Jet-Lag and Sleep-Dep

Greetings, gentle readers.
After a fitful night's rest at what was until recently a Holiday Inn in Johannesburg and a pursuant two and a half hour's trek northward toward desert, wilderness, and general bush territory, what we find is this:
Apparently, following up a marathon series of flights and activities across the globe with a series of early mornings and late nights is a poor idea.  When the driver arrived to convey the three of us north to Pilanesberg, I was muddled enough to think that we were going to do some kind of trendy yoga somewhere, and that the driver had introduced himself as "End-Row."  I thought it was some sort of cute sports nickname.
Well, the driver's name is actually Andrew, and the most famous yoga performed in Pilanesberg was probably some sort of breath-control and wriggling contortion exercise performed by the many miners lost in countless cave-ins in the subterranean platinum mines that dot the landscape.

The less-glamourous side of Sun City.

Pilanesberg and Rustenburg are smack in the middle of some of the richest platinum deposits on Earth.  Historically, whenever there is valuable stuff in an inherently dangerous place, a vast economic discrepancy manifests.  Poor, hungry folk end up scampering around in perilous danger, and slobberingly rich owners earn fantastic profits on their investments.
Pilanesberg is the fourth-largest national park in South Africa, and Rustenberg is the home of the only private venue of the 2010 World Cup.  It's therefore appropriate that, immediately adjacent to this conflict between ecological conservation and resource exploitation on a Norilsk-scale is Sun City, the Las Vegas of the southern hemisphere, and a poster city for decadent excess.  But I can save my rants about unionization, xenophobia, and the Royal Bafokeng for a later time.
Anyone who has worked with me at Castle Rock should recognize the name Hartbeespoort.  I wrote a series of science and biology items on hypereutrophication.  I expounded upon the causes, symptoms, and stages of eutrophication.  Now I've actually seen the bright green scum that fills the lake.  My pictures thus far don't do it justice, so I'll revisit this topic after I've got better photographic evidence.
Anyway, made it to Bakubung Bush Lodge along a number of roads that have been equipped with toll-collecting equipment that hasn't yet been activated (and won't be if people will heed the example of southern Ontario and avoid privatizing roads) and past motorists that were very courteous and communicative.
In South Africa, if you're driving a slower vehicle, or are uncomfortable travelling as quickly as the speed limit suggests, you pull to the left margin of the road and activate your hazard lights to let people behind you know that they can pass you.  Those that pass blink their four-way lights in return to thank you for your magnanimity.  And in this simple way, road rage is made a distant and alien concept.  Everyone expresses respect and acknowledges the graciousness of their fellow motorists, rather than gunning them down.
Finally, I spent the waning hours of the day in a bush vehicle, chasing the "Big 5" animals of South Africa and trying to capture them photographically.  I'll probably publish a full album of this stuff, but I'll try and hit you with a couple of tasters.

The original source of the Vuvuzela, the B-flat kudu.

If you look really closely, you can see a rising full moon.

Like all mammals, these things have seven vertebrae.  Yes, evolution is a cute thing.

Our accommodations here are spartan, but tolerable.  The weather is quite agreeable from a Canadian point of view, but chilly and inhospitable according to the native population.  As I head off to bed, daunted by the 0430h early morning alarm that is to rouse me and send me back into the bush for some more safari fun, I'll let you have a look at the meagre surroundings that cushion me to sleep.

Until next time, good night England and the colonies.
—mARKUS

Back to Africa... Again

Greetings, Gentle Readers.

What we find is this:  cruising eleven kilometres above the jungles of sub-Saharan Africa in the dead of night, our tired and weary travellers snatch fitfully at hints of sleep.  It’s been almost 48 hours of travel with only a six-hour nap in Mississauga to interrupt the cascade of customs checks and the uncomfortable cattle-car confines of coach class.

Right.  Well, apart from the fact that I was unaware of the limitations of Microsoft Office Starter, and their subsequent impact on the functionality of Microsoft Word, the trip thus far has been relatively uneventful and mercifully free of international incident.

The plane that carried us away from Edmonton on the morning of Saturday 20 April fled an oncoming snow front, and thus we surfed on the crest of a prodigious tailwind that dropped us at Lester B. Pearson International airport a full half-hour earlier than expected.  In a cascade of meteorological dominoes, our arrival had also displaced an unseasonal snowstorm from the Greater Toronto Area.  Good news all around on the weather front.

Saturday night came about rather quickly, since we’d zipped three time zones away from the setting sun.  After an odd dinner of rice and something that resembled meat from T & T Supermarket, we settled into some hard family anecdotes, rumours, gossip, and general familial catching-up.  Much to my dismay, “T & T” does not stand for “Trinidad and Tobago” in this instance.  Not sure what it stands for, but if it must have something to do with the permeating smell of slightly-gone-off-fish and the oddly gelatinous rubbery pink substance that they supplied instead of beef.

Sunday morning, I managed to finally meet up with Richard Barter after four-plus years of cyber-correspondence.  His Man City team contrived to lose to Tottenham in a cross-London derby that essentially handed the Premier League throne to Manchester United.  Not to be outdone, Liverpool then managed to draw a game in an amazing amount of injury-time whilst our star striker decided to do his best re-enactment of a Donner Party dinner service, to the dismay of hapless but tasty defender Branislav Ivanovic.  Luis Suarez is probably headed for a lengthy suspension and some bath salts rehab, both of which will significantly diminish Liverpool’s dwindling odds of qualifying for… pretty much anything.  So much for a shot at the LDV Vans Intertoto Continental Breakfast Championships.

Then there was the newest member of the fellowship.  My father and I are old veterans at dealing with the sort of neurotic paranoia that has characterized international airport security checks and customs inspections since some jackanapes stuffed some fertilizer in his sneakers in a pre-boarding lounge.  Bringing in a n00b is an awkward proposition.  Personally, I try to avoid packing anything that involves liquids, gels, pastes, colloids, solutions, precipitates, isotopes, compounds, elements, or anything with mass, momentum, density, or charge.

Quick summary:  while my father and I breeze effortlessly through every X-ray monitor, Geiger counter, metal detector, 3D MRI scan, and full-body cavity search, dear Uncle Mel got more scrutiny than a frog at a snake symposium.  My father attributes it to the fact that Mel is toting around an odd-coloured backpack, and that backpackers are routinely profiled as homicidal lunatics by the authorities.  I reckon that Mel just packed the wrong stuff – prescription medication, a nail-clipper, clothing, etc.

The answer is probably somewhere in-between.  I reckon that Mel hasn’t used his luggage in 20 years, and stored the bags in some sort of asbestos-ridden phosphate plant owned and operated by the IRA in direct contravention of the nuclear microproliferation treaty.  The team at Heathrow swabbed that backpack more than the deck of the HMS Beagle.  My father and I have learned to stand patiently after the security areas and make bland conversations that absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Al-Qaeda.

We paid some extortionate amount for a couple of lads to hold our bags at Heathrow and ran into the City to spend some of the 11 hour layover.  As we toured around the old stomping grounds, we checked out parts of Hyde Park, Mayfair, and the Kendal part of Marble Arch W2.

Even after death, these animals march into peril.

I’m inserting photos of the latest iteration of the Duke of Kendal, as well as what my camera says is a 3D image of the Animals in War memorial,

and the gilded American Eagle of Freedom squatting obnoxiously atop the anachronistically-designed and heavily-fortified American Embassy.

The American Spread-Eagle, eager to deposit steaming piles of justice and virtue all over Grosvenor Square.

And thus our story takes us high above the dark continent at its darkest.  The 11-hour flight to Joburg has at least let me catch up on my movie-watching.  Here are my quick and dirty reviews of all of the inflight films that I’ve seen thus far.

Hotel Transylvania:  Better than expected family fare with an all-star voice cast, and just enough intelligent jokes to carry it past the usual kiddie-potty-humour (e.g., witches hoovering farts with bellows, Bigfoot clogging the toilets, etc.).  Predictable with few challenges, there are enough charming bits to make it tolerable.  2 Jellybeans.

