The trouble is that we get far too much information pouring into our brains day after day. And at least 99 percent of it is of absolutely no use at all. Mostly what it does is provoke stress and anxiety and more often than not a feeling of helplessness in a world out about which we can do nothing.
How does it help us to make it through our days knowing, for instance, from Sky TV that there is a gridlock of traffic on the M5 into London, that yet another child has been abused and murdered in a quaint little English village, that more people have been blown to smithereens in a car bomb or by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan or Pakistan or for that matter to hear on a local radio stations in Cape Town that the traffic lights at an intersection of Umbilo Road and Gale Street in Durban are not working or, that male chimps prefer to have sex after eating meat.
And exactly what am I supposed to do after reading one of those a bright yellow stickers on cars that proclaim “Baby on Board.” Applaud!
Mark Twain, a former editor and author of Huckleberry Finn said that the invention of the telegraph signaled the end of news that mattered. It meant, he asserted that instead of receiving local news about community events the reading public would receive more useless information of absolutely no use to them at all.
I recall the direction given to me by the former editor of the Cape Times when I was appointed night editor of this newspaper more years ago than I care to recall.
“Your job, “ said Koos Viviers, “is to take all the news pouring into this building from all over the world, and filter it to deliver only what is important and relevant to the lives of the people of Cape Town, to help them make decisions about their day.”
Then there was no Sky TV, no internet, no websites, no blogging, no Twitter, no Facebook, no streaming, no cell phones and no nothing except newspapers, radio and local TV.
Then came the big switch on and now we are bombarded with useless information every second of every day. It pours in via e-mail, via cell phones, via the internet, via radio and via TV.
It’s got to the point that hardly anyone does any work anymore all we all do is e-mail, and SMS mostly useless information to one another day after day, at work and stare at TVs or DVD’s night after night at home.
How sad it is to drive past a DVD shop on yet another beautiful day in Cape Town where we are spoiled for choice of natural wonder, to see one family after another carrying a piles of rented DVDs to watch in curtained darkened rooms behind barbed wire and electric fences. A far better time is to be had, I believe, by switching it all off as often as possible and slipping out from under the rubble of useless information to enjoy a day in the sun.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Urban Edge Monday, July 06
Speeches may inspire people but they don’t get things done
There is a Buddhist writer named Ram Das, who in the flower-powered 60 and 70s wrote a best selling book, titled Be Here Now.
It was one of those books that seemed to be everywhere but was mostly in student digs on bookshelves made from sagging lengths of timber stretched precariously between wobbly piles of face bricks.
Also on those makeshift shelves were, more often than not, titles such as Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Hobbit, Herman Hess’s, Siddhartha, and probably a volume of poetry by Leonard Cohen, with pages yellowed by leftover sticks of burned incense.
Somewhere, on the floor probably, would be a copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue, which was like the internet in print.
It gave longhaired hippies food to fuel their impossible dreams of living an idyllic life in a wattle and daub shelter, growing vegetables, milking goats they knew by name and generally being at one with nature not to forget the universe. Live for today, be here now, tomorrow will never come.
This came to mind this week while reading Business Report columnist Nontyatambo Petros, who called on President Zuma eradicate poverty as he said he would in his State of the Nation Address.She cited hawkers as an example of a group of people who ought to be encouraged rather than harassed. If they were not vending she wrote, hawkers would be consigned to an abyss of joblessness, poverty and misery. (and probably resort to crime to survive.) She ended the column quoting Zuma. “For as long as there are South Africans who die from preventable disease; For as long as there are workers who struggle to feed their families and who battle to find work; For as long as there are communities without clean water, decent shelter or proper sanitation; For as long as there are rural dwellers unable to make a decent living from the land on which they live; For as long as there are women who are subjected to discrimination, exploitation or abuse; For as long as there are children who do not have the means nor the opportunity to receive a decent education; We shall not rest, and we dare not falter, in our drive to eradicate poverty. “
I am sure President Zuma meant every word of it. But nothing tangible will happen. The hawkers will continue to hawk and the harassers will continue to harass, the poor will continue to be poor and rural dwellers will not be able to make a decent living on the land on which they live.
Within hours of his speech, I bet, people were already faltering, and faltering all over the place in celebration of their political victory. But that’s beside the point.
There were equally uplifting moments in US president, Barak Obama’s inauguration speech. “Yes we can,” he said and “Yes we can,” replied the throng But they can’t really, can they? Nor will they ever.
