Kachasu

I love nuclear power. Clean, efficient and cost-effective. But, and really I am not trying to be a pessimist, how on earth is it going to work in Africa? We can’t even run the electricity system without screwing it up. And they want to open the tender to the Russians. Can we all spell Chernobyl?

It actually frightens me that this could happen. In fact, it probably will. Between the Russians and the South Africans it will be a monumental fuck up.

No really. We scrimp and save on maintenance and routine replacements/repairs on all sorts of things like electricity, roads, policing… Nukes cannot be treated in this way. Once again, remember Chernobyl? Africa as a whole does not have a good history when it comes to repairs and maintenance.

What on earth inspires anyone to believe that nukes are a good solution in Africa? We will be a nation with three-headed, web toed children.

Please explain it to me.

Most of you will have guessed by now that I am not exactly a domestic kind of woman. I have never ironed a shirt or cleaned a toilet in my life. I can’t make a bed, unless it has a duvet on and even then it looks squiff. Up until fairly recently I took no interest at all in domestic affairs. Since buying this big old house it has become a different story. It was built in the 30s and I have gone totally 30s mad in the restoration of it (the light fittings then were amazing) and the purchasing of furnishings and fittings from antique shops. Anyway, I digress. I found a book called ‘Housekeeping for the Modern Woman’ printed in 1936. Ever since my maid has been subjected to ancient cleaning products and rituals. My cleaning stuff bill has gone from several hundred a month to R100. I shit you not. And here is how.

First and foremost in the domestic cleansing arsenal is vinegar. This stuff is amazing. It cleans anything. AND deodorizes (the smell of vinegar vanishes when it dries and somehow takes all the bad smells away too) really effectively. It has to be white spirit vinegar which you can buy in 2l bottles from Pick ‘n Pay for like R7. Balsamic will not do.

I started off having Gertrude clean all the old brass window things. Smear on vinegar, wipe off, sparkling brass. Just like that. I swear. So I got more adventurous. All the old Handy Andy, Shower Duck, Clean Green bottles filled with 3 parts vinegar to one part water. It also works as a very useful air freshener. Especially in my and The Artist’s end of the house in which we smoke like chimneys so it can get dead smelly. Our bedroom, TV lounge and passage have never smelled better. Cat piss? Vinegar!

Then, much to Gertrude’s dismay, I stopped buying fabric softener. The book said vinegar is the best. I tell you, my clothes have never been so soft and fluffy. Do not dilute for this. Just vinegar.

My wooden floors (mostly pine but the front rooms are yellow wood) are now treated with olive oil and vinegar as the carrier. They are beautiful. Plus, no nasty floor wax smell.

Toilets and other nasty areas she cleans with Ammonia. WARNING: Do not mix vinegar and ammonia in a bottle thinking it will be more efficient. The fumes will probably kill you. I tried.

Apparently to clean mold etc off showers you need a thing called Borax. I have not found this. So Gertrude uses Jik. Works like a charm.

The only modern things we buy are dishwashing liquid and clothes washing powder.

The beauty of it is, I don’t have a home that smells like fake pot-pourri, lemon, pine etc. It’s just a home that smells like cooking (not mine, The Artist’s). Gertrude is happy because it actually works better than modern stuff.

I am happy because now I can spend that money on other things.

The story off iol is pasted below. When I die, I expect my family to freeze-dry me and stick me in a glass table. Like a dining room table. They resist this and think I am joking.

Tokyo – The Japanese inventor of instant noodles will symbolically blast off into space next week at his funeral at a baseball stadium officiated by three dozen monks, his company said on Friday.

The funeral for Momofuku Ando, who died on January 5 at age 96, will take place on Tuesday at the Kyocera Dome in Osaka, which can hold as many as 55 000 people, said Nissin Food Products, which Ando founded.

Because Ando tried to reproduce the dangling delicacy for astronauts, the funeral at the closed-dome stadium will feature projections of images from space along with chanting and synthesiser music, said Nissin Food.

In a sign of his instant noodles’ success, top business leaders and a major former prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, will deliver eulogies at the funeral, to be officiated by 34 monks.

“Momofuku Ando invented ‘Chicken Ramen’ and ‘Cup Noodle.’ Before his death, he devoted his efforts to inventing space noodles,” a Nissin statement said.

“So our company has decided to use the space theme to conduct the corporate funeral to see off the late Momofuku Ando into space,” it said.

A woman I know was at an event with some high and mighties from one of SA’s listed companies. As usual she was not wearing knickers. Before she knew it one of these slimy cretins (in fact the big boss whose name I will not use because I can’t take the law suit) has his hand up her skirt and almost inside her.

GRIM! As she was telling the story, the men around the table laughed it off. I cannot think of anything more revolting and was full of righteous indignation.

