Progress

A man wakes up from a coma after 20 years.

Coma Man: So what’s changed in the last 20 years? What wondrous marvels are there for me to discover?
Doctor: Oh, you won’t believe it.
Coma Man: Are there flying cars?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Cars that run on water or air?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: How about anything besides oil?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Have we cured cancer?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Alzheimer’s? Parkinson’s? Heart disease?
Doctor: No, no and no.
Coma Man: Is there peace on Earth?
Doctor: (Laughs) No.
Coma Man: Is the global environment better?
Doctor: Worse, actually.
Coma Man: Is the global economy better?
Doctor: Worse, actually.
Coma Man: Have we eradicated poverty?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: How about racism?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Have we put a man on Mars?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Do we have stations on the moon?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Can we time travel?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Do people have robot servants?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Clones?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: So what’s changed?
Doctor: There’s a website where you can tell everybody what you’re doing in 140 characters or less.

Mia’s Annual Christmas Message

Hanukkah has been around a lot longer and is observed by a lot more people but it is not nearly as important as Christmas. It is a minor festival. We light candles, say prayers, go about our business. There is no reason to artificially inflate its importance just because it is usually at around the same time as Christmas. Our most important days are usually around September or October. It is ok if you don’t know what they are. We do not need everybody to go crazy over them.

Profiles in Courage

American airports can have very long lines at the check in counter. If you want to kill Americans gathered in large groups then this would be a good target. The queues in Israel are spread out and staggered. It seems like nobody has to wait in a long line. And when you check in you are asked simple questions. They also do this at American airports. The difference is that the Israeli agents are actually paying attention to what you say and how you say it.

All luggage in Israel is scanned at the check in counter in a screening area that can withstand a large blast. There are also metal boxes that can house bombs if necessary and a decompression chamber. If something suspicious is found it is dealt with immediately. If something suspicious is found at an American check in counter they will evacuate the entire airport and wait for the bomb squad.

Imagine No Imagination

My parents enjoyed talking to their children. We were not seen as a distraction. But I’m sure we were more than annoying from time to time. There was a period of what seemed like forever when Ellie and Dara did nothing but argue. Dara’s voice especially could get very high when agitated. When I was old enough they would gang up on me. But from what I remember I always held my own. I was born with the ability to laugh at people who tried to insult me. This is almost never the reaction people hope for. Eventually Ria and I reached the stage where we argued a lot but our arguments were always silent so they never had any effect on whoever was driving.

How to Build a Mediocre News Outlet

[Picture © Yoko Ono]

A woman who once interviewed John inflated her own importance. She also said that the interview took place just minutes before he died, which goes against everything we know about his last day. And they played a snippet of the interview where John said that he will be turning 40 soon and Sean will be 5, future tense. John and Sean were both born on 9 October. If the interview took place on 8 December then they would already be 40 and 5, present tense. John may not have been the most educated person in the world but he knew English well enough to properly use verb tenses. Either the interviewer is full of kak or CNN played the wrong interview.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
John Lennon

Haifa Fire

All is well here.

I’ll say more about it later as time permits.

How to Make a List

Kylie posted a list from the BBC of books they think everybody should read. They also claim that most people have only read 6. That seems a little pretentious to me but that’s the BBC for you. The list is also very anglocentric.

BBC List
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



I prefer this list. It’s far more international and has more great literature than pop trends. They also don’t number it because only somebody with serious problems would put Da Vinci Code above Hamlet.

Norwegian Book Club’s 100 Best Books of All Time
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Fairy tales – Hans Christian Andersen
Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous
Book of Job – Anonymous
Mahabharata – Vyasa
Njal's Saga – Anonymous
One Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, a trilogy – Samuel Beckett
The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Poems – Paul Celan
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Stories – Anton Chekhov
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Possessed – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Medea – Euripides
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Goethe's Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands – João Guimarães Rosa
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Iliad – Homer
Odyssey – Homer
A Doll's House – Henrik Ibsen
Ulysses – James Joyce
Stories – Franz Kafka
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Castle – Franz Kafka
Shakuntala – Kālidāsa
The Sound of the Mountain – Yasunari Kawabata
Zorba the Greek – Nikos Kazantzakis
Sons and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Poems – Giacomo Leopardi
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Pippi Longstocking – Astrid Lindgren
A Madman's Diary – Lu Xun
Children of Gebelawi – Naguib Mahfouz
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Essays – Michel de Montaigne
History – Elsa Morante
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Tales – Edgar Allan Poe
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel – François Rabelais
Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
Masnavi – Rumi
Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
Bostan – Saadi
Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
Blindness – José Saramago
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
King Lear – William Shakespeare
Othello – William Shakespeare
Oedipus the King – Sophocles
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Confessions of Zeno – Italo Svevo
Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Ramayana – Valmiki
Aeneid – Virgil
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar



Then there is this list. Very French but it has some great books that the BBC thinks are worse than the Da Vinci Code.

