Elliott Rodgers

Kulula is a low-cost South-African airline, with it’s head office in Johannesburg, that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a real shame that Kulula doesn’t fly internationally, they deserve some support if only for their humour, very typically South African (never met a South African I didn’t like).

Flying 101 – Captions

• aircon ducts = not that kulula needs it… they’re already cool.
• avionics = fancy navigation stuff.
• a.p.u. = extra power when you need it most.
• back door = no bribery/corruption here.
• black box = which is actually orange.
• boot space
• cockpit window = sun roof; co-captain and big cheese.
• first class windows = throne zone (more leg room baby!)
• engine #1 and #2 = 26 000 pounds of thrust.
• front door = our door is always open … unless we’re at 41 000 feet.
• fuel tanks = the go-go juice.
• galley (front of plane) = cuppa anyone?.
• galley = food, food, food, food….
• landing gear = comes standard with supa-fly mags.
• loo = or mile-high club initiation chamber.
• nose cone = radar, antenna, and a really big dish inside.
• rudder = the steering thingy.
• seats = better than taxi seats.
• stabiliser = the other steering thingy.
• some windows = kulula fans = the coolest peeps in the world.
• tail = featuring an awesome logo.
• windows = best view in the world.
• wing #1 and #2
• plane’s registration = ZS-ZWP – OK-PIK. = secret agent code

Kulula airline attendants make an effort to make the in-flight “safety lecture” and announcements a bit more entertaining. Here are some apparently genuine examples that have been heard or reported:

On a Kulula flight, (there is no assigned seating, you just sit where you want) passengers were apparently having a hard time choosing, when a flight attendant announced, “People, people we’re not picking out furniture here, find a seat and get in it!”

On another flight with a very “senior” flight attendant crew, the pilot annouced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached cruising altitude and will be turning down the cabin lights. This is for your comfort and to enhance the appearance of your flight attendants.”

On landing, the stewardess said, “Please be sure to take all of your belongings.. If you’re going to leave anything, please make sure it’s something we’d like to have.”

“There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane.”

“Thank you for flying Kulula. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride.”

As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Durban Airport , a lone voice came over the loudspeaker: “Whoa, big fella. WHOA!”

After a particularly rough landing during thunderstorms in the Karoo , a flight attendant on a flight announced, “Please take care when opening the overhead compartments because, after a landing like that, sure as hell everything has shifted.”
(more…)

Friends will tell you I never watch TV programmes like Big Brother, I’m a celebrity get me out of here etc… These past few weeks I’ve secretly been watching Celebrity Masterchef. Thanks to BT Vision and BBC Replay I didn’t miss the final and what a fantastic final it was.

I watched an episode as I noticed Lisa Faulkner was in it, an actress I’ve quite liked since she played Victoria Merrick in Holby City (I have her appearance in FHM magazine somewhere as well… ). Lisa came across as very down to earth, sweet and vulnerable and like she didn’t quite understand how she’d managed to stay in the contest. I watched it first as well to be honest she’s very pleasant to watch! (*blush*) and I’m a bit of a foodie. After watching one episode I was kinda hooked and rooting for Lisa the whole way. She surprised herself by stayed in the contest and completely surprised herself by winning!!

Her genuineness showed as the three of them waited for the results, Lisa shrugged to herself as if to say “I did my best”. When she was given the trophy (“Wow! Do I get to take the trophy home?”) and the closing moments of the final when Greg asked her if she believed she was a good cook. She replied “Well maybe quite good“.

I sometimes take Marley, a long haired Jack Russell out for a walk down the park and took this photo of him, sat on a bench looking rather thoughtful…. he was probably wondering how he could get me to give him another treat!

Marley (Sheppie's mate) sits looking thoughtful on a park bench.

*rant*
Today I’ve had spam from the same bottom feeding pond scum spammer offering me breast implants, teeth whitening, weight loss secrets, p**is girth and length increase and both Valium and Viagra. Oh and I missed off “teen acne treatment”…. Who or what the f**k does this spammer think I am?
*rant over*

I’ve been meaning to do a book review of the simply brilliant Like Bees To Honey by Caroline Smailes for a while and finally got round to doing one. It can be found here or via the Book Reviews page.

I should warn you that I absolutely love Caroline’s books and really enjoyed Like Bees To Honey. I’ve tried to avoid giving away to much of the plot as well.

On one of my hunts round the internet for which got sidetracked I found a really great little program called Desktop Earth (v 2.0) which sets your windows wallpaper to a satellite view of earth which can be centred on a time zone of your choosing. What really sets this apart from other programs is the dark part of the earth moves over time to accurately show night time around the earth based on the time of day and time of year. If that wasn’t impressive enough it can even update (every 3 hours) to show cloud cover.

The imagery is based on NASA’s Blue Marble Next and Earth’s City Lights and is amazingly detailed especially if you select the Abundant Night Lights.

Desktop Earth v2

You can download Desktop Earth 2.0 for free from http://www.codefromthe70s.org/desktopearth.aspx

This is such an amazing photo of Sheppie, I decided it deserved a post all of it’s own. While playing with Sheppie and his tennis ball, throwing it for him to catch I managed to land the ball in a tree which leans at an angle and has low branches. The local children love climbing it, little did I expect Sheppie would climb the tree and make himself at home! He climbed by himself, unaided and under his own initiative. No Border Collie’s were harmed… one owner was left a bit surprised and shocked.

Sheppie climbed up a tree to retrieve his ball

Before someone screams “photoshopped” it is genuine (I’ll upload some video at some point).

Today as an experiment I decided that I’d go out of my way to be as nice and helpful to people as I could all day…. nothing huge, just in little ways… a kind of extension to the whole “see someone without a smile give them one of yours” sort of thing.

People’s reactions where on the whole varied.. some people were confused, some people looked at me like I was crazy, some people were blatantly suspicious of my motives (which I thought was rather sad really).

Although it took more energy continually going a bit further towards being nice, it was worth it.

One lady in her seventies had the best response EVER when I showed her where the eggs had been moved to in my local Sainsburys…

“You’re a lovely young man. My grand-daughter’s only thirty one next month and single, you single? ”
“I’m single, my girlfriend dumped me in January. ”
“More fool her. You looking? ”
“I think I found someone. ”
“Oh well. ”

And off she went…. very random, very funny.

So someone just had to try me on my Rules for leaving comments. Sadly you bottom-feeding pond scum, you picked the wrong day and the wrong time to behave like a t**t. This morning someone using an IP from Ubiquity Server Solutions decided to spam multiple times from the same IP on the same page. I know it was them as they had the same IP address each time. A screenshot of the spam comments and details has been sent.

I’ll update this post with any replies from Ubiquity Server Solutions… If any. I don’t count an automated reply telling me a ticket has been logged.

Oh and they used gmail accounts so I’ll probably report them to Google as well. After some marmite toast, cup of tea and doing the washing up from yesterday (I hate washing up so it’ll put me in the mood for a rant).

Update: Less than an hour later, had a reply from an Allen Jenkins saying they’d passed the complaint onto the customer responsible for the server oh and he added Thanks.

Update: They obviously take things “seriously” given that further spam reports went unanswered and they didn’t deal with the fact the original spammer sent an abusive message.

Way to go on a spam policy!