in Cape Town but it feels right having an 'omafiets' here in Amsterdam even if not having brakes on the handlebars feels very weird.

The weather promises to be very good tomorrow so we'll probably go for this ride.

Here she is, parked outside my front door. Such serenity, don't you think?

Page 158

2007-03-28T20:32:00.000+01:00

My copies of 'Shaggy Blog Stories' arrived today!

Actually, they arrived yesterday but the package was too large to fit through the door so they had to be picked up from the post office today. My son picked them up for me while I was at work today.

Opening the parcel was such fun! Paging through the book was even more fun. Finding my own contribution was like finding a favourite jumper that had got lost at the back of the cupboard. I immediately looked for the 'truly awful howler' of a typo that Mike mentioned as having crept into my entry:

Where the text says "Three hundred and (*)", you need to add an R, thusly:

"Three hundred Rand (*)"

That was our one truly awful howler. The rest, I can live with.

It wasn't there! Nor were any of the other typos Mike and others picked up. Seems like I don't have a rare first edition with its valuable typos.

As of yesterday at 17:30, 430 copies of 'Shaggy Blog Stories' had been sold, making a £1910.06 contribution to Comic Relief. That's a great contribution but an amount of £2000 would look so much better.

GO BUY A COPY!!

Tailored for expats

2007-03-23T00:11:00.000Z

Being tagged can either be tedious or great fun. But, either way, tags can be quite illuminating. I've been tagged by chocolate girl, an expat in Germany. It's a great tag and one that most expats should enjoy being tagged with. And since it's one I think expats should enjoy, I'll actually being tagging someone with it. You'll only find out who the unfortunate soul is after reading my answers.

Name 5 things you love in your new country:

The ‘different-ness’ of the place that gives me a constant feeling of being on holiday
The continuity between a long, glorious history and a very modern present
Quirky, interesting shops dotted all over the city
Fresh produce markets
Great public transport and bicyles

Name 4 things that you miss from your native country:

Blue skies and warm weather
Feeling completely at home
My children
The feeling of being in Africa

Name 3 things that annoy you a bit (or much) in your new country:

The way the Dutch pour beer
Strange electrical connections and not enough of them (maybe that’s just my flat)
Over-crowdedness , both with locals and tourists

Name 2 things that surprise you (or surprised you in the beginning) in your new country:

How tall so many people are
How wet and windy it is

Name 1 thing that you would miss terribly in your new country, if you had to leave it:

How cosmopolitan it is

The unfortunate soul? Well, there are six of them:

My son arrives in about 10 hour's time. I feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store!

My son

2007-03-21T21:36:00.000Z

My son finished school last year and is taking a gap year before going to UCT next year.

He arrives on Friday to spend some time with me in Amsterdam. With a bit of effort on his part (he's never had to earn a cent of his own), he'll be finding part-time work here to fund his travels elsewhere. His first port of call will be here.

COMING OUT TO CHILDREN: GUIDELINES FOR FATHERS

Come to terms with your own gayness before disclosing to children. This is crucial. The father who feels negatively about his homosexuality or is ashamed of it is much more likely to have children who also react negatively. The father must create a setting of acceptance by first accepting himself. If he tells his children when he is ready and comfortable, it is likely to be a positive experience for everyone.
Children are never too young to be told. They will absorb only as much as they are capable of understanding. Use words appropriate to the age of the child. Details may be added as they grow older.
Discuss it with children before they know or suspect. When children discover their father's sexual orientation from someone other than the father, they often are upset that their father did not trust them sufficiently to share the information with them. It is exceedingly difficult for children to initiate the subject, and they will not bring it up even though they want to.
Disclosure should be planned. Children should not find out about their father's homosexuality by default or discover it accidentally or during an argument between their parents.
Disclose in a quiet setting where interruptions are unlikely to occur.
Inform, don't confess. The disclosure should not be heavy or maudlin but positive and sincere. Informing in a simple, natural, or matter-of-fact manner when the father is ready is more likely to foster acceptance by the child. If possible, discuss or rehearse what will be said to children with someone who has already experienced a similar disclosure.
Inform the children that relationships with them will not change as a result of disclosure. Disclosure will, however, allow the father to be more honest. Children may need reassurance that the father is the same person he was before. Younger children may need reassurance that the father will still be their father.
Be prepared for questions: Some questions and possible answers are:

Why are you telling me this? Because my personal life is important and I want to share it with you. I am not ashamed of being homosexual, and you shouldn't be ashamed of me either.
What does being gay mean? It means being attracted to other men so that you might fall in love with a man and express your love physically and sexually.
What makes a person gay? No one knows, although there are a lot of theories. (This question may be a childs a way of asking if he she will also be gay.)
Will I be gay, too? You wont be gay just because Im gay. Its not contagious, and it doesn't appear to be hereditary. you will be whatever you are going to be.
Don't you like women? (The child might be asking, "Don't you like Mom?" or "Do you hate Mom?" If this question is asked by a daughter it may also mean, "Don't you like me?" or "Do you hate me?") I do like women but I'm not physically (or sexually) and romantically attracted to them as I am to men.
What should I tell my friends about it? A lot of people just don't understand so it might be best to keep it in the family. You can discuss it with me any time you want. If you want to tell a close friend, go ahead and try it out. But the friend might not be accepting, and she or he might tell others. You should be prepared for those possibilities. If you do tell somebody, let me know how it turns out.

WISH ME LUCK!!

I came, I drank, I went.

2007-03-17T14:29:00.000Z

I came:
I almost didn’t - I very nearly wasn’t allowed to board the Nottingham flight at Schipol. Blame that on me leaving the flat late, the tram breaking down, and a delayed train. It’s really not that pleasant plonking yourself down next to a fellow passenger, huffing and puffing, dripping sweat everywhere. Less pleasant for the fellow passenger, of course. Mike put me up even though he was already tripping on ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’ adrenaline. Thanks, Mike. Despite the adrenaline, he looked just as he did when I saw him in Amsterdam a few weeks ago.

I drank:
We met up with several friends at the Lord Roberts. It wasn’t a particularly late night but both of us felt the effects of beer on us in the morning. A few hours later, after several cups of tea and a slice of toast, we were in the café at the Broadway Cinema, the venue of Nottingham’s first blogmeet. Thanks for organising it, Mike and Lisa. A very successful event, in my opinion.

I wasn’t the only international guest as Rob had travelled all the way from north of the border. Besides Siobhan, everyone else was local: Lisa, Mike, James, Michelle, Neil, David, Sarah, Lord Bargain and Alex. Most of us had not met before but we got on surprisingly well. The topics of conversation ranged from gap years to local politics to oiled Nubians. More beer was consumed. No food was eaten. Well, not by me even though the place serves food that is more than acceptable.

The pink contingent (a disproportionately large one) accompanied by our favourite honorary pink lady, Michelle, decamped to the Lord Roberts. Lots more beer. Still no food. Apparently, I got rather drunk even though I succeeded in not embarrassing myself. Had I not been taken home by D, a man known to be quite a dab hand with a hammer, I’d probably have done a good job of embarrassing myself later on that night.

I returned to Mike’s to get changed and pick up my stuff before we went to Michelle’s for brunch. Ah, at long last, food!! Food, glorious food! Thanks, Michelle. No beer but lots of Bloody Marys and Bucks Fizz. Red wine too! Thanks again, Michelle.

Back to the Lord Roberts for a last pint with Alan. Make that two pints. Oh, and another half, please.

I went:
I almost didn’t - I missed the last bus to the airport. That bloody bus driver wouldn’t wait even though I was only a minute late. He drove past with a dismissive wave of his hand. Bastard!

Thank god for taxis! Mike, James, et al probably thought the same as I’d have been spending the night with one of them had it not been for the taxi.

2007-03-16T08:05:00.000Z

After a marathon effort, Mike (and several very hard-working people who assisted him), got the book out in time for today, this year's Red Nose day. Read about it here but, more importantly, go order it here.

Go on now, you know you want a copy.

My head hurts, does yours?

2007-03-15T11:37:00.000Z

My daily metro journeys are simple affairs. I read if I have a seat; I stand and switch off if I don’t. Yesterday evening was different. I was standing but not switched off. I was thinking so hard that my head hurt.

I stood there wondering if my fellow-passengers had been created by me. I wondered if the friends that I’d seen in Nottingham this past weekend no longer existed now that I wasn’t actually seeing them. My son is arriving on Friday next week to spend part of his gap year with me. He’s in Cape Town at the moment, out of my sight. Does he exist?

I’d been reading this article (by Robert Lanza) in the office just before leaving for home. You need to read it to get a clear understanding of its implications but I’ve summarized it for you. I used to read a lot about this kind of stuff but, in recent years, my mind has got lazy, happy to read nothing more complicated than the Sunday papers. I think Lanza’s article manages to get a bunch of concepts across in 7500 words whereas it takes many other writers a book to get across.

Be prepared for a long, roller-coaster journey from ancient Greek philosophy to modern-day scientific reality. A scientific reality that, despite the theories of quantum mechanics, largely fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. To recognise how the subjective experience relates to a physical process you need to take a biocentric world view.

Read more..

Our sense of the forward motion of time is really the result of an infinite number of decisions that only seem to be a smooth continuous path. At each moment we are at the edge of a paradox known as The Arrow, first described 2,500 years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once, he reasoned that an arrow is only in one place during any given instance of its flight. But if it is in only one place, it must be at rest. The arrow must then be at rest at every moment of its flight. Logically, motion is impossible. But is motion impossible? Or rather, is this analogy proof that the forward motion of time is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something within us? Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg discovered the Uncertainty Principle, a cornerstone of quantum mechanics. You can know either the velocity of a particle or its location but not both. If you know one, you cannot know the other. As an analogy, think of a film which is made up of many individual frames. To see the film, you need to see the frames in motion but once they’re in motion, you’re unable to see each individual frame. From a biocentric perspective, this makes sense: time is the inner form of animal sense that animates events—the still frames—of the spatial world.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here: position (location in space) belongs to the outer world, and momentum (which involves the temporal) belongs to the inner world. Time is not a feature of the external spatial world. In Heisenberg’s words: “A path comes into existence only when you observe it.” There is neither time nor motion without life. Reality is not “there” with definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer.

Twenty-five hundred years later, the Zeno arrow paradox finally makes sense.

Before Heisenberg shook up the world of physics with the Uncertainty Principle, Einstein had already shaken I up with his theories on relativity. His theories rely on a core concept of discrete entities and spacetime. He held that the speed of light is constant and that events in one place cannot influence events in another place simultaneously. In the relativity theory, the speed of light has to be taken into account for information to travel from one particle to another. However, experiment after experiment has shown that this is not the case. In 1965, Irish physicist John Bell created an experiment that showed that separate particles can influence each other instantaneously over great distances. The experiment has been performed numerous times and confirms that the properties of polarized light are correlated, or linked, no matter how far apart the particles are. There is some kind of instantaneous—faster than light—communication between them. All of this implies that Einstein’s concept of spacetime, neatly divided into separate regions by light velocity, is untenable. Instead, the entities we observe are floating in a field of mind that is not limited by an external spacetime.

The experiments of Heisenberg and Bell call us back to experience itself, the immediacy of the infinite here and now, and shake our unexamined trust in objective reality. But another support for biocentrism is the famous two hole experiment, which demands that we go one step further: Zeno’s arrow doesn’t exist, much less fly, without an observer. The two-hole experiment goes straight to the core of quantum physics. Scientists have discovered that if they “watch” a subatomic particle pass through holes on a barrier, it behaves like a particle: like a tiny bullet, it passes through one or the other holes. But if the scientists do not observe the particle, then it exhibits the behavior of a wave. In short: If observed, particles behave like objects; if unobserved, they behave like waves and can go through more than one hole at the same time.

Dubbed quantum weirdness, this wave-particle duality has lead science to concede that quantum physics is incomprehensible outside of complex mathematics. How can quantum physics be so impervious to metaphor, visualization, and language?

You're halfway..

However, if we accept a life-created reality at face value, it becomes simple to understand. The key question is waves of what? Back in 1926, the Nobel laureate physicist Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability, not waves of material as the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had theorized. They are statistical predictions. Thus a wave of probability is nothing but a likely outcome. In fact, outside of that idea, the wave is not there. It’s nothing. As John Wheeler, the eminent theoretical physicist, once said, "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."

A particle cannot be thought of as having any definite existence—either duration or a position in space—until we observe it. Until the mind sets the scaffolding of an object in place, an object cannot be thought of as being either here or there. Thus, quantum waves merely define the potential location a particle can occupy. A wave of probability isn’t an event or a phenomenon, it is a description of the likelihood of an event or phenomenon occurring. Nothing happens until the event is actually observed. If you watch it go through the barrier, then the wave function collapses and the particle goes through one hole or the other. If you don’t watch it, then the particle detectors will show that it can go through more than one hole at the same time.

Science has been grappling with the implications of the wave-particle duality ever since its discovery in the first half of the 20th century. But few people accept this principle at face value. The Copenhagen interpretation, put in place by Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Born in the 1920s, set out to do just that. But it was too unsettling a shift in worldview to accept in full. At present, the implications of these experiments are conveniently ignored by limiting the notion of quantum behaviour to the microscopic world. But doing this has no basis in reason, and it is being challenged in laboratories around the world. New experiments carried out with huge molecules called buckyballs show that quantum reality extends into the macroscopic world as well. Experiments make it clear that another weird quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, which is usually associated with the micro world, is also relevant on macro scales. An exciting experiment, recently proposed (so-called scaled-up superposition), would furnish the most powerful evidence to date that the biocentric view of the world is correct at the level of living organisms.

One of the main reasons most people reject the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is that it leads to the dreaded doctrine of solipsism. The late Heinz Pagels once commented: "If you deny the objectivity of the world unless you observe it and are conscious of it, then you end up with solipsism—the belief that your consciousness is the only one."

Physical reality begins and ends with the animal observer. All other times and places, all other objects and events are products of the imagination, and serve only to unite knowledge into a logical whole. We are pleased with such books as Newton’s Principia, or Darwin’s Origin of Species. But they instill a complacency in the reader. Darwin spoke of the possibility that life emerged from inorganic matter in some “warm little pond.” Trying to trace life down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously from nonliving matter wants for the rigour and attention of the quantum theorist.

Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the corner, and yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have no idea how to explain its existence from physical laws. The questions physicists long to ask about nature are bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics can furnish no answers for them.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience.

We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order.

We are living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that time and space are entities in the universe to one in which time and space belong to the living. Think of all the recent book titles—The End of Science, The End of History, The End of Eternity, The End of Certainty, The End of Nature, and The End of Time. Only for a moment, while we sort out the reality that time and space do not exist, will it feel like madness.

Do you see what I mean about a sore head? Are you wondering if I actually exist? I’ve never seen most of the people who read this blog so I really can’t be sure if any of you exist. In fact, I can’t be sure that those I’ve actually met actually exist. Although I saw Mike last weekend and I’m sure that his collaborative book for Comic Relief, ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’, will be available to buy from tomorrow (BUY IT!!), I’m not sure if he exists right now.

This kind of sore head feels so different to the one I had on Sunday morning after a night out in Nottingham.

Shaggy Blog Stories: a collaborative blog-stunt for Comic Relief

2007-03-09T11:40:00.000Z

Mike over at Troubled Diva has come up with a great idea for Comic Relief's Red Nose Day. He's proposing to assemble and publish – in the space of just seven days - a paperback anthology of blog writing, that can be sold to raise funds for the charity.

The book will be called 'Shaggy Blog Stories: a collection of amusing tales from the UK blogosphere'.

Go here for further details.

My favourite jumper

2007-03-07T22:49:00.000Z

As soon as I woke up, I knew that the previous night had been overly indulgent, even by my standards. My throat was so dry that I couldn’t swallow without grating off bits of it; my eyes rejected the aggressive daylight streaming through the skylight with such a vengeance that you’d have thought a transplant had gone wrong; the thud in my head was like that of an onboard motor.

Thankfully, I was alone in my bed.
Read more..

SA Blog Awards 2007

2007-03-06T18:34:00.000Z

Although I've been aware that nominations were taking place, unlike last year when still very much a blogger newbie, I've not paid much attention to this year's South African Blog Awards. That was until today when I noticed that my reader stats were swelling with hits from this year's awards site. To my surprise (and delight), I've been nominated in two categories, 'Best overseas South African blog', a category I won last year, and a new one, 'Best GLBT blog'.

I confess to not having nominated anyone (not even myself) so it's with cap in hand that I thank all of you who nominated me. Thanks, I really appreciate it!

