(Retro- blogging) (Cape Town Part 2 - see here for Part 1)

On our second morning of the Cape Town trip, we woke up to find the ocean still beating away at the rocks on the coastline there in Gansbaai. Ate a hurried breakfast of leftover pizza (we had, in our infinite wisdom, saw fit to order that in addition to dinner, the night before), and then hopped into our swim gear, warm clothes over that, and off for the boat.

(It should be noted that I didn't really take one good digital picture from the boat at all, because I was either a) in the water with the waterproof camera or b) capturing everything on video from the observation deck.)

After a brief morning briefing, we loaded our plump tourist torsos onto the ship of death, and off we chugged into the surf. 15 minutes later we were a few hundred yards off the coast, albeit on the far side of the sweeping bay. You could hear the surf crashing in the distance, and there were 2-3 other boats in view, all preparing to do what we were preparing to do. The water was green and inviting - didn't look very cold at all (it wasn't).


After they maneuvered the steel cage into the water and secured it next to the boat, the portly captain gave us his final warning speech on the particulars of getting in and out, and when he got to his question of who wanted to go first, Brian and I already had our hands in the air. So we wet-suited up, grabbed some goggles, strapped weights on, and hopped in the cage. They were chumming the water all the while, and once we were in a largish (say about the size of a nerf football) chunk of tuna was tossed out, on the end of a rope with a small bouy to keep it afloat. It hovered there just below the surface, maybe 15 feet in front of the cage with 4 sacks of human meat encased in neoprene in it.

About 1/4th of the cage is above water the whole time, and they tell you to keep your head above water so that you can hear them shout at you when to go down, if they see the shark coming. Screw that, I had my face under the water the second I was in there. I tried to keep one ear above water for the most part, to hear when they did shout, but for the first few minutes I was busy swimming around the bottom of the cage, trying to see something before anyone else.


Which I did, go me. An 20' long 2,000 lb. beast from the depths, swimming non- chalantly about 15 feet under the tuna, acting like it wasn't really interested. It just kind of faded into the green haze, and then, just as I was going up for air BAM, out of nowhere she comes flying up at a 45 degree angle, honed in on the tuna. Chomp. Gone.


That was the nature of our sightings for the next few hours. You'd see them poking around from time to time, checking out the boat, the cage, the tuna, but you'd rarely see them just before they went for it. Most times they'd just come straight up from the bottom, engulf the tuna in their massive jaws (most of which had roughly 16,000 massive razor teeth), and then they were gone, as quick as they came.


After seeing at least 2 or 3 of them take multiple tuna samplings, we got out so that the next group could go in, and went up to the observation deck to take pictures / video. We went in again later in the morning, and although we didn't see as much, we did get our closest exposure, when one kind of came at the cage as it struggled to get the tuna off the line. They thrash their massive tails around and it causes a lot of bubbles/foam, but 2000 lbs. of shark muscle is hard to miss when its right next to you. So I decided to give it a little love tap, and stuck my stupid hand outside the cage to touch it, on the top of the tail, just behind and down a little bit from the dorsal fin. I'm pretty sure it didn't notice. I still have my hand.


All in all we probably saw 12-15 different sharks, most of them multiple times. Its hard to tell exactly, they look a lot a like when all you see is a flash of grey and then enough teeth to tear a cow in two.


So then we packed it in and headed back for dry land, which is safe, and where you have much more chance of seeing death by massive creature coming for you, which is rather comforting. Like the penguins, for instance, which we stopped to see, and more unfortunately smell. Except they are not massive, and they do not want to eat you. Well, they might, but they're clearly not well organized enough to be much of a threat.


We drove off to Franshoeck, one of the 2 main wine countries outside of Cape Town, and found our B&B. After unloading, we sauntered around the town a bit and then found a nice bar/restaurant that opened onto a kind of enclosed square in the artsy little shopping area. They had a massive screen put up for the rugby qualifiers so we watched that, accompanied by many beers and plates of not-very-good-for-us food.


The next morning we hit a few of the wineries, the first of which, although it was signed like a winery, in the middle of a massive vineyard, and looked for all intents and purposes like a winery, was actually a private residence on the side of the valley with an incredible view from the portico between what apparently was the house and the big building that was certainly not a winery. Maybe it was a library. Who knows. Anyway the guy, looking like a guy our age who had just woken up on a Saturday morning, politely informed us we were mistaken, but let us take some pictures of his view.


Then we went to some real wineries, the best of which was Cabriere, which I hope to get back to. They have a Pinot Noir Blanc (not a red) that was incredible, but it may have just been because it was the last one I tasted. The old dude who showed us around was pretty funny and closed his act by inviting pretty girls on stage to help him open bubbly bottles with a sabre, the old fashioned way. Their reward for success (or failure, for that matter), was a kiss from Mr. Lech.


Back to Cape Town. Found our hotel downtown, checked in, took off for Table Mountain, climbed it - about a 3 hour climb but we were hoofing it a lot faster than that. Great views of the city from the top, then on the way down in the cable car I brilliantly recorded over some of my shark footage. Idiot.


That night we headed out to Long Street with Jenny, who was also in town. Billiards, Mexican dinner, more billiards, then copious amounts of late night dancing.

Sunday after packing everything up we hit the waterfront for some light shopping and lunch before heading back to the airport. Met some other US / UK consultants in the airport headed back to JNB as well, Brian and Jenny got to know them better over the next month or so, but I was a little busy for follow-up at the time.


The best part about Cape Town was the sharks, hands down. I won't say its the best part of my time in Africa so far, because there's been a lot of incredible things, but seeing those things up close vaulted right up there next to skydiving, for me. It made you feel your humanity, it reminded me that I am just food, albeit with a soul. But the shark neither knows nor cares about the second part.

It is now time to talk about the eyeballs.

My eyeballs, in particular. Unlike most of the rest of me, they are not perfect (refer to every picture taken of me since my teenage years). I hate the idea of contacts in general and so I've never tried them, which is rather like hating the idea of driving a pickup instead of an SUV without ever having tried it, but I digress.

So, I wear glasses, to correctly slightly-off vision. Which, ironically, determined a lot more about where my life wound up going than most other things I can think of did.

I was 16 or 17, I can remember I wasn't living at home at the time, but as I had recently graduated from high school, I was thinking about next steps. I had decided I wanted to fly planes, but not just any planes. I wanted to fly fighter jets for the Navy. It would either be fighters, or nothing at all. I didn't want to fly if it didn't mean extreme high speeds and blowing things up. I remember this much clearly. I remember telling a Naval recruiter that.

Said recruiter was kind enough not to try and pull one over on me, and made it clear that my chances would be as good as anyone elses' at landing a pilot's seat if I went straight into the serve. He said that I'd be a lot better off applying for their flight school if I was coming out of a top private flight college. Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, here I come. I was filling out the applications paperwork and pretty much planning to go there and nowhere else.

That's when it happened. Talk about timing, I mean, I had a half-completed ERAU application on my desk at home, sitting at the tippy-top of my to-do stack. I can still see it, clear as day - next to the first TV I ever owned, in the corner of that ugly, oppressive yellow rented room I lived in at the time. But I wasn't there when it happened, I was at work.

