Good. Now you can get on with your day and start… HANG ON A SECOND!

Here’s Landmarkr!

Super straightforward: 6 photo clues to a Landmark, City or Country. The clues get progressively easier, and you get a guess each time a picture is revealed. And there are some helpful hints along the way:

Lisbon, Portugal is not on the right continent.

which can really help to narrow it down (this is sarcasm).

Much like Wordle, the quicker you get it, the better person you are. But of course, you’ll need to tell your friends about it so that you can boast to them about your superior record.

And with a full archive of over 200 days available, free of charge, it’s also super addictive. This post has taken me three hours to write, because I just keep popping back “for one more go”.

100% record so far.

My first failure will hurt.

It looks like a scene from a disaster movie, with floods, broken trees, branches and damaged buildings everywhere.

We did get completely battered by yesterday’s storm.

But… give it a couple of weeks (ok, or maybe a month), and all that will be tidied up and forgotten about, and Cape Town will still be the most desirable city on the continent.

Which has its drawbacks:

But still, you’d rather be here than anywhere else.

Biggest storm this century for the Mother City, allegedly.

I’m finding it hard to disagree.

Floods everywhere, trees down – one killing a motorist just around the corner from us – branches all over the place. It’s going to take a while to clear up.
School went ahead for us, but plenty didn’t. And everyone has the day off tomorrow…

…which seems weird, given that today was horrific and dangerous, and tomorrow is just going to be wholly unpleasant. But I doubt that many students will be complaining.

There was a 1½ hour period this morning where nothing could land at Cape Town airport:

Imagine leaving Johannesburg, and then – 4 hours later – ending up in… Johannesburg.

Heartbreakingly awful. Thoughts and prayers.

Locally, there is plenty of damage, with trees down all over the neighbourhood. With the polyphagous shot hole borer beetle epidemic having weakened many of the oak trees around the area, the winds were just too much for a lot of them, and the results are pretty devastating.

If the forecast is correct (and it’s been unerringly accurate today), then we’re just in for about 20mm of rain tomorrow, which is still a lot, unless you’ve had 110mm the previous day, in which case you feel like grabbing your swimsuit and then heading to the beach.

Hopefully, with less wind and less rain, there will be an opportunity to start the clear up: not least for me in our garden. Although, maybe I actually quite like our new rim-flow pool.

But tomorrow looks rather ominous.

The South African Weather Service (SAWS) has issued an Orange Level 8 weather warning for disruptive rainfall in the Western Cape.

Level 8 indicates “Severe” impact, and yes, Mother Nature is throwing everything at us all at once: big waves, big winds, and a lot of rain.

The Garden Route was hit by an Orange Level 8 last week, and… well…

It didn’t end well.

While many schools in the Winelands are closed tomorrow, ours in Cape Town go ahead unless we hear differently overnight.

We’re as ready as we can be. 

I have an umbrella.

Let’s see what happens.

And we all differ in what special touches we apply to our houses to make them stand out from the crowd.

I’m not sure we’d all go for this sort of thing, though:

Dorset is weird.

Oh. Hang on.

Apparently, it’s not for interior design. It’s an annual community occasion:

She said: “What happens is we get these poo fountains shooting up in the street and in people’s houses. It’s becoming an annual event.”

“People need to take notice of this because we’ve got more housing coming along and Dorset Council has made this a development area.”

Like the church fete or some Morris dancing. Everyone can join in. Candy floss, ice cream vans, a coconut shy and some poo fountains. Lovely.

All the fun of the fair.
Yeah. Dorset is weird.

A couple of points here. And they’re important ones.

Firstly, while Hantavirus is an RNA virus, and there is some evidence that Ivermectin blocks some viral proteins from entering the host cell nucleus, Hantavirus replicates outside the host cell nucleus, so Ivermectin would have precisely zero effect on that process.

Well done.

Secondly, Mary Talley Bowden was reprimanded by the Texas Medical Board after she prescribed er… Ivermectin to a patient infected with Covid. A patient who she didn’t have permission to treat.

I honestly can’t think why she’s suddenly trying to be controversial again now, aside from the fact that her book: Dangerous Misinformation: The Virus, the Treatments, and the Lies, “a memoir about her COVID-19 work and clashes with medical institutions”, comes out – gosh – it comes out this month.

Grifters gonna grift.

