“We will no longer accept money out of undergarments”

I love this…

In SA, a lot of people keep their money in their bra or panties rather than their pockets – less likely to get stolen that way! It’s not unusual to be in a corner cafe and see an auntie reach into her bra to pay for a half loaf of bread and some milk at the end of a long day.

Which means they have been up til now.

So now people who store their money that way will have to remove it and place it in a wallet before entering the store. What’s next? Washing our hands before we touch money? Which by the way, is already dirtier than poo (worldwide). Read this if you don’t believe me.

(Found this sign picture, by the way, on a facebook group I reluctantly belong to called South Africans in the USA. What’s great about this group is it’s really pro-SA, friendly and not full of racists. There’s a theory that South Africans who go to the US rather than just running to the country that colonised SA and messed it up centuries ago are simply nicer people, although I’m told Florida has it’s share of gremlins…)

What do the Cape Town shark flags mean? Nobody knows! Allow me to clarify.

I’ve swum in the sea in Cape Town at least once a day since I arrived home a month ago and guess what? I’m still not dead! Not only am I not dead, I still have all my arms and legs.

I mention this because I’ve asked a few of my friends, many of whom are regular beach goers, what the flags mean. They all agree that the Black flag with the white shark means a shark’s been seen in the bay. The others… they’re not sure really. They all agree the red one means danger and the green one might mean there’s a shark. They’re all understandably confused, because the flags are stupid. They make it look to anyone driving by as if Cape Town’s sea is infested with great whites. In fact, it’s not nearly that dangerous.

This is one scary flag. What does it mean? Answer: NOT that there is a shark in the water. It means that visibility is poor and the shark spotters can’t guarantee they’ll see it if it’s there. This is the case most of the time.

Now you know.

Okay, apologies for the poor color. South Africa has always been rather bad with colour and don’t care for it much, so the sign is a little faded. A GREEN flag is the best. It means it’s safe to swim and the shark spotters up on the mountains will probably see the sharks in time to sound a warning. The BLACK flag is second best. It means they can’t see for sure, but they probably will. And the RED one is actually not the end of the world. Means there’s a shark cruising around in nearby beaches. WHITE is bad news. That means there’s a shark. Don’t swim. Even if only out of courtesy to the poor shark spotters, who hate it when you die cause then people think they didn’t do their job in time.

When they see the black flag – or any of the flags with sharks, my friends do one of two things, assuming it means “there’s a shark and the surfers are only out there because they wanna die”:
1. Turn round and drive home.
2. Drive to a beach that doesn’t have shark flags at all. Cause what you don’t know won’t hurt you. UNLESS IT’S A FUCKING SHARK. Duh.

A fun sign explaining surf etiquette to beginners and Ubuntu to everybody. Muizenberg has some great waves, but is also known to be a beginner’s beach. It’s the best place imaginable to learn to surf, and well-serviced by the shark spotters, who have a great view from their station, high up on Boyes Drive. The water is also warm. I’ll never forget my final sunset swim with my mom, the clean white foam, the soft salty light.

Signs of South Africa

South Africans aren’t rude. We’re just overly familiar and brutally honest.

Newspaper posters on the lamp posts: It has been an insane year in SA. And WTF is now in the dictionary (the Oxford is always a few years behind – they’ll catch up one day.)

We tend not to respect celebrity for its own sake. We tend not to respect authority for its own sake, either. After all, Apartheid used to be law. Nowadays, driving over the yellow line is illegal. Anyone here never done it?

The upside: Cars don’t have to sit behind you on a single lane highway for 3kms. Downside? It’s illegal? Upside? Nobody cares. Downside? Over 1200 road deaths this holiday. Upside: Fast traveling and fun times.

Cape Town is famous for the fact that you can come here and… be completely ignored no matter how famous you are, except maybe if you leave the city or want to fuck girls from Camps Bay who wanna be famous too. Colin Farrell spent lots of time here cause he could walk around without his sunglasses on (not that he did, his eye would hurt, cause Cape Town parties hard and drugs are fresh off the boat). But mostly he was here cause Capetonians think they’re special. They’re like, “Oh, you’re Colin Farrel? Really? Well fine, but I’m from Cape Town.”

Celebrity Rehab? Come here and get sober. We don’t care how who you are, or how wasted you are.

I think these signs from all over South Africa exemplify this point. We’re special. We get to say it like it is. Take…

OLD AGE

So I took a tour of an old age home, looking for a friend of my Mom’s who she hadn’t contacted in a while. She was freaked out – being about 24 years closer to death / urinating on herself, than I am. But this sign in the complex made her laugh.