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
1 The Stranger – Albert Camus
2 Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
3 The Trial – Franz Kafka
4 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5 Man’s Fate – André Malraux
6 Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
7 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
8 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
9 Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier
10 Froth on the Daydream – Boris Vian
11 The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
12 Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
13 Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
14 The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
15 The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
16 Paroles – Jacques Prévert
17 Alcools – Guillaume Apollinaire
18 The Blue Lotus – Hergé
19 The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
20 Tristes Tropiques – Claude Lévi-Strauss
21 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
22 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
23 Asterix the Gaul – René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
24 The Bald Soprano – Eugène Ionesco
25 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – Sigmund Freud
26 The Abyss – Marguerite Yourcenar
27 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
28 Ulysses – James Joyce
29 The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
30 The Counterfeiters – André Gide
31 The Horseman on the Roof – Jean Giono
32 Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
33 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
34 The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
35 Thérèse Desqueyroux – François Mauriac
36 Zazie in the Metro – Raymond Queneau
37 Confusion of Feelings – Stefan Zweig
38 Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
39 Lady Chatterley's Lover – D. H. Lawrence
40 The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
41 Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
42 Le Silence de la mer – Vercors
43 Life: A User's Manual – Georges Perec
44 The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
45 Under the Sun of Satan – Georges Bernanos
46 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
47 The Joke – Milan Kundera
48 A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
49 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
50 Nadja – André Breton
51 Aurélien – Louis Aragon
52 The Satin Slipper – Paul Claudel
53 Six Characters in Search of an Author – Luigi Pirandello
54 The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertolt Brecht
55 Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique – Michel Tournier
56 The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
57 If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
58 The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
59 Les Vrilles de la vigne – Colette
60 Capitale de la douleur – Paul Éluard
61 Martin Eden – Jack London
62 Ballad of the Salt Sea – Hugo Pratt
63 Writing Degree Zero – Roland Barthes
64 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
65 The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
66 The Order of Things – Michel Foucault
67 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
68 The Wonderful Adventures of Nils – Selma Lagerlöf
69 A Room of One's Own – Virginia Woolf
70 The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
71 The Ravishing of Lol Stein – Marguerite Duras
72 The Interrogation – J. M. G. Le Clézio
73 Tropisms – Nathalie Sarraute
74 Journal, 1887–1910 – Jules Renard
75 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
76 Écrits – Jacques Lacan
77 The Theatre and its Double – Antonin Artaud
78 Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
79 Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
80 Moravagine – Blaise Cendrars
81 The General of the Dead Army – Ismail Kadare
82 Sophie's Choice – William Styron
83 Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
84 The Strange Case of Peter the Lett – Georges Simenon
85 Our Lady of the Flowers – Jean Genet
86 The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
87 Fureur et mystère – René Char
88 The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
89 No Orchids For Miss Blandish – James Hadley Chase
90 Blake and Mortimer – Edgar P. Jacobs
91 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Rainer Maria Rilke
92 Second Thoughts – Michel Butor
93 The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt
94 The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
95 The Rosy Crucifixion – Henry Miller
96 The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
97 Amers – Saint-John Perse
98 Gaston – André Franquin
99 Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
100 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

The Degeneration of Toon Town

[All pictures copyright somebody]

It’s Gedding Bedder All thuh Time

All of my classes at university were in English. Though I had an Indian professor who was sometimes difficult to understand. English is the official language of California. Xenophobes say that most people in California speak Spanish but it is really something like 25%. English is the de facto language of the US. They have no official language though xenophobes will tell you that it is English. They also claim again that most people speak Spanish but it is closer to 10%. I am not sure what they have against the “Mexicans”. Anybody from anywhere south of the US is Mexican apparently.