Wreck-It Ralph:  Another family-style animation film.  Again, some extraordinary voice talents without which the film would fail entirely as an artistic endeavour.  The plot is nothing fabulous, but as an old video game aficionado, I enjoyed many of the in-jokes.  The music (based on MIDI algorithms, for the most part) is amusing, and the visuals are a fabulous span between 8-bit Nintendo and hyper-realistic “Gears of War”-esque graphics.  Check out the song "Sugar Rush" to get an idea of the retro-caché value of this film.  Found the sugary-sweet “don’t dislike people because they are different” thematic message to be particularly cliché and trite, and that’s what left the worst taste in my figurative mouth.  2.5 Jellybeans.

Django Unchained:  Obviously Quentin Tarantino is well-versed in his Douglas Sirk, since he appears hell-bent on exaggerating everything in his films beyond melodrama to thoroughly muddy the waters between intent and content.  For example, the sociopathic and linguistically talented German character (and the actor who portrays him) return from “Inglourious Basterds,” but this time, he is mercilessly hunting and executing slave-folk instead of Jews, so he’s a good guy.  Samuel L. Jackson is possibly the best bit of the film as a cross between a classic Uncle Tom and Salacious Crumb.  Silly film, but most likely adored by fans of torture porn and Blaxploitation.  2 Jellybeans.

Cloud Atlas:  Self-indulgent rubbish that exists to provide a bit of fun and variety for some jaded Hollywood falling stars.  Good thing that there was some preachy and paternalist content, or else luminaries like Susan Sarandon would never have graced the thing.  1 Jellybean.

Life of Pi:  If a film’s measure of success is how much you wish to slap the lead character, or the amount that the film can beat the audience with faux spiritualist, regurgitated Kahlil Gibran platitudes, then this effort is a home run.  My criteria are different.  I think that watching this film on a plane gives it a single Jellybean, because the strength of this film lies in the colour, imagery, and depth of the graphics, and a dinky wee 9” screen does no justice to these assets.  The “I ripped off Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” scriptwriting and wafer-thin plot do nothing to further the bland, polemic agenda of basically saying that all religions are one and that all God’s children are equally fluffy and cute.

SkyFall:  OK.  So some people wanted to go back to the purist days of 007 as written by Ian Fleming.  No underwater Lotus Esprits or laser-equipped space shuttles.  Just spy stuff.  I get it.  So does everyone else, after the film abandons any attempt to conceal its self-consciousness.  From Q’s “Were you expecting an exploding pen?  We don’t do that anymore,” to three different characters commenting on a spy’s equipment of consisting of nothing more than a gun and a radio, to the Crocodile Dundee-emulating declaration that the protagonists must go to where they are on familiar territory.  I was waiting for Ralph Fiennes to suddenly declare that the future of espionage lies in the past, and that Bond should pick up a hoe and begin subsistence farming to get into the mind of an anthrax attack from the point of view of the bacterium.  Nice action sequences and some very gruff and grumbly delivery from a bleak and unkempt Daniel Craig.  Shoehorning a new Moneypenny into the film to replace Samantha Bond was particularly unnecessary.  A very generous 3 Jellybeans.

Must run.  Have a safari in the morning.  Will try and keep people informed with all of the news as it happens, relevant or not.

Cheers and good night, England and the Colonies.

—mARKUS

Snowman-Sanctioned Same-Sex Nuptials Verboten

In the volatile, post-election atmosphere of the American experience, it should be remembered that there is still one thing that is profoundly American.  The Klan may hate the Westboro Church because of a lack of respect for veterans, and the Hell's Angels may hate both of the aforementioned groups for their respective bigotries, but amidst all of the hatred, there is one thing that all Americans can follow single-mindedly and without critical thought:  the prohibition of same-sex snowmen marriages.
Sure, the imaginations of children can lead them to believe that a snowman can act as some sort of religious authority figure.  These children's fantasies might be wistfully delusional enough to deny that the frosty figure will sexually abuse them, but they can be horrifically harmful in other ways.  Even if the frozen precipitation construct could be imagined as Parson Brown, it must also be remembered that Parson Brown would never condone marriage between two people of the same gender.  An imaginary Parson Brown might agree to marry two children of an age one-third of the legal age of consent, but if they are of the same gender, the conventions of ideal American society dictate that said Parson be salted and reduced to a grainy puddle at the first opportunity.
On the other hand, the god-given second constitutional amendment guarantees that underage children should have unfettered access to semi and fully automatic combat assault weapons so that they can blow the steaming viscera out of anyone that calls them a wimp on Twitter.
Sic Semper Americanus.

Gadzooks! Discussion!

Greetings, gentle readers.
When posed the question of the cause of Canada's seeming dearth of innovation and scientific creativity, particularly in the field of entrepreneurship, Dr. Peter Hackett made some very poignant, yet very mildly-targeted remarks.  I expounded on one of them, and was helped along in the exploration of the topic by several individuals.  Shayne Tymkow, James Kropfreiter, and Fritz Kropfreiter, take a bow.  The point changed from education failing to nurture so much as to instruct, to big business as the barons of industry and commerce controlling the economic welfare of society, to governments increasingly dependent on worker-drone mentalities in order to maintain power, and finally to society at large for failing to create a socialist nirvana where the proletariat control the means of production.
I followed that up with this contribution:

I'm reminded of the Monty Python "Church Police" sketch, where the officers of the church/peace petition to find the murderer through the use of prayer...
"O Lord, we beseech thee—tell us: who croaked Leicester?"
(at which point, a large Gilliam-esque hand descends from the heavens and points to Eric Idle. A voice booms:)
"The one in the bracers, he done it!"
(Idle is seized by the detective-parsons before admitting:)
"It's a fair cop, but society's to blame."
"Right," comes the rejoinder, "We'll be charging him too."
In short, I think it a bit of a cop-out to lay the blame on the nebulous invisible limbs of "society" at large.  Sometimes, economic adversity can act as a stimulus for innovation, as people look for ways to use creativity as a means of escaping seemingly deterministic economic strata.
As evidence, I offer this:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/12/1205_sb_necessity/1.htm
I think there's something more existential going on, and our society has done nothing to arrest its progress - we're reaching Hegel's "End of History." No one wants to be the progenitor of his or her own values any more.  The thymos, or superego, or whatever you want to call the part of the human existence that strives to achieve beyond precedent, is in serious decline, and as much as that process is being encouraged by big business, government spending, curricular design, and identikit educators, the ultimate responsibility is an individual one.
Not to just act as a mouthpiece for Fukuyama and Bloom, et aliter, but isn't North America a wallowing sty of political and philosophical apathy?  Doesn't the political right historically grow in power and stature when people cease to critically analyse and act upon conclusions drawn?
James is probably right.  No one cares any more.  Voter apathy has never been more pronounced.  As long as our material needs and creature comforts are provided, we can lead lives of quiet desperation and never worry about the greater good or the examined life.  The more anxious of us will take up some spurious cause and use that as a rationalization for intellectual torpor.  Stop global warming, save the muskrat, end third-world debt, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fur is murder, meat is murder, KFC is murder, murder of a murderer may or may not be murder, feed the children, feed the fur-wearing murderers to the children, blah, blah, blah.  People can champion these little short-term, third-rate, first-world indulgences until they choke.
Bottom line - we're not achieving, creating, or innovating because we've got comfortable little cages.  It's not the fault of our captors.  We just built a very cozy jail, and we don't want to get out.
Just my tuppence-worth.
—mARKUS

