Economics and hallucination
COULD there be a link between the discovery of a magic mushrooms processing factory in Pinetown and various public utterances of late?
Magic mushrooms – or "shrooms", as they are known in the trade – have hallucinogenic properties which were popular in the ancient Aztec civilisations of South America, giving a real lift to their ceremonies. They apparently give a good buzz.
And here we have various public figures talking of creating five million new jobs over the next few years, the whole thing driven by a six percent growth rate. This surely is magic mushroom talk.
Will the police investigators make the connection? And who has been responsible for feeding shrooms into the canapés of our leaders? We need to get to the bottom of this. The jungle grew over the Aztec civilisation while they were jigging around and chasing butterflies. We don't want that here.
Growing fame
JULIUS Malema's fame continues to grow. A five-minute Juju Friday exercise on Twitter last week apparently made him the second-most tweeted topic worldwide'
He wants to close down Twitter? No, that's crazy. Apart from its being impossible to achieve, the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity.
I've an idea Comrade Julius is well aware of that.
Roll of dishonour
MEANWHILE, cads have tried to market on the internet a toilet roll bearing Julius's face on every sheet. This device was first employed in the old Rhodesia after UDI when somebody produced toilet paper with the face of Harold Wilson, the British prime minister.
Such lavatorial humour prompts stern reaction, such as when the editor of a Wits student newspaper was deported to his native Britain for a cartoon which placed prime minister John Vorster inside a toilet bowl.
But they were pre-Twitter days, pre-Twitter tactics..
The genie is out
THOSE seeking to regulate the newspapers and close down the flow of public information might, meanwhile, draw a lesson or two from the Malema/Twitter affair.
The genie is out of the bottle. In the digital age, you can't suppress information. Text and images fly about the world in nano-seconds. Try to control any kind of information and it spreads exponentially.
It's bad news for those who are still psychologically rooted in the Cold War, but that's how it is.
Fridge record
A WOMAN in Oxford, England, is in the news for being the owner of a refrigerator that has served her for 58 years without giving any problem. Retired piano teacher Doris Stogdale first bought the fridge – a General Electric – in Malaya in 1952, and since then it has followed her family round the world and been in almost constant use.
That's quite a record. I myself bought a fridge forty-something years ago and it's also still going strong. A few of us used to camp down at Mbotyi, on the Wild Coast, every Christmas and refrigeration always was a problem.
We would keep our beers in a canvas bag of water slung in a tree and the combination of seepage and evaporation in the breeze would keep them chilled. But nothing else could be kept. Then one year a friend and I bought an old paraffin fridge on an auction sale in Maritzburg. We lugged it down to Mbotyi and set it up in our campsite. It worked like a charm – cold beers, butter, milk, ice, all that kind of thing. That was when we started going soft.
When it came time to leave, we didn't feel like lugging this fridge all the way back so we gave it to one of the cottages at Mbotyi. It's still there today, now converted to gas, and still making ice.
Our fridge was already old when we bought it so it probably beats Mrs Dogdale's for longevity. And I bet it beats hers in the ratio of longevity to capital invested. We bought ours on the auction sale for a pound.
Tailpiece
A WOMAN finds her husband stalking about the kitchen with a fly swatter
"What are you doing?"
"Hunting flies."
"Any luck?"
"Yep - three males, two females."
"How can you tell them apart?"
"Three were on a beer can, two were on the phone."
Last word
I don't have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They're upstairs in my socks.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT,
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