What the World Should Know About Israel

The convoluted answer is that Israel is the big bad guy while Palestine is oppressed. If that is true then why don’t I ever see complaints against Jordan, Syria, Egypt and other countries that are oppressing Palestine? Why are there no protests against Egypt’s blockade against Gaza? Or even Palestine’s blockade against Gaza? If a blockade is a great humanitarian catastrophe, why is it not a catastrophe when other countries do it?

The International Community has complained many times that Israel has troops in Palestine but they have never complained that the Arab League will not let Palestine control itself. Iran and Syria have had troops in Lebanon and Palestine for decades. Why is that not on the BBC?

And even if the talking points were accurate it would not explain why Israel gets more coverage than China, Russia, Britain, Spain or other countries that oppress smaller neighbouring territories. In what parallel universe is Israel a bigger human rights violator than China?

I Went to California But I Forgot to Blog About It

Another great thing about school reunions is how reality just klaps you in the face. When we were young we were all going to be the great movers and shakers of our generation. Every single one of us was going to do what we loved and excel at it. Ten years on most of us were nowhere we thought we would be. There were no household name directors, movie stars or celebrities at this reunion. None of us are president of any country or major corporation. Nobody won any medals for curing diseases or invented the next big thing. Most of us are just regular people living regular lives. Some have died and some are probably homeless or junkies living in seedy motel rooms but they did not come to the reunion. Most of the people who showed up seemed to be relatively satisfied with their lives.


Downtown Los Angeles from Griffith Observatory
That is not a problem with the lens. That is the smog.


The Hollywood sign from Griffith Observatory
Most large cities have a large tower with great views. Los Angeles has Griffith Observatory.


Capitol Records
This is where old men in suits butchered Beatles albums. I don’t think the Beatles ever set foot in the building but their Walk of Fame stars are here.


Sunset Blvd
The street changes dramatically from Los Angeles to Beverly Hills.


Powell Library
With comfortable chairs and 8 million books you could easily spend a lot of time here.


Royce Hall
The steps may not look like much but on a hot summer day they can give you a good workout.


Queen Mary
Now a hotel and museum. I’ve no idea why there is a Russian submarine next to it.

All the Leaves Are Brown

When we were in school we were young and idealistic. We wanted to save the world. Or at least change it. None of us saved the world as far as I know. I’m not sure if anybody changed it. Everybody was going to be the next Spielberg. Nobody in my graduating class is anybody you have ever heard of. A few are working in the entertainment industry but they are not famous. I went to school at the same time as a few people who are now marginally known but they probably do not have Tom Cruise on their speed dial.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement and arguably the most important day on the Hebrew calendar. Some say it is Shabbat but I personally disagree. I am firmly in the Yom Kippur camp. It is the day we ask for God’s forgiveness for everything we have done against him and each other. Some of us do more harm to God than to man. I have been told that we are the worst people but I think it is the opposite. God can handle whatever I do to him. People are much less resilient.

Military Censorship

Current Events Yet Again

First came the typhoons and I did not speak up because there are no typhoons here.
Then came the floods and I did not speak up because there are no floods here.
Then came the famines and I did not speak up because people are not hungry here.
Then the air killed us all and there was no one left to speak up.



Not my problem


A moral outrage


Who is she wearing?

Even More Current Events

Americans are proud of their reputation for religious tolerance. Except when they are not. Sometimes it seems that American tolerance means Catholics and Protestants can live side by side peacefully. That is great but what about all those heathen religions? The ones practiced by those whiteless Americans who are not real Americans since their grandparents came from somewhere other than Europe. From my experience Americans are far more intolerant of Muslims than are Israelis. And Israeli xenophobes have a better case for concern. And Israel never claimed to be tolerant.

More Current Events

Are most goyim antisemitic? I am not sure how you would quantify such a thing. Polling 100 people in Ohio is not the most representative sample. Nor are 100 people in Iran. If you could poll a billion people all over the world then maybe we would have something. Go to any website with a story about Israel or the IDF and if they allow comments then you will see some of the most racist things anybody could possibly say. But is the hate and idiocy online a reflection of offline attitudes or do people use that anonimity to say the craziest things they would never say in person?

A Few Current Events

I’m not an extremist. I do not believe that unions should always have their way and I do not believe that managers should always have their way. I think every case should be viewed on its own merit. In this case I think the unions should be thankful to have jobs and happy that the government is even offering anything at all. The fact that top government officials live in luxury is irrelevant. That is an issue for the courts and the voters to correct. I can sympathise with people who work hard for little money but I’m having a hard time sympathising with people who risk the education of children and the health and safety of the public for 1.6%. The average RSA high school teacher makes R10 000 per month. An extra R160 does not seem like enough to put people at risk. That is three extra Starbucks coffees each month.

