Category Archives: Life

Botox Ballies Blues Band

I sent this cartoon to Reed & Brauer:

Old age home Asylum Rockers

BTW, ‘ASILO’ on the wall means ‘ASYLUM’.

Steve Reed wrote: I love it. Over here in Aus, the national broadcaster has a competition called ‘Exhumed’. A fitting term for those of us, like yourself, who played in a band as a younger person but wanna give it one last go. 

The blurb is: Exhumed is a band competition with a difference. It’s not for has-beens, it’s not for wannabes, it’s for the never-weres. It’s for people who play music for the sheer love of it. If you fit that description, enter and listen to your Local ABC Radio to be part of Exhumed. You could hear your track on the radio, be interviewed on air, perform at your local Exhumed event and feature in an ABC Music release. Each station across the country will choose a winner. Of those winners only six will go through as finalists and perform live on TV at our Grand Final. But just one will take home the title ‘Exhumed Winner 2013’.

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/exhumed/

I wrote: C’mon Brauer! Enter the Botox Ballies Blues Band in this great competition!

Reminds me of a gathering of old canoeists where someone said, We’re the Has Beens.
Mate of mine hurriedly clarified, “Swanie you’re not a Has Been. You can’t be a Has Been if you Never Was.”

PS: Reed, you may not know this, but the BBBB is quite famous behind the Boerewors Curtain among certain square circles that are often in their cups. They even pay to play at some events in far distant little known venues. Serious! Brauer’s on guitar and quite vocal.

He got lost under a pair of bloomers that was lobbed onto the stage once. Rumour has it.

As for the suggestion that I actually ‘played in a band,’ truth is more like ‘played with the band’s instruments at the same time the band was rehearsing and was tolerated by the band members.’ To be accurate. 1973.

~~oo0oo~~

Montclair Sunset

Leaving work today I stepped out of the lift onto the roof and was greeted by this:

Montclair sunset (3)

Then I got home and things got better! There was Tom in the kitchen making this delicious curry (Cecelia has ‘flu):

Tom_cooks_curry[1]

– and me drinking Sheila’s wine like this:

Sheilas_wine[1]

– and Jess gave me a back massage like this: 🙂

Life is good!

 

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitise and archive books and other cultural works and make them freely available on the internet.

It was started in 1971 by Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois.

The university had a Xerox Sigma 5 mainframe computer in their Materials Research Lab. By befriending the operators, Hart was given an account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time; Hey! It was there and they didn’t really have a whole lot they could do with it. Everything was so new!

Michael Hart & Sigma computer

Seen above is a later Xerox Sigma 9 with a pic of Michael Hart pasted on.

Now, what would the average 24yr-old male do with this novel ‘thing’ called “access to a computer”? We know what most of us would do NOW: Search for titty pictures.

Cleavage

But there was no internet then, no World Wide Web. This would only come later, starting with something like this:

1973: Global networking becomes a reality as the University College of London and the Royal Radar Establishment of Norway connect to the American ‘ARPANET’. The term ‘internet’ is born.

1974: The first Internet Service Provider is born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET, known as Telenet.

What Michael Hart did was amazing: He decided to just ‘make things available’ to anyone who could access them. As he added free content, his idea grew to wanting to encourage the creation and distribution of ‘ebooks’ – as many as possible in as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many languages as possible. The aim became ‘to break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy’. His initial goal was to make the 10,000 most-consulted books available to the public at little or no charge, and to do so by the end of the 20th century.

He named the project after Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century German printer who propelled the movable type printing press revolution which made knowledge more widely available.

– the famous gutenberg bible – a plate and a page –

There are now over 56 000 books available free on gutenberg.org. (March 2019: 58 000). (January 2020: over 60 000).

