the corner office

We were promised rain until today, but They Lied. By yesterday the sun was back in full force and by now, every molecule of water that fell has evaporated back into the air and a sizeable proportion of said molecules are oppressively gathering around me.

It's 33C today. The heat index after humidity is taken into account is supposedly around 37C. That's around 100F. I know it can get worse here, and it might not be regarded as particularly hot in other parts of the world, but it's hot & humid enough for this Vaalie, thankyouverymuch. With that, I shall stop complaining about the weather. Promise.

Ah well. I'm in the office to get some last minute work done (I lie, I'm just here for the air conditioning). The Christmas pressies are purchased, the what-to-buy pressure is off, and now all that's left is to submit and go gentle into that Christmas-spirit-infested night. Food, booze, family, and presents. All of these are best had in moderation, but that's never the case over the next few days.

If you celebrate Christmas religiously or culturally, or if (like me) you aren't particularly fond of this time of year but find it's easiest to go along for the ride anyway, and even if you're simply lucky enough to have a day off, then I do hope you have a merry Christmas. See you on the other side.

My last post had me drrripping wet from the heat and talking about the drizzly skyline. Then came Sunday, and 'drizzling' turned to 'raining', and then came Monday (being today), and 'raining' didst turn to 'pissing down'. It's eased up now, by the looks of things, but it comes and goes. I'm still enjoying the misty rainy skyline, this time from our Durban office up on 'the Berea'. ADSL versus trying to hook up my rig to the folks' phone line... no contest.

Bit of a bummer that I'm sitting here grafting, but it's not all work thus far and I'm squeezing in a bit of a holiday as well, so that's OK.

Everyone here has been whingeing like hell because of the rainses, but I love it. Firstly, because I'm a rain kinda person, and second, because it's a lot cooler and bearable for unhealthy farts like me. I know that when the Evil Yellow Eye does make an appearance again, it's going to be even more humid, but for now I'm enjoying it.

I suspect that if the Durbanites didn't need to occasionally cart goodies from the sugar mills and harbour up to us folks inland, the entire city would just fall asleep.

Hot. Humid. Strange place.

Johannesburg is a city that makes you old, Durban is a city you can grow old in. It's the weather, and the sea, and the history, and a lot of things. It's part olde-worlde British colonial charm, part third-world chaos. I mean, nobody retires to Gauteng... apart from the locals who've slowly steamed away for generations, Durban is a city full of people who've had enough of everywhere else and come here to live a lazy life where lazy weekends meld into lazy weeks until years have slipped by and it simply doesn't matter. I think that people in Joburg and Cape Town invent fancy expressions like 'quality of life' and aspire to it or pretend to have it while people in Durban just live it. It's so completely different in mindset and lifestyle to Joburg that it's hard to believe we're all in the same country.

That's the romanticised version. Give me another week in this bloody heat and I'll be far less generous in my prose. Right now I'm staying with my folks a block away from the sea, while Ronwen is up in the hills in Westville with her family (her new nephew is cute as can be). Looking out the window of my folks' 16th-floor flat, it's all hazy and drizzly, fragrant sea breezes wafting in.

Seeing anywhere from the 16th floor with the lights of the city shimmering in the mist, and it's hard not to get romantic. I start getting that ah-man-I-wish-I-lived-in-Durban feeling. Then I sit down, realise I'm sopping wet with sweat (in Joburg you perspire, here you just sweat), and I remember why it is this tropical climate thing is best taken in small doses only.

Durbs is a great place though. I lived here for nearly a year in '99, Ronwen is a local. My parental units have been here for nearly 9 years, Ronwen's folks for ever, the majority of our families live here. The place is busy as hell with all holidaymakers at this time of year, but it's great seeing everyone, relaxing, and eating like a pig.

The first thing my mom does every time she sees me is tells me 'you don't look like you've picked up any weight', and then proceeds to ply me with food and goodies for the entire duration. I suppose that's what holidays are about :-)

I've set up a laptop, I've got a vamped-up Linux box (headless and easy to travel with), about 5 extra hard drives, a switch and a pile of cables. And a couple of pet projects to take care of. We've got the PS2 packed, a heap of DVDs, I've got my books for a January exam, and I'll grab a couple of unread novels from the bookshelf.

