I’m confused. It does happen from time to time, usually over unimportant things like political history and tax regulations.
And that happens to the best of us, doesn’t it, Julius? 

But this time, it’s altogether more serious. I am confused about pizza.

There are several different sorts of pizza eaters and several different types of pizza to go with them.
The pizza snobs will insist on an olive wood-fired, traditional Umbrian-style oven, built from terracotta tiles recycled from Julius Caesar’s bathroom and a pizza base rolled on the inner thigh of one of Silvio Berlusconi’s hand-maidens.
These are the sort of people that like rocket on their pizza.  Because there’s nothing better than making posh cheese on toast and then chucking some raw dandelion leaves on top before you eat it.

Then there are the pizza slobs. Those are the people that will even accept pizza from Scooters, despite their preference for speed rather than their classiness, their lack of accuracy in putting the correct ingredients on the round dough bit and the fact that they (possibly) cook their wares in a 650W Pick ‘n’ Pay microwave recycled from Julius Malema’s kitchen.
Still – you know what you’re getting when you order. And you’ll be tucking into your food while the snobs are still checking a lengthy paper trail concerning the authenticity of the flour, picking weeds in the back garden and fainting from hunger.

In the middle is the happy medium: Butler’s Pizza. Look, it’s not larney, but it’s far from the doughy trash of other delivery services. “Just nice”, some would say. Seth Rotherham, he of 2oceansvibe and snarly jail face fame, has long been a fan of Butler’s and thus, they have recently introduced a new pizza to their range: The Rotherham.

The Rotherham: Bacon, Feta, Salami, Half Mozzarella, Thin Base

Am I the only one bewildered by this bizarre pizza design?
If, as has been previously described, pizza is actually just posh cheese on toast, then why remove half the cheese and half the toast?

“Hmm – I’ll take one ‘The Rotherham’, please.
And I’d like some watered down beer and half a tub of ice cream to go with it.
Actually – while I’m waiting - do you have any Ricoffy?”

A hypothetical situation, obviously, as Butler’s are delivery only. But you (might) get my point.

On the plus side, Butler’s have introduced a real pizza at the same time: The Meaty Foursome, which actually has nothing to do with Jacob Zuma’s polygamous relationships, but is what carnivores such as myself have been crying out for for quite some time now.
It’s almost perfection. If they’d just added Bombay chillies they could have just called it The 6000.

But they didn’t.  So they can’t.

After seeing the aftermath of a pretty nasty accident outside the towing firm near our lab:

…I was delighted to learn that a new organic airbag is being installed on BMW cars.

Good thinking.

Yes folks, it’s that time of year again when the months training done by cyclists on the local roads – free-wheeling through red robots, riding thirteen abreast, not bothering to buy lights, cycling along the freeways etc etc – come to fruition as they get some roads closed for a little while and then get to complain about the heat and the wind for the next six months.

But this year is slightly different, as the self-proclaimed God of cycling and n times Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong is in town.
Cue desperate fawning from all and sundry in the cycling community (all of whom are on first name terms with Lance Armstrong)  and the new regulation that we must all worship Lance Armstrong because he did all that without getting caught using drugs – not like today’s cheats.

Lance Armstrong arrived last night in Cape Town and wasted no time is slagging off the local immigration officials because he didn’t have two blank pages in his passport (a fairly regular entry requirement for many countries around the world) and thus Home Affairs refused him entry.
Fair play, I would have thought, but Lance Armstrong wasn’t happy.
“Don’t you know who I am?” he might well have said. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. But if I had have been there, I would have guessed that he was someone that didn’t know even the basics of traveling abroad.

However, this tweet:

@LanceArmstrong Well, made it in to SA. Not the friendliest welcome I’ve ever received but we’ve all seen immigration officers like that. #posterboymaterial

has divided the nation.

Yep – Lance Armstrong had a go at passport control because they were following rather basic guidelines. And that brought out his sickeningly sycophantic fans in a tirade of anti-Home Affairs abuse. This in turn caused a backlash of people who think Lance Armstrong is actually rather ordinary who pointed out that only a egotistic twat would turn up at passport control with a full passport and then blame someone else. I think I was one of them.

Aki Anastasiou risks the wrath of the cycling mafia with his suggestion that Lance Armstrong owes South Africans an apology. But I’m in full agreement. Whether he meant it or not, he’s come over as arrogant and hugely self-important – and damn rude about a guy who was just doing his job. 

