Skip to main content

Fire!


This is a picture from some time back in Marapyane, right behind my host family's house. We were out there with buckets for a couple hours defending the perimeter of the property with buckets and so forth, which was successful. It probably wasn't too necessary as it was one of those cool, fast grass fires that goes out easy when it runs out of fuel, and my family's lot was mostly sand. Still, it felt good to be out there manning the barricades as it were, and it helped me integrate into the family a lot. Brush fires are quite common back there, especially during the winter/early spring where there's lots of dead growth to burn, and probably part of the natural order as not two weeks later there was a couple inches of fresh growth over the black ash. I used to see little kids starting those things practically every day.

Perhaps it's too bad that the goats and sheep have gnarled down every bit of edible anything for a mile radius around my village--down to mineral soil, as my dad would say. The vegetation is a bit sparser here in any case.

Today I went for a long walk down the dry riverbed, and perhaps tomorrow or Monday I'll have some good pictures of that country. It's a bit deserty and certainly filled with some spiny plants (next trip to Kuruman I plan to buy some sturdy boots, or my tennis shoes will be toast in short order), but against all expectations I actually found a steep slope with some commanding views (for Northern Cape). Quite nice.
Posted by Picasa

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that