I worked in a supermarket and, thanks to unions and whatnot we had stupid ridiculously long break time with every shift that we were basically forced to take (I'd have rather worked an 8 hour shift straight through half the time instead of having to sit around for an hour and a half and be there 9.5). So, naturally, we had a fair deal of spare time on our hands each day, a few of us being on breaks together at the same time. This led to lots of interesting stuff, ranging from whip-its in the dairy refrigerator box, to flirting with the waitresses at the diner across the parking lot, to a hybrid form of wiffle-ball in the stockroom where the rules changed daily based on the locations and amount of product in the stockroom at the time.

The latter involved all sorts of weird specific rules that we made up as we went. Many times if you hit the ball, you might not be able to see where it clearly landed. If the pitcher saw that the landing location was out of the batter's view, he could offer the batter a gamble by shouting "food item" or "non-food item" (a term that's come back to haunt me on my current project here in Africa, ironically). The batter, already making his rounds of the bases, then had the choice to either guess the item (e.g. "Corn chips!") - hence accepting the offer, or, alternatively, decline the offer (by shouting "No thanks!" or some derivative thereof, often ranging towards the more vulgar). If the batter guessed correctly, he got to round the bases as in a home run, and it counted for two points. If he accepted but guessed incorrectly, it counted as an immediate out, and minus one point. It was, naturally, a gamble that was rarely taken except in desperate situations (e.g. low scores, break time perilously low, etc.).

Well, one day I was at bat, had a hit, and the offer was made. Rounding first base I had a view of the item the ball had landed on (in the liquor section) which the pitcher hadn't realized I would have. The rule involved that the pitcher couldn't touch the ball til the offer was accepted or denied, and failure to accept or deny on the batters part before reaching the next base caused an immediate out, however the batter could stop anywhere along the baseline to try to see where the ball was, without incurring any penalty. So I stopped, sized up where the ball was sitting, and guessed that it was liquor (duh). "Hah!" shouted my shift manager, the pitcher, then informing me that it was a box of pasta sauce. Argument quickly ensued, but upon walking over to check it out for myself, I found that yes, indeed, there was a lone stack of Ragu sitting in the liquor department area, far from where it should have been.

"I thought the big 'Ragu' on the side of the box might have tipped you off," Greg said.

"I never saw it."

"What? How did you miss it? Its right there. It was even facing you, from that direction."

I thought about what he said for a minute, and then walked back towards first base. It was a big stockroom, and I had put quite a smack on the ball, so it was no small distance, but still - standing there some 30 or 40 feet away, I realized that while I could see something written on the side of the box, it was a little fuzzy. To fuzzy to determine the difference between "Ragu" and "Malibu," I thought.

And that's when I realized I might have a very minor vision problem, which was not a very minor thing at all for a kid who knew he needed 20/20 unassisted to fly the kinds of planes he wanted to fly.

That all flew through my head about 10 times as fast as it takes to read it, and I immediately had that sinking feeling in my stomach.

A month or two later at the optometrist, it was confirmed - I had lost, and would never regain, my perfect vision (literally and figuratively, I suppose).

Anyway.

A friend of mine recently got Lasik, and I realized that the reason I've never been interested in looking into it is pretty closely related to this story. You see, they require perfect vision unassisted to fly fighters, but of course the first thing I looked into upon getting home from the optometrist was whether or not you could get in with surgically-enhanced 20/20. Something about the g-forces and the pressure on the eyeball and the potential to undo the effects of the surgery mid-flight. No go.

I had decided not to fill out the application for ERAU any further than I already had, back on that fateful day in the stockroom, but the second thing I did when I got home from the optometrist (after checking on the surgery option) was to throw that thing in the garbage and sulk bitterly.

So that's most of the story of how I wound up going to a private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania with no idea about what I wanted to do with my life. It never would have happened, if it hadn't been for the union-enforced long lunches, or the batter's choice rule, or the misplaced Ragu, or perhaps my slight decline in visual acuity.

And that's why I've always had a small, stupid little thing against Lasik. It was the surgery that wouldn't help me out when I was in my worst bind. So screw it.

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

RIP Sir Ed.

Back safe in ZA. Long flight, through Dakar again, which I loath. But I was next to two smallish and very devout Jewish girls (they got kosher meals and would stand right in their seats to do their morning and evening prayers) so it wasn't nearly as bad as the monsters I had to sit next to flying to the states. Anyway, they were nice and said they'd like advanced copies of my books on Africa when they start coming out.

Got to watch 3:10 to Yuma and 75% of Into the Wild, so that was nice.

My Hertz super-elite double-extra-platinum brilliant-shining-diamond premier-top-executive president's circle status got me an upgrade from the economy car I reserved to a freakin beamer - not a small one either, roughly the equivalent of a 520 in the states, I think. Haven't bothered to check yet, but it smells of leather and is fun to drive.

And I started my new running program this morning, and it was painful. Aclimating.

That is all. More soon.

This morning I was watching Reel Talk (randomly, don't usually watch TV on Sat mornings, but I'm awake early because I'm still sick). I was trying to keep up with their Top 10 lists (2 of them) for the movies of 2007, but then I had a minor social explosion. Margy texting me about good old Simon Peter Plummer, catching up on Bootlegger's notes from Peter and Joey from the past few hours, and chatting simultaneously to 3 different people on 3 different continents on 3 different IM applications (Trillian/AIM, Gchat, Skype - you know who/where you are).

Anyway, thankfully they have their lists on their website, so I was able to complete my recap. I liked their lists for the most part and below I've added my comments where applicable.

Jeffery's Picks
10. Across the Universe - Sony Pictures makes the list, naturally. One of the many that flew under my radar whilst in Africa - a musical comprised of Beetles songs. Looks not half-bad, will be Netflixed.

9. Nanking - The book on my sidebar - Flyboys - referred to this story somewhat colloquially as "The Rape of Nanking" which is really what it was if you know anything about it. Absolutely will Netflix this one.

8. I Have Never Forgotten You - Just like #9, a movie I will certainly Netflix, because its important.

7. The Kingdom - The DVD machine at the grocery store hasn't had this in stock my entire time here and I'm too lazy to go to Blockbuster. Might have to be NF'd as well. They showed a little too much of this movie in the trailers.

6. Ratatouille - Watched on my flight from Joburg to NYC. Was fun. Not sure it was top 10 fun.

5. Into the Wild - Want to see even though its a bit morbid, I read the book years ago, I devour anything Krakauer writes, the same way I devour anything Sean Penn screenplays and directs. Likely NFer here too, sadly, though, due to time constraints at this point. This one also gets soundtrack of the year award in my book - its Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder's first ever solo album, with some beautiful stuff (visit the site).

4. Beowulf - Not that interested, although it does have Angelina Jolie. Won't watch it until after I read the story again, however.

3. Waitress - Two words: chick flick (although sadly, the writer / director was murdered late last year).

2. The Kite Runner - Want to see, but also not until I've read the book, which I haven't picked up yet, I prefer to read popular books a couple years after their craze phase.

1. No Country For Old Men - REALLY really want to catch this one before I leave the states, maybe Sunday afternoon.

Allison's Picks
10. Gone Baby Gone Morgan Freeman with his usual Midas touch. Also Ed Harris and Casey Affleck. From the same author as Mystic River. Haven't seen it but will NF.

9. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Going to see this evening, at the Angelika, for free, thanks to Viv's co-worker's boyfriend. High expectations.

8. Margot at the Wedding - Not very interested in a sarcastic Nicole Kidman. Jack Black is probably the only redeeming feature of this film.

7. Paris, Je T'aime - How did I miss this one? 18 shorts about falling in love in Paris. The 21 directors include: Walter Salles, Alfonso Cuarón, Tom Tykwer, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven, Alexander Payne, Gérard Depardieu, Gurinder Chadha, the Coen Brothers. Cast includes Fanny Ardant, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Sergio Castellitto, Willem Dafoe, Maggie Gyllenhall, Nick Nolte, Natalie Portman, Miranda Richardson, and Lewis Sewell, to name a few. Another NFer.

6. Across the Universe - See Jeffery's #10.

5. I Am Legend - Another one of the few I've seen. Liked it, cool to see NYC completely empty. Hot mustang in the first scene.

4. Rescue Dawn - Saw this one too, last summer before leaving the states. Christian Bale and Steve Zahn in a based-on-a-true-story flick about being imprisoned and escaping a Vietnam POW camp. This one was pretty good although it didn't get much press at the time.

3. Atonement - Chick flick but apparently I HAVE to see this one at some point (although the idea of my Keira making love to another man is admittedly a difficult one). So, NF.

2. Knocked Up - This looked kinda "eh, I'll see it if I happen to be in the same room" when I first saw the trailer, which is how I still feel. I heard mixed reviews. Unlikely to be NFed.

1. 3:10 To Yuma Missed this one too, but it might still be in the theaters in ZA when I get back there. Looking forward to it.

Honorable Mentions (actually these were where they called out breakout performances by certain stars, but it helps list a couple more movies, so I've reworked it)

Transformers - Michael Bay did not destroy much of what was good and right about my childhood.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Just missed it coming out in the states when I was leaving last year, will have to NF.

Juno - Out now but I'm only mildly interested.

In the Valley of Elah - Saw this one when it came out in ZA. Expected it to be better based on the title, which if you aren't aware, is biblical - its the place my namesake picked up 5 smooth stones. Anyway, the movie was pretty depressing.

American Gangster - Really want to see this, its another one I'm hoping will be in the ZA theaters when I get back.

Bourne Ultimatum - Also caught this one in ZA. The Bourne series has stayed high quality.

Update: Since writing I've seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (great, but sad), 3:10 to Yuma (pretty cool), most of Into the Wild (great, about what I expected), and American Gangster (very very cool).

Where I've been on the internets lately (aka: links):

The Edge World Question of 2008 is out with 164 of the world's leading minds weighing in on the question "WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?" As usual, its some of the most fascinating reading on the internet of the entire year (scroll about 1/3 of the way down the page to get to the index of the actual responses).

I've been writing elsewhere as well, about what I've changed my mind about, as well. So to speak.

I recently finished this blog. Yes, its a blog with an end, for a change. Fictional, but really, really creatively written. I actually linked to it a couple of years back but didn't re-find it and make the time to read it until just recently.

Found out I wasn't crazy for having a blah New Years Day. I had a really wonderful Introverts Day, before I even knew it was.

Moleskine Project.

Also, what I didn't get for Christmas:

An ORK Poster

A quilt made from all my favorite old tee shirts (OK I'd rather not pay these guys to do it so much as get someone I know to do it).

Speaking of shirts.

A WarBowl (OK I'd really rather just make this myself but I haven't figured out how best to do it yet, but I'm closing in on it).

Season 3 of The Office is out (I should add that I still need seasons 1 and 2 as well).

A dog. I still can't be a good dog owner yet but man do I want one.

Basically anything from Mxyplyzyk.

And a couple of things I did get:

A bunch of new drawing stuff - sketchbooks, blank post cards / notes & envelopes designed for drawing, a really cool graphite pencil set. So I started carrying my smaller moleskine and a pencil around again. I'm in the right mood for it.

My Sigg Bottle (mine? MINE? mine?).

Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition 1.5TB External Hard-drive (from me. to me.).

Wow. That went fast.

Let's try and recap the holidays, fast forward style.

After work in Denver I was home with the folks in Sacto / Nevada City for about 5 days before heading to LA for work and then the Santa Ynez wine country (found a second white I love in '07 - a viognier, the first being the pinot from Franschoeck) and then Santa Cruz island. Back to NorCal for the Christmas times, then off to NYC via the aforementioned Chicago.


Last Friday was Jason and Julie's wedding which was a whole barrel of monkeys fun. Nice ceremony followed by incredible hors d'oeuvres and a nice dinner with a bunch of the old crew there. Everything seemed to go really well and then they were off on their honeymoon leaving me to house-sit for the week.


The next morning I headed off for DC in a 'stang and managed not to have a run in with the 5-0 for the whole trip. It was Sarah's birthday and there was hiking and bouldering and Irish pubbing and movie-going and burgering and game-playing and game-watching and movie-watching. It was a good, long day. Gretta has grown HUGE since I saw her last, she's so big now.


After church on Sunday Jack and Rebecca cooked a truly awesome fritatta brunch for us with lots of bacon and these cool toast things with tomatoes and goat cheese YUM. And they got me one of my favorite Christmas presents - one I've been wanting ever since I saw it on Rebecca's blog. Also I found out that almost all of Hopper's best pieces are currently being exhibited at the DC Art Museum and my Moleskin with my as-yet-uncompleted sketches sits back in Africa on my desk, useless. Bah.

Once I got back it was already almost New Years Eve. There was like no sleep this past weekend, basically. Had spiced wine at Nicole's pre-party / housewarming thing at the coolest apartment that any of my friends have. That, plus walking around the village this afternoon, pretty much sealed where I want to live when I come back. I love that nabe. Anyway, headed over to Jen's apartment to pre with the Daves and Chris (Negrin's little brother). Then we caught a cab down to the party that Amber and Erin et. al. put together in a loft in Tribeca. Had the bitterest, angriest cabbie ever. The party was good, saw a couple old faces, met some new ones, all of a sudden it was midnight and soon after we shot out of there for the bars, ended up in the West Village (where else) at some bar I had never noticed there before, even though it was on Hudson. I turned into a pumpkin a couple hours later and headed home. Hoboken was, as expected, insane.

New Years day I watched a lot of football, then headed over to Dave's folks place to help them clean up Christmas leftovers, his mom makes the tenderest turkey ever. Caught up with his parents and Jon and Ann Marie, then Dave and I saw Sweeny Todd, which was more gory than Sin City, I'm pretty sure. But the musical parts were actually quite nice.

This week has been catching up on sleep, cleaning up the various computers and discs etc. in preparation for the great back-up of '08 (I ponied up for a 1.5 terabyte - having officially left the realm of GB - when I was back in CA. Merry Christmas to me.), which begins shortly, when I stop procrastinating.