My New Niece

Dara and Shirah are both resting comfortably. Coming to life seems to take a lot out of a person. Giving life does not seem like much of a picnic either. When people announce births they always mention how much the baby weighed and how many inches she was. I have never really understood that. Does anybody need to know how many inches any baby is? I think as long as she is healthy and has all the right parts that is what matters. So you will get no baby inch report from me. Sorry. Quite frankly I could not say. I have no idea. I could ask her mother but she is probably asleep right now. I could phone her father but he is probably asleep right now. I could ask Shirah’s grandmother. I know she knows that sort of thing. But she is probably asleep right now. We seem to sleep a lot in my family. Especially in the middle of the night.

Lost in Translation

But sometimes being older and more experienced helps. I was on a test run in the AS565 with an older and very experienced flight instructor who was watching every move I made. It probably did not help that he was one of those old cranks who thinks that women should not fly. But I’m used to that type. What did help is that I think safety is more important than anything else. I did a full IFR flight plan just as I always do. I went over the WX, I did the full checklist, I did the walkaround, I made sure the fuel cap was secure. This is more important than some people realise. I checked the tie downs and tail. Just as I always do. Too many pilots are too complacent. Especially when they have more experience. Experience has told me to always check the TITS. Which is a safety acronym and has nothing to do with couture.

A Sale of Two Titties

There was never anything wrong with Joëlle’s tits. She is on the other side of 30 so maybe they do not stand at attention the way they used to but they still get the job done. Even so, time is crueler to women than men. Or maybe it is society and not time. We are taught from a young age that our sexuality revolves around our appearance. Sometimes short hair is fashionable, sometimes it is long hair. But you always have to have great tits to be a real woman. Boys seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. And they really don’t want to get to second base and discover it is all tissues.

How to be Celibate

The psychological part is easy for me. I have been in an actual impact descent. It is nothing like the simulator. In the simulator you know that you are going to crash. You wake up in the morning knowing that you are going to crash several times that day. You also know that you will very likely survive. There are professional divers in the pool with plenty of oxygen for everybody. There are trained emergency medical personnel nearby just in case something goes awry. You know exactly where you are at all times and will never have to deal with environmental situations other than the water in the pool. Once you get out of the water you are done. There is no floating around in the ocean for days waiting for somebody to find you. None of this is available in a real crash.



Some of my favourite actors

Ants in My Pants

I never had any kind of curtains on my windows in China. My bedroom and laundry room faced a field. The other side of the house faced another house but my kitchen was at roof level with the house across the street. Without curtains the light from my windows attracted all manner of flying insects at night. The flying insects attracted geckos. I grew up with geckos, especially in Durban, so they do not bother me.

My Favourite Climbing Partner

He found a new life, got himself an education and married the woman of his dreams. He named his first two daughters after his real parents and kept searching for more information about the past while he and his wife built a future. They were the happiest couple I have ever seen. I’m sure they argued from time to time but I do not remember that. What I remember was two people who genuinely loved each other and never held back on displaying affection in public. When I was younger I had friends who were always embarrassed when their parents kissed each other or them. I never was. Probably because it happened all the time. It was completely natural to me.

Ngiyanemukela

I think it was in the United States once, even though Americans do not care much about football. They have a completely different game they call football. It is more like rugby. Americans may not care about football and their team has never won the World Cup but they have to host it because their people are more willing than Asians and Africans to spend money frivolously. And that is really what FIFA cares about. It has nothing to do with where the most fans are or who joined their club first. South Afrika was the first country outside of Europe to join and it only took 100 years to host.

But My TV Said So

If your TV is anything like mine it told you that crime rates in China are rising and it is almost impossible to really know what the figures are. But your TV probably never mentioned that Chinese schools are amongst the safest in the world. School shootings are unheard of. There are no gangs. Not in the schools at least. Chinese gangs are more interesting in controlling gambling than recruiting children. Teen pregnancy is not simply well hidden. It is really not an issue. Most teenagers stay away from sex to avoid family shame. That still means something to the Chinese. It is also very hard to find any privacy when you live with several generations in the same house.

