Billion Year Old Carbon

Thankful that the bus strike is over.

Perplexed that I've lived with an earworm of epic proportions for the entire strike.

Don't know what it means to have this constantly going through your head?

Welcome to my world.

"..But There's You and There's Me"

I love riding the Gaubus to work and back. The off-peak uncrowded, air-conditioned splendour affords me the opportunity to relax and listen to my own music while commuting through Joburg's northern suburbs. It's the perfect start and end to every work day - in the morning, swooshing through dark streets and hushed suburbs and in the afternoon, huffing along through the after-school traffic while seated far above it all. All this and an audio backdrop of Bowie, Supertramp, Gaia Consort and Resident AntiHero.

However, yesterday's reprise of Crime of the Century was - pretty rudely, I thought - interrupted by the acting out of some real-time cops and robbers a couple of meters from the golden flanks of the bus.

We were coming to a stop at the huge, complicated intersection of Main and William Nicol when the sharp reflection of flashing blue lights actually managed to catch my attention. By the roadside, mere feet away from the portside passengers on the bus, was slewed a really expensive-looking BMW - slewed right into the hard shoulder, that is, with a lighted SAPS vehicle right behind it. I'm assuming (and was told by another passenger, later) that there was an unmarked car cutting off the forward escape route, too.*

Even over my headphones - over Rick Davies declaring "Who are these men of lust, greed and glory? Rip off the mask and let's see"  I could hear the police loudhailer telling the occupants of the BMW to get out of the car and put their hands up, or they would be shot. And I'm not kidding, for from out of the SAPS van stalked a lean and fit young policewoman with what I can only call (in true peasant style) a "semi-automatic" gun cradled professionally and pointed (only temporarily, one readily assumed) at the ground.

My very first thought after removing my earphones was that I should perhaps be looking for something to duck behind. Not out of any gripping fear - it just seemed the sort of thing I should be doing in this fresh mini-playlet.

My fellow passengers, however, had all rushed to the left side of the bus, many waving smartphones at the spectacle of 5 men - 4 small, frightened-looking yellow-complected men and one much bigger dark-skinned Black man - getting out of the luxury vehicle, quite slowly and raising all their hands in the air.

We started babbling at one another, and a Sir Juice 200ml bottle rolled and bounced down the gangway as one young woman apparently lost control of her hands. The man who had been dozing in the well below me awoke and looked confused.The lady sitting behind me noted that the driver of the BMW looked guilty. I asked for someone to get the footage up on Twitter. Supertramp continued opining on corporate greed from my now-dangling earphones. Men stood around, meters from the Gaubus, with their hands in the air. A policewoman brandished an assault rifle in everyone's general direction....

And then the bus moved off, leaving a little tableau behind in the afternoon half-sun.

Image: Mises SA


*Addendum: I have since learned that the bus, after changing lanes to go around the SAPS van, then swung sharply inwards again, making an effective barrier to the supposed crooks. The bus is evidently in training as a superhero crime fighter.

Still Not Halloween

Well, no, and it's still not Halloween in a few days.

It's still Beltane, here in the Southern Hemisphere, but I've just about given up pointing that out to most people.

I've had to conclude that either South Africans of the middle-and-upward classes don't know what season it is, or they're unaware of the significance of the ages-old celebration of the start of Winter.
(Or they just don't care and are just doing shit because the Americans do, and I must say I find this parenthetical reason the most compelling of the three).

So, OK, a quick run-down of what Samhain, also known as Halloween, has meant to humans for thousands of years:

It's the start of the Winter season. The Celts only recognised 2 seasons, Summer and Winter. Summer started on the first week in May and we celebrate that as Beltane in the Northern Hemisphere. The start of Winter was the first week in November, midway between the Solstice and the Equinox.

It marks the beginning of the period of cold and dark, the time by which all harvests were to be safely gathered in and shelters made proof against the gathering loss of sunlight.

