Rinka's Random Reading

Cape Town 2

2007-03-16T10:40:00.000+02:00

Cape Town

2007-03-14T06:16:00.000+02:00

a rather melodramatic post more for myself than anybody else

2007-03-08T01:36:00.000+02:00

Riding the taxi to work today I had an amazing feeling of peace and calmness, like things will work out, my destiny is still in the making, life goes on. We rode past the newly opened vida, another film shoot on the unfinished highway. I even got a compliment about my teaching today. So I've hit some stumbling blocks along the way and I need to figure things out and stop quitting all my jobs but I still believe there is a life here that I'm living and that is worth fighting for.

update

2007-02-13T04:03:00.000+02:00

So I've got drafts waiting about movies I saw, books I read, places I went etc which is what this blog is all about actually. But for now, here is a random update. M, you're my hero. Here's why. I've been exploring internet cafe's around Cape Town, ok, maybe not that many but still. The waterfront internet cafe charges about R22 for 30 minutes or something like that, I didn't even dare to go there. Gardens Centre internet cafe is really nice, with the cricket on in the background, new computers, a fast connection but also charges about 50c for a minute. On Friday I had to apply myself and force myself to make good use of my time on the net so I went there. R30 for an hour. sho. A few weeks ago I went to an internet cafe just outside Cape Town station, very close to the Adderley street flower sellers. R5 for half and hour. Now that sounds better you say. But all the computers were old, still worked on windows 1982 or something like that and you had to pay extra to use a flash disk, how bizarre. And the woman was very unfriendly. Today then, I went to the internet cafe inside the station. Promising at first, friendly service (maybe too friendly), surrounded by Nigerian video films one could buy or rent that 3 years ago was a huge mission to find for me in Stellenbosch, eventually having to use family contacts and an undercover deal in Bangkok. The computers looked newish, email was no problem but it took ages to go to any other sites and I kept opening Mike Abalo's CV by mistake. So I took M's advice and went to the internet cafe close to where I get the taxi, opposite the trueworts headquarters and what a joy. Run by Asians, I shouldnt be surprised. Nothing showy mind you and the muzak in the background is a bit irritating but R5 for an HOUR! and brilliant connection.

So there, all that to tell you that I have a telephone interview on Thursday with a school in Istanbul. Is that where my destiny is heading? We'll see. Watch this space.

images

2007-01-24T04:23:00.000+02:00

I apologize for the lack of images on my blog these days. Here are some for you to imagine:

3 women in front of me in the taxi, facing me, are eating KFC R1, 50 ice creams

an old women selling Barbie backpacks and bags sits under the bridge with the town hall and table mountain in the background

I pass a scale on the sidewalk with a handwritten sign that says 50c.

Haikus

2007-01-24T04:14:00.000+02:00

Here are some haikus from my class (they are pre-intermediate if that means anything to you).
They chose a topic to write about and I didn't tell them about the syllables.

The fire is hot
My heart is also hot
I fall in love with her
(fire)

The sky is dark
the forest is quiet
my mind becomes lonely
(night)

Spring brings new life
the colours of the flowers are very different
the plants grow
(spring)

what is you colour?
blue, black, grey or white
just the weather decides
(sky)

drops fall down
a man feels sad and lonely
the rainbow appears
(rain)

about a million birds are flying
they make me innocent
please dont melt, birds
(snow)

The class and other observers voted nr 1 the best one.

Hello earth

2007-01-24T03:54:00.000+02:00

What do you call a person who still talks even though the person listening is not interested in what they have to say any more ...

a teacher

(ok, this joke works better when it is being read aloud in an English school staff room.)

I promised quite a few people that I would update my blog so here you go. Access to internet has been a bit of a struggle which may account for my laziness. For those who dont know, I quit my job at the NGO and am now teaching English to tourists. I dont want to do this in Cape Town for long but things like babies and weddings (none of them mine) and my laziness (have I mentioned my laziness?) will still keep me here for a while.