Which gets me back to Ram Das. There is a great divide between what people on public platforms say and what actually happens. Speeches exist only at the time that they are spoken; they do not to get the work done. They are here and now things; speakers speak, we feel good, then we all go home and nothing really gets done. That’s the way it is. President Zuma will not eradicate poverty. Poor people who find a way to make a living will eradicate the poverty in which they live and no one else will. That’s the way it has been, that’s the way it is and that’s they way it will always be. At best all speeches can do is inspire. Even Churchill, one of the greatest speechmakers of all time, never fought anyone on any beach. The British soldiers inspired by his speech did.
By-the-way, I have never read that Zen motorcycle book. The pretentious title irritated me then and it still irritates now. I haven’t read the Hobbit either. But I was inspired by Siddhartha, and left melancholy reading Cohen, and I was there then but I am here now.
evelyn@hwb.co.za
Speeches may inspire people but they don’t get things done
There is a Buddhist writer named Ram Das, who in the flower-powered 60 and 70s wrote a best selling book, titled Be Here Now.
It was one of those books that seemed to be everywhere but was mostly in student digs on bookshelves made from sagging lengths of timber stretched precariously between wobbly piles of face bricks.
Also on those makeshift shelves were, more often than not, titles such as Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Hobbit, Herman Hess’s, Siddhartha, and probably a volume of poetry by Leonard Cohen, with pages yellowed by leftover sticks of burned incense.
Somewhere, on the floor probably, would be a copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue, which was like the internet in print.
It gave longhaired hippies food to fuel their impossible dreams of living an idyllic life in a wattle and daub shelter, growing vegetables, milking goats they knew by name and generally being at one with nature not to forget the universe. Live for today, be here now, tomorrow will never come.
This came to mind this week while reading Business Report columnist Nontyatambo Petros, who called on President Zuma eradicate poverty as he said he would in his State of the Nation Address.She cited hawkers as an example of a group of people who ought to be encouraged rather than harassed. If they were not vending she wrote, hawkers would be consigned to an abyss of joblessness, poverty and misery. (and probably resort to crime to survive.) She ended the column quoting Zuma. “For as long as there are South Africans who die from preventable disease; For as long as there are workers who struggle to feed their families and who battle to find work; For as long as there are communities without clean water, decent shelter or proper sanitation; For as long as there are rural dwellers unable to make a decent living from the land on which they live; For as long as there are women who are subjected to discrimination, exploitation or abuse; For as long as there are children who do not have the means nor the opportunity to receive a decent education; We shall not rest, and we dare not falter, in our drive to eradicate poverty. “
I am sure President Zuma meant every word of it. But nothing tangible will happen. The hawkers will continue to hawk and the harassers will continue to harass, the poor will continue to be poor and rural dwellers will not be able to make a decent living on the land on which they live.
Within hours of his speech, I bet, people were already faltering, and faltering all over the place in celebration of their political victory. But that’s beside the point.
There were equally uplifting moments in US president, Barak Obama’s inauguration speech. “Yes we can,” he said and “Yes we can,” replied the throng But they can’t really, can they? Nor will they ever.
Which gets me back to Ram Das. There is a great divide between what people on public platforms say and what actually happens. Speeches exist only at the time that they are spoken; they do not to get the work done. They are here and now things; speakers speak, we feel good, then we all go home and nothing really gets done. That’s the way it is. President Zuma will not eradicate poverty. Poor people who find a way to make a living will eradicate the poverty in which they live and no one else will. That’s the way it has been, that’s the way it is and that’s they way it will always be. At best all speeches can do is inspire. Even Churchill, one of the greatest speechmakers of all time, never fought anyone on any beach. The British soldiers inspired by his speech did.
By-the-way, I have never read that Zen motorcycle book. The pretentious title irritated me then and it still irritates now. I haven’t read the Hobbit either. But I was inspired by Siddhartha, and left melancholy reading Cohen, and I was there then but I am here now.
evelyn@hwb.co.za
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
I discover I’m a twit and that twitching isn’t for the birds
I really noticed the obsessive hoopla around birds for the first time a number of years ago in the mist on a wet and slippery path high above the Victoria Falls. I was with a group of journalists among whom was Kate Turkington, the charming and well-traveled journalist and broadcaster who is also a renowned twitterer.