At this time, the ancestors and the little folk - those of other realms and dimensions - would take advantage of the liminality of the environment and draw nearer to humans. It thus became necessary for us to devise strategies to keep them from our doors, our stored crops and our livestock.

You can very easily see how the spooky motif and the tradition of Trick-Or-Treating became established out of these mass subconscious workings.

 The problem comes when you try to apply these venerable rituals to the start of Summer. It won't work, and you end up playing the absolute fool across all worlds, dimensions and realms.

Good luck with that, as ever, South Africa.

Pic: May Queen from the Beltane Fire Festival, 2012

The Deep Mid- Winter

A colleague at my (new! 3 months only!) place of work mentioned this week that there were only 12 weeks until Spring.

Being the new girl in the district, I hesitated to make a 'thing' of it - although I was tempted.

You see, it's one of my triggers : how we mark the seasons of the year. It irritates me that many people can't see how beautifully simple it is.

We have 52 weeks in a solar year, with 4 seasons. That's 13 weeks per season

When each season starts appears to vary from person to person. Here in the southern hemisphere, the Winter Solstice is celebrated on or around June 21st. Now here comes the nub of the whole "season" matter:

If you call this day "MidWinter", you have just fixed a point around which you will have to configure all the other seasons.

I have no idea what's so hard to understand about "mid" and "Winter" coming together in one word. It's the mid-point of Winter, right? So in another 6 and a half weeks it will be the end of Winter, right? That's around the first week in August, and I get to call it Imbolc.

Unfortunately for me, most Seffricans believe that Spring starts either at the beginning of September, or else on the Vernal Equinox, around 21st September.

But how can that be? Unless you are counting Winter as starting either at the beginning of June or at the Solstice...which we've agreed to keep calling Mid-Winter, OK?

"Mid" does not mean "start". It means the bloody middle, people.

So, figuring from this fairly rock solid premise (and assuming 4 seasons of roughly equal length, unlike the Celts, who really only had Summer and Winter), the Vernal Equinox would be the middle of Spring, the Summer Solstice the middle of Summer (or MidSummer!) and the Autumnal Equinox on around March 21st would be the mid-point of Autumn.

That leaves 4 points as ending/starting days for each of the seasons. And as luck would have it, many Pagans already celebrate on these days - Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnassad and Samhain. The start of each season.

So pardon me while I revere the very depth of Winter - when the apparent Sun reaches its lowest point in the heavens as seen from Earth - as MidWinter. That's in just one week from today.

And Imbolc, the start of Spring, a scant 6.5 weeks later, in the first week of August.

Makes frighteningly proper sense to me.

More sense-making goodiness here.

Freedom Day

"I do not deny that I planned sabotage.
I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence.
I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites"
Nelson Mandela
Pic: from Pagan Freedom Day 2004 in Joburg.

Not Recommended

Having been practically brought up on the works of Robert A. Heinlein - which probably explains a lot of my fucked-up earlier life when you think about it - I was not averse to catching a showing of Starship Troopers on the telly last night.

I remember that the original novel was decidedly not one of my favourite Heinleins - the jingoism is strong with this one - but have hopes that the film will put a different slant on it.

Aaargh. Aaargh. Aaargh. My eyes. My poor bloody eyes.

Although my eyes were probably the least bloody bits of flesh in the arena last night. This is a gory movie.
But apart from that, I found the juxtaposition of purposely laughable fascist clips from the future media and the deadpan fascist dialogue from the actors just a bit much.

It's very likely that I am a naive film watcher. I found the whole spectacle so disturbing - or rather, my body found it so disturbing, for my brain insisted upon watching to the end - that my legs were weak and shaky by the time I eventually went to bed.

Not recommended for children,lovers of Heinlein or anyone with a drier sense of humour than the average American.

Pic: Found on this site

RDH 844 GP

Oh yeah, almost forgot.

Grosvenor Road, Friday 12th April. 4 pm-ish. Overtaking into the face of oncoming trucks.

Bloody half wit then got stuck in front of us for the entire length of Grosvenor/Douglas.

