wrm

Forever young.

Fsck me, all these old people are my age!

20100505(002)r

So we went to the Alphaville / Spandau Ballet concert at the Grand West Grand Arena last night.

This is the view from the Q row (hint: there are no R, S or T rows).

Being far away was good, because… it was loud. I want a hi-fi like that. Alphaville was great, lots of good loud noise and stuph. And strobes have certainly improved since the eighties, these must draw the power of a small third world country each.

Spandau Ballet? zzzzzzz. I mean, a very nicely put together show, video footage from waybackwhen, very well done but… it’s still Spandau Ballet :-)Â OK, Barricades was great, but the rest was just a variation on the theme. Pick a line, sing it N times, cue a sax solo, sing the line a few more times, end of song.

Maybe I’m just not a Spandau Ballet fan (I’m not. I was there for Alphaville)

Down in the mosh pit golden circle the glow of cellphones has pretty much replaced the traditional cigarette lighter (although a few lighters did come out for Forever Young). In our day you had to smuggle a recording Walkman in to make bootlegs.

Next up: Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Wishbone Ash, on the first. If I can get the damn Computicket site to work right. Right now, it shows either “fully booked” or “no space available” — last night’s show was far from full, so I don’t believe that.

2010-05-06 by wrm Farting around 0

Motivational

motivator39e93d1a9e5672bfe5feb2ab329074fcc4281f52

2010-04-22 by wrm Farting around Geek Guns 0

Girls and Guns

Three girls, lots of guns.

Sunrise

Some photographer friends wanted to do a photoshoot with guns. The range being a much better location for this than the beach (one probably needs a permit and a police escort on the beach these days…), we all hied off there at oh-dark-early this morning, to catch the sunrise.

BootFullaGuns

I didn’t really know what they wanted to do, so I threw most of my rifles, revolvers, pistols, leather and camos in the back of the car. And we ended up using pretty much all of the above.

ThreeLevers

Savage ’99, Norinco JW-21, Winchester ’94.

MorningLight

3W5K7064

Started with leverguns on the steps, then moved to the IPSC / IDPA “funhouse”.

ThreeGals

Oops

Only one of the three gals had ever handled a gun before, so I started the morning by showing them how to keep their fingers out of the trigger guards, how not to point the guns at people, and the like. But to get realistic photographs, one has to break those rules.

Good thing is, this gal asked me if I was sure when I said “point the gun at me” :-)

Astra44

I just know that if I don’t say anything, someone is going to run across this posting, Photoshop the above picture, and find out that yes, indeed, that Astra 44 Magnum is loaded for bear.

Astra44Loaded

So before I get an email “Finger on trigger! Loaded gun! Sky! Falling!”… I made dummy rounds specifically for this, because this kinda picture with an empty cylinder is just silly, OK?

3W5K7129

3W5K7158

After all of this I took one of the gals to the target range, where she shot the Astra NC-6 22 revolver, the Llama XIV 22 pistol, the Norinco 22 levergun, my CZ 22 silhouette boltgun, and the Star DKL 9mm short pistol.

In other words, a Good Day :-)

2010-04-18 by wrm Guns 1

Absolutely gorgeous

Via www.retrothing.org. Brad Smith went and re-created The Dark Side of the Moon on a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

Damn, it’s good. Or I’m strange. Or both.

Download here.

Share and Enjoy.

2010-04-06 by wrm Geek 0

Nostalgie

Dis ‘n eetplek. In Baron van Reede straat. Ek is nie honger nie. Glad nie. But the smell of the buffet is going to drive me to gluttony.

Kêrel langs my voel dieselfde. Bel pêlle om te kom help vreet.

Sê vir my ma ek het dapper gesterf.

2010-04-03 by wrm Farting around Foooooood 0

KKNK 2010

Brought to you by modern technology, in this case a Nokia E61i.

So hier sit ons oop die stoep by Fokus.com (was laas jaar iets anders en die jaar voor dit ook… maar was nog altyd ‘n nice venue). Kos is excellent, diens is moer stadig, en Theuns Jordaan is besig om Skipskop te cover by RSG voor die CP Nel museum. Of rather, klink soos hy, vermoed dit is nie (laat ons nou nie die man in die gesig vat nie).

Beste koffie so vÃªr is by die Montague huis, maar koffie hier is ook heel drinkbaar. Moet nog gaan shoppe voor 1 uur show.

OK nou het ek eers my cursor verloor, tik blind, meer later.

2010-04-03 by wrm Farting around 0

The search for wheels

A week ago, we went to braai at a friend’s place in Bellville. Drove past a used car dealership in Durban Road, they had an Opel Meriva on the lot.

