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More surfing

That was today. I've got a nice bruise cooking on my jaw from being smashed into the bottom, but it was still fun. I seem to be oddly good at it.

Mini formation

Today on a hike we saw the formation from yesterday in miniature.

Hole in the wall

This is an odd geologic formation. I jumped into the middle there.

Jungle hike

Today we took a stroll up a thick jungle creek. There were some outrageous spiders, but it was still beautiful. Reminded me of Belize, actually.

Lazy day

Today I spent most of the day just hanging around recovering from the surfing yesterday. A good relaxing day. I'm hearing a lot of Xhosa around these parts. To my ear it sounds a lot harder than Tswana. It's got the pops and clicks that are so troublesome for non-natives, and the average word seems to have about 30 letters. Sounds beautiful, though.

Surfin' Mzanzi

Today Noah and I rented a surfboard and spent a couple hours trying our best surfing on this beach. It might be hard to see, but the surf was quite heavy, I'd say between 2 and 4 feet. We got homogenized out there, but it was a lot of fun. It's a holiday here, so hopefully next time there will be less people.

Merry Christmas!

This is the beach here at Coffee Bay. It's the Indian Ocean, which I'd never seen before.

First look at Eastern Cape

This is Mandela's country.

Sunset

This was from two nights ago here at Noah's.

Happy 202nd post!

I was going to have a huge blog-tastic celebration for my 200th post, but I forgot. So you're going to have to be satisfied with this rather lame substitute. I made it successfully to Noah's, and we've spent the day working in the garden and making some pancakes for lunch. He's in Northwest province, which as far as I can see is broadly similar to Northern Cape (maybe a bit flatter). We're getting ready to go to Pretoria and generally having a good time. More news shall be forthcoming as it is available.

Holiday time!

So I'm going to be away for the next couple weeks and posting will be rather light. So here's couple of things to keep you busy: The Riemann hypothesis is pretty cool. Can't say I really understand it, but it seems shiny. David Vitter (yes, the same one) comes up with some good questions for Ben Bernanke. Tom Friedman says Muslims need to kill each other more. Ben Nelson says he's going to filibuster the health care reform bill. I give it a 50% chance of passing before Christmas. The military's super-duper technology foiled by ultra-advanced terrorists. Check out this trailer . Wish me luck!

Fans...

  ...are truly glorious machines.

Peace Corps post of the week

My friend Noah brings Teh Funny : While the actual washing part I don't find particularly appealing, I do like the air drying. I find it satisfying to hang up wet clothes knowing that in a little time they will be nice and dry. It is not so much the drying part that is satisfying but the notion that I want something to be done and the way I make it happen is to leave it outside and then it gets done without me doing anything. Additionally, there is something about wind and sun dried clothes that makes the clothes a little nicer, someone needs to spend a lifetime researching what that is and then put it in a bottle or teach it to a dryer. Billion dollar idea! Go read.

We're doomed article of the day

Chris Mooney : Yet at precisely this time, a growing movement argues that 2° Celsius—which corresponds to roughly 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—simply isn’t “safe.” Famed NASA climate scientist James Hansen and the 350.org movement are pushing the boundaries of the conversation by calling for a return to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that we have already passed (we are currently at 390 parts per million), and that correspond to something more like 1.5°C. And in Copenhagen, a bloc of developing nations has also coalesced around this goal, citing the threats of submerged Pacific islands, a scorched Africa, and much else.

News: last couple weeks' reax

This is probably the last message you’ll get from me for a while. On Friday I’m going over to another volunteer’s site to visit and hang out for a couple days, then we’re going to Pretoria, then to Eastern Cape! I’m still debating whether or not to take my internet phone, but I’m leaning towards yes, so I should have the occasional post on my blog. I know everyone is keeping up on that religiously, right? (Right?) I’ll be back around the fourth or fifth of January. School is out here, so things have been a bit dull here for the last couple weeks or so. I actually ended up writing the math and English test for the 7th and 8th grade, since I did almost all the teaching for those subjects this year (even though I arrived 3/4ths of the way through the year). I only tested them on what I had taught, which was several grades below level, but most of them did fairly well. I figure with a whole year of me forcing English on them they’ll be a lot better next year. In my humble opinion

A fistful of kitteh

Im in ur blogz usin up ur megabitez  

My roof

  It's really a wonder that it leaks, eh?