Now that I'm in the running for two awards, I urge all of you who nominated me and the rest of you to vote for me. And, of course, vote for the others who are nominated in other categories.

To vote, click on the logo or go here.

Several of my favourite blogs have also been been nominated so I'll not only be voting for myself.

Three Things

2007-03-04T23:40:00.000Z

I've been tagged by the mad, wonderful Babs to reveal three things about me in a variety of categories. So, here you have them:

3 Things That Scare Me:
My habit for living in the present (and in the past) but never looking to the future
The taxman
Disappointing my children

3 People Who Make Me Laugh:
My kids (I don’t mean to copy Babs, it’s true)
Myself ( in a kinda pitying way)
Victoria Wood

3 Things I Love:
The smell of the sea and the smell after it has rained after a really hot day
Buying people presents
Sex (sorry to be predictable)

3 Things I Hate:
Having to work for a living
Bigotry and intolerance
Doing things I don’t like to do

3 Things I Don't Understand:
Violence
Fanaticism
Fetishes

3 Things On My Desk:
Red wine
Cigarettes
Headache pills

3 Things I'm Doing Right Now:
Making green masala paste
Listening to music
Drinking red wine

3 Things I Want To Do Before I Die:
Write a novel
Meet my half-sister (my father allegedly had an illegitimate child before meeting my mother)
Be at peace with myself

3 Things I Can Do:
Put my legs around my neck
Put my head in the sand (figuratively)
Lie convincingly

3 Things I Can't Do:
Spend time in the company of bigots
Network (horrid buzzword, but you know what I mean)
Be responsible about things financial

3 Things I Think You Should Listen To:
Adagio for strings in G Minor by Albinoni
All along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan's song) by Jimi Hendrix
The things said about you by those closest to you

3 Things You Should Never Listen To:
The things said about you by those closest to you
Politicians who profess to speak for the ‘man in the street’
Religious fanatics

3 Things I'd Like To Learn:
To speak Xhosa
How to laugh
How to worry about the future

3 Favorite Foods:
Piri piri chicken
Roast lamb (all sorts of ways, but especially the way the Greeks do it)
Braai-ed (barbequed) yellowtail

3 Beverages I Drink Regularly:
Coffee (especially cappuccino and espress)
Red wine (is it a beverage?)
Beer (is it a beverage?)

3 Shows I Watched As A Kid:
I was 17 before I watched TV (no, I’m not THAT old!), but here are some shows I’d like to have seen:
Courage the Cowardly Dog (didn’t exist when I was a child)
The Addams Family
The Avengers

3 Bloggers I've Tagged:
Minge
Anjou
To The Bowlines

Cast your eyes heavenwards tonight!

2007-03-03T11:24:00.000Z

Tonight's lunar eclipse begins at 2018 GMT, with the Moon totally immersed in the shadow of the Earth between 2244 and 2358 GMT. The next to be seen over western Europe will take place on 21 February 2008, but in the middle of the night between 0300 GMT and 0400 GMT. (BBC Report)

It's very cloudy outside so I suspect I won't be seeing it. Damn!

Amsterdam Scarab

2007-03-01T23:29:00.000Z

Just be yourself?

2007-03-01T22:45:00.000Z

From someone's profile header on a gay dating (*) site:

FUCK! AND LIKE CRAZY! LOVE HARD AND DEEP! going crazY! role play a lot! chemsfriendly! Just be yourself!

Let's hope he's better in the sack than he's at logic.

(*) sordid sex site

The Mousetrap

2007-02-28T20:29:00.000Z

Two mice in the kitchen last night. Four traps were set. One dead mouse this morning. One mouse in packet of pasta this evening. Lucky mouse, squeamish me couldn't kill him (her?) and he got released outside near Prinsengracht canal.

I suppose he'll be back tomorrow evening. Better put the pasta away.

I feel very tempted to say one mousetrap is still going after 55 years but this one only lasted 11 minutes. Too corny, so I won't.

The fucking cheek of it!

2007-02-27T15:49:00.000Z

I’m amazed at how quickly complacency sets in with me. One moment I’m a finely attuned killing machine, the next, the enemy has breached the gates and I’m allowing it to party under my nose.

Yes, the mouse is back!

Not that specific mouse, of course. It was well and truly dead when I found it at the bottom of the bucket of water I’d used to trap it with. And I don’t think Dutch mice are any more prone to resurrection than British or South African ones are. This is a new one. For a short while though, it seemed as if its ghost had made an appearance. A couple of days after it had been sent out in a body bag (= kitchen rubbish), a mouse appeared for the briefest of moments one evening. That was all. There was no further sign of him in the week that followed. I put it down to an apparition created by my over-developed mouse-detecting sensors. With no further sign of him, I forgot about mice until I started hearing suspicious noises in the kitchen. Still no sign of a mouse though. One of the kitchen windows has been taped with thick tape to keep out draughts but the tape gives way on particularly gusty days. Perhaps that explained the ‘mouse noises’?

Then I saw it again.

It ran along the entire length of the kitchen surfaces. This was no ghost. Nor was it a product of my over-active imagination. This was a real mouse. Unlike the first appearance of the first mouse, I wasn’t consumed with an immediate desire to get rid of it. The whole rigmarole of setting up a trap seemed like too much effort. I tried to ignore it. As the days went by, it got bolder and bolder, making less and less of an attempt to disappear as quickly as possible. I suppose its lack of speed could have had something to do with it getting fatter on all the rich pickings to be had in the kitchen. Surely not that quickly? Still I made no attempt to get rid of it. The closest I got to displaying it any ill-feeling was stomping loudly in the kitchen. Not a pretty sight but not scary either; hardly the actions of a hardened mouse-killer.

Then, on Sunday night, I heard screeching sounds. They sounded like fighting noises but they could have been the noises of mouse revelry. How does one distinguish between the two? I’ve no idea. But there was definitely more than one mouse in the kitchen.

And then last night, while lying in bed reading, a mouse ran across the bedroom floor. Bloody hell, talk about getting bold! I threw Sunday’s newspapers at it and felt rather pleased with the way I made it scuttle, its arse and tail bouncing ungainly as it fled out of the room. ‘War and Peace’ may have been more effective but there was still no sign of it by the time I’d switched the light off.

Hours later, in the middle of dreaming about Helen Mirren, I woke up. Nothing odd about that as I usually wake up several times during the night. But what was odd was feeling something moving against my ankle. It had to be a mouse. To check, I slowly moved my leg to see it there'd be any reaction. Sure enough, something moved. And very quickly too! I had a fucking mouse in my bed. The fucking cheek of it!

I’m not going to bother about my water bucket trap tonight. Instead, I’ll stick with convention – I’ll be setting several conventional mousetraps.

UPDATE: My next post proves that the mouse wasn't a ghost or a figment of my imagination. Squeamish readers need not worry about the PG-rating of the evidence.

The Metro can be such fun!

2007-02-24T00:40:00.001Z

It takes me half an hour to get to work each day. Trams 1, 2 or 5 get me to Central Station then I get metro 54 to Bijlmer.

Although the metro is a rapid-transit system connecting various parts of the city, it’s not the mode of public transport used in the city centre (Amsterdam Centrum), the only part of the city that tourists tend to visit. There, the tram is king. Working in the outskirts of the city, I need to use the metro even though I prefer the stop-start jerkiness of the tram. It connects far-flung bits of the city but only consists of 4 lines at present. Born in 1968, it’s a very modest and much younger cousin of the great metro systems of the world, like the Paris Metro and London Underground.

It took me about 6 weeks before I noticed something familiar about the metro map. I was standing in a packed carriage on my way home and peering through the tall Dutch men at the map above the doors, checking how many stops were left before I got to Central Station.

When the carriage emptied, I took the pic above. The angle isn’t great but for those of you who know the London Underground, you’ll know why I was reminded of it.

I had a closer look at the metro map on the platform. The similarity was still there but not quite as strong. With only four lines spread across a representation of the entire Amsterdam region, the similarity is less obvious. It wasn’t quite as much of a reminder of the London Tube as the compressed map in the carriage was. At the bottom, towards the right, I noticed that the map had been produced with permission from the London Transport Museum.

I’d come across my first example of another public transport map based on Harry Beck’s iconic London Underground map.

Although the Amsterdam metro map has been called a soulless copy of the London Underground map, with only four lines, what else could it be? Soulless or not, it also spawned its own version of the infamous Tube anagram map. For all sorts of annoying legal reasons, the London map was removed from its original site but it can still be seen here.

As to be expected, the anagrams are Dutch words. Many of them are very funny but not of much use to a person who can’t speak Dutch. I could translate them (or get them translated) but, instead, have decided to produce my own version with English words. Yes, I know that I’ve come to the party late but I seem to be good at that. With a good anagram generator it’s a simple thing to do but some of the shorter station names were problematic. Being Dutch, they make use of Dutch word constructions which differ from those in English. There were a number of them that didn’t produce any anagrams in English. To get around that, I cheated by tacking ‘station’ on to the station name to 'force' an English anagram from the anagram generator. I did it with these stations: Bijlmer, Brink, Bullewijk, Gein, Westwijk and Zuid.

Here you have my version. If you click on the map you'll be taken to another page where you can hover your cursor above the station name to get its proper name.

So my daily commute isn’t between Central Station and Bijlmer but, depending on which map you use, it’s either between ‘Notelaars Intact’ (Whole Walnut tree) and ‘Belrijm’ (rhyming bell) or ‘Raincoat Talents’ and ‘Tom Jib’s Latrine’.

Note: I've had some problems loading the anagram map using Firefox. Not sure if that's a problem with my computer or something else. If you're also having a problem, let me know. The problem may have something to do where the page is hosted. Try here if you're having a problem.

Learning to lithp in Dut-th

2007-02-19T23:16:00.000Z

Learning Dutch is no easy thing, particularly for English-speakers, as most of the Dutch are very fluent in English and will quickly switch to English if they hear a foreigner trying to speak Dutch. Consequently, many expats in the Netherlands make no attempt at learning Dutch. I could easily do the same but speaking Afrikaans means that I already understand a substantial amount of Dutch. So I've resolved to learn the language.

Today is my second lesson.

Now while Afrikaans is considered a language in its own right, rather than a dialect of Dutch, there is a greater divergence within the dialects of the Dutch-speaking zones of the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname than there is between standard Dutch and standard Afrikaans. So it's going to be a real breeze for me, right? Well, maybe, but there are quite a lot of basic differences one has to get used to at the start.

English, Dutch and Afrikaans are all West Germanic languages but English developed from the Anglo-Frisian branch unlike Afrikaans and Dutch which developed from Lower Franconian. Despite that, some Dutch-speakers will say that the simpler Afrikaans grammar is a bit like English.

Like English, Afrikaans nouns only have one gender whereas Dutch has two, common and neuter. And since gender influences the pronouns referring to a verb and the article used with it, there is a more complicated way of expressing these than in English and Afrikaans.

Notice how the third person plural 'hulle' in Afrikaans differs from the Dutch 'zij'. Several Dutch dialects, however, use 'hullie' and 'zullie'. The word is so different to 'zij' which is also used for the third person singular that it's difficult for me to get used to.

And then there's the pronunciation. The Afrikaans word 'loop' is sort-of pronounced 'loo-ip' whereas the Dutch pronounce it 'lope'. 'Uit', the Afrikaans for 'out' or 'from' is pronounced 'eight'. The Dutch pronounce it as 'out'.

A particular feature of Afrikaans is its use of the double negative, something that is absent from the other West Germanic standard languages. Most people learning Afrikaans find the double negative an odd thing to understand as a double negative in, say, English, tends to indicate a positive. Being used to it, I keep having to stop myself from using it but I get confused about whether I should keep the first negative or the second one.

English: I do not want to do that.
Dutch: Ik wil dat niet doen.
Afrikaans: Ek wil nie dat doen nie.

When it comes to vocabulary, the two languages are still very close. Because of the linguistic influences of English, Indian, Malay, Malagasy, Khoi, San and Black African languages, Afrikaans has a more diverse vocabulary than Dutch but most sources suggest that it still shares about 85% of its vocabulary with Dutch. The 15% divergence is very marked in everyday life. Just by going to the supermarket, I pick up on it:

But, oddly enough, for all the diversity of the Afrikaans vocabulary, it seems that the Dutch use more English words than the Afrikaans do. For example, the Dutch and English use the same words for 'drugs', 'stewardess', 'lunch' and 'barbecue' whereas the Afrikaans words are 'dwelmmiddels', 'lugwaardin', 'middagete' and 'braai'. And then there are words such as 'poes', the Dutch word for 'cat', which has an entirely different meaning in Afrikaans.

So, this learning Dutch lark may not be as simple as I'd hoped. But, it's a small class, just three students and the teacher, so that should help. We're all gay so if I learn to lisp in Dutch, you'll know why.

Especially for Caroline

2007-02-17T15:54:00.000Z

This post is especially for Caroline. Bristol Caroline, not Amsterdam Caroline. I'm having dinner with Amsterdam Caroline tonight, but have never had the pleasure of meeting Bristol Caroline so far.

Firstly, I've posted another picture of the building that I work in to show you that the building is truly orange. Previous pictures weren't quite as clear.

Do you agree with me now?

Secondly, you weren't that keen on my recent tweaking as you find the text on a semi-transparent background a bit disconcerting. There may be others who feel the same but, especially for you, I've implemented a choice of themes for viewing this blog. You can choose between 'transparent' and 'opaque' depending on your preference. Make your choice in 'display themes' just above the picture of the strange boy without an arm.

I think that it works properly with Firefox, IE7 and previous versions of IE. If anyone notices any glitches, please let me know.

As of today, Tony Benn no longer exists

2007-02-16T01:37:00.000Z

I’ve been masquerading as Tony Benn. Not the real Tony Benn, of course. That would be way beyond my capabilities! My Tony Benn looks exactly like the real thing but in every other way, including his name, there’s no similarity at all.

After getting Razaq’s letter offering to make me rich by helping him realise his dream of assuaging his conscience before he died of a horrible illness, I thought that I’d indulge in a bit of scam-baiting to get his picture. That’s when I became Mac Hooper.

Mac Hooper, 76 and retired, lives with his daughter, son-in-law and grandson in Nottingham. Mac Hooper is a novice with computers and emails, has a bit of money and feels that he’d like to put a bit of good back into a world where he’d been a bit of a bastard in his time. I thought he was just the sort of person who’d appeal to Razaq and I was right.

I got his pic. Two of them, in fact. Poor thing, he does look poorly, doesn’t he? Mission accomplished, I could have stopped then but once I’d hooked Razaq, I felt that pulling him in would be quite fun. To do that, I needed to send him a pic of myself.

I've removed the pics he sent me. One of my readers (see comments) told me that they are the pictures of a man who is since dead. His widow has been distressed by the use of her husbands's pictures in this way.

My first inclination was to find a picture of some despot or other. Someone who’d been in the public eye but who was less likely to be recognised these days. So no Saddam Hussein. Too young, anyway. Margaret Thatcher? Wrong sex. Augusto Pinochet? P W Botha? Good choices! I especially liked the idea of P W Botha. These guys had been bad in their time. Really bad! Their heyday was long gone. Whomever I chose had to pass as Mac Hooper, retired Nottingham businessmen, beloved grandfather. Military uniforms and admonishing fingers wouldn’t do. But every single picture I found of them was forbidding, threatening or angry. I should have known that avuncular and despot were unlikely bedfellows so I moved on to another unpopular species. I could have gone for estate agents or lawyers but chose politicians instead.

That’s how Tony Benn came to be Mac Hooper.

I’m now at the point where I must return a signed power of attorney to his attorney in Maida Vale. Since letters from Nottingham don’t usually have Dutch stamps on them, I’m visiting my sister in the Netherlands. The old dear had a stroke so I’ve come to visit her for a while. I was going to post it to him but Razaq’s boring me now. And, anyway, tweaking the appearance of this blog has been much more interesting.

So, as of today, my Tony Benn no longer exists.

Razaq and his cronies are the dark side of the really unpleasant face of capitalism. Actually, that’s not true. They’re just opportunists preying on naiveté, ignorance and greed. Not really the sort of territory Tony Benn would have much truck with.

Tony Benn was a politician in less cynical times. Corrupt politicians weren’t uncommon in his day, of course, but those were also more principled times. Tony Blair is no Tony Benn! Or am I the naive one here? So what would he have thought of all this? Not much, I’m sure, but I’d like to think that he’d see the humour in being Mac Hooper for a while.