Yep, it's the geek equivalent of the umbrellas (for sun, not rain), boogey boards, skottel braai, rugby balls and fishing rods. Ronwen and I are joining the annual Vaalie exodus to Durbsbythesea.

Verily, Ronwen and I are heading off to Durban for two weeks' holiday.

I'll be popping into our Durban office for a real bandwidth fix now and then, but for the most part Internet access is bound to be erratic with the schlep of dialling up from the parental units' pozzies, so I'm bound to be a little scarce. To bed I must; a long drive ahead of us tomorrow...

Amazing! R & I decided to live on the eeedge and watch the midnight screening at Montecasino last night. We got home after 4 so we're a little ragged today.

Unlike the Matrix, I think it's a given that anyone who's interested in seeing it knows how it ends, so I won't worry about hiding this. If you don't want a spoiler, don't carry on reading.

It started off a little disjointedly, and I sat in the cinema fearing that the movie would be a flop. Thankfully things picked up pretty quickly and on balance, I'll just say I thought it was excellent. The effects, and especially the battle scenes, were absolutely mind-blowing. The Oliphaunts and cavalry battles were unbelievable. The Scouring of the Shire was left out as expected, but they handled the end rather sensitively.

It wasn't without its niggles though. Some of the plot changes from the book made sense, but others I didn't enjoy. In a few places they seemed like rather cheap and transparent attempts to build up a bit of drama. Arwen's life being tied to the ring. Pfff. The 'negotiations' with the dead army. Pffff. Gollum framing Sam. Pffff. Also, I don't think they portrayed Denethor too convincingly. He came across a lot less 'noble' than he should have been, and his trauma over Faramir came across more as selfish madness than true grief.

The movie was around 3 and a half hours long, and despite that, and as expected, certain parts seemed a little rushed. I read somewhere that Christopher Lee was dismayed that Saruman was left out of the movie, completely, and it was a pity. About 10 seconds of Isengard and that was that. I thought the whole Palantir issue was glossed over a little, and the soppy side of me thought it would have been nice to see Eowyn and Faramir's relationship develop. Aragorn's healing and whatnot also got the chop, as did the Captain of the Gate. I hope that the extended version includes some of these scenes, we'll have to wait and see.

A lot of people have said that the Fellowship was the weakest of the 3 movies. RotK is definitely more like the Two Towers than the first. I have to admit that for me, the first movie was still the most moving, because by now I'm a little desensitised to the huge panoramic shots, the amazing recreation of Middle Earth. In a way, I think we now take for granted things that were absolutely unbelievable two years ago. Having said that, I can't complain. The Return of the King was the monster finale that I'd been waiting for, and personally, I'm a happy Tolkien fan. Now, I'll be interested to see what the rest of the world, fans and otherwise, think?

On 16 December 1838, a little over 400 Voortrekkers set up a laager of ox wagons alongside the Ncome river. This followed a year of skirmishes and fights between the Zulu nation under Dingaan's rule, and the Boer settlers. The battle that was looming would have been another natives-versus-colonists set-to that repeated itself across the world.

The major difference though, is that prior to the battle, the Boers under the leadership of Andries Pretorius (nope, dunno if he's a great-granddad), had (supposedly) made a pact with God. I'm not sure what God said for his/her part, but the Boers basically promised that if God let them win, they'd commemorate the day forever after. Somewhere as part of this pact was a loves-me, loves-me-not assurance that if they won, it meant that God was on Their Side, naturally.

The 16th saw a battle between 464 Boers and 10,000 Zulus, in which over 3,000 Zulus were killed without a single Boer fatality. The carnage was such that the Ncome River became known as Blood River. Gunpowder versus assegaai spears might have had a large part to do with it, but history is always written by the victors, and since then (or at least during the past century), the 16th of December has been commemorated as the Day of the Covenant, Day of the Vow, or in olde English circles, as Dingaan's Day.

