SA Cycle Champions in Bloem

South Africa’s best cyclists converge on the Free State, but the result is a mixed bag

It is obvious that the local officials went to a lot of trouble to pull off a successful event. Today, during the event, I noticed officials at various intersections verbally informing motorists and cyclists how to avoid each other.

On my way home on the eve of the road championships, I noticed that some of the turns on the cycle course were far too dangerous to include in such an important race. A good example is the cruel left hander into Olympus.

I also expected carnage on Sunday as traffic would have converged on the tight turn at the Berg en Dal church (at the roundabout on the lower end of Albrecht street). The officials can be credited with closing off the initial slipway turn into Olympus, and for making arrangements with the church in Albrecht street to have no morning services.

Even so, I would have liked to have seen that particular circle and several other roads, like Lucas Steyn, closed off altogether. When I drove up I encountered a train of cyclists in the right hand lane and only saw a cyclist at the last moment riding just off the centre of the road. Later in the day I saw that some cyclists were going up the left lane, others the right lane, some up the centre, with the result that no one knew – neither cyclists nor drivers – where they ought to have been.

While Sunday presented sunny if somewhat blustery conditions, the weather was less benign for the rest of the championship. The same can be said for some of the officials. What is noteworthy is David George’s incredible victory – his fourth – in the elite men’s individual time trial. George finished in a time of 50 minutes, 26 seconds, just 8 seconds ahead of James Perry, with Nick White third in 51:39. Peculiarly, George was asked to start first when the convention in cycling is that the slowest rider leaves first. This is the standard applied in all races, including the prologue and time trials at the Tour de France.

It has to be said as well that for a rider who is hoping to win, he really needs to ride behind at least one other rider. The rider in front acts as a carrot, an incentive. To ride out first will almost certainly impact on a rider’s motivational levels on the road. And everybody knows the time trial in incredibly tough of the body.

The time trial can also be excruciatingly difficult in terms of mental endurance as well. So, to make matters worse, just before the halfway turnaround point, a flag waving official indicated to David George to turn around, and he did so, and began the chase back. Fortunately George realized almost immediately it must have been an error, he slowed down again and turned, and then turned around at the proper co-ordinate. It is difficult to convey the agony of such a mistake, when the rider is making a supreme effort to make every second count on the bike, and riding to the limits of his ability.

The reason for the blunder is not certain, but Dave Bellairs, second in charge of FSA apologized to David George for the mistake. It is a credit to George that he was still able to win, even if by a narrow margin of just 8 seconds. One wonders what would have happened if James Perry had beaten David George, or if George had turned where he was told to turn and possibly disqualified as a result.

In an earlier article (Free State Cycling A Shambles) I alluded to this tendency of local officials to daydream on the job. In a local championship event I was allowed to ride 10km beyond the 100km route’s turnaround beacon, and then turned around eventually having found no one beyond Dewetsdorp despite many orange beacons further along the route. That said, the volunteers were wide awake and competent that I saw today.

Meanwhile Ronel van Wyk achieved a milestone by reaching a tally of 300 cycling victories by winning the elite ladies time trial. Today I saw a banner tied to a tree in Heuwilsig with words to this effect: Come on Ronel, #301.

The Road championships presented the elites with a very arduous 197km of riding over a hilly course, consisting of innumerable 16.4km laps. The route was very spectator friendly, but I counted only a few handfuls of supporters here and there, and many of these people seemed from out of town anyway. Bloemfontein is one of those cities where you can hold an event like SA Championships in the middle of suburbia, and the local residents wouldn’t realize it.

In Port Elizabeth last year I also noticed very few spectators, but then it was held beyond the cities limits. At the very least I would like to anticipate more fun riders taking an interest in these events, but I think the local cycling bodies and the City of Bloemfontein needs to market the event a lot more in future. It is bizarre that the OFM Classic (in November) for example appeared to have a much steadier support base, and a sort of carnival atmosphere, than SA Cycling Championships. Anywhere else, London, Auckland, Sydney, Munich, Boulder, perhaps even Cape Town, the streets would have been filled with flocks of curious people. But I’m sure those cities would also promote the event, both to locals and those coming from out of town.

I think what’s needed is a more inclusive approach, not only towards cyclists, but also towards the public. Such a big event should also be used to convey the message that cyclists would really like the co-operation and friendship of motorists, rather than an aggressive facing off. Perhaps the public could be invited to test drive certain vehicles in the train behind the riders and team car, just to include the public more.

Conceivably it’s no accident that the public more or less ignores cycling events. Because they don’t understand the sport, and are not invited to understand it (through information-rich articles or inserts in the weekend newspapers, and festivities surrounding the event) the response is indifference. Our local newspaper (as far as I know) didn’t publish a timetable for the various races, so that’s something else to consider.

These are important suggestions, because we have to notice what impact our ideas, our actions have on other people with different ideas. I noticed a driver this morning bellowing at an official, and red faced, and obviously very irritated that he had to share the road the whole day with a lot of cyclists. But then if route markers are planted on your lawn without your permission, or you’re driving and suddenly find both sides of a double lane road blocked off, shuddering with red and white tape, without anticipating this, it is likely to irritate. Even so, I feel it is a shame.

