Sweet audio from the sugar bird

It seems the human race is becoming more and more hard of hearing as it evolves. New cinema complexes install sound systems that blast the message across at excessive decibel levels, with too much treble. I noticed this in London and now a new local complex in Cape Town is following suite. Nature provides a more balanced sound mix, unchanged for millions of years. As the summer cycle reaches its peak the bird life in Cape Town thrives. Last evening we saw a flock of Cape sugar birds hopping from tree to tree making its way south to Cape Point. These beautiful creatures have long tail feathers, with the males reaching up to 40cm, and make a complex range of calls labeled as 'grating, chirping, chipping and twanging' by Roberts Book of Birds. They are endemic to the the Western Cape, thriving in the local flora known as fynbos. We have fynbos Proteas in our garden which provide nectar for their long beaks. Also knocking around is the common migratory barn swallow with the swept back wings. It summers in South Africa, often as far south as Cape Town and is known to come from places like Wales in the UK, a journey of 6000 miles, completed over two months, feeding on insects in the air and beating its little wings 5-7 times a second. The QSL is from The Magic 756 in Wales, using 1 kW and heard in Kent on AM in 1996.

Keeping lite in Plett

Awoke to rain at dawn - a north-wester! Unusual at this time of the year and I rushed to Muizenberg to catch the early wave. It was perfect, glassy 3-4 foot swell with some bigger sets at the back. Table Mountain was covered in cloud but out in the water a warm, milky sun blinked through. We're just back from Plettenberg Bay, or Plett, one of SA's most popular watering holes, crammed with holiday-makers mainly from up north around Johannesburg, with loads of SUV's, Mercs and Beamers, flashy gear and general signs of conspicuous materialism. When you're at a sunny holiday resort over Christmas and New Year, with family, some not seen for years, it's hard not to consume far too much. It's a good way to get the belly to start hanging over the belt. SA was an early-adopter of lite beers and I stuck to the 2.5% alcohol Windhoek lite all through. Not sure if it made much difference but I sure felt virtuous! And it still tastes like beer. Each can carries about 2/3 of the calories of an ordinary lager. To round off a nice holiday equities surged on the first day of trading in the New Year with the FTSE 100 closing above 6000 for the first time in yonks and the local FTSE/JSE All Share breaking to an all-time high above 40000. Plett was named by Baron Joachim van Plettenberg, Governor of the Cape in 1779, after himself! The QSL is from a Dutch pirate station Radio Blue Star, using 50 watts, heard on short-wave in Kent in 1996. It was based in Zwolle where van Plettenberg was laid to rest.

Boehner, bain of the recovery

For some time now prospects for global equities have steadily ticked up. The first signal was the significant fall in volatility in the Euro as Eurozone leaders coordinated various moves to allay investors' fears that the whole edifice would crack and collapse. Another key was the dawning perception that US housing's long slump was over. Now it is common to read about how the number of new homes built is outstripped by household formations. In reality this is a big pendulum swing that's been under way for some years. If we look at the four major economic zones, US, Eurozone, China and Japan it is possible to paint quite a positive synchronised recovery picture for 2013 - not stellar but moving in the right direction, and still accompanied by very low global interest rates. In such a world, where do you wanna be? In equities, has been my call and still is. Enter stage right, the dysfunctional US political system led by the Republicans under John Boehner. Fiscal cliff is all you've been reading about for weeks and they are still bickering more than ever. If I was American I'd vote Republican, but this is ridiculous. America needs to avert the cliff now and restructure it's entire tax system shortly thereafter. It's simple arithmetic, stupid. The clock is ticking on the national debt, fast. But they continue to play silly brinkmanship. Obama won the election, move on. The QSL is from WCKY, Cincinnati, Boehner's home town, heard on AM 1530 in Cape Town way back in 1968.