This victory was presumably seen by the Boers as a clear sign that God didn't like heathen black people and was probably a fundamental affirmation for them, being uneducated Calvinistic Christians, that they were indeed the new Israelites being led by God into a new Canaan. A century later this expressed itself as the highly convenient belief for the architects of apartheid that the Afrikaner nation had a hotline to God and were perfectly entitled to the fruits of apartheid - the Battle of Blood River, fought and won after making a covenant with God himself, dammit, was a sign of that.

koff

Post-1994 a holiday celebrating God's choosing of sides wasn't a policitally correct thing to do, and in a very deft move that kept everybody happy, the public holiday was changed to the 'Day of Reconciliation'.

I learned an interesting fact this evening (never made it into our textbooks when I was in school) - another reason for it being a day of 'reconciliation' is that the African National Congress launched Umkonto we Sizwe, their military arm, on 16 December 1961.

No doubt a couple of hardline ANC/PAC supporters will be chanting 'kill the white man kill the boer' and 'one settler one bullet' somewhere tomorrow, and a couple of out-of-touch Afrikaners will be dressed up in khakis and look pathetic at the Voortrekker Monument, but for the rest of the country, it's another day off. Reconciliation is often about finding commonality instead of differences, and if there's one thing all of us have in common, it's not objecting to a day of sitting at home and doing f-all.

Anyway, nice bit of history for the grandkids one day.

We got a PlayStation 2 on Friday. Wondering why I've been so low profile? :-)

R & I decided that we may as well invest in a PS2 which not only provides gnarly gaming entertainment (not that we play too many PC games, but a PS2 is just different, dammit :-), but can also double up as a DVD player, since we'd had enough of gathering around my PC to watch DVDs.

Burnout 2 rocks. We haven't tried any other games yet :-) We also hired a couple of DVDs for last night (it's too bloody hot to do anything else). We finally got to see Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone (I know, we're trez behind the times), and Treasure Planet. HP well good, TP well Disney, enough said. I've never read any of the HP books and my first exposure to the Hogwarts world was the second HP movie. Tom Brown's School Days with magic. Loved both movies to bits. It's a pity they can only churn out a new Potter movie every year or two, because let's be honest, the young lad playing HP won't be very convincing once he's turned 21.

Ronwen also hired The Mothman Prophecies. Personally, I don't do horror flicks, because I'm a big wuss. Ronwen arm-twisted me into watching the opening bits, and in the end, it turned out to be more of a supernatural thriller than a horror movie, and I think I enjoyed it more than Ronwen did. There was only one kakbroekskrikkend moment in the movie, where Richard Gere headbutts a mirror, but other than that my wussified old ticker didn't take too much strain.

In between all of this and the heat, we've been trying to do some spring-cleaning in anticipation of leaving for Durbs next week for two weeks over Krismis and New Year's. I don't know why it is that the Ubercleaning Sessions only kick in for when we know we're not going to be around. Is this to be polite to the burglars?

Ronwen's off at a girl's day out at the Roodepoort Botanical Gardens, and I've got some more flat-sorting-out to be done before friends pop by to watch The Two Towers in anticipation of RotK which we're going to see on Tuesday night. Gotta dash!

Just had a really freaky experience.

A feature on South African highways, (and I'm sure other countries have exactly the same things), are 'island' petrol station/convenience store/fast food joints. The only way to get to them is usually from the highway, or perhaps a slipway from an onramp, and they always only spill out onto your side of the dual carriageway again. Because they're so isolated, you usually have 'twins', one on each side of the highway.

I stopped in at the N1 South BP Express at the Beyers Naude offramp to grab a bite to eat on the way home. Needless to say, the MacD's was closed but the BP Express shop has a 'Wild Bean Cafe' / deli inside. The place itself was deserted. A few petrol attendants (yep, ZA doesn't do self-service petrol for some reason) huddled in a doorway, two blokes behind the Wild Bean counter, the cashier behind bullet-proof glass and one middle-aged lady parking off at one of the tables around the corner drinking coffee. I don't know what brings a middle-aged lady to be sitting on her own at a BP Express at 1h45 in the morning but some things are best left unasked, I think.