There’s a more serious side to this though. Lance Armstrong has 2,500,000 followers on twitter and much like Stephen Fry, can’t pretend he doesn’t recognise the power and significance of what he shares. When he blames someone else (specifically SA Immigration, in this case) for an error that he made, it reflects badly on this country. And until he apologises (to the same audience), no amount of cheesily-posed photos on Chapman’s Peak Drive are going to swing the damage that he has done to SA’s reputation amongst his sadly brain-washed devotees.

It seems that Ashanti Lodge, whose exorbitant 309% World Cup price increase we noted in January and who still hadn’t sold their rooms for the tournament just a couple of weeks ago, have had to rethink their pricing strategy for June and July.
Their rates page now has a little note for the dates over the duration of the World Cup:

Price on application as match days have different rates to non-match days.

The cynic in me wants to suggest that this is just another ploy to rip off fans traveling over to SA for the football.
And he’s probably right.

What Ashanti don’t seem to have realised is that fans attending the games at the Cape Town Stadium will still have the opportunity to fly out after the matches, as the airports will be running for pretty much 24 hours a day during the World Cup. And with greater numbers of cheaper flights being announced all the time, it will surely be more tempting to head “back home” to wherever you’re based, that to pay rip-off prices in Cape Town.

All of which augers well for businesses in the Mother City.

Not.

I do enjoy summer here in the Cape, but today was too much.

My English enzymes can’t cope in these sorts of temperatures and have to be cooled and revived with a special mixture of Castle Milk Stout and Castle Milk Stout. The first four didn’t seem to get through, but after another four I fell into the pool and felt much better.

Later, we headed to the beach with the rest of Cape Town and enjoyed the sea breeze and our square metre of sand, most of which was dug up by Alex and deposited on his sister.
The place quietened down as the sun ducked behind the mountains and the temperature suddenly plummeted to a chilly 34°C and we headed home to the beer fridge.

NOTE: Already been asked several times: this temperature was outside, in the shade, out of the (slight) breeze.
We were happy at 34-35°C, then it suddenly leapt to this peak and then dropped back to 38°C after about 10 minutes.
Cape Town weather is weird.

Greetings from sunny South Africa, where, having utilised a couple of 737’s and my 3-year old son to help me, I successfully turned the front garden into the horticultural version of Ground Zero, It’s a job I’d been meaning to tackle for ages, so with the alcohol (really, who uses mercury anymore?) hitting a heady 33°C, this seemed the unideal opportunity to do it.

It wasn’t my idea, of course. Mrs 6000 was the one that suggested I make a start on it. I strenuously argued my point and after a terse discussion, thought I had the perfect excuse to get out of it. But the (female) paramedics that were stood over me when I came round said that I could get the stitches put in later and promptly disappeared off for their lunch break.

Knowing that music makes the job go faster (and conveniently drowns out continuing instructions from indoors), SnoopyToo – my iPod – came along with me, and as I attacked a particularly resistant agapantha, I was treated to Fifth Amendment’s Scared Am I. Which summed things up nicely for both the plant and myself.  
I thought – as I tore his little roots out of the ground – this is a song I should share with my reader. Both of him.

And thus, having installed the WP Audio Player plugin and plonked a few megs of mp3 into the media library, here it is:

Fifth Amendment should have made it big. Their nu-metal sound hit the market just as nu-metal was becoming popular, it was just that… well… it just never quite happened for them. A UK tour (I will never forget that night in the backroom at the Bullingdon on Cowley Road), a couple of singles and an album. I bought them all and still have them.
And then a trip to LA. I never heard of them again.

If Alli, their flame-haired singer is out there and reading this, I’d love to know what you’re up to now. If you have some free time, I could do with some help in the garden…

While we’re suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous thirties, the UK has had a horrible, horrible winter. Much of which has been beautifully documented by flickr user karl101.

These are two of my favourites, snowy foggy view and ferris with moon, but his whole photostream is well worth a (long) look.

I recognise that this is going to be blogged ad nauseum over the next month, but I’m still going to throw a post up (geddit?) on here because I think it’s brilliant.

Remember OK GO and their song Here It Goes Again back in 2006? No?

How about if I ask whether you remember the treadmill video song?
And yes, we’re back singing from the same duck row.

At the time, that video was new, fresh and hugely popular – it still is. Well, now OK GO have OK GOne and done it again with their latest video for This Too Shall Pass.