Meanwhile: SO MUCH more evidence that someone screwed the pooch when that boat got to St Helena and the couple of weeks that followed. Ah Jesus.

Still, the place looks absolutely amazing – like nowhere else on earth – and the community’s lifestyle and relationship with the sea is fascinating.

Here’s an NPR… docu-site? – I’m really not sure what to call this sort of content – all about life on the island and the people who live there.

Link: Tristan da Cunha – the world’s most remote inhabited island.

It’s easy reading, and offers a lovely introduction to the place, with some amazing photos and videos.

I was accused by a couple of individuals on social media of being “dramatic”, and of “scaremongering”.
They took exception to my view that – coming from Argentina – this particular strain of Hantavirus (at that point only isolated in one patient, and not the other two seriously ill patients or the three individuals who died, including the one that collapsed in OR Tambo airport) could well have been passed from human to human.

But then a day later, the WHO agreed with me:

The World Health Organization says there may have been rare human-to-human transmission of hantavirus on the Dutch cruise ship where three passengers have died.

The virus is usually spread from rodents, but the WHO said in this instance it could have spread among “really close contacts” aboard the MV Hondius vessel. 

And today, our local NICD confirmed that:

And sure, that still doesn’t mean that we’re in any huge amount of danger from Hantavirus, but equally, it doesn’t mean that we’re in the clear, either.

Thankfully, there finally seems to have been some hard work done in contact tracing those on board the flight with the Dutch woman – which was almost certainly 4Z132 on April 25th:

Now we just need to know what she did (aside from collapsing) between this flight landing at 20:31 and her not getting onto KL592, which departed at 23:58 that evening.

That’s two confirmed cases so far, then. And it would be foolish not to assume that her husband also died from the virus. Given this new development of potential human to human transmission, they’re also going to medivac another close contact of his off the ship today.

Important work again by the NICD is confirming the strain of Hantavirus, and good that we’re now able to look at the outbreak and any potential consequences with fresh information. But I’m still sticking to the way that I ended that last post on this subject:

It’s going to be interesting couple of weeks ahead.

As Winston Churchill once noted:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.

But it isn’t perfect, as… er… Winston Churchill once noted:

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Both statements can be true. And both statements probably are.

The issue of allowing every vote to count the same is – of course – both the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the democratic system. Because everyone should be equal, but then you end up having the same voting rights as… well… as this person:

Honestly, who inconsistently capitalises the word “Vinegar”?

OK. OK.
Obviously, that’s not the real problem here. The problem is ethanoic acid fumes.

No, no, no. The problem is not that either. The problem is that this person’s vote is going to effectively nullify your vote in any upcoming election. Because it’s unlikely that you’ll be intelligent enough to read this blog, but stupid enough to vote for the same party that they do.

And the worst bit of it? They are not alone. Remember this?

More fuel load incoming. Heavy metals via Geoengineering. Today are heat warnings danger to humans and environment….hmmmm I wonder why…….metals create a magnifying glass effect burning everything with the sun rays and absorbing all the moisture.

All for “climate change” and the “sustainable goals”. The WEF/UN/BILL GATES ERADICATION OF ALL LIFE ON THIS EARTH. DOWN TO ZERO EQUALS ZERO LIFE ON EARTH. That will eventually also include all the politicians who execute the devils orders.

And this?

Weather manipulation and gas like artificial fog is what is making people sick and this combined with 5G is killing all trees, insects and nature, contaminates all water sources.

And this?

Many people have been having dreams lately but as always umlungu [white people] will say “it’s climate change” and the sheep will believe umlungu over us.

And all of these people?

All those evil pilots spraying us and never ever ever telling anyone about the poison. And the airport people that load the planes. Those dudes are evil.

And suddenly, your vote is worth absolutely nothing. Worse than nothing, if such a thing was possible in an election process.

Yes, Churchill was absolutely right. The only issue being that no-one in their right mind would waste five minutes of their precious time on any of these Vinegar-inhaling moonbats.

That cold front actually dropped 54mm on us in just under 24 hours.

And so yes, that is how it’s going to work, and so I wasn’t wrong in my assessment.

Check out this weekend:

We get somewhere around 1400mm of rainfall a year in this bit of Cape Town. So to get another 100mm (give or take) over 3 days this weekend on top of the 200mm from the last two weeks would really be quite something.

And the good news is that the rainfall over the dams is above the long term average for this time of year for just the second time this decade.

At least we’re not on the Garden Route this week.