To remedy this I feel we need some innovative ideas on how to solve this obvious disconnect. In my view communication, and in particular various forms of marketing, even branding the sport of cycling, will do a lot to improve the image and receptivity towards it. And I think it needs to be received better in order to grow. In France cycling is a national pastime, celebrated with wine, and picnics, and outings into the country. Here it is still perceived as a nuisance. But then South Africa, and here in the Free State in particular, we are still a long way away from France.
For all the time trial and road championship results, visit www.cyclesa.com

Predictions for The Road to a Home

We’re making our home into a gallows

During the Ice Ages, measured over hundreds of thousands of years, the levels of CO2 fluctuated in our atmosphere from 170-280 parts per million. In 2005, the warmest year on record at the time, the Earth’s CO2 levels stood at 370. This represented the top of an anomalous near vertical line on the graph, and since 2005, this figure has continued to increase at an alarming rate.



If the ten warmest years on record mean one thing it is this: the next ten years will also be the ten warmest, with each subsequent year likely to be somewhat warmer than the last. The alarm bells begin to chime when we consider the possibility of a second decade of continuous increases in global warming, possibly even a third and fourth and fifth. In such a scenario, the weather will be an adversary capable of substantially altering the number and quality of the human population around the planet.

One factor provides a measure – albeit an indirect one – of the impact of climate change. This is through the impact of food prices. Crops have become more difficult to sustain. Large numbers of livestock and poultry are kept alive at greater cost, and with greater and greater difficulty. And right now, we’re at the beginning of an inflationary trend (based on food prices) not just in your country, but throughout the world. We’re also seeing the prices of many other inputs rising: from commodities to energy. Everything is going to be more expensive in the future, with climate change driving many of our costs. We will experience what is called a supply crunch in many aspects of our lives. The reason for this is simple: too many people, too many users straining the capacity of a finite system.



When that system breaks, we will see all our innovative efficiencies bounce back as gross inefficiencies. We experience this whenever our car breaks down, or our phone doesn’t work, or the lights go out. Our level of helplessness can be quite chronic. And so the casualties will be untold numbers of those users that caused the systemic failure. The crash will be similar to the conventional use of the word to describe motor vehicle accidents and the sudden failure of a computer program to respond. It will manifest essentially as a sudden and unexpected Disconnect – but from major systems, from food, to energy, to money.

A crash implies the immediate ceasing of a system to function. Few, if any people, anticipate an abrupt change, not for the climate, or for a stock market slaughter, or anything else. But then few people even ponder the world beyond the pursuit of a job, a salary, or the next entertainment. Our economies are based to a large extent on stock markets, but stock markets – while somewhat delusional and disconnected from actual value – are tethered to some bottom line realities, even if it is just sentiment. When the market has an epiphany about the world, when it realizes what is already self-evident, the bubble that is sustainable growth will simply burst: massive quantities of wealth will be wiped out, as is the natural order of things, and will portend similar systemic crashes in other areas.

It is a terrible realization to wake up in the morning and discover that the vague impulses of disaster flitting through one’s brain are not a dream. That yesterday’s reality is real for today, and will remain with us for the rest of our lives.

But we do not awaken in the morning, wherever we are in the world, wary of a second 9/11, wary that every Northern Hemisphere summer may bring about the destruction of another major city by a Category 5 Storm. We have absorbed the horrors of AIDS, the threat of H5N1, and the symptoms of already chronic climate change, and continued about our daily business. We have breakfast and go out to our jobs as though we expect the world we live in to be there – a pleasant home for human beings – for the next 10 years. If you think about it, you probably expect the planet to sustain us at least for the course of your lifetime. You believe you will see your children going to school, and graduating. Do you know that that is no longer a certainty we can take for granted.

If we consider chronic climate change, and look at what Al Gore touched upon in his excellent presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, we have to acknowledge that we are already very very deep, and very very far, into unchartered territory. CO2 levels are currently far beyond record levels. There’s no surprise there, but the record goes further than 10 000 years, beyond the last ice age and the ice age before that, beyond 100 000 years ago, beyond 400 000 years ago. As far back as we can see based on ice core samples, we are not merely double these extreme levels, but treble them, and if we could continue the way we are to 2050 we would see CO2 levels ascend vertically on a graph to around 5 times the highest levels ever recorded.

From far away the graph resembles the letter T lying on its head, with the right hand side chopped away. The average is maintained, is stable, for hundreds of thousands of years, but when we reach our time, and our generation, this millennium, the spike breaks away from the average and rockets into a vertical ascent. It is not irrational to look at such a graph that is collated from a timeline of data that is at least 50 000 times longer than the lifecycle of that creature –the creature responsible for these chronic changes – (a human being), and be humbled, reduced and even frightened by what we have achieved. We are now experiencing the rapid adjustment of the Earth’s temperature to record CO2 levels, and year after year the averages are going up, new records are set, so that each year becomes the warmest on record. If one extrapolates that data, it should be already obvious that conditions will continue on their trend through 2008, 2009, 2010… What can we expect the weather to be like 10 years from now, in 2017, or five years after that, in 2022?