see wikipedia Project Gutenberg

~~~oo0oo~~~

Incredibly, the Sigma 5 base memory was just 64K Bytes. Maximum memory was limited by the length of the instruction address field of 17 bits, or 512K Bytes.

Freedom Day

April 27 1994 was the first post-apartheid election where all South Africans were free to vote.

** pic voting **

Freedom Day.

“Wherever South Africans are across the globe, our hearts beat as one, as we renew our common loyalty to our country and our commitment to its future.”

  • Nelson Mandela

    #freedomday

Elections 1994_2

Those Special Years

Oktoberfest in Munchen – Wor kan isch pinkel gen?
Beer’s good; Wine makes you sleepy! ne Fanie?

Even if we live to be a hundred, the first twenty five years are the longest half of our lives. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so as we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memories than all the years that succeed them.

  • paraphrased from a quote by Robert Southey, English Romantic Poet

.

With music like this, no wonder ‘our’ best years were so memorable:

So basically it seems we have ten years of knowing nothing, then fifteen magic years of knowing everything (feature pic), doing everything and having the most fun and then about fifty years of thinking WTF happened!? – and some regretting we didn’t get up to even more stuff in the magic fifteen.

The Bend Whisky Phone-001.jpg

 

A Card – A Hug

Jess made a lovely card for my birthday!

Jess Bday card for Dad (2).jpg

On the way back from fishing I told Tom about her card.

Well, I gave you a hearty hug, Dad, he said. And its true. He did. Plus – don’t let him hear this – a bit of a speech vaguely similar to the words on the card. I had a huge grin on my face.

They want to buy me a present. I said Hold On, Maybe We’ll All Chip In And Buy Me A Telescope.

Oh, said Jess, I was going to buy you a chocolate.

Auspicious Day

April 1, 1976: During an early-morning interview on BBC Radio, the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced that at 9:47am that day a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur. Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, and this planetary alignment would temporarily counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity.

Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment the alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47am arrived, the station began receiving hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman reported that she and her friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

Moore had intended his announcement to be a spoof of a pseudoscientific theory that had recently been promoted in a book called The Jupiter Effect, alleging that a rare alignment of the planets was going to cause massive earthquakes and the destruction of Los Angeles in 1982.

The first one:

April 1, 1698: The earliest known record of an April Fool’s Day prank, as reported in Dawks’s News-Letter the following day: “Several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch to see the Lions washed.”

The joke was that there were no lions being washed in the Ditch – or moat – of the Tower of London. It was a fool’s errand.

For well over a century after this, the prank of sending unsuspecting victims to see the “washing of the lions” at the Tower of London remained a favorite April Fool’s Day joke. In the mid-nineteenth century, pranksters even printed up official-looking tickets that they distributed around London on April first, promising admittance to the non-existent ‘annual lion-washing ceremony’.

April Fool Lions_2

Anyone saying the worst April Fool joke ever was in 1955: Ha! Ha! I’ve heard that one before.

And I’ve been caught out – more than once. And sometimes forgotten.

 

Deja Bloody Vu

Can you believe it? The irresponsibility!

Tom is writing exams, writes five and decides he wants to write the last three when I can invigilate. The others have been invigilated by his tutor Langelihle and another third-year student Rebecca. So we settle on Saturday afternoon and Sunday.

Except he arranges for Ryan to come around and the two of them beetle off gallivanting heavens know where and doing heavens knows what. So he only wrote the last three papers on Monday and Tuesday. Bloody hell! Who would DO something so irresponsible!?

Er, actually, maybe his father?

Back in 1972 I had four matric final exams, then a five day break before the last two. Me, Fluffy and Gabba took the gap and disappeared off to his farm behind the mountain after pulling in at the liquor off-sales on the way where he could legally buy grog, him being eighteen. Plus.

Gabba was a great friend to have, he had a car and lived all alone on his farm where he bought and sold cattle for a living – ‘speculated in cattle’ they called it. In matric! Cool! His farmhouse was a half-house. You picked your way over the rubble of the first half and entered by what used to be an inside door but was now the outside door of the remaining half.

We flattened the beer, which made us thirsty so we scrounged around and found a big old glass two-eared flagon of umqombothi on top of the fridge, fermenting quietly. We finished what was in there and phoned Frank on the party line. Frank was another bachelor alone on his farm nearby. What shall we do? we enquired of Frank, knowing that he would guide us wisely, him a few years older. Frank said “I’ve got beer, come!”