Le Bois Sacre

A friend of mine is celebrating six years of sobriety tomorrow.

I have no idea if she attends AA meetings, but for myself - and I suspect for many an addict -they just never did work sufficiently to put me in that place where I could achieve consistent freedom from alcohol.

Today I'm looking back down 14 years of continuous, wonderful, almost unbelievable lack of dependence on either alcohol or tranquilisers. I still sometimes dream of how it was, and I wake up terrified. Lest I forget.

I was quite surprised this week to find myself watching an episode of Law & Order - Special Victims Unit. Surprised to be watching the gods-damned telly, for sure (especially a series dedicated to murder porn in which the victims are nearly always women), but more surprised to find that the episode contained a strong endorsement for Ibogaine as a substance-abuse treatment.

Iboga - used by the Bwiti and NeoBwiti people of West Africa for ages as an initiatory drug - is found chiefly in the roots of 3 plants, 2 of which(Tabernanthe Iboga and Voacanga Africana) are found only in Africa, while the third (Tabernaemontana) flourishes as far afield as Australia.

It is quite usual for a heroin addict to break her dependency on opiates after a single-dose treatment of Ibogaine; something almost unheard of in drug rehabilitation. No scary and life-threatening withdrawals either.

This plant ally seems to work by kicking the addict gently out of her well-worn groove of substance abuse. It confers a heightened ability for introverted insight, the process sounding a little like a near death experience. Or a Shamanic Dismemberment, which I understand is its usual application in Africa.

So, all the nations of the world have picked up on this wonderful medicine and are using it to break the chains of heroin dependence throughout their lands, no?

No, of course not. In the US, Australia,Sweden,Denmark, Poland, Belgium, France and Switzerland it is a schedule I drug, tightly controlled, and even growing the plants turns one into a criminal automatically. Notice that those countries are among those with the highest level of tragedy concerning Heroin abuse.

I see that we apparently boast an Iboga treatment centre in the Western Cape in this country, though. I wonder if it's still a going concern? That would be something  - for all our violence and extreme forms of patriarchal woman abuse - of which we could be very proud.

Pic: le bois sacre, or Tabernanthe Iboga, courtesy of the vaults at Erowid

Fish And Water

It's International Women's Day and here in South Africa, a woman is killed by her intimate partner every 8 hours. 

It's International Women's Day, and female scientists are still earning considerably less than their male peers.

It's International Women's Day, and women are being killed as "Witches" in higher numbers than ever before. Never mind the "Burning Times". We have a real, present holocaust on our hands here.

The reasons? Doubtless they are many, or could be presented as many by people far more qualified than I in social science matters. But, for my own curiosity, I have a one-word catchall answer to the why of it: the Patriarchy. You're stewing in it, and have been for thousands of years, so that you often don't see it for what it is.

The patriarchy: that ignoble structure which has its roots deep in the big monotheistic religions of today, as well as in agriculture, civilization and city-building, and of course the Wetiko disease.

The patriarchy: whose reign degrades and hurts men as well as simply killing women.

It's not going away any time soon. Not so long as most of us are as unaware of it as a fish is of water.

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.

Indelible Mark

There's a new comet in town.

Comet C/2011 L4, popularly known as Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, the observation array attached to the University of Hawaii - and shame on you, Albany Herald, for calling it the Institute for Astrology), is presently appearing in the skies of the Southern Hemisphere.

An Argentinian observer has estimated its brightness at magnitude 2.8, which is considerably better than the down-graded estimates were predicting - although still worse than some of the media fanfare.

For this one - and it's a non-periodic comet, so this is a once-in-eternity visit - those of us in the Southern Hemisphere get a chance to see it before our Northern Hemisphere friends. Here's a great Java applet which shows that the comet crosses from South of the plane of the Ecliptic to North of it in about 10 days' time. So UK and US comet watchers be prepared!