In just these 3 years that lie ahead of us, we need to brace ourselves for extreme natural events. We cannot predict what they will be, but we can be sure they will be catastrophic. We know to expect more powerful city destroying hurricanes all over the world. We know we can expect more of the kind of heat waves and floods we have seen, and pestilences and insect plagues in our immediate future. And we know while the world population climbs towards 7 billion, food shortages and water scarcity will begin to manifest in a major way. Food shortages will become normal in our lifetime. But all of this will be exacerbated by the reversal of a condition that has allowed us to live so comfortably for little more than a 100 years. It has been in the era of cheap oil that we have been able to redistribute so much CO2 into the atmosphere. In fact, it is courtesy of oil and other fossil fuels that took millions of years to create, that man was able to unbind that energy in just 2 generations. Our efficiency at doing so has jolted our atmosphere, and we have yet to see what electric responses from the sky are in store for us. But it is abundantly clear that a Reckoning is imminent – the response of the world to our burning already half of an entire planet’s fossil fuels – resources of carbon that took millennia of living creatures on Earth to deposit - in a blink of geological time, we have sparked these liquid-petrified forests into smoke. The anomaly that allowed this to happen on such a grand scale is us, and many of us holding the keys to machines that burn barrels of the stuff every single day.

Mankind has maintained a fairly stable population on the planet for a long period, and just as the graph for human population spikes upward in the last 200 years to reach a figure several times the average (from less than 1 to around 6 billion), so CO2 has followed the same trend, as each human being has become a user of resources, but also a fire starter, a user and converter whose life is based on accelerating this process of conversion – of sun stored energy fired into the atmosphere as a warm gas.

In plain language then, if the summertime in conditions in countries as far apart as South Africa and South Korea are equally sweltering, and frankly, unbearable, what can we expect year upon year upon year? The reason I ask these questions is because I found myself in both these countries thinking: “If it gets just a few degrees warmer than this, people are going to start dying here.”

Naturally, those devices we might want to rely on to defend ourselves against the weather (air conditioners for summer, any heating devices for winter) simply produce additional heat, and consume additional energy resources when we simply cannot afford to be consuming any more than we are.

Can we realistically imagine the Earth as a place for our children 10 years from now? No. Climate change is one argument, but the use of nuclear weapons in our lifetimes is virtually certain. The odds favour the likelihood of a nuclear event in the not too distant future. Now it becomes clear the level of insanity that has taken over our species. When people everywhere should be making radical changes to their lives, in fact they are not. In the back of our minds we are aware of side issues, but perhaps we put it in a box marked ‘To Do’, but we continue ‘To Do Something Else’ in the moments we have available to ourselves. Perhaps we feel that nuclear weapons don’t exist in the real world, only in Hollywood movies, and we’ll always have a James Bond to save us at the last minute. No.

If you are reading this, you should be aware that just weather conditions alone will become very uncomfortable for you and those around you in your lifetime. It has already started, and 2008 will see hotter summers wherever you are, hotter than we’ll see this year, and 2009 will be even hotter still. We’ll report on the changes happening, rather as commentators report on a football match. Our dismay and discomfort will turn to horror. We can do an analysis after various spectacular moves, having seen breathtaking demos of this planet’s atmospheric power. We can make predictions, but essentially, we will be bracing ourselves for a score. In the same way that we score the number of hurricanes in a year, or note record temperatures or levels of rainfall, so we will get into the habit of watching a scorecard.
What we will experience though is no half time whistle, no end time whistle, in fact no reprieve at all. Probably, conditions will be worsening even into third and fourth and fifth generations. If you imagine the world will be something like it is today, wake up. The world will be entirely altered – ice caps will have disappeared, ski-resorts will be abandoned on mountains, massive relocations will have taken place. And dislocated crowds, unused to inconvenience, will test the tolerance of local communities, as we saw with the exculpated residents of New Orleans. It is when this dislocation leads to competition of limited resources – and weather chaos will eventually cause massive crop failures – that wars will erupt.

In the near future we will experience such a chaos of converging catastrophe that having a war – humans fighting humans – will be particularly ludicrous. Also, in our lifetimes, we will see the end of religion: Either a savior of the world will pluck the saved in a rapture of souls, or gravity will continue to exert itself on all people equally (whatever they believe), and we will all remain here to deal with the consequences of our actions. But we will see religion finally tested on the rock and fire of a furious planet and our own desire to live will be weathered and broken and beaten back. A fraction of the people alive today will survive, and in conditions of spiraling austerity.

We are on a road, whether we like it or not, to the new home we have fashioned for ourselves.
It is completely rational to suggest that there is nothing people can do now; irrevocable damage has already been perpetrated on the planet’s weather systems. These still need to be completely borne out. So we have these options:
Either party like there is no tomorrow, or change your life completely, and immediately.
Choosing the latter will mean quitting your job for something more meaningful and practical, not having children, no longer buying or driving in cars (or flying), eating a fraction of meat (based on human dental and digestive design) and no longer participating in the buying or building of houses. What is insanity is to continue living the way we do, as though we anticipate another 5 years of the same, perhaps 10, or even 20. It’s not going to happen.