We finished that and Frank said “Let’s go to town”. Who were we to argue? We hopped into his car, I think a Datsun 1800 SSS, and roared off to town at terminal velocity, strong and clever. I remember a narrow bridge across a spruit approach and disappear in a blur with a loud WHUMP! in the middle of it followed by half a second’s silence – airborne.

Gabba Frank car

In town we woke up the barman of the Royal Hotel down near the railway line. He grumbled a bit, but Frank was having none of it so he went off and reappeared with a case of dumpy beers. We then drove round to the R’s home and threw pebbles against an upstairs window. Penny opened the window, shimmied down the downpipe and we were OFF again on the dirt roads to the farm behind the mountain. At high speed. Invincible.

The next night back at Gabba’s place I phoned my Mom on the party line during a heavy thunderstorm and downpour. “Where have you been? Come home!” was the message but I said “What? Hard to hear you! I’ll be coming back tomorrow”. She said “Yes, rather don’t drive in this weather.” I said “Don’t worry, I’m the responsible type”.

I’m sure* Tommy wasn’t up to kak like that, so maybe he doesn’t take after his Dad.

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umqombothi – traditional Zulu beer

spruit – stream

kak – mischief

*- not really sure

Urgent Phone Call at Work

I’ve left the kids alone at home, so when the ladies at work say, “He says it’s urgent!” I take it.

It’s Tom.

Dad! We need to get a lamb roast and rosemary and garlic and small-cut vegetables to roast. It’s a slow roast and we don’t have any rice or lamb stock in the pantry!

OK Tom, we’ll go straight to the shops when I get home.
My 12yr-old has been watching a cooking show on the box.

Tom chef.jpg

~~oo0oo~~

Terry wrote:

Oh that is super funny!! Alone as in NO adults at all?

Me:

None. Cecelia on leave. Tobias is only Mon Wed Thurs.

So far they have been boringly safe and haven’t set anything on fire. It’ll come . . .

Under a previous regime I’d have been in trouble . .

As I would have been for Tom losing lots of skin and getting a huge heat rash when he fished topless all day the first day at Happy Wanderers. Aitch put more sunblock on them in a week than I have in 2,5 years.

Terry:

Hey its not cool to be too black, I hear!! Loads of sunscreen or she will haunt you!!

Me:
We’re all so aware of that, but remembering to do it . . .

Tito Mboweni’s son got picked up by the cops for being too black! I imagine that happens all the time. We’re very aware of that, too!

Kids are watching old Bill Cosby DVD’s (over & over until they know all the words OBH!)
Quite striking how they have chosen all the actors in it to be light-skinned – some to the point of whiteness! Bill himself is by far the darkest of the “Huxtable family”!

The funny thing is I “met” Bill Cosby in 1969 when an exchange student from upstate New York came to Harrismith. He brought a vinyl LP with him:

cosby LP.jpg

Here I am 45yrs later listening to my kids listening to Cosby.

Terry:

And my kids and I always said Bill Cosby was just a dark Pete Swanepoel 😀

~~oo0oo~~

2018:
This was 2014. Now all our Cosby stuff has been destroyed before discarding it. Sad, but he’s history in our books

Jessie, and Jaynee’s Fairies

Jess saw fairies in Jayne Janetsky’s Gauteng country garden way back around 2005. Jayne had little fairies and fairy lights among the fascinating boulders hidden in an indigenous forest copse. Also hanging from the branches and around the pond. Jess has always remembered them and still refers to them from time to time, years later. So it was a lovely surprise to get this email from Jayne – now living in Mocambique:

2017/05/26, Jayne Janetzky wrote: Thought Jess may like to look through a book I wrote for grandson Tyler – it’s about the faeries she remembers.

Talented daughter-in-law Ansobel did the illustrations!

Jayne Faeries Book_2

Wonderful! I replied. And the best part of all – It’s ALL TRUE! I was there, I saw it! The great big rocks, the pond, the fairies themselves! The lights! Jess will love it.

I found an aerial view of Jayne’s cottage and its magical garden.

Jayne's The rock

Here I arrowed the cottage with the (really, genuinely) magic adult veranda where liquid flowed and wondrous meals were served. The popping of champagne corks was an everyday sound here – now that is truly magical!

Also 1. The flat rocks which made such an interesting feature in the front garden; 2. The magical forest with a trail through it past high boulders and a pond, every nook and cranny with fairies and fairy lights and candles! Jaynee knows how to do theatre!

jaynes-the-rock_2

Adults who do things that kids never forget are magic adults.

How Hard Can It Be?

Craig Naude sent this:

Orchestra conductor

Jon Taylor wrote:

It only looks like that to the members of the audience who have already finished their boxes of wine.

I wrote:

Oh rubbish! How hard can it be? I have successfully air-conducted many operas, arias, concertos, minuets, fugues, and more in my car and in my bath.
Fugue, man. 😉

Pete Brauer wrote:

