Einstein Says...

Far be it from me to argue with a genius, particularly when his signature equation, E=MC2 doesn't raise a hair on my woolly head as it whizzes way above my 5'8" body.

I googled what the equation means (e = a unit of energy, m = units of mass and c2 is the speed of light squared) to save some readers from having to do the same and hopefully I'm not alone in being none the wiser - physics, numbers, equations, formulas fuzzle my head and make my eyes spin.

However, I can totally relate to this Einstein quote, difficult as it is for a Cancerian, genetically engineered by the planets at birth, to leave the cosy rut she wraps snugly around her like a cuddly duvet.

What is life but a road trip with one single, absolute and common destination for everyone, magnificently captured in the infamous Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch?  "E's passed on!  This parrot is no more!  He has ceased to be! ....'is metabolic processes are now 'istory!...This is an ex-parrot!!"

We have to keep moving.  Evolution is simply changing and adapting to an environment in a constant state of flux.  It's not only our surroundings that change; we, as people change.  Parents continually remark how their offspring resemble one side of the family or other, how Johnny inherited dad's rugby skills and Jane has her granny's love of music, Thembi has her father's eyes while Sbu, sadly, is as short as his mother.  We seem to stop the comparisions as they grow to teenagehood, but a penetrating look in a mirror will show you that in middle age you appear to look more like one parent than you ever did before. It's not only wrinkles and skin folds that emerge, our appearance is changing with the years as well.

Likewise our interests progress and develop in different directions with time. Our world contracts and expands according to our interaction with it and I, for one, love the easy accessibility of technology and Google. Reading a book or watching a movie with my phone in one hand, ready to check a fact or new word.  This usually leads to some interesting new nugget of knowledge and no one could fault that.

We grow as we stretch our boundaries, both physical and mental.  In the rapidly narrowing gap between where I am now and my final destination lie new experiences and adventures.  The choice to pick them and leave behind the familiar and comfortable is mine. We can fear falls and dead ends, but simply sitting in one spot marking time is not enough.  Scrapes and bruises will heal, things going wrong will be blog fodder and for heavens sake, when I'm rocking on the porch, strawberry daiquiri in one hand and a walking stick useful for poking passing whippersnappers in the other, I need something to talk about and relive.

One life, end date unknown.  Live it fully and with joy.  Then fall off your perch and pass on.

Shackled in Spanish - For Better or Worse

Much to my regret, a polyglot I'm not.  Schoolgirl French confused the hell out of me - how could common everyday objects have a gender?  Trying to pick up Portuguese to aid communication in Mozambique brought the same problem - the gender of an object changed EVERYTHING in the sentence and flummoxed my uniglot brain.

Fortunately, No 2 Son, who consistently walked the failure line with Afrikaans at school, appears to have a natural linguistic ear and tongue for indigenous African languages and has taught himself some basic isiZulu, SiSwati and isiXhosa.  He happily chats away to appreciative locals in their own tongue and I'm both proud of and envy him for this skill.

Not, it must be said, that English is easy for people to learn.  Which is totally amazing to a native English speaker, absolutely oblivious to the wily traps of our language.  We don't give a thought to the trickeries of homonyms, for instance. 

Huh?  

Yup, those tricky words both spelt and pronounced the same, with completely different meanings.  A selection: 
Address   Back   Bank   Board   Cast   Check   Duck  Exact   Fair   Fine   Fly
Grave   Groom   Hood   Iron    Jam    Line    Plane    Skirt   Wave   Yard 

Getting the picture?  And that's before we tackle Eight and Ate, Nay and Neigh, Fare and Fair, Knife, Five and Fifth...

Spanish, I think, takes the cake for having a homonym which has a rather startling juxtaposition of meanings.

Esposas. Wife.  And Handcuffs.  Female readers keep breathing.  Male - pick yourselves off the floor and stop laughing.  This can be unpacked in a less than flattering view of the husband, as well.

Picture the scene back in Spanish Stone Age.  Reluctant bride dragged by the hair to the altar. (I always think of an altar as a slab upon which sacrifices are made.  It's an interesting choice of name for the spot on which couples are forever bound, swearing to forsake all others, care, obey (?!) and so on).