Like a good girl she smacked him hard, but she says he just looked at her like “so what”.

Is it just me or is this totally unacceptable behaviour?

Anyway, this is probably why most women in business wear trousers.

It is late and I am irritated so too idle to write my own detailed opinion. So, like I did with the homeopathy crap, here is an article off www.quackwatch.com.

Do not listen to mumbo jumbo!!!!!

Deepak Chopra claims that “by consciously using our awareness, we can influence the way we age biologically. . . . You can tell your body not to age.” He has reportedly made millions of dollars marketing such messages along with books, lectures, tapes, and consumables based on a “modern” version of an ancient Indian healing system (ayurvedic medicine). Chopra promises “perfect health” to those who’”through ayurvedic methods’”can harness their consciousness as a healing force. Chopra claims that “remaining healthy is actually a conscious choice.” He states:

If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules. On the other hand, if you have sad thoughts, and angry thoughts, and hostile thoughts, then you make those molecules which may depress the immune system and make you more susceptible to disease.

The rear cover of his book Perfect Health states:

Once you have determined your body type from the detailed quiz inside . . . this book provides you with a personally tailored program of diet, stress reduction, exercises and daily routines. It’s based on a 5,000-year-old system of mind/body medicine that has been revived today as Maharishi Ayurveda. Its a total plan for . . . using the power of quantum healing to transcend disease and aging’”for achieving Perfect Health.

Chopra claims that herbs prescribed in ayurvedic treatment “take the intelligence of the universe and match it with the intelligence of our own body.” His audiocassette program, “Magical Mind, Magical Body,” is promised to help you “achieve a brilliantly blissful life.” Time/Life Video has advertised his “audiovisual workshop” as “a must for anyone seeking perfect health.” Called “Growing Younger ­ Practical Guide to Lifelong Youth,” it contains tapes and a guidebook containing “interactive exercises designed to help you personalize your anti-aging strategy to your body’s individual needs.”

The Nightingale-Conant Corporation is marketing Chopra’s “Journey Into the Boundless,” an audiotape set said to be “based on a life-changing seminar’”that frees you to realize your full potential.” The product brochure quotes Chopra as saying that, “Understanding your body’s natural rhythms and needs activates unbelievably powerful disease-fighting processes within you.” The product is also promised to tell: (1) how to eliminate fears and phobias from your life forever, (2) how to heal illnesses by stimulating the body’s “inner pharmacy,” (3) how to eliminate health problems simply by understanding your body type,” and (4) the secret of people who eat whatever they want and never gain a pound.”

On a “Donahue” show, Chopra maintained that people who are happy not only have fewer colds but are less likely to get heart disease or cancer. During one segment, Chopra took Phil Donahue’s pulse and diagnosed him as “a romantic.” The program also featured a testimonial by Marian Thompson, a patient whose metastatic breast cancer had gone into remission with chemotherapy plus ayurvedic treatment. Chopra asserted that his methods had played a major role in the woman’s apparent recovery by strengthening her immune system. Ms. Thompson subsequently died of her disease.

Another of Chopra’s books, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, is reported to have sold over a million copies in hardcover, including 137,000 in a single day after an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show. Chopra has also attracted considerable criticism. In 1994, Forbes magazine dubbed him “the latest in a line of gurus who have prospered by blending pop science, pop psychology, and pop Hinduism.” A more recent report in Esquire described him as “a personable, charismatic man of handsome mien and beguiling voice who has mastered the rhetoric of enhancement.” As far as I can tell, Chopra has neither published nor personally conducted any scientific studies testing whether the methods he promotes help people become healthier or live longer.

Chopra’s book Return of the Reishi promotes the idea that meditators can levitate. Chapter 13 describes his personal experience with “lifting off,” which he calles “the first threshold in yogic flying”:

As the meditator begins to practice, he lays down a pattern of repetition in which the body more and more begins to understand what the mind wants. In scientific parlance this is called behavioral conditioning. In common language, he is simply acquiring a habit. Mundane as it sounds, flying is simply a habit. Over time, the body stops shaking and, unexpectedly, while doing nothing more than the same practice he has done in the past, the person accomplishes the result. His body lifts up and goes forward.

Needless to say, this is a remarkable moment for every meditator, and of the fifteen thousand TM meditators in America who practice the yogic flying technique, each one remembers his first liftoff with incredible vividness. My own experience is fairly typical. I was sitting on a foam rubber pad, using the technique as I had been taught, when suddenly my mind became blank for an instant, and when I opened my eyes, I was 4 feet ahead of where I had been before.