And laugh again.

And this is what you get – I think this is a lovely way for an old age community to remember you. I think it’s okay to laugh in the face of death. Perhaps it’s even often fucking essential.

DEATH

We dare it. We double dare it. We’re not like Americans; scared to venture from our car to our apartment if the “air” isn’t already on on a hot day. Sweating never killed you… except when it did.

Okay, it’s unlikely that today’s cell phones could cause a gas tank to explode… but it’s still annoying to the petrol attendants when you use yours. Same reason why they pretend it’s dangerous on airplanes BTW. “If you use your cell phone now, nobody may ever talk to you again.”

Now actually, lighting a cigarette at a gas station is actually genuinely stupid. If you do it while you’re on your cell phone you will also be sneered at while you die.

WE DON’T CARE WHO YOU ARE

Aaaaand back to that.

Real reason for this sign: Grapes close to the road get covered in dust and are hard to make wine with. Other reason: People who live on farms feel free to drive really fast and ignore speed limits and this farm is surrounded by other farmers.

Enterprising South Africans in “Cuteness for Sale”

In the last few weeks, bad and good things have happened. Six people died: in Poland drinking infected vodka, in Pakistan in a bomb blast, in SA trying to get jobs – the 1300 people selected from thousands of applicants for jobs as Traffic Cops were asked to run 4km in 30 minutes in hot conditions. Six died of dehydration on the spot. One killed himself because he wasn’t picked. Another died later in hospital.

We’re certainly not lazy out here. And we’re good at finding new ways to make money, whether that be making Christmas trees out of wire or baskets out of plastic bags or … exploiting cuteness.

This is genius: Get customers at your restaurant to pay to feed your livestock for you! Later, you can eat the livestock.

Relatively cute bunnies. Who’s not going to pay R2 (USD .28c) for a child’s smile?

This tiger’s like “I am going to fucking kill you if you make me stand on this boat for ONE more minute while you paint me.” Accidentally hilarious art for sale in the same coffee shop.

And a giant pineapple? Yes, that’s a great idea. It’s surrounded by pineapple fields and if you wanna pay R10 you can climb up to survey the fields, or watch a video about pineapple farming. They also sell juice, jam, t-shirts…

Donald Trump, asshole extraodinaire, lurks in a corner of a pharmacy in California, representing a very different kind of enterprising.

Safe to love, not safe to love…

So we are clear: I don’t write about signs because I’m too stupid to realise that if I just posted pictures of cute animals I could have much more traffic to my blog.

It’s not like I don’t have ACCESS to cute animals.

See?

That’s a Cow and Calf in Nature’s Valley. Cute, right?

 

Og Moma! “Stay away from my baby” says that eye.

And here’s a ginger cat that will only drink mineral water.

This kitty at Wild Spirit Backpackers only drinks from the spring water tap. Such a clever kitty.

And here’s a lonely calf whose momma has been taken away…

Free range. But lonely! Don’t get too attached though.

Awwww. CUTE. This little calf hasn’t figured out that it can’t have it both ways and keeps trying to scratch its own head with its hoof while grazing.

What’s for sale? Is that a real kitty?

It’s a real cute kitty! In a basket. I have no idea what we did with these before we had the internet.

Awwwwwww…. cute. And with cuteness, of course, comes Jean Barker’s Little Lecture on Hypocrisy, customized for your displeasure.

That calf won’t have her momma for long. Even on a nice, organic farm, the male calves get taken away and fattened for slaughter, and the females get weaned and turned into milk cows asap.

Thinking about this, I realized why most Americans (as the most extreme example – it’s a general western thing) mind so much if you kill a dog and don’t give a fuck if you torture, and then inhumanely transport and slaughter, 10 million cows a day to McDonalds, Burger King and In ‘n Out: They / we maybe, have been taught that it’s safe to love dogs because they won’t be farmed for their meat. And cats are also Safe to Love, because although cats would happily farm humans for meat given half a chance, we aren’t going to eat cats, because they taste like crap. Same reason we don’t eat penguins. Dogs survive by sucking up big time.

And they know it’s unsafe to grow emotionally attached to a cow or a chicken or a pig (or allow your kids to) because that cute cow is gonna cop it. Self interest, as usual, explains our so-called morals.