Ad Infinitum, Ad Nauseam

Greetings, gentle readers.
One of the great men whom I have the honour of knowing was just interviewed by my old university chum, Todd Babiuk.  Dr. Peter Hackett was asked to explain the culture of innovation in Canada, or lack thereof.  The interview can be found here:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Canada+failing+create+culture+innovation/4095349/story.html
The interview followed hard upon an interview Dr. Hackett did with the Canadian Science Policy Centre, and can be viewed on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNhW0ErMXNA
Here's my response (for those of you who haven't heard me blather this already):
I will try and compose a more comprehensive response soon, but my knee-jerk reaction at the moment seems to rest with a couple of comments that seem nested in the middle of the interview.  There is an issue with gauging the amount of successful innovation in a society or culture by using a monetary scale.  That strikes me as a topic for lively discussion, but skirts what I consider to be the point: how does one foster a culture of innovation, risk-taking, creativity, etc.?
Seems almost corollary to Aristotle's challenge to define "the good life."  I reckon that Peter touched on some areas of the solution—most saliently, how NOT to do so.  "Streaming", "tracking", and all those other educational buzzwords sound great when designing pedagogical approaches to conditioning and developing the human mind for achievement, but are symptomatic of the character from H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" who proclaims that the only way to defeat the Martians is to go underground, and teach children SCIENCE,
and not (if memory serves correctly) "poems and all that rubbish."
Students have been increasingly treated as a commodity, rather than potential creators of their own values.  Schools have become less concerned with a liberal arts education, and more preoccupied with training toward an economically-specific skill-based objective.
I reckon that the answer to many of these questions—why does Canada have such a low rate of PhD. graduates?  Why is entrepreneurialism not viewed as a significant or even viable contributor to a nation's well-being?
The answer may be rooted in the failure of our educational system to foster critical thinking, epistemological discussion, the love of learning, and an ongoing inquiry into the human condition as preconditions for understanding technical and scientific principles.
Why get a PhD., when a technical certificate will get you the job in fibre-optics that you want?  If students feel compelled to learn more, understand more, APPLY more, then they will push the envelope to extend the body of knowledge that defines their disciplines.
I reckon that we've thought too much about what kids learn, but not how or why, and that's the fundamental basis of my analysis.  At least for the time being.
Cheers,
—mARKUS

Geek Rock

Greetings, Gentle Readers.
At long last, I've decided to offer some more lyrics/poetry to the multiverse via the wonder and power of the interweb.  I wrote two poems almost a year ago now, with the full and express intent of rendering them as song. I've since noodled around with a few guitar chords, asked a few musically-inclined friends if they had any ideas, and thus far, not a note has been set down and no track has been recorded.  It could be because my words are crap, and that I'm a fair wordsmith, but a fundamentally mediocre poet.  The final word can only be issued by you, my long-suffering and eternally patient audience.  But first, the story.
Last year, the brilliant and unjustly maligned Lloyd Barker, taking time out from sweating incessantly over his Forge of Physics, was informed that he had defaulted on his university student loans, and that the collection agency was now after all of his assets in some sort of Rumplestiltskin-esque settling of debts.  Things looked grim, and Lloyd was sizing up his options, of which there were terrifyingly few.  Enter our boss, the Director of Science, who offered to settle Lloyd's debts out of his own pocket.  Oh, all right, out of his own credit card.  Point being, Lloyd was saved, everything was back on an even keel, and the camaraderie amongst our team reached an all-time high.  Lloyd is still dutifully repaying the redoubtable Richard Klinger for his magnanimity, but I personally felt that there ought to be some greater reward — some form of recognition that exceeds mere repayment or acknowledgment.
And so I wrote a bunch of geek-rock lyrics.  Just last week, I was introduced to "Beautiful Small Machines," Bree Sharp's most recent musical project.  A video collection on YouTube can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfx4UH659kQ&a=4oVf-d_DwKCv3jykLQhRb6G5vSn-jFJg&list=ML
and their home page (complete with Facebook/MySpace/iLike/etc. links) is found here:
http://www.beautifulsmallmachines.com/
I'd always rather liked her folk-rock style, but suddenly we find her amidst a bewildering swirl of synthesized electronica, and her lyrics are filled with echoes of the concept of geek-rock that I was trying to tap all those months ago.  I sent a message to her MySpace page, but I haven't heard back.  And so I decided to throw my work open to the four winds.  Whosoever can make these words into something that a radio station will play, or some varsity music store will stock will have my thanks, and may consider themselves free of any obligation to credit me in any way.  I just want the word to get out that Richard Klinger is a true mensch who ought to be celebrated for being an awfully nice and self-sacrificing individual.  Obviously, it would be great if Don DiLego and Bree Sharp sunk their collective metaphorical artistic fangs into it, but if anyone can create a recording with a hint of a melody and a bit of craft, then be my guest.
Here goes:

Richard, Richard

Richard, Richard Klinger
A man of science and distinction
Has more power in his little finger
Than the coefficient of friction
Stay around, let’s tarry and linger
Within the realm of his jurisdiction

CHORUS:
Richard, Richard Klinger saved the day
Dissociation constant — he’s got your pKa
Richard, Richard Klinger is the way
More awesome than thorium’s nuclear decay


Richard, Richard Klinger:
Caustic in any melée—
Refines bauxite
With hydroxide
Rewards you with aluminium pay*

CHORUS

Richard, Richard Klinger
A master of jousts, champion of duels
Kinetic energy of a stinger
That measures several gigajoules
Puts your troubles through the wringer
Lathes your worries with his tools

CHORUS

FADE

— m. cHAN


*In a nod to Bree Sharp, I would add a background vocal track asserting "aluminum!" I had actually considered that before (see next lyric), but she beat me to the punch in the song "Superconducter."

The Director

He’ll analyze yer
     fertilizer
     when the time is ripe

He’s no miser
     has a geyser
     for a phenotype

CHORUS:
The convection with direction
Puts the lady folk in heat
Their collection gets correction
If their apparatus is incomplete

He’s torrential
got potential
has great mgd (VEC-ARROW!)**

His differential
is intentional
and his body diagrams are free.

INSTRUMENTAL

CHORUS

No interference
gets his clearance
got supersonic scrutiny

Planck’s constant
gets despondent
when his wavelength finds your frequency

CHORUS

FADE

— m. cHAN


**Blogger doesn't render MathML very well. Actually, not at all. And the MathType that MS Word uses is even less effective. You may notice that the physics expression for vertical work against gravity requires a vector arrow over the acceleration value of "g," because it represents a vector quantity. The ASCIIMath code entity that expresses this character augmentation is an arrow named "vec."

In any event, it's late, and I've got lots of work to do yet. As always, comments and criticisms are invited. In a new and uninteresting twist, I would welcome a digitized music recording better.

For now, good night England and the colonies.

Cheers,

—mARKUS

iPhones are eVil

Greetings, gentle readers.
And so, after much ado about many things, Jules and I made it to Minden, Ontario.  Her parents, in addition to being thoroughly wonderful people, also have the stamina of blood-doped racehorses.  I didn't subject my own parents to the sort of extensive slideshows of South Africa that I unleashed on these poor people.  Into the wee hours of every night, twenty-three to the dozen, ground littered with the hind legs of donkeys, tiring the sun with minutiae until it falls out of the sky, I banged on about the most uninteresting things about Africa imaginable, and still these kind people feigned interest.  Astonishing.
The grounds in Minden were also amazing.  The lot opened onto the river, which flows rapidly and warmly (24°C) past the canoe and motorboat moored at the dock.
The verdant landscape and fantastic wildlife were not the main event, however.  As the family reunion began to take shape, it became obvious that the people were going to be the curiosities and spectacles.
Cousin Dave, for example, might be considered to be a disaster-profiteer.  Incidentally, the shuffles in family-relations are simplified for clarity.  If I show the slightest interest in genealogy, I suspect that my family will ambush me and expect me to deconstruct the entire patrilineal side of my genetic heritage.
The family member that I really appreciated was Cousin Norm.   Not only did he take control of the barbeque (to my enormous relief), but he did so with authority and ability.  The fact that he was smoking cigarettes over cooking meat was a bit odd, but the man knew his business, and I was not willing to tell him off.  He's also mastered more martial arts than I know languages, so I wasn't about to get uppity.
It wasn't until later in the evening that I got to play Cousin Norm at chess.  If anyone has ever played me at chess, you'll know what I do.  I don't lose, but I want to see what you do to try and win. Cousin Norm had a fantastic go with his queen before he accepted the draw.  Julie's father was astonished.  Wins are over-rated.
In any event, the weekend was a wonderful cascade of events that was ruined by two things: first, Lloyd was fired from Castle Rock.  That rocked things in a number of ways.  Jules and I weren't sure of the level of investiture we had in that decision, and how much we could have helped.  The second thing was the way in which Ontario deals with toll-based roads. We had a rental car, which is apparently not allowed on toll-roads.  No one actually spent the time to tell us this, and this led to a horrible route through ghastly roadways that led us back to Hamilton in just enough time to run to the plane before it started taxiing for takeoff. All of the good things that I had built up about the province were thrown out of the window.  By the end of it, I was glad to be rid of the place.  I still miss the people, though.  Oh, and the ice cream.
Cheers,
—mARKUS

Greetings, Gentle Readers.