“Ancient Roots”
Proponents state that ayurvedic medicine originated in ancient time, but much of it was lost until reconstituted in the early 1980s by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Its origin is traced to four Sanskrit books called the Vedas-the oldest and most important scriptures of India, shaped sometime before 200 B.C.E. These books attributed most disease and bad luck to demons, devils, and the influence of stars and planets. Ayurveda’s basic theory states that the body’s functions are regulated by three “irreducible physiological principles” called doshas, whose Sanskrit names are vata, pitta, and kapha. Like astrologic “signs,” these terms are used to designate body types as well as the traits that typify them.

Like astrologic writings, ayurvedic writings contain long lists of supposed physical and mental characteristics of each constitutional type. Vata, for example, is said to “govern all bodily functions concerning movement” and to accumulate during cold, dry, windy weather. According to Chopra’s Time/Life Video guidebook: vata individuals are “usually lightly built with excellent agility” and “love excitement and change”; balanced vata produces mental clarity and alertness; and unbalanced vata can produce anxiety, weight loss, constipation, high blood pressure, arthritis, weakness and restlessness.

Ayurvedic proponents have claimed that the symptoms of disease are always related to the balance of the doshas, which can be determined by feeling the patient’s wrist pulse or completing a questionnaire. Some proponents claim (incorrectly) that the pulse can be used to detect diabetes, cancer, musculoskeletal disease, asthma, and “imbalances at early stages when there may be no other clinical signs and when mild forms of intervention may suffice.” Balance is supposedly achieved through “pacifying” diets and a long list of procedures and products, many of which are said to be formulated for specific body types. Through various combinations of vata, pitta, and kapha, ten body types are possible. Somehow, however, one’s doshas (and therefore one’s body type) can vary from hour to hour, season to season, and questionnaire to questionnaire.

I am without The Artist this week. So it would be tonight that a Parktown Prawn emerges from the 70 year old woodwork. I shriek and the girls come running. I make the eldest mush it to death with an old shoe and then spike it with a stiletto. They know I am not going to deal with it so there is a pragmatic grimness as they go to the task. Now it is a mangled lump on the Catholic Crapper floor. Only fitting that it should be in there, like some sort of mangled sacrifice.

I ask in all sincerity: what sort of a God created that thing? Why? While I lie in bed, worried that it springs to life (I have seen these things in action before) all my crucifixes and other bits and bobs can contemplate the creation. I, in the meantime am going to take a dormicum and flake out in 30 minutes or so.

While on the subject why the mosquito? Why the Hadedah (or however you spell it)? These are not normal. The mozzie serves no purpose and the Hadedah is like a pterodactyl. I have never seen a dog or cat take one on with any success and all they do is make a terrible noise. When I drank I would wake up with a vile hangover because of those damn things and wonder how to get rid of them.

Wait a minute- Maybe I heard that Hadedahs eat Parktown Prawns? That may be the case, but I ain’t inviting one to live in my house.

In African culture (I forget which one) people would take a chicken to bed at night so it could peck all the nasty critters off the floor. Seems like a good deal. But my cats would eat the chicken- If it was a Hadedah it would eat the cats.

I am tired and traumatized.

My very favourite cousin Luke just popped around, on his way back from three years in China and heading back to the UK. Another art-type so he and My Artist have been discussing the merits of burning wooden sculpture and the best accelerants. Have not seen Luke for about 5 years. The weird thing is he is a 6ft 6inch male replica of me. Skinny, blue eyes, dark hair… His brother, Andrew is the spitting image of my brother. How is this so? Well, my mom’s sister married my dad’s brother so the offspring of both unions was bound to be genetically similar.

My eldest daughter is madly in love with Luke. He is 24 years old now and she is 12. Since they met (when she was three) she has been intent on marrying him. Given the genes this is not such a good idea. Can we all say three headed children with webbed feet? Anyway, he is getting married in August (no, not to a relative) so she is a bit heartbroken. But they all hopped in the car now to head off and hang out at my mom’s. We will see them later.

Another cousin (but from the Amerian side of the family, one of the odd branches that is half-hawain) is also here. Her name is Kai and she is an art collector. I am surrounded by art-types and art-wannabees.

Anyway, it is actually really good to know all my scattered family. We have a long history riddled with bizarreness. Like my maternal grandpa who owned coffee plantations in the Cameroons and shot his chef in a farm uprising before fleeing to what was then Rhodesia.

Maternal great grandma was quite a scandal. She first married a respectable English doctor for whom there is a stained glass window in a church off Baker Street. They had two kids (one of which is my grandpa – see above for shooting details) Not happy with him she moved to Japan and spent a year or so salmon fishing and generally behaving like a hippy. She then married a Hawaian chief of police. He was a shit – but she had two kids with him too. She ended up married to a Russian and lived happily ever after.