As wired.com report:

For nearly four minutes — captured in a single, unbroken camera shot — the machine rolls metal balls down tracks, swings sledgehammers, pours water, unfurls flags and drops a flock of umbrellas from the second story [sic], all perfectly synchronized with the song. A few gasp-inducing, grin-producing moments when the machine’s action lines up so perfectly, you can only shake your head in admiration at the creativity and precision of the builders.

The song?  Meh – I can take or leave it. But the video is an absolute work of art.

I can’t be arsed with the Daily Mail anymore.

Who could forget the infamous Peter Hitchens piece in the Daily Mail last year, covered so adequately in my “The Daily Mail Quandary” post? The quandary being that while the Mail is seventeen different sorts of crap and provides a platform to ill-informed and racist bigots, it also publishes pictures of Kelly Brook frolicking in the surf in a bikini. And while that reasoning may seem a little shallow, it was just enough to keep me clicking through in the vain hope of seeing some more pictures of Kelly Brook frolicking… well… anywhere, really.
This from the newspaper that stated after Diana’s death in 1997:

Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, have declared that any use of paparazzi pictures will have to be cleared with Lord Rothermere, the proprietor who, in turn, proclaimed that there would be a ban on “all intrusive pictures except where they are considered necessary”

Lord Rothermere has since considered tens of thousands of intrusive pictures “necessary” – whatever that means. It’s almost like the “ban” was just words to pacify middle England and AN had no plans to actually ever institute it. How odd.  

But I digress. Again.

Yesterday’s Daily Mail was back on the offensive (in more ways than one) with a stingingly crap article about Jacob Zuma, who is on an official visit to the UK at the moment. The catchy headline?

Jacob Zuma is a sex-obsessed bigot with four wives and 35 children.
So why is Britain fawning over this vile buffoon?

Feeding the  misinformation to Britain’s middle to right-wing idiots this time was Peter Robinson, the man who last year suggested that Britain should invade Zimbabwe (didn’t we do that once before already?) and even wrote 554 words documenting how it might happen (and in doing so, demonstrated why he should never be allowed near any sort of word processor ever again). 
Incidentally, the Tony Blair quote on Mugabe as being “a man has destroyed his country, many people have died unnecessarily because of him” in that article made me chuckle. Doctor Pot, I’d like you to meet Mr Kettle and Brigadier Black.

Robinson’s distasteful Zuma article pokes fun at the culturally-acceptable polygamous relationships of the President and – when passing judgement on Zuma’s exra-marital affairs – demonstrates hypocrisy and exceptionalism we’re so used to when foreigners write about SA. Because Britain’s MPs are hardly squeaky clean in any regard, now are they? And because while Robinson complains about Zuma’s lavish lifestyle while others are starving in his country, the Evening Standard is reporting:

In London 41 per cent of children, 650,000 in all, live below the poverty line (defined as less than 60 per cent of median income), the same as 10 years ago. In inner London the figure rises to 44 per cent.

This just a few miles down the road from the banquet which Zuma will be attending tonight thanks to the Queen.
Not, I hasten to add, that any of this necessarily makes JZ’s behaviour acceptable. But singling him out for abuse is a little unjustified.

And now Zuma has hit back – the Cape Times headline today:

British think we’re barbaric, says Zuma

President Jacob Zuma said he was not surprised by the UK press’s scathing criticism of his polygamous practices because Britons have always believed that Africans were “barbaric” and “inferior”.
In what could spark a diplomatic row, Zuma said those who did not understand his culture should engage with and not hurl insults at him.
“When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way. Bear in mind that I’m a freedom fighter and I fought to free myself, also for my culture to be respected.”

A little bit of generalisation on the whole “Britons” thing, – Peter Robinson certainly doesn’t speak for everyone in the UK – but aside from that, I’m in full agreement with him.

Although I wouldn’t have any issue with him being particularly barbaric towards Peter Robinson.

UPDATE: Nice work by Herman Wasserman on his Look South blog.
UPDATE 2: SA Good News describes “Britain’s disapproval of President Zuma’s polymagous ways”.
No – that was the Daily Mail not Britain! GWTP!
UDPATE 3: Murray Hunter’s “modest” (brilliant) addition to the Zuma debate.

I pulled back the bedroom curtain this morning to reveal a beautiful peachy cloud-topped Table Mountain, glorious blue skies and a moon handily placed so as to balance the left hand side of the vista.

It seemed rude not to share.

Must get those trees trimmed…
Bigger here.