awesome news inbetween it all

Henry Rollins is coming to Cape Town for a spoken word show, as everyone who knows me have been informed already. Its amazing news. I heard Henry Rollins for the first time in his album Weight as a youth, then I found out that he writes, but I was never able to find any of his books. Then I had some time to kill in Kuala Lampur and walked over the the tall towers (the ones you see in pictures of KL) and ambled about. Found this huge bookstore in there and started going through the books in the music section. I found one of Henry's books, and another and another, I was so excited and happy and just...well ja. I bought them all and took them with me to a remote island and read them all as slowly as I could to savour them. I was hooked. They are brilliant, not so much tropical island reading, but brilliant none the less. I later bought more of his books online, two of them arrived at my house signed! Jeesh was I jumping around like a crazy person. Thing is, as stupid as this sounds, its inspirational. The books, what he writes, I've often called him my Mike Lipkin. When everything seems to be going against me if stuff seems impossible somehow reading his work just changes my mind. Look what he's managed to do http://21361.com/ . My favourite of his books are Solipsist and Roomanitarian. See if you can find it.

Season

I've spent two weeks off. It was awesome, mostly got to catch up on Admin I've been too busy to get to through the rest of the year. Also I was learning how to drive my new motorbike. Its brilliant, its beautifull look http://motoring.iafrica.com/newsbriefs/711675.htm See told ya. Spent time with family, friends, other people's friends and people who work for Unisa and Vodacom (no we didn't manage accomplish anything at either establishments).

Then on the first day of the year Gethyn left for two days in Joburg and then straight on to Chad. The country. This site is a bit more scary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad and isn't it lovely how they included pictures of a severed head on this one.

Driving and service seems to be getting worse. I used to just get annoyed at people who complain about the service in South Africa and bad driving in Cape Town. Its getting a little rediculous though. Went to a restaurant called Mario's in Greenpoint for a farewell dinner with Gethyn. It has a great reputation and seems very authentic. We made reservations and got a table behind a pillar (perhaps the source of the problem). We ordered a drink and then had the manager running over to say "I see you're looking for something in the menu, we don't DO pizzas you know", fair enough neither of were there for the pizza but lets not get funny about it. We ordered a grilled fish and a marinara pasta, it was fine, nothing spectacular. The fish was a bit salty but both baby potatoes were nicely done (!) . The marinara was okay, nothing to write home about. That was it for the rest of the evening. We weren't offered another drink (which was annoying as I wasn't driving for a change and could have gotten tipsy if I wanted) and couldn't even get the waiter to bring us a bill after sitting around with our dishes still on our table for half an hour. I won't even get into the cell phone provider Vodacom. We went to the shop in the Garden Centre in Cape Town, don't know why, we might as well have just hollered our problems into the view from the balcony for all the good it did. We were completely ignored, no explainations, just ignored.

What I've noticed about driving which is a bit worrying is that certain brands of cars no longer include functioning indicators in their cars. These brands include Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen. Keep an eye open, its pretty weird, people who drive without indicating or putting other motorists in danger are often driving one of the above cars. Must be a manufacturing flaw or something, they don't seem to be able to indicate when changing lanes, parking, turning or for any other reason.

I sounds like a tourist, but unfortunately its true, service is terrible and driving is worse.