We will soon see the global weather anomaly turning to calamity, and then:
The End of Entertainment. Nuclear War. The End of Religion. There will be hunger and starvation, and fire in the sky. The sun will burn the Earth, then flood it, then freeze it in a combination that will test the resilience of all living things to breaking (extinction) point.

In the trilogy the Lord of the Rings, darkness had to be faced. But they had the assurance at least that they could face their fate in a world that had, at least, reasonably fair weather. We won’t have that. Against the backdrop of ever worsening weather chaos, floods, droughts and storms, we will have to find a way to live in the world. Our lives, already unstable, from here on out will become even more unbalanced. What remains is a slippery road and at the end of it a home underwater with its roof on fire. And somewhere on that road we will have to find the ring. We’ll need to cast the ring into Mount Doom; it is the ring that binds us all. A ring of voracious greed. Before that step though, we will reap the whirlwind; we will be consumed as a natural balancing consequence of our mad consumption, and the men of the world will be chopped down like wheat.

And tomorrow morning, whether we do something or nothing, the same slippery road to the sunken, burning house, will beckon once again. The light over our road is fading. And yet, it is a journey we must take. The more we delay taking the road to a home, and a home worth having, the fewer choices we will have at the end of the day.

SA’s cyclists in Bloemfontein this weekend

As I was about to step into our offices today, I noticed a car on Nelson Mandela drive hauling a bunch of shiny Cervelo bicycle frames. It’s that time of year again, when the best cyclists in the country go head to head first in Time Trial tussles, and then two days later, over several up and down laps in the Road Championships.

The field this year is the biggest in years. But SA’s this year takes place against a background of controversy too. 2007 is also the first year that CSA plans to make their licenses compulsory for all fun rides. This means that riders who turn up for races now have to join a club first, pay their fees there, and then make applications through these organs for a CSA license. Many cyclists are unhappy with this level of control.

For the full story click on the title of this post.

VET MEN 35-39 (20km)

PLACE RIDER NAME PROVINCE RUN TIME OFF LEADER

1 654 PHEIFFER LUKE WP 00:27:06.8 00:00:00.0

2 660 VAN GELDER DONOVAN KZN 00:27:08.2 00:00:01.4

3 656 PRITCHARD CHARLES CG 00:27:09.5 00:00:02.7

4 650 MOOLMAN WERNER KZN 00:27:10.9 00:00:04.1

5 667 LABUSCHAGNE JOHAN CG 00:27:31.5 00:00:24.7

6 668 KLOPPER KOOS GN 00:27:44.6 00:00:37.8

7 666 WILLIAMS LEE ANDREW CG 00:27:47.4 00:00:40.6

8 655 PIENAAR FREDDIE GN 00:28:10.6 00:01:03.8

9 629 PIEHL ANDRE CG 00:28:30.5 00:01:23.7

10 639 HARMSE WERNER SG 00:28:48.8 00:01:42.0


VET MEN 30-34

PLACE RIDER NAME PROVINCE RUN TIME OFF LEADER

1 577 HARVEY CRAIG CG 00:40:20.8 00:00:00.0

2 574 LABUSCHAGNE DAVID CG 00:41:21.1 00:01:00.3

3 561 FOURIE PETRUS JOHANNES FSS 00:43:37.5 00:03:16.7

4 568 HYAM DAVID EP 00:43:47.5 00:03:26.7

5 571 PRETORIUS COEN FSS 00:43:59.6 00:03:38.8

6 572 O'REILLY DONOVAN GEORGE BOR 00:44:13.9 00:03:53.1

7 565 CAMPBELL GLEN CRAIG CG 00:45:04.1 00:04:43.3

8 564 DAVIDS ABDUL QUAYUM WP 00:46:31.9 00:06:11.1

9 562 FOURIE JEAN FSS 00:47:05.9 00:06:45.1

10 566 BÖHMER LEON MPU 00:47:10.8 00:06:50.0

11 569 JACOBS AWIE BOR 00:48:08.4 00:07:47.6

12 560 STROEBEL CORNELIUS NW 00:50:56.9 00:10:36.1


Last year's results over 30km for 30-34 ...

Hypomimia

Hypomimia, a Medical sign, is a reduced degree of facial expression.

It can be caused by motor impairment (for example, weakness or paralysis of the facial muscles), as in Parkinson's disease, or by other causes, like psychological or psychiatric factors (for example, if a patient actually doesn't feel emotions, and thus doesn't show any expression).

Bradykinesia

Definition of Bradykinesia:

Slowed ability to start and continue movements, and impaired ability to adjust the body's position. Can be a symptom of neurological disorders*, particularly Parkinson's disease, or a side effect of medications.

The word bradykinesia is logically derived from two Greek roots: bradys, slow + kinesis, movement = slow movement, slow motion, slow moving.

*Can also be a symptom of going out on a weeknight and drinking peach-schnapps, whiskey, cider etc

Squish Squash

After my record of victories against J I fancied myself as a half decent squash player. Last night I got my butt kicked. Played about 9 games, the first four were: 9-0 or 9-1. Got up to 9-3 or 9-4 in the last games. My opponent this time was a guy I studied with at Varsity.