Today started my social-catch-up with the NYC folk who I didn't connect with yet, brunch with Nicole and then dinner with the guys at Arthur's tonight, which will be exceedingly fattening. I think I have lunch tomorrow with someone but can't remember who, and then dinner with Bo. Then more people and meals and hopefully catching a showing of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at the Angelika - one of my favorite cinematographers ever. Sunday will be church and youth group and seeing all the kids again, plus meeting the newer leaders. Monday I'm at the Cookes' but might hit the office, then I think its either Tues or Weds I'm back to good ol' Zed A.

So that's what I've been doing. Should be returning to more frequent blogging shortly, including more retro-blogging, also story time, as well as my inaugural annual list of things I didn't get for Christmas (hint, hint, birthday present buyers).

I'm sitting in the airport I hate above all others, with a passion that burns with the fury of a million fiery suns.

But I did confirm my first class upgrade for my flight to EWR so I am going to be full of drink and sandwich and not rubbing elbows with the overweight mother (who's brother actually had the gaul to ask me to switch to a middle seat three rows back so that he could have my aisle bulkhead one, yeah right pal) and her infant child who throws his food on me for a couple of hours. The flight from Sacto was fun.

My flight is delayed, because no flight, from any airline, between ORD and EWR has ever, EVER departed and/or arrived on time. Its one of the select few routes in the world (I kid not) that is routinely scheduled to take about a half an hour longer than it does in reality, because the powers that be have come to accept the fact that this route will never fly on time. But United gets the closest, which I have proven through long and painful empirical investigation.

I will concede this airport one commendation - they have about 10 available power sockets scattered throughout an airport of a couple hundred gates that see many thousand people a day. So, if you are smart, and you know how to beat all of those people, and you don't mind sitting on the floor, you might just be blogging from a laptop that's actually being charged while you type, so that you can work on email on the flight. If you're not busy eating and drinking on it.

The traffic to this airport, from anywhere, is some of the worst on the planet. That doesn't have to do expressly with the airport itself, but its close enough to be added to the list. The rental car facilities (which, thank God I did not have to deal with today, as I am only connecting through hell on this trip), are pretty much on the other side of the city from the airport. They cart you back and forth in buses that run on no discernable schedule or for that matter any regular route. They just kind of randomly show up at random terminals. At random times.

The terminals are conveniently located about 3 miles apart from each other, for no apparent reason. Thankfully, however, there is no convenient transportation assistance offered beyond the endless underground tunnels which have been donned with a neon light show to make you forget temporarily that you want to claw your eyeballs out. And the people-mover (you know, the flat escalator type thing) on the left hand side between terminals B and C has been broken for the better part of 5 years now. The pallet of spare parts they keep near the wall at the end is collecting dust. More every week.

Here's what really bites me though: I actually can tell by the turns the plane makes from the gate whether or not we are headed to a runway or to a holding pad. I don't even need to listen to the ATC channel or look outside to see where we are going. I can feel it in the plane's movements.

These are the terrible things you come to know when you travel for work.

I hate O'hare.

I'm back in the states now.

This past weekend was Lesotho with Tracy and Paul, I'll get to retroblogging it in due chronological order, but suffice to say it was underwhelming. But OK.

Monday was work and then I drove down to the Joburg office in the afternoon for a one-on-one with the head of my particular service line, to discuss the potential of further projects in Africa following ADP. Suffice to say it was pretty cool.

Tuesday was work and then I ran home to grab a shower, grab my bags, and drive the whip to the airport. It served me well for the last couple months and I'll miss that little manual transmission 1.6 Polo - I think I got one good picture of it on the Lesotho trip. Got on a 7:20pm flight bound for Dakar, Senegal, then on to JFK. Suffice to say I was not looking forward to that.

Wednesday I arrived in NY and Dave picked me up. Got a jacket and some ski gear out of my storage unit, picked up some pastrami sandwiches at Sarge's, showered and changed at Dave's place, caught a cab to LGA and flew to Denver, where I struggled to stay awake til 9pm, after being up for 50 some hours. Suffice to say I was tired.

Today was work here at WV's Denver site. Good stuff. Same tomorrow. Then home.

Being back is a little weird. Suffice to say.

It is now time to talk about the snake.

Apparently the closest thing I attained to lasting lore at my alma mater was the snake. I like to claim that I did much else of significant merit while there (golfing off the roof at security guards, sprinting around Map in the snow, sans clothes, the spoon fiasco, etc.), however this seems to be the one that stuck - I recently had yet another current student there call me out on it.

So, without further adieu...

I was living on my own for a bit from somewhere around the time I was 16 til - a few months before I turned 18, shortly after which I left for college. During that period that I lived on my own, I acquired a ball python from a co-worker of mine. He was named Cope (pronounced ko-pee) - the snake, not the coworker - after the chewing tobacco, Copenhagen (said co-worker was a hick, the kind that many northern California natives frown on because they make Phil Jackson's sweeping generalizations somewhat accurate).

When I moved back home before leaving for college, mom did NOT like the idea of having a snake around, but I was able to keep it in the garage when I moved back in on the promise that he would not come in the house.

Well, one day I'm working on my car and I had him draped around my neck, and I literally lean inside the door to grab a tool from the laundry room. Providence would have it that mom pulls up right then and that was close enough to the snake being in the house. So he had to go to the barn until I left for school, and that's when I gave him to my buddy Ed, down the street, for safe keeping.

Ed keeps him through my fresh and soph years at the grove, and everything's going fine. But then the summer between my soph and junior years, Ed informs me he's moving to the bay area for school and can't keep him. I didn't want to get rid of him, but I had no means / funds to transport him back to Pennsylvania (I had the faint thought that it might not be a good idea / within the school rules to own a snake there, but it faded pretty quickly).

And then the Grinch had a wonderful terrible idea.

The night before I was due to go back to GCC, I picked up Cope from Ed, and took him home - kept him in a pillowcase with the top tied in a knot - he would just sleep coiled up in there. Mom would have killed me if she knew he spent the night in my room. The next morning the pillowcase goes delicately in the top of my backpack, and I deliberately dress in nothing containing any metal whatsoever - shorts, sweatpants, t-shirt, big hoodie, and flip flops.

This was the year that Robbie was coming to join me at the grove as a freshmen. Being Robbie, she packed way, WAY too much stuff, and when we get to the airport they inform her that one of her bags is too heavy. So we have to start unpacking all her vital stuff and mom starts trying to put some in my bags. Well mine get pretty full in a hurry, and then mom starts angling for the backpack, which has not left my back, as it has a sleeping snake in the top of it.

At this point we got into a bit of an...arguement... about...the situation at large. I really wasn't upset like I was feigning, but there was no way I could let mom kill my snake cramming robbie's crap on top of him, much less risk her finding him in my backpack and freaking out in the middle of a busy SMF airport.

So I proceed to STORM off to the bathroom, and that was pretty much that.

Of course, the bathroom was all part of the plan anyway. I head into a bathroom stall, take Cope out, wrap him around my waist (he'd often just chill there like a big thick belt, if he wasn't feeling super active), and tuck my shirt around him and into my pants. I put the hoodie on over the shirt, close up the backpack, come back out, settle things with the folks, and then Robbie and I head off to security.