The enthusiastic twits around her, pecked at every description she offered, keen to be recognised for their ability as twits — or is it for twitching? Whatever!
As Kate identified one little black or brown job (LBJ) after another they chirped in delightful recognition. Lagging behind the gaggle was the former editor of the Sunday Times Magazine. He glanced across at me, cocked an eyebrow at the twittering among the twitches and said with disdain: “I know penguins.” That summed it up for me.
But of course I knew birds. There were the Indian Mynahs (Acridotheres tristis) at the shopping centre in Broadway, Durban North were I grew up making such a racket in the trees that you could not hear yourself think.
Then there was a trip to an ostrich farm, so I got to know what an ostrich looked like and of course there were all those black birds in that scary Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds. From my longhair hippie days, before I became short, bald and slightly podgy I recall the depressive Leonard Cohen signing about being a bird on a wire, but he never named the kind of bird that he was nor wanted to be. He was just happy to be a bird on a wire like a drunk in a midnight choir trying in his way to be free.
I also know vultures. They were in that animated Disney version of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. Modeled on the Beatles, they were very funny wondering what to do with themselves not at all like the real vultures that I saw near Kruger Park who knew exactly what they were doing as they shredded what was left of a bambi that had been killed earlier that morning.
Of course I was also aware of the kind of “birds” pursued by Michael Caine in Alfie and I am pleased that I never stooped so low so as to refer to a girlfriend, even in my Brylcream days as “my goose.” But I digress. There were also seagulls those grey birds flapping around, pecking for scraps on the beach while we were bleaching our hair with peroxide, tuning our 50 cc buzzies for more speed or, on good surf days, hanging ten in the tubes off Battery Bbeach. Then I read a book about Cape Point, where the seagulls are apparently terns and there are so many of them that the authors of the book claimed that no stone in the area remains unterned.
I also know doves. I tried to kill some a few years ago by throwing stones at them when I was trying to get some sleep in the afternoons so I could survive night shift. Their constant cooing kept me wide awake. Eventually I strapped a sad-looking teddy bear to the chimney in the hope that the glare from his glass eye would scare them off.
But my indifference to birds has changed now thanks to a recent trip to the Richtersveld with friends Sara and John who know their birds. Now I too have a hunger to be a twit. So I page through bird books with the same intense interest that I once devoted to Scope in the hope that I too can get to the point where to see them is to know them
The enthusiastic twits around her, pecked at every description she offered, keen to be recognised for their ability as twits — or is it for twitching? Whatever!
As Kate identified one little black or brown job (LBJ) after another they chirped in delightful recognition. Lagging behind the gaggle was the former editor of the Sunday Times Magazine. He glanced across at me, cocked an eyebrow at the twittering among the twitches and said with disdain: “I know penguins.” That summed it up for me.
But of course I knew birds. There were the Indian Mynahs (Acridotheres tristis) at the shopping centre in Broadway, Durban North were I grew up making such a racket in the trees that you could not hear yourself think.
Then there was a trip to an ostrich farm, so I got to know what an ostrich looked like and of course there were all those black birds in that scary Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds. From my longhair hippie days, before I became short, bald and slightly podgy I recall the depressive Leonard Cohen signing about being a bird on a wire, but he never named the kind of bird that he was nor wanted to be. He was just happy to be a bird on a wire like a drunk in a midnight choir trying in his way to be free.
I also know vultures. They were in that animated Disney version of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. Modeled on the Beatles, they were very funny wondering what to do with themselves not at all like the real vultures that I saw near Kruger Park who knew exactly what they were doing as they shredded what was left of a bambi that had been killed earlier that morning.
Of course I was also aware of the kind of “birds” pursued by Michael Caine in Alfie and I am pleased that I never stooped so low so as to refer to a girlfriend, even in my Brylcream days as “my goose.” But I digress. There were also seagulls those grey birds flapping around, pecking for scraps on the beach while we were bleaching our hair with peroxide, tuning our 50 cc buzzies for more speed or, on good surf days, hanging ten in the tubes off Battery Bbeach. Then I read a book about Cape Point, where the seagulls are apparently terns and there are so many of them that the authors of the book claimed that no stone in the area remains unterned.
I also know doves. I tried to kill some a few years ago by throwing stones at them when I was trying to get some sleep in the afternoons so I could survive night shift. Their constant cooing kept me wide awake. Eventually I strapped a sad-looking teddy bear to the chimney in the hope that the glare from his glass eye would scare them off.