So Americans call the Koreans and Chinese barbaric for eating dog, or become furious / feel nauseous when they see Cheval on the menu in France. Why can’t people see past the things they’ve been taught to feel and realise that feelings are not an indicator of right and wrong? Does the fact that I can love dogs AND consider eating them make me a psychopath – or the only sane person I know?

 

Alcoholic slush puppy at my favourite movie theater.

After America’s family-friendly diet of fat and corn syrup and fake sweetener at the movies it’s good to be back in South Africa, where The Labia, my favourite little indie cinema, is screening The Oranges, that doccie about Sushi, The Hobbit (yeah, odd), and various other more indie films whose names I don’t remember but am smug to say I can pronounce. And in in case you’ve had a stressful day, or a great day, you might want to add a shot of vodka to your slush puppy – which is what we call those ice drinks here in SA.

Celebrate the results of the ANC’s internal candidate election of Ramaphosa for Deputy with this cooling summer cocktail and a pretentioius movie from France. Ah, the pleasures of being a member of the African bourgeoisie.

Rock on, my homeland. Also good news in the political arena. Although Zuma’s back for another term, which I’m sure he’ll use to consolidate his theft of millions from South Africa’s poor, there’s a chance Ramaphosa will be our next president, in 2019. He may not be perfect but he’s got to be less of an embarrassment than the guy we got right now.

How does the South African Winelands crisis look from the USA?

We don’t hear much on the news about South Africa really. The USA isn’t fighting a war there and we don’t produce anything they really need.

Except, possibly, great wine with a different swing to California’s good stuff.

This billboard is all over Los Angeles. “What can one person do?” Well, not everything, guys. Time to start doing a bit of the heavy lifting ourselves perhaps?

So what a pity there’s the possibility of international boycotts after the international community discovered just how little workers on farms earn?

I wrote this article about the issue on News24. Now, I know some people really can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage. I also know a lot of people who could pay workers more per day and employ them fewer days, or who can afford double what they pay, and still under-pay.

It’s not a question of whether or not the wine industry can afford to pay more than it does. It has to. End of story. If it doesn’t, the international community will stop buying our wines.

Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes down. I am almost certain I’ll get the usual death threats – hopefully from angry white people who’re too lazy to carry them out.

The image South African Wine wants.

The image South African wine is in danger of getting.

From elevator farts to pinnoccio to pie charts: leftover signs posted

Sometimes life makes no sense. This week, I’m having a new version of an old dream at night. I’ve had it so often I’m often lucid in it at this point, but still unable to control the emptiness I feel no matter how I force it to end. So in that state of restless randomnity, I WANT to write, but I have nothing. Nothing in particular to say after wandering through my own day like a ghost.

I don’t remember who facebooked this, but I knew instantly that it belonged on this blog. What better way to introduce a post about nothing in particulars? I guess it would be time to stop looking and start living.

Pinnoccio is one of my favourite characters. So favorite that I have dated him and even married him over the years. Usually by the time he becomes a real boy, he’s someone else’s though.

The result of your actions will be an equal and opposite re-action. But this is my beef with Karma: it doesn’t seem to strike the person responsible. So for example, the people who voted for apartheid are mostly in Australia whining about SA to anyone who’ll listen. The people suffering its bad karma are in South Africa, suffering. This makes no sense, and frankly, is proof that if god does exist, he desperately needs a secretary.

Zuma is part of the bad karma. He’s not the worst president in the world, but he is ineffective, sexist, nepotistic, unable to form a coherent voice from the multitudes of voices within the ANC, and prone to obvious stupidity. This makes him not unlike Mao / Stalin, the obvious references in this satirical artpiece. I’m reading about Mao at the moment in the form of an amazing Biography/Autobiography, “Wild Swans” – the story of three generations of exceptional Chinese women. That book’s probably half the reason I’m so down on humanity at the moment.

And here’s what I miss about home. Stuff like this. This sign picture, taken by Nick Aldridge, who I hope won’t mind me using it in low res. here, was snapped at the Red Hill Shebeen. Red Hill’s a beachside community. Each of these little holiday towns has a little township next door (yeah, not much has changed since apartheid days out there) that supplies the holiday-makers with cheap labor and so on… I’ve been to a lot of them because I had this fairly dangerous habit of getting drunk and deciding to visit on the pretext of buying something. My poor, poor boyfriends…

Taken by screenwriter Leslie Rann, in the elevator of her LA apartment complex. Hilarious, how they explain the exact science of the smell moving around. It should really say “Please do not remove head from ass while in elevator. We prefer all your holes to be plugged while in public places.”

