Matieka 2007 report

Last weekend was the annual German carnival Matieka in Stellenbosch. I tried to attend the main event on Saturday evening, but never got to the door, since all 600 tickets were sold out by the time the event was supposed to start officially. I was even dressed for the event, just like most other people. The theme as every year was virtually unknown by most or simply ignored.

Just simply standing in the queue was an interesting experience and quite a bit of fun. Just for fun and the experience, I tried to dress as a female character, which most people in the queue did seem to recognise as a real female. One person who came with me also said that I looked the part. The outfit itself was a Supergirl costume which was open at the legs, stomach area and upper chest. The face I sorted out by using a realistic mask from Greylandfilm and a wig. To cover the rim of the mask around the eyes, I added a black eye mask. The idea was to look like a woman who wore a Supergirl costume with a bit of mystery added about what the face looks like. The end result was more or less as desired. Only one person seemed to have realised that I was not really female, the rest didn't seem to notice. Hands and legs and chest area would give that away a bit, as well as the eye rims possibly showing underneath the eye mask. The hair also looked too much like a wig.

The whole experiment served to see the response of people around me and to see what some people like or don't like about the costume, in order for me to better advise my clients who want to rent that kind of outfit or similar ones. Part of the experiment was to see just how different the response of other people is, simply by not wearing normal clothing.

The hard choice of what costume to wear

This weekend I am yet again going to the annual German carnival in Stellenbosch.

Unlike all of the previous years, I would like to wear a costume that is a bit more unique and less stereotypical. This year I was thinking of trying to wear a female outfit when combined with a realistic mask and wig. I have tried supergirl and a pirate costume, both actually fit and look quite good.

The usual costumes would be Wolverine, Superman, Batman, Jedi Knight and a few others. Most of my costumes would get too hot at such an event.

Dead PC

Yesterday I had lots of fun with my PC having a death scene. It started with a blue screen showing IRQL_NOT_EQUAL_OR_LESS error message. After the reset button, PC froze during booting. Later on the BIOS froze as well while navigating the menu. I tried to swap the RAM DIMMs and put single ones into other slots. At one point in time, the BIOS was doing a lot of quick beeps. Now that doesn't even happen anymore.

Supplier reliability issues

Lately I have become more wary of having to use local people and companies to help me do various things. The main problems being reliability and communication.

Examples:

1. A new supplier that phoned me to offer their services does not answer phone calls at different times of the day. The same applies to email enquiries. I wanted to buy something and was willing to pay for that, but now they have lost a sale since I have to yet again resort to the overseas suppliers who take longer due to shipping delays but deliver the goods.

2. Someone who was doing repairs for me seems to have lost some things that were supposed to have been repaired. Repairs that would take a few hours at most, I only ended up getting those back between two and three months later. Most of the time no communication at all when I enquired about the status.

3. A company overseas that does some manufacturing also doesn't respond to enquiries (email or telephone). I don't see how they can sell things if they operate like that.

The end result is: I am sceptical at best to give anybody some work to do and with that adding to the lack of experience and unemployment.

Spider-Man at Cape Town Book Fair 2007 at CTICC

A recent news article from the Readers Den newsletter showed the following article which was now also listed on BKE Costume Rental:

Spider-man makes an appearance at 12.00 on Sunday 17 June (Readers Den, Stand G16, Exhibition Floor ). Spider-man will hand out a selection of all ages comics - kids only! Photo opportunities with Spider-man are welcome.

Read more information about the Cape Town Book Fair.