Frik - Respect.

But beware of my learning curve.

Body is nice and sore - stretched - today.

The Human Problem

For the full article, click on the title of this post.
It’s not Climate Change, or AIDS, or Oil that’s the problem

6.5 billion may seem like a small number. 6.5 after all isn’t much. It sounds like a tall person. The human population of planet Earth should probably be written like so:

6 500 000 000

On paper it still fits comfortably into one sentence. But that number of human beings doesn’t fit into any sustainable systems anywhere. They do incredible damage every day, and produce gargantuan quantities of waste.

In fact, unlike other animals, every time human beings move, they pollute their environment. Every time they cook. Everything they do erodes the natural world of its resources. In fact right now, your reading this article on a computer screen, and me writing it - something that may seem particularly benign - is consuming resources.

Reflections

A swimming pool is a fishbowl for the soul. It is a place to be
buoyant, a place for the sun to sprinkle itself into rectangular blue.
It is a place where wet dreams spin down a towel-dried spine.

Maybe some of the magic and charm of toiling in a pool comes from primal memories when I spun in amniotic fluid, dark and warm, with outside sounds muffled and crushed. Maybe a swimming pool is a place where the inklings of life blink back at us, through the stars, the silver stairs of light, where bodies are suspended, and I suspend my own, in a rectangular bubble bursting with light.

A swimming pool, in its most basic sense, is merely a rectangle of water for people to put themselves in.

There is ecstacy in that, and also, despite all this delight,loneliness. The loneliness of the long distance swimmer comes from isolation, from being in a sterile white world for long periods of time. It comes from being alone with oneself, in water. But this is not without warmth, or the glittering light of reflection. Sometimes the images shiver, dripping icy from their source. More often they spring buoyant and bright from the dancing rainbows that flow and radiate their chlorine dreams across the bleached chessboard backdrop that is the swimming
pool.

I saw my own reflections in the dark black bar running the polar white length of our lanes. I saw myself drifting in the night, I descended down, until the water pressed tightly against my ears, and saw my dark eyes shining in the dark, the tips of my hair catching the light and drawing it towards the dark black bar. I'd watch these silhouettes of light play off the the small waves that snaked around my body as I
crawled powerfully from one end of the pool to the other.

Sometimes I'd swim underwater and turn upside down and see the surface turn into a mirror, so that I was flying and below myself.
Reflections set off introspection. And a curosity in the swimmers stroking the water beside me.

Best Food Book

From Publishers WeeklyWhat can we do to help stop global warming, feed the hungry, prevent cruelty to animals, avoid genetically modified foods, be healthier and live longer? Eat vegetarian, Robbins (Diet for a New America) argues.

Noting the massive changes in the environment, food-production methods, and technology over the last two decades, he lambastes (in a manner less tough-mindedly restrained than Frances Moore Lapp‚'s classic Diet for a Small Planet) contemporary factory-farming methods and demonstrates that individual dietary choices can be both empowering and have a broader impact.

Robbins, heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream empire (he rejected it to live according to his values), takes on fad diets, the meat industry, food irradiation, hormone and antibiotic use in animals, cruel animal husbandry practices, the economics of meat consumption, biotechnology and the prevalence of salmonella and E. Coli. Some details are downright revolting (euthanized dogs and cats often are made into cattle feed), horrific (some 90% of cows, pigs and poultry are still conscious when butchered) and mind-boggling (it takes 5,214 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef). Despite all this and more distressing information, Robbins ends on a hopeful note, detailing growth in organic farming, public awareness and consumer activism worldwide, as well as policy changes, especially in Europe.

Well researched and lucidly written, if sometimes overly sentimental and burdened by cliched rhetoric, this book is sure to spark discussion and incite readers to examine their food choices. (July 2)Forecast: Diet for a New America was both controversial and influential; Robbins's name (and that of Dr. Dean Ornish, who provides a foreword) should draw readers, particularly to the author's six-city western U.S. tour.

Global warming, animal rights, meat safety and genetically modified food are being recognized as important issues, but the kind of sea change the book calls for is unlikely to find a mass audience.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

How To Be Unhappy

Make little things bother you. Don't just let them, MAKE them.

Lose your perspective on things and keep it lost:don't put first things first.

Get yourself a good worry, one about which youcannot do anything.

Be a perfectionist, which means not that you work hard to do your best, but that you condemn yourself and others for not achieving perfection.

Be right. Be always right. Be the only one who is always right, and be rigid in your rightness.

Don't trust or believe people, or accept them at anything but their worst and weakest.

Be suspicious. Insist that others always have hidden motives.

Always compare yourself unfavorably to others. This guarantees instant misery.

Take personally everything that happens to you.

Don't give yourself whole-heartily to anyone or anything.

Above image courtesy topleftpixel.com

Legal Juncture

YOURSELF / HEARTLAND PUBLISHING

We refer to the above matter and confirm that we have provided final insructions to the Sheriff to remove and store property of your debtor.

