Capensis Calamity Blog Review

Capensis Calamity Blog Review

Blog about adventures in Africa with bees

(and incidentally... my first bugs with beta are crawling out...so if this font is all screwed up, I apologize. It's not me. It's the BETA.)

Capensis Calamity is a fairly new blog, one of my finds when I was having a day of near-record boredom, click-click-clicking away on the Next Blog button. I admit I almost gave it a big, capital P “PASS” when I read his blog description,

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.-Henry David Thoreau”

But I gave it a lookee-look and I’m certainly glad I did. ‘Cause, my friends, this guy is standing up and doing some living! Old Thoreau would have totally approved, unlike how he’d feel about boring-as-hell, non-living folk like me who sit on their asses and worry about bills instead of trekking through Africa and being a superhero and…well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Since June, our hero of the story, who I do not think is either female, or 104 years old, as the profile would have you believe, has been tramping about South Africa, “in search of fame, honey, and dogs with bees in their mouth so when they bark they shoot bees at you.” Well, the first month in the archives is June, but it contains only a picture of (presumably) our blogger. Yes, the one above.

I have to say this… my only complaint is that he doesn’t write enough. The last post, while incredibly awesome… I mean, it has photographs of a gigantic red grasshopper that nobody in America has ever seen… it was on November 13^th. Come on now, Mr. Calamity, let’s get a move on here and start with the blogging.

(Yes, I realize the irony of me telling someone else they should ‘keep upon’ their blog. Haa haa hee hee. That’s me. Ironic.)

So, scanty as they are, the posts are quite enthralling. June holds nothing but the above picture, but in September, things started getting interesting. On September 24^th, there were the daring chronicles of the search for killer bees. Did they find them? Well, yes indeed, and you can read for yourself, if you’d like. Did it involve stinging, one might ask?

At some point in the late night trip back to the guesthouse we had lost the lids of one of the killer bee hives, and in the quiet of dawn the bees were becoming restless. Getting in to the car involved a few more stings to the face and neck, though by now the swelling was as bad as was it was going to get and the pain was dulled by the lack of sleep.

Not only do the bee-seekers get themselves stung, but they release veritable havoc on the poor gas station attendants, as well. I have to wonder, is being stung by thousands of bees a normal risk a gas station attendant faces in South Africa?

We pulled up at the service station and were greeted as always in South African petrol stations by four or five attendants. Quickly they set about washing the windscreen, opening the petrol cap, checking the tyres. And quickly the Killer Bees set about f**king up all and sundry in the area. Pouring out into the petrol station the tiny weapons of death started stinging the attendants and then set out to find anything else that was moving...with dismay I watched a family pull up in 4WD and all hop out into the path of the bees.

The end of that post includes a picture of an interestingly swollen-faced blogger with what we presume are many painful bee-stings causing the said swelling. Think onthat for a wee minute. The face is swollen from bee stings. Da-yum. I ask, what more could you ask for? Aren’t we all, on some deep and rarely discussed level, quite afraid of bees and their pokey little asses? Well, I am, and I aint afeared to admit it, so this blog is a lesson in bravery. Written in that dry british-sounding sense of humor to boot. And, bonus, it’s full of great pictures like the grasshopper ones. The above-mentioned bees, of course, but there are pictures of tiny tortoises, too. Again, I ask it… What more could you ask for?

You could ask for other animal pics, and maybe throw in a photo or two of a grinning man with what appears to be a pyramid of fruit and/or feathers on his head. Up, yup, here it is. Allow me a small quote:

“….is truly the scariest man I've ever met. He moved around much like a puppet, as though he weighed nothing despite his massive headdress. He also sang through his teeth in a high pitched hum and suddenly burst into fits of staccato, monotone laughter. If anyone gave him money he danced around in circles crying "Thank-lyou, Thank-lyou". The nightmares continue.”

You could ask for colorful and intriguing dialogue such as:

“FUCK, THESE BEES FUCKED US MAN!"

"THIS IS KAK! THESE FUCKING BEES ARE KAK MAN!"

Uh-huh, and check.

It won’t take you long to delve into the interesting life of Capensis Clamity and come out the other side just like me, with a big ass grin on your face and one burning question… When the heck is he gonna post next? Check it!