Last night I went with a few people up Lion's head to see the comet. I had my doubts about going but it was fantastic. I was so glad I got a chance to see it, we decided it looked like a hole in a Truman sky. We also saw a fire in Camps Bay. (Thanks for the photo Roelof)

I have a conversation class two afternoons a week with a swiss mountain guide (literally Mr perfect - friendly, sense of humour, laidback, good-looking, perfect life - his other teacher and i think there is something wrong with being so perfect) and an older Japanese couple (maybe in their 60s). They get on so well together that I just sit back in that class and the conversation flows for about 2 hours. Amazing. The other day I brought in a world map for the couple to show us where in the world they've been because they've been almost everywhere. Well, this Friday they are going up Lion's Head together. My advice was dont take the chains, but I think they will. The Japanese couple have climbed Mont Blanc after all.

Random Facts

2006-12-14T11:11:00.000+02:00

A friend sent me this link, brought to you by BBC news

100 things we didn't know this time last year

I'm not sure how long it'll stay up but here are some of them.

3. While it's an offence to drop litter on the pavement, it's not an offence to throw it over someone's garden wall.

7. Baboons can tell the difference between English and French. Zoo keepers at Port Lympne wild animal park in Kent are having to learn French to communicate with the baboons which had been transferred from Paris zoo.

14. It's possible for a human to blow up balloons via the ear. A 55-year-old factory worker from China reportedly discovered 20 years ago that air leaked from his ears, and he can now inflate balloons and blow out candles.

15. Lionesses like their males to be deep brunettes.

20. The Queen has never been on a computer, she told Bill Gates as she awarded him an honorary knighthood.

22. The length of a man's fingers can reveal how physically aggressive he is, scientists say.

29. When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.

37. Cyclist Lance Armstrong's heart is almost a third larger than the average man's.

58. The average guest at a Buckingham Palace garden party scoffs 14 cakes, sandwiches, scones and ice-cream, according to royal accounts.

68. The Very Hungry Caterpillar has sold one copy every minute since its 1969 publication.

73. One in six children think that broccoli is a baby tree.

99. The Japanese word "chokuegambo" describes the wish that there were more designer-brand shops on a given street.

My weekend

2006-12-11T03:17:00.000+02:00

Watched in cinema:
The Holiday
Happy Feet

Read:
In the skin of a lion by Michael Ondaatje

Best tv moments:
How I met your mother
The West Wing
(both Etv Sunday)

Worst tv moment
Judge Dredd (etv Friday)

Exercise:
walking from my flat to labia on kloof
10 laps in the swimming pool

Listened to:
3 tapes of RSG news broadcasts I had to monitor for work.

The Emperor of Scent

2006-12-08T08:26:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago I read The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr, non-fiction hardcover I borrowed from a friend.

Not at all what I expected but more interesting for that. I expected story of scientist and how he got the Nobel prize, instead story of scientist and how no other scientists wanted to listen to him. About man called Luca Turin, biologist, chemist, physicist, with amazing sense of smell. He came up with theory on how we recognise smells but no-one wanted to let him in. He also wrote a perfume guide or two. I love the way these people describe smells.

“Most laypeople,” says Luca Turin, “subscribe devoutly to this lovely little fiction that science is a perfect intellectual market.” And indeed, most of us do. We want to believe that science is dispassionate, objective, and (for those who dont have use for a theological god), omniscient. We want to believe that every idea that merits attention is given it. That the good ideas are kept, the bad ones discarded, the industrious rise, the lazy sink, and that hard work and honest data are rewarded.
This isnt real. Perhaps unfortunately, perhaps not. Scientists are human. Vested interests beat out new ideas. Egos smother creativity. Personalities clash. Corruption is as common as the survival instinct.

“I was so ignorant,” Turin would say later. “I had the confidence of the ignorant, confidence in myself and my abilities and, most of all, in Things Working Out. In good people recognising good ideas and working together toward the Truth.” He paused. “That is truly something only the young could believe. You think everything's going to be just fine.”

And these places all have the same smell, a fruit salad on a color TV with the color turned up way too high.

Barkeeps at a molecular cocktail bar, the lab techs glance over the order, set a little bottle on a scale, which they then reset to zero, and start adding small amounts of chemicals. They have rotating trays. Press a button, and a thousand perfume materials appear at their fingertips, thousands of fascinating molecules to smell. They mix their frangrant molecular cocktails – order up! - and send them upstairs to be smelled.