Up at 0430h on Friday morning to catch the shuttle bus to the airport.  After hauling the multi-ton suitcase of doom up Bellamy Hill and arriving (we thought) with a few minutes to spare, we discover that I’ve left my mobile phone charging on my computer.  Since Jules was convinced that we need the GPS functionality of the thing, I sprinted back down the hill to go retrieve it.  No sooner had I successfully grabbed the thing, hastily stuffed it into my jacket, and made it down the lifts and out the front door, the thing rang.  Sure enough, it’s Jules.  The news?  The shuttle bus came early.  Julie’s message for me?  Hurry up.  By the time I made it back to the Hotel MacDonald, I managed to sprint across the intersection at which the shuttlebus (containing Julie) was waiting for the lights to change.  I hopped on board and proceeded to shed enough perspiration to fill the snorkels of every man, woman, and child in Belize. 

Tired, exhausted, and dehydrated, we finally got to the airport with enough time to check the gravitic anomaly that is the suitcase of woe onto the flight, grab a bit of breakfast, and board the plane in a leisurely fashion.  Now, I’ve done a lot of flying recently, and my general conclusion is that North American airlines have been duelling over profits for quite some time, so they’ve cut out all of the frills, like free meals and headsets, and things like elbow room.  That was the case for United as well as Air Canada.  This flight was WestJet, so I was willing to try and keep an optimistic perspective.  Maybe this airline would be different.  It isn’t. 

Packed like sardines to the point where I thought my knees were going numb from being pressed into the seat in front of me, we were informed that if you wanted food, or headsets, or oxygen masks, you had to pay for them.  The bright point was the pre-takeoff announcements.  I’ve heard dozens of these over the past few months, so I must confess to being a bit jaded.  They went something like this:

“Allo, my name is Domenic, and if you don’t like my French accent, then tough, because we’re both stuck with it.  I’d like to introduce you to your flight crew today.  Behind the bulletproof steel door that only we can open is the captain, Charles.  Sitting next to him, holding his hand and sometimes stroking his hair, is the co-pilot, Michel.  In the middle of the aisle, you can see my new girlfriend – we just met yesterday – is the unforgettable... erm [aside: what was her name again?]  Oh, yes, Melanie.  And standing next to me at the front of the cabin is the handsome and very single Claude.  He is taking numbers, so ladies, get them ready.”

“And now, it’s showtime as we start our safety presentation.  In the event that the cabin [muffled whisper] decompresses, oxygen masks [muffled whisper, slightly more urgent] will descend from the [whisper: “Later!”] compartments above your heads [whisper: “I’m doing a safety presentation!”]  For your entertainment on this flight, we have two bathrooms, one at the front, and one at the rear of the craft.  There are six exits, which... erm... that flight attendant in the centre of the aisle is pointing at: two at the front, two over the wings in the middle, and two at the rear.  Please try and locate the exit nearest you in case you need to use it.”

And so, despite the discomfort and the relatively inhumane living conditions, the little bit of levity went a long way towards preventing my cynicism and general grumpiness from spiralling out of control, much as it did on my last flight into Los Angeles.  That, and the fact that we don’t have to deal with American customs.  That’s worth a gold star in anyone’s book.

The flight was relatively uneventful, aside from the girl sitting next to me asking for a blanket and pillow.  If “sitting” could be used to describe being shoehorned into a space unfit for a battery-farm chicken.  Turns out that the plane was sold out of such amenities.  I offered my scarf, marketing it as something that “acts as BOTH a pillow and a blanket.”  She politely declined.  I played a little “Heroes of Hellas” until Domenic returned to the airwaves.

“’Ello ladies and gentlemen.  We are landing 20 minutes earlier than scheduled, which is clearly because of me, so let’s hear it.  Clap, clap?  [pause for applause]  You are about to hear one of those phrases that is like a song in my heart:  we are now beginning our final descent into Hamilton International Airport.  For those of you continuing on to Moncton, this is your plane, and we will be happy to escort you on to your final destination.  If you do decide to disembark, remember to take your boarding pass and piece of ID with you, and remember that we will only make one boarding call, so if you don’t remember those things, have fun in Hamilton.  For those of you leaving us, your luggage will be on the carousels in the arrivals lounge within the next 48 hours.  On behalf of myself and only myself, I would like to thank you for flying WestJet, and hope that you’ll be with us again soon.”

Interesting that Domenic, as near as I could tell, never made much attempt to put any zest in the French translations of his announcements.  I got one half-hearted attempt at a joke, I think, but the rest sounded pretty routine, particularly since I’ve heard the same announcements en Français innumerable times on both sides of the Atlantic over the past two months.

The John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport is basically a barn.  With a baggage carousel in it.  At the opposite end of the barn are the two car rental kiosks.  After collecting the outrageously heavy bag and loading it onto a creaking and complaining luggage caddy, we collected this rather stout and sturdy-looking red Dodge Avenger.  I’m used to renting econo-boxes, so this was a bit of a paradigm-shift for me.

Looking around, I noticed that all the vehicles were somewhat squat and blocky.  Trucks, jeeps, SUVs, sedans, station wagons, sports cars... all rather square and heavy.  I suppose that since Hamilton is a bit of a steel-town, it’s not surprising that they like their vehicles made with a maximum amount of reinforcement and substance.

And so, armed with a printed Google Map and our functional but inelegant vehicle, we headed off north for Minden.  A few minutes in, we realized a few things.  The Greater Toronto Area has a smeg-load of radio-stations.  There were roughly 3 within each MHz of FM range.  And after a quick surf, we soon realized that none of them were playing Journey.  Obviously the Boston (TM) Premium Audio system was going to waste.  Unfortunately, I had also forgotten my happy satchel of computer and audio-visual patch cords, so I couldn’t hook my netbook, iPhone, or MP3 player up to the car stereo.  Thankfully, there was a logical midpoint between Hamilton and Minden.

Newmarket is a quiet, sleepy suburb very reminiscent of Sherwood Park.  There are plenty of green spaces and forests, and there are gentle hills and valleys crinkling the topography of the town.  They also had a ripping Radio Shack (now The Source) located conveniently close to a Greek place that does fabulous chicken kebabs.  A happy lunch, and we were off to Cottage Country, Journey in tow.

A cottage in Cottage Country apparently doesn’t mean what I thought it meant when I was growing up.  A cottage now is a sprawling four- or five-bedroom, multi-story dwelling, each one with its own independent water, sewage, electrical, communications, and natural gas systems.  The country is lovely.  Trees grow in abundance along the river and lakeshores, as well in copses.  The herbs and shrubs are numerous, the air is sweet, and the insects are belligerent and tenacious.  The water in the dam-controlled rivers is warm and refreshing, and the sundowner times are pleasant and pacific.

But the next day, the placid environment was about to be overrun by members of the Dunn family.

And that is another story.

Goodnight England and the colonies.

