old biscuit mill

I'm pretty sure I've waxed lyrical about The Old Biscuit Mill here before, but if not, here I go... It's the best way to spend a Saturday morning in Cape Town, taking in the scene of culture-on-culture, while bustling your way through beautiful and interesting people to get to the glass of champagne, oysters, chicken roll, fresh apple tea, enormous cup cakes, 70cm pizza, falafel or curry - depends what you choose to have for breakfast.
The tastes are amazing, the stores are fun and you never know who you're going to bump in to.

What excites me about The ' Mill this morning is its website. It's adorable! No high-tech flash, and yet it does have some fantastic ideas - and I'm particularly fond of my new discovery this morning - they've worked in images of all the people who actually have stores there. Click on "SHOPS", and each of them pops up in the doorway displaying their wares (I sound like an old nursery rhyme). It's even more fun, as one of my family members is in there - see you Dales! :)

radio ga ga

In Johanssburg, we're luckier than most regional areas in terms of our radio selection. We have the national 5fm, regional Highveld, and a slew of other options most don't have: Yfm, UJfm, Jacaranda, 702Talk (who are the nicest bunch to mail and ask for 'that song that went la-la-la-li-la last night"). And yet I'm constantly surprised by the amount of people that choose to listen to Highveld sooner than 5fm. Other regional areas I've lived, 5 always seems to win out quite easily. But here... Jeremy Mansfield and Darren Simpson definitely seem to dominate the morning breakfast slot time and again.

This morning though, I got the perfect comparison between the two and finally made up my mind. Both Jeremy and Gareth Cliff have a sort of "old school track" moment (both for entirely different reasons, but still). This morning, they played at roughly the same time, and the respective selections were:

Ghostbusters Theme Song vs Pearl Jam's "Betterman"

No prizes for guessing which station played which.

If that doesn't finish the argument for any of you living in Jozi, nothing will :)
My radio buttons have officially been changed to 5 and Y. Or bust!

how to lose your job, but gain countless fans

I've always enjoyed Top Gear. Not for the cars (obviously) but for the presenters. They're quirky, quick-witted and funny to say the least. This morning I found out something about James May I never knew, and never would have guessed. He really is a dark horse...

According to Wikipedia, Top Gear presenter and journalist James May was fired from Autocar magazine in 1992 for putting together a hidden message spelled out using the drop letter at the start of each article.

"So I had this idea that if I re-edited the beginnings of all the little texts, I could make these red letters spell out a message through the magazine, which I thought was brilliant. I can't remember exactly what it said, but it was to the effect that "You might think this is a really great thing, but if you were sitting here making it up you'd realise it's a real pain in the arse". It took me about two months to do it and on the day that it came out I'd actually forgotten that I'd done it because there's a bit of a gap between it being "put to bed" and coming out on the shelves. When I arrived at work that morning everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company's office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I'd done because I'd made the words work around the pages so you never saw a whole word. But all the readers had seen it and they'd written in thinking they'd won a prize or a car or something."

his masterpiece:

amatomu

I finally joined the listing of South African blogs - and made the front page!
Don't know what took me so long, but wheee - I'm now public.

mad grand opening!

New York's brand new Museum of Arts and Design opens this weekend, and guess what? I'm not there! Boo hoo!
The building looks incredible, and I can only imagine New York will steal the frontier in design with this addition to the sphere.

Have a look at some of their store goodies - they're must-have!

lolcats

I haven't always been a cat person. In fact, I haven't really been a pet person. Since Russia and Vegas though, cats hold hours of entertainment for me - if only they would stick around that long :)

And worse still, I recently started browsing LOLcats! Not just looking at ones forwarded me by friends, but I've actually downloaded the app on to my iPhone that pages through a huge selection of LOLcats. And yes, I've added some to my "favourites". I'm not sure what this says about me. I haven't decided yet. But I fear I'm on a slippery slope...

friday music

my current favourite song: The Verve's "Love is Noise"

spring has sprung

Back from holidays to some very curious changes in the air. From politics (wtf?), to work (sigh), to home (yipee!), things have really put on a new face since we left for Thailand four weeks ago.
I'm not sure if it's a seasonal thing - the spring equinox was last week - or an end of year thing. A friend tells me it's the rain - we'll all waiting for the rain to come and it's making us edgy. Whatever it is, I feel like I'm watching it through sky-blue-tinted glasses - it all just seems so far away.

In fact, I feel like I'm in the first few weeks of December, when everything starts to wind down and you're really just sitting around waiting for the date you're allowed to officially not arrive at your desk anymore for the year. But it's still September - that's a long way away...

Maybe it is a seasonal thing, but something is in the air, it tastes like cinnamon, and cinnamon can be good or bad, depending on how you use it.