It is the perfumers who transform the confidential briefs from the religious visions and aesthetic hallucinations at the houses of Dior and Calvin Klein and Givenchy – obsessions and poisons and envies and joys; “We want the smell of old melting candles in ballrooms of Italian marble during a Chinese winter,” “Give us the fragrance surrendered by a young blue flower crushed under the heated, ivory back of a woman with chocolate eyes,” “We must have the scent lightning makes the instant it strikes a platinum rose.” The perfumers turn these visions into structures of neutrons and protons and electrons welded together that make our eyes suddenly open, make us sit up, turn and inhale, molecules that blossom and flame, molecules that spin stories.

Tom Ford was dreaming of a perfume that smelled like fresh cherry wood licked by a green-hot oxygen fire in a Balinese temple, Marc Jacobs absolutely demanding a blossoming daffodil floating on an ocean of smoky Siberian snows – would these molecules work?

The Good Women

2006-11-30T03:51:00.000+02:00

My weekend reading was The Good Women of China - Hidden Voices by Xinran. She is a Chinese journalist, now living in England, who had a radio programme called "words on the night breeze" where she invited women to call in and talk about themselves. Most women wrote letters or left their stories on a cassette which recorded calls. Anyone who knows their history or who has read Wild Swans will know what the women (and men) in China endured. In this book Xinran tells the stories of women and their experiences (mostly bad), women challenged by the cultural revolution, an earthquake, or simply by their family and their domestic situations.

The saddest story was "The Girl who kept a fly as a pet". She was abused by her father, made herself sick to go to hospital so that she could get away from home and felt the soft touch of a fly on her skin was a loving caress.

The book sounds bleak and depressing and while it is, it shows the potential of journalism and giving people a chance to tell their story and just to unload. It makes the book much more grabbing and enjoyable to me than The Bookseller of Kabul which just left me depressed and with the feeling that I'll never want to be a journalist. But maybe it's me that have changed.

The last chapter is about the women of Shouting Hill, eye-opening, women in very rural area/desert in Northern China who has no clue of what is happening in the "real" world. Gender activists would have a field day there but the women there were the happiest of all the people Xinran met, simply because they didn't know better. That was their whole world.

Hermux Tantamoq and Linka Perflinger

2006-11-29T03:58:00.000+02:00

Doesn't this sound like a fun book? Would love to read it. Found it when I googled my name (we all do it, don't we??).

Time Stops for No Mouse: A Hermux Tantamoq Adventure (Paperback)
by Michael Hoeye

link

It's impossible not to like Hermux Tantamoq, the watchmaking mouse. He relaxes in a flannel shirt printed with pictures of cheeses from around the world, he has a caged pet ladybug named Terfle, he writes endearing thank-you letters to the universe each night, and he has a big heart--a heart that aches for the fearless aviatrix Ms. Linka Perflinger, who unexpectedly visits his shop requesting an emergency rush repair of her wristwatch. Little does he know that this brief rendezvous with the jaunty adventuress will change his life forever. When a week goes by without word from her, he doesn't know whether to be worried or angry. He drafts a slightly unpleasant, then desperate, then not-too-sweet, not-too-sour letter to her and awaits her response. Nothing. Even nasty encounters with his neighbor (the horribly garish and affected cosmetics tycoon Tucka Mertslin) and pleasant interludes with his artist friend Mirrin don't distract him from his new heart-quickening obsession.

His worst fears start to cement when a yellow-eyed, thin-lipped, sharp-tongued rat comes to his shop and says with a dreadful smile, "I've come for Linka Perflinger's watch." Hermux isn't about to fork over his beloved's watch without a claim check, and ends up following the rat... all the way to Linka's house! And, what's this? Is she being kidnapped? The plot thickens as Hermux boldly enters her apartment (what has gotten into him?) and discovers a mysterious letter from Teulabonari and an overturned spicy-smelling plant. As he says to his ladybug that night, "This is the beginning of a new career for me. Either as a detective or a jailbird. Only time will tell. If it turns out to be the latter I will be asking you for hints on decorating my cage." Soon he begins to make a connection with these strange clues and the cosmetics mogul Tucka, who pulls him into her scheme to create eternal youth in a bottle (to be taken internally).

