Cars without drivers
IN CALIFORNIA they're preparing for driverless cars. Governor Jerry Brown rode to Google headquarters in a self-driving Toyota Prius before signing legislation this week that will pave the way.
The bill will establish safety and performance regulations to test and operate autonomous vehicles on state roads and highways.
The cars use computers, sensors and other technology to operate independently, but a human driver can override the autopilot function and take control at any time.
"Today we're looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality - the self-driving car," Brown says. "Anyone who gets inside a car and finds out the car is driving will be a little skittish, but they'll get over it."
But here's an anomaly. We've had cars without drivers for years. They jump red lights, weave in and out of traffic at high speed and stop wherever they like. They behave of their own volition. They cannot have at the controls a human being who has been programmed to observe the highway code. They are controlled by something that is close to alien.
A variant is the super-luxury driverless limousine whose auto-pilot is in constant telephone transmission to Sadie at the tennis club, Tracy at the hairdressing salon or the maitre d' at whatever lunch establishment the GPS is zeroed in on.
Are we ahead of California? Well, obviously not when you look at the wreckage. What we need is an inversion of that fail-safe technology – something to override the human being behind the wheel
Cock Robin
THERE'S been response to the request for the Fanagalo version of Who Killed Cock Robin? Readers Clark Leroy and Ian Rich supply the Chilapalapa version (the equivalent of Fanagalo in Zimbabwe and Zambia) but the local version remains elusive, apart from the chorus:
Zonke zinyoni phezulu
Yena khala kakhulu,
Yen' izwile yen' ifile
Inyoni Kokilobin …
Here's an extract from the Chilapalapa version as sung by entertainer Wrex Tarr:
Ubani bulalili Cocky Lobbin?
Mina said the sparrow
Na lo picannini bow and arrow
Na lo intercontinental ballistic missile kamina,
Mina bulalili Cocky Lobbin.
Tarr was laying it on rather, in the interests of comedy.
I'm afraid stargazing correspondent Richard Siedle is not much closer to getting all the words of the local Fanagalo version that he requested. But I can direct him to a hostelry in Windermere Road where he will find a fellow who can be persuaded to sing One Man Went To Mow in Swahili. I don't know if that helps.
Patois
FANAGALO is, of course, a somewhat despised pidgin patois invented for communication on the mines a long time ago when workers were recruited from all over southern and central Africa. It's not really respectable to speak it these days.
Mind you, do we have any control over the melting pot? Do we have any control over language? Swahili is a similar patois of Arabic and the indigenous languages of East Africa. The Tsotsi Taal of the modern townships is creeping in everywhere.
Hey, Bru?
Army tradition
INTERESTINGLY, reader response reveals that Cock Robin (sung in English) is an integral part of the formal mess dinners of two local regiments, the Natal Mounted Rifles and the Umvoti Mounted Rifles, with a build-up in Zulu.
Ronnie Coppin says a formal dinner of the NMR begins with the commanding officer crying: "Sesifikile!" (We've arrived!) Then three times he shouts: "Kubulawayo!", to which all present respond "Ji!"
Then they sing the chorus of Who Killed Cock Robin? – "All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing …" etc.
Then the padre says grace and the dinner commences.
Charles Wilson says it's the same with the dinners of the UMR.
Where does all that come from? Why a children's nursery rhyme? Why Cock Robin?
Eek!
AN ABERDEEN housewife reached into her cutlery drawer for a teaspoon … and found instead a red, black and brown-striped snake coiled up.
She phoned the Scottish SPCA, who came and captured the snake and are caring for it. They describe it as a harmless milk snake, probably an escaped pet.
Obviously it was in the cutlery drawer by mistake. It was looking for the fridge.
Tailpiece
A SCOTSMAN, an Essex Girl and a Martian walk into a bar.
Landlord: "What's this? Some kind of joke?"
Last word
Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day.
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