I've got Cope wrapped around my waist the whole time. Put the backpack on the x-ray belt, breeze through the metal detector, pick up my bag, head back to the next bathroom I can find, pack Cope back up in the pillowcase / backpack, and head for the gate (this is all pre-9/11 mind you, probably wouldn't have tried this after).

Robbie and I proceed to fly cross-country with Cope sleeping at my feet. He spends the night with me at our uncle's place in Cleveland, then we arrive safe and sound at GCC where my first order of business was buying an acquarium.

That was how my junior year at the grove started, up there in that room in Alumni where I didn't really have a real roommate (another story, for another time), I had Cope instead. All the guys would come over once a month to watch me feed him, it was good times.

However, there were a few guys in particular who were NOT privvy to said feedings, namely the two Order of St. George (read: dorky goth) tools who lived in the room next to me, and generally ruined my otherwise serendipitous experience in Alumni. These guys were freaks, and they had their freak buddies up to do freaky stuff with them CONSTANTLY and it was usually in the middle of the night, when normal people (namely, me) were trying to sleep.

One evening I walked by their door and it was open, but all the lights were off in the room. I heard talking / giggling. I stood there for a minute trying to figure out what was going on, before I realized they were watching the Harker windows with binoculars, from the dark of their room. Harker was the girls dorm across the street.

Suffice to say they were just terrible to live next to. I couldn't stand these guys. I did not get on well with them.

Back to Cope.

A python's main goal in life is to find a way out of his acquarium and go explore for warm dark places to curl up and sleep, where no one will bother him. So of course one day about halfway through the semester he manages to break out and disappear. Now, these things can go almost anywhere, squeeze into almost any hole, find the most random places, etc. - so you have to be careful when searching, and you have to look EVERYWHERE.

So the first thing to do is make sure he's not in the room, which meant moving the entire room, piece by piece, into the hall. Check every drawer, between the clothes, inside the desk, check the mattresses for potential holes, look inside the couch lining, every box, the entertainment center - anything he could have burrowed into. It all goes into the hall once its deemed to be snake free.

Well, he's not in the room. The room is EMPTY and he's not there.

So its time to review alternatives. The ceiling tiles are too heavy for him and besides, I don't think he could have gotten up there, so the only options are a) he crawled through the heating vents to any of the other rooms on that side of alumni (one long vent ran the length of the building, 20 rooms or so, or b) he crawled through a hole in the floor into the ceiling of the first floor - the men's bathroom was just below me and the security office was next to that.

I move everything back into the room (I think this was around the time that the RD started to suspect weirdness was up in my room, but that's more related to the fact that I didn't have a real roommate, which as I already mentioned is another story for another time). I decide to check option b first, and that night I go down to the mens room on the first floor and climb up into the ceiling with a flashlight and make sure he's not there.

So that mean's its option a. He's in the vents or, more likely, in someone else's room on the hall.

I then let all the guys in the other rooms, everyone but the OSG tools, know that Cope's on the loose. They all know that he's harmless and they're more likely to hurt him than he is to hurt them, so they all are cool with it and look through their rooms (not to the same level that I did, but I encouraged as much thoroghness as possible).

Well, no one finds him, so that leaves one of two possibilities: he's either in the vents or the OSG room. There's simply no way I can tell these guys about him - we've gone to security over each other before (I would sometimes accidentally leave my stereo blasting in the early AM when they were just going to bed after they had kept me up all night, etc.). So i know they'll rat me out if I tell them, so I cross my fingers and hope for the best.

I figure cope will get thirsty in a week or so and come out looking for a drink. But snakes can go for a while without food / water (I only fed him monthly, for instance). About 3 weeks passed.

I kind of stopped thinking about it so regularly after a while. I had left a bowl of water in the middle of the acquarium in the middle of the room in hopes he would come back, but never saw him in the course of the three weeks, and the water didn't disappear.

Well, one night I'm doing laundry over by the new racquetball courts. The easiest way back to my room was through a long hallway above the old racquetball courts, which deposits one at the very far end of the long hall I lived on, from my room.

I get through the door with my arms full of clean laundry, and just about start down the long hallway towards my room when I realize there's about 20 people around it - everyone who's ever worked security for the school, Van Til's son (the head of security), a couple cops, and a few guys from the hall. Nobody's looking my way but then one of the guys from the hall sees me and gives me a very discreet wave-off, so I spin around and go into hiding for an hour or so.

When I finally sneak back into the hall, everything's settled down, so I head for the room of the guy who waved me off, before (he was with the Nu Lambs, I think). He and his roommate give me the scoop (this was at like 3 in the morning, mind you):

Apparently the OSG tool who stayed on the bottom bunk had been crawling into bed at an early hour (for him) and when he crawls in, he feels something at his feet. Throws back his covers, sees Cope. Jumps so hard he hits his head on the top bunk and either faints or knocks himself out. Falls on the floor.

Tool #2 sees this, and flees the room, screaming bloody murder, leaving his buddy behind to be eaten by the snake of doom.

He runs down to security, they come running up, help tool 1 out of the room, but no one will go near deathsnake.

The guys on the hall know he's harmless but nobody wants to admit knowing anything about the snake so they all just stand around saying nothing while security debates how best to kill Cope.

They end up calling all cars (cops, etc.) to weigh in on the decision, and fortunately one of the cops knows something about snakes and says it's a harmless one. That's about when someone indicated to security that there might be an acquarium in my room. So they go in there, find it, put him in it, take him down to the security office, and leave me a note, TYPED OUT (no joke) on a piece of scratch paper taped to my door.

Man I wish I still had that note. It said something about the owner of the acquarium needing to report to security immediately.

I check out security from the long end of the hall downstairs and there's still a bunch of people there waiting to see me show up, so I give them about another hour til things settle down (I did have laundry to fold, after all). Finally, I decide its time to face the music, head downstairs, and there's still 3 security guards and the smart cop.

They all inform me that yeah, I'm in HUGE trouble but its going to be up to the administration how to best deal with me, as stuff this big is out of their hands.

Then they start asking me all these questions like "why's he drinking so much water?" and "could he kill a small child?" etc..

I answer all the questions, fix the top of the acquarium for them, and then they keep him in the office that night and I have an 8am appointment with Toncic, the Dean of Men.

I head down to Crawford (where the administration offices were) in the morning thinking "That's it, I'm toast, they are sending me home. And then Mom and Dad will kill me."

I'm waiting out in the hall for my sentencing and T. Scott Gordon, this one guy who worked for the administration but I was never sure what exactly he did, who always had a mustache and a bowtie, walks by and looks at me grimly and just shakes his head in dismay over the low, low state I had sunk to.

Then I get called into Toncic's office. I'm waiting to hear the world "expelled" at any second. Toncic informs me its a very serious violation, and that this isn't going to be treated lightly. He then informs me I'm going to have to get rid of the snake immediately.

Then he starts in asking me questions about the snake, just like the security guys - how long i've had him, how big he can get, is he dangerous, etc...really curious about it.

Then he dismisses me to go work on getting rid of the snake.

I'm thinking, for about 3 seconds, that I actually might get out of this thing, as we head towards the door of his office.

And he opens it, and Nancy Paxton is standing there. I think her official title was Boss of the College. The college president was basically a front man for the whole thing, while she methodically pulled the strings that made the puppets of that school dance. She maintained (and boasted in) her 80% rate - fully that many students would someday marry a fellow student of the institution.

