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The Goat Tower

Alex •


The Goat Tower at Fairview, Paarl. Photo: Taxi81 [wikipedia]

Here's one from the philosophy of give-'em-what-they-want: a tower house for goats!

Apparently this sort of thing is popular in South Africa, with the first being The Goat Tower at Fairview, Paarl, which was built in 1981 by Charles Back.


Comments (9)

Newest 5
Newest 5 Comments

Goats do love climbin' stuff. There's a guy in town who has goats in a pen in his front yard. There's a small pond, as well as several other things for the goats to do, but they all crowd together on a cement bench because its the highest thing to stand on.
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I have been to the Fairview winery. Among other things, they produce a wine named "Goats do Roam" (a very bad pun on Cote du Rhone) which features a drawing of the tower on the label. The tower was built to give the goats something to climb, which they do with great abandon.

The goat tower is not a particularly big deal in terms of attracting tourists...none of the local tourist literature I have seen features it. But Paarl (Afrikaans for "Pearl"), along with Franschhoek, is part of the Western Cape's Wine Country, much like California's Napa and Sonoma Valleys, and attracts considerable interest for that reason alone. South African wines are lovely, BTW.
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I saw exactly the same thing about a week ago, except there was a model car with the hood open instead of a model tractor. I can't recall if it was on Neatorama or Digg, but the video looked as if it might have been captured from a kid's show like Sesame Street. So, this may not be original.
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I remember something like that in the movie "Top Secret". It was a telephone, only the telephone was huge and far away and the scene was shot to make you believe the phone was regular size and close to the camera. Until someone picked up the oversized phone.
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This technique goes back about 100 years. It's been used for placing miniatures or paintings into movie scenes before the invention of the optical printer, and even much more recently. It's very easy to do, as long as you have a lot of light, which creates the long focus area so everything from a few inches to infinity is in focus.

I used this technique in my teenage moviemaking days. A friend stood on a ladder far from the camera and a crashed spaceship model was placed right up in front of the camera, so it looked like he was climbing out of the top hatch of the ship. Those were the days!
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Here's an entire website of stills using the same technique. It's been around for at least 4 years..but I know the idea has been around much longer.
http://dubster.com/cars/index.asp?id=419
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Obviously this guy didn't do his homework. A John Deere D is bigger than the relative size of the Mercedes C. For someone wearing and driving the sterotypical professor accoutriments, i'd expect better.
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