But my indifference to birds has changed now thanks to a recent trip to the Richtersveld with friends Sara and John who know their birds. Now I too have a hunger to be a twit. So I page through bird books with the same intense interest that I once devoted to Scope in the hope that I too can get to the point where to see them is to know them
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Seeing more police would help us not to fear the unseen
One day soon, I hope an anthropologist will look into life at the southern tip of this continent and explain the reasons for the undercurrent of violence that has come to permeate almost everything we do.
That study may show that contrary to walking a long road to freedom, we have stepped into lager where life is edged, to quote Hunter S Thompson, by fear and loathing.
This struck me (an appropriate pun I think) recently when I stopped, last week, on my way home late one afternoon to give two young hitchhikers a lift.
I don’t normally stop to give people lifts after reading so many horror stories of hitchhikers becoming hijackers. This fear was heightened some time ago when I stopped to give a young man standing at the foot of Ou Kaapse Weg a lift. He was going to Ocean View he said. Then he told me, on the most desolate stretch of road through Silvermine, that he was on his way home on parole after serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence for murder.
I was very happy when he asked me to stop at the Long Beach Mall to let him out.
Anyway, that was then and this is now, so last week when I saw a young couple running along the side of the road near UCT, I assumed they were late for an appointment, threw caution to the wind and stopped to help them on their a way. Not long after they had settled into my car the ear-ringed man in the passenger seat told me that they had just escaped from a notorious drug rehab centre in the north.
My hand dropped to the side of my seat, where I keep a wooden axe handle, just in case he decided to jab a knife in my ribs and relieve me of my car. Being hijacked once a lifetime is enough. But once I had listened to their story – over the thumping of my heart driving with one hand while the other held on to the axe handle – it appeared innocent enough. They were out for the weekend, fully intended to return and they turned out to be, well, peaceful. Although I was relieved when we arrived at their destination and I was able to travel on, unharmed.
After surviving two threatening thugs in my back garden, I venture out these days gingerly, eyes like a chameleon, scanning for tikked-out creepy crawlies slithering over the walls – especially after my neighbours woke at 3am a few weeks ago to find two men in their lounge. Now they have a home ring-fenced with barbed wire.
Yes, I am happy that the muggers, who attacked hikers at Silvermine where I go for relaxing walks, were arrested but I can’t really walk there again without constantly looking over my shoulder. And last weekend during a gap in the rain I walked nervously with Sara on a dirt road above Sandy Bay, until I saw other hikers walking on the road then felt safer.
What we don’t see here are lots of police everywhere. In the southern suburbs we see hundreds of them at Newlands when there is a game of rugby or cricket but otherwise none at all.
In Brazil or at least in Sao Paulo, Manaus and Rio, where I was recently they also used to have a lot of creepy crawlies preying left right and centre on frightened citizens. Now they don’t because there are police everywhere. Police on the beach, police on street corners, police standing outside the shops, police on buses police in cars. All of them steely eyed, stern and foreboding hands resting on the pistols holstered at their hips.
You’d be quite stupid, I imagine, to mug anyone in those cities without expecting to be caught and thrown in jail. Visible policing seems to work. I never got mugged once. Not that I missed be it. But I did notice my guard begin to drop, my sense of fear dissipates and I closed the eyes in the back of my head for a while. So I am not sure why we don’t do that here. Maybe we should play more sport on our street corners or games of rugby and cricket in our back yards. Then there’d be cops everywhere and we’d be safe.
That study may show that contrary to walking a long road to freedom, we have stepped into lager where life is edged, to quote Hunter S Thompson, by fear and loathing.
This struck me (an appropriate pun I think) recently when I stopped, last week, on my way home late one afternoon to give two young hitchhikers a lift.
I don’t normally stop to give people lifts after reading so many horror stories of hitchhikers becoming hijackers. This fear was heightened some time ago when I stopped to give a young man standing at the foot of Ou Kaapse Weg a lift. He was going to Ocean View he said. Then he told me, on the most desolate stretch of road through Silvermine, that he was on his way home on parole after serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence for murder.
I was very happy when he asked me to stop at the Long Beach Mall to let him out.