She asks me if I was the young man with the snake.

I reply that I am.

She tells me what a big deal this is, and I apologize and grovel, basically the same thing that just happened with AT in his office.

Then SHE starts asking me the same set of questions. AT is so excited at this point that he starts answering her questions FOR me. I'm standing there in dumb disbelief.

I'm not really clear on how the conversations ended but I do remember walking out of there with both of them kind of shaking their heads in a comical awe at me like I was some mildly-famous visitor to the college, or something.

So I walk back, find a friend of a friend over at Slippery Rock (the next college-town over) who was happy to have a free pet snake (he was worth a good deal of cash by that point), and drive it over there that afternoon.

And that was the last I heard about it from anyone in the administration. No fine, no suspension, no call to my parents, nothing. In fact, it got me on a first name basis with a bunch of them that I wasn't very close to before.

And that's pretty much the story of the snake.

(Oh and the OSG guys never gave me any crap again, EVER. That was the best part, in my book.)

Random stuff mostly related to being in Africa:

I'm going to Lesotho this weekend and am going to do the highest abseil in the entire world. So I can cross that off the list. See here.

South Africa has the highest number of HIV infections in the world. Something like 70% of the worlds' cases exist in sub-Saharan Africa. See here.

My hands are doing just fine, because its summer here, but even in the winter it stays warm enough and there's enough moisture in the air that I don't think I'd have a problem. I'm debating whether this is a sign, or not - but I like living somewhere that I don't have to worry about them.

Tipping is a bigger part of life here, there's more of it, but you tip less, amount-wise.

The food here is pretty good. Pizza rocks. Chinese sucks. Burgers are average. Bacon is different and is sub par so bacon cheeseburgers are right out. Salads are not big here as its a very meat-eating culture, so usually they're average at best. Steaks are pretty darn good, and the highest-end ones are cheap, in USD. They have most of the normal fruits and veggies I'm used to although my blueberries are now imported from Europe. They have Hass avocados (but they call them avos, here), so this officially qualifies as somewhere on the planet I could live long term. Cheeses are average, and the selection is much smaller. The water is fine, haven't had any problems with it. Oh and there's an organic strawberry yogurt from Woolies (Woolworth's) that I will miss very much when I leave.

Its still a pretty lonesome (which is a different word than lonely) experience here on the whole. I don't really have a lot of friends, and the nature of the work is such (typical of a consulting project) that I don't have a lot of evening time to make them. I've been trying to make them through church and so forth, but my social muscles have gone a little slack. Plus the whole introversion thing. I have more time to myself (be it working or otherwise) than is probably good for me.

The Rand (ZAR - their monetary unit) is back up to almost 6.80 against the USD. It was 7.30 when I got here, and dipped below 6.50 at points in the last 2 months. So now is a better time to go on vacation, but still could be better.

I am behind on my work.

Things that the sore on the inside of my cheek where I accidentally bit myself does not like: Italian dressing. Also, chips and guacamole, but its just had to learn to deal with that one.

There aren't a lot of cops here (and they wonder why there's a crime problem). So sometimes, when I stay late in the office, and there's not a lot of traffic out, I drive home like I'm in a Rally race. Which is pretty fun.

I've developed either a sinus infection or an allergy to something in the last 24 hours. I hope its the former and I hope it goes away soon.

I get to watch everybody wake up, so to speak, as daylight generally hits their part of the world and they log on to their various IM application of preference. When I get in, the London people usually show up about an hour after me. Around 2pm US the early birds from the Eastern US start to show up. Western US joins about 3 hours later, as 5pm here is 7am their time. I can also see who's generally up late in the US, because they're still online when I get in every morning.

It will be strange going back to the US and jumping straight into winter. Hasn't felt like Christmas here one little bit. Its hot. You don't have Christmas when its hot.

I'm gonna have a heck of a lot of video editing to catch up on when I get home.

We have a pretty cool 2-bed / 2-bath apartment here in Pretoria. By "we" I mean Paul, the consultant who joined the team recently, and myself. We're paying too much for the rent (by local standards) but its under our project budget so its not a big deal. Its furnished comfortably, although the general theme of the place is fairly minimalist, and has lots of nice deck space to sit out on (its a penthouse apartment). I'll try to get some pictures of it up. I miss the old place a little but the bed in this one is way more comfy, which is a big plus, although I'm struggling more to get up in the morning and run. Its right across the street from a shopping center, which is pretty key seeing as we share a car.

Dry cleaning is crazy expensive here.

(Retro- blogging) (Cape Town Part 1)

The weekend after Madikwe, Brian and I took off for Cape Town. I mis-booked my flight originally for a day later, so I had a minor fiasco at the airport securing a flight on another airline (SAA was less-than-not-very-helpful, thank you less-than-not-very-much). Then that other airline did something I was simply shocked by. I was near the front of the queue to board, since I was very early for that flight, seeing as I had arrived thinking I would be on another flight. So I was one of the lucky 30 people they asked to switch to another airplane (as this one was overbooked), "departing Joburg and arriving Cape Town" at the exact same time (right, like they have parallel runways here like its O'hare or something, I later realized). So I say "sure, why not" and they move 30 of us to the gate right next door. And then they board the other flight, the one I was originally on. And they don't board us. And they don't tell us anything. And our departure time comes and goes, and still they tell us nothing. A couple hours later they finally board us and fly us to CT, without so much as an apology from anyone. They lied to my face. Worst customer service experience ever.

But, the trip was not to be darkened by that nightmare. We got into Cape Town and drove to our first hotel on the waterfront in Simon's Town, near where we would go on a shark-breach viewing cruise early the next morning. Except the next morning I couldn't drag Brian out of his bed, even after pouring water on him (that pissed him right off!). So I drove to the docks alone, in the dark. Met up with the other folk there for the cruise and then met our boat operators, and then we were off. It was about a 20 minute ride out to Seal Island.

Seal Island is pretty much the only place in the entire world that you can go and watch the great whites actually breach (read: jump fully out of the water). Its due to the nature of the shallow waters around the island, the color on the bottom of the sea floor and the color of the sharks themselves, and the sheer numbers of endless seals that like to use this island when they're not off swimming around the world. There's anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand seals coming in from or going back out to sea from the island on a given day.

The way the sharks work is that they come straight from underneath their prey, and when they hit it (usually swimming along the surface), they are propelled by their momentum into the air, where they hang for a brief second before disappearing to the deep again, hopefully with a blubbery little snack in their maw.

I didn't really get many pictures of this trip because I was working the video camera more than anything, as there's a much better chance of catching a breaching on video than on the digital cam. I did get one breaching on tape, albeit far off, but it was truly awesome to see, as you can hear in the video when I start freaking out about it (when I get some time off at home this month, I'll try to get clips up on youtube).

We did a little trolling around the island with our fake carpet seal behind us but didn't get much response there, nor to the chum in the water later - had a couple big ones come by briefly but none that stayed around, so no one bothered going in the cage. After that we poked around the bay and saw some whales, and then back to port. Brian had woken up and did a later-departing whale-watching cruise, so I waited for him to get back and then we kind of off-handedly decided to drive down and see Cape Point.