Anyway... you know these guys just want to be at home with their families, sleeping like the rest of the world, but they still make an effort to be friendly. They're good okes. I'm busy paying the cashier and making idle thanks/you're welcome mah-man chit-chat, when two cop cars come racing up and skid to a halt outside. By the way the doors were opening before the cars had even stopped, I kinda figured they weren't popping in for Wild Bean coffee. As one of them made for the door unholstering his gun, it became more clear that this definitely wasn't social. About a half-second later one of the petrol attendants shouted 'not here!'. The cops stopped, looked at each other, a bit of confused discussion with the petrol attendants, before one of them shouted 'wrong one' (less politely), with which they hopped back into their cars and raced off again.

Only as they were pulling away did it sink in. Desolate petrol station. Only person facing the dude with the cash is me. Reported armed robbery in progress at Beyers Naude BP Express, and the only dude who could possibly be the perp is me. Once that had sunk in and I'd realised that I came rather close to having 8 cops giving me the 'freeze motherf***er!' treatment, I was almost disappointed that it didn't happen. It's not every day you get to act all innocent and actually be innocent and get away to tell the story. I got over it really quickly though.

Of course, the real cock-up was that instead of the BP Express on the N1 South where I was, the robbery was probably on the other side of the dual carriageway at the N1 North BP Express. These poor coppers would have to race about 5 kms down the highway before they got to another offramp that allowed them to turn around and come back up. Actually, I don't give a shit where the real robbery was happening, I was just grateful it was somewhere else.

The cashier's only words were "there's lots of robberies happening to us", followed by "now I'm feeling scared, man".

No shit. I was feeling it too. Knowing there's krimnals in the vicinity and rather edgy cops and they're all armed to the teeth left me quietly kakking myself and just wanting to get the hell away from there. Which is more than the poor cashier can do. "This glass is bullet-proof, isn't it?", I ask, tapping on the glass and trying to sound reassuring. "Yes, but they come in with a petrol guy from outside", he says, pointing a mock pistol at his head. "What can I do? I have to open up."

Kinda puts things in perspective. I got to hop in my car and bugger off, kiss my girlfriend goodnight and chill out at home with my Prego roll and write up a blog entry. The cashier, the Wild Bean dudes and the petrol attendants have to stick around for another 5 hours before the rest of the world wakes up, wondering whether the next car that turns off the highway is going to be filled with AK-weilding thieves who'd just as soon shoot them as greet them.

Welcome to Africa.

With that, I'm off to bed. But as I said to the cashier as I left, I am thinking of them.

Well, it's nice to feel like part of a community, even if it is just the handful of folks on the entire continent of Africa who've mustered up a blog. AllAfrica dropped me a mail a while back mentioning their new African blog list. At the time I had a squizz and nobody was listed. Feeling a little skaam, I decided I'd wait and see just how popular it would be. Nobody wants to be the poor fool listed with two other blogs as being representative of the African blogging community. Not the kind of pressure or notoriety I aspire to.

I noticed a couple of days back that Ashok mentioned 'em, so I took a look again, and finally I'm listed.

On telly they're advertising yet another Creedence Clearwater Revival Best-of CD. Personally, the majority of drunken singalong CCR songs that make it onto the perennial best-ofs are songs I'm not partial to, probably due to overexposure. I'm a big fan of their drawn-out, swampy, bluesy tracks though, and Suzie Q is probably one of the famousest of those. Prodded by the advert, I found my copy of their eponymous debut (iirc) CD and track 3 is the full-length, 8 and a half minute version of Suzie Q.

About 1 minute into the track my mind started meandering, as is its wont, and I began to wonder whether anyone knew what the hell Suzie Q's real surname was.

A quick Google later and I am now educated. The song was written by Stan Lewis circa 1957, and Suzie Q's real name was Susan Lewis:

And she was hot stuff, with a wiggly walk and cutie-pie talk that made Lewis' world. Suzie Q was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Suzie Q was 2 years old, his little daughter.

Now that, I wasn't expecting. You learn something new every day.

And on that note, I'm off to do the dishes and irritate Ronwen with the most off-key rendition of "I Put A Spell on Yew" that I can muster.