Being cranky

I admit it: I take advantage of being a foreigner. The villagers here think Americans are incredibly strange, so everything I do people are staring blatantly, five feet from me, or following me around. I can't resist the temptation to just be bizarre, like walking in circles or talking to myself in Spanish. Another volunteer posted recently about her experience with cultural beliefs and "indirect communication:" When I was staying with my host family, I engaged with an interesting, if exhausting, conversation with my host family father about my motivation for serving Peace Corps and why I was "serving" in South Africa. I tried to explain that I was a volunteer, had left my life and family at a great personal sacrifice, all because it was a great honor to serve my country and a wonderful opportunity for a life experience. He seemed to think that I was doing it because the governement would make me very rich. After I picked myself up off the floor from laughin

Epic sunburn

  The sun is much more powerful here than I remember it being in the Northern Hemisphere. I assume it's the ozone hole, because this was after standing outside for about 15 minutes.

The latest from Matt Taibbi

I tend to like Matt Taibbi, and I thought his latest in Rolling Stone was pretty good : Around the same time that finance reform was being watered down in Congress at the behest of his Treasury secretary, Obama was making a pit stop to raise money from Wall Street. On October 20th, the president went to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York and addressed some 200 financiers and business moguls, each of whom paid the maximum allowable contribution of $30,400 to the Democratic Party. But an organizer of the event, Daniel Fass, announced in advance that support for the president might be lighter than expected — bailed-out firms like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were expected to contribute a meager $91,000 to the event — because bankers were tired of being lectured about their misdeeds. "The investment community feels very put-upon," Fass explained. "They feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to

To kill and butcher a cow

WARNING: This post will be fairly gruesome. Don't say I didn't warn you. I've always thought that people that eat meat should be willing to partake in the physical dismemberment of the animal in question, so when my principal told me that I was going to help slaughter a cow, I agreed. He said at first that I would be delivering the killing blow, which made me a bit nervous, but it turned out not to be the case. A bit of a letdown, actually. I've always wanted to prove to myself that I could actually kill something that large. I think the biggest thing I've ever killed is a prairie dog. In any case, we went over to a local farm owned by a man named Saudi who had the cow. We paid R4000 for a smallish heifer (there was a much larger one for R6000). I didn't bring my camera to this part, which is a shame as it was the most interesting bit. They put a slipknot around the neck of the cow with a thick rope and took a turn around a nearby tree, so that with two

My principal's party

  This wasn't too bad, as far as these kind of things go. All the Tswana get-togethers seem to happen in roughly the same way. First, it will start late and end later. There will be a long program where lots of different people give speeches. This will happen under a tent of some sort, and since it's summer it will be unbearably hot under there. There's breaks every so often for dancing or songs (shown to the left). The old ladies will get really into the dancing if it's good (or they're drunk), and sometimes they'll start dancing themselves and wade into the dancers. At the least they'll ululate, and if enough of them do that they'll drown out the singing. It will finish later than you could have imagined, and people will stay a long time getting wasted. Most importantly, everything will proceed in a completely haphazard and illogical way. See here for a good demonstration : It's now getting on 1pm. We ask when we might make it to our tour

Epic day

I didn't get up too early today, but right out of bed I went to a farm to watch a cow be slaughtered. That was super interesting, but I'm going to do an extensive post on it later, so I won't spoil it now. Then I went with my principal to Kuruman to buy about R1600 worth of booze for his going away party (as he's retiring at the end of this month--did I mention that?). On the way back to my village (after making multiple stops, of course), we went to pick up one of his (two) illegitimate daughters. I learned that not only did he have three kids in one year from three different women, he also claimed that one of them wasn't his for a time and refused to pay child support, and was thrown in jail as a result! His daughter is at her first year in university and speaks fluent English with an Afrikaans accent. It's always good to meet one of the kids who makes it out to a university and ends up sensible and intelligent.