Makes you want to run the red light

Traffic lights drive you mad. Or robots, as they are quaintly called in South Africa. Sometimes the whole intersection is idling, waiting for pedestrian lights even though there aren't any pedestrians. Or the lights are green for the cross road but no cars are there, meanwhile there's a bunch of cars waiting on your side. Tests are now being conducted in Harris County, Texas to combine smart lights with vehicles' new anti-idling systems to calculate the flows at intersections. This system also makes use of drivers' cellphones, like Waze does for traffic densities. Already in place is the Scoot technology used on many of the 4000 traffic signals in London and 250 of the 1200 lights in Cape Town. Cape Town Council claims its Scoot system saves motorists R30 million in 'operating and time costs'. That may be so but I can think of loads of intersections where there seems to be a lot of pointless idling and waiting, burning up gas and time. And it's often for those invisible pedestrians. I can remember in Cape Town years ago a system of rubber strips on the road that recorded flow and sent this to the light, which would then react. Many lights had them and they seemed to work pretty well. They've gone now. A case where new technology has retrogressed from old technology. The QSL is from KYOK, Houston in Harris County Texas. They were using just 5 kW on AM 1590, heard in Morgan Bay, South Africa in 1993.

Dak down in the Drak

Cape Town's excellent V&A Waterfront was the scene for Red Bull's Flugtag today and 40+ aircraft of all shapes and sizes strutted their stuff. These events never fail to impress with their ingenuity and pure sense of fun. Some of the planes were destined from the start to plunge straight into the water, from the 6-metre high ramp protruding off Jetty 1. And so it was with concoctions that paid barely no attention to basic aerodynamics but were still propelled into the abyss with great abandon. My son Matt's plane was a serious effort by the Cape Town Flying Club with an 8-metre wingspan and a rear flap that enabled them to get some lift. For pilots, this week has been tragic with the SA Air Force 35 Squadron (based near Cape Town) C-47 going down over the Drakensberg with 11 on board. This was a modified Dakota, basically a DC-3 with turbo engines. The Dak is an amazing survivor, the first being built in 1935 and widely used ever since for many purposes. They were built in plants in California as well as Oklahoma City, 10 000 in all over the years. I had quite a few flights in Daks during the 1970s, mainly in what was then South-West Africa, flown by young pilots who used to throw the planes around like toys. They were built to take punishment, which makes the 35 Squadron loss all the more mysterious. It will be hard to determine just what went wrong because there was no black box on board. The QSL is from KOMA Radio in Oklahoma City, heard on a trip to San Francisco in 1993. One of the great US AM stations.

Sierra Leone swings through the cycle

Sierra Leone is a poor country, with GDP of just $2.2bn and a population of around 6 million. By comparison, London has a population slightly larger at 8 million and a GDP of over $750bn. But Sierra Leone is on a roll with real growth running at around 6% in recent years and a huge surge likely this year with the flow of iron ore production hitting full stride. The country was devastated by a terrible civil war which ended in 2001, infamous for 'blood diamond' atrocities. This was the third election since then and the first to be run by the country itself. Incumbent president, Ernest Bai Koroma  was elected to a second term with a convincing majority of 59%, enough to avoid a second round vote, while the ruling party, All People's Congress, increased its majority in parliament. The opposition has alleged irregularities and stuffed ballot boxes but is unlikely to resort to violence and the international observer community has given the thumbs up. So yet another west African state passes more or less smoothly through an election cycle and the region's growth continues to hum along. The QSL is from Radio Sierra Leone, heard on 90mb short-wave in Cape Town in 1969. It has the distinctive Africa-shaped Sierra Leone human rights stamp on the postcard. What a nice surprise in the mailbox, long ago

Kellogg's is a waste of space

In this consumer's world we chow through huge amounts of stuff, probably a lot more than we need. Over the years economists have reminded us that having things doesn't necessarily mean happiness, and can even mean unhappiness. The latest on this theme is Robert Skidelsky's 'How Much is Enough?' which draws on a theme of Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, where he imagined that as the human race grew richer it would seek more leisure. Eventually we'd only be working 15 hours a week. But that simply hasn't happened and the desire for more is a strong as ever. Pity then that Kellogg's, the famous branded cereal provider continues to rip us off and that we continue to fall for it. A box of Kellogg's All Bran Flakes here is smartly packaged but the contents are way less than the box. Kellogg's might argue that the contents 'settle' in transit but even the packet itself inside is a lot smaller than the box. This is waste, a lack of economic efficiency and deludes an easily-deluded public. Each box takes up more space in the truck, in the trolley and on the shelf. Well, it's a free market (sort of) and if Kellogg's gets away with it, well so be it. Kellogg's sure is big business, with 3rd quarter sales of $3.7bn and operating profit of nearly half a billion. It's a brand that's been around for over a century, not many like it. The QSL is from WKAR Radio broadcasting from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan just a few miles up the road from Kellogg's HQ in Battle Creek, MI. It was heard on a trip to Chicago in 1992.