I stepped out into my front garden a half hour ago (best viewing time is roughly 30 minutes after sunset) quite forgetting the welcome rain and thunderstorms we've been experiencing in Gauteng these past 2 days. Horizon-to-horizon clouds prevented me seeing anything but bats flitting across the dome of the sky. Sigh. 

Well, this looks like it might be an interesting sight, at least. I am transported back to my late teens, working with Jack Bennett and Johannes Wolterbeek-Muller, scanning across the dark skies low on the horizon, sweeping for comets old and new. What has changed in me? Much, but the love of the skies seems to be an indelible mark in my soul, and I fear I shall never totally eradicate it.

It Can Not Be Otherwise

A 7 hour planned electricity outage this morning caught us by surprise.

When I say planned, of course, I mean planned by City Power and not communicated to the end users.

So, from 1 in the morning - as Warren was defragging his desktop - until almost precisely 8 am, we had no electric power in the quiet suburb of Bloubosrand.

We had somewhere to go this morning, too, and showers were sketchy. Apologies to anyone who chanced to encounter us out and about.

It was to Woolworths we headed - after stopping at the bank to draw an unusually large sum of money - to pay our Woolies account up in total and close the bothersome account. Woolies weren't always a pain in the arse, either. There was a time when their quality was good and their financial management above reproach. No more, alas. After completely failing to send me statements which actually arrived in my postbox for several months, and after sms-ing me incorrect information on my payment amounts, and after displaying a total lack of regard to South Africa's clothing manufacturers(opting for the glittering, cheap Chinese products which have a lifetime shorter than a disintegrating meteor)...after adding all this up, I decided I didn't care to do business with them anymore.

I've been mulling over the fact recently that good old homo sapiens is getting stupider by the year. Not just according to this entitled, privileged,university-educated middle aged woman, but also according to several sources with much less biased points of view.

It seems that one of the problems may be the environment we've created for ourselves. An environment poisoned by pesticides, replete with high fructose corn syrup, petroleum products toxic to the brain, and a culture where the possession of those afore-mentioned cheap, glittering tawdries is a major marker of worth.

Well, sigh. We surely never set up this earth-plane to be a cake walk, did we?

 My middle-aged Pit Bull, Scylla, displaying her hunting prowess earlier today by catching and then consuming a baby Lourie - something she doesn't do too often, especially the eating part - has reminded me that actually, this plane was never supposed to be a dimension of sweetness-and-light. We eat each other. And kill each other for no apparent reason - worse. And heap such pain and sorrow upon each other all the time, that I wonder why any of us think that peaceful non-harm is a natural state of being.

I have carefully avoided saying that this plane is devoid of Love. For that is not the case.
All sorrows, all he pain, all the seeming unnecessary hurt is all there as part of our plan.
And Love informs that plan, in every shade and shape of its coming-into-being.

It can not, I submit, be otherwise.

The Grey Lourie, mourning loudly even now for its massacred offspring, reminds me of this.

Pic: courtesy Wilkinson's World

Awaken In The Dream

Having taken a firm resolve to let the professionals fix our Legendary Car , Warren and I took it down to Safety Brake and Clutch this morning for the fitting of a new master brake cylinder.

We hiked up to the Sandwich Baron and bought a breakfast of cheese and bacon on French rolls, then walked back down to where we had left the car.

The wait was over four hours long - but damn, those people did the job properly!

While waiting I parked myself on a stone storm drain cover under a tree whose species I have yet to pin down - despite it being a pretty common planting in the new North of Joburg - and read chapters out of Tara Sanchez' The Temple of Hekate off my phone. When my eyes tired, I gazed at the people in the streets below me; coming and going and lounging around, people on foot and people behind the wheels of tons of fast-moving metal; people going to work and people hoping to find work. Human people being, in short, human people on a warm and windy Monday morning in Joburg.

