Skip to main content

Ways in which America is unquestionably superior to South Africa

Image
By
1. Beer.  When I arrived in Denver after a marathon 24 hours in the air, I sat down at a pub in the airport and ordered a porter, and it was by far the best beer I've had in two years.  The taste of freedom.  Speaking of which...

2. Customer service.  The bartender at this place also had the best customer service I've had in two years.  Friendly, polite, cheerful, and very well-timed.  Quite a shift from the usual South African sullenness where you have to practically lay out bear traps for the waiter to get the bill.

3. Food.  My mother made some corned beef with vegetables, and a shortbread with Palisade peaches for dessert, and it was a workout my tongue hasn't experienced in some time.  There's good food to be had in South Africa, but more often it's a kind of red-headed stepchild of old British cuisine consisting of small variations on "boil it into an unrecognizable paste."

4. Construction.  Walking around my family home, designed and built almost entirely by my father, I notice that the standard of construction is substantially higher.  It's often in the details, but in my experience that's what makes a home feel very high-quality.  For example: all the doors are hung exactly right.  No falling open or closed.  All the taps, excuse me, faucets, are correctly and consistently labeled (that's a mistake you'll find even at high-end places in South Africa).  The house is designed so in the winter, the sun shines inside and warms the place, but in summer, it's stopped by an overhang.  I never saw a building in South Africa that was designed with the sun in mind.  As far as I can tell, a great number of the buildings were put up in the 70s and haven't been improved since then.

5. No roosters outside my window.  Good lord, that is a relief.  On a run this morning, I noticed that some of my neighbors out here in the boonies actually have roosters, but so long as I can't hear them from my bedroom, that's acceptable.  I don't imagine this will happen, but if I see any on my property, I'm gonna take em out with my dad's new varmint gun (which is great fun, by the way).
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 22, 2011 at 3:51 PM

    And no donkys. At least, here in Michigan. Don't miss them, or the dung, at all. I love the green. Everything is so green here, so very green. My eyes are just so happy to feast on the grass and the trees, the rivers and the lakes, I really missed this. B

    ReplyDelete
  2. RyanAugust 22, 2011 at 3:55 PM

    I totally know what you mean about the green. Our part of Northern Cape was just bleached out.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
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
Post a Comment
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
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
4 comments
Read more

Internet Writing and the Content Vacuum

By
It's been a few times now I've had full weekday control of the Monthly 's headline blog, Political Animal, and I feel like I have a decent idea now what it's like being at the top level of blogging. (Not to say that I am  at the top level, of course, just that I've walked in those shoes for a few days and gotten some blisters.) Anyway, the first thing I've noticed is that it is really, really hard to do well. I've had days before when I just didn't have anything to do and ended up at home writing 4-5 posts in one day on this site, but pro blogging is an entirely different beast. The expectation is that during the day you will write 10-12 posts. This includes an intro music video, a lunch links post, and evening links and/or video. So that means 7-9 short, punchy essays on something , with maybe 1-2 of those being longer and more worked out thoughts. This ferocious demand for content is both good and bad. The iron weight of responsibiliy—the knowledge
7 comments
Read more