Power of Opinion

Saturday morning, and, having decided to cut my weekly washing into 4 loads rather than 2, I'm awaiting the machine wash-cycle's pleasure and watching the news on the BBC.

(I watch the Beeb because, frankly, I prefer their use of language - rather than the parochial butcherings of the US or South African news services.)

A segment on Honduran immigrants to the US comes on.
The Trump 'regime' (it's really a shit-show lead by an incompetent con artist, but 'regime' will do) has decided to end the protection given up to now to refugees from Honduras.

An elderly Honduran woman is among those interviewed. Speaking in Spanish, she opines that, while 'gringos' are undoubtedly intelligent, they sure aren't hard-working like Hondurans.

Now, that is a blanket statement of racial bias if ever I heard one. But she is elderly, non-White...and a woman. These 3 characteristics give her a status slightly above a doormouse in the social hierarchy. If she had been, say, a middle-aged White bloke, her statement amounting to "Whites are lazy" would have been roundly condemned, and probably not been allowed to be aired at all.But there she ws, on international television, blithely calling Whites lazy and no-one batting an eyelid.

What this underlined most strongly for me was that your position on the social ladder determines the power of your opinion. Someone (that middle-aged White bloke for example) has the power to,presumably, hire and fire people, and his opinion carries a much greater weight of authority than that of the elderly Latina woman. So she gets away with it, whereas he, these days, wouldn't.

And that's OK. With great privilege comes great responsiblity, both for our selves and for others, so the higher your social standing, the more powerful your every opinion truly becomes.

But for this morning, I just had a laugh-out-loud moment.

The New Inquisition

Five hundred years ago we had the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith aka the Inquisition wandering the Earth, poking their noses into humanity's very thoughts, burning people and generally, you know, making complete arseholes of themselves. And us.

The guardians of the faith admitted of no contrary view. Heresy was having a thought which didn't accord with their dogma. They were quite sure that they had the right of it, and smugly set about lighting fires under people they considered to be not-right.

Today we have the "New Atheists". The arch skeptics and debunkers who wander the Earth sniffing out heresy in the form of thoughts which do not accord with their dogma. Their very narrow, non-negotiable definition of what is true by way of "science".

Instead of burning people alive, however, these latter-day inquisitors have to settle for cajoling public broadcasters into taking down videos of talks by people they don't agree with.

People like PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, James Randi, Richard Wiseman and that other Dick, Richard Dawkins, never seem to tire of frothing at the mouth whenever they spy someone behaving heretically. Someone like Graham Hancock or Rupert Sheldrake, whose talks on TEDx have been marked for deletion after complaints by these whiny fundamentalist evangelists of the Only Way.

My gods - and all the Dicks are God, too - I'm killing myself laughing here. No need to light a fire under me.

Records

Anybody out there with an open-top Mercedes coupe in their garage?

Because it looks like we , over at Epona Coven , actually own your car.

I'm looking at the ownership papers right now. The ownership papers which we paid R320 for and which we took home from the Randburg Licensing Department this morning.

We thought we were taking the bakkie off the bank's name and putting it onto Warren's. Seems we overestimated the efficiency of the Randburg Municipality. Again.

I suppose we should have checked those papers out thoroughly before leaving, but in our defense, it's a bit difficult when you're navigating through the gaps between importunate free-lance licence-photo-takers yelling for your business.

Mercury Retrograde. Again, I should have remembered.

But we did do something fairly unusual right after that. We went to Sandton City to spend my horrible Sandton City gift vouchers - on books of course.

We were actually into the Mall of Horrors, purchasing books, and out again in 45 minutes. That's some kind of record.

So Much Fun

A bit of a classic start to Mercury Retrograde. Starting last night, our wireless internet service provider wigged out completely, a more than 12-hour long interruption of service at a most inconvenient time.

But I should have expected it, I guess.

The other thing I should have remembered about Mercury Retrograde is the degradation in quality of casual communication. I was given a warning, after all, what with a bureaucratic nincompoop's insistence on a copy of my matric certificate ( here's a heads-up: not all of us completed High School in South Africa, and those of us who've passed through University more than 30 years ago shouldn't really be asked for these things.).