The park was pretty interesting, I'd like to go back and spend a little more time at the beaches there some time. The point itself is actually pretty hilly, so once you leave your car in the parking lot and dodge a few baboons there, you start either the hike up or can take a tram half the way. We opted for the tram, for time's sake, which was a good idea - there's still a pretty significant hike out towards the point from the top of the tram. So yeah - this is me, at the end of the earth.





























We hiked back down (all the way), saw some more baboons, and then drove out of the park, stopping for Mr. Turtle, who was leisurely crossing the street. It was cool to see so many cars casually stopped for him, like this was what you did here, I wish I could have gotten a shot of the scene.


















Upon picking up our gear back at the hotel, we were off to Gansbaai - it was a beautiful couple of hours drive down there, mostly along the the water, although not with a clear view of it the whole time. Coming through one mountain pass, I was zipping along at probably 140kms and BAM there goes a baboon shooting across the road like a bullet. We missed him by no more than a meter. It was just like in the states where you almost hit a deer, except it was a freakin baboon - yep, you're in Africa.


We arrived late afternoon in Gansbaai, to another hotel on the waterfront, dropped off our stuff and headed into town to get some internet, so I could send off my status report for work, and then find dinner at a local bar/restaurant joint where we were clearly the only sore thumbs in the place. The food was terrible and we were smart enough to get a pizza to help tide us over back at the hotel. When we got back we decided to trek down onto the rocks by the water in the dark, and no sooner had we got out there than we saw a couple of sets of headlights careening around the bay towards us. Turned out to be local cops trying to catch poachers (of what we didn't find out), but they looked pretty relieved to see two stupid tourists with a small flashlight, and we were relieved to see them relieved. Hung out on the rocks a little after that, then back to the hotel, for night 2 of going to sleep to the sound of waves crashing, which is pretty much the second best thing ever.

The first best thing ever would happen the next morning, and that will be Cape Town, part deux.

Reading update time!

Recently finished (in no particular order):

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail - Bill Bryson. Bryson did an incredible job researching the subject and related subjects at large, and intertwined them cunningly with his story of adventures on the Appalachian Trail. I learned a lot about the trail and enjoyed the read, from his rather comical perspective. I'd never try the AT but perhaps the PCT someday...I think that would be a cool honeymoon, or perhaps fun to do with my brothers. Not both together, though. Anyhow, I'm going to try to add Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything to my list in the near future.

Blue Like Jazz - Donald Miller. This was, like many books, about what I expected of it. Not a completely amazing book, but it did make some good points, sometimes in interesting ways. Miller at times almost seemed to be trying a little too hard to be a spiritual "hipster," for lack of a better way of putting it - but it was still a pretty decent read. I like reading this genre because its close to some stuff I hope to write myself someday.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - A Low Culture Manifesto - Chuck Klosterman. Basically a semi-structured rant on pop culture in the US. Really funny at parts, a bit pedantic at others. Kind of like Bell, above, came off as trying really hard to not appear to be trying to be cool, so as to actually be cool...and basically just losing the reader in the process.

Metal Men: How Marc Rich Defrauded the Country, Evaded the Law, and Became the World's Most Sought-After Corporate Criminals - A. Craig Copetas. Rich basically single-handedly created the futures markets for things like oil and a million other things that come out of the earth - metals, ores, etc.. He avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the US and fled the country - Clinton pardoned him on his last day in office but Rich has never returned to the states - likely because acceptance of a presidential pardon implies guilt, and he's still afraid they'll figure out a way to get him. Rich also cunningly bought up the entire world's supply of boron at one point, allowing him to set the price on it, which he drove up - which had a significant affect on his mass ownership of other products dependent on a cheap supply of boron - although the book doesn't go into a lot of detail on that in particular. Interesting book for us businessy types.

Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality - Rob Bell. Similar to the BLJ genre, above - I liked it because I'd like to write from my own perspective on similar topics someday. Bell is a fantastically smart guy, however there were certain things (read: endless, long endnotes that should have just been included in the regular text) about his writing style that didn't quite jive with me. Also, not a lot of new ideas here, but some interesting additions / extrapolations to old ones.

Currently reading:
What is the What - Eggers;
Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck;
Teach Yourself Afrikaans - McDermott

(I can't read one book at a time, its a problem)
(There's probably 20-30 books that were read between these ones and the last time I updated my sidebar. FYI. I will probably never remember what they all were.)

The other day I had my normal salad for lunch but went with the French vinaigrette for a change in dressing (I'm mainly a bleu cheese man). Which jogged a funny memory.

I spent a year or two working in a Raley's supermarket mostly as a grocery-bagger / loader-into-your-car-er (I think the term was "Courtesy Clerk"). It was a weird point in my life for a lot of reasons, which is why a weird work environment like that probably suited me as well as it did. Had some psychotic management in the time I was there, ranging from derranged-but-pretty-funny to completely-control-freak-and-probably-has-human-heads-in-the-basement-at-home. This memory, however, focuses on the former.

He liked to play tricks on the new kids. Well, we all liked to play tricks on the new kids, but he just happened to be the first to play one on me. It was my first closing shift, so about ten til 11, he asks me to head out front and take down the flag. I'm new on the job and still responding with "yeah sure right away" and running off doggedly, so next thing I know, I'm outside looking for a flagpole. Which didn't exist. Come back inside and everyone's waiting for me to walk in with a huge grin on their face. Har.

Well this practice of jokery sounded like a fine thing to me, provided I wasn't the object of it, and so when the next kid got hired a couple weeks later and I was no longer the rookie, I promptly asked Steve, the shift manager, what the plan was. Steve said he saved this ones for the kids he thought were particularly naive, so I took it as somewhat of a complement that he hadn't pulled it on me. He called the new kid over, asked him to go get him a can of the dehydrated water on aisle 10, right next to the dehydrated milk. Poor girl.

Also fun was the supremely important shopping cart count. This one was usually doled out in a very urgent fashion, and key to its employ was doing so at an at least somewhat busy time, to make it more difficult. We probably had 200 of them or so, and the manager would instruct the rookie that district management was visiting later today and needed a detail report on store assets, including an accurate cart count. Picture this exasperated kid trying to walk through the store, counting all the moving ones, while trying to keep an eye on the door for ones leaving / coming out, then running outside to count all the ones in the parking lot...etc.. Good times.

My personal favorite, however, was the salad dressing shake. This was another one saved for those leaning towards the more gullible side of the scale. All you did was ask them to go make sure all the oil-based salad dressings were well-shaken. Don't worry about the cream-based ones. Thanks.

I can't tell you the endless hours of joy we had at some people's expense, as they stood there with a bottle in each hand, diligently shaking. Customers walking by, staring oddly but apprehensive to say anything to the kid they were assuming was a little "slow."

And that's what I think of when I have French vinaigrette.

I recently achieved (very) mild internet fame. Here's how.

I'm part of this "community weblog" that basically anyone can sign up for. Its called Metafilter, and for various reasons its one of my very favorite places on the entire internets. Essentially, the way the site works is that any user can post a link to anything on the internet, given a few specific rules (it hasn't been posted before, etc.). Each user can only post one link every 24 hours, and the idea is that people should only post "the best of the web" (BOTW). So its a great way to find out about cool stuff on the internet you might have otherwise missed.