The Municipality

  On the 7th, I got to Kuruman at 6:45 from the village I was visiting. After some coffee at Wimpy, I went to the municipality where the Kuruman library is and waited for it to open at 10 am. I sat on the steps out of the rain, read two chapters of Ulysses , and took this picture. The library was about half the size of the one in my hometown (of 10,000), but it had air conditioning, so I sat there for the next six hours and read 2.5 Stephen King books. (Each one took about as long as the chapters of Ulysses , but were a lot more enjoyable.) It's definitely a place I'm going to be visiting a lot.

A view of Kuruman

  Some people I've talked to seem to think I'm in the middle of Darkest Africa, so I thought this might be interesting. The level of development scales down exponentially as you go to the villages, but Kuruman is a reasonably well-developed place. One thing you might not know (you can see it in the picture): here they drive on the left side of the road. Damn Brits.

Article of the day

From Mike Tidwell in the Washington Post : December should be national Green-Free Month. Instead of continuing our faddish and counterproductive emphasis on small, voluntary actions, we should follow the example of Americans during past moral crises and work toward large-scale change. The country's last real moral and social revolution was set in motion by the civil rights movement. And in the 1960s, civil rights activists didn't ask bigoted Southern governors and sheriffs to consider "10 Ways to Go Integrated" at their convenience. As President Obama said , "So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f_cking changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of someth

Nachos!

  Oh man, these were delicious. They might not look quite as good through my cheap camera, but they still must be recorded for posterity. The avocados especially were fantastic.

Away...

I've been away from my village for the past couple days visiting other volunteers, as school is basically out and I don't have much to do. Right now I'm staying at a volunteer's site who has an entire two-bedroom house all to himself. I'm a bit jealous, but we made some guacamole that was simply heavenly. Yum!

Opposition parties

One of the big problems I see here in South Africa is that there is basically no credible opposition party to the ANC (quick genuflect to Peace Corps policies--I'm not endorsing or criticizing any specific policy or party in South Africa, merely a structural tendency of humans in general). Parties that control a country for a long time (which is currently the case here) tend to get lazy and corrupt. We've seen this with Republicans and Democrats in the US, and it's much worse in SA given the moral victory after the end of Apartheid. Thus I recommend The American Conservative , The Agitator , The Daily Dish , and Unqualified Offerings . It's easy to get lost in one perspective, and these folks keep me sharp.

On the word "blog"

Boy, I hate it. It combines the fecal connotations of "log" with the foul miasmatic imagery of a bog, and has the look of "bleh" or "slog." It seems to have lodged in the vernacular like a tapeworm though, so I imagine it's here to stay.

Sunset

  This from a couple days back. I was on a run, and really had to slog it out to make it back in time.

News

As a card-carrying liberal elitist, and given that it’s passed into December, I’m going to loose a salvo in the War on Christmas (cf. Bill O’Reilly) and say Happy Holidays! For Thanksgiving, one of the volunteers rigged together a little party for a few of us in Kuruman. We got one of the bed & breakfast places to set it up for us—all we did was pay about $18 for a full spread. It was delicious, and a nice reminder that there are a few traditional practices that I can talk about with the Batswana. There are a tremendous number of the B&B/ lodge places in Kuruman, around 20 by my count. Yet there aren’t any US-style hotels. Not sure why that is. All these B&Bs are owned by Afrikaners, and last weekend I met more of those folks than I had in the past, and got a more subtle picture than I had up to then. After Thanksgiving I planned to visit another volunteer, so I went around town with him as he searched for some medicine for his horse, which has terrible saddle sores (

The national debt

A lot of people I know have gotten cranked up about the national debt. Sure, it's a big problem, made worse when douchebags like Reagan caused it for no reason. Yet now is not the time to be worrying about it. Krugman sez : When I was on This Week yesterday, George Will tried his hand at the debt scare thing, saying that we’re in terrible shape because by 2019 the interest on the debt will be SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS. (That should be read in the voice of Dr. Evil). I get that a lot — people who talk about the big numbers which are supposed to imply that things are terrible, impossible, we’re doomed, etc. The point, of course, is that everything about the United States is big. So you have to interpret numbers accordingly. As the graphic above shows — it’s taken from an article that managed to maintain a grim tone while reporting numbers that actually weren’t all that grim — what we’re talking about is a debt-service burden roughly comparable to that under the first President

Turkey!