Many many of these oddities. I have all the letters and paperwork and belongings going back about four centuries. Think I could write a book.

Anyway – good to see my gorgeous cousin. My mom travels all the time and stays with relatives the world over. I think I should make more of an effort to keep in touch.

Some of you will recall an earlier blog about my extremely trying situation at home with boyfriend and alternative healing mumbo jumbo (http://www.blogmark.co.za/index.php?q=node/7128). A new theory has now been espoused by his charlatan healer friend. Wait for it… he has an alien fungus living inside his body and must avoid certain foods and take hedge-witchery crap to rid himself of it. Diagnostic method? Iridology. This is the looking at an eyeball which then tells you every single thing wrong with a person. Sounds solidly scientific does it not?

I just got a call:
R: “Hun, Lara says I have this alien fungus blah blah.. iridology… blah blah… must have (insert herb/tissue salt name here) please can you get it for me on your way home?
L: “No.”
R: “Why?”
L: “Because it’s bullshit and I am not going near some crappy little Welleda shop.”
R: “Oh”

AAARGH! This woman is a fear-mongering new-age hippy monster. Last week at loved one’s birthday she overheard me and Hermon talking about Thailand. He says charcoal stopped him getting upset stomach. I was saying I have been several times and never had problem.

Charlatan: “Charcoal is very bad for you, take (insert herb/tissue salt name here) instead.
H&L (in unison): “We are charcoal based life forms!

She saw she was going to get no joy from us and moved on to spread her fear and disinformation elsewhere.

Oh and then there was the syphilinum cure. Evidently, by taking small sugar balls you can change your genetic structure and rid yourself of fear, anxiety and alcoholism. These are the freaks that make and bottle Tachyon Angel spray for children. Hands up who knows what a tachyon is? I do and, trust me, it ain’t gonna be trapped and bottled.

I detest and loathe these people. These spreaders of fear. I then get irritated with R because he believes every sodding word and we are all subjected to bullshit remedies. Naturopathy, homeopathy, kinesiology – the list of quackery is endless.

Give me a blood test and chemicals any day.

After my blog about rape yesterday some people (ok, mostly the herd of bovinerebels) suggested that the complaining and voicing of negative opinion was bad for our country and should therefore stop. Huh? If we all agree, and I think we must, that Apartheid was one of the greatest evils of the last century (second to Nazi Germany maybe) then we have to be in favour of civil society exercising it’s right to moan. And we must also be in favour of the international community applying pressure.

We have a very big crime problem here. No avoiding it. Why should shutting up and playing happy families serve us in ending crime and getting government to do its job in this regard? It wasn’t doing it on its own, that is for sure. Complaining and international boycotting and pressure ended Apartheid. Any particular reason we can’t use the same tools to end another social evil?

It works. Look at how rumours of losing the 2010 soccer has galvanised government into action. Look at how the continual onslaught of public pressure has got it to change its tune.

Telling citizens to shut up because of what the international community might read into our current crime problem is not dissimilar to the drunken, family beating father that nobody talks about because “what will the neighbours think.”

Before anyone starts screaming about how whities do this too: YES. I KNOW. But it is not as frequent or as often in the news- this is like some sort of mass mental illness that seems to be happening. Why do some black South African men feel they can rape small children? And then they kill them. What the fuck is wrong? I am tired of hearing rubbish theories on this – I know we have black men on this blog – so cough up? What is the deal?

Soweto students are pretty much rioting because they keep losing friends to rape and murder. An 8 year old girl in Soweto was sleeping in her bed and a man BURROWED UNDER THE SHACK WALL to strangle, rape and burn her. A 14 year old was gang raped and stoned to death.

Huh?

What is it that makes so many of these men decide that this is somehow an acceptable thing to do?

Never mind children – we have the HIGHEST rape incident rate in the world. Why? All I want to know is why.

I am not interested in how “not every black man rapes women and children.” I KNOW this. What I want to know is how come so many think it is fine? Surely it has not always been like this and therefore some sort of cultural tradition – like slaughtering bulls. If that’s the case then we are in more trouble than I first suspected.

This is a rant – but I have a nearly eight year old daughter and that kind of story makes we want to track the fucker down and do things that make Hostel look like a Disney movie.

Sorry if I enrage any of my fellow South Africans with inflammatory blogging. What happens is that whenever I see a story about a child being hurt in any way I get completely angst-ridden about it. I am a mom and I do this weird mental overlay where it’s sort of “what if that were my child” or I imagine how my child would feel if she were abused/raped/tortured/neglected. It generates a very emotional response. Of course I do not believe that every black male is out there raping and killing their own people. I do not live in fear. I often, however, live in revulsion and incomprehension at what humanity can do to itself.