After ignoring Razaq's last few emails, this is the one I received yesterday:

Dear Partner

What is the problem you getting back to me, dont forget you are assisting a deying man willing to touch the life of the poor all over the world which has been my dream, have you collect the money from the bank, please get back to me urgently so i know what to do next.

I am typing this mail with pains all over me awiating for the day I will be call tp Glory,.

I await your urgent mail to keep my nerves down

Thanks

Razaq

Gary Frisch: RIP

2007-02-14T22:19:00.000Z

Gary Frisch, the co-founder of Gaydar, the phenomenally successful gay dating website, was found dead on Saturday.

Gary and his then-partner, Henry Badenhorst, moved to England from South Africa in 1997 and co-founded QSoft, an information technology consultancy firm, that owns the Gaydar brands. Gaydar was launched two years later. Today, it's believed to be earning more than £1m a year, has more than four million subscribers and is one of Britain's busiest internet sites. Last year, Gaydar was included in the list of Britain's 'Coolbrands' by the Superbrands organisation, an independent authority on branding.

From the Daily Telegraph:
Gary Frisch was born on January 22 1969 in Cape Town. While working for the De Beers industrial diamond firm, he studied computer sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

On graduating, he set up his first computer software company, Frisoft Software, which he later sold to Q Data (now Business Connection, one of South Africa's biggest information technology companies) in 1994. He became technical director of one of Q Data's divisions until 1997, when he and Badenhorst moved to Britain to launch QSoft Consulting, which they originally formed to develop revenue management systems for the Dutch airline KLM.

Gary was found dead beneath the window of his eighth-floor London flat. At this stage, the police do not suspect foul play but have not ruled out suicide. Known to be a shy man, he'd probably not relish the media attention that his death has attracted.

At 38, most of his life was still ahead of him. Gary, rest in peace.

Tweaks done for now

2007-02-14T21:28:00.000Z

Well, I managed to get the '.png fix script' working. For the uninitiated, that means I've managed to implement transparency in Internet Explorer for versions prior to IE7.

You can't imagine what a sense of achievement this has given me. I must be a geek after all!

Unfortunately, due to a lag in it becoming active, the transparent bits are first displayed in grey. To me, the end product looks good but some readers may find the delay annoying. I could just say 'Do yourself a favour, and use a proper browser like Firefox,' but that would be rude. So if you do find it really annoying, let me know and I may consider removing it.

If any geeks out there know how to speed it up, please let me know.

Template-tweaking

2007-02-12T14:30:00.000Z

I'm tired of this blog's fussy background so I'm tweaking the template a bit.

So, if you notice odd things happening with the formatting, you'll know why. Once I hit on something I like, I'll leave it there but I'll be expecting comments about how it looks and whether it's an improvement on the one you're used to or not.

UPDATE: I've incorporated some suggestions made such as making the blog fit into the display size of lower resolution monitors. I've also done a bit of work in getting the posts to display on a semi-transparent background. Unfortunately, due to deficiencies with Internet Explorer, I can't release it just yet. There may be a work-around but it's quite techy stuff that may be beyond me. If you're interested in seeing how it works with Firefox, have a look here.

I quite like the look of it, what do you think?

UPDATE (contd.)
If I ever manage to get round the transparency problem with .png files for IE prior to IE7, I'll do something about it. For the time being, the transparent background will display as grey for earlier versions of IE.

Ball bearing? Not here!

2007-02-10T16:05:00.000Z

I'm really sorry to disappoint all you testicle-shavers out there but how was I to know that this would come up fourth in a google-search for 'how to shave your balls'?

And in case you search for 'ball bearing', you'll arrive here or here. A search for 'ball baring' will also disappoint.

Post of the Week

2007-02-09T07:56:00.000Z

Mike and a few others have revived his ‘post of the week’ idea. This time it has its own home.

It’s a great idea as it acts as a portal to some of the best blog-writing chanced upon by participating blog-readers during the week. And I’m not just saying that because Mike has nominated me twice in as many weeks! It’s actually true! Not only does it pull together some of the best writing of the week, it’s also the perfect way of discovering new blogs.

So far I’ve just been a lurker, but it’s far better to be an active participant as the more people that get involved, the wider (and richer) the source of nominations. You can also go one step further and really get involved by volunteering as a judge as well as nominating posts.

Felicitas - a year on

2007-02-05T20:30:00.000Z

It’s coming up for a year since Felicitas, a friend of mine in Maputo, carefully planned her suicide by writing suicide notes to various friends before taking an overdose. As far as I'm aware, it was her only suicide attempt. It worked. She put the suicide notes on a 'memory stick' with instructions for a friend on how to email them to the people concerned.

I was one of those friends.

We’d known each other for close on 3 years but had never met. Ours was an email friendship that had developed from an email I’d sent her asking for advice on how to get a copy of my Mozambiquan birth certificate. A formal email correspondence quickly developed into a close friendship where we discussed every facet of our lives. We were of a similar age, we both smoked and liked whiskey, and although I’d grown up in Mozambique where she’d moved to 16 years previously, that’s where the similarity ended. She was a childless, German divorcée living on the outskirts of Maputo, the 'third-world' capital of Mozambique; I was a South African gay father living in Nottingham, an English provincial city. She taught languages and did translations for a living; I was an IT consultant in a large corporate environment. For all our differences, we got on famously.

For many months, my flag counter was a constant reminder of Felicitas’s death as the number of my readers from Ghana stayed constant after her suicide. Although she was based in Mozambique, her ISP always registered her as being in Ghana. Slowly, the Ghanaian flag started dropping down my sidebar as the flags of other countries overtook it. It was this blog’s way of lowering a flag in her remembrance.

With the huge spike in readership I got after having my insults post picked up by dooce and kottke, Ghanaian readers increased but Ghana’s flag slipped dramatically as more and more readers from elsewhere found my blog. Felicitas wasn’t forgotten but the daily reminder of her death was no longer there. The recent discovery of a photograph of her that I’d thought lost after reformatting my hard drive in May last year was the most forceful recent reminder I’ve had of her. That was about six weeks ago.

Then I started getting further reminders.

Caroline is always going on about synchronicities, a concept that appeals to me but in which I've no belief. To me, synchronicities are coincidences, nothing more, nothing less. But having said that, my mind always picks up on coincidences, no matter how tenuous they are. Sometimes you’d think that I try to create links where there really aren’t any.

In a recent blog entry of hers, Caroline posted a picture of the shrine at the bottom of her garden. It prompted me to comment about visiting my mother’s grave for the first time in 1996. She’s buried in a beautiful, tranquil spot under coconut trees about 200 metres from the sea. Wild and overgrown, it's a wonder that the weeds, wild-flowers and grasses grow in the sandy soil. The blue of the sky rivals that of the sea that can be seen through the trees. Seagulls and crows swirl in the sky, competing with each other in trying to drown out the gentle sound of the waves. In turn, they are drowned out by the sounds of children playing at the nearby school. You’d never realise it was a cemetery if it were not for the faded white crosses battling to emerge from the undergrowth. The cemetery is attached to the Anglican Mission just outside Maxixe, Mozambique. My mother was buried there in January 1970.

Like Felicitas, she was a horsewoman and a foreigner in Mozambique. Again I was reminded of Felicitas.

A few days before, I’d picked up ‘Under the Frangipani’ by celebrated Mozambiquan author, Mia Couto, to read on the tram. Set in a decaying, colonial fort that’s being used as a refuge for old people, it’s about an African world in which people pass through the door separating reality from the spirit world. At first I couldn’t get into it and put it down - I suspect that I may have over-dosed on ‘magic-realism’ in the days when I couldn’t get enough of Gabriel García Márquez. I gave it another go a few days later. The book and I suddenly clicked. Days before, the characters had seemed wooden and lifeless. Now they were brimming with vitality - I felt myself accompanying them in and out of the spirit world, I felt their despair, their hope and their resignation with their lot in life. I could even smell the strong, cloying scent of the frangipani blossoms as I sat in a crowded tram full of people bundled up in their winter woollens.

One of the fort’s occupants, talking to the sole white man in the refuge, says, ‘You, Sidimingo, belong to Mozambique, this country is yours. Without a shadow of a doubt. But doesn’t it make you shiver to think of being buried here?' The old white man shrugs. ‘It’s that your spirits don’t belong to this place. If you’re buried here, you won’t have a peaceful death.’ He isn’t suggesting that the old white man has no place in Africa but that his spirits, without the company of their ancestral spirits, will not feel at home.

Although I’m an atheist, I began to wonder about my mother’s spirits in that tropical graveyard. Felicitas was cremated but I began to wonder about her spirits too.

As I write this, I can feel the scorn that Felicitas is pouring on me, pouring herself yet another Jameson’s. ‘These are the only spirits you’ll find in me,’ she’s probably saying.

Up until then, I’d forgotten that Mia Couto also connects me to Felicitas. Tenuously, but there’s a connection, nevertheless. In the month before I started blogging, a time when we were still in almost daily contact, Felicitas asked me to proof-read a translation she was busy with. Her command of English was excellent (she once corrected a grammatical error on this blog) but she’d sometimes ask me for advice on how to word something in a more idiomatic way. She felt that her formal written English was not always right for the work she was translating. She hoped that my advice would give it a looser feel. The piece she was translating was the transcript of a speech (*) that Mia Couto had given to the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation the month (June 2005) before.

Unlike most other trees in Mozambique, the frangipani loses its leaves in winter. The character Domingo Mourão remarks on this fact when he says, 'When I came to Africa I didn't experience autumn anymore. It was as if time no longer moved forward, as if it were always in the same season. Only the frangipani restored that sense of time passing to me.' It’s not an indigenous tree, but no one is aware of this. It has come to belong in Mozambique. Does it shiver thinking about dying in Mozambique? I don’t think so. I’d like to think that the spirits of my mother and Felicitas belong where they are. I know they do.

And I know that while their deaths may not have been peaceful, they are at peace now.

(*) English translation (not by Felicitas)

Window on my world

2007-02-04T23:09:00.000Z

Unusually for me, I decided to tag myself with something that minge has been touting:

Please take a photograph of whatever you see before you, this Sunday (4th February 2007) at 5pm/17:00 (local time) and email it to me. Feel free to add any information you like, what the picture shows, what you were doing at the time, where you are, whether it's typical or atypical of where you are or what you do at 17:00 on a Sunday afternoon. Anything. It's up to you. helpful.

I hibernated this weekend, spending most of the time indoors, only venturing out twice to get a few groceries and an English Sunday newspaper so my contribution reflects that. And being an indecisive sort, rather than send him just one picture, I've sent a collage. That's cheating, I know, but I cheated more than just that - none of the pictures were taken at 5pm today and some were even taken yesterday. Ok, so I'm a cheat, but here you have a window on my world.

If you click on an individual picture, you'll get a bigger version of it. And if you want a bigger version of the collage, click here.

An unwelcome visitor

2007-02-03T17:29:00.000Z

A simple rat/mouse trap using a bucket, newspaper, cardboard ramp and bits of cheese.

Thinking that my trap wasn't going to work, I went out and bought some mousetraps.

You may have been wondering what's brought on my recent obsession (*) with killing poor defenceless animals? Quite simply, I woke up a week ago to find a mouse in my kitchen. It scampered away as soon as I arrived and wasn’t seen again until I returned from work that day. Again it scampered away not to be seen until the following morning.

And so it went on, day after day.

Mice are very cute but they’re still vermin. Not vermin in a rat kind of way, of course. If anything untoward were to come of it being in the kitchen, it wouldn’t have been much more than mice droppings and nibbling away at any foodstuff it came across.

Nevertheless, I decided to get rid of him.

And rather than go out and buy a mousetrap, I decided to try something I’d heard about before. Fill a bucket with water; cover it with newspaper that has had a cross cut into it with a sharp knife; sprinkle cheese on top. A rat would easily jump on to the paper to get at the cheese but a mouse is a lot smaller so I created a ramp to the top by balancing a piece of cardboard against the bucket.

I fully expected to find a drowned mouse the morning after setting up my contraption but it had managed to get the cheese without mishap. ‘Oh well, so much for that,’ I thought and went out and bought some mousetraps. They're very flimsy, made from plywood and thin bits of wire. Definitely mousetraps as opposed to rat traps. Very cheap too - less than 2 euros for four of them! Despite having bought them, I decided to give my contraption another go. I made a bigger cut in the newspaper so that there was less chance of it being able to take the mouse’s weight.

It worked - no more mouse in my kitchen!

A much better way of disposing of a mouse than having his body broken by a conventional mousetrap, don't you think? And definitely much more humane than the glue traps Ambling Sheep drew my attention to. Yes, I know that my contraption could have been even more humane by leaving the bucket empty. But what would I have done with the captured mouse?

There you have it, the reason for my going through my past experiences of being an animal murderer.

Do NOT click on this picture
if you are of a sensitive disposition.
You've been warned!!

(*) part 1, part 2, part 3

Moles and mustard gas - more death in the garden

2007-02-02T17:28:00.000Z

‘I’m not enjoying this.’’ I called out to my wife.

She was standing at the upstairs window as I held a struggling mole underwater in the fishpond. ‘I’m sorry,‘ she said. What else could she say? Even though it was all HER fault.

The mole showed no signs of giving up its struggle. ‘I really am NOT enjoying this,’ I called out again.

For a while in the mid-nineties, my troubles with moles became an absolute obsession. They weren’t much of a problem at the Claremont house as most of the front was paved and the back garden was small enough to keep them at bay. Then, in 1994, we moved to Kenilworth. The new house had a much bigger garden. The previous owners had neglected it but the fundamentals were still there, including a big area of patchy lawn that wouldn’t take much to be transformed into a luxuriant stretch of green grass. Fertilizer, regular watering and lots of loving care were all it needed. I was in my element. I’d always been a keen gardener and the new garden offered so many more possibilities than the old one. Within the space of a few months, the lawn looked amazing. It was perfect for volley ball, frolicking with the dogs and, best of all, lying on. I loved lying on it on a hot summer’s day, feeling its moisture cool my skin as I looked at Devil’s Peak in the distance.

And then the moles arrived!

There’d been no sign of them when we moved to the house so I can only assume that the much softer, moister soil I’d created after several months of devotion to the lawn had turned it into an attractive place for moles who were feeling over-crowded in our neighbours’ lawns. My every morning was greeted with fresh signs of them - huge mounds of black soil dotted all over the place; long tunnels zigzagging across the lawn like drunken spider legs. They incensed me. Stamping down the soil provided brief relief - their traces were less obvious and it gave my aggression towards them a necessary outlet. But it didn’t get rid of them. Before long, parts of the lawn were looking patchy again.

Something had to be done!

It’s amazing how many home-made remedies you hear about when you get a group of gardeners together and discuss mole problems. Ground glass, Jeyes fluid, soapy water, you name it. They all insist that their remedy works and that it’s the best. I tried them all. Some seemed to work but never for long. Then someone mentioned mustard gas.

‘You mean the stuff they used in the first world war?’ I asked.

‘Yes, the same; It's called Phostoxin, you can buy it at the chemist. It comes in big pellets that you stick into the tunnels after you’ve moistened the soil. The moisture releases the gas which then travels along the tunnels, killing the moles. But you have to be really careful with the stuff, it’s lethal.’

This stuff had to work! The following day, I asked for it at Noyes, the chemist on the corner, expecting to have to sign a poison register or something. Not only was there no need for a signature, but it wasn’t even kept behind the counter. Tubes of the stuff were on a shelf where they kept a small number of gardening items.

Wear rubber gloves….Do not handle with bare hands….Do not inhale fumes….Do not use during windy conditions….Contact your doctor on accidental inhalation….

My great-grandfather was buried in Flanders Fields (read more here). I’d read Owen, Sassoon, Remarque and others. To say I was nervous the first time I used the stuff, would be an understatement. I handled it with great care! It definitely worked as there was an immediate decrease in mole activity. Not permanently, however. Every time there was any sign of mole activity, out would come the mustard gas. Over time, I became blasé about using it, even handling the pellets with my bare hands. That stopped when I accidentally inhaled some fumes and felt an awful closing sensation in my chest. I can be so stupid at times!

I didn’t know what actually happened to the moles nor did I care. I assumed that overcome by fumes they curled up and died in their tunnels. I’m sure that’s what happened but the gas wasn’t always as lethal as I expected it to be. I suppose its effect dissipated the further away you got from where the pellet was placed and the more holes there were that connected the tunnels to the surface. Sometimes a gassed mole would emerge from its tunnel, blind, dazed and confused.

The first few times it happened, Headman, the gardener, was there to deal with it. He wasn’t there the day my wife rung me at the office.

‘You’ve got to come home. There’s a mole on the lawn.’

