God’s Work Unspoiled

Last weekend, I was blessed to spend the better part of Saturday not only earning a severe sunburn, but also getting to see some of what has to be the most beautiful unspoiled nature on the planet.  My boss and I took a tour over the area generally referred to as the Cape of Good Hope.  From what I can gather from the locals, that term is most accurately applied to the entire general area around Cape Town, South Africa, and we covered most of it in a van and on foot over the course of the day.  Many of you have heard me talk about what I wanted to be when I grew up when I was a little kid.  I had seen Shamu and knew that marine biologist was the correct carreer for me.  That never really worked out, and much has happened since then.  Just the same, I have always been a fan of whales.  Well, it turns out that October is pretty good whale watching time on the Cape.  While I don’t know for sure, I suspect it has something to do with it being spring down there, and the boy whales showing off for the girl whales.  The sort we were able to see were Southern Right Whales.  I left the hotel hoping to see one, and before the day was out, we had seen a dozen or more, all from the shore.  Some just kinda swam around, but I’ve included a somewhat fuzzy pic of what I suspect was a rather randy whale.  There are many more like it (including the fuzziness). I’m also including a picture of Cape Point, the south-western most point of the continent of Africa, whatever that means.  I mean, I understand how to measure the most southern, but the most south western?

Soul-lag

I once read a book (Pattern Recognition) in which the main character theorised that the cause of jetlag was the fact that the soul could not travel at the same velocity as the body. In other words, the body could travel from one continent to another in a matter of hours, but the soul required a bit more time to make the same journey, effectively leaving the body soulless for a bit. Clearly, this is not exactly based on any sort of theology I am familiar with, but just the same, I understand and identify with the dynamic that brought the character to this conclusion. If I were to expand the theory just a bit, for amusement sake of course, I would probably at this point add a corralary that states that travelling souls do not home in on the body itself, but rather on some sort of cosmic trail of bread crumbs that it somehow leaves behind. As a result, when one takes a long L-shaped flight, to say, South Africa via Amsterdam, the soul does not take an “as the crow flies” route and achieve some sort of Pythagorean-derived time savings on the catch-up. Ooooohhhh no. In my experience, I suspect that not only does it follow the path of the planes on which you travel, but further, that if you change planes in a foreign country, it can easily be thrown off course and end up in Angola or something for a while. All this to say, it’s Monday here in Cape Town, I’ve been here since Wednesday (I think), and I’m finally starting to feel normal.

Keith’s Alter-ego

He can’t seem to accept it, so I’m going to have to help him out. KB ABSOLUTELY looks like Tony Stewart.