So this morning, when our gas bottle finally gasped its last exhalation, I rang up the nearest Builders Warehouse  in Rivonia to check that they do exchange 19kg bottles as well as fill up 9kg ones. Assured of getting both bottles replenished, we scooted around to Rivonia and immediately faced what looked very much like the march of the Walking Dead in the Builders Warehouse parking lot. Rivonia habitues are like a cross between the typical English Chav and a Sloane Ranger: garishly decorative, distracted,bumbling,loud and brainless.

And those were just the customers. The staff need an urgent refresher course in the distinction between their arse and their elbow, I think.

We came away with a half-charge on the 9kg bottle and an empty 19kg bottle, having spent a good 90 minutes going from pillar to post and cashier to refund department, only to find out that they had run out of gas.

As I said, this is classic Mercury Retrograde behaviour and I suppose I should've anticipated it. But it wouldn't have been so much fun then, would it?

Cab Day

Funny protest signs.(H/t Echidne)

Actually, I'm not thinking of Jesus.

I'm thinking of the great taxi ride we had this morning, courtesy of Orange Cabs.
The driver was quite mad, and the wind through the open windows only increased the exhilaration of narrowly missing an oncoming car , bumping over road-works and dodging Putco buses by a hair. I know why dogs love to stick their heads out of the windows of moving vehicles. It's so much fun.

Jacob, the Mad Driver, took us to Bel Air Mall for grocery shopping, then onto PJ Adendorff's for trestles and finally he waited in the hot sun with a Coke while we bought a clutch plate and thrust bearing for the Legendary Car.

Helping us with our parcels at the gate, Jacob expressed a wish to be our driver again in the future. This life is too short to turn that sort of adventure down.

Noticing a Police van parked down our road, we found that our 2-doors-down neighbour had been burgled while we were away. Warren and I reviewed our camera footage for the hour in question - and found something strange. Just 5 minutes before the burglary car(which we had actually seen standing in the street as we left but had mistaken for the neighbour's vehicle) drove past our gate, the cameras recorded a security vehicle going the same way. The robbers took 8 and a half minutes to break in, clear the place out. stuff the loot into their car and drive off again. Our recordings show the car going back with its boot half-open.

Christmas shopping for someone, I guess. It's time, and past time, that we all just let go of our stuff.

By the way - if you're without transport for just a day in Joburg, don't go rent a car. The cab companies have come a long way since Rose's, and it works out much cheaper.

Stunning Humour

At home while Warren strips the clutch plate out of the Legendary Car, I found the image above in Neil Kramer's Facebook update this morning.

I had very little to do, other than the laundry, so I turned on the GodsDamnedTelly.

Guess what was showing?

No, go on, just guess.

Sometimes the Universe's sense of Synchromystic Humour is stunning.

Our Own Private Storm

In what was a rather less-publicised event than Hurricane Sandy, Bloubosrand in Joburg got hit by an energetic electric storm last night.

In particular, we received one cloud-to-ground strike on a nearby tree -thank you, tree, for taking that one for us - followed a few seconds later by a deadly strike to outside camera number 5.

I think someone else got hit on their property, too: a security alarm went off all night. If I had been a burglar, I would have been delighted, as it clearly indicated that no one was home at all.

The strike to the camera was a bit puzzling at first - we have 2 floodlights, a satellite TV dish and a WiFi Internet antenna on our roof after all, offering much more logical targets - until, about 4 seconds later, I realised that a combination of 3 factors favoured the camera getting hit after all.

Firstly, that's a metal fence it's sitting on. Not just mesh either, but good solid steel. With huge bloody spikes on every paling. The camera was mounted just below one huge bloody spike. When lightning graces the nether regions with its presence, it is looking first and foremost for high charge density, that is the amount of electrically charged particles per volume. Which is really high on a bloody big solid steel spike.
Also the cabling for the camera was wound unprofessionally around the paling.

So - solid metal, sharp point and running electrical current. Sounds like a lightning target to me.

All hail Thor, and thank you for sparing the Internet connection.

Pic: Storm over Sandton

Lace Curtain Morality..

...that arises in the kind of mind which hangs lace curtains in their windows so that no-one can see in from the outside. From the inside, the lace curtains can be twitched aside..of course.