I visually followed a couple of clean, neat guys who may - I thought at first - have been looking for work in this area of light industrial businesses. One was dressed in freshly laundered blue overalls, the other looked more like a pirate in his jailing jeans and bandanna. They stopped to hail a passing stranger, which was what drew my attention to them - but what kept my attention on them was my growing suspicion that they were fairly slick criminals casing various joints. I'm not sure even now why I thought this. But they must have felt my gimlet gaze upon them at some stage, for they turned around several times and looked around for the source of their discomfort.

Next I decided to play with the owner of a humongous Hummer vehicle parked in the Absa Bank lot. I waited, wondering what someone who would drive such a gas-guzzling, earth-destroying monster would look like. When he walked out of the bank and flashed his remote unlock, I saw a young-ish man in long shorts and baggy T shirt, his fish white arms and legs proclaiming him to be some kind of software programmer - just like me. I hated him on sight, of course. What did he need that much metal to be driving around in? Where was his consciousness that he apparently needed so many tons of metal alloy and large amounts of petroleum to take him to his local bank? What a tosser.

At more or less that moment, another customer of the brake centre ambled over to what I was rapidly considering to be my tree and sat down upon the stone drain cover. Much too close, I felt - but then I tend to wield a personal space about the size of a European country. I sidled away down the embankment, and then got very irritated when I had to climb past him to get to Warren when the car was ready.

I remember this flood of indignation, irritation and self righteousness. I remember thinking very clearly that all these monkeys were nothing like me. That I was so much better than them that I was practically another species, and that the reason I disliked them so much was that they were demonstrably not like me.

Uh-oh. Wetiko Disease attack.

When we start drawing out the perceived evil in everyone around us - everyone but ourselves, of course - then we are surely caught fast in the Wetiko Disease.

Those hateful ways of those people I'd just been other-ing were my own shadow, evoked and visible and appalling. It took a couple of hours before I could admit that truth to myself.

A couple of hours and a listen to Paul Levy on Red Ice Radio , talking about his new work, Dispelling Wetiko. 

Well, well, well. And are we finally ready to admit that we have a disease of insanity?

Yourself especially, Terri , as you are no different from any of those other humans out there.

This is very important for us all to remember. We are the only people to be actively crafting our suicide, and taking the rest of the living world with us. When Wetiko Disease has us pinned, we certainly do not see it, do not acknowledge it. And this is the pernicious nature of this sickness - we'll be feeling that Everything Is OK as we slide down into extinction, despite what the trees and the birds and our own domestic animal companions have been trying to tell us for the last 6000 years.

Please. Can we not awaken in the dream?

The Machine In Action

I sometimes wonder why I even open up the page at News 24.
The standard of original journalism - when it occurs at all - is low, sometimes only being beaten in the godsawful stakes by the comments section.

But seriously, people - what have we come to?
Over 34000 applicants for 90 trainee posts at the Traffic Department.

Of those, over 15000 got through to the next qualifying round - where 6 died of heat and exhaustion and one committed suicide following a physical fitness test.

I speak from experience when I say that being penniless, homeless, and hungry messes with your mind all right.

When you're in such a place, the need for survival is the over riding one. And you don’t really stop to think how you could be doing anything differently - you just play by the rules embedded in the culture.

Get a job. Earn some money. Buy the food/shelter/happiness you are being denied.

But there's something very, very screwed up with that when thousands apply for the most menial of jobs - and some of them die trying for that golden ring, which in the end doesn't even deliver on its nebulous promise.

There's a whole lot wrong when we don't even question how this system came to be the life-destroying, soul-shredding monster that it is.

The machinery of Wetiko culture, stomping, chewing up and spitting out the species which brought it into existence.

Colonised Mind

Dear Mr. President. Dear, dear dear Mr. President.

I don't often raise the energy to comment on the stuff which comes out of Jacob Zuma's mouth, anymore. Or I'd be here all day. But this latest piece of nonsense serves to highlight exactly where the president of South Africa's mind is sitting. And it's not a pretty place.

So, people who love dogs more than people have a lack of humanity, do they?