At school the PACT Symphony Orchestra came to play at an assembly. They gave a schpiel about how important the conductor was. They then called up a kid from the audience to have a go at conducting – and the orchestra played out of their socks to the kid randomly  waving his arms and the baton around as if it was a traditional weapon.

To show the difference when a real fundi conductor brought the best out of the orchestra, the conductor came back on – and of course the orchestra didn’t play a note in tune or in time.

I wrote:

I love that! That’s a hoot!
I bet the musicians had a ball doing that! Every formal orchestra ‘captive musician’ must secretly want to break loose and be a Jagger. Or at least a Vanessa Mae.

Vanessa Mae violin

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PACT – Performimg Arts Council of the Transvaal

Drink Up!

Headline News: Drinking Alcohol Doesn’t Actually Kill Brain Cells

Well, there goes that joke about the slow wildebeests (the bewilderbeasts?) being thinned out by the marauding hyenas, thus sharpening up the survivors’ gene pool.

The news:
Scientists once believed that the number of nerve cells you have in your brain, once you reach adulthood, was all you’d ever have. Thus, damaging these cells could be extremely detrimental to the individual. However, this isn’t correct.

Ha! New neurons are created all the time in the adult brain, in a process that is called neurogenesis, or more technically, imbibing wisdom. I knew it!

Yay! Neurogenesis! I just made a few new brain cells to host this new info. The picture above is a snapshot of me while that process was happening. Voila!

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Remember how alcohol works to make you invincible?

Chips Tomorrow!!

Keep your head low tomorrow Friday 2nd March, and if you’re in the habit of wearing a top hat, don’t.

An asteroid called 2018 DV1, about the size of a bus, will approach within 113,000 kilometers of Earth during its flyby.

NASA’s Asteroid Watch program will host a free webcast, led by astrophysicist Gianluca Masi in Ceccano, Italy, for the event. The webcast will feature views of the asteroid as seen by a 16-inch robotic telescope at the Tenagra Observatories in Arizona. You can watch the webcast live here Friday, beginning at 0530 GMT.

Astronomers in Arizona first spotted asteroid 2018 DV1 on Monday 26 February so I dunno why they didn’t tell us sooner.

Anyway, don’t say you weren’t warned, my followers. Both of you.

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footnote: I watched it for you. It was terrifying! The asteroid looked this this fullstop on screen . except fuzzier. For an hour it did precisely nothing. Then, thank goodness to a sigh of relief, it disappeared. You can relax now.

Prof Chris Barnard’s Farewell

At the airport yesterday I saw a new book on Professor Chris Barnard by James-Brent Styan: ‘Heartbreaker’.

It’s fifty years since the world’s first heart transplant and the famous surgeon and playboy is in the news again, as people use the anniversary to look back afresh . .

A while ago I had found Aitch’s 1983 diary. Her entries to record her overtime as a cardiovascular perfusionist assisting during heart ops had abbreviations likes “palliative VSD 1.5hrs; MVR 1.5hrs; CVG”.

One of her entries in December was ’17h00 Wed 14 Dec Farewell for CNB, Nurses Lounge, Clarendon House’. I knew that CNB meant Christiaan Neethling Barnard as she worked with him at the time. She would run the heart-lung machine to oxygenate the blood while he and the other surgeons worked on the patient’s heart.

I had time before my flight so I  thought I wonder if they have anything about his retirement in the book? and flipped through it.

And there she was on page 216:

Aitch Prof Chris Barnard (2)

So I had to buy it to show the pic to Jess and Tom. Jess said “Cool”; Tom shrugged: “We knew Mom was famous!”

Aitch Prof Chris Barnard (1)
– there she is! –

~~~oo0oo~~~

A few years prior to this, Jess had been able to Show and Tell her classmates about her Mom.

Things To Know

People usually aren’t listening. They are either thinking of what they are going to say next, or something else entirely.

Everyone is insecure about something, it’s not just you.

You are going to die no matter what.

Your kids will experience hardship.

The bigger an organization is, the harder it is to make a change even if the need is obvious to many.

Some people are bad and have bad intentions.

Many people (not all) will steal R100 from you today even if it means missing the opportunity to earn R1000 from you next week.

You will never be 100% sure about all decisions. But always make a decision because it’s better to go back and fix it than to never make it at all.

There is ALWAYS someone who makes more money than you, is more fit, has a better looking spouse, has an easier life, good things happen to them. Usually more than just one.

How you react to an event, problem, emotion, or anything, is more important than the actual event, problem, emotion or whatever. You cannot control your emotions, you cannot control others, all you can control is how you are going to react. Sometimes it’s easy but usually it’s really really hard.

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Skyler Irvine on quora.com