Once delivered to the altar, poor Cavewoman is handcuffed / bound to the excited groom.  Maybe they had to tie them together before she legged it back to her peaceful berry-gathering.  Smart woman knew what awaited - skinning and cooking the woolly mammoth he brought home, washing his bearskin skivvies...

However it happened, Spanish speakers are stuck with a word whose double meaning is quite derogatory.  Although, get a group of English speaking husbands together and in no time at all they are speaking about their 'ball and chain', 'trouble and strife' and 'handbrake'. Notice how they are awfully brave in a group and out of earshot...

Misogyny has no language barrier, it seems.

Determining the Value of Skills

It was interesting to read an employment agency's summary of skills currently in demand and the accompanying salaries.  I dare not show this to Him Outdoors; the archetypal Martian who regularly, on my behalf, with the Martian's natural instinct to solve a problem the Venusian hasn't even raised, expresses his deep annoyance at the pittance freelance writers earn.

He knows more than anyone the hours I spend hunched over my computer, hastening my failing eyesight and creating crevices in my brow that would challenge Botox's best efforts.  If I cared enough to go that route (or could afford it!). Weekends and holidays flash by unnoticed in commitment to deadlines and delivery and the laptop is fired up before the first morning cuppa is brewed.

Engineering, it appears, is top of the pops in terms of demand. With finance, IT and medical in hot pursuit.  Monthly salaries range from R61 000 to R70 000, eye-watering sums indeed.  Policemen, nurses, teachers and social workers clock in between R9 700 to R14 000 a month, musicians average R15 000 and graphic artists around R13 000.  

The highest earning Member of Parliament in South Africa earned R226 400 per month in 2016. I'll leave this right here to fester.

The SAFREA rate for freelance writers is R3.50 a word. Let me tell you from experience what that means.

You see something interesting that you'd like to write about, so craft a letter to the editor about the topic, angle, who you are likely to feature, when it'll be ready and so on.  Success! You'v been commissioned to write a 1000 word article. With photographs which the mag doesn't pay for but you must provide. Oh, and this publisher pays R1 per word below the suggested freelance rates - do you have a problem with that?  You spend hours researching and sourcing people to interview.  Your head buzzes as you search for the opening 'hook', and the vital conclusion.  After almost a week of work, you deliver exactly 1000 words, with six photographs, precisely to brief.

"Um, we'll publish this in 3 months time."  OK, I'll have to wait four months for payment but am delighted to find a home for this piece.  Four months pass and the ed drops you a note - 'please invoice for 853 words, we had to cut the piece.'

And that's as good as it gets - I'm registered on an international Freelancers site and let me tell you, with writers from across the globe competing for work, rates of 1 US cent per word are quite common.  

It's ironic that the creative arts are so poorly paid, unless you are a Hollywood star or a musical global phenomenon. Can you imagine your life without music, looking at a beautiful sculpture or painting, or reading for knowledge or pleasure?  I certainly can't yet those essentials don't drop out of thin air - they were produced with time, effort and God given talent. And justifying poorly paid, vital workers such as teachers, social workers, cops, nurses and so on as 'vocational' makes me want to vomit.  These are skills EVERYONE, at some point in their life, depends on. These are the carers, life savers and life changers society cannot do without.  It takes a special kind of person to enter these careers so why, oh why, do they not carry the salary scale of an engineer or an IT geek?  

Please don't feel sorry for me, I love writing more than anything I've ever done. Naturally, as with all jobs, it often palls under the pressure to produce for a living but the expanse of knowledge gained, the people I've met, the experiences I've had are priceless and worth everything.

It seems that as I get older, a communist salary system becomes more appealing.  Equal pay for equal work isn't only about the sexes.  If a nurse, a writer and an engineer each work long hours and give it all they have, why should the financial rewards be so radically disparate?

Who determines the worth of a person's skills?  I'm a believer in effort and results.  If both are fully given, then 100% value has been delivered and the job description and title should surely slide down the value scale?