As-Salamu Alaykum

Catholics have a pope. If he tells them all to wear blue shirts you will hear about it. You will probably even see a few people wearing blue shirts. Jews have not had any central leader since the temple was destroyed. There are community leaders all over the place and influential organisations. Israel's Chief Rabbinate is generally regarded as the highest governing body, though many people in other countries disagree. If they tell everybody to wear blue shirts you might hear about it. I'm not sure how many people would actually do it. Muslims have different leaders in different countries. Iran has their ayatollah but he is mostly a political leader. He does not hold much sway outside of Iran. If he told everybody to wear blue shirts you would probably never hear about it and it is even less likely you would see anybody do it.

Thou Shalt Not Proselytise

In my experience the least tolerant are the atheists. They will often accuse anybody with a different point of view of “bible thumping” even when such people never quote their particular bible or push any belief. The atheists always seem much angrier than anybody else. Online at least. People often behave very differently offline. Even the most fire and brimstone Christians cannot match the hateful online rhetoric of some atheists.

I do not need anybody telling me that Jesus died for my sins and I do not believe that he did. But the people who say so usually also tell you to have a nice day and are much friendlier than the atheists who blame anybody with faith for all that is wrong with the world. If religious people are so judgemental and want everybody to believe what they believe and the atheists are supposed to be the opposite then should they not be more open minded toward different beliefs?

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

The other day I crashed 6 helicopters into a corvette, killing a total of 21 passengers, 8 flight crew, 2 ground crew and sometimes myself. Not to mention destroying $20 million in equipment. Fortunately, this was all done in a simulator.


 
This is how it looks live. As you can see there is very little margin for error.

Sometimes You Should Shoot the Messenger

Nixon was more qualified to be president than Kennedy in 1960. He took his work more seriously and earned everything he had, as opposed to Kennedy’s sense of entitlement. Kennedy was barely younger but looked much younger and he was far more comfortable in front of the camera. He probably won because of the televised debates.

Carter was much younger than Ford and had a full head of hair at the time. Ford was winning the election until they went on TV together. When Carter was the incumbent he was winning until he went on TV with Reagan, a former actor. Reagan won in a landslide.

Dukakis lost to the first Bush largely because he seemed distant on TV. He was also a hairy Mediterranean immigrant’s son running against a Connecticut WASP from a political dynasty.

The first Clinton was a generation younger than the first Bush and looked a lot better on TV. He was more charming and more articulate. Women wanted to sleep with him. And many did. Nobody wanted to sleep with Bush. Clinton easily won.

Obama looked young, charming, non-threatening, articulate. McCain looked old, crippled, sometimes mean. Who did you expect to win?


Gordon Brown's official Downing Street portrait

Mavet la Mickey Mouse

Israel produces propaganda also. But it is usually more upbeat. Israeli propaganda is more along the lines of Israel being a beacon of light for Jews looking to escape oppression and bigotry. I have never seen anything with Jews decapitating anybody or calling for death to anybody who draws a cartoon about Moses. I guess that is one of the differences between a stable democracy and a terrorist organisation.

War and Remembrance

Yom HaShoah is the day we commemorate the six million people who were murdered by bigotry. It is a national day of mourning and a religious observance, though the religious aspect is debated. It is one of those days when you will find secular and religious ceremonies at the same time. You can go to any government office, school, library, hospital, military instillation, synagogue, mosque, church and people will be praying and lighting candles. You hear a lot about tensions between Israelis and Arabs in the international media but I have never seen any Arab not observe the two minutes of silence. In my family it is also a day when the TV is absolutely forbidden. This is a custom I’ve grown to appreciate more as I got older. And TV programmes got worse.

I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major

Though I will probably never be on the cover of Teen People Magazine it was a valuable learning experience. I got the chance to play multiple roles in the filmmaking process. I was technically the director. Not that I can use any of it to join the DGA. I was almost always the editor. My university education in editing is what got me the job in the first place. I was usually the DP and camera operator. Sometimes I would have somebody else do the actual shooting. Sometimes I was the sound mixer, which is very different live than it is in the bay. Sometimes I was even the gaffer. Just about the only jobs I never had to do were wardrobe since almost everybody on camera just wore their uniforms, and makeup since we had a few great makeup artists.

Let’s Go For a Drive

 


 




The food pictures that I did not take are free use stock pictures. The still from Georges Méliès’ Trip to the Moon is out of copyright. The helicopter is copyright Universal Studios. I don’t know where the breastfeeding picture came from. It might have come with my OS.