Splendid Isolation

A cyclist who sparked outrage in Belgium last year after he went viral for kneeing a young girl to the ground during her family’s Christmas Day walk is now suing her dad for sharing the video online.
The footage was filmed by five-year-old Neia’s dad, Patrick Mpasa, during their family walk in a nature reserve in Baraque Michel, Liege Province, on December 25, 2020.
In the video, the five-year-old girl is seen walking by her mother’s side on the snow-covered path as the cyclist approaches them from behind. Just as he rides alongside the girl, he seemingly extends his knee out, hitting the little girl and knocking her to the ground before continuing on his way unbothered.
The cyclist was taken to court in Verviers, only to be given a suspended sentence on the grounds that he had been criticised enough on social media and was ordered to pay the girl’s family a symbolic and pitiful €1 in compensation.

And the best part:

Now, almost a year after the incident, the cyclist is heading back to court to sue the girl’s father for defamation on the grounds that the backlash the video received resulted in him feeling so threatened by the public he was scared to leave his own house.

Act like an asshole, get treated like one. And for the legal action? Dismissed with costs, if there’s any justice left in the world.

Cyclists act like they own the fucking road, anyway.

Good Man Down

November 16, 2021 Kim du Toit Bad News, Literature

I see that novelist Wilbur Smith has died aged 88, and I have to mourn one of the world’s great storytellers.

Longtime Readers will recall that when anyone asks me to recommend books about South Africa, I recommend Wilbur Smith’s Courtney trilogy (When The Lion Feeds, The Sound Of Thunder and A Sparrow Falls ) as the best of the bunch (along with Stuart Cloete’s Rags Of Glory, for the Boer War).

Having read almost all Smith’s Africa novels, I have to say that after a while the stories become somewhat formulaic — but that does not take away from their wonderful pacing, excellent settings and gripping conclusions. In fact, it says quite a lot that I, knowing all that, still have read and continue to read his books as soon as they appear on the (digital) shelves. In other words, even though I pretty much know what’s going to happen within the first few chapters, I still continue to read because at all times, I learn stuff about the location(s) of the stories and their characters.

Sooon there’ll be no more Wilbur Smith novels, and I have to say, a little joy has gone out of my reading world.

R.I.P.

Quote Of The Day

November 16, 2021 Kim du Toit QOTD, Seen On Campus

“Physical sciences is a VERY hard subject, which will require ALL of your attention and your FULL brain capacity (and for a large fraction of you, even that will not be quite enough). You can ONLY do well (ie achieve your potential, which rightly or wrongly several people here assumed you have) if you are completely focused, and learn to enjoy the course. People who just TAKE the course, but enjoy their social life, can easily survive in many subjects — but not in this one. Remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’ — and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable.”
— Professor Eugene Terentjev, Cambridge University

My hero. It’s precisely what I would say to incoming freshmen if I were teaching a course at university. (Which is why I wouldn’t last long.)

Predictably, all the Fainting Goats are outraged.