The Head Spinning Antics of Hysteria Lane Bathed in the Glow of Community Love

Welcome to my little corner of the universe.  We have a postal code and our rooftops are seen on Google Earth but by most standards we live in a parallel universe which today delivered a corker that I simply have to share.

I'm jumping the schedule story list but hell, it's my list and I'll treat it with the disdain it deserves.  After all, I'm working hard on 'loosening up' and 'being in the moment' (how overworked are those phrases?) and this is me shaking loose.

So, I'm enduring a few days downtime this week while these old bones host Star Wars 98, or GoT 10 as Immunity System, with it's ally Drugs, fights Infection to the death, with my body being the battlefield.  Judging by the aches and pains, the battle is a hard fought one but IS and D are emerging top of the heap.  Yay!

Returning from the shower this morning to a flashing collection of missed calls from a medley of folk, including Him Outdoors, I felt Armageddon approaching. What could be so urgent at this time of day?  

Apparently, HO couldn't get hold of me, (my phone's been on silent for days) so he called in reinforcements from the 'hood.  In a nutshell, the line stretched from HO in Durban to Hilton in White River, then went to Kate enroute to Joburg, who sent it to Belinda in White River who in turn deftly forwarded the message to Sherreen, my neighbour across the road.

Who wasn't at home.  She was hard at work in her office as any self respecting business woman would be on a Thursday morning.  (With the exception of Bookclub Day, but that's only one Thursday a month.)

The message was 'HO can't get hold of Tracy.  Deep concern, is she OK?'  and Hysteria Lane were treating their mission conscientiously.  But Sherreen is not your flapping type and sensibly dashed from her office to the local music school downstairs where she knew Junior Son was hanging out.  The perk went right out of her stride when she was told he was on his way back to varsity. So, what was happening to her neighbour?

Plan B - call her daughter and send her over the road to gently knock on the door and check.  But what if the knock isn't heard?  Maybe give the patient a quick call first. Voila!

Did we laugh as she related the cat's cradle of phone calls, which turned into a right cackle of glee when Junior sent a message later from Joburg saying that Sherreen was trying to get hold of me.  Apparently her daughter took the instructions to 'Get hold of him any how you can' seriously and good old social media joined the fray.

In the meantime, of course, I'd got hold of HO and all was sorted so time for my next nap.  It was a delightful surprise to awake a few hours later and find him in the doorway - the miracle of flight!

My brain was processing this vision before me when another friend called. I was expecting to receive a message about HO but no, this friend is a meteorite gadding gleefully around our mini galaxy and she was on the phone with an invitation to join her on an evening walk.  Her invite declined, she went into detail about her kidney infection which cleared up overnight after she drank litres of water.  She didn't need bed rest and drugs. I earnestly assured her that the doctor had done the necessary tests with more in process and the doctor was very certain of her diagnosis.

"Oh," exclaimed Meteorite. "I think I had a very mild case of that then."  Yes dear.  

To the very dear friends and neighbours who created an emergency telephone message service, to the 2nd generation who connected on FaceBook and especially to Meteorite who had me in fits of laughter over the, well, randomness of individual trains of thought, love and light to you.

We are White River blessed.

Chairman Mao, Bat Bombers, Tree Climbing Crocodiles and more...

Hey, hey it's Friday and time for some funny bone ticklers.  I follow UberFacts on Twitter purely for their daily dishing out of ridiculous facts which breaks the monotony of angst and despair from news sources.

American based, not everything is of interest or relevance down here but there are some complete howlers, such absurdities that it's worth taking a few minutes to confirm the facts.  So far, I haven't caught them out but here are a few of my 'favourite things', as Mary Poppins would trill.

During WWII, the US wanted to bomb Japan using bats rather than an atomic bomb.  I swear, it's true - read the article on http://www.historynet.com/top-secret-wwii-bat-and-bird-bomber-program.htm.  What's so astonishing is that not only did President Roosevelt believe this plan had legs ("This guy is not a nut ... worth looking in to"), the lengths the military went to in order to thoroughly test the plan was bizarre.  Bats were put in ice cube trays and chilled to make them hibernate, then were fitted with teeny little bombs, taken up in a plane and dropped from 5000 feet.  