Suffice it to say that gentle Hermux gets in way over his head with his detective work and proceeds to have fur-raising encounters involving spies, thieves, killers, betrayal, the Fountain of Youth, snakes, calliopes, and dramatic rescue attempts. Throughout it all, however, Hermux continues to thank the world at large: "Thank you for corner grocers. For sandwiches and honey fizz. For scary news and narrow escapes and trolleys and shopping bags. Thank you for loyal pets and bold adventurers (and adventuresses)." Readers will be disarmed by Hermux's earnest, inquisitive nature and zeal for life--and thoroughly engaged by the suspenseful action adventure. Highly recommended! (Ages 10 to adult) --Karin Snelson

familiar faces

2006-11-29T03:51:00.000+02:00

When I lived in Japan I shared a house with loads of other foreigners. One evening a program came up on BBC which I encouraged/forced everyone to watch because it was about Cape Town. I think it was called 6 degrees of separation or something like that, a person goes to a city and meets somebody, then meets somebody different that that person knows and so on and so on until they've met 6 people from quite different backgrounds and areas. Anyway, so they had a white Sangoma (traditional health - body/soul - specialist) on which was quite funny for me.

This morning as I was walking from my flat towers to get the taxi, I saw him walking into my complex with his gear. So does he live there or was he on his way to perform his services or was he just visiting a friend?

German faces

2006-11-24T11:34:00.000+02:00

Otto Dix: Lady with Mink and Veil 1920

"Some of these faces are entirely new, and not only because the show consists mostly of German loans. If you think you have never seen Dix’s ferocious “Lady With Mink and Veil” before, even in reproduction, you may be right. It was discovered only in 1993, in the estate of its German owner. A predecessor of Picasso’s contorted renderings of Dora Maar, the image may depict one of the many war widows who turned to prostitution to keep afloat.

Confirming Dix’s eye for detail, she wears a droopy slip whose homey blue trim suggests the country, not the city, along with a green hat and a ragged fur. Her teeth are broken, and her breasts sag from her bony sternum. Her heavily rouged face, seen through a bright blue veil, seems to grow larger from left to right, like a seamless form of Dada montage. It is woozy, as if we see her through the eyes of a drunken customer. Dix, who trained in decorative art before turning to painting, made the veil by dipping a real one in paint and using it as a stencil."

Max Beckmann: The Old Actress 1926

Karl Hubbuch: The Swimmer of Cologne 1926-1928

From: Amid Shadows of War, a Cultural Decadence

Science vs. Religion

2006-11-21T08:17:00.000+02:00

From A Free-for-All on Science and Religion by George Johnson

I just wanted to quote a few lines and then things went out of control because I wanted to give a balanced view of the article. I think the scientists are getting a bit extreme here. Hello closedmindedness. They aren't supposed to be like that! Ha ha.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”
...

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.
“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”
Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

Last Monday's clouds

2006-11-21T03:18:00.000+02:00

There was a strange feeling to the air...

Cinema Je t'aime

2006-11-20T02:59:00.000+02:00

So the Cape Town World Cinema festival is on at the moment and I'm loving it. To be honest though, I am only watching three movies. I have two down, 1 to go. Tomorrow night I'm watching Volver, the new Pedro Almodavar movie, and I cant wait!

Thursday late afternoon after a delicious cafe gelado at the vida e on Kloop I sat down at Labia on Orange for

Bamako

In this fresh, lively and entertaining approach to Africa's inherited problems, beautiful young singer Mele (Aissa Maiga) and her husband Chaka (Tiecoura Traore) are divorcing. Accompanying their emotional battle in the dusty courtyard of their home in Bamako, Mali, is a bizarre court session where the World Bank and IMF are being sued by the countries of Africa. As eloquent lawyers, judges and witnesses gather to discuss the multiple injustices faced by Africa's populations, daily life carries on around the court: a couple is married and women dye fabrics. Light relief comes in a mock-Western shoot-out in Timbuktu with filmmaking gun-slingers Danny Glover and Elia Suleiman.With subtle mastery, Abderrahmane Sissako weaves an entertaining tale that details life in contemporary Africa while managing to explore how Africans feel about their position in an increasingly globalised world.

Having watched quite a few African films in my life, or more than other people I know, I thought I'll see a contemporary one. Pace is still very much the same, cinematography beautiful and everything subtle as always. There were mostly foreigners in the audience.