‘Now? What do you want me to do about it?’ I asked.

“You must put it out of its misery. It’s boiling out there and Barney (our large German Shepherd) keeps bothering it. I’m keeping him inside now.’

‘Can’t you do something about it?’

‘I can’t, you must.’

Who can argue with logic like that? Twenty minutes later, I was looking at what seemed to be a dead mole on the lawn. Hardly surprising as it had been gassed with Phostoxin, mauled by Barney then laid out to dry in the scorching sun for several hours. I picked it up. I was ready to toss it into the dustbin when I noticed a faint heartbeat. Shit, the poor thing was still alive! Just barely, mind you. I did the first thing that came to mind – held it under the water in the fishpond. A quick drowning would put it out of its misery.

Barely a second later, it was struggling like a wild animal. Not an almost dead one, very much a wild animal with lots of life in it.

Having started to drown the mole, I felt that I had to continue. Although the water may have revived it, it had to have been severely weakened by all that had happened to it that day, including being held under water. I continued holding it under while it tried its best to squirm out of my hand. ‘This won’t last much longer,’ I kept thinking to myself. The squirming wouldn’t stop. ‘Please die now,’ I said to myself, over and over again. Suddenly it stopped; it was dead. How long it took, I don’t know, but, to use a cliché, it seemed like an eternity. It was truly, absolutely horrid!

Next time it happened, I chopped off the mole’s head with a spade.

Death in the garden - pigeons this time

2007-02-02T07:38:00.000Z

Deciding to get rid of pigeons is simple, getting rid of them a lot more difficult. I may think of them as jumped up rats but I wasn’t going to kill them, as easy as that may have been. Also, killing them would not have gone down well with the kids. In fact, getting rid of them without protest from the kids was not going to happen.

So they stayed until two events forced my hand.

Eight months after moving into the Claremont house, my wife got a stomach bug that persisted for several months. Night after night, she was in the grip of cramping pains. Her doctor was baffled. Each new course of medication failed to bring any proper relief, let alone get rid of the condition. It was only when her doctor heard about the pigeons and how they often strode into the kitchen demanding food that he realised she’d probably picked up some sort of parasite from them. A new prescription quickly got rid of the cramps. From then on, the lower part of the kitchen stable door was always kept closed. Yes, they definitely had to go.

Still we didn’t get rid of them. Not until one of them got ill.

One afternoon I found one of the smaller ones standing in the corner of the back porch. I approached it, expecting it to rush back into the garden. It didn’t flinch at all. As I picked it up, I could feel its nervous heartbeat but it made no attempt to escape. A bird with a broken foot or wing would still have tried to get away. This bird displayed no sign of fight; its fear was completely muted. Realising there was something wrong, I turned it over. I almost gagged. The smell of putrefying flesh was overpowering. Its anus was a mass of seething maggots.

In Africa, elsewhere too I’m sure, if you’re not careful, animals with flesh wounds often have fly eggs laid in them. Within a few days they’ll hatch and the wound will crawl with maggots feasting on the diseased flesh. Timely application of the right sort of disinfectant easily gets rid of them and the wound usually heals rapidly. With some species of dog, you have to be especially vigilant about eggs being laid around their eyes, particularly during the hot, dry months when flies descend in black, sticky clouds. This, however, was no ordinary infestation - nothing I could do with the bottle of disinfectant in the medicine chest was going to do the pigeon any good. I’d never been fond of ‘our’ pigeons; the rat infestation and my wife’s stomach bug had put them on borrowed time. There was absolutely no reason for me to feel for it. So I abandoned it to the rats? No, I took it to the vet.

‘Please see what you can do for this pigeon,’ I told him. ‘’It’s not a pet or favourite animal or anything, so don’t spend too much time on it if it looks unlikely to survive. I just don’t want it to suffer.’

Some 36 hours later, I got a call from his receptionist. ‘Mr Nomad, I’m very sorry to give you bad news,’ she said in her practiced sympathetic tones. ‘Your pigeon didn’t survive its illness.’

‘It looked very poorly, I didn’t think it would make it,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t want it to suffer.’

‘We tried our very best,’ she said, her voice lowering a few more octaves.

‘Oh, that’s alright, it wasn’t a pet.’

I knew that my Samaritan act wasn’t going to be free, vets not being known for their altruism, but some painkillers and, possibly, the assisted death of a pigeon shouldn’t cost much.

‘How much did you say?’ I asked when she told me how much I owed them.

‘Three hundred rand (*),’ she said again.

‘What did you do? Put it on life-support for 24 hours?’ I wanted to say. Instead I said, ‘I really didn’t expect to pay that much.’

I should have stomped on that fucking pigeon, not taken it to the vet! In the next few weeks, I got rid of them all.

(*) A lot of money for not saving a pigeon's life in 1993.

Drowned rats

2007-02-01T11:33:00.000Z

Putting down rat poison isn’t the same as shooting a bird, is it? You know they’re going to die; you may even get to see their bloated bodies but it doesn’t feel like deliberate killing. They’re vermin, they spread disease. Letting them live is stupid and dangerous. You can do it yourself or have pest control do it for you. Getting pest control in is a bit like buying your meat at the supermarket. The sounds and smells of beef roasting away in the oven are untainted by the bellowing of animals being led to the slaughter and the smell of their fear mixed with the smell of their blood. But how can I compare a cow with a rat? A cow is a beautiful animal with deep, brown eyes; eyes that will easily drown you. Rats are, greasy, literally so; they twitch furtively, feverishly; their tails are scaly. There’s no comparison at all!

I first put down rat poison when living in Claremont, Cape Town. We lived across a canalised river from Villagers Rugby ground. The small, back garden was dominated by an ancient oak tree that once formed an avenue of trees along the river bank when it was still a proper river. A pigeon hutch perched on top of a tall pole under the tree. An ugly blight on the urban landscape, I’ve never been particularly fond of pigeons (*) - flying rodents, feathered vermin. Feathered rats, you might say. These, however, were of the fan-tailed variety. Brilliantly white, their tail feathers fanned out proudly behind them. Kitsch, feathered rats, in other words. Jumped up rats, but still rats. We’d inherited them from the previous owners and although we’d rather not have had them there and they seemed perfectly capable of feeding themselves, we took to feeding them.

By feeding them we were also feeding the large, dark rats that lived in the river canal’s cracked walls.

Not much was seen of them during the day but as soon as night fell, the area under the oak tree became a sea of undulating fur and slicing tails. Sometimes you’d see a rat scampering over the lawn in the twilight, but it was too dark to see their massed milling from the back porch. For that, you needed to get closer. Not too close as that would scare them back into the river. After seeing three of them shred a fledgling that had fallen out of the pigeon hutch, I decided to wage warfare on them.

They had to go!

Putting down rat poison is tricky business when you have dogs that have free rein of the garden. Not only is the poison fatal but you need to keep them away from the poisoned rat carcasses. The safest place to put the stuff was in the garden shed. While the dogs were unable to get in there, we knew that the rats had no trouble at all - rat shit was all over the place!

In the first few days of my war on the rats, I collected numerous of their bodies on a daily basis. In less than a week, their numbers had dropped off radically.

The daily carcass collection involved a hunt round the garden and careful examination of the shed. On the second day of the war, while lifting up pots and other bits and pieces of garden equipment in the shed, I came across seven blind, hairless, baby rats. With the mass killing of rats that was taking place, it shouldn’t have been unexpected but discovering them was still a bit of a shock. They looked so defenceless. Of course they did, they were so defenceless! Seven may not be three and farmers’ wives don’t live in Claremont, but there was no way that they’d be running anywhere. I couldn’t just leave them there to starve to death.

It would have been easy to crush them under foot but remembering how, as a child, I’d seen unwanted newborn kittens disposed of, I chose to drown them. It was swift and, I hope, painless. But despite the enjoyment I’d been getting from killing the adult rats, it was very unpleasant.

Soon we were rid of them. Living near the river, it was never going to be a permanent thing but feeding the pigeons was definitely going to encourage the rats.

Those pigeons had to go!

(*) I may not like them that much but one of the best sounds of summer is the sound of the doves calling out to each other in the stifling heat.

A bird in the hand is not worth two in the bush

2007-01-30T21:30:00.000Z

A proud little nomad posing with his pellet gun and squinting into the sun. Taken at my childhood home in Matola, Mozambique.

My teenage mother and uncle with my grandmother on a riverbank outside Johannesburg. My uncle is supporting his gun - they must have been shooting at birds or hoping to do so.

I shot my first bird at eight soon after having been given a pellet gun by my uncle. Both he and my mother had grown up shooting flying things with alacrity. It was thought that a pellet gun would be a great source of fun for me.

They were right.

I loved shooting bottles and tin cans off walls. A masala (*), especially if overripe and hit in the right place, exploded impressively. Loquats and marulas didn’t explode but hitting them took much more skill. Shooting at birds began as soon as I got the gun. It was what you did with a gun. Boys that didn’t have guns, killed birds with catapults. And none of them had a mother who waxed lyrical about her youthful shooting sprees and immediately christened my gun by shooting several mousebirds. Their limp, soft, warm bodies fascinated me.

I wanted to shoot one too.

Shooting a bird wasn’t as easy as shooting fruit or tin cans. Aiming while pointing a gun upwards wasn’t that simple - I always missed or they’d fly away before I had time to shoot. I decided to ‘cheat’. There was a very large marula tree in the paddock that was always full of birds engorging themselves on the fruit and the fat mopani worms that infested the tree at certain times of the year. The paddock gate was just the right height for an eight-year old to rest a gun on it while taking aim. I took aim and shot. A small green bird plumetted to the ground. With a loud shout of glee, I ran towards it.

My first bird!

It’s broken body lay amongst the rotting fruit; blood trickled out of its beak and through a hole in its chest. Instead of picking it up immediately, I stood looking at it. Watching its blood stain the ground. I didn’t want to touch it, I wanted to run away. I wanted to hide.

I picked it up and wept.

This was colonial Africa. Animals and birds were being killed around me all the time. Killed for sport and slaughtered for food. On festive occasions, our neighbours would sometimes slaughter a pig by slitting its throat and letting it bleed to death. The chickens we ate were often slaughtered by the cook in the backyard. My mother continued using my gun to shoot birds. The better shots amongst my friends killed with their catapults. None of this bothered me but I never killed again.

Not until many years later, that is.

(*) also known as groenklapper, elephant orange, monkey ball, monkey orange, Natal orange, spiny monkey ball, kaffir orange, mpapa, mtonga, angora

Time for a Spring clean

2007-01-28T15:37:00.000Z

Yes, I know that Spring seems light years away with this weather but it's time to do a bit of spring-cleaning of this blog. There's quite a bit to do but, for the time being, I've limited it to getting my links in order.

Some of them have had to be deleted because the blogs no longer exist:

Xmichra decided to stop blogging as a concession to relationship problems
Nyasha (coffee addict) still has a presence at world wide photoshoot but I miss her 'proper' blog. She still needs to explain why she deleted it. Cow!!
Girl with a dot com has also gone and will be sorely missed.

I've also deleted those that I no longer read or that don't get updated anymore. Some of those that are updated very infrequently have been left as I'm hoping that they'll get updated again at some stage.

And there are several new ones to add:

Mike introduced me to Caroline and we met a couple of weeks ago when Mike spent the weekend here. She's one of the original bloggers, you know.
The fabulous minge is someone who stumbled across my blog and has been entertaining me with his eccentric view on life.
I'm not sure how Anjou found me but he seems to like me a lot so that says a lot about him. But, apart from that, someone who seems to love cows because they have four stomachs and one heart has to be good.
Herschelian is a woman who loves to write about three things - reading, ranting and recipes. I don't do too much ranting but I love reading and recipes so she's on a winning wicket. Being South African (even if she refers to herself as an ex-South African!) helps too!
Another introduction from Mike is Non-working Monkey, who has just moved to Amsterdam from the UK. She seems cool but that would apply to any introduction from Mike.
My link to James introduced me to 'blonde but bright', an American PhD student who has lived in Amsterdam for quite a while. Beware of her pop-up that could fall foul of your web-censor if you click on her at work. :-)
His link also introduced me to Alexis, a great source of comments on Dutch life by an outsider.

Go read them, I'm sure you'll like them as much as I do. Further spring-cleaning will be evident in the next few weeks.

Albert Cuyp

2007-01-27T17:22:00.000Z

Today's wanderings took me to the Albert Cuyp street market in De Pijp. I'd been told about it by lots of people but was still unprepared for the glorious assault of colour, smell and variety of the place.

Judge for yourself.

Just as I was taking the picture of the tram, I was accosted by the oddest creature. He was very short, quite aged and dressed in the weirdest outfit. I'd have said his sex was indeterminate but despite his face being caked in heavy makeup, I could tell that a man of sorts lurked beneath as his five 'o clock shadow was quite visible. An aged, small dog (a chihuahua?) was firmly clasped to his chest.

His expression was angry, as was the tone of his voice. He barked at me in Dutch so it took me a while to work out what he was saying.

'Did you take a picture of me?'

He was reassured when I told him that I hadn't and strode (can a very short person stride?) away. Poor guy, he must have people taking pictures of him all the time.

I really wish that I'd been able to take his picture!

Anyway, I know where I'll be buying my fruit and vegetables when I have the chance to get there. Which, alas, will only be Saturdays.

The Quintessential Amsterdam experience (*)?

2007-01-26T15:16:00.000Z

I joined colleagues for drinks last night. By the time the trams had stopped running, they were in the mood to go clubbing in De Pijp but I was the only one amongst them without a bicycle. I was happy to go home but they were having none of it.

One of them would give me a lift on the back of his bicycle.

Although they’d been there before, we got lost so I was given a long, scenic journey through Amsterdam on the back of a bike. Once we found it, we decided that the queue was too long. We went to another place near Leidseplein instead. Yet another long queue put an end to the idea of going clubbing.

A five minute walk later, and I was home.

(*) Mike’s term.

Does Razaq really take me for a moegoe?

2007-01-22T21:51:00.000Z

Like most of the rest of you, I get my fair share of offers to buy viagra at hugely discounted prices and offers to increase my penis to huge proportions. Along with offers of loans, university degrees and requests to check my bank details (phishing) for banks that I’ve never banked with. Unlike many of you, including Rob, I’ve been spared the various scams (419 fraud) that promise untold riches if you’re stupid enough to provide them with your bank details.

Until a few days ago, that is.

From: aj.meutgeert@home.nl
Subject: Email from Samiu
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:42:54 +0100

Dear Sir/Madam,

This letter may come to you as a surprise due to the fact that we have not yet met. I have to say that I have no intentions of causing you any pains so i decided to contact you through this medium.

As you read this, I don't want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday. My name is Razaq Samiu, a merchant in Dubai, in the U.A.E. I have been diagnosed with prostate and esophageal Cancer that was discovered very late due to my laxity in caring for my health. It has defiled all form of medicine and right now, I have only about a few months to live according to medical experts.

I have not particularly lived my life so well, as I never really cared for anyone not even myself but my business. Though I am very rich, I was never generous, I was always hostile to people and only focus on my business as that was the only thing I cared for. But now I regret all this as I now know that there is more to life than just wanting to have or make all the money in the world. I believe when God gives me a second chance to come to this world I would live my life a different way from how I have lived it. Now that I know my time is near, I have willed and given most of my properties and assets to my immediate and extended family members and as well as a few close friends and Schools in the UAE. I have decided to give alms to charity organizations, as I want this to be one of the last good deeds I do on earth. So far, I have distributed money to some charity organizations in the U.A.E, England and Ireland. Now that my health has deteriorated so badly, I cannot do this myself any more. I once asked members of my family to close one of my accounts and donate the money, which I have there to charity organization in Bulgaria, they refused and kept the money to themselves. Hence, I do not trust them anymore, as they seem not to be contended with what I have left for them. The last of my money which is the huge cash that I deposit in a bank in England Uk.

I want you to help me collect this deposit and dispatched it to charity organizations and let them know that it is I Razaq Samiu that is making this generous donation.

I am writing this from my laptop computer in my hospital bed in England where I wait for my time to come. If you are interested to help me i will give you more information about this like the amount that i deposited in the bank and Contact of the bank so you can contact them. I will also send you a picture of myself when i am on my laptop in the hospital.

Note that you will take 20% out of the funds and give 80% to the charity organizations. I pray that God uses you to support and assist me with good heart God be with you.

If you can help respond back to me on my private email:
razaqsamiu2@yahoo.es

Razaq Samiu

Between receiving Razaq's heart-rending email and now, I've received a couple of 'romance-scams' on a gay chat site. Obviously, my time of innocence when it comes to being the target of scammers has come to an end.