—mARKUS

Retrospectives and Recriminations

Greetings, gentle readers.
Well, I am now safely back in Edmonton and once more ensconced in my drab and pedestrian existence. Thanks to input from one of my senior colleagues, I now have a scheme afoot to make work a more tolerable activity, but other than that, nothing significant has changed around my office during my absence.  The employee turnover seems overly high, training procedures seem spotty, and cliques in fiefdoms snipe at one another instead of cooperating.  Looks like I'll have to do something, or else start farming out the resumé.
Thinking back on the trip to South Africa, and anticipating any questions, the best part of the trip had to be watching Germany dismantle Argentina in the quarter-finals in Green Point Stadium, Cape Town.  The raucous singing of the German fans, and the torrents of quasi-intelligible shouting and raving by the Argentinian fans made for a lovely auditory as well as sporting experience.
A close second would be hanging out with the predatory wildlife, whether that be the sharks of Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, or the cheetahs and birds of prey at the Spier Estate, near Stellenbosch, Western Cape.  The non-predatory wildlife, like the elephants of Addo National Park were also interesting, but not quite as fun.
Third place was an evening that constituted an aggregation of things.
A lot of people have asked me about the different laws and regulations in South Africa, and one of the things that hey are astonished to hear is that people are allowed to smoke cigarettes inside pubs, clubs, and bars.  Granted, in the Chrome nightclub in Cape Town, there was a separate smoking area, away from the dance floor, but that was probably more because it got very hot and sticky on the dance floor, and mixing that with stale smoke would have been aesthetically disgusting, not hygienically so.
All that aside, I quite liked the local pub just down the street from my cousin Liesl's flat in Kenilworth.  It wasn't too loud, the television was adequate for watching footy, it was large and airy, and the locals that I met were a solid bunch of terribly good blokes and ladies.  Somehow, it also always managed to be the right temperature.  Cape Town got cold often, and despite the doors being open to let air in, the warmth from the kitchen was always just enough to strike a comfortable equilibrium.
So it was that I found myself down at the local on the evening of the Deutschland-Uruguay match.  It was being played in Durban, and there was a frog's chance at a snake symposium of getting a ticket, getting there, and as I later discovered, getting off your plane.  A pack of private jets had blocked the runways, and a couple of thousand fans couldn't get to the game as their flights were diverted.
As usual, I found a couple of the local lads, and managed to shoehorn myself into the crowd at the bar.  There were two people with vuvuzelas — one was a huge, burly, barrel-chested Springbok fan about two people to my left.  The other was a woman in the darkened corner toward the exit.  The two of them started honking/buzzing at one another, and the spirit of fun (and annoying noise) hung over the crowd like the ghost of Christmas Present.  Everyone was getting into the spirit of thumping Uruguay, who were about as popular as the Totenkopfverbände at a Bar Mitzvah.
Uruguay had beaten South Africa 3-0 in the opening round of the World Cup, thus ensuring that even though Bafana Bafana thumped the French, they were still doomed to be the first host nation of the Cup to be dumped out at the first hurdle.  Strike one.  Then, after all of the other African teams had been dumped out of the competition, the last Africans standing (Ghana) were knocked out on penalties. By Uruguay.  Strike two.  How did that game go to penalties?  Luis Suarez prevented a goal with his self confessed "save of the tournament."  Problem:  he's not a goalkeeper, and anyone else using his/her hands to manoeuvre the ball is committing a foul.  It was cynical, and he was punished for it, but it denied Ghana the chance to be the first African nation to ever make the semi-finals.  Strike three.  TV commentators were remarking on the police escorts for the team as they went toward the stadium in Durban.
Not only were the phasers in the pub set to "party," the place was jumping, and the Germans were obliging the Africans with their clinical and exciting play.  Around half-time, I managed to tear my eyes away from the gripping spectacle above me to glance around the pub.
There were cigarette girls.  Honestly.  They had the strap-around-the-back-of-the-neck deals, and the trays in front of them, with rows of cigarette packs.  It was one thing that people were smoking in the bar, but this was something new.  Or rather, something old.  This was something I'd expect to see in "Carry on Spying" or some sort of French cabaret period-piece film.  They moved around the bar, seeming to hover together like a trio of ladybugs, which didn't seem to make much sense to me if the idea was to vend their wares to as many customers as possible.
Eventually, they settled at the blank spot at the bar which had been vacated by my friend, who had run off to answer the call of nature.  Coincidentally, next to me.
"Hey there," I said to the nearest (and shortest) of the three.  "How much are you charging for those cigarettes?
It was about that time that I noticed that the cigarette packs in the tray were about half of the size of a normal cigarette pack. And what looked like the sample cigarettes had about half of the diameter of the cigarette dangling from the girl's hand.  I looked from one to the other.
"Wait, you're selling these things, but you smoke a different brand..."
"Oh yes," she replied airily. "I smoke Camels.  I don't really care for these ones."
That threw me for a bit of a loop.  Some marketing genius was going to get lynched for this.
"So... if you don't like smoking them, how could you sell them to other people with any conviction?"
"We're not allowed to actually sell them," she said. "We are only allowed by law to be around and wait for people to approach us."
"That's easy," I said glibly. "You're very pretty.  People must approach you all night, non-stop."
She blushed and glanced over at her two comrades, who were busy doing something else.
"No, really... it's not like..."
"Well, here," I offered, reaching in my pocket for some cash. "How much for one of those packs?"
"They're 27 rand," she began, before running through what I assumed was a rehearsed speech.  She drew in a breath of air, not cigarette smoke and began. "We are prohibited from actually selling you cigarettes.  What you can do is hand the money to the bar, the bar will give you a pack from their supply, and then they will change inventory with my friend here."  She gestured toward the taller blonde behind her.
I'm sure that I had some sort of quizzical look on my face as I held out 30 rand, the barman took it, made change, gave some money to the blonde cigarette girl, then gave me my change and a 1×1×3 rectangular prism.  Presumably filled with cigarettes.
I opened the package, and the brunette with the cigarette tray watched me closely. I suspiciously pulled out a needle-thin smoke, and look at her suspiciously.
"If I smoke this, won't people think that I'm a homosexual?"
She giggled slightly.
"I wouldn't worry about that," she said.
"Well, why do other people buy these things?" I asked.  "Do they taste better?  They don't look more efficient..."
"I don't like them," she replied. "They don't have enough in them, and you really have to suck to get anything out of them."
I looked coolly at her as I imagine James Bond would have.
"You mean, I ought to be paying you 27 rand for the privilege of watching you smoke one."
"Oh, you... you're making me blush."  At that, she was off to the other end of the bar, her taller, blonder associates belatedly in tow.
In short, Germany was the good guy, I was some sort of quick-talking Lothario, and the world seemed like a better, brighter place the next day than it had the day before.  Not a bad third-place finish, as near as I can tell.

Cheers, and farewell England and the Colonies.

