Category Archives: Thoughts

Toys for the Landy Lady

Michelle drives a classic old Landrover and despite her love for Olivia (the Landy’s name) she lusts after something sleeker, faster and more fuel-efficient. Her first lustlove is the Ariel Atom but her eye is now turning towards the Caterham Superlight R500. Perhaps something like the Ferrari FXX would be more suited for someone that runs Virgin Earth, whose site states “We strive to minimize our impact on the planet while providing quality services and products at affordable prices”.

My Top Ten Albums

Nic started this off with 20 albums to educate your children with and Melissa followed up with her top eleven albums.  So here are my all time faves.

  1. Live, Throwing Copper
    live-throwing_copper
  2. The Clash, London Calling
    the_clash-london_calling
  3. Pavlov’s Dog, Pampered Menial
    pavlov's_dog-pampered_menial
  4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
    fleetwood_mac-rumours
  5. Queen, Live Killers
    queen-live_killers
  6. Bad Company, 10 From 6
    bad_company-10_from_6
  7. Def Leppard, Pyromania
    def_leppard-pyromania
  8. Chris de Burgh, Spanish Train and Other Stories
    chris_de_burgh-spanish_train
  9. Neil Young, Harvest
    neil_young-harvest
  10. Rodriguez, Cold Fact
    rodriguez-cold_fact

So what are your favourite albums?

Abscess

Abscess I am not feeling too happy right now as I have a big abscess in my chin.

It started off last Wednesday (four days ago) as an apparently infected hair root. By Thursday an abscess had started to form and it has just gotten bigger and bigger. I had hoped that it would develop a head near the surface that I would be able to open and drain myself. As this hasn’t happened I will be going to the doctor tomorrow so that I can get some antibiotics, and hopefully get the blasted thing drained.Abscess

This is really getting annoying as I have had several of these large abscesses in the last year or two; with this being the third that is going to need lancing this year. In January I had one on the back of my neck lanced, in February one on the inside of my thigh and now this one on my chin. Both my sons have also had them and while some have presented as spider bites with necrotic tissue rather than a pus-filled abscess, others seem to just be regular abscesses. Fortunately Mela hasn’t had any as she has more than enough medical worries of her own without having this sort of thing.

Ster-Kinekor evil or just incompetent?

Since late this afternoon I have received 13 SMS messages from Ster-Kinekor advising me about an Iranian film festival at the V&A Nouveau. The second through fifth were merely annoying but since then they have been driving me crazy. They say that I can SMS some string to a number to stop the messages. It will just cost R1/SMS. Screw that, I don’t see why I should pay them to stop spamming me.

Interviewed on SA Rocks

I’ve been a member of the SA Rocks group on Flickr for quite some time and the other day Nic interviewed me for the blog. Read the interview here.

Romancing The Stone

Here’s the gallstone that, along with a bunch of smaller ones, has caused me much grief over the last year or so. Hopefully now that it is out I will start to feel more human.

gallstone

How Galling

I have been getting episodes of acute abdominal pain accompanied by fever on and off for at least 6 months. This past week saw me wake up with one on Saturday and have another on Sunday evening. I went to see the doctor who decided that it sounded like problems with my gallbladder and arranged a sonar examination. This confirmed a 2cm gallstone and I saw a specialist today who will operate to remove my gall bladder next Thursday. In lieu of any new photographs here is what my sonar results look like.

gallstone

Address Change

The address of this blog has changed from craniac.wordpress.com to craniac.net.  The old address should continue to work as should the old address for my RSS feed.  It might be a good idea though to change the address of your feed subscription to https://craniac.net/feed/.

Hunters and Collectors

As an active Flickr member I am always dismayed when I come across an account belonging to what I call a collector.  This is someone who has created a free account, not added a custom icon or profile details and has posted no photographs.  They simply collect huge numbers of favourites, usually of a narrow set of subject matter, often of the eye candy variety.

This morning such a person added some of my photographs of female surfers to their favourites.  I found that this person has almost 8,000 favourites but that gathering favourites is their only activity on Flickr.  As someone whose images have been targeted by this person I am curious as to what the purpose of the collection is.  In the case of this person, the favourites are largely photographs containing women wearing tight clothing.  Among the targets are surfers, triathletes, women swimming with dolphins and women dressed as superheroes.  It almost conjures up visions of some socially inadequate guy living in his Mom’s basement, sitting in front of his computer wearing women’s underwear and a leather mask; frantically rubbing himself while scrolling through his thousands of favourites, deriving sexual pleasure from images that are not sexy at all to the average person.  Freaky!

As Flickr is a photo sharing site, I am certainly not in favour of these collectors and tend to ban them when I find them targeting my images.  This doesn’t mean I ban everyone with favourites but no images of their own.  If someone has a varied, and reasonably small collection of favourites, that’s fine.  It’s the creepy ones with the huge, narrow and vaguely fetishy collections that I object to.

It’s Official, I’m a Dirty Old Man

I was in the mall this morning, waiting my turn for the ATM.  Alongside waiting her turn at another bank’s ATM was an absolutely stunning woman, definitely not a girl, and I didn’t even think of her as a young woman; she was somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties I would say.  She was wearing a denim miniskirt and heeled slip-on sandals, between which were the most gorgeous pair of long, sculpted, perfectly tanned legs.  As she took her turn at the ATM she lifted her heels off the soles of her shoes, standing on tiptoe, which only served to show off the muscular definition in her legs even more.  I couldn’t help but admire these lovely legs and figure, and the lovely face and cute, short, blonde hair style that was revealed when she turned away from the ATM.

As she moved away she stopped opposite me to talk to someone she knew while she was putting her money away.  She dropped a coin the landed up between us.  Being a gentleman, not to mention in thrall of her legs, I bent to pick it up and placed it in her hand, to which she said "Dankie Oom" and suddenly I felt really old.  If mature women are calling me Oom, then I must look a lot older than I feel.

I should probably explain this for the benefit of non-South African readers.  Afrikaans people use the terms Oom (Uncle) and Tannie (Auntie) as a sign of respect for older people.  In some ways it is similar to the English Sir and Madam although perhaps less formal and carrying more of a connotation of respect for elders than respect for a stranger or person in a position of authority.  As an English-speaking South African I understand that it is a sign of respect but I still find it unnerving to be called Oom by someone I would consider an equal.  It is understandable for a child or youth to use this form of address to an adult but I would not expect another adult to address me in this way, even if there is a ten or fifteen year gap in our ages.