It's typically found among the bourgeoisie - the class I was brought up in and from which I have spent the last decade trying to purge myself.


There's a certain running-around anxiety involved in the central thought form: "What Will They Think?" .

I freely admit to having suffered from this clutching dread myself for many, many years.

I do understand the roots of it - the need for social cohesion, the fitting-in to the tribe so as not to be expelled as a dangerous freak.

But really, should it obtain today? Should our hearts and minds be so set upon putting up a good front, whatever the cost?

Especially when you know Who you are. And lace curtains are nowhere involved.

I have just witnessed a pretty hilarious form of this syndrome/morality here at my place of work.

On Tuesday evening we were told that Important Visitors were coming, so that we had to ensure our desks were spic and span (that's mine at the top of the post- but it always looks like this) .

A fever of activity - polishing, hoovering, taking down of notices - ensued around the office for the next couple of hours. Soon we were gleaming - and that's fairly unusual for the casually happy office environment I work in.

And we were also extremely uptight, like a schoolgirl with rigidly plaited hair, waiting against the wall at the Saturday night dance.

The neatest cherry on the top of this phoniness was an order not to "congregate on the smokers' balcony."

I went home and couldn't stop laughing for most of the night. I even woke up chuckling.

People - you are so funny.

The Fraud Meeting

Last week we held a meeting of the Fraud Department.

The topic: Teamwork.

Gregg, Michiel, Jacob and Sifiso gathered early and decided to have a game of Foosball.

 

While, at the other end of the room, our Manager tried to get the visuals to work. Bloody Microsoft.

 

Eventually Ollie gave in and called on the services of the No-Bloody-Help-Desk.

While the Team concentrated on adding Hamdy to the Foosball side.
And I, of course, took pictures.

Going Insane

All together now:

 Five names that I can hardly
 Stand to hear
 Including yours and mine 
And one more chimp who isn't here
I can see the ladies talking 
How the times are getting hard
And that fearsome excavation 
On Magnolia Boulevard 

CHORUS:
 And I'm going insane
 And I'm laughing at the frozen rain 
And I'm so alone 
Honey when they gonna send me home 

Bad sneakers and a Piña Colada 
My friend
Stompin' on the avenue
By Radio City with a
Transistor and a large
Sum of money to spend 

 You fellah, you tearin' up the street
You wear that white tuxedo
How you gonna beat the heat
Do you take me for a fool 
Do you think that I don't see
That ditch out in the valley
That they're digging just for me 
 CHORUS

From Steely Dan's Katy Lied album. Probably their finest.

Niggling Misery

Full Moon along the Cancer-Capricorn axis tonight, which means my House of Mind is being illuminated strongly. And irritatingly.

I asked Warren about crime rates in Joburg at the full of the moon, and he pointed out that in fact the rates are lowest about now, increasing as we get nearer the New Moon. Professional criminals, we have in this city - they prefer to work at night without the Moon backlighting their activities.

That I have a Third House in Capricorn should tell you a lot about my grumpy-old-persona. I can be like your Granddad when his rheumatoid arthritis is playing up, especially as my natal Saturn is right around the same place that Full Moon is sitting in right now.

Tonight I felt like pitching a fit about the number of trailing electrical wires festooning the house. It's temporary, until we get all the lighting and cameras in their proper places. But the demise of the fridge's electrical socket has not helped - a long extension cable now runs right across the living room.

So, niggling misery would be my watchwords for the day, I guess. But not fatally so. I'm still aware of how richly privileged I actually am..not in material goods alone, or education, or anything else which fades like the morning poppy heads.
Just intensely privileged to be...here...now. On the Earth in all her toil and glory. Among the people - human and non human - who sing the hymn to Life Abundant every morning, and chant the evensong of the Sea of Remembrance as each night falls.

I am blessed to be starting to really remember Who I am...and who, by extension, You are, too. You can recall it if you bend your mind to it, you know.

Goat Stew

Saturday morning and, having done our meat-and-groceries run the week before, we had forgotten that most folks would be out shopping today.