—mARKUS

The Return to the Commonwealth and Civilization

Greetings, gentle readers.
U.S. Customs officials are generally amenable folk.  In my case, whether it be through accident or intent, I had rather pleasant and expeditious dealings with them.  That being the case, I was also in a position to observe the inefficiencies of a system imposed upon these rather innocuous people and the impact that Homeland Security has on travellers into, out of, and through the United States.  I've not yet had the experience of entering the United States by sea, highway, or subterranean James-Bond-Übervillain express train, so I'm restricted to describing my observations of dealings with airborne travellers.
American citizens were generally treated with a tad more class, but my father can attest that as we entered the John Foster Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and we were herded through door number four into our special shuttle container, and taken to a large, white, and sterile room without a clock and with plenty of queue barriers, We went into the right queue.  American citizens and holders of green cards went into the left queue.
In a strange twist of fate, those of us in the right queue weren't forced to wear yellow stars on our clothing, but we did notice, in the 45 minutes that we spent in the queue, that there were 10 out of the 14 available counters open to the queue on the left.  The queue on the right had 16 counters, but only one had an offical attending it.  In addition to watching the other queue clear out while we stood waiting and calculating how long we had to catch our connecting flights, we also noticed that people with ethnic garb, long hair, and other distinguishing factors spent an awfully long time at the one open counter.  They had to remove hats, glasses, etc. and stare into a video camera, have their thumb- and fingerprints taken, shed their footwear, and their fingers were swabbed and chemically analyzed for ions.
Hopefully, I shall have smuggled these words through my final experience with customs in Vancouver before some over-zealous protector of America's verdant pastures of democracy happens upon the concept that a male terrorist might smuggle sticks of C-4 up his urethra to the second knuckle, and thereby rewrite the entire system of searching passengers in transit to include violations of civil liberties that men like Alexis de Tocqueville would never have considered.  
I reckon that the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium is a viable one.  I don't think the American populace are easily likened to the frog in the pan of water that does not react to changes in temperature, only in changes that exceed a certain rate, and therefore a slow and gradual increase in temperature will cook the frog without any reaction, while a swift increase in temperature will allow the frog to perceive the danger and leap to safety.  To describe people, or even the American people as being so myopic as to not realize that a situation is becoming untenable until it is too late is unfair.  That being said, I reckon that people settle into an equilibrium, or political rut, until there is a break in the equilibrium.  It need not be so startling as introducing a frog to boiling water, but a sea-change or a swing in zeitgeist can spread like a wildfire, and people, political systems, and institutions can shift dramatically befopre settling into the next comfortable plateau of development.
The troubles at the recent G12 summit-do-dah in Toronto give evidence that our current political plateau is comfortable enough that a few squeezes of human rights and freedoms are not enough of an impetus to spur a wholesale re-evalution of the system.  The question I pose is... how many knuckles up the urethra will the average voter take before one civil liberty lost is one too many?  This is no revolution-or-die frog scenario, but one that requires us to simply consider Aristotle's advice about the unexamined life.  Americans have already begun to respond.  Democrats hold both houses of Congress, the first non-white man is President and Commander-in-Chief, and confidence in the federal government is crumbling in the approval polls after only a year in office because the military interventions around the world are neither concluded, nor reasonably justified in their continuance.
Lesson to be learned from this particular aspect of my travels - next time, I'm going British Airways, and I'm going through Heathrow, Terminal 4.   Intercourse cheapskate North American airlines and their "credit-card-transactions only" food and drink policy.  To perdition also with the cattle-car mentality, and the riff-raff; the uneducated and uncouth masses that Donavan will no doubt affirm to be the soul-eroding company of trans-continental flights.
Actually, I'm becoming of the opinion that we went wrong giving up on the Zeppelin.  I don't want to sit in a rabbit-hutch next to that fat guy with the bladder-infection and Tourette's syndrome.  I want a deck.  I want an agora of discourse and exchange.  I want to talk to my fellow passengers without making reference to begging their pardon whilst jamming luggage into ridiculously small overhead bins.
I reckon that there are only two options.  
The best would be only to travel by sea and rail.  Those who haven't read my diatribes on post-traumatic stress disorder should know that I consider the decline of those modes of transport as popular choices for mass conveyance to be a primary cause.  Cause for some serious consideration when comparing Second World War veterans to Vietnam and Gulf War vets.  
The other is to become fantastically rich and travel first-class Virgin Airlines tout les temps.   But then you only meet other fantastically rich nutbars, and not real humans.
In any event, our society has become pigeon-holed, impersonal, and categorized enough without our current air transport system encouraging and perpetuating those sorts of socialization.
I know Richard Klinger would join me in rhapsodizing about the romance of the rail, and I've got many stories of the cool things I've done and the people I've met on trains in Portugal.  Actually, just getting places with my awful Portuguese was somewhat of a minor miracle.  Aircraft are all about maximizing profit per fuel expenditure in North America, and the passengers are just consumers to be filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, and debriefed in order to make up the numbers that push the operational budget indicator into the black.
In any event, I'm just about to set off for my final leg of the marathon journey home.  Time to recharge some batteries and set up for the last push.
Cheerio and good night, England and the Colonies.


—mARKUS

I'm a Ramblin' Man

Greetings, gentle readers.

Well, with the beaches and mountain faces of South Africa long left behind in the vapour trails of my travels, and with the past World Cup having lurched to an altogether foreseeable uninspired climax, we are left with two resonating questions.
First, what have I learned about travel in general?  In other words, I need to identify the areas of growth in knowledge and experience that would make future travels more efficient, enjoyable, economical, etc.  Second, what are the most lurid and graphic hedonistic excesses of this trip in particular?  There is evidence of demand for this sort of thing.  Thus far, I've been asked by three different people.  Because it offers the possibility of being interesting reading, it will therefore be dealt with later in the interests of increasing the magnitude of any potential suspense.
Travel
The biggest priciples that I've encountered as a person travelling the globe are twofold:  If given any options at all in the matter, I would prefer to travel alone and spontaneously.
Going solo creates dynamic situations that require improvisation and accommodation.  In addition, from my personal experience, I learn more about things, people, and events on my own than I do from companions.  The lyrics from Jethro Tull's "Teacher" jog through my head as I write this, but a critical point is time-management.  This is not to say that I derived zero value from travelling with others on this particular escapade, but I felt constrained, rather than liberated in my ability to experience and enjoy.  On the whole, I interacted with more people and discovered more interesting facts and angles of interpretation when experiencing things on my own.  As an example, my father, my aunt Jenny, my cousin Liesl, and I went to the Victoria and Alfred waterfront.  Once.  I've now been there once in my life.  Huzzah.  The time there was predominantly spent trying to get all four (passive-aggressive) people to do a single thing, coordinating how we were going to find each other if/when we split up at all, giving directions to one another, and generally milling about wondering where that other person from the group wandered off to.
One can only take so much of this sort of conversation:
My father: "Where are we going?"
Liesl:  "Where would you like to go?"
Me:  "Where can we go?"
Jenny:  "Is anybody hungry?"
My father:  "Where is the food place around here?"
Liesl:  "Are you hungry?"
Jenny:  "I don't know.  What does everyone else want to do?"
Liesl:  "There's the aquarium..."
Me:  "I'd like to see the aquarium."
My father:  "Where's the aquarium?"
Me:   "We walked past it on the way from the car park."
Liesl:  "The aquarium is really nice."
Me:  "OK.  Where's Jenny?"
My father:  "I think she went somewhere to eat."

That resulted in our quartet breaking up so that my father and I could go and see the aquarium, and Liesl went off with her mother to look at the shops.  The aquarium was very pretty, but my father didn't seem interested in water ecology, oceanography, or marine biology.  His most urgent aquatic interests lay in the state of his own watery bowels, which forced him to scuttle to the restrooms frequently.  That particular affliction also manifested itself frequently in airports, leading to the oft-murmured "Watch my bags" and my consequent uncomfortable shuffle in place in airports, waiting for his reemergence.  Incontinence on two different continents.  Sad, really.
Did I learn as much as I could have done at the aquarium?  Probably not.  My father was anxious to hurry through the exhibits at breakneck speed so that

1. he'd always know where the restrooms were located, and
2. he wanted to make sure that we were done and didn't lose contact with Jenny and Liesl, who, he was convinced, were going to leave without us in Liesl's car.  