Then I had half an hour break to meet up with a friend, to go buy sandwiches at Kuai (spelling?) around the corner and come back to get a good seat for

Paris Je T'aime

The cinema was packed, every single seat taken. And it was worth it. I love sitting alone in an old cinema, with just a few others scattered around, where I can put my feet up on the seat in front of me and throw everything I carry around with me on the seats around me. But sometimes the atmosphere of a packed cinema is electric and fun and just adds heaps to my experience of the film. Enough about that, the movie

In 1964, six of France's most famous directors collaborated on a film about Paris. The result was Paris vu par. Since then, much about Paris has changed. In the spirit of the original project, twenty-one directing teams were each given five minutes to make a love story. Their collaboration presents a remarkable film that reflects the cosmopolitan nature of Paris, reflected through the perception of each creator's own background and nationality.Using a fleet of actors as superb as the directors, this film is as visually rich as the multi-layered, multicultural modern city it represents. This love letter to Paris trawls through the neighborhoods and lively characters of Paris, portraying love veiled, revealed, imitated, sucked dry, reinvented and awakened.

I remember one reviewer said it was a good movie for those with ADD. I really enjoyed the movie and I dont even have ADD. Some stories I liked more than others, of course and I have 6 favourites. Respect to these filmmakers and actors. And in the piece above, where it says "portraying love... sucked dry" - that is meant literally.

One of my favourites, by Joel and Ethan Coen features Steve Buschemi in the Paris underground - how can you go wrong?

Another day

2006-11-17T02:55:00.000+02:00

Another day, another protest march down Adderley street to parliament. Today’s was fun though. It had a police marching band (with a bergie doing his moves alongside until a policeman pushed him away), it had posters asking for things like “transport”, “housing”, “equal employment”, posters with the slogan “nothing about us without us”. It was lead by kids in wheelchairs. It was the disabled community.

Kiwi

2006-11-14T16:05:00.000+02:00

Follow this link and watch the animation. It will make you laugh, it will make you cry...

http://drawn.ca/2006/11/13/kiwi/

For those wonderful few reading this blog, I'll be a bit bad at posting this week. I need a PA. Anyone interested in the job? pay is crap but job satisfaction will be high.

Forgive and forget

2006-11-08T15:19:00.000+02:00

I have two friends who are big Ian McEwan fans and having never read one of his books I gave Atonement a try. I'm sorry to say but I was a bit disappointed. I struggled through the first part, only able to read one chapter at a time even though it was written beautifully. It went faster towards the end but the book had no staying power for me.

I wrote the above yesterday. Last night I was looking for quotes, passages I enjoyed (I remembered the chapter numbers and searched in them). Suddenly I really enjoyed reading parts again. I got caught up in the book and reread favourite scenes. So, in the end, I think my opinion of the book will change if I read it again. But I wont. There are too many other books and writers out there that I still need to give a try.

"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back....

But of course, it had all been her - by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?...

She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her significance. "

"A Fauvist dedicated to improbable colour might have imagined a landscape this way, especially once sky and ground took on a reddish bloom and the swollen trunks of elderly oaks became so black they began to look blue. Though the sun was weakening as it dropped, the temperature seemed to rise because the breeze that had brought faint relief all day had faded, and now the air was still and heavy.
The scene, or a tiny portion of it, was visible to Robbie Turner through a sealed skylight window if he cared to stand up from his bath, bend his knees and twist his neck."

"Even that would be better than lying here groaning. No, it wouldn't. It would be worse, but he still wanted it. He had to have it. He wanted it to be worse."

Weekend

2006-11-08T10:31:00.000+02:00

I had a lovely weekend, packed full. Over the weekend and last night, watching the sun set over Camps Bay I just realized once again that I do love this place, even though I'm planning to leave it again soon.

On Saturday morning we had breakfast at Knead in Wembley square. Full marks for presentation.

Then we went wine tasting at Uitkyk, very chilled, we were the only people there, the wine pourer showed us his scar. Then we went wine tasting at Waterford, 9 wines, three with chocolate. Divine. The rain pouring down in the courtyard. We went for a late lunch in Stellenbosch after that, then for a post meal stroll. On to Somerset West to visit with parents and friends and then back to the flat, buying chocolate at the one stop on the way.

Sunday on to the penguins at Boulders beach near Simons Town. Whenever I told the Japanese I come from Cape Town, most of them always went "oh, penguins" or Boulders beach. KAWAII!!!
But damn, the penguins are cute.