Do you think I should reply and see what happens next? It would be interesting to see his picture, don’t you think? But, while it would be interesting, it’s definitely not original. Some people have elevated the activity of ‘scam baiting’into a fine art.

Whole websites are devoted to it.

I remembered reading about a particular scam-baiting website that specialises in hoodwinking the ‘scamsters’ into doing the most ridiculous things: posing for pics with hilarious signs, making elaborate carvings, actually get tattoed, etc. You can see some of the results below.

Another one is called 'Bait a Mugu'. According to them, a mugu is a 'term used by the scammers among themselves to describe their intended victims. Roughly translated this term mean "big fool"'. Now hang on, that word sounds suspiciously like the Afrikaans word, 'moegoe'. According to Wiktionary, 'moegoe' is a South African pejorative word meaning an idiot or a mampara. It suggests that the word may be derived from 'moeg ou', the Afrikaans term for 'tired person'. If that's the case, the word has travelled all the way up to West Africa. Alternatively, like many other Afrikaans words, it's a truly African word that has been adopted by Afrikaans.

Here's a selection of 'trophies' from '419 eater'.

You know, while finding those pics really amusing, I started to feel sorry for these people. Poor, ignorant people, trying to make money by any which way. There even seemed something racist about the whole thing.

Hang on, Nomad, don't be such a wet, bleeding-heart liberal! These guys are responsible for pilfering nearly $200 million from Americans annually and costing the UK economy £150m a year. Ok, so people are stupid to fall for this sort of thing but these scammers aren't people one should be feeling sorry for.

Phew, bleeding-heart moment over. Here are some more pics:

Ok, while I won’t go into a whole scam-baiting exercise, I’d still like to see Razaq’s pic. Watch this space for further developments.

Five things most people don't know about me

2007-01-18T20:28:00.000Z

Ambling sheep has tagged me with the assignment he was tagged with: "7 successes in 2006" or "5 things most people don't know about you".

SEVEN successes??!! I honestly don’t think there were 7 things that happened to me in 2006 that could be described as successes. So it’s going to have to be 5 things that most people don’t know about me. But, before I do that, let me review my post on ‘twenty random things about me' as I may have revealed quite a bit there that people hadn’t known until they read that post.

Ok, much of this is going to be embarrassing, but here it goes…

The first one is in keeping with a recent post of mine – I was born with 'black balls'. By that I mean that I had a large, dark birthmark that covered most of my testicles. It was surgically removed when I was 4 as my parents thought it best if I were not to suffer years of teasing at school. In later life residues of it led to more surgical removal.

I was orphaned when I was 11. My mother died of pneumonia when I was 10, my father died of tuberculosis a year later. Both diseases are very treatable, even way back then, but both of them can easily kill if the circumstances are right.

Because my father was very ill in hospital with tuberculosis, everyone in the school (all 80 pupils and 9 teachers!) had to be tested for the disease. I was staying with very close family friends at the time and we’d all been tested already so I didn’t have to go nor did their one son who was in my class. We were left in the classroom when everyone else went across to the clinic nearby to be tested. The headmistress was in her office so that we weren’t completely alone in the building. My friend and I spent the time sucking each other off in the classroom.

I once had sex with someone (a man, of course), at my house in Cape Town when my wife and kids were upstairs. I had been chatting with him online for ages and he convinced me that it would be alright for him to come round despite my usually subscribing to the maxim of ‘don’t shit on your doorstep’.

One of my most shameful childhood moments was when my mother told my grandmother (she later became my guardian) that I’d been on the beach throwing balls up into the air for my grandmother’s dog to catch. It was shameful because the balls were clumps of sand that burst into the dog’s face and mouth when he tried to catch them. I’ve no idea why I did it as I loved the dog. And since I adored my grandmother, I was beside myself with shame. Many years later, when going through her things after she'd died, I found the letter I wrote to her apologising for my actions.

So there you have it - five things that most people don't know about me, four of which were better left in the closet. I won't be tagging anyone but if anyone feels up to the challenge, be my guest and consider yourself tagged.

Amsterdam XXX

2007-01-17T15:53:00.000Z

We all know that Amsterdam is famous for its liberal attitude towards sex so seeing ‘XXX’ all over the place is to be expected. But over the past week or so, I’d begun to notice it in the most unexpected places and was wondering if there was some other significance attached to it. I pointed it out to Mike over the weekend when I saw it etched into some granite benches. Later, at the Rijksmuseum, I noticed it again. It appeared as a barely noticeable stamp at the bottom right side of the frames on many of the museum’s huge paintings.

What could a portrait by Frans Hals have to do with porn? It had to have some other meaning.

I asked one of my colleagues about it on Monday and he chuckled, thinking that I was referring to the customary interpretation of the symbol. Um, do I really look that innocent to some people?

‘Oh, that one, that’s the Amsterdam symbol, it’s on the flag and coat of arms,’ he said once I’d explained that I wasn’t referring to porn.

He didn’t know what it meant but a quick google gave us the answer. They’re three St Andrew's crosses, believed to represent the three dangers which have traditionally plagued the city: flood, fire, and pestilence. The coincidence of Amsterdam being so intimately associated with porn and having ‘XXX’as part of its official symbol seemed remarkable.

Could the symbol have arisen because of this association?

More googling found one place that sites the Amsterdam flag as being a possible source of ‘XXX’ as the symbol of porn. But my interpretation of further meanings associated with ‘XXX’ makes me doubt that. Etymology Online says that ‘In malt liquor, XX denoted "double quality" and XXX "strongest quality" (1827).’ It also says that ‘X’ was first used to designate "films deemed suitable for adults only;" by Britain in 1950 and was adopted by the US on Nov. 1, 1968. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable has this to offer on the origin of XXX: "X on beer casks formerly indicated beer which had paid the old 10s. duty, and hence came to mean beer of a given quality. Two or three crosses are mere trademarks intended to convey an impression of its extra strength."

In this article on the origins of the X-certificate, it says that its introduction ‘was widely seen as a necessary development to reflect the fact that many film-makers were tackling more adult-oriented themes in ways that made it difficult or impossible to cut their work to make it suitable for the A certificate. BBFC Secretary John Trevelyan later admitted that two mistakes had been made in defining the X certificate - the minimum age for admission should have been eighteen, and it should have had a different name, as the 'X' tag was too suggestive, not least because it rhymed with "sex".

I’d venture that ‘XXX’ comes from a combination of XXX meaning extra-strong and the X-certificate. Although I’d like to think that there’s a connection with strong liquor and uninhibited sex, I think that may be pushing ít a bit. That’s just a happy coincidence, much like the Amsterdam connection.

Anyway, whatever the true origins of the term, it’s a term that's destined to stay. There are strong moves afoot to adopt .xxx as an internet domain for the porn industry.

Do you shave your balls?

2007-01-15T21:24:00.000Z

Interesting chat up line, don’t you think?

I was sitting at the bar at the Amstel Tavern; the Troubled Diva, Mike, had popped off to the toilets. A rather interesting-looking man had given me a meaningful look before sitting down next to me a few minutes earlier. When Mike got up to go to the toilet, I had another look at him.

He fist said it in Dutch before realising that I didn’t understand him.

‘No, I don’t,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m far too lazy for that sort of thing.’

Nothing came of it, possibly because I turned away from him to chat to Mike on his return. Shortly after that we moved on to Amsterdam’s newest gay bar, ‘Prik’.

It was great having Mike here for the weekend as we got to do and see a lot. On Friday, we started off at the trendier, twinkier places before ending up at the Cockring. Saturday started off at the cheesier, less trendy places. We landed up at the Cockring again.

But it wasn’t gay bars all weekend despite Mike saying, late yesterday afternoon, that he needed a good dose of the straights after feeling all ‘gayed out’. We also did the social thing and the cultural thing.

Saturday didn’t actually start off at various gay bars as we met Caroline for lunch that afternoon. Mike and Caroline, one of the original bloggers and inventor of the ‘permalink’, have known each other for several years now. He ‘cyber-introduced’ us soon after I arrived in Amsterdam but thought a real-life introduction would be so much better. We met up at De Waag for coffee then strolled over the square to a small Chinese/Japanese ‘fusion’ restaurant. While chatting about all sorts of things, we pigged ourselves on delicious dim sum. Conversation flowed smoothly without any alcoholic lubrication. Caroline may have been suffering from a really bad migraine but you’d never have known it. I’ll have to pluck up the ‘courage’ to meet up with her again soon.

Afterwards, a brisk walk in which we were buffeted by Arctic blasts took us to the Stedelijk Museum. Both of us were equally despairing about the crap masquerading as the cutting edge of visual art. It redeemed itself with two excellent photographic projects by two photographers, Broomberg & Chanarin. One looks at apartheid ten years after the end of apartheid, the other concerns the never-ending conflict in Israel. Each consisted of powerful, disturbing images that would never have been commissioned by the respective tourist boards of the two countries. So many years after the demise of apartheid and Israel’s issues are still being portrayed alongside South Africa’s inequalities.

And yesterday, it was the Rijksmuseum. Ongoing renovations have severely restricted the exhibition space but in a way that is perfect for an infrequent museum visitor like myself. Holland’s ‘Golden Age’ was sumptuously portrayed in about 15 large rooms, enough to summarise the history of the period while showing off the creativity that flourished at the time. Had there been more to see, my tired feet and fuzzy head would have united in anguished protest.

Mike left at 7 yesterday evening – his plane back to Nottingham was leaving at 9. I was already in bed by then!

It's the little things...

2007-01-11T14:59:00.000Z

As of yesterday, I’ve got a Sofi (social security) number. As of today, I have a Dutch bank account. And, today, I finally got round to getting myself a season ticket for the tram and metro. Apart from registering myself on the bevolkingsregister (municipal register), something I’m not sure if necessary or not, I could regard myself as officially resident in the Netherlands even if not truly an Amsterdam resident until I get myself a bicycle.

But, despite all that, I’m still feeling rather displaced.

It’s the little, everyday things that strike home the most. Odd things like scanning labels at the supermarket, trying to work out ingredients or how something needs to be prepared. Speaking Afrikaans, I can make out most of what is said on the labels so imagine how difficult it must be for someone with no knowledge of Dutch. Watching a barman pour beer (a deliberately large head is poured then most of the foam scraped off so that the glass is only about 80% full) makes you feel cheated but that’s the way they do it here.

As I said, the little things.

Back online!

2007-01-07T18:58:00.000Z

My broadband connection (not the stolen one) is working so I'm back online. Now I'll be able to get to my many emails and start reading all the blogs I've neglected of late. For those of you who know how verbose I can be, this isn't going to be one of my long epistles so you can breathe a long sigh of relief.

Here is the evidence that I work in an orange building:

And here is a pic I took of the moon over Prinsengracht at 8am as I was on my way to catch the tram. Yet again, I wish that I had a decent camera and not have to rely on my camera phone.

Time to get nailed?

2007-01-05T10:53:00.000Z

A new year, a new country, and a new leaf, right?

Well, not quite as I’ve been stealing bandwidth from a neighbour again. My flat has a wireless broadband connection but I’ve been unable to connect to it as yet. I’m hoping my landlady’s boyfriend will be round this weekend to help me sort it out. Anyway, all that to say that my attempts last night to load pics proving that I work in an orange building were thwarted by the neighbour’s unstable connection. I was also going to blog about my last sordid moments in Nottingham and the way I began the new year in Amsterdam. That will have to wait until next time.

Really, one just can’t get the right calibre of neighbour anymore!

Week one of the new life in Amsterdam is almost over and I haven’t been out on the tiles once. Unheard of behaviour for me - I must be getting old! That will change as of tonight, of course. But, being spoilt for choice and having Reguliersdwarsstraat less than 5 minutes walk away, what venerable establishment should be the first to be graced with my presence? Well, as fate will have it, this blog has been going through another spike again after my insults post was included in kottke’s list of the 100 best links of 2006.

So, I’ll be going to ‘De Spijker’ just around the corner from me even though leather isn’t my sort of thing.

Why? Well, another meaning for spike is nail and the Dutch word for nail is ‘spijker’. It makes perfect sense to me even if it doesn’t to you!

2007 is here!

2007-01-01T18:43:00.000Z

And I'm in Amsterdam!

I caught Eurostar at 12.30 yesterday and got to Amsterdam just after 7pm. The journey was mostly uneventful but the train switch at Brussels was a bit fraught. I only had 20 minutes in which to do it which should have been enough had the two platforms not been miles apart and had I been carrying less luggage. I got my connection with 30 seconds to spare!

Once I got to Amsterdam's Central Station, I texted my landlady, saying, 'I get trams 1, 2, 5, or 9, right?'

She replied, 'No 9, others ok.' So I got number 9.

After about 10 minutes, I decided that the journey seemed unfamiliar. I had another look at her reply and realised that she'd meant 'Not 9'. Off I got, returned to Central Station and got number 2. None of this was very pleasant. It was raining, the trams were crowded and my luggage made me an unpleasant hinderance to other passengers.

It was about 8.30 when I got to my apartment. The landlady and her boyfriend were there to greet me with a bottle of champagne.

Happy New Year everyone!

Happy Christmas everyone!!

2006-12-24T01:20:00.000Z

Thanks to Babs for the link

Winter's here!

2006-12-22T13:35:00.000Z

Winter's here at last!

Not that I particularly like winter of course, but it has been strange not feeling properly cold until the last few days. I've actually had to wear a scarf to keep me warm rather than as a colourful neck accessory. The fog has been playing havoc with the airlines and driving has been particularly tedious as everyone slows down to a crawl.

The following series of pics were taken over the past month and a bit, all at about 8am as I walked to catch the bus between the central bus station in Northampton and work.


10th Nov	14th Nov	15th Nov	16th Nov	21st Nov


22 Nov	23rd Nov	11th Dec	22nd Dec

But much more interesting than the eventual arrival of winter is the fact that today's my last day (*) of work in Northampton!

Not only am I moving to a new job in a new city in a new country, but my daily commute is going to become SO much easier. Instead of the daily nodding off during the hour and a bit long car journey to and from work, my daily commute is going to be a mere 20 minute tram and metro journey. Bliss!

For those of you who are unlikely to be reading blogs in the next few days, let me wish you all a Merry Christmas and, especially, a great New Year. For those of you who'll be around, I'll wish you again at the appropriate time.

(*)I had to change the password on my PC today. I changed it to 'lastday'. It had been 'orange' for the past month.

I'm not the Ipswich killer!

2006-12-20T10:24:00.000Z

Taken from an email I sent my landlady-to-be in Amsterdam:

The trip back to England was a bit of a nightmare. The plane arrived at Luton at 9.30pm after which I needed to catch a train to Nottingham. Rather stupidly, I hadn’t looked into the rail situation at that time of night and found that the last train going in my direction was a train to Derby. So I had to get off at a station (Long Eaton) as close as possible to Nottingham from where I’d get a taxi. I’d never been to Long Eaton before so wasn’t prepared to find it a rather strange ‘non-town’ with an almost non-existent station placed on the outskirts of the town. I arrived there at half past midnight and found myself almost in the middle of nowhere with not a taxi in sight. Well, there were taxis around but they were ferrying people about or had stopped working for the night.

I started to walk towards the town centre thinking that it would be easier finding a taxi there.

About 100 metres ahead of me, I could see a woman walking in my direction. She’d probably seen me wandering around aimlessly on the corner and wondered what I was up to. At that point, I crossed the road as a taxi was approaching on the other side of the road and I thought it may stop. It didn’t. I crossed back again, thinking that, as a local, she’d know where I could find a taxi at that time of night. As I approached her, I could see that she looked rather panicked. In fact, she looked like a gazelle trapped in the a pantechnicon’s headlights. I asked her about taxis and she, pointing wildly in the direction of the town centre, she stammered ‘There, that way. You must go that way!’

Long Eaton is a long way from Ipswich but I’m sure the murders have made women walking in dark, isolated places feel very vulnerable. Poor thing, I wonder if she slept well that night?

It reminded me of when I lived in Brighton when I sometimes used to catch the bus just outside Sainsbury’s at the bottom end of St James’s street in Kemptown. A beautiful black woman sometimes used to catch the same bus with her young son. One day I overheard them speaking Portuguese to each other so I moved closer to them and said something (in Portuguese) stupid like, ‘You speak Portuguese, so where are you from?’ There are a lot of oddballs in Brighton but I don’t think I especially look like one. Nevertheless, she looked a bit freaked out by the question and seemed loathe to reply. Feeling rather foolish, I said something even more stupid. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not trying to hit on you, I’m gay.’

