A Cheetah C of the South African Air Force.
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Tag Archives: South Africa
Flying The Flag
As South Africa celebrates Freedom Day today I thought it would be appropriate to post this photo.
Lost in the Kalahari
I’ve noticed before that the folk at Kalahari.net seem to have problems with their search engine. I was just trying to find a book to link to for another post and the first hit from an author search for David Allen returned this.
How they made that match I’d love to know. I have sometimes seen where a title search doesn’t find something but an author or artist search reveals that they do in fact have the very title their search couldn’t find. Perhaps they should consider looking into this.
This is Ridiculous
SABC News reports that the lions that mauled park owner may be put down. This is crazy, people take predators out of their natural habitat, put them in a small enclosure and then blame the animals for following their instincts and helping someone put themself in line for a Darwin award?
Update: Perhaps I was a bit harsh with my Darwin Award reference. Latest speculation is that the cause of him getting out of his vehicle may have been an epileptic seizure. Whether that is the case or not, friends and family are saying he would not ordinarily have gotten out of the vehicle as he was very careful. I suppose it is pointless to speculate at this stage. Investigations will reveal what happened, or not.
Update: The final word, confirmed by results of the post-mortem examination, is that he was killed by a stroke; probably staggering out of the vehicle shortly before he died. The lions only mauled his body after his death had already occurred.
A Visitor’s View of Cape Town
Someone at Outdoor Photo pointed out Skip Hunt’s South African Photo Tour, a blog with well written stories and some excellent photographs, documenting a visit to South Africa, and Cape Town in particular. It’s well worth taking a look at.
Supporting local artists
Today seems to have been a day for supporting local artists. I bought a copy of So Close, Tertia Albertyn‘s book this afternoon and was going through my feeds a little while ago when I came across her latest post about Verity, a local singer who is employing the interesting technique of pre-sales to raise the money to record her first album. I had been meaning to become one of the future owners for a while now and saw Tertia’s post as a sign that now was the time. So I have bought a copy and have become future owner #994. I’m looking forward to being a part of the album creation process by helping to choose the songs that Verity will record.
Jo’burg needs more ways to bury its dead
The Mail & Guardian Online reported that Jo’burg needs more ways to bury its dead; it occurs to me that some creative solutions involving all the old mine shafts might be in order.
Wat is daardie woord?
Sometimes the human brain works in the weirdest of ways. I was watering the garden the other evening and my mind was wandering when it locked onto the topic of bras, no not those guys from Urban Trash, but brassieres. So you’re thinking “He’s a guy, what’s so weird about that?”, well the weird thing is I wasn’t visualising a nice pair of boobies in a Wonderbra but wondering what the Afrikaans word for a bra was. I’m pretty bilingual and when I sometimes have trouble thinking of a word I can usually refer to my sons’ old school English-Afrikaans dictionary, but somehow I don’t think that will help this time. I’ve tried googling but didn’t find anything of use, or interest, other than the rather interesting image accompanying this entry. No doubt somebody will be able to tell me what the Afrikaans word is but perhaps you know of an online resource that can help with English-Afrikaans translation.
Peter Steals?
OK, maybe Steals is a bit strong, even if it does conveniently rhyme with the site owner’s surname, but I was amazed to see this article reporting that the consumer complaint site hellopeter.com requires companies to subscribe, at a fairly substantial annual fee, to have the ability to respond to complaints made about them.
Supporting Local Music
I’m not sure how I ended up on Rhythm Records’ mailing list but when I received a copy of their newsletter last week it looked interesting so I took a look at their site and spotted one or two albums I wanted to buy.
This evening I got around to actually doing so. I was very satisfied with the experience. They have a long list of South African artists on their catalogue and offer non-DRMed downloads in MP3 format so you can play them on any OS and download them to any MP3 player. Their music is reasonably priced at R6 per track, considerably less than the likes of Pick ‘n Play, who charge more than twice this for most tracks and only offer DRMed downloads that can only be played in Windows Media Player.
So what did I buy? Two albums, Takeaways by Bed On Bricks and The Red Stone Album by Pebbleman.
I saw Bed On Bricks play live at Rock The Bay in December 2005 and thought they were a really great live band so when I saw that their third album was an acoustic live set I just had to buy it. I’ve given it a spin and I like it. It has a mellow vibe but is still upbeat and funky as you would expect from Bed On Bricks.
My only experience of Pebbleman was the track Loaded Gun that I downloaded from SAMP3.com a few months ago. It is a driving guitar-based rock track and impressed me greatly. Listening to the samples of Pebbleman’s other tracks revealed them all to be of the same ilk. A nice album, not metal, but good old-fashioned hard rock.
I will definitely be passing more of my business to Rhythm Records and will continue downloading sample tracks from SAMP3.com to get an idea of what local music I like and want to buy. I suggest you do the same.
On the subject of South African music, you might want to check out my South African Music group on Flickr. If you’ve taken any photos of South African musicians then join the group and post them.
craniac's place 