After the penguins we drove to Cape Point, tourist central. They come by the bus loads. Cape Point was actually a bit disappointing for me, dont know what I expected really. But you're standing up there around the lighthouse with the Korean or Chinese shoving you out of his picture and the German on the other side writing on the wall. Still, the sea and view is pretty spectacular.
Drive back around the other side, utter dejection when we find out Chapman's Peak drive is closed, but then on to Robben island tour. The ferry ride going was okay, coming back was a bit rough. Spray and wind like you wouldnt believe. I love Table Mountain. I had to trim this photo as someone's nose and cheek was in the bottom right corner.

Robben Island tour was interesting but too many people, I couldnt stand the crowd so went up ahead and took this photo of our guide as he showed us the way out.

Random snippet

2006-11-03T10:33:00.000+02:00

“I don’t see any horns on your head,” one of the North Koreans said. “I hope you don’t see any on mine, either.”

Ouch

2006-11-03T08:33:00.000+02:00

Drew Beck Meyer

This should probably be 3 different posts

2006-11-03T08:04:00.000+02:00

"Beijing has put on its best face to court Africa, “the land of myth and miracles,” as official posters call it. Political leaders of 48 of the 53 African countries, including 40 heads of state, are to arrive this weekend for a huge diplomatic event, the China-Africa forum." link

I saw two funny things on my way to work in the taxi this morning. First there was a dove trying to eat a niknak on the pavement. It spat it out, hopped on to the other niknak lying there, gobbled that and proceeded to the one it spat out. An acquired taste it seems.
The other was a security guard on his way to work with a small pink backpack with purple rabbits on his back.

Yesterday I meandered around Bo-Kaap, the muslim area in Cape Town, for the first time with two British friends visiting. I love the excuse of them being here for doing touristy stuff in my own city. I'm going to Robben Island on Sunday. What I liked about Bo-Kaap was its tranquility even though it is so close to the city centre. Children were actually playing on the streets, hide and seek, skipping rope, a brother made his younger sister cry. N had her zoom lens out to capture the children while S cringed in embarrassment hoping she wont take a picture of the two girls in their traditional clothes going somewhere unknown.

Little Miss Sunshine

2006-10-30T14:08:00.000+02:00

I saw Little Miss Sunshine this weekend. Loved it. It's a film script I would have loved to have written, family with interesting characters on a road trip. Acting was also excellent, especially uncle Frank, suicidal nr 1 Proust scholar in America with a "silly" liking for boys, and Olive "little miss sunshine" herself. I felt quite vindicated having eaten an icecream before watching the movie, you'll have to see the movie to know what I mean. superfreak

The Sea

2006-10-27T10:57:00.000+02:00

Just the other day I was talking to somebody about me maybe not being in the mood for reading as I couldn’t get into the book I was reading even though it was well written and I wanted to know what happens. I usually read loads, but haven’t been able to finish a book in ages. I needed this short novel to reaffirm my love for reading again and that with the right book I can read anytime. I read John Banville's The Sea last weekend. I'm sure it has gotten a lot of criticism but it was also last year's Booker prize winner. I was just in the mood for it. One man dealing with his grief, looking back or going back to an incident in childhood, nicely written, showing off words that most people, meaning me, dont know the meaning of. Wonderful evocation and description of people and places and feelings, which always makes a book a winner for me because that is something I cant do when writing.

first line: They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.

Some more quotes:
The first time we came home for a visit – home: the word gives me a shove, and I stumble – my mother hardly spoke a word to her.

I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion, I know, everyone entertains it.

No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory, but their version will be different from mine, and from each other’s. Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

Paris syndrome

2006-10-24T15:43:00.000+02:00

Ok, I am so completely gatvol of the work I have to do, transcribing a conference I attended last week. Let's have some diversion.

Article I read today in the Cape Times, semi-hilarious. I am missing my funny Japanese students, what an interesting story I could have shared with them.

Fragile Japanese tourists unhinged by French foibles

PARIS: Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris, as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported here on Sunday.
"A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses," Youself Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the ... hospital told the newspaper.
...
The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed "Paris syndrome" was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.
"In Japanese shops, the customer is king, whereas here assistants hardly look at them ... People using public transport all look stern, and handbag snatchers increase the ill feeling," said Bernard Delage, of the Jeunes Japon association which helps Japanese families. - Reuters

Can I just say that people using public transport in Japan look pretty stern as well, especially when they elbow you in the guts or stamp on your foot to get a better seat or place to stand.