We currently await the Sheriff's confirmation that Heartland's property is stored at the Sheriff's premises.

We will inform you of execution sale- date and time.

Yours faithfully


VERMAAK & DENNIS
J ELS

Censorship

Click on this post to link: should blogs like this be allowed?

Everest Calling

First cell call from Mount Everest was recorded on a blog

Your cellphone chirrups. Your colleagues around the boardroom regard the interruption with obvious annoyance and frustration. But holding up a hand with the cellphone in it, you defend yourself, saying: “Sorry, I need to take this. It’s from the top of Mount Everest.”
36-year-old Rod Baber, a British mountaineer, has made the first cellphone call from Mount Everest.

It was no easy feat either. First off, Baber would have had to remove his oxygen mask which meant not only would he have difficulty breathing, but would be even more susceptible to the cold. Baber had to tape the phone’s batteries to his body to prevent them from freezing and becoming useless. The initial transmission was not live, or made to a living person, but recorded on a voicemail account created by the expedition’s sponsor Motorola, and subsequently posted on Baber’s blog.

Gasping at almost 9km above sea level, Baber says, “Hi, this is Rod. Making the world’s highest phone call on the 21st of May. [Fumble]. It’s 5:37am. It’s about minus 30 C. It’s cold. It’s fantastic. The Himalayas are everywhere. I can’t feel my toes. Everyone’s in good spirits. We got here in record time.” He then describes what he wants to do once back at base camp.

The 2nd call he made was live, to his wife and children in Cirencester, Gloucestershire,in the UK. Typically climbers spend only around 15 minutes on the roof of the world, so Baber had to be brief. He told his family: “It’s amazing. I can’t feel my toes.” Baber then sent this first ever text message from Everest, to Motorola: “One small text for man, one giant leap for mobilekind – thanks Motorola.” We will probably hear Baber’s message and see the text message used in television commercials to promote the Motorola brand around the world.

Having already seen Baber’s story flighted in various media, I am reminded of South African software billionaire Mark Shuttleworth’s trip into space. Knowing the world would be reporting on this story, I contacted the advertising agencies that did promotions for Shuttleworth (the world’s second space tourist) and suggested Mark record a message in space on a simple Dictaphone which could later be relayed as inexpensive but powerful radio commercials to promote tourism to the country (a much underutilized, and under marketed resource). Som thing like:
“This is Mark Shuttleworth. Space really is our final frontier, but you don’t have to come to outer space to find your inner space. Visit South Africa.”
Perhaps an additional website for information could have been provided, along with in-support outdoor advertising. In an email Mr Shuttleworth indicated that the Russians were strict in terms of what cosmonauts were allowed to do and take with them. Every gram had to be calibrated. So unfortunately, that opportunity slipped away unused.

Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising to hear that the first cell transmissions from Everest only took place this year, in 2007. Satellite transmissions have of course been made in the past, one of the most famous was from Rob Hall, the New Zealander who was patched through to his pregnant wife in that fateful year, 1996, before succumbing on the mountain.

But cellular technologies have been present around the world for some time. People have made the claim in thousands of contemporary conversations that with a cellphone one is reachable (theoretically), everywhere, from Mount Everest, to the bottom of the ocean. That has not been 100% true in the case of the cellphone. Baber’s call was thanks to China Telecom’s new base station at Rongbuk which is 19km from the summit of Everest, and 8km from base camp. It is one positive development of the unhappy taking over of Tibet by China that at least the local communities may benefit from the deeper pockets of the intrusive Chinese regime. Until now, regional telecommunications had only been possible using shortwave radios and the heavier and more expensive satellite phones.

Baber remains fortunate to have been able to transmit from Everest, given the extreme cold. To illustrate just how susceptible batteries and the like are to becoming dysfunctional in the extreme cold of high altitude, I refer to the almost 6km high Kilimanjaro (a third lower than Everest), a peak I climbed in the mid 90’s. Once on the volcanoes rim, which is probably half as cold as Everest, perhaps minus 10, or minus 15, we discovered that the camera’s battery was simply too cold to use. After stuffing the camera between my inner shell (a cycle jersey) and my skin, I was able to resurrect a few faint pulses of battery power. It was sufficient for a summit photo, but there was an agonizing moment where the person I handed the camera to said, “It’s not working.” By the simple action of removing it and handing someone else the camera, exposing it to the icy air, the battery had once again lost the small amount of body heat I’d imbued it with. Thus I had to re-heat the camera for the all important photograph and try again. ‘It’s still not working. It’s dead.” After the third time my companion was able to take a photograph, freezing the image into the camera’s cold digital mind space.

In the near future, space tourists (perhaps on Virgin Galactic rocketships) may demand to be able to communicate from space to their families and friends. Companies like Connext (who provide internet from airlines) already provide us with connectivity at 30 000 feet, but once again only satellite phones are likely to work from space right now. But given the extreme energy demands of space travel, I personally do not believe space tourism will last more than a season or two, if it ever gets off the ground. Then again, with human beings, anything is possible.

Background for this article from www.ananova.com and The Sunday Times London.

Image courtesy topleftpixel.com

Kunstler: let's stop talking about making better cars and start talking about occupying the landscape differently -- which we're going to have to do anyway.