Northgate wasn't so bad at around 9am-we returned a faulty solar light and got out of there.
Makro at Struben's Valley was another matter. The place bustled with shoppers and hungry on-commission salesmen. There was no concensus on the right side of the aisle on which to walk, and people literally milled.After accusing Warren of dilly-dallying, I cursed at the ATM which produced my cash on the second try. Normal conversation was impossible, owing to the combination of white noise, various clashing pieces of departmental muzac, and above it all some jerk on microphone exhorting us to rush to the high tech arena to snap up our bargains.

The till lady was incredibly slow, asking me for coins in change which I then had difficulty counting owing to the overriding blare of discordant sounds. I looked up. Till lady was wearing an expression not so far removed from bovine. I looked around. People staggering by with their eyes downcast, stoic masks on their faces. Not a glimmer of intelligence, curiosity or even irritation among the lot of them.

And I stood there, suddenly feeling as if I were the only human being left upon the face of the planet.
The moving beings around me seemed possessed of no heart, no brain, and no soul.
Of such moments are intricately woven theories of solipsism born.

Warren needed then to return to Northgate, where we purchased more solar lights. And then some electrical cable. Voltsing was missing from Northlands Deco Park, of a sudden. So we ended up at our local electrical store, right next to...

Chima's African Spices and Nigerian Foods.

..whose speciality is apparently Goat Stew. I wondered where all the neighbourhood goats had got to..

Your Towel...

...do you know where it is?

Are you certain?

Happy Towel Day!

Not Appropriate

Yesterday's news:
6 people, 2 goats killed in crash

"The taxi rolled and four patients were found about 17 metres away from where the taxi was," said spokesperson Synock Matobako. One of the injured said the passengers in the taxi were sangomas on their way to a ritual in Zandspruit. Matobako said two goats and a chicken were also inside the taxi. The goats were killed in the accident "

Last Saturday morning, we were woken to the sound of very loud drums- apparently constructed from dustbins- penny whistles and chants. No problem - a cleansing ceremony going on at one of my neighbours' houses.

The repeat performance on Saturday evening was also OK with us, although both Warren and I were starting to get a bit headach-y and testy.

Sunday morning however, crossed the line.
I know we're early risers, but most people in this suburb are not.
The din was truly incredible.
Warren got out the petrol-engined lawnmower and I got out my mortar and pestle.

Dragons Blood, Rue, Tonka Bean and Hyssop. A truly moving mixture when pounded into a fine powder, sprinkled on glowing coals and swung over the back fence.

You know,our Ancestors are not bloody deaf - far from it.

Just don't piss the Shaman off. We have limits, too.

.....Has It Gone Yet?...

Remind me never again to wipe my brow and sigh with relief after a Mercury Retrograde.
Just as you relax, it bites down, harder.

Warren and I have the best possible camouflage when we're out driving the Joburg roads: we're a patently middle-aged couple in an inexpensive and definitely not new car. Therefor we rarely get stopped in a roadblock and we're not prime targets for the JMPiggyD's random pullovers.

Until Saturday.
We were coming back from the Sunninghill Builder's Warehouse - having phoned ahead and made sure they had gas refill facilities - with a couple of 9kg canisters behind the front seats, and two lengths of conduit slanting over my shoulder from the backseat. So, I guess we looked like gun-runners. Or drug mules. Or land invaders. Or perhaps we just looked like a soft target, for the two joy-riding piggies on Witkoppen Road.

You know something? I grew up with the firm belief that the Policeman Is Your Friend. I was taught as a child that, if I was ever lost or in trouble, the first thing I should look for was the Bobby's friendly tall helmet. This may still be true - but likely as a landmark to walk away from as fast as possible.

South African Metro Police are the pits. Suffering,correctly,from feelings of inferiority, they never waste an opportunity to boost their...somethings...through arrogant and unnecessary interactions with the public. Suffice to say, the search of my handbag which turned up nothing and the search of the cubbyhole which turned up the Boline are now hilarious memories: but at the time, they were enough to raise all the hackles on my back. Ah well, the Police State of the World, now.