So on the Japan theme, here are some 1920 Japan children's book illustrations from magazine titled Kodomo no Kuni (Children's land - if my Japanese serves me correctly and yes, that was shamelessly showing off). It was featured on Drawn.

Jerome Liebling

2006-10-19T13:18:00.000+02:00

These days it seems that physical “truth” can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright. Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed.
But returning to the source of a thing–the real source–means the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts.
My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic.
–Jerome Liebling, The People, Yes, 1995

Saw this article about him, a mentor for documentary filmmaking. Here are a few pics.

Cathedrals

2006-10-18T09:22:00.000+02:00

When I was a bit younger, I wrote, or tried to write a poem about the red cathedral. It was a structure I saw in the area of Saldanha, we were visiting my brother in Langebaan - I had to write a History essay that weekend. It was a factory or something industrial but it was red or brown red or maybe not even that red at all. It was however majestic and had a mystical quality about it.

Yesterday I was driving from a convention I had to attend for work at Goudini Spa. The mountains all around were beautiful, purple, green, blue, brown and grey, clouds lying low. then just before the Hugenot Tunnel there was this mountain. When I saw it the first word that popped into my head was cathedral. It was a natural cathedral, majestic and magical.

The weekend I was at a photo exhibition and saw why I wanted to visit Namibia. The guy had taken photos of "cathedrals" in sossusvlei area, stone/rock structures or mountains that rose out of the desert or vlei (my ignorance spreads far and wide). They looked like alien sculptures but also had that m qualities.

Last night I was watching the third and final installment of the documentary "the story of God" on SABC 2. It is narrated by a Jewish man who goes out to discover the story of God, how people believe, how religions work and in last night's show, the challenge of science. He visits the creationist museum in America, gets a mathematician to work out his belief percentage based on probability and talks to the scientist who has or thinks he has discovered the God gene (why some people believe more than others). It helped me to sort out a lot of my religious issues and like the narrator I choose uncertainty instead of the certainty that scientists with the God gene or fundamentalists offer. That doesnt diminish my belief in God. So if I wanted to connect this paragraph with the rest of the post I could say my tv was a bit of a cathedral last night. But maybe that's stretching it a bit far.

New York Times

2006-10-12T08:23:00.000+02:00

The new york times is my home page. Here is a picture from an essay titled "Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing". The picture is by Ward Schumaker.

Tik Tik Boom

2006-10-10T10:10:00.000+02:00

Tik Tik Boom

"Flirty" who I work with just showed me the Daily Voice, not the best of sources but in this case I trust them, and their article on drug deals happening at the Mitchells Plain town centre in front of police's eyes, across the road from the police station. They have photos of people exchanging jewelry and cell phones for drugs. They sit and smoke the drugs outside in front of everyone. The merchants own these neigbourhoods, able to buy houses, vans, and lawyers in cold hard cash made from kids that eventually sell the shoes off their feet for drugs.

During the stakeout the Daily Voice witnesses how the dealers accept two cellphones for drugs. The hair salon owner says most of these cellphones are robbed from people shopping in the town centre.

Things I love 1

2006-10-05T12:03:00.000+02:00

Things I love 1

Mail and Guardian, the newspaper, the website, and above all: the week in pictures (on the website). I always love their selection of shots that reflect the current affairs of the week.

2006-10-03T15:30:00.000+02:00

Inspiration for yesterday

So yesterday I was on drawn, my favourite arty blog, when I came across the much blogged about critique that Alex Toth wrote about Steve Rude's work. I read the critique and while it was scathing and Steve Rude denied a lot of the charges Toth levelled at him, it ended with this brilliant page.

2006-10-02T15:37:00.000+02:00

Ok, so I am about to enter the world of blogging. It's 3h30 on a Monday afternoon, almost time to go home to my tampon tower flat. I've just moved from my sunny office opposite the Grootte Kerk to a desk in another shared office. The upside is that I have a new computer which is a bit slower but actually has newer programs on and internet explorer doesn't shut down every time I access certain sites.

I'll probably change the title of this blog. At the moment it's Linka's book journal. I've been doing a book journal on my laptop for about 3 years now, noting at the least the name of each book I've read, its author and where I got it. When I'm bothered I add my thoughts or quotes from it. I thought I would just do that on the internet but I read so many interesting things on the net each day and see interesting things around me that this will probably just be a mishmash.

2006-09-24T20:05:00.000+02:00

A bit of randomness.