Test one wasn't very successful - most of the bats didn't properly awaken from hibernation and were unable to fly!  Still, the tests continued, using some 6000 bats in a determined effort to make this plan, well, fly.  The project was finally shelved in August 1943, much to the inventor's distress.  

Fortunately, testing on animals at that time apparently didn't elicit the (rightly so) furious public outrage it does today.

Continuing on, according to documents released by the State Department in 2008, during a personal meeting between Chairman Mao Tse Tung and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973 good old Mao bemoaned:

"You know, China is a very poor country. We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands." The Chinese leader drew laughter when he returned to the proposition a few minutes later. "Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you 10 million." he said, adding: "We have too many women … They give birth to children and our children are too many."

Don't believe me?  Look at http://foreignpolicy.com/2008/02/15/mao-offered-kissinger-10-million-chinese-women/

Just where do we start with this?  (And to be fair, it was probably said in jest.)  The logistics of transporting 10 million women across the world. How many jumbo jets would flood JF Kennedy airport?  At an average of 4 passengers per taxicab, how many cabs would fill the airport ranks?  And can you imagine the commotion of 10 000 000 tongues, jet lagged but still fighting to utter their daily average of 30 000 words...

And, of course, they DO give birth to children...apparently, that's a female thing which has nothing to do with men.

The import would, however, have been great for retailers.  10 million new customers, fresh from the bleakness of Communist China, hitting Macy's and Nordstrom.  

Which leads me to funny fact number 3 - the average UK woman will own 111 handbags in her lifetime.  I'm sure the average American can match that.  Are there enough cows in the world to provide sufficient leather for 10 million x 111 handbags?  Not to mention the shoes... 

Still, as crocodiles and alligators can climb trees (ok, if you insist, Google this UberFact as well! https://www.livescience.com/43291-crocodiles-can-climb-trees.html) perhaps the bags could have been crocodile skin? 

No, it was probably better to keep those women locked up in Beijing.  The methane levels breeding cows for those bags and shoes would have fried us by now.

Last, but most certainly not least, is making diamonds from tequila. Yup, some ill considered research and experimentation by Mexican scientists has done this very thing. "The scientists noted that 80-proof tequila (40 percent alcohol) had the ideal proportion of ethanol to water to create diamond films. In order to make the diamonds, they evaporated the tequila into a vapor, and then heated the vapor above 1400 degrees Fahrenheit before depositing it on silicon or stainless steel trays. The resulting diamond films were between 100 to 400nm in diameter and free of impurities."

What a load of bollocks and a shocking waste of magnificent tequila - none of my friends would exchange that magic elixir for a rock at any price.  What would our Hottie Dottie Diner's conferences be like without a margarita or 17?    

https://uber-facts.com/2015/03/06/you-can-make-diamonds-out-of-tequila/

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-11/creating-diamonds-tequila

Despair in the midst of a passion filled stadium

I admit to thinking long and hard before writing this post.  Lightly Green is usually a cheerful look at the ridiculous around me, or delights in revealing some gems discovered on one adventure or another.  Today's story weighs heavily on my heart, though, and banging it out on a keyboard is the only way I know to stop my mind running the tale on an endless loop of restless nights.

Ellis Park was at it's usual Test fever pitch when we arrived for the SA / France rugby test (see the previous blog, Taxi,Taxi for our transport tale!) The brick and concrete passages and ramps were crammed with over 40 000 fans, predominantly green and gold (who could not stare at the grown man in his Springbok onesie, complete with a horned hood!) although the dude with a stuffed imitation chicken hat, with legs and a head flopping listlessly alongside his jaw was also a good sighting.

Vendors selling biltong (beef jerky), soft drinks, flags and ice cream clambered up and down the stands, waving samples of their wares hopefully at the crowd and doing a fair business because being a noisy, interactive spectator is physically demanding work equalling the brute force activity on the pitch.