It seems to me that that was a giveaway statement all on its own. That there should be a hierarchy of love, that we can choose to love one species more than another. In my experience, that is not where people who are compassionate to non-human animals are coming from. They love fellow non-human creatures in the same way they love human creatures. If you love your canine companions, and spend time and money on them, does that mean that you don't love other humans? As if there were some limit on the amount we can love each other.

As if love for each other, for life, is a quantifiable commodity.

As if there were some scale of worthiness-to-be-loved, with humans on the top, naturally.

As if the local canine family members waited with loaded guns and malice a-thought to rob and brutalise others for their property.

Oh yes, I know how Zuma thinks of dogs - as property. It's very close to the way he thinks about women, actually.

This raising of humans above other creatures, this denigration of non-human life as less worthy of love, this commodifying of life, this is not Ubuntu.

Tell me: who truly has the colonised mind?

Pic: Found at Drinkalot.com

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.

Blame Greed, Not Nature

One dead, 19 others injured at Linkin Park concert in Cape Town.

And so many people blaming "Mother Nature" for the tragedy.

Well, let's take a look. What was Lucozade - a face of Big Pharma GlaxoSmithKline, doing at the concert in the first place?

Linkin Park is a successful purveyor of popular music, and as such has been backed by the corporate music industry until the general populace is just about forced to like it. Me, I think their music is low-level garbage - but what do I know? - my musical tastes are not informed or coerced by huge media corporations.

So Lucozade leapt at the chance to increase their sales  improve their media coverage, to which end they had hired dozens of attractive temporary corporate shills salespeople and erected an enormous billboard upheld by (unanchored, an eyewitness testifies) pillars bearing their logo.

When, as is not uncommon in Cape Town, the winds reached gale force and people struggled to keep upright while walking, this whole structural edifice of low-level communication...fell over. Injuring 20 of the salespeople and killing one of them.

Big business wanting to increase their visibility by being seen at the cool gigs is not, in my anarchical outlook, forgivable at all. What it boils down to is greed. Which is what powers much of our culture. From popular music bands which I wouldn't listen to if you tied me down with a pair of earphones, to lifestyle consumables like the rabidly unhealthy "energy drinks" which wreck livers while allowing us to pretend that we're really cool, too, the whole system is run and maintained by corporate greed. Little men chasing the illusion of happiness through wealth and, they think, power.

It's all so damned transparent that it makes me howl with laughter. When I'm not weeping for their victims - every one of us - that is.

Beltane Blessings

"Blessed be thy feet, that have brought thee in these ways.

Blessed be thy knees, that shall kneel at the sacred altar.

Blessed be thy womb, without which we would not be.

Blessed be thy breasts, formed in beauty.

Blessed be thy lips, that shall utter the Sacred Names."

..and the mercury hit 35 degrees Celsius today, Beltane in the Southern Hemisphere.

There is still, however, chocolate cake for tea.

Cognitive Dissonance

As we approach the astronomical midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice (on 7th November this year), we see the signs of Life burgeoning all around us.
Here, South of the Equator, the trees are almost all fully-leafed.
The thunderstorms of the Summer are in full swing on the Highveld.
In my garden, roses are scrabbling at the walls and cascading over the wooden patio frame - white, red, orange and purple - glorious in their profusion and heavenly in their scent.
Honeysuckle has regrown from being viciously cut back last Winter and is now blooming, too, on the North of the ritual space outdoors.
Grass has to be cut once a week, so fast its growth is now.

Everything sings, hollers and shouts of Life: growing, blossoming, increasing. Life yelling unto Life "I'm here!" under a bright, hot, Southern African sun.

Listen to the local energies. They are speaking to you of the upswing of the pendulum, the cresting of the seasonal sine wave. The Summer coming in all its glory.

So tell me - among all this Life, all this growth, all this increase - why in the nether hells would you celebrate the Day of the Dead?

Merry, lusty Beltane everybody South of the Equator.
And Blessed Samahin to you Northern lot!


Pic: Spheres of Light

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