Meerkat hits the big time
JUST when did the meerkat go global? This quirky and appealing little denizen of the Kalahari desert and such places is a natural for film footage, and indeed he has appeared in various local advertising features.
But suddenly he's in the international big time. He's adopted a Russian identity – Alexsandr Orlov – and pedigree, including a great-grandfather in Tsarist uniform who fought in the Meerkat-Mongoose war of 1728 and appears on the internet.
Now Alexandr – created originally as a fun diversion by the VCCP advertising agency in London – has written his autobiography, A Simples Life (No, it doesn't make sense to me either), whose sales are outstripping those of former British prime minister Tony Blair and showbiz celebrity Katie Price.
Not bad for a meerkat. I must get cracking on that memoir of Laurence the Leguaan.
Frenchies!
WHEN French and British engineers first mooted, in the 19th century, the building of a cross-channel tunnel to link the two countries, lurid cartoons appeared in England showing French soldiers pouring out of it with fixed bayonets.
Sentiments were no doubt similar in France. The Napoleonic wars had built up a stock of mutual suspicion and ill-will that has by no means dissipated.
Yet Britain and France are now to merge their military/naval operations in all kinds of areas, a development that has been hastened by the need on both sides to rationalise and drastically cut government spending.
It's a bad day for the Francophobes and Anglophobes. Some of their favourite jokes, their pet prejudices, will have to be ditched.
A cultural bridging is needed. How about a run by the Folies Bergere on the London West End?
Ball of fire
MEANWHILE, the notion of the French and the Brits sharing aircraft carriers recalls the one about the carrier-based American aviator in the Pacific theatre during World War II,
This fellow had been a little erratic and had been warned that unless he tightened up his act he would lose his wings. Determined to prove himself, he took off one morning.
He was an absolute ball of fire. He shot down two Japanese Zeroes. He torpedoed a Japanese cruiser. Making a pass over a Japanese destroyer, he dropped a bomb right down the funnel. Boom!
Running short of fuel, he nevertheless performed a victory roll as he came in to land on the carrier flight deck. The capture wires had barely eased when he was out of the cockpit and striding jauntily toward the waiting captain.
He saluted: "Whatchya think of that then, Cap'n, Sir?"
The Captain: "Velly funny, Amelican pig!"
Missing limerick?
IAN GIBSON, poet laureate of Hillcrest, thinks he might have found the limerick sought by reader Lydia Weight, who can recall only the first two lines:
A limerick's written with ease,
Like a man on a flying trapeze;
With only five lines,
Including scansion and rhymes,
It is verse that will certainly please.
Would that be it?
Another limerick
MEANWHILE, Ian is so exercised by Julius Malema's calling Helen Zille a "cockroach" that he supplies comment, also in a limerick:
There should have been reproach,
When Zille was called a cockroach;
But the President's silence
Condoned verbal violence,
Thus weakening his non-racial approach.
Tailpiece
A COUPLE are going out for the evening. They're in their glad rags and need only to put the dog out when their taxi arrives. However, as the couple go out the dog bolts back inside.
They don't want the dog shut up in the house so the wife goes out to the taxi and the husband goes back indoors to chase the dog out.
The wife doesn't want to advertise that the house will be left empty so she says to the taxi driver: "He's just going upstairs to say goodbye to my mother."
A couple of minutes later, the husband gets into the cab.
"Sorry I took so long. Stupid bitch was hiding under the bed and I had to poke her with a coathanger to get her to come out. Then I had to wrap her in a blanket to stop her scratching and biting me as I hauled her ass downstairs. Then I threw her out the back door. She better not poop in the vegetable garden again!"
The silence in the taxi was deafening.
Last word
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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