Oddly enough, after that rather unpromising beginning, we became quite good ‘bus-friends’.

Prepping myself for the move...

2006-12-18T21:54:00.000Z

My mind is starting to shift into Amsterdam mode so I've decided to help it along with a few purchases.

I bought Ian Buruma's critically acclaimed 'Murder in Amsterdam', a 'rivetting account' of the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist, Mohammed Bouyeri. It discusses how a clash between European Enlightenment values and Muslim fundamentalism is ripping Dutch society apart.

Always a controversial figure, Theo van Gogh's murder was very much a result of his collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a brilliant and stunningly beautiful Somali from a prominent political family who fled to Holland to escape a forced marriage, learned perfect Dutch, joined the left-wing Labour Party to advocate for abused Muslim women immigrants, and by 2002 was a Member of Parliament and rising star in the conservative free-market Liberal Party.

For a Muslim perspective on the book, read this review.

I also bought the Moleskine City Notebook for Amsterdam. It's a beautiful little book that I fear my laziness may make a waste of money. But, being a sucker for the words 'the legendary notebook of Hemmingway, Picasso, and Chatwin becomes your guide to Amsterdam', I was easily hooked.

A bit of googling introduced me to a new blog, American in Amsterdam. It appears that James is a well-travelled gay American who recently moved to Amsterdam. By looking at his BlogMap, I can see that he lives very close to the flat I didn't take.

Talking of which, in a fit of prematurity, I tried to alter my BlogMap to reflect my address-to-be in Amsterdam. At the time of posting this, it hasn't worked - possibly some fate thing won't allow me to until I'm actually living there.

Update: Blogmap now shows me as living in Amsterdam.

Argentinian steakhouses, bikes, canals and dildos

2006-12-17T21:22:00.000Z

Apart from 4 days soon after I got married 22 years ago, I don't really know Amsterdam except from 2 days spent there recently. One was for my interview a few weeks ago, the other yesterday when I was looking for a flat to move into when I move there on New Year's Eve.

It's still a beautiful city with beautiful architecture and my lasting memories of the place are unchanged except that there seems to be less dog shit all over the place. The canals are still there, as is the red light district and the numerous coffee shops full of tourists. Bikes, bikes and more bikes - they are everywhere! But, what is it about Argentinian steakhouses that there are so many of them? I don't recall them from my visit of 22 years ago. Their ubiquity reminded me of how I was struck by the huge number of orthopaedic shops in Madrid when I visited many years ago.

I walked all over the city yesterday, trying to get a feel for the areas that surrounded the two flats I was going to see.


gabled canal houses	green wall	17th century canal	iguana sculptures	another iguana

wall fish	bikes everywhere	bikes copulating	more copulating bikes	bikes standing

sleep or dead?	dead bike	sex toys for all	Mrs Ball's chutney	Restaurant Portugalia

There are lots of sorely neglected bikes around - I wonder what happens to the dead ones?

It's good to see that Mrs Ball's chutney is available and nice to see a Portuguese restaurant as some Hispanic competition to all those Argentinian steakhouses. It's next door to a gay hotel called the 'The Golden Bear'. I was reminded of Nyasha (*) when I saw it. The restaurant, that is.

Both flats were great but I chose the one closer to all the action. It's on the first floor as opposed to the fourth floor as was the other one. But those weren't the main reasons for choosing it.

It's very spacious, beautifully furnished and is the only flat in the whole building. It has very high ceilings, lots of lovely original features including heavy antique doors that separate the living room from the rest of the flat. It's on Leidsestraat, a very busy shopping street and is very close to a tram stop. So, unlike the other flat, it's going to be rather noisy. But, living over a club as I do now shouldn't make that too much of a problem. Leidseplein, a tourist trap heaving with bars and restaurants is nearby, as is Vondelpark and the book district. The Rijksmuseum is 5 minutes walk away so I'll have no excuse to not be cultured. And, if I want to be uncultured (probably more likely) there are numerous sleasy gay venues nearby.

I suspect I'm going to enjoy staying there.

(*) Nyasha's usual blog seems to have disappeared so now you need to go here to find her.

The countdown to Amsterdam begins….

2006-12-15T10:27:00.000Z

I’m flying out to Amsterdam this afternoon to view a couple of flats tomorrow. I’ll be taking my maximum luggage allowance in the hope that I’ll take one of them and be able to leave my suitcase there.

My Eurostar ticket is booked for the 31st so I’ll be starting my new life in Amsterdam from about 7pm on New Year’s Eve.

Work (groan!) starts on January 2nd.

Party time for queers in Cape Town

2006-12-11T09:56:00.000Z

It's almost time for the annual Mother City Queer Project (MCQP) costume party.

The first one, The Locker Room Project, was held in 1994 , the year of South Africa's first democratic election which led to sexual orientation being enshrined in the world’s most liberal constitution. It was such a hysterical success (*) that MCQP has grown up to become an annual event on the international queer circuit party calendar.

But, while it may be a queer event, it's very popular with the straights. Straight people in the know, that is. The sort that know that a really good queer party is hard to beat when it comes to friendly, over-the-top, uninhibited fun.

I've yet to go. Maybe next year if I'm in Cape Town. Had I gone this year, I seriously doubt that I’d have dressed up as a super hero. Dressed up as anything, actually. Perhaps I could have passed as Benjamin Parker?

This year it's being held on 16 December, the Day of Reconciliation, a public holiday that has been know by various names, including the Day of the Vow and Dingaan Day.

One wonders what the pious Voortrekkers would have thought about all those prancing moffies in their glittering costumes? Skande!!

This is how 5FM radio is advertising the event.

(*) not my words - lifted from the MCQP website.

Something for the weekend, sir?

2006-12-10T11:29:00.000Z

Have you noticed how straight barbers are so often parodies of 'ultra masculinity'? It's as if they want to distance themselves as much as possible from any idea that they may be gay.

Where else, apart from in the company of drunk men watching a game at a bar do you find people who are so obvious about their liking for football, girls and getting pissed?

I wonder if straight koffie-moffies (*) (do they exist?) are the same?

(*) Afrikaans (colloq): trolley dolly

A 'god' visits Nottingham

2006-12-07T10:21:00.000Z

On Tuesday, after so many years of being a fan, I eventually got to see the man that so many of his fans think of as God. I’m talking about that miserable, arrogant, twisted genius known as Morrissey, the man whose lyrics can keep the angst-ridden teenager alive in all of us, no matter how old we are.

The hair is greying, but the trademark quiff is still there. No longer sylph-like, rather barrel-chested in fact, his moves are still the same. He seemed calmer, happier than he's been known to be, more at peace with himself and the audience, despite the occasional ascerbic comment. But this was still the real thing, the real Morrissey!

Although he sang a few of the lesser known B-sides, he mostly stuck to crowd-pleasing favourites. He was good. Very good!

There was enough chanting of his name and enough roses thrown on stage for you to know that there were many amongst the audience who thought of him as God. They must have been the ones who burst into lustful roars when he stripped off his shirt during ‘Let me kiss you’. Rather cleverly but, I suspect, a regular party-trick of his, he ripped it off towards the end of the song while singing, ‘But then you open your eyes, and you see someone that you physically despise.'

I may be a fan but I really don’t understand the extreme adulation he inspires. My best friend from university, these days a respected forensic psychiatrist, still suffers from this adulation, despite being my age, ie Morrissey’s age. He stood in a queue for over five hours a few years' ago, waiting for Morrissey to autograph something (probably a CD) he was promoting. For five hours he thought of things he had to say to the great man. Finally, when in the presence of his god, he was so tongue-tied that he was unable to greet or thank him, let alone say something profound.

Even very well-respected writers succumb to this adulation - Mark Simpson’s celebrated biography of Morrissey is called ‘Saint Morrissey’! Mark Simpson is credited with coining the term, 'metrosexual'. Douglas Coupland, another author closely associated with a popular term, 'Generation X', is another huge Morrissey fan. His Observer interview of Morrissey makes for interesting reading.

But, as a fan, albeit not an adoring one, it was great to eventually have seen him. It also gave me an excuse to join the YouTube generation. The clip is quite long (8 minutes), rather fragmented, and not of the best quality (camera phone), but it gives you an idea of what it was like to see Morrissey at the Nottingham Arena.

Update: The Independent reports on 'Screams of heresy from Morrissey fans':

Tony Wilson the godfather of Manchester's music scene, has launched a vitriolic attack on the singer just a week ahead of a public vote to decide if he will be Britain's "Living Icon".

Wilson, the former Haçienda nightclub boss and label manager behind New Order and Happy Mondays, tells me: "Steven [Morrissey] is a nasty human being. He treats people like shit and has done throughout his career. Smiths fans confuse the art with the artist."

Morrissey declined to comment. The city's most famous musical export is on the final shortlist of three - up against Sir Paul McCartney and, mercifully, Sir David Attenborough. The Living Icon will be announced on BBC2's Culture Show next Saturday.

No doubt Morrissey would greet a victory with characteristic jubilation.

Dodgy in Nottingham

2006-12-04T10:22:00.000Z

A large, luxurious sedan, darkened windows, parked outside a casino with its lights on. The sort of car that attracts attention while saying, 'If you know what’s good for you, don’t look at me.’ Taking pictures of its numberplates was definitely not the sort of attention it wanted.

Yep, there was something distinctly dodgy about that car.

Now the Germans have an even smaller one

2006-12-01T09:37:00.000Z

Just a few months ago, I wrote about the world's smallest cinema, Nottingham's Screenroom, situated a minute's walk from my flat. Well, it seems that that accolade now belongs to The Palastkino on Bahnhofstraße in Radebeul, Germany, which opened on 30 October.

According to a report by Guinness World Records, it only seats 9 people, just under half the capacity of the Screenroom.

“Bulging trousers” sealed the win

2006-11-30T14:16:00.000Z

Judges for this year's annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award were moved by first-time author Ian Hollingshead’s evocation of “a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.” His description of “bulging trousers” sealed the win, the judges said.

“Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts,” the judges — editors of Literary Review magazine — said in a statement. “Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point.”

The prize aims to skewer “the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.”

Some of the other contenders produced equally excruciating descriptions of sex and things sexual. Mark Haddon compared sexual rapture to "the smell of coconut" and "brass firedogs". Tim Willcocks, this year's runner-up, wrote about medieval passion in a forge: "In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil's Fire."

Go here to read more about this year's award.

Things are moving too quickly!

2006-11-27T11:39:00.000Z

On Saturday, my son went off with a whole bunch of his erstwhile classmates for the ritual post-matric ‘klomp pomp’ (*) in Plett. That same day, my fifteen-year-old daughter got her nose pierced.

At this rate, I’m going to be a grandfather soon!

(*) Afrikaans (colloq.): gang bang

A blue plaque for a Zulu king

2006-11-24T09:39:00.000Z

Cetshwayo kaMpande, the Zulu king who, in 1879, inflicted upon the British the most crushing defeat they had known, has been honoured with an English Heritage Blue Plaque. Only the legendary British fightback at Rorke's Drift, immortalised in the 1964 film Zulu starring Michael Caine, has preserved the reputation of those military leaders who decided to take him on in the Zulu War. Cetshwayo was played by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, later leader of South Africa's mainly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party.

The plaque was unveiled on 30th October at 18 Melbury Road, London, W14, where he spent a month in 1882 following his exile from Zululand. During his stay, he met Prime Minister Gladstone and visited Queen Victoria. Although the duration of his stay was short, his visit made a significant political impact - very few African princes, and no other Zulus (save those accompanying Cetshwayo) had visited London at this time.

Ian Knight, a historian and author, said: "Everyone in London was curious to see this guy who had given the British such a bloody nose. As is often the case, the British secretly admired the pluckiness of an underdog. They lined the streets for a look, all expecting him to be a scowling savage in a loincloth but he turned out to be impeccably dressed in European clothes. He apparently made a great impression on Queen Victoria and everyone else he met and ended up being cheered wherever he went."

While honouring of Cetshwayo in this way has been generally welcomed, the historian and writer Kwame Osei had this to say on the website Black Britain. "It would be of more value if it were part of a wider programme such as apologising for enslaving Africans and reappraising how African people are viewed, portrayed and treated in British society."

The South African Times article on this event ends with a list of some other South Africans who have been honoured with a blue plaque:

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912): Composer of the 'Song of Hiawatha'
Sol Plaatje (1876-1932): Black South African writer and campaigner for African rights.
Olive Schreiner (1855-1920): Author.
Ruth First (1925-82) and Joe Slovo (1926-1995): Freedom fighters.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor? I immediately thought of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he of the albatross, and was sure that he wasn’t South African so went to check on Wikipedia. I had the wrong man, of course! Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, someone I'd never heard of before, was an English composer born in Croydon to an English mother and a Sierra Leonean father. Huh?? So, why did the South African Times put him down as a South African? I did a bit of digging and found a really interesting article about him but this is all it mentions in terms of a South African connection:

Gwennie (his daughter) changed her name to Avril after her first divorce, as a symbol of a new beginning. As Avril Coleridge-Taylor, she had considerable success as a conductor and composer (the Ghanaian national anthem is by her); but, having moved to South Africa in the 1950s, and the colour of her father's skin being discovered, she was subjected to all the intolerance apartheid could muster, and unable to work.

Beef and chorizo stew

2006-11-22T14:09:00.000Z

For those of you who like your stews wholesome and spicy, you may like to try this stew I concocted a couple of weeks ago. It was delicious enough for me to try it again the other day.

In my usual way when it comes to cooking (apart from baking), I tend to be rather hazy when it comes to being precise about ingredients. I know that some people prefer to be given exact quantities for ingredients so I’ve tried to provide some sort of guide as to how much of everything you need.

2 large onions
lots of garlic
olive oil
1-2 fresh chillies (or crushed dried chillies)
oregano
½ kilo stewing beef
3-4 medium carrots
10-15 shallots
3 large potatoes or 15-20 new potatoes
boiling water
1 chorizo (*) sausage
4-5 bay leaves
2 cubes of beef stock
red wine
salt
lots of chopped parsley (**)
black olives (optional)

Coarsely chop the onions and 3-4 garlic cloves. It’s a good idea to peel them first! If using fresh chillies, chop them finely. Sauté the onions in olive oil with the oregano and chillies. This makes a spicier version of what the Portuguese call ‘refogado’ (onions sautéed in olive oil until brown and sweet). Chop the beef into 2-3cm cubes. Add the beef and stir until browned on all sides.

Chop the carrots into discs ½–1cm thick. Stir into the mixture together with the shallots. If using large potatoes, peel and chop into pieces the size of a new potato. New potatoes don’t need to be peeled or chopped but they absorb much more flavour if peeled (tedious!) or chopped in half. Stir the potatoes into the mixture.

Cover with boiling water and adjust heat until the stew is simmering quite vigorously.

Remove outer skin from the chorizo and cut into cubes about ½ cm thick. Stir ½ or slightly less into the stew along with the bay leaves and crumbled stock cubes. Stir in lots of crushed garlic. Add about 1 cup of red wine.

Add salt to taste but be sure not to over-do it as stock cubes can be quite salty.

Simmer for about 1 ½ - 2 hours, stirring the mixture each time it’s necessary to top up with more boiling water. Another cup of red wine can be added after an hour.

The beef and vegetables will be tender by this stage and the liquid will have started to thicken a bit. The chorizo, after softening in the beginning, will, however, have got harder as its moisture and flavour infuse the rest of the mixture. It’s still delicious so remains in the stew but is now joined by the remaining chorizo. Remove a few potatoes, mash them and return to the stew. This helps to thicken the stew. Stir in lots (not all) of chopped parsley along with the olives, if using them. If you’re a garlic addict like I am, you may want to stir in some more crushed garlic at this stage.

Simmer on a lower heat for ½ hour, stirring and topping up with water if necessary.

By the time it’s ready to serve, the newly added chorizo will have softened nicely. If you feel that the stew still needs thickening, stir in some thickening made from combining flour with the liquid from the stew. Make sure you stir it in carefully and properly as you don’t really want your stew swimming in lumpy liquid. And don’t over-do it as you don’t want to turn it into gloop.

Apart from the words of caution at the end, this stew is very simple to make. It’s delicious at any time but perfect for winter.

Serve on rice, garnished with lots of chopped parsley. And if you’re not concerned about all the starch you’re eating, provide crusty white bread for mopping up the juices.

(*) If you ever got to read my post on how I prefer Portuguese chouriço to Spanish chorizo, you may be wondering why I haven’t used chouriço in this stew. Quite simply, chorizo is readily available in the supermarkets here, chouriço isn’t. Incidentally, chorizo (and chouriço) can sometimes have quite a noticeable orange colour (probably from the paprika used to make it). My orange theme continues…....