Easter Monday dawned bright and dry. Very dry.
You remember the four or five days we were without water a little while ago? Well, the very same pipe burst all over again on Monday.Or possibly Sunday night. Whenever Mercury was busy tracking across the same part of the heavens it was traversing the first time it happened.
OK, so we can deal with that, in a way. Bottled water from the stores would stretch. And they would have, too, if Joburg Water, in their infinite incompetence, hadn't turned the water on full bore on Tuesday - breaking not only one of my house pipes, resulting in a flooded house and soggy ceiling, but also sundry pipes in the suburb. A trip down along the roads of Bloubosrand turns into a pre-canoe venture, with domestic water sleeting down several of them, and the unforgettable sight of a hand-painted board advertising an itinerant plumber placed in the path of a hill-tumbling torrent issuing from yet another broken-piped house.

Mercury Retrograde in Pisces? Thanks for all the memories.

Ask A Shaman

Playing along with the Mercury retrograde at its peak, we have experienced a fallen-over database table, a fallen over data warehouse and a fallen over risk management system. And that's just at work.
At home, just ask Warren about the fallen-over horse racing comms systems. This morning, in a last-gasp mirroring, we had a suburb-wide power failure at 3 am.
We'll be finished with this nonsense by tomorrow mostly - just a few electronic ghosts popping up over the next week to remind us - and I can go forward once more. Hopefully.

But that's not what I wanted to mention this morning. This article tells us that, in the cities, Sparrows alter their dialect. In common with most humans, dogs and plants, they speak in a different tone and with subtly altered vocabulary to the way they communicate in the countryside.
Well, as the saying goes, duh.

I realise that many of us humans like to have stuff proven by scientific methods. It seems to be a part of our makeup, or maybe just a large part of our enculturation, that we need backup to our knowledge.
But, really. we could have saved the time and money we spent on that little project and put it towards, for instance, female education in Africa.
We could, in other words, wanting confirmation of this deeply-known fact, just have asked a Shaman.

Just Say No

Today is Just Say No To Stupidity day.

The things you can do today to help keep stupidity in its place are, inter alia:

Turn off that damned popular radio station on your drive to work. I don't know why they insist that they're brightening people's day when in fact they sound like brain dead morons.

Refuse to read even one Mass Media headline. Ghouls and attention whores, the lot of them - when they're not in the pockets of wealthy interests.

Stomp on that temptation to make small talk about the weather or the latest celebrity death. Well - OK, maybe the weather holds the promise of brain-stimulating discussion. If you can't potentially at least improve or challenge yourself or your audience by what you're about to say - don't open your mouth.

Try, at least some of the time, to really be here now.

Brought to you by the woman who turned down the car radio while yelling  shut the fuck up you brain dead morons just this morning.

Read Obligation

...by Scylla

"Unless you have to. Unless the spirits demand it. Unless you have no other option: Do not walk the Witch-path. You'll come out the other side mad, dead, or a shaman. And them ain't the best odds. "

Well said Scylla. Who is not, I might add, my dog of the same name.

But also:

You could come out all three. Mad, Dead and a Shaman.

Just saying.

Pic: Found somewhat inexplicably here

Listen

Have a great weekend, wherever you are.

Love your companions - animal,mineral, vegetable and spirit - and love your eternal spirit.

Breathe.Listen - can you hear it?

..And In The Running..

...for the stupidest quote by a physicist ever, Fermilab's Dmitri Denisov's memorable opinion on why the 'new particle' spike in the data of one collector was not found in the data of another:

"Protons and antiprotons don't know what detector they're colliding in."

Now, call me a reactionary, out-of-date ex-physicist if you like, but I'd have thought that the first and most obvious explanation would be precisely that - although re-couched as instrumental error.

For of course the particles 'see' a difference between the detectors. The detectors are in different physical locations, no? The experiment were run over different periods of time, not so? Possibly different local temperature, pizo-electrical fields...hell, even different colours of paint could affect the outcome.

But it seems today's particle physicists are so wedded to their ideal conditions of experimentation - conditons in which all possible effects due to temperature, pressure, gravitation, friction and so on are eliminated - that they are failing to live, as it were, in the real world.

I'm sure they've done their best to provide experimental conditons as alike as possible for the two detectors. But who knows whether the spirit, which blows where it listeth, is not the differentiating factor?