About: http://data.cimple.eu/news-article/b9057fd870776ec0817650e4f793297f36693cb73cf085ade8a216ef     Goto   Sponge   NotDistinct   Permalink

An Entity of Type : schema:NewsArticle, within Data Space : data.cimple.eu associated with source document(s)

AttributesValues
rdf:type
schema:articleBody
  • South African Fredie Blom celebrated his 116th birthday on Friday unfazed by the coronavirus crisis, over 100 years since the Spanish flu pandemic killed his sister. "I have lived this long because of God's grace," said Blom, possibly one of the oldest men in the world. Lighting a cigarette, he recalled the 1918 pandemic that left tens of millions dead worldwide including his sister. Blom was born in 1904 in the rural town of Adelaide, tucked near the Great Winterberg mountain range of South Africa's Eastern Cape province. He is older than a 112-year old British resident named the world's oldest living man by the Guinness World Records in March. Blom's age has not yet been verified by the body. Grandchildren whizzed around as Blom sat on the front yard of his home. Neighbours arrived soon after to sing happy birthday. Blom has spent most of his life working on farms around Cape Town. He met his 86-year old wife Jeanette at a dance and won her heart over with his jive moves. The couple have been married for almost fifty years. They moved to the Cape Town suburb of Delft three decades ago. At his great age, however, he says he won't let the coronavirus pandemic panic him. And he did not mince his words about South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa, complaining about a nationwide ban on cigarette sales as part of a series of lockdown measures. "He doesn't know what he's doing," Blom grumbled, adding that cigarettes were his only birthday wish this year. Blom stopped visiting doctors more than two years ago, claiming he was tired of being pricked and prodded. "Now he just takes two Disprins a day, but sometimes he steals my pills," Jeanette said, laughing affectionately at her stubborn husband. While Blom never had children, he adopted Jeanette's two from a previous marriage as his own. "He has done everything for us," said Blom's step-daughter Jasmien Toerien, 38. "He would wake up at three or four in the morning to cycle to work," she fondly recalled. "He loves animals and gardening." str-sch/har/kaf
schema:headline
  • One of world's oldest men marks 116th birthday in South Africa
schema:mentions
schema:author
schema:datePublished
http://data.cimple...sPoliticalLeaning
http://data.cimple...logy#hasSentiment
http://data.cimple...readability_score
http://data.cimple...tology#hasEmotion
Faceted Search & Find service v1.16.115 as of Oct 09 2023


Alternative Linked Data Documents: ODE     Content Formats:   [cxml] [csv]     RDF   [text] [turtle] [ld+json] [rdf+json] [rdf+xml]     ODATA   [atom+xml] [odata+json]     Microdata   [microdata+json] [html]    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3238 as of Jul 16 2024, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-musl), Single-Server Edition (126 GB total memory, 3 GB memory in use)
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2025 OpenLink Software