Anyway, the rather brilliant creator of this site is an internet / community moderating genius, he's written all these (basically) white papers on the subject, and he's started a few sister sites, the most successful of them being AskMetafilter.

AskMeFi is a site where, again, given a set of rules, any user can post a question for the community to answer - i.e. anyone can answer. The idea behind it is called "hive mentality" - basically the assumption that one of the other bees out there has dealt with my problem / query before, and you can usually get your question answered (questions can be about anything, as long as they're within the rules - not chatty, hypothetical, etc.). The questions work differently than the main page in that a user only gets one per week, instead of one per day.

Anyhow, AskMeFi has been so successful that it (basically) put Google Answers out of business (and I'm pretty sure that's still the only publicly-released venture they've ever shut down). Its a great site, very useful, and quite interesting.

Enter me. Yesterday some guy posts a question asking "Where do police / security dogs go when they are retired?" So I posted this answer (which I will copy-paste here for your convenience):

I used to work in Macy's Department Stores corporate offices (as a buyer, not a dog handler), above the Herald Square store in Manhattan. As the store is incredibly large (about 10 floors of retail space), they at one point had a problem with either a) homeless people hiding in the store for a warm place to sleep at night, b) would-be thieves hiding in the store waiting to plunder and then hopefully break their way out of the store after hours, or c) both.

So, naturally, they built a dog kennel on the roof. They keep about 4-5 retired police dogs (all german shepherds) up there and use them nightly for patrolling the store, after hours. I had more than a couple late nights in the office when most of the lights were out and people gone home, and I had to remind myself again and again - "they don't patrol the office floors, dummy."

I once ran into a guy on the service elevator taking a cart with bags of dog food on it up to the roof, and, being a dog lover, I started chatting him up. Turns out that his is a pretty lonely job up there on the roof, just him and the dogs, and he was more than happy to tell me all about them and invite me up for a visit.

Every once in a while I'd be driving by the store on the weekend, usually on the 35th street side, and I would see one or two of the dogs out there on the street with a handler, in the middle of the day. I'm not sure if they were using them to give the appearance of security for the sake of deterrence, or perhaps to chase down run-away shop lifters, or just giving the dogs a change of scenery.

So, that's one place some of them retire to.

Annnnnnnnnnyway...the front page of Metafilter, which probably gets about 1-200,000 visits / day (I have no idea and that's a completely random guess, but there are currently almost 63,000 registered members, so you do the extrapolating), has this "sidebar" - a column off to the left. The moderators sometimes post something they think is cool there, and then it gets a lot of visibility / hits that it otherwise wouldn't have gotten. Getting anything you wrote/did posted to the side-bar is something of an internet-nerd honor, so to speak - everyone "favorites" (tags) your answer, asks follow-on questions, etc....

Yeah so back on the fifth of November (remember, remember), I got side-barred on Metafilter.

So, yes, I am an internet nerd. And now I am a (very) mildly famous one.

(File under: things I won't be telling mom about.)

U.S. Consulate General, Johannesburg
Warden Message – November 27, 2007

This warden message is being issued to remind Americans that crime levels tend to increase during the holiday season. With that in mind, please review and put into practice the following security precautions. Please consult the Consular Information Sheet for South Africa at www.travel.state.gov for additional precautions.

Crime:

Armed robbery of cash-in-transit vehicles and personnel occurs throughout South Africa, and peaks during December and January due to the increase in cash flow from commercial stores to banks. These attacks have also included incidents at major malls and in large grocery stores. Individuals should raise their level of situational awareness while in the vicinity of cash-in-transit vehicles, and to the extent possible avoid areas where they are located.

As an added note of caution, please be vigilant when using your Debit/Credit cards at ATMs. There have been several reports of ATM PIN thefts/ATM cloning schemes that result in multiple unauthorized cash withdrawals from personal accounts. If you need to use an ATM, first make sure no one is loitering in the area. Should someone offer to "help" you, leave the area immediately. Generally one should avoid using an ATM in a remote area.

Smash & Grabs/Carjacking:

Motorists are urged to be extremely cautious when approaching intersections and to hide bags, cell phones, and other valuables from view. Criminals are on the lookout for valuable items they can see through the car windows. Doors should be kept locked and windows rolled up at all times.

Crimes against property, such as carjacking, have often been accompanied by violent acts, including murder, when victims resist or are slow to respond to attackers’ demands. South Africa also has the highest incidence of reported rape in the world. Foreigners are not specifically targeted, but several have been the victims of rape. Victims of violent crime, especially rape, are strongly encouraged to seek immediate medical attention, including antiretroviral therapy against HIV/AIDS. Questions about how to receive such treatment should be directed to the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate.

In Public Areas:

When in public, remain vigilant for signs of trouble. Before entering any establishment, scan the area for suspicious activity to avoid walking into a robbery in progress. Remember where the nearest fire exits and other avenues of escape are located. Avoid walking or driving near cash in-transit vans since they are frequently targeted by heavily armed gangs. If you hear shots fired, immediately get down on the ground. Do not try to investigate or intervene.

Registration with U.S. Consulates General:

We strongly recommend that you register your presence in South Africa with the nearest U.S. Consulate General via our registration site located at https://travelregistration.state.gov/ibrs/ui/.

For the latest security information, Americans living and traveling abroad should regularly monitor the Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs Internet web site at http://travel.state.gov, where the current Worldwide Caution, Public Announcements, and Travel Warnings can be found. Up-to-date information on security can also be obtained by calling 1-888-407-4747 toll free in the U.S., or, for callers outside the U.S. and Canada, a regular toll line at 1-202-501-4444. These numbers are available from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday (except U.S. federal holidays).

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions:

The U.S. Embassy is located at 877 Pretorius Street, Arcadia in Pretoria, telephone (27-12) 431-4000 (from South Africa 012-431-4000), fax (27-12) 431-5504 (from South Africa 012-431-5504). The U.S. Embassy web site is http://usembassy.state.gov/pretoria/.

The U.S. Consulate General in Johannesburg provides consular services for Americans in the Pretoria area. The Consulate General in Johannesburg is located at No. 1 River Street (corner of River and Riviera Road), Killarney, Johannesburg telephone (27-11) 644-8000 (from South Africa 011-644-8000), fax (27-11) 646-6916 (from South Africa (011-646-6916). Its consular jurisdiction includes Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, NorthWest, and Free State provinces.

The Consulate General in Cape Town is located at the 2 Reddam Avenue, Westlake, Cape Town, telephone (27-21) 702-7300 (from South Africa 021-702-7300), fax (27-21) 702-7493 (from South Africa 021-702-7493). Its consular jurisdiction includes Western Cape, Eastern Cape, and Northern Cape provinces.

The Consulate General in Durban is located at the Old Mutual Building, 31st floor, 303 West Street, telephone (27-31) 305-7600 (from South Africa 031-305-7600), fax (27-31) 305-7691 (from South Africa 031-305-7691). Its consular jurisdiction includes KwaZulu-Natal Province.