an exercise in percussive maintenance
Tag: South Africa
Today is South Africa’s birthday, and at 21 years old this country is about as well-behaved as your average legally-an-adult-but-mentally-still-a-teenager who is still coming to terms with the new-found freedom that comes from escaping the restrictions of the parental home and the ability to legally purchase alcohol (which happens at eighteen over here, but by twenty-one most have not yet adapted).
Warning: I strongly advise sensitive readers to skip this one.
South Africa has always been considered a world leader in transplant surgery, ever since Doctor Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first successful heart transplant in the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in 1967. Apparently we’ve made history in this field once again…
My country is messed up. Our rivers run bright green with sewage (I would know – I live next to one), you can seriously damage your car if you hit a patch of asphalt between all the potholes in the road, we have a president that makes Nixon look like a boy scout but keeps getting away with it, and a few weeks ago we managed to break democracy when half the opposition was thrown out and the other half walked out during the State of the Nation address.
But at the same time we have an amazing country with amazing people.
Just as I was finishing up tonight’s post the power went out. All part of our government’s plan to get people playing board games and talking to each other again (more on that later). As a result you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the latest instalment of if all else fails… Sorry about that 😉
A little over two hours ago my desk started shaking. Then I realised our entire building was shaking. So this was how it was going to end?
About twenty seconds later the Earth stopped moving and two seconds later #earthquake was trending on Twitter and South Africa experienced a sudden spike in online activity. Someone needs to do a study on what this says about us as a species.
Anyhow, according to the USGS the quake measured a magnitude of 5.3 at the epicentre which is a little under 100km away from us. No damage here, but closer to the action at least one person was killed when a wall collapsed and an as-yet unknown number of miners are trapped underground (oh, yes, the epicentre is in a major gold-mining region). It’s also not known yet whether mining activity could have triggered the earthquake.
Those of you interested in this type of thing can find more information here.
P.S. Did I say no damage? Not quite accurate. My chess set was massacred.
A lone tower remains standing