Summarizes how most people feel about pie charts. Although I’m not that into pie, here. Americans like them sweet. I miss the little individual ones you get at gas stations in South Africa. My favorite: Mutton Curry. One of those and an appeltiser the morning after a late night and you’re ready for a day at the office!

Right. Now I can finally delete all that shit from my desktop. Thanks for listening.

Smokers need to clean up their act – or die faster

Sometimes it takes going to a different place to clear your head of all the bad things to which you’ve simply become habituated. Like waste, and inconsiderate, dirty cigarette smokers. A recent trip to Busan, South Korea, opened my eyes to what proper enforcement and government action can achieve.

Busan is a surprisingly clean city. Surprisingly because it’s not like a US city where there are rules about EVERYTHING from the height and spacing of stairs, to where you may and may not smoke. The air is clean despite the huge condensed population thanks to great public transport. And although Koreans smoke about as much as South Africans, smoking is not permitted everywhere: Not in public parks, not on beaches, not in restaurants (but in bars and Karaoke places it’s okay).

A beautiful beach. Reminded me of beaches in KwaZulu-Natal except for something important: It was perfectly clean. No glass. Clear water. Very safe – even though there were few bathers for some reason there were life guards all along it. I wonder if they stop people tossing cigarette buts? If only our fearless leader would have let us swim…

Do the drains run to the sea as they do in California? I hope not, because people do toss their cigarettes there. Not the way USA smokers do – as if it’s a gesture that represents freedom and democracy or something – but pretty regularly. Still the reminders not to smoke are more than just signs. They’re huge and unmistakeable.

I got it! But give me a few drinks and I might forget once a month.

As gaudy as the signs were, they seemed to work.

… and there’s a lot of beauty to protect.

At the entrance to the park, collections of garbage remind you not leave it lying around. Some garbage cans – trash bins – would be nice though. At the same location where vending machines sell drinks there are none. Sadly, this rocky outcrop, one of the most beautiful, is also the most littered with chip packets, cigarette butts and other debris of what we call “civilisation”.

Made me think back to a walk in a park in California with one of my favorite people in the world. We were having a great day, so I didn’t say anything. I also didn’t say anything because I’m so used to the things smokers do, all of which I hate so much that it’s a physical effort not to shout at random strangers. But he kept tossing his cigarettes. And I didn’t know how to deal with it. I still think about it.

Dear Smokers: I hate it when smokers…

1. Sit right next to me on a bench and smoke, when they could walk away.
I’ma former smoker. Smoking right on top of me is like me putting just a dash of vodka in an alcoholic’s coke. Not very cool at all.

2. Leave a dirty tray of cigarette butt my house
I was nice enough to let you smoke on my balcony. So put it in the trash, ffs. It smells, and I don’t want to clean it up.

3. Toss your cigarettes all over the place
It’s shameful to pollute a beautiful place, or even a random street or apartment block with your but ends. How much more effort does it take to step on it, then pick it up? Yes we know they’re disgusting and you want it to get away from you as soon as you’ve satisfied your craving. But that doesn’t mean we should all have to clean up after you. It doesn’t mean we want your buts in the ocean next time we swim. It’s like pooping, okay. Put your toilet paper in the toilet after you wipe. Or, or if you’re in Korea, in the little basket next to the toilet. God, at least poop is bio-degradable.

That’s my rant for today.

Just because smokers are destined to die of cancer doesn’t mean the should get to annoy us all while they’re still alive. I used to smoke. I may not have been perfect, but I never tossed my but ends out on the street. That’s the bottom line.

Black in So-Cal, USA

I just went back to writing columns for News24, Africa’s biggest news website. While my rate of pay has dropped thanks to the ailing exchange rate, I’m glad to be back in the saddle after a much-needed break. I’ll now be writing twice a month. And here’s the lastest column: Black in So-Cal, USA – about the subtle but sure form of racism I encounter all the time here in Orange, California and surrounds.

South Africa’s apartheid history is well known. I feel sick at the thought of how little black, indian and colored kids must have felt seeing signs like this. Imagine not letting a child share the sea with your child?

But the USA, until very recently, had similar laws – google it. The friend I write about in the column remembers getting into trouble as a child while visiting his grandma in the South for using a drinking fountain that was whites-only. There may not have been a sign by then, but in the South, people knew their place… “Colored” has a very different, and offensive, meaning in the USA to what it does in South Africa of course.