Images courtesy topleftpixel.com

Dismantling Bad Habits

We're almost halfway through 2007. What have you achieved so far? Now is the time to assess success, and dismantle a few bad habits that are going to tie you up in knots before you even start.

1. Why worry?

Worrying tends to drive a number of negative responses or reactions. When we get locked into it, when we've really got our teeth gnawing on the bone of worry, what happens is this: nothing. Most often, worry paralyzes us. Almost as often, when worry actually gets us to do anything, it's often the manifestation of a bad habit: comfort eating is a prime example.

When we sit around and worry begins to overwhelm us, the simplest way to feel better -- without doing anything -- is to eat something. It has the added bonus of feeling like we're doing something, and what we're doing is changing how we feel. Except, when it's done, we know we're not changing anything (not in a good way), and there are yucky side-effects like additional weight gain, mood swings and self esteem and motivation levels that slide down another few notches.

Another side effect of worry is insomnia. This is an extremely damaging side-effect, and its perniciousness is grossly under-estimated. Lack of sleep on a day to day basis severely erodes our ability to enjoy life, to effectively do the simplest tasks, and we run the real risk of endangering ourselves and others when we're in our cars or handling sensitive equipment.

So here's a rule of thumb this year. The moment you sense something is bothering you, go and do something. Develop the habit of instant response to worry, and you'll wipe worry out.

2. Time Management

Research has indicated that some families watch up to 40 hours of television a week. That's a working week! If you want to release up huge quadrants of time in your life, limit TV time, and whenever a social engagement conflicts with what's on TV, pass up the TV. At the end of your life you're going to evaluate the quality of your time on Earth by the nature of relationships you shared with others. You're not going to fondly remember a single TV program.

On weekends, get out of bed early and go out and celebrate the day. If you really need the sleep, sleep on a Sunday afternoon, and if you must, Saturday afternoon as well. The best way to ruin the perfect day is to sleep until lunch time and then feel too gloomy to emerge until the day is just about done. Give yourself the time to live, and it starts first thing in the morning.

3. Move -- get light

If you're heavier than you should be, cultivate an attitude where you are done feeling uncomfortable in your own skin. When you attempt to lose weight, do so aggressively, but in a way you can sustain for at least a month or more.

Combine exercise with a modified diet. The sooner you get yourself lighter, the sooner you're going to enjoy yourself more, and the more you're going to bask in better esteem, yours and others. Each day you delay is a day in the shadows of who you could be, so get going.

4. Find a paradigm

The beginning of the year is not the only time to think about your identity, but it's a great time to do a thorough checklist of your life. Think about who you are, your identity, your values, what you’re doing with your life. Evaluate the long term results you’re seeing in your friendships, in your health, and wealth, and make some changes.

5. Anticipate change

If you intend to shape the direction of your life this year, one skill matters more than most. Anticipation. Anticipation is the opposite of worrying. It's not reactionary, it's what? Yes, it's about being proactive. Because of course it's more than merely knowing what is about to happen, or finding a problem before it manifests. It's a matter of anticipating the future, which means letting go of the precious present momentarily for long enough to grasp what's immediately about to happen. And with that knowledge, you'll change your strategy, change what you’re doing. It's easier to ward off a small problem that's about to happen, than clean up the mess once the pot smashes onto the kitchen floor.


The above five points represent a broad theoretical dimension. Make sure you internalize these 5 points, and learn to practice them now, and on a daily basis, going forward. The first four are fairly simple, but if you're not there yet, you need to burn a lot of energy and find the discipline to at least get yourself through the starting gates. Then, when you're ready, get into the habit of anticipating. And when you anticipate, think laterally instead of linearly; think in circles rather than straight lines.

Now, here are a few practical suggestions. While the above mindsets present a governing psychology, you'll still need miniature goals, models and patterns to move your life along. You apply the governing psychology to these goals. It's important to remember that setting goals is crucial, but goals are not:

-Exercise
-Save
-Be more social.

Those are merely thoughts, hopes and wishes. Without specifying quantity or quality and a date, goals are merely daydreams. So, make your goals specific, and don't make the timeframe in the far future, make them immediate, and revise them often:

-Exercise: run easy every 2nd day in January, starting with 30 minutes a day
-Save: save 10 percent of my salary this month
-Be more social: drinks every Wednesday at X, with Y, swim with Jane every Friday at 4 p.m. in the gym


Without specifying quantity or quality and a date, goals are merely daydreams.

Now set a new set of goals for 2007, and make them worthy goals. That way you'll emerge at the end of the year basking in your own glory. Enjoy your success.

©2007 Nick van der Leek

Ad Awards

What’s hot and what’s not right now

You’ve heard them say that for broadcasters, ‘Filling’ is what they call movies and everything else on TV we like to watch. ‘Content’ is what they’re actually selling (the advertising). From our perspective, we tolerate the content in order to be able to see the filling.
Having sat through two of the three Lord of the Rings episodes on etv, I want a game plan for the third episode: Return of the King. The plan is called: How to avoid nuisance ad breaks.