Crowd watching is always entertaining, a vastly diverse mix of spectators in groups large and small different in every detail except one - their enthusiasm for rugby.  Beer flowed, voices roared and 'our' team were giving the opposition a reasonable thumping.  Life is good.

Or not. The sun had long packed up for the day, allowing winter chill occupation of the stadium. Concrete, cold's best friend, eagerly absorbed and passed on the rapidly dropping temperature and it was then that THE ice cream seller climbed up towards us.

Aged somewhere in his mid 20's, his solemn face was the only motionless object in the stadium.  His eyes, dull with hopelessness, arrested my gaze and clutched my soul. I felt his story.  

Who knows how hard he fought to get a job selling ice cream in winter to a crowd more intent on beer?  How many taxi's did he have to catch to get to the stadium, and how much of that single day's earnings did transport suck up? How many ice creams would he sell and would he be in trouble with his employer for not selling them all?  Did he have a long, cold journey home in the dark, late on a Saturday night ahead of him.  All this to earn what?  R50?  R100?  And what about tomorrow?  Rugby is seasonal and the stadium not regularly used.  

A tsunami of guilt washed from my head to my toes, radiating through Him Outdoors absorption with the match.  Shaking his head at my story, he bought ice creams we didn't want and asked what else we could do?  

The minute rational part of my brain agreed.  We are in no financial shape to change the life of one extra person, let alone the millions of needy around us. Adopting a local creche and doing what we can within our means has us at our limits.  But it is not making a difference to the bigger picture of desperation and need, which continues to grow like an untreatable dread disease.

Amidst thousands of people spending hundreds of Rands on watching a single rugby match, here was an individual doing his damnedest to scrape some survival money.  Some would say he's lucky, he got the gig but is that really good enough?

South Africans are thoroughly overwhelmed by the immensity of the need in this country.  Monthly, jobs are shed.  Inflation pushes against constraints. Millions of people live incredibly hard lives just trying to survive and make do.  How many are able to improve their lot?  And the politicians continue to bicker, deceive, play magician games with the economy and peoples lives - the SASSA debacle is an outrageous crime against humanity, in my view.  And that's just one in a basket of indecent governance issues, albeit probably one of the most critical considering SASSA pays grants to the most desperate in society.

It's too easy, being overwhelmed by the numbers, to generalise and switch off to the sea of hopelessness we live in.  But sometimes, it's a photograph by Sam Nzima or Kevin Carter, highlighting an individual, that finally breaks the protective wall of our complacency.

My anonymous ice cream seller was that individual to me.  Seeing a person and not a crowd made the problem real and not a number.  But I still don't have any ideas to make a real difference in the larger picture.

My 20-something year old sons have hope - they are making their own way in the world but they have the resilience and the tools to cope with the challenges along the way.  They have the confidence to stride out for their dreams, and the bounce to recover from setbacks.  They got these qualities from a comfortable, supportive home where food, warmth, power, water and transport were always available.  Parents who established rules and, alongside their rights, taught responsibilities.  Parents who dropped them off at school in the morning and were home in time to cook dinner and supervise homework.  

These, I believe, are the essential foundations of any society.  We can't throw 'entrepreneurship' around and expect people to make a success of this difficult path just because it suits the government to throw this back on it's citizenry rather than create sustainable jobs.  Or education.  Or ensure that health and decent homes are available to all.

'Cry the Beloved Country' has become popular among the chattering class on social media but I refuse to cry for a collective.  I'll weep for a young man who is a Born Free, and without prospect.

Taxi, Taxi

Rugby.  The South African male's nirvana which for most of winter keeps them glued to the telly, beer in a vice-like grip while they give the ref, coach and team the benefit of their expert advice naturally (to their great frustration) ignored by the guys playing the game.

Being in the city when the Springboks face France at Ellis Park guaranteed that we'd make a plan to attend the match live, and Him Outdoors decided that the fiendish stadium traffic would best be tackled via the Gautrain.  That was a good call as our memories of post match gridlock are not happy ones.

