Smoky Cogs

I just had to had to take my car in to get fixed, because my wheel was about to fall off. Literally. One of the wheel lug bolts (the bolt that holds your wheel onto the hub) had broken off, and another was on its way out, so off I went to the Tableview Tyres, a tyre fitment centre nearby.

Well, fortunately for me, the guy there told me is a pretty routine affair to replace the lug bolt, but he did not keep stock of it, so I would have to get it from the dealer. I thought I would try a spares dealer first, since they would be sure to be cheaper than the authorised Hyundai dealer, but after questioning a shopkeeper or two, I discovered that the only place to get those lug nuts was at Hyundai.

Well, at the Hyundai service centre, I got the shock of my life when I saw the price of a new lug bolt (with nut, since half of my old bolt was stuck in the nut still with no way to get it out). A single lug bolt and nut costs R50 – and I needed 2. How on earth are Hyundai able to charge such an exorbitant amount for a bolt! I expected to pay somewhere in the region of R20-30 but this was just plain ridiculous.

The sad part is that I was pretty much held to ransom. I had no choice but to pay up, since I could not get them anywhere else.

After getting the bolts and having them fitted at my tyre place, my car is running fine again, but I am just absolutely gobsmacked at how car manufacturers can take consumers for a ride with spare parts.

The news came out today that the price of fuel in South Africa is going up by 34c per litre again beginning of next month, pushing the price over the R8 per litre mark again.

While I could complain for hours about the high fuel prices, there is another something else that I never quite fully worked out. Why does the media in South Africa follow the price of Brent Crude oil.

Whenever the world oil price is quoted on TV, or in the newspapers, or on the radio, the ONLY price that ever gets quoted is Brent crude.

The problem with this is that South Africa does not import much Brent Crude oil. Most of our imports come from the Middle East, with much of the rest coming from Africa. I was reading a report that we may soon be getting large amounts of oil from Angola. And most of this oil sells for a different price than Brent Crude.

Sure, the differences in the prices between regions would not be vastly different, but why aren’t those prices ever quoted? What makes the price of Brent Crude so special?

I think it would be a very justifiable proposition that the price we see in the media for oil, should be the average which we as South Africans are paying for oil, or perhaps a split of the prices which are relevant to us. It would certainly make trying to estimate the next petrol price increase easier.

The world is an absurd place.

For those that have not been following the story in the news, on Wednesday, Caster won the woman’s 800m at the World Championships in Berlin with a massive lead getting a time of 1m 55.45s. What sparked off controversy was some people claiming that Caster is actually a man.

Now I know Caster has a fairly masculine appearance, which may cause people to speculate, but come on, the test to determine whether she cheated or not is simple. Just check to see what bits she has.

According to the seriously braindead authorities, it is rather more “complex” than that. I would like someone to explain that to me. Surely, if you have the right bits for being a woman, then genetically, you must be a woman, unless of course you underwent a sex change. And even then, you are fed so many hormones, your body essentially is female.

Let us also not forget the utter humiliation of a test like this. How many of us would be thrilled to have our gender – the very fabric of our being – called into question?

And, seriously, if she is a woman, but fails the gender test, then where exactly can she compete, since she won’t have the right bits to be considered a man, and fails the test to be considered a woman?

Another consideration about the ‘gender test’ is, where do you draw the line? Apparently they take things like hormones, DNA, etc into account when determining the results. What then about lesbians, for example? No offence meant to lesbians, but since they don’t follow the ‘normal’ definition of a woman by liking other women, then would they fail this ‘gender test’ too? Of course not!

All this really is, is a very bad case of sour grapes. Caster wins these races in spectacular fashion, and people immediately suspect that she is cheating.

Well done Caster, and I hope you go far!

Read a full article here on BBC Sport

We, as South Africans, are seriously ripped off when it comes to internet connectivity. Our data speeds are substantially lower than most other countries in the world, and to have anything near a decent connection costs an arm and a leg, and then some.

Last month, it was announced that the Seacom cable connecting Africa to Europe was completed, and I nearly thought it was time to celebrate. Up to now, the total international bandwidth in South Africa was 120Gb/s, through the SAT-3 and SAFE cables. Now, the Seacom cable promises speeds of 1.3Tb/s. An unheard of boon for us.

My joy was short-lived however, and my hopes fading quickly. We are now caught in the middle of bad infrastructure and monopolistic telecoms companies. You see, Telkom, owns about 90-95% of the two current cables, and the national backbone, which means up to now, almost ALL internet access had to flow through them. they have contracts in place with the internet industry which forces them to use them, and thus the local internet industry is only able to use the new Seacom cable as a supplementary cable. At the moment, only 6.1%, or 80Gb/s of the cable is being used (or to use the technical term – is lit).

Our local infrastructure is also bad. The limit which our landlines lines can handle is 4Mb/s, and that is if you are close enough to an exchange which supports it. Our wifi networks are spotty at best. I suffer personally from this. I have a 3G connection supplied by Vodacom, which in theory promises me 3.8Mb/s. From my house, on the northern fringe of the Cape Town urban sprawl, there are only two spots in the house where I get anywhere even remotely close to a 3G connection, let alone 3.8Mb/s. Most times I have to limp along with a severely degraded GPRS connection which can barely load Google. And it is not like I am living in a rural village somewhere out in the middle of the Karoo.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, though. When those contracts start running out, then the internet industry will be able to start using the Seacom cable more, and there are a number of projects to upgrade the local infrastructure, so maybe one day, hopefully sometime in the reasonable future, we will be get fast, cheap internet…..until then, I will have to content myself with playing “hunt for the signal” while hacking off another limb to pay for my subscription.

I was completely disgusted when I heard the verdict on the worst animal cruelty case I have seen in a long time.

First, though, a little history lesson. In January, a teacher in the Eastern Cape decided to punish his dog, which had bitten his daughter on her nose, by dragging the dog behind his car for 1.5km along a tar road.

Needless to say, the poor dog suffer severe injuries, and had to be put down. Most of the skin on it’s right side had been scraped off,  his tongue was ripped loose, and his eye had been cut open.

The man was arrested when the SPCA laid seven charges of animal abuse at the local police. The scary thing is that the police tried to persuade the SPCA not to lay any charges as the man was “just punishing a naughty dog”.

The SPCA wanted the maximum penalty of R60000 fine or 2 year prison sentence.

The verdict was handed down yesterday. He is to have an 18 month prison sentence, 9 months of that suspended, or the option of a R3000 fine.

That for me is disgusting.
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This afternoon I took my car to a place in Maitland, and got the best darn news a guy can get. It is going to cost me less than R3000 to do the steering rack.

This would of course constitute bad news on any other day, but not today. For you see, last Friday, I took my car into the Hyundai dealer to determine what the problem with my steering was, and they told me, after keeping my car there the whole day, that my steering rack had to be replaced and was going to cost about R9000. And did I mention that this was the third time my car had been there and each time they changed their mind as to the problem.
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