Now I was all for replacing Tanya’s Astra Classic with another Astra Classic, maybe the short-arsed one with an 1800 engine, because she doesn’t get nearly enough traffic fines… yea, right. But they stopped making the G-cars in 2005, and something newer would be nice.

But the later Astra models are either huge, or resemble an overgrown Kadett. On the other hand, the Meriva looked nice. White, 2006 model, 113k on the clock, R89k.

If they wanted to actually sell the thing to us, that is.

You see, if you’re looking to drop close to a hundred thousand ront on a car, you probably have a job. Which means that you will be pitching at the dealership outside of core hours. What do you mean, you don’t do test drives after 4? Or on Saturdays? Feh.

Meanwhile Pieter found a Gumtree listing for a little more than what the fools in Durban Road wanted, for a car with 45k on the clock, as opposed to 113k. Sounded good to us, so we went to see the car on Saturday. Tanya liked it, let’s do it.

Of course, when it came to banking details time, the price was suddenly R 99 900, up R 900. I’m not one to quibble over 1%, so I told him to deliver the thing with a full tank and I’m happy.

Update: Jaco delivered the car, already transferred to Tanya’s name, with a new licence disc valid for a year — I can’t complain about the service.

Google crumbs: RMP Motors, Bellville.

2010-03-08 by wrm Cars 0

Keeping Aaron happy :-)

When I started this blog, it was all about the house.

Well, things have moved on, and while the house still needs lots of attention, I’ve also started blogging about guns and cars and computers.

I figured that this is not fair to houseblogs.net readers, so I spent a little time figuring out how to exclude some posts from going there.

Turns out it’s dead simple. Changing the RSS feed to http://www.retro.co.za/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=-6,-56 excludes categories 6 and 56, being “Guns” and “Cars” (I left the “Geek” for Laura-Jane).

So if you’re running WordPress, and you don’t want the wrath of Aaron… :-)

2010-03-01 by wrm Geek House 0

Why I never throw anything away.

Tanya’s car going up in smoke left us with a slight transport problem.

You see, the Rand-Lover was leaking water from the thermostat housing, and I figured it’s the gasket. So I pulled the housing, bought velumoid, psyched myself up for the job, thought about it, drank beer, and otherwise procrastinated, as dictated by my basic nature.

Which lead to me hurriedly bolting things together on Wednesday evening. And guess what? It still leaked. Made it to work by pouring water in the top faster than it could run out the bottom, or side, in this case.

S6302148r

Removed the thermostat housing and got our driver to take it to a MIG welding place, where the fellow shook his head and frowned. Whereupon I phoned around, looking for a replacement, but no such luck. Apparently these things have by now all corroded away in a similar fashion to mine.

So Tanya had to give me a lift home last night, which also means that I had to give her a lift to work this morning.

S6302149r

I used the opportunity to shoot through to Bellville, where I have a shipping container, will all the stuff I’d accumulated when my ex kicked me out, as well as a bunch of stuff I’ve accumulated since then. Gads, I love my stuff.

S6302150r

And there I found, as I rightly suspected I should, the thermostat housing which I didn’t use, because it was then the worse of the two, but of course now it’s by far the better of the two.

Which means that the Yellow Rand-Lover rides again.

S6302151r

For your further edification, I present Plan B. Or is that Plan C?

This is the bottom thermostat housing off the front of the Chev 2.5 engine head (in other words, the bit that the broken bit in the previous pics bolt on to). With a piece of pipe, an angle grinder and an arc welder, one can create a functional equivalent to the aliminium part, but one that should last as long as the rest of the head.

2010-02-26 by wrm Cars 0

Accidents come in threes

Which means all of y’all can relax now.

First AD rolls his deer magnet, then Breda gets rear-ended, and then Tanya’s car catches on fire on the M3. Tanya blogs, so I guess it counts.

S6302124r

As far as we can tell, the aircon fan shorted out. Smoke poured out the dashboard, Tanya pulled off, called me. I got there, yup, looks like smoke all right. Opened the door to open the bonnet, and the fresh air fanned flames, coming out the dash. Hmmm. Not an easy fix then.

Disconnected the battery, left the car to stew. Fellow pulled up, handed me a fire extinguisher, I shot it at the dash, closed the doors again. We figure that might have helped keep the temperature down to “smoulder” instead of “burn”.

Fire department arrived around an hour later. Dumped a few hundred liters on the dashboard, making sure the smouldering is out. Car was a write-off anyway.

S6302127r

So now Tanya and I smell of smoke, and we need to go car-hunting again.

Moral of the story: make sure you have marshmallows in the boot.

S6302132r

2010-02-24 by wrm Cars 3