Anyway, that was then and this is now, so last week when I saw a young couple running along the side of the road near UCT, I assumed they were late for an appointment, threw caution to the wind and stopped to help them on their a way. Not long after they had settled into my car the ear-ringed man in the passenger seat told me that they had just escaped from a notorious drug rehab centre in the north.
My hand dropped to the side of my seat, where I keep a wooden axe handle, just in case he decided to jab a knife in my ribs and relieve me of my car. Being hijacked once a lifetime is enough. But once I had listened to their story – over the thumping of my heart driving with one hand while the other held on to the axe handle – it appeared innocent enough. They were out for the weekend, fully intended to return and they turned out to be, well, peaceful. Although I was relieved when we arrived at their destination and I was able to travel on, unharmed.
After surviving two threatening thugs in my back garden, I venture out these days gingerly, eyes like a chameleon, scanning for tikked-out creepy crawlies slithering over the walls – especially after my neighbours woke at 3am a few weeks ago to find two men in their lounge. Now they have a home ring-fenced with barbed wire.
Yes, I am happy that the muggers, who attacked hikers at Silvermine where I go for relaxing walks, were arrested but I can’t really walk there again without constantly looking over my shoulder. And last weekend during a gap in the rain I walked nervously with Sara on a dirt road above Sandy Bay, until I saw other hikers walking on the road then felt safer.
What we don’t see here are lots of police everywhere. In the southern suburbs we see hundreds of them at Newlands when there is a game of rugby or cricket but otherwise none at all.
In Brazil or at least in Sao Paulo, Manaus and Rio, where I was recently they also used to have a lot of creepy crawlies preying left right and centre on frightened citizens. Now they don’t because there are police everywhere. Police on the beach, police on street corners, police standing outside the shops, police on buses police in cars. All of them steely eyed, stern and foreboding hands resting on the pistols holstered at their hips.
You’d be quite stupid, I imagine, to mug anyone in those cities without expecting to be caught and thrown in jail. Visible policing seems to work. I never got mugged once. Not that I missed be it. But I did notice my guard begin to drop, my sense of fear dissipates and I closed the eyes in the back of my head for a while. So I am not sure why we don’t do that here. Maybe we should play more sport on our street corners or games of rugby and cricket in our back yards. Then there’d be cops everywhere and we’d be safe.
A classic and so much more fitting of Neil Diamond’s talent
Home Before Dark
Neil Diamond
Those people who have preferred to remain in the closet rather than tell the world that they actually like Neil Diamond can come out now, thanks to the amazing collection of songs by the man who gave us Hot August Night, and some of the most enduring anthems of the ‘60s.
Like he did for the late great Johnny Cash, with the American Recordings, Rick Rubin has taken Diamond by the scruff of his neck and wrung from him a CD full of songs which are good enough to put Diamond back at the top of the charts.
“No-one ever put me in a studio and asked me to sing the songs I want to,” Johnny Cash said of Rubin. This allowed Cash to deliver the best music he had ever recorded. Well, the same must be said of Diamond who in his liner notes describes the year of agony he went through to produce this album.
Track 12, Home before Dark is what the sticker on the CD promotes as the winning, chart-topping track, but I had difficulty getting past track one, If I Don’t See You Again.
This is such a great song, a wonderful love song in fact sung about a short relationship in the mould of the best Diamond has ever done from Sweet Caroline to I Am I Said, Holy Holy and any other Diamond hit you care to name. Diamond has a lot to thank Rick Rubin for.
This CD is a classic and so much more fitting of a song-writing man of Neil Diamond’s talent than that failure of a comeback attempt – ’12 Songs’ – released a year or so ago. Welcome back Mr Diamond. EJH
Neil Diamond
Those people who have preferred to remain in the closet rather than tell the world that they actually like Neil Diamond can come out now, thanks to the amazing collection of songs by the man who gave us Hot August Night, and some of the most enduring anthems of the ‘60s.
Like he did for the late great Johnny Cash, with the American Recordings, Rick Rubin has taken Diamond by the scruff of his neck and wrung from him a CD full of songs which are good enough to put Diamond back at the top of the charts.
“No-one ever put me in a studio and asked me to sing the songs I want to,” Johnny Cash said of Rubin. This allowed Cash to deliver the best music he had ever recorded. Well, the same must be said of Diamond who in his liner notes describes the year of agony he went through to produce this album.
Track 12, Home before Dark is what the sticker on the CD promotes as the winning, chart-topping track, but I had difficulty getting past track one, If I Don’t See You Again.
