Claymore

There's this commercial on the radio that is advertising emergency medical rescue by helicopter for the low, low fee of R90 per month.

How incredibly rare is is to be in a situation where you survived an accident or something, but you're hurt badly enough that the small time advantage (if there is one) of getting a helicopter medivac will save your life? Pretty rare, I'd say.

I wonder how many customers that company has...

Accents:
For those non-South Africans who seem to think the South African accent is nice, here's Whackhead's guide on how to speak English wiff a Souf African eksent.


Online dating:
I love reading the dating profiles linked to local news sites. This one, FireLilly84, seems somewhat strange. To start with, she seems to not be very discriminating about what she's looking for - it appears that she's looking for a breathing male. But then, in her narrative description, she has this:

Why should you get to know FireLilly84?
I am a confident, assertive girl looking for the same thing in a man. I'm looking to meet my match in all respects - someone who can stimulate me at every level. I have ten toes on my right foot.

OK, then. I always wanted a girl with ten toes on one foot...


Traffic:
The AAD2008 airshow was held down in Cape Town over this last weekend; too far for me to go, sadly. I hope they move it back to Pretoria soon. Anyway, this marvellous little vehicle was on display there: A Smart car with a gun-mount. Ideal for traffic, I say.




Politics:
So, South Africa's President, Thabo Mbeki, has resigned. I'm no fan of his - his denialist AIDS policies, ineffectual policy on Zimbabwe, uncaring attitude to domestic issues, tolerance of incompetence, and behind-the-scenes guiding hand have annoyed me. That said, I am uncomfortable with him essentially being removed from office so abruptly. It seems like he's taken it with grace though; I expect he's still be used acting as a roving African diplomat (hey, that's mainly what he's been doing anyway).

On the plus side, there's a good chance certain Cabinet members will leave too - in particular, those incompetents who have done so much damage to South Africa in the fields of telecommunications, health, and energy.

I was reading a couple of nice Time Life books on the Luftwaffe and the RAF during WW2, and that got me on to looking up a whole bunch of things on Wikipedia, thinks like the Victoria Cross (did you know that only one has ever been awarded to a fighter pilot?), and entries on many of the great aviation heroes, such as Johnny Johnson, Pat Pattle, Douglas Bader, Guy Gibson, Leonard Cheshire, Sailor Malan, Hans Ulrich-Rudel (unsurprisingly, he was involved in the design of the A-10 Thunderbolt II), Erich Hartmann, Adolf Galland, Hans-Joachim Marseilles, and many others. They're virtually all dead now, over 63 years later, but it seems strange to know that many were still alive when I was a boy, and nuts about aircraft. My great-uncle Hugh was a Spitfire pilot; I wish I'd got to know him better. I met him for the first time in 1977, when I was on a trip to Windhoek; apparently he was astonished at how much I knew about WW2 aircraft.

I'm amazed at how those men all coped back then; it must have been so hard, getting back into a fighter or bomber each day, knowing that it was not unlikely that they'd not be coming back, and that it was quite probable that some of the comrades wouldn't.