  This is a picture from my thanksgiving. A delicious taste of home, made by a South African no less! Good times.

I'm back!

Sorry for the lack of updates this weekend. I had a lovely traditional thanksgiving, then went to visit another volunteer. I'll be posting some more updates later today. I hope everyone had a good turkey day!

Moar kittehs!

  This picture isn't too good either, but it gives you an idea of the size of 'em.

Kittens!

  Yesterday the family cat gave birth to four babies. They're tiny, a bit hard to see in this picture. Their eyes are still closed, and they can't walk or stand up. Some people might hate me for saying this, but I really do like cats better than dogs (maybe because the runty, flea-ridden bastards bark every night for hours). The cats seem to have fewer fleas than the dogs as well--I think it's a different species that lives on cats. I find myself considering adopting one of the kittens for my time here. It would be nice to have a companion, and a cat would be so much less hassle than a dog. No doubt as they get older they'll be less attractive, but for now they're awfully cute. The whole birthing process was interesting to watch. This was the mother's first litter, yet she knew exactly how things should go. When the baby came out, she licked it clean, then bit off the umbilical cord. When the afterbirth came, she ate it immediately. A model of efficen

Thoughts on the Peace Corps

There's a post that's been kicking around in my head for awhile and reading the blog of one of my fellow South African finally brought it into focus (her blog is great, by they way, you should definitely check it out): As much as I came into this thinking I was expectation-free, the reality of it is I did expect to see circumstances more along the lines of what I saw in Ghana and Uganda. I’ve been struggling a little bit with this and somewhat questioning the role of Peace Corps here. The biggest problems, as far as I have seen thus far, lie in the lack of morale and motivations of society and continued disparity among races. These are problems that can only be healed with time. Clearly, there is work to be done in the schools and there is definite value to having Peace Corps volunteers working in them. I think my problems are more selfish, in the fact that I have never held much interest in working in education, among other things. Anyway, I know there’s no use in second-gue

The new Palin book

Apparently Sarah Palin wrote a book called Going Rogue (really--well, someone ghostwrote it for her). I'm not going to read it, but Matt Taibbi hits this post out of the park : Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust. The reason for that is that poor Rush is an anachronism, in the sense that his whole schtick revolves around talking about real political issues. And real political issues are boring. Listen to Rush any day of the week and you’ll hear him playing the old-fashioned pundit game: he goes about the dreary business of picking through the policies and positions and public statements of Democrats and poking holes in them, arguing with them, attacking them with numbers and facts and pseudo-facts and non-facts and whatever else he can get his hands on, honest or n

Things I never learned in school

  You've gotta embiggen this picture and check it out. I never knew pot caused diarrhea!

Burning trash

  I had a good blaze going last night from my monthly pile of trash. This picture is from after it burned down quite a bit. Burning trash (as well as littering) is strangely thrilling. There's not much else to do with it--there are no dumps, and I don't want to bury things where people drink the water right out of the ground. Yet so many unspoken codes are being broken I feel almost criminal, in a good way. At first, I started a small fire in case the plastic didn't want to burn. Then I upended my fridge's cardboard box with most of the trash in it over the top. This sealed well at the ground, making a square pillar of trash with the fire at the bottom. I thought it would smoulder slowly for a while, but after a couple seconds it burned like a gas flare. For a few moments the sides of the box contained it, and the fire poured out the top like the tresses of some demonic Rapunzel. I wished that I had my camera, but I didn't want to miss it, and sure enough, it

Keep your wits about you online

Felix Salmon details a sleazebag practice : In general, the customers of these companies have no idea that they’re customers until they discover mysterious charges on their credit-card bills. When they investigate further, they find that during the checkout process at reputable websites like priceline.com or 1800flowers.com, they inadvertently clicked on a link which automatically gave their credit card details to these rip-off merchants. By the way: CPM means cost per thousand, or how much these companies pay the website per thousand clicks on the ad (I learned this in the comments). Previously those same companies harassed another blogger in court about this same thing. Definitely a good reason to keep your an eye on your credit card bill. Via Kevin Drum .

High drama in the sky yesterday

Clouds like well-lit cauliflower.