(**) I’d like to try it with lots of chopped coriander.

My future is ORANGE!

2006-11-21T16:45:00.000Z

I start work in Amsterdam on January 2nd. In an orange building!

Synchronicity - my future's orange?

2006-11-19T03:32:00.000Z

Having grown up in the sixties and seventies, orange has never been one of my favourite colours, but, perhaps as a result of the synchronicity that Caroline keeps going on about, orange has featured rather heavily in my life of late. I may not have the sequence right, but here is the evidence.

After many months of cadging my broadband service from the bar next door, I eventually started paying for my own connection. For no particular reason other than seeing a promotion at Maplins, I chose Orange. This came after many months of deciding that I prefer Firefox to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. No, there’s no connection between Firefox and Orange, but the Firefox logo is also orange in colour.I then embarked on a vigorous defence of redheads (aka gingers) which was closely followed by my recipe for the ‘best carrot cake in the world’.

Are you beginning to see a common thread through all of this?

I then managed to get myself an interview with a major bank in Amsterdam whose logo is rather orange. Not really an odd thing for a Dutch organisation as the House of Orange has dominated Dutch political life since William I of Orange (also known as "William the Silent" and "Father of the Fatherland") organized the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule, which after the Eighty Years' War (1566 - 1648) led to an independent Dutch state.

Although I could dredge up the Dutch connection with South Africa, I think that may be stretching a point to far. But it does remind me that I still have to do a post about my 121st flag visitor.

Anyway, as a result of the impending interview (this coming Monday), I thought it worthwhile to get my wardrobe up to scratch. Unlike the stereoptypical view of a gay man, shopping just isn’t my thing, particularly clothes shopping. However, once I force myself to trawl the shops looking for new garments, I can get into the spirit of the exercise. Over the past week or so, I’ve been on a bit of a shopping spree, primarily to find myself a decent suit. En route, I bought myself a few odds and ends that have nothing to do with the interview. I actually went a bit mad buying jumpers, jerseys as we call them in South Africa, at Limeys who have been having a great sale.

And, guess what, their sales shopping bag is orange!

I didn’t get my suit there but I got a really beautiful one that cost me a small fortune from Paul Smith. Although buying a suit would usually be a rather unpleasant ordeal for me, my rather sentimental streak narrowed the choices enough to make it relatively simple. Paul Smith is an international designer, especially renowned for his men’s wear, whose roots are in Nottingham. He’s known for his predilection for stripes, stripes of many colours, not necessarily orange. I decided on a Paul Smith suit as I thought it would be nice to own something with a strong Nottingham connection as I may be leaving Nottingham soon. Yes, yes, counting one’s chickens before they hatch and all that, but that’s the way my mind works.

Just in case you’re wondering, there isn’t a hint of orange in the suit!

The final nail in the orange coffin (I’m not obsessed with my death clock!) was visiting Caroline’s blog for the first time in a couple of weeks. Yep, more evidence of orange - her orange scribble is at the top of the page.

The future’s bright, the future’s orange?

There's lots of orange stuff for you to view below. If you want to see bigger versions of the clips, click on the numbers.


1	2	3


4	5	6


7	8	9


10	11	12

Too many wakeup calls!

2006-11-15T10:43:00.000Z

Most people would agree that the sound of the morning alarm must rate high up there with the sound of nails scratching a blackboard and the sound of an epidural needle crunching through flesh as amongst the worst sounds in the world. Ok, maybe my comparisons aren’t the best as blackboards aren’t used anymore and listening to a needle crunching through flesh in preparation for an epidural may not be that common. But, I’m sure you get my point.

Up until not so many years ago, most people used a proper clock to wake up. Proper clocks that made proper clock noises. Including wakeup alarms. Hearing a morning wakeup alarm at any other time of the day was most unusual.

These days, many of us use our mobiles as an alarm. And while mobiles often have retro phone ringing sounds, they don’t seem to have retro alarm noises. Well, mine doesn’t. ‘Consumers want choice’ is the capitalist mantra. And, boy, do we have choice when it comes to ringtones - the world is awash with them! Apart from the sound of an old-fashioned alarm clock! So I shouldn’t be surprised that some idiot in my office has recently got the same phone as I have and uses the same ringtone that I use to wake up in the morning.

It’s driving me fucking mad!!!

And now there are five....

2006-11-15T01:46:00.000Z

....countries that recognise same-sex marriage.

With yesterday's passing of the Civil Union Bill, South Africa joins Canada, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Spain as countries where same-sex marriage is legal.

It can certainly be argued that the Bill still allows for discrimination in that it provides for equal but separate ways of getting married depending on whether a couple is gay or straight. But, as Johannesburg's Business Day put it in their editorial:

Do the means matter, as long as the end is the same? Can separate ever be equal?

It is possible that these questions will still have to be answered by the Constitutional Court, despite the legislature's best efforts to find the middle road. Government appears to have recognised that the compromise position is not ideal in the long term. Patrick Chauke, who chairs Parliament's home affairs committee, is already talking of the need for a comprehensive review of the marriage laws, whether or not the Civil Union Bill ends up before the Constitutional Court again.

In an ideal world, one law should cater for everyone, regardless of gender or sexual persuasion. But it was probably wise for the lawmakers to take into account the fact that SA is not an especially tolerant society -- our diversity may make living here infinitely more interesting than it is in more homogenous states, but there are downsides too. The Civil Union Bill could be seen in the same way as some of the political reforms that were introduced in the dying days of the apartheid era. They did not go nearly far enough, but served as a means of persuading a conservative society to accept long-overdue change without provoking avoidable conflict. The sky did not fall in, and racial attitudes have progressed rapidly since then.

If the Civil Union Act serves to extend an existing right to more South Africans, while at the same time placating traditionalists, it would be churlish to be overly critical of its means of doing so.

Are my days numbered?

2006-11-13T00:08:00.000Z

'Nomads to be first people wiped out by climate change' says a headline in the Mail and Guardian. So, perhaps, my 791,008,169 seconds (as of now) calculated by the Death Clock are a bit too optimistic. It seems as if there's no point to quitting my filthy fag habit.

If, perhaps, you have a morbid fascination with death, you may want to go here. After scaring yourself and rekindling your long dormant interest in religion, solace can be found here. And if you want to know more about that pic (beautiful, isn't it?), take a look here.

Pine needles and poppies

2006-11-10T11:39:00.000Z

Heard in the lift this morning:

Brunette: I was looking at the xmas decorations in the loft yesterday and wondering if we need to get any new ones.

Blonde: Yes, that time of the year is almost upon us again.

Brunette: And I was thinking that we may get a real tree for a change this year.

Blonde: How nice. I was talking to Becky in HR (*) today, she’s thinking of getting one too.

Brunette: They’re a bit messy, but they smell so nice, don’t you think?

(*) It may have been 'Tracey from Accounts' or 'Sandra from Collections'

I got out at that point. It surprises me that people get artificial Christmas trees. If you’re going to have a tree, have a real one, I say. So what if it sheds needles within days of putting the thing up? And, a few weeks later, when you pack the decorations away, make sure you put a few needles away with the decorations. Along with ancient, favourite decorations, they create a sense of continuity that I like.

Despite being a cynical old bastard, I have a sentimental streak that surprises even me.

While on the topic of celebratory plants, I’ll digress to another, one that is much more topical at this time of the year, than a Christmas tree. Yes, it’s almost poppy day again.

I got rather verbose about it last year, even slightly sentimental, so I won’t go over old ground. What follows is 'new ground', to me that is.

Until a few days ago, I was completely unaware of the ‘clash of the poppies’ as, to me, only the red poppy had any symbolic significance. I now know that the white poppy is similarly symbolic yet has a whiff of controversy about it:

It was first introduced by the Women's Co-operative Guild in 1933 and was intended as a lasting symbol for peace and an end to all wars.

Worn on Armistice Day, now Remembrance Sunday, the white poppy was produced by the Co-operative Wholesale Society because the Royal British Legion had refused to be associated with its manufacture.

While the white poppy was never intended to offend the memory of those who died in the Great War, many veterans felt that its significance undermined their contribution and the lasting meaning of the red poppy. Such was the seriousness of this issue that some women lost their jobs in the 1930s for wearing white poppies.

The battle of the poppies continues to this day with clashes being reported in Canada.

Although I admitted to sentimentality above, I’ve never been one to get too worked up by wars of the past, no matter how tragic, how much I owe them the freedoms I take for granted and even though they may have killed some of my ancestors. However, I do think that Rebecca Sullivan’s (*) poem, ‘There Lie Forgotten Men’, chosen to lead tomorrow’s Armistice Day celebrations is very good:

From 'There Lie Forgotten Men'

She stands there alone

At the edge of the silent place

And she is shocked

New wars brew and these forgotten men

Will play no part in them

The dead silence warn no ears but hers

In great halls, in moments of great decision

What they fought for is forsaken

And by day's end new gravestones

Appear on the blood red ground

She finds what she seeks

'Sgt John Malley Age 27'

His life brutally ended

And she stands by his grave

But he can give no answers

And she weeps for him

For the empty hole he left behind

And for the new emptiness

Soon to join the black chasm.

And her tears join the flood.

(*) Rebecca Sullivan is a 13-year-old schoolgirl who has never written poetry before.

Marriage in South Africa - true equality at last?

2006-11-09T00:07:00.000Z

The gay marriage thing has been going through a rocky ride in South Africa in the past few months. The Constitutional Court gave the government a year in which to amend the current marriage laws so as to afford gays and lesbians the same rights as heterosexuals when it came to legalising their unions. If the government fails to do so, the current marriage law will, by default, refer to both gay and straight couples.

Although the objections came quite late in the year, they came from the expected quarters, ie the religious and traditionalist bigots. In the past few months, South Africa's top legal minds have been grappling with how to comply with the Constitutional Court ruling yet not upset those against it too much.

A report on the whole issue was repressed until quite recently. Now that it has surfaced, one of its rather novel ideas, one that could keep most people happy, has emerged:

The solution ultimately proposed by commissioners is novel and creative, and for that alone, it is a mercy that publication of the report has been permitted.

Take the existing Marriage Act, they say, and fix it by adding a simple phrase so it will apply to heterosexual as well as homosexual couples. Then introduce a new law, that could be called, for example, the Orthodox Marriage Act, and make this law for the exclusive use of partners wanting to marry under religious rites and who have problems using the generic marriage law. This new law would be identical to the updated and now all-embracing "old" law, except for the addition of a limited definition of "orthodox marriage" -- and for being limited to opposite-sex couples.

Couples could then choose to marry under the law that most suited their religious, moral and other views.

It doesn't seem as if that route will be adopted as the Civil Unions Bill is still on the cards, a route described by some Constitutional Court judges as inadequate in guaranteeing true equality as it makes for a 'separate but equal' status. The way things stand at the moment, religious groups opposed to the term "marriage" in the Civil Unions Bill are set to lose their battle after the National Assembly's home affairs committee adopted the African National Congress's (ANC) amended version of the Bill on Wednesday (8/11/2006).

"Civil-union partner means a spouse in a marriage or a partner in a civil partnership," reads the amended Bill, in defiance of religious groups' demands.

It will be interesting to see if the law gets passed as is to be followed by later legal challenges as to its fairness in the eyes of last year's Constitutional Court ruling.

But, whether it gets challenged or not, and whether any such challenge is successful or not, South Africa is on the brink of legalising the rights of gay and lesbian unions.

A truly remarkable achievement!

Do you want to play a game?

2006-11-08T01:23:00.000Z


Animator vs Animation	September 12th

They're simulations, really, not games. Both involve shooting. One interactive, the other not. One will raise a smile, the other will make you think.

I found them here and here (via digg). You'll need flash installed to play them. One of them has to be downloaded so make sure you press the download button when you get there.

The best carrot cake recipe in the world

2006-11-07T01:15:00.000Z

Some while back,Terri gave me a present after returning from her wanderings around Europe. More recently, she was talking about carrot cakes and I commented that I know the best carrot cake recipe in the world. With a claim like that, she wanted to know more.

I made it this past weekend as a sort-of welcome home present for James who invited a few friends round to his place to welcome him back after his recent run-in with a bus in Hangzhou. So, there's absolutely NO connection between this post and what has been written on this blog about gingers/carrot-tops in the past few days.

The great thing about this cake, apart from its extreme deliciousness, is how very easy it is to make. Follow the simple instructions and there's absolutely no way of landing up with a flop.

250 ml oil
4 extra large eggs
500 ml sugar
10 ml ground cinnamon
5ml ground ginger
dash ground nutmeg
5 ml salt
750 ml grated carrots
625 ml flour
10 ml bicarbonate of soda
10 ml baking powder
grated rind of 1 lemon
250 ml flaked almonds

Beat the oil, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and salt together in a bowl. Stir in the grated carrot.

Blend the flour, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder and stir into the carrot mixture. Break the nuts into the bowl, stir in with the grated lemon rind. Pour into a deep, greased and floured 25 cm cake tin.

Bake at 180 C for about 80 – 90 minutes until piercing the cake with a skewer leaves the skewer clean.

What about the icing, you may be asking? It seems to be traditional to have a a lemon- or orange-flavoured icing spread on top of carrot cake. Icing, of course, helps hide any cracks the cake may develop on top. Anyway, I'm sure it would taste good with icing but it's totally unnecessary as the cake is delicious enough without any.

See, I told you this is a simple recipe.

Peas in a pod?

2006-11-05T13:46:00.000Z

One got off very lightly, it seems that the other won't.

One hundred thousand, here we come!

2006-11-05T10:33:00.000Z

I think it's going to happen sometime today, Guy Fawkes Day. The best of the fireworks may have happened yesterday, but they'll still be celebrating me tonight.

Gingers aren't mingers!

2006-11-02T23:04:00.000Z

Danae by Gustav Klimt. Many painters have exhibited a fascination with red hair. The colour "titian" takes its name from Titian, who often painted women with red hair. Other painters notable for their redheads include the Pre-Raphaelites, Edmund Leighton, Modigliani , Gustav Klimt and Sandro Botticelli, whose famous painting, The Birth of Venus, depicts the mythological goddess, Venus, as a redhead.

Prince Idon of Mu fled his homeland, arriving in Atlantis at sunset. 'Moved to tears, he wished that its beautiful red tones could be saved for posterity. In an instant his hair was changed to red and every succeeding generation of redheads was reminded of that first spell-binding sunset.'

So what is it about the British and their antipathy towards redheads? Or, to use their pejorative term, what is it that’s wrong about gingers (pronounced ging-ers, both hard g’s)? Not only do they use it pejoratively, they combine it with another British pejorative term (one I particularly dislike), ‘minger’ (also a hard g), so that you have ‘ginger-minger’.

Doug isn’t the first person to suggest that I may have a thing about redheads. In fact I’ve joked about it myself in the past. Not only do I happen to have a wife and two children who are all redheads but, my ex, a boyfriend of seven years, is one too. And there I was, two nights ago, swooning about the redheaded double bassist of the Puppini Sisters.

So do I have a thing about them?

Well, having a wife who’s a redhead made the likelihood of my having redheaded children rather high:

According to ‘The Redhead Encyclopedia’, a book devoted to the study and celebration of the flame-haired, there's a 50% chance the gene will be passed to the children if one parent has red hair. If one or two parents aren't redheaded but carry the gene, there is a 25% chance of having a ginger child. And if both parents are redheaded? It can be any colour as long as it's red.

Although there’s a tinge of red in my beard (rapidly being superseded by swathes of grey!) and the hair on my arms can look slightly red when seen at a certain angle in bright sunlight, I’m not a redhead. Well, not enough of one, I don’t think, to ensure that my offspring are redheaded. So, my choice of mate explains them.

But why would I choose a redheaded mate?

Research on the matter offers completely different reasons:

Rees (2004) suggests that the vividness and rarity of red hair may lead to it becoming desirable in a partner and therefore it could become more common through sexual selection. But, Harding et al (2000) proposed that red hair was not the result of positive selection but rather occurs due to a lack of negative selection. In Africa, for example, red hair is selected against because high levels of sun would be harmful towards fair skin. However, in Northern Europe this does not happen and so redheads can occur through genetic drift.

Contrary to what Harding proposes, selecting against red hair doesn’t apply to me as I selected my mate in Africa. So, perhaps it was sexual selection in my case? Of course it was sexual selection! Choice in other words. How else does one human select another? I can’t say that I’m that comfortable with the idea of my selection criteria being governed by forces of nature over which I have no control. Um, having said that, I’m gay (despite the anomalous selection of a female redhead), something over which I have no control. Oh, bollocks to natural selection being the reason for my choice, there must be some other reason.