1). Make popcorn
2). Add a paragraph to an article in progress
3). Make list of chores to do for Monday
4). Mute the TV and read a page of a novel
5). Sms someone

The reason these escape clauses are necessary is because commercial breaks ruin the ethos of the movie, and are usually not nearly as entertaining.
There’s something wrong with that. Sometimes advertising is entertaining. I’ve seen an advertisement for paint (not released) in South Africa that has a black guy and white guy visiting houses in suburbia. When it’s a white owned home, the black guy plays skivvie, and busily gets to work while the white guys put their feet up and relax with a beer. But when they turn up at a home with a black family, the white guy becomes the skivvie. It’s a comical look at the changing BEE/cultural mindset of the country.

Rocks

At the moment, Toyota is producing some good material, not only on television but also on the radio. Have you heard Bill Flynn playing the bushman interpreter (Toyota Landcruiser radio spot)? Part of what makes it work is that it is telling a story. It also works because it’s funny. And it brilliantly conveys the message within the fairy tale of the Nambeeb; that in your Toyota, you’re not going to experience any fear. I did wonder whether there is such a thing as a desert wolf (in Africa), but apparently there is – in Ethiopia.
The other commercial I’ve seen at the cinema and on television. It features a boertjie who notices he is not attracting the attention of a girl he likes. He has a makeover, but when he returns to his tough Toyota bakkie in a pink shirt, his car feels he is too much of a softy: ‘Hey, it’s me. Open the door.’

Huh?

Nedbank is doing very well, not only in its advertising, but they are working hard to win back market share lost a few years ago. In terms of advertising, it’s fresh, but not as dynamic and hardworking as the bank it is representing. And I don’t think highlighting the ‘N’ as a Nedbank ‘N’ in ‘Make thiNgs happen’ is very effective. It’s too incidental, even untidy. I don’t think it works. Perhaps the entire word ‘happen’ can be converted into a Nedbank font so that NEDBANK = HAPPEN/HAPPENING, or all, or just the first letters could be using the Nedbank font. After all, Nedbank are setting the standard for low banking fees, and at the moment, Nedbank is where a lot of consumer friendly banking is happening.

Rubbish

I don’t want to watch a junk commercial where a snake falls on a man’s head in a jungle, and then he grabs an AIRWAVE which miraculously restores his blocked passages. This is the sort of thing a young rookie at an ad agency dreams up, and possibly because he’s had one awesome idea for something he knew something about, no one thinks to second guess the idea.
Here’s mine: A row of men, perhaps prisoners or schoolboys, or even sailors. They are distracted by something – watching rugby, or lifeguard duty, or homework, or reading the paper (theoretically the same theme can be repeated using different scenarios). A beautiful woman approaches, walks by, everyone notices her, some even smile and close their eyes. But one man (is he crazy?) does not notice her. His buddy beside him offers him an AIRWAVE. When the woman returns, he’s able to smell her perfume just like the others and everyone (including the attractive lady, who notices this change) is happy.

When I was at advertising school, I found myself frowning on commercials that made you laugh. I believed that they were not going to sell the product at the end of the day. Although that remains a cogent argument, commercials that make you laugh do a great deal to improve brand acceptability. If we welcome the intrusion of a commercial because we like it, the chances are we will become increasingly positive towards that brand. Hence, the brand conveyed through a comical message cannot be dismissed. On the other hand, a brand that consistently irritates you (through repetitive, unimaginative marketing), is going to be blocked, and flagged by the consumer as: To Avoid in Future.

Finally, I want to repeat something my lecturers told me at advertising school. They said becoming generic is the worst thing that can happen to a brand. In fact, the opposite is true. I recently received sms’s from a friend traveling through Dubai. She wanted to know which type of iPod she should buy, and several messages later I realized she thought iPod was a word like TV or radio. In fact, only one company, Steve Jobs’ Apple, make the iPod. Other companies make their version of the portable music player. But since the iPod is now generic (and also an icon of our era), it means Apple needs to do very little to sell their player (as long as their distribution keeps up). Other generics include Speedo, Hoover, Xerox, IBM, Coke (as the only cola) and Microsoft (as conventional software). Generics kill advertisers though, because it is very difficult to market a brand against a generic in many cases, particularly when the product category is still new, or sophisticated enough to rebuff imitators. In time though, this can change.

Tonight when I watch Lord of the Rings, I will probably not do any of those 5 things mentioned above. I’ll probably flip to another channel. The broadcasters seem to know this, as it seems all advertising seems to flow out at the same time intervals. If that is the case, we will allow ourselves to be exposed to advertising that at the very least entertains us, even better if it makes us laugh. Obviously the best advertising bears some relevance to the contents juxtaposed alongside it. People interested in Lord of the Rings might want to know how much, where and when they can get their hands on the latest Harry Potter Book, or the latest EA Games version of Rings, or other Tolkien-based bestselling material. TV needs to keep its content and filling Inline. Google does this for the internet, but what keeps TV’s advertising from becoming gargled? In time, perhaps Google or some other interactive software will make for a more seamless and relevant commercial fill on TV, unless the future of TV is the internet, which seems more likely.