This is such a great song, a wonderful love song in fact sung about a short relationship in the mould of the best Diamond has ever done from Sweet Caroline to I Am I Said, Holy Holy and any other Diamond hit you care to name. Diamond has a lot to thank Rick Rubin for.
This CD is a classic and so much more fitting of a song-writing man of Neil Diamond’s talent than that failure of a comeback attempt – ’12 Songs’ – released a year or so ago. Welcome back Mr Diamond. EJH
I didn’t wrestle an anaconda, but I turned the tables on a piranha
Manaus, Brazil: As it turned out, I ate a piranha and did not get eaten by one of those nasty little fish with the sharp teeth, as I feared when I planned to swim in the Amazon.
Here piranhas are as common as guppies. They suffer, it appears, mostly from a bad press thanks to visit to the region by a former US President and an early James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, in which one of the baddies was shredded after being thrown into a pool of hungry piranha.
According to Wikipedia, to guarantee a good show for Roosevelt during his visit to Brazil, local fishermen blocked off a portion of the Amazon with nets and dumped hordes of starving piranhas into the pool that had thus been created.
Then they sliced up a cow and tossed it into the river, setting off a wild feeding frenzy and a leaving a skeleton in their wake. Roosevelt declared the fish evil, and the journalists traveling with him spread the word.
Pira-nia, as Amazonians pronounce the name, do not generally eat people except when they are really, really hungry. Otherwise they swim around much like other fish, underwater not bothering anyone.
What was more worrying to me were huge iguanas. They kept dropping off the trees and plopping into the water around and about the canoe from which I was fishing. I am not into reptiles at the best of times so this was rather disconcerting; piranha below and iguanas above.
I did not swim in the river where I caught the piranha, as they were obviously hungry and taking what bait they could. So once I had dropped my line into the water and caught my fish I was paddled in my canoe to a nearby riverbank in a completely different section of the river for a swim.
The day before our party of nine had been taken deep into an estuary, our canoe had been run aground and we had been marched off the front end into the Amazon rainforest.
I was not too happy seeing the canoe disappear back downstream while our forlorn group, dripping wet in the tropical rain, stood on the bank, as our guide later described - like wet chickens.
Then suddenly we were alone in the rainforest, nine gringos, one Peruvian and one Amazonian with a nasty looking panga in his hand. I stood there recalling scenes from a film I saw about a crazy Brazilian slicing and dicing tourists to stock his trade in body parts.
But our guide was quite friendly. He taught me how to make poisoned arrows and shoot them from a blowpipe and how to tempt tarantula spiders out of their holes in the ground while I wondered why I would want to that.
I am not particularly fond of anything with lots of hairy legs that creeps and crawls, particularly when I am in the Amazon rainforest on the lookout for Anacondas three days away by boat from help at the Amazonian capital of Manaus.
Not that being in Manaus would have helped. It’s just the kind of Grahame Greene place from which people disappear. It feels like the end of the earth, from where, if you took one more step, you might plunge off the edge of the world; the kind of place you get to when you are on the run from the Federales and there is nowhere left to hide.
Mind you, it was there where I saw my first piranha — at the fishmarket where they were piled in sharp edged little pyramids. Little did I know that a week later I would be eating one, grilled! And what a bony little fish they are; mostly skeleton in fact which was all that was left of the piranha on my plate after it provided a meal for me.
Here piranhas are as common as guppies. They suffer, it appears, mostly from a bad press thanks to visit to the region by a former US President and an early James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, in which one of the baddies was shredded after being thrown into a pool of hungry piranha.
According to Wikipedia, to guarantee a good show for Roosevelt during his visit to Brazil, local fishermen blocked off a portion of the Amazon with nets and dumped hordes of starving piranhas into the pool that had thus been created.
Then they sliced up a cow and tossed it into the river, setting off a wild feeding frenzy and a leaving a skeleton in their wake. Roosevelt declared the fish evil, and the journalists traveling with him spread the word.
Pira-nia, as Amazonians pronounce the name, do not generally eat people except when they are really, really hungry. Otherwise they swim around much like other fish, underwater not bothering anyone.
What was more worrying to me were huge iguanas. They kept dropping off the trees and plopping into the water around and about the canoe from which I was fishing. I am not into reptiles at the best of times so this was rather disconcerting; piranha below and iguanas above.