Turns out that they were watching a performance at the amphitheatre, and were going to ring us on one of our mobile phones when they were done.  An hour later.  We also missed out on the cavern golf and the gem/mineral mine.  That could have been fun.  Oh well.
Next, there's the issue of planning versus improvisation.  I don't mind a bit of planning.  Maybe even a fair bit of it.  Too much, and suddenly, there is too much effort being put into tracking what boarding time is at what gate, and which relative is meeting us at which bus station at what time, and whose mobile number is needed in this specific circumstance, etc., etc.  The larger the travelling party, the more often is heard "Do we have time for...?" and the more often the answer to that question, regardless of content, is no.
Company is nice, people are good, friends and relatives are virtuous elements in one's life.  Sadly enough, I have had the most fun exploring completely foreign places on my own.  There are exceptions, of course, but I reckon that's the rule.
I'll continue by attacking air travel.  Flying places in North America is a hardship to be endured, not the sort of exciting or thrilling adventure I always felt it to be as a child.  South African Airlines did a fair job of making sure that no-one died of malnutrition or advanced desiccation on flights that lasted longer than 2 hours.  Apparently, United Airlines and Air Canada have no such compunctions.  They will sell you food (credit cards only) and drink, and maybe rub your lips with a sponge dipped in sour wine when you're reaching some of the nastier stages of death, but other than that, you're herded into enormous queues, crammed into rabbit-hutch-sized seats, and if you're flying economy - on a seat sale - that's accepting standby passengers, you've wasted your time if you spent any of it anticipating a pleasant experience.
One fellow was a reasonable sort.  A bit stand-offish and brusque, but he's American and I expect that sort of thing.  He was organized, got his carry-on luggage into the overhead bin, was sitting quietly in his seat reading as we waited for boarding to finish.  People were still filing in, cramming the ridiculously narrow aisles (all the better to fit you in) with their bags and bodies.  Two Asian kids in their late teens or early 20s were trying to push against the flow of people moving in to reach our American, who was minding his own business.
For 15 minutes, they clogged the aisle and made life miserable for other passengers, because they were pestering this poor fellow to switch seats in order that they might sit together.  Apparently, it took both of them to stand there, haranguing this innocent fella, and generally making asshats of themselves to achieve their goal.  Which they consequently did.  After a number of polite suggestions:

• "Why don't you switch for the seat next to the other one you've got?" the man protested. 
• "I'd really rather not move..." he pleaded.  
• "I was here first, and this is my assigned seat on my boarding pass." he reasoned.

The responding vacuous stares and pidgin English responses from his open-mouthed assailants, coupled with people making disgusted grunting noises and shooting deadly glares in his direction as they tried to sidle past the human roadblock of asiatic hormone confusion, eventually persuaded the man that it just wasn't worth it, so he packed up his stuff and moved to the back of the airplane.
That was one of the milder offences against human dignity and common sense that was regularly experienced through airports and airplanes and shuttles alike.
Must sign off now, but I'll be back with all of the lurid stuff, and probably a choice word or two to describe American customs practices as xenophobic paranoid schizophrenic histrionics gone horribly awry.
Cheers for now,
—mARKUS

A Final-and-Forget Mission

Greetings gentle readers.
In just a few minutes, I'll eat some tasty braai chicken and pork and shortly thereafter trot down the street past the enormous moving truck that's blocking the lane and down to the pub to watch my final — Germany v. Uruguay.
Not that Uruguay are worthy finalists.  Far from it.  They got to the Semi-Finals by drawing France, then beating South Africa (86th in the FIFA World Rankings), Mexico (15th), South Korea (52nd), and Ghana (37th).  Wow.  Awesome way to conquer the titans of the sport en route to the semi finals, where the first top-ten team they met promptly snuffed them out.
On the other hand, the Dutch have only managed to beat one top-ten team themselves in Brazil, and they had to yawn their way past over-rated Cameroon (a generous 11th), Denmark (26th), Japan (43rd), and Slovakia (34th) to get to Brazil.  Commendable patience in dealing magnanimously with the weaklings of the tournament.  Terribly Dutch.
No, Uruguay are not great opposition for a German team that disposed of the poorly-prepared English and the arrogant Messi-sideshow that was Argentina. (Ninth and eighth-ranked in the world at the time of the draw respectively, BTW...)  No, the reason that I want to see Paul the Psychic Cephalopod and all of his various magic sea-monster pals vindicated in their opinion that Deutschland will triumph over Uruguay is that Uruguay have made themselves the most hated team since Maradona's Argentina in 1986.
Both teams used handballs.  Both teams claimed that the infringements were "Hands of God." Unfortunately, the difference between the two was that Maradona cheated to beat the English, decent contenders of the day, and he consequently scored a fantastic solo effort later in the game that justified his reputation as the most skilled player of his generation.  Luis Suarez managed to irritate a tremendous amount of Africans by handballing because:

1. They eliminated the last African team in the final.
2. They eliminated the team with the squad with the youngest average age (24.1).
3. They had been taken to the brink of losing by a team that might generously have been considered the third-best of the African contenders to start the tournament.  A goal would have supported Africa's claim to be the next footballing hotbed.
4. Suarez is a bit of a moaning minnie about offsides and other infringements the other 99% of the time.
5. They blitzed Bafana Bafana 3-0 back in the group phase, effectively torpedoing them out of the next round — the first host nation in history to not progress to the second phase.
6. At least the Brazilians are South Americans who have the decency to play with black players, dammit.
7. Gyan's failure to score the resulting penalty destroyed any belief that Ghana deserved to be in the next round anyway.

Bottom line:  Everyone here hates Uruguay.  They are Africa-killers, cheaters, divers, whingers, and one-dimensionally dependent on their two strikers to shoot the ball.  That means that everyone is on my side.  Germany, the second-youngest squad in the tournament, now has a chance to prove that the balance of world footballing power is changing.

Here's the danger:  if Spain win tomorrow, but do not score four goals or more, they will be the lowest scoring winners of the World Cup in history.  I don't care how much Johan Cruyff lauds them as fantastic ambassadors of the world's game - tell Americans that Spain can win a World Cup by scoring fewer than two goals per game on average  (right now, they're on seven goals in five games), and they will say the usual "Yeah, that game is boring.  They all end 1-0."

Spain's last three games?

• Spain 1 - 0 Portugal
• Spain 1 - 0 Paraguay
• Spain 1 - 0 Germany

They might be entertaining games to the cognoscenti, but goals change games, goals win games, and most importantly, goals put bums on seats, and advertisers on HD satellite channels.

So bully for Spain if they pull off another 1-0 win.  Ruud Krol will babble endlessly about ball-possession, assurance in the midfield, etc.  Give me the freewheeling Germans any day of the week.  Like today.  I'm done dinner and off down the pub.  Also flying out tomorrow, so my next bit should be from North America.  Cheers, and thanks for paying attention.

—mARKUS

Just playing those mind games together...