Ah, but ‘ginger’ is Cockney slang for queer (it rhymes with ginger beer) so maybe that’s where my liking for redheads comes from? That still doesn’t make sense of why I’d go after a redheaded WOMAN. But, as I said, that’s somewhat of an anomaly, so best not concentrate on that. Rather let me move on to the choice of a redheaded man.

Here you have Seth Green, one of many famous redheads. Rick Astley, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton are three others.

If I’m to do this ‘scientifically’, I suppose I should consider each of his traits/talents/attractions in turn, then determine how his redheadedness features in comparison with them. Let’s see, beautiful blue eyes, great legs,strong hands, lovely wrists, fun to be around, big cock, fantastic in bed….yadda yadda. Don’t worry, I’m beginning to bore myself, so I’m probably boring you too. You know what, I’m beginning to think that this is going nowhere. He is, however, closer to my son’s age than he is to mine. Could that mean anything? Ok, let’s NOT go there! I can assure you….

The thing is, as I write this I’m beginning to think that I do have a thing, not an obsession mind you, about redheads. Not all of them, let me hasten to say. I’ve got nothing against freckles but some of them do have a washed out look that would suit a blinking troglodyte freshly exposed to the light. Even my wife had a few concerns about our son getting his ear pierced. ‘I don’t want him to look like trailer-park trash. It could look so common with his hair colour.’ I could see her point but she really shouldn’t have worried as he’s a very good looking boy and couldn’t look common no matter how hard he tried.

So, I sort of acknowledge that there are certain redheads who look insipid and unsightly but there are so many of them who are really gorgeous. I still can’t understand the British ‘ginger-minger’ thing. The way they use the term sometimes reminds me of the way some South Africans use the K-word. Why else would Catherine Tate manage to get so much mileage out of her sketch where she’s forced to seek refuge in a haven for redheads? If redheads were a recognisable ethnic minority, the slurs you hear against them would be covered by hate crime legislation.

Since there are such relatively high proportions of redheads in the Irish and Scottish populations, perhaps this is a strange manifestation of English condescension rather than a British thing? Maybe it stems from suspicion towards anthing that isn’t conventional? Or is it an ancient throwback to the Roman loathing of the barbarians(*)? Well, whatever it is, it’s strong enough for redheads to feel ‘persecuted’ enough to set up websites like redandproud and redprince.

The redheaded pre-Raphaelite beauty Lizzie Siddal, the model for John Everett Millais' Ophelia. She almost caught her death posing in a bath of cold water wearing a vintage dress bought for her by the artist for a princely four pounds. She eventually died of a laudanum overdose and was buried with her love letters from her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Deciding to retrieve his poetry and publish it, Rossetti had her exhumed. Legend has it that despite the fact she'd been dead seven years, Siddal looked exactly as she had in life. Apart, that is, from her red hair, which had continued to grow until it filled the coffin.

For those redheads that feel persecuted, I think they should take solace from this statement from Jonathan L Rees, Professor of Dermatology at the University of Edinburgh:.

Red hair is such a distinctive characteristic that one can imagine, in some future world, two red heads meeting up on some distant planet and the conversation quickly turning to their place of birth! Whether or not they were both of Celtic blood, they could be sure that at least one of their genes was remarkably similar.

And, they also need to know that there are people like me who find a lot of them very attractive. In fact, some people seem rather obsessed with them. The Redhead Cluster Phenomenon was set up by a guy who has this to say:

‘Since boyhood I’ve always believed, at the deepest level, that redheads are standard-bearers of the grandest and most wondrous human beauty. Redheaded males, I mean. I barely notice girls, and I certainly barely notice red-haired girls, despite coming of age in the Farrah Fawcett-Majors era.’

It’s been a long while since I bedded a redhead. Mmmm…something to think about now that the weekend is upon me….

(*) The etymology for the word barbarian:
Derived from the Latin word: barbarosa (meaning redhead). The Roman Empire had many battles against some of the Nordic tribes, who happened to have red hair, and so those Nordic tribes were labelled as barbarosae by the Romans. Because the Romans thought they were barbaric, they hated redheads, so to them barbarosa was a negative adjective. Ever since, many non-redheaded people (not just those of Roman descent), think of them in the same way. Incidentally, Judas Iscariot was also meant to have been a redhead. More ammuniton for those who call redheads 'ginger-mingers'?

And, sticking to etymology, where does the word ‘ginger’ (meaning redhead), come from?

Picking up stompies (*)

2006-11-02T13:10:00.000Z

Walking into that freezing box, euphemistically known as the smoking-room, I overhead part of the conversation between two fellow workers:

Tall, thin, cadaverous youth (the sort that pronounces it ‘yoof’) with wonky teeth: ‘I don’t know how I managed it, I was so pissed, but I managed to shag her. I woke up in the morning to find her there and thought, what the fuck, who are you.’

Much shorter woman: ‘What was wrong with her?’

Yoof: ‘I suppose she was alright, not really that much of a minger.’

Woman (sounding slightly defensive): ‘She probably didn’t look her best if she had a hangover.’

Yoof: ‘Yeah, you’re right. I think I’ll keep her number, maybe text her sometime.’

Woman: ‘For when you’re desperate?’

Yoof (grinning wonkily): ‘Yeah.’

Refreshing honesty? Maybe. But it sounds so wrong to me. Since when did men starting talking to women about other women like that?

(*) South African slang (not to be confused with Stompie Moeketsi): stompie - A cigarette butt. From the Afrikaans stomp, meaning "stump". The term picking up stompies means intruding into a conversation at its tail end, with little information about its content.

Michelle came up trumps

2006-11-01T20:53:00.000Z

Oh yes, those pics are a lot better than the ones I took. SWOOOOOOOOON!!!!!!!!

Thanks, Michelle.

What did I do on Halloween?

2006-11-01T09:15:00.000Z

I went to a burlesque show and fell in ~~lust~~ love.

Mike, being an occasional purveyor of free concert/gig tickets, invited me and Michelle to The Social last night for an evening of burlesque.

We got there at 8.30 but it was 11.30 before the main act, ‘The Puppini Sisters’, did their thing. Up until then, barring an uplifting rock act (hardly burlesque!), the evening was very much like a student revue. Being rather tired from too little sleep the night before, I’d contemplated leaving before the latter day Andrews Sisters appeared on stage.

I’m pleased I didn’t.

They were slick, they were polished, and they looked just right (*). More importantly, however, the double bassist was totally gorgeous. He looked like a young, much better-looking, Boris Becker. And, if anything, he looked even better for the part – white vest, braces, fedora, casually confident. I couldn’t take my eyes off him! Although the crowd was about 15 people deep and I was at the back, I’m sure he was smiling at me.

Why else did he seem to respond each time I smiled back?

I knew that my camera wouldn’t do justice to the event, let alone him, so I jumped on to Google when I got home. There was lots on the Puppini Sisters (an official website as well as the obligatory myspace profile) but absolutely nothing on Nick ‘Fingers’ Pini apart from a few references here and there. But, not a single photograph!

Michelle, you were there at the front with your fancy camera – make sure you send me some decent pics of him!

(*) Mike’s opinion: ‘In a sophisticated cabaret bar, their act would have gone down a treat. In this sweaty rock venue, it all fell rather flat’. He’s right, of course, but I didn’t feel flat at all.

My neighbourhood

2006-10-30T11:19:00.000Z

Although I woke early, I spent half of yesterday lying in bed with Saturday’s papers and idly watch re-runs of Friends. Being the day that the clocks turned back, it would be getting dark by five so I’d have to be out of the flat by 2 if I wanted any proper daylight. From now on, for the next 6 months, I’ll be leaving for work when it’s dark and arriving home when it’s dark. So you can appreciate why I normally find the day the clocks turn back one of the most depressing of the year. Yesterday, however, was a perfect English autumn’s day – the air was crisp, the skies bright blue. Going outside put me in a great mood.

The long shadows and bright sunshine were perfect for snapping away with my camera phone. Viewed on the camera, each picture looked like a miniature masterpiece. Once I downloaded them on to my computer, the limitations of relatively low resolution were immediately apparent.

So much for my masterpieces!

But, until I get a decent camera, this is the best I’ve got. They’re actually not that bad, I suppose. Good enough, anyway, to give you an idea of what my neighbourhood looks like on a lovely day. All of the pics were taken within 10 minutes’ walk from my flat.

You will see that I’m rather keen on the Victorian Gothic architecture of Watson Fothergill. Keen enough, in fact, to consider a separate post devoted to him at some stage. I’ll have to have got myself a decent camera by then.


goose gate	carlton building	jesse boot – goose gate	pavement glass	red door – stoney street

fothergill warehouse	fothergill plaque	stoney street	church railings	church yard

st martins	old firestones sign	lacemarket hotel	pitcher & piano door	pitcher & piano

pitcher & piano spire	fashion	jones’s boots	paul smith	pavement cafe

topman	nottingham street	st peters	american express – sa flag	rainbow flag

town hall	market square	zaras	zaras entrance	old jessops building

the social	fothergill offices	fothergill doorway	fothergill hinge	old angel

hornbys	squeek	squeek door	public relations	rose of england

The Broadway cinema has changed

2006-10-28T21:25:00.000+01:00

It's great living opposite the Broadway Cinema even if I don't go there as often as I want and should. Sort of like being in Cape Town and never going up Table Mountain, if you know what I mean.

Until its recent revamp, it was looking a bit tatty around the edges but in a way that I liked. Apparently, the Nottingham Film Theatre opened there on September 2nd 1966, on the site of a 1839 Weslyan chapel, but the building had a rather pleasing Art Deco look. Yes, had, as the revamp has completely changed the way it looks.

For the past few months, I've watched the way it's been changing and was rather dismayed to see the huge sheets of blue glass being placed on the facade. It looked as if the place was going to be transformed into yet another indistinguishable modern steel and glass structure. But, now that it's finished, despite it having lost its original appeal, I think they've done quite a good job.

I had a drink in the new bar upstairs last week and can see it'll become a favourite haunt of many, including me. As yet, I've not been to the two new cinemas built in the basement, one of which has been designed by one of Nottingham's favourite sons, Paul Smith. So, I haven't seen, let alone sat on, the 'love seats' he's designed for the place. Call me old-fashioned, but I suspect that I won't like them as I prefer conventional seating in a cinema. For the time being, however, I'll reserve judgement.

Once spiked, twice not shy

2006-10-26T17:04:00.000+01:00

That’s an impressive spike, huh?

And while it looks as if the dramatic falloff could have depressed me, my daily visitors were still considerably higher than usual for many days after the spike. In fact, they’re still a bit higher than usual.

It may not have depressed me but I’ve felt the need to be spiked again. Why else would I post another list of great insults? Why else would I draw attention to myself on digg and reddit?

And did it work? Absolutely not!

Oh well, I suppose I could try following these instructions on how to get noticed on digg. Or, maybe, I should just resign myself to happy memories and lower hits.

Pass me the vodka!

Then again, maybe not. I could seek solace in the fact that, today, I got my 1000th visitor from South Africa since installing my flag counter. A small consolation, perhaps, Germany will be overtaking South Africa soon.

Now where's that vodka?

How do you destroy a god?

2006-10-24T12:23:00.000+01:00

You hack his website!!

I wouldn’t say that I’m addicted to porn, but I have a strange penchant for it that consists of periodic bouts of downloading porn yet almost never looking at it again once it’s on my harddrive. Once, in a fit of boredom, I spent several hours separating my porn into different categories yet when I had to reformat my harddrive a few months ago, the thought of losing all my porn didn’t bother me in the least.

In pursuit of this odd penchant of mine, I have several websites that I visit regularly when the porn-urge is upon me. One of the best, ‘Deus Grego’, is updated daily with new material that suits the most varied of tastes. An odd name, you may think, but entirely appropriate if you know that it’s a Brazilian site full of gorgeous men – ‘Deus Grego’ is the Portuguese for ‘Greek God’.

The urge was upon me a couple of days ago and I duly clicked on the web address.

‘Good God, what have I pressed on?’ was my immediate reaction. I checked and double-checked that I’d spelt it correctly. Yep, nothing wrong with my spelling. But that was definitely not the ‘Greek God’ I know!

A bit later, I got several emails from the yahoo news group associated with the site (yes, I know I’m sad!), one of which said the following:

‘…Um ato de vandalismo e repugnante demonstração de intolerância com o direito de exercermos a nossa homossexualidade!... Homem, necessariamente,não precisa gostar de mulher! Somos seres livres, donos das nossos gostos e preferências… Alguma coisa tem que ser feita. Podem contar comigo, precisamos nos unir!’

In English:
‘…An act of vandalism and a repugnant demonstration of the intolerance of our right to exercise our homosexuality!..Men do not necessarily have to like women! We’re free, owners of our own tastes and preferences…Something has to be done. You can count on me, we need to unite!’

Fucking hell, we’re talking about a porn site here, not Mugabe’s attitude towards gays!

Here(*), go have a look at what the hackers have done – its fucking hilarious! Ok, maybe not that funny, but it's damned funny. Be warned, it’s not work-safe. Look, I know that hacking websites is no laughing matter, and I’d hate to have my blog hacked, but those hackers have a sense of humour!

(*)UPDATE: It appears that they've got their website back. So for those of you who didn't get to see what happened, I'll have to tell you - it was plastered with explicit pics and ads for young women. Yes, god forbid, female tits and ass on what was once a gay porn site!

Sack Manto!

2006-10-22T16:34:00.000+01:00

Scratch the surface of many a white South African and you'll find a racist.

That's why, on hearing white South Africans lamenting, often with justification, about the state of the country and the ANC government, my own inner prejudice tends to listen to what they'e saying with scepticism until I'm sure that their comments are not motivated by racism. So, on reading the Mail & Guardian article on a new website urging people to do their best to get Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang sacked, in which one of the co-founders of the site is named as Anton de Waal, I went to the site apprehensive that it may be the product of racism.

Well, I'm sorry that I was sceptical as the site has been created by people who are genuinely concerned about the way HIV/AIDS is being handled by the South African government. This should have been immediately apparent as the site is endorsed by Zapiro, a brilliant political cartoonist, whose political credentials are, in my opinion, beyond doubt. Go here to see a selection of his 'Manto cartoons'.

Although I've posted about Manto before, you may not know to what extent she's hindering HIV/AIDS education and treatment in South Africa. Here are a few choice snippets taken from the 'Manto Moments' section on 'Sack Manto':

"When I saw a report saying I had been silenced, I thought, 'Oh my God, maybe I am living on another planet'"
iol.co.za - 8/10/06
Finally we are in agreement.... Ed

"I think the TAC was just a disgrace, a disgrace not only to the [health] department but a disgrace to the whole country. But I think, as South Africa, we really demonstrated that we are doing pretty well."
Manto After the AIDS conference in Toronto 2006
News24.co.za - 28/08/06

"beetroot, garlic, lemon ... and buy a bottle of olive oil. All these things are very critical."
mg.co.za - 8/6/05

"Dr Rath's work complies with and complements our programmes."
mask.org.za - 10/5/05

"I don't remember saying I endorse the Matthias Rath foundation ..."
mg.co.za - 5/5/05

"Raw garlic and a skin of the lemon -- not only do they give you a beautiful face and skin but they also protect you from disease."
mg.co.za - 5/5/05

"It is very sad how the media handles this issue. I think garlic is absolutely critical. Lemon is absolutely critical to boost the immune system. Olive oil is absolutely critical ... just one teaspoon, it will last the whole month."
mg.co.za - 9/2/04

(Aids)... "could also be a God-given opportunity for moral and spiritual growth, a time to review our assumptions about sin and morality".
mg.co.za - 1/4/03

"Look at what Bush is doing. He could invade." ... Manto on why money needs to be spent on defence rather than treating AIDS
Sapa - 19/12/02

"Today I want to dispel this myth, because it is absolutely not true .[ that ARV's work ] The pharmaceutical industry and those who have a vested interest in the drug industry fuels this propaganda."
SAPA - 7/11/00

"We (the ANC government) have no plans to introduce the wholesale administration of these drugs in the public sector. ARVs are not a cure for Aids."
Speaking at Health Budget Vote in National Assembly
hst.org.za - 8/11/00
Minister, nobody has EVER said that ARV's cure Aids! Ed.

While I doubt that voting for Manto to be sacked will achieve anything, nervertheless, I urge you to vote.

Go here and vote. NOW!!