I did not swim in the river where I caught the piranha, as they were obviously hungry and taking what bait they could. So once I had dropped my line into the water and caught my fish I was paddled in my canoe to a nearby riverbank in a completely different section of the river for a swim.
The day before our party of nine had been taken deep into an estuary, our canoe had been run aground and we had been marched off the front end into the Amazon rainforest.
I was not too happy seeing the canoe disappear back downstream while our forlorn group, dripping wet in the tropical rain, stood on the bank, as our guide later described - like wet chickens.
Then suddenly we were alone in the rainforest, nine gringos, one Peruvian and one Amazonian with a nasty looking panga in his hand. I stood there recalling scenes from a film I saw about a crazy Brazilian slicing and dicing tourists to stock his trade in body parts.
But our guide was quite friendly. He taught me how to make poisoned arrows and shoot them from a blowpipe and how to tempt tarantula spiders out of their holes in the ground while I wondered why I would want to that.
I am not particularly fond of anything with lots of hairy legs that creeps and crawls, particularly when I am in the Amazon rainforest on the lookout for Anacondas three days away by boat from help at the Amazonian capital of Manaus.
Not that being in Manaus would have helped. It’s just the kind of Grahame Greene place from which people disappear. It feels like the end of the earth, from where, if you took one more step, you might plunge off the edge of the world; the kind of place you get to when you are on the run from the Federales and there is nowhere left to hide.
Mind you, it was there where I saw my first piranha — at the fishmarket where they were piled in sharp edged little pyramids. Little did I know that a week later I would be eating one, grilled! And what a bony little fish they are; mostly skeleton in fact which was all that was left of the piranha on my plate after it provided a meal for me.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Alternative network allows cell phone users to pooosh down costs by half.
Cell phone users are in for a treat with free e-mail, lower airtime bills, instant messaging and improved access to chatrooms, thanks to new services being offered by a leading alternative network.
pooosh, an already trusted European concept, used globally, is downloaded free using the internet onto your cellphone. This mobile service, in competition with other networks, allows users to buy pooosh airtime at lower rates.
“With pooosh you’ll find your monthly cellphone bill plummets” said Don Tredoux, CEO of pooosh Cellular (Pty) Ltd.
Once the user has downloaded and registered their pooosh account, the user is given free, unlimited access to a personalised pooosh email address, instant messaging, and access to chat rooms. Apart from all these free functions pooosh also offers cheaper rates on sms’s, international calls, and a unique voice chat feature.
Another important feature is that pooosh offers parental control. “Safety for our users is one of our top priorities and we empower parents with a parental control feature on chatrooms to supervise what their children have access to when using the application” said Tredoux.
Starting a pooosh community by getting friends to download the application allows users to stretch their budget and cut back on traditional airtime.
“Calls to about eight of your friends or family make up 80% of your phone bill. Once they are communicating using pooosh you’ll see the difference in your phone bill” said Tredoux.
pooosh airtime is available at Shoprite and Checkers and will be available from January 2009 at Edgars, Jet and the rest of the stores within the Edcon group.
To start poooshing go to www.pooosh.mobi to download the free application and follow the instructions to register.
pooosh, an already trusted European concept, used globally, is downloaded free using the internet onto your cellphone. This mobile service, in competition with other networks, allows users to buy pooosh airtime at lower rates.
“With pooosh you’ll find your monthly cellphone bill plummets” said Don Tredoux, CEO of pooosh Cellular (Pty) Ltd.
Once the user has downloaded and registered their pooosh account, the user is given free, unlimited access to a personalised pooosh email address, instant messaging, and access to chat rooms. Apart from all these free functions pooosh also offers cheaper rates on sms’s, international calls, and a unique voice chat feature.
Another important feature is that pooosh offers parental control. “Safety for our users is one of our top priorities and we empower parents with a parental control feature on chatrooms to supervise what their children have access to when using the application” said Tredoux.
Starting a pooosh community by getting friends to download the application allows users to stretch their budget and cut back on traditional airtime.
“Calls to about eight of your friends or family make up 80% of your phone bill. Once they are communicating using pooosh you’ll see the difference in your phone bill” said Tredoux.
pooosh airtime is available at Shoprite and Checkers and will be available from January 2009 at Edgars, Jet and the rest of the stores within the Edcon group.
To start poooshing go to www.pooosh.mobi to download the free application and follow the instructions to register.
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