Greetings gentle readers.
Part of the story of the Round of 16 was the relative lack of upsets.  With apologies to England fans, a neutral observer had to like Germany's chances before the game.  The other part is the matching of very similar teams with one another.  Paraguay and Japan both play a very defence-first, counter-attack-second style of play, while the Brazilians and Chileans favour speed and quick wing play, Spain and Portugal are both offensively-minded, short-pass, possession teams, USA and Ghana are both direct and physically-oriented teams, and Argentina and Mexico both enjoy flamboyant stretch passes to the inside-centre channels.  The only real contrast was the Dutch and the Slovaks, but even that wasn't much of a stretch as Robert Vittek and co., hot off a gunslinging victory against the Italians in group play, grew exponentially in confidence and swagger, and suddenly didn't feel like stifling the Dutch midfield so much as forcing interceptions and dispossessions, and barnstorming at the Dutch defence.
What was the result?  Well, with Portugal and Spain playing off, and Brazil facing Chile, at least one European and one South American country were guaranteed to advance to the Quarter-Finals.  No surprises there.  As for the other confederations, CONCACAF and Asia lost both their respective representatives, and then there were only three continents left.  Eight teams, four from South America, three from Europe, and one from Africa.  As we moved into the Quarter-Finals, the story looked like it was shaping up to be some sort of triumph for South America, and a vindication of Latin American footballing philosophy in terms of the accusations of simulations to deceive the officials, poor sportsmanship, disreputable behaviour and announcements, and devious fouling.  After all, South American teams comprised only 5 of the 32 teams that began the tournament (15.625%), but by the QFs, constituted 50% of the teams left.  The host continent was left with a single representative, while the previous two World Cup winners from Europe were gone by the end of the group phase.
Boiled down, this was turning into a metaphor for cultures, nations, regions, traditions, and languages to have it out on a football pitch. That being said, the big showdowns in the quarters were a mixed bag.  Four of the top five FIFA ranked teams were drawn against each other, with Spain the only favourite amongst the three "unfancied" teams.  Basically, the big boys were knocking each other out, while the small fry continued their rather easy road to the semis.
It was tempting to cheer for Uruguay, since they have the smallest national population of the final eight, and a FIFA ranking in the double-digits (19th), but I'm in Africa, and that makes a big difference.  First off, they were in a group that wasn't very strong.  South Africa played valiantly as hosts, but really, they were never going to get to the semis in anyone's books.  They were brave minnows, but they were positively colossal against the fractious and mediocre French, and the Mexicans came, got to the round of 16 against the other two soft pieces of opposition, and meekly went home.  So Uruguay wasn't really taxed at all for the first bit, and even managed to get some people here riled up by putting three past South Africa.  Popularity in SA = low, accomplishment on the "beating world-class team"-o-meter = next to nil.  Then they were the beneficiaries of some generous officiating to nudge past 52nd-ranked South Korea by a single goal.  If you're waiting for the part where they become the underdogs, struggling and defying impossible odds... you'll have to keep waiting. Their quarter-final opponent:  37th-ranked Ghana.
On the other hand, consider Germany.  They came out of Group D... the only group that had both qualifying teams win their games in the round of 16.  Then they beat ninth-ranked England (1 World Cup), to be rewarded with a fixture against eighth-ranked Argentina (2 World Cups).  Germany was sitting sixth on FIFA's rankings, by the way, based on the qualifying campaign that featured captain Michael Ballack and goalkeeper Robert Enke.  Neither is playing with the team at the tournament.
Brazil (2nd-ranked) was set up for a match against Holland (3rd).  Good thing that the heavyweights meet at these late stages of the tournament...
That left stuttering, stumbling Paraguay (30th) to prostrate themselves before first-ranked European Champions Spain.  Paraguay made such heavy weather out of squeezing past Japan in a penalty shootout that it boggled the imagination how teams like Côte d'Ivoire and Italy were out, and yet the way to the quarters opened up like some sort of Old Testament Red Sea before the Paraguayans.
The nifty thing that took over at this stage of the tournament manifested in different ways, but it was essentially the workings of a single phenomenon — the psych-out.
Arjen Robben began the quarterfinals' psychological duelling when he began to play with the Brazilian defence's minds.  25% of the time, he would feint, shuffle, dribble, and otherwise diabolically torment the Brazilian full-backs.  75% of the time, he would try and lure them into sticking out a foot before bodily flinging himself over the extended limb, and plunge to the turf in a crumpled, agonized, writhing heap.  His moaning body would roll about and his pale, trembling hands would brush away Brazilian hands extended to help him up until the referee awarded a free kick and/or a yellow card.  Then he would bounce sprightly to his feet and carry on.
The Brazilians lost it.  After going up by a goal, Robben's histrionics and (to be honest) terrible acting skills had unsettled the whole Brazil team.  Dunga was shrieking at the top of his lungs at every Dutch free kick that Robben won, and Kaká, started angrily snatching at shots from distance instead of delivering measured passes inside. Filipe Melo was probably the most tormented and wracked, however.  After a miscommunication left him blocking off his own keeper from a rather meaningless-looking cross, he then belatedly tried to slide out of the way and tipped the ball into his own net.  A little more aggravation and frustration later, and Melo had stomped on Robben in disgust at another theatrical performance by the Dutchman.  Red Card.  The Brazilians were suddenly disorganized, disadvantaged, and in thorough disarray.  By the time they had recovered a modicum of composure, Wesley Sneijder had put the Dutch up 2-1.  Brazil chasing a lead are a sad sight.  Talented footballers who see dribbling runs as expressions of artistic freedom and every curling drive to a top corner as a song of their soul are suddenly confronted by the reality that the clock is ticking and if they don't somehow jam a jabulani over that white goal line, their tournament is over.  Aesthetically perfect passing plays are replaced by hurried and panicked direct assaults, and somewhere in a favella outside São Paolo, a young dreamer huddles in a corner and cries.
Cynical, yes.  Was gamesmanship allowed?  Certainly.  Effective?  Undoubtedly.  Brazil are out, the Dutch are through to the semifinal in Cape Town.
Meanwhile, in the Clash of the Titans that millions have craved for decades, Ghana fold under pressure to the Uruguayans.  This game was a battle of nerves.  Ghana was more physical, more imposing, and faster.  The Uruguayans were cagier, conserving energy and even substituting on older, savvier veterans as the game progressed toward what seemed to be a 1-1 draw.  When Ghana unleash a final assault at the end of extra time, the ball is cleared off the line toward a Ghanaian head, directed back toward the empty net and then... is volleyball-spiked off the line by striker Luis Suarez.
South Africans who were holding a bit of a grudge against the team that beat Bafana Bafana 3-0 now had a whole new reason for hating Uruguay.  As near as I made it, Suarez made a cynical bargain, paying the price of a red card and a penalty kick to exchange a certain game-losing goal for an almost-certain goal.
Ghana turned to their tournament top-scorer, and hero against the United States in extra time, Asamoah Gyan, to win the game with the final kick of the game.  Score, and the game ends in a win.  Ghana would be the first African team ever to make the semifinals of the World Cup.  All he needs to do is score, and he's made history and earned the gratitude of a whole continent.
His nerves fray, and as he starts his approach to take the penalty, his eyes anxiously flit along the goal line, trying to spot a clear spot, some twitch of the goaltender, something that will give away which spot of the net will be open when he hits the...
crossbar.
He's out-thought himself and skewed his weight away from his foot before he struck, and ended up hitting the ball at a low and away point, scooping it too high and off the bar.
At that point, all of the Ghanaians are rattled, because the next thing is a penalty shootout, and although Gyan scores his, two of his team-mates make the same mistake and end up rolling tame daisy-cutter balls into the waiting arms of Muslera in the Uruguayan net, and canny old world-travelled vet Sebastian Abréu puts away the winning penalty away for the South Americans right down the centre of the net.  Poor Ghanaian keeper Kingson had deked himself out and leapt out of the way of the shot even as it was being struck.
The Germans got inside the Argentinians' heads very easily.  They just took the lead.  Argentina, beneficiaries of an outstandingly weak group had really only faced serious opposition from Mexico (15th in the world), and they beat them comfortably, trotting out 3-1 winners.  The Germans blasted the Argentinians down early in the first half, sprang enough quick breaks to make the Argentine defence afraid to support overlapping attacks, then isolated the attackers until the Argentinians were frustrated.  Then the hammer fell, and Argentina had nowhere to run.  Their plan A was spectacular, but they had no contingencies for chasing a game against an opponent that is tormenting your full-backs and is passing laterally through your defensive third at will.  Maybe if they had a Pablo Aimar or another such scheming midfield general, they might have conjured a plan B, but as it stood, they were trapped in a pit of their own devising.
Finally, Spain and Paraguay.  Spain won with unstoppable apathy.  They treated Paraguay with such contempt and dismissive casual play that by the time they realized that they needed to put in a goal to end it in the prescribed 90 minutes, they did so quite comfortably with now-top-scorer of the tournament David Villa.  Paraguay made looking like a bunch of hyperactive second-rate pub-leaguers seem really difficult.  They never really looked like scoring, let alone winning.
Tomorrow, the Dutch take on the dastardly Uruguayans here in Cape Town.  If I go, I am not taking that ghastly Fan Walk again.  Maybe I'll parachute into the stadium to avoid the crowds.
Wednesday, the Germans challenge the Spaniards in what should be the most explosive match yet, as the two remaining offensive dynamos of the tournament go toe-to-toe.
In the meantime, I invite any criticism, discussion, clarification, or augmentation of any of this rubbish.  Feedback is the lifeblood of intelligent discussion in the agora of ideas.
Until next time, cheerio and adieu.
—mARKUS