Smut Bone

Yes, many of you have them. BlackBerry™, Android™ or iPhone™ (which is notorious for it's narrowly-vertical QWERTY touch-screen keypad. On top of that, one needs to remember that it's "smart". Inspired by this, I give you Damn You Autocorrect!!. Thanks, Josh.

And speaking of Josh, I always thought that he'd be the perfect candidate with the bandwidth to creatively handle Emails from an Asshole. That, by the way, is a compliment.



















"What I did on my vacation
For the last 10 years.
Took pictures of your town
Plaid perfume on my breath.
I mean I've been drinking Scotch
While wondering through your town."



Linkey-Loo Robot -

AJC







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Epic Fail


I have to apologize for my sporadic Linkeys this past month. Between work, 3rd-world internet access, and travel (for work), my time dedicated to rooting links to post was severely hamstrung. I'll try to do better in the future.

Until then, let's all look at one view of a little neighborhood known as
It is said that every journey begins with a step. Mine actually began with an "The Mission".

Thanks, Jason.















Linkey-Loo Robot -

AJC







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Cape Town Chronicles - Part 3


Well, this week has been a whirlwind. With a deadline hanging over my head, and clients over my shoulder, I've been relegated to the edit suite pretty much daily from 9am - midnight (and beyond). That basically makes for not having time to seek out Cape Town material for the Linkey. I did engage in a lot of conversations through the course of my edit sessions, so here's just a few highlights:

Traffic lights are known as "Robots". It's odd, I know. The most common type of arugula that seems to come w/ just about every meal is known as "Rocket". I'm starting to sense a space-age theme here.

A few terms that are both entertaining and perplexing:

"Howzit?" Meaning, "How is it going? My response of "It is" was generally greeted by blank stares.

"I'll see you just then." Meaning, "I'll see you soon".

"Awesome!" Meaning, "Awesome".

"Cheers!" Meaning, "Good bye" or "Thanks".

My personal TNSC will be spent flying over the continent of Africa to London. From then on, it's technically Friday, which will have me traveling home via LAX. To that I say "WTF?!"

See you all next week.

Cheers!!







Linkey-Loo Robot -

AJC







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Cape Town Chronicles - Part 2


Once jet lag wore off, I was able to settle into a relatively routine existence here (with the fulcrum of my day being work). It's amazing now much easier travel is these days thanks to what I'll call "smart electronics". It's those universal power adapters that are either built in to, or come with, all of the "new" necessities of life (computers, cell phones, etc.). They easily handle the range of world voltage from 110v - 230v and require just a simple and cheap plug configuration adapter to make them work. No more bulky power converters with fluctuating capabilities. Just devices that behave abroad how they behave at home. Why did this take so long?

Since it's late Summer here in South Africa, and one is always trying to beat the heat, on a recent car trip for a location scout one of my "handlers" kindly picked up refreshing beverages and snacks for all of us at a gas station convenience mart. One of the disparate items that was thrust into my hand was a sickly-sweet Strawberry and Vanilla "Drumstick™" like ice cream cone that had a dense chocolate coating and sticky Strawberry syrup on it. Trying to be gracious I consumed it, but realize why I hadn't had a snack of this ilk for nearly 20 years. Besides the diabetic-like spike in blood sugar level in my body, my hands were pretty much rendered useless thanks to the melting syrup. The only thing that I could grab to make the sugary taste go away was a bag of Nacho Cheese & Hot Wings flavored Dorito's™ chips. I tell you, the culinary combinations here in SA pretty much avoid any kind of subtlety and refinement.

The region certainly doesn't seem to be lacking coffee. It's not great, but it could certainly be worse. It's generally "filter coffee" (often French Press) or "Americanos" (espresso shots w/ hot water to make it the consistency of US coffee). People here generally take coffee with both sugar and cream, and usually in small quantities (and almost always in cups - and I don't mean paper). I unfortunately have a caffeine habit to maintain, so I have to make a nuisance of myself to get the proper dosage. But I found this little gem just outside the back alley of my hotel. It's called Deluxe Coffeeworks, and it's a tiny roastery/ coffee counter run by 2 friendly 30-ish New Zealanders. They have quite the business going on. I threw them for a loop the first time I went in as I ordered "off the menu" with a triple Macchiato to "take away", but they have the routine down now. Here's another little blurb on them.