Clutching Gautrain cards we arrived at Rosebank station and asked to top up the balances to cover the cost from Rosebank to Ellis Park (about 10 kms as the crow flies).  R85 (phew!).  Plus an additional R101 for new cards as ours had expired.  A solid R186 each for a quick train ride - outrageous! Uber here we come.

I'd deleted the Uber app to declog my bulging phone memory so it took a few minutes to reload it.  In which time, Him Outdoors had hailed down a taxi and was beckoning me to hurry up and get in.

Taxi.  Yes, a real live, Oxford Road, 16 seater Toyota Hi Ace special. A battered veteran of the daily crush to move over 1 000 000 South Africans to and from work and shops.  And me dressed like a teddy bear, a bulging Michelin Man figure prepared for freezing stadium conditions.

                                  

In I roll, squeezing into the back seat corner and watching in complete fascination as our R20 is passed forward to the driver and off we stutter.  The taxi was everything you'd expect - the interior light smashed, no panel on the side door, an engine making the choking noise of an overworked espresso machine.  When it was running, of course.  Frequent shudders threw the passengers forward in their seats as stall after stall brought us to a halt.     

                                

The taxi stopped to pick up a glamorous young woman.  Cautiously, she opened the door and stared at the occupants.  "Oh, men only" she said, beginning to step back.  "My wife is with me," piped up HO.  Giving us a level look, she climbed over two empty seats and sat next to us.  As did the lady picked up at the next stop. HO did what he always does and got chatting.  "These guys pay a woman to sit in the taxi, but she works with them," our companion explained."I never get into a taxi full of men, even if there is one woman in the taxi.  It's too dangerous."  A sobering reality check about the dangers on our roads, which don't only come from vehicles. 

"Why is the driver doing that?" I whisper to HO.

"What?"  

"Holding a R100 note at arms length out of the window." 

Within minutes, it became clear.  As we putt-putted up Jan Smuts Avenue, another taxi drew alongside and the passenger handed five R20 notes to our driver in exchange.  Aha, smaller notes required!

This process was repeated as we drove through Hillbrow.  This time we stopped across the road from a fish and chip shop and our driver summoned a passerby to take the R100 note into the shop and get more change.  

"How do we tell the driver where to drop us?" my husband asked his neighbour. 

"You don't," she replied.  "He stops where he wants to."

Indeed.  Within four blocks we were ejected into the middle of a busy intersection.

"Ellis Park is over there, let's walk until we find a metered taxi," suggested HO. Fat chance of that in the lower end of Bree and Smit streets, which were pretty much stationery Hi Ace taxi ranks.

It was quicker and less obstructed to simply walk along on the road because the pavements overflowed with hairdressers, pedestrians, salesmen, on-the-hoof eateries and barbecues, rubbish and displaced cement pavers making the going underfoot tricky.  All we had to negotiate on the tarmac were piles of weird rubbish on the edge of the road - broken chairs, curtains, odd shoes...household type of garbage which we assume came from some of the adjacent abandoned buildings.  

Even at my brisk pace, there was plenty of opportunity to survey the surroundings.  Neatly dressed women lugging shopping bags, one mother impatiently pulling along her little girl, proudly wearing her fairy princess dress over a warm cardigan; an elderly grandfather in his Sunday best jacket and hat, carrying his toddler grandson over a wet morass of garbage and running water. 

All normal, slightly old fashioned Saturday-afternoon-shopping-in-town scenes that large suburban malls have rendered history for most of us.

I loved it.  Every single minute of it.  Decrepit warehouses, showrooms and flats, one dated 1910 and others which looked even older.  In places, renovated buildings stood out proudly, glowing with colourful paint and neat fascias.  The blare of 50 genres of music competing above hooting vehicles and a Babylon of voices.  The whiff of diesel and other less savoury aromas. The people, intent on their business even if it was just relaxing, having a beer or a bite to eat, twitching their hips in tune with the music.  Smiling.  Everyone was smiling. Living in the moment, getting on with Saturday in time honoured tradition.

I'm so glad we didn't take the train.