Though English is the primary language spoken here, a good portion of the population quickly slip in and out of Afrikaans, a unique hybrid of Dutch, Malay, Portuguese, French and Bantu. "Ja" (pronounced "yah") means "Yes", as opposed to the accented English version (pronounced "Yayez". One other grammatical observation that amused me was the often heard use of the term "you must". I'm thinking "No, I really don't HAVE to do that. WTF?!? Though it is stated directly and with conviction, it actually means "you might want to" or "you're probably going to have to", rather than being a definitive edict.

Among the plethora of trees throughout the Cape Town region, there is a common one called the "Dingle". And yes, it does have berries.

5am call times on location, 15 hour days in the edit suite and shoddy internet connections are cramping my Linkey stylings, but I'm doing what I can.

Cheers!




Linkey-Loo Robot -

AJC







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Cape Town Chronicles - Part 1

It is said that every journey begins with a step. Mine actually began with an Anchor™Porter BEFORE stepping on to a SFO -> NYC red-eye that started the trip. 22 hours of flight time, and an additional 7 hours of combined layovers later (spanning 3 calendar days), I stepped foot onto Cape Town, South Africa. You may remember that it hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The locals here are also the people that presented the world with the Vuvuzela. For those of you that do not know, Cape Town is a historical and vibrant port city on the Southern tip of the African continent and is flanked by the Atlantic Ocean on one side, and the Indian Ocean on the other.

From the airplane's window on our descent, I was reminded of a city that was an odd mishmash of Honolulu and the Monument Valley. It's port has a natural breakwater that the Dutch took full advantage of when securing a route from Europe to the East Indies for their spice trade. Above Cape Town the incredibly steep Table Mountain looms. It's an amazing testament to the power of the volcanic upheaval that formed this amazing spectacle..

Upon checking into the awesome Mandela Rhodes Hotel in the heart of the downtown, I quickly discovered 2 things that were lacking: water pressure, and ease of internet access. The lack of water pressure may be due to the fancy-ass shower head that gently "rains" on the user, and the internet issue can only be blamed on a company that prides itself on wireless "Anywhere On" internet access, but doesn't really have it's shit together. Daily connectivity is fraught with challenges. Also, though I don't have a rental car, I noticed that gas is somewhere around $9/ gallon. Who knew?

Though I'm steeped in work, a quick stroll of the area surrounding the hotel one morning reveled all kinds of 17th century Dutch style buildings, which lead to some beautiful 18th century British Parliamentary buildings, lush gardens, and well planned museums. At least I think that it was British. I saw a statue of that lady that's on the Bobmbay™ Gin bottle, and that's British, so i figured that this place was alright.

My daily routine starts with an elevator ride to the open-air rooftop restaurant for a continental breakfast selection that includes an array of the following: various dry cereals including Wheatabix™ (for the Canadians), an array of sliced fresh fruit, a cheese patter with all kinds of stinky cheeses (the French), an assortment of breads and sliced cold deli meats (Germans), and steam trays filled with all kinds of cooked sausages, bacon and compulsory scrambled eggs. The distinct lack of pickled herring leads me to believe that Norwegians don't necessarily travel here for vacation.

Since it's Summer here, the weather has generally been around 85 degrees, though Tuesday's high temperature hit 96. Normally I can handle this, but the 6th floor office that I'm working in doesn't have air conditioning. The ceiling fan also leaves something to be desired. Yesterday morning, as I headed into the office for a 5:30am location scout, I was pleasantly greeted by a city blanked in a marine layer of fog, and a light, wet, cool breeze that reminded me of San Francisco in June. If I'm not mistaken, the temperature is going to jet back up today.


To be continued….






Linkey-Loo Robot -

AJC







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