The more things change ...
SCIENTISTS at Oxford University have discovered that a video game known as Tetris can be useful in preventing people having psychological flashbacks to distressing episodes in their past.
The psychology department tested a group of people. They were shown distressing videos – horror crashes and so on – then were split into three groups. One played Tetris – which seems to be a game in which you use coloured building blocks on-screen – others played a game called Pub Quiz and the rest were told to just sit around and twiddle their thumbs.
They were also asked to keep a flashback diary for a week.
The Tetris players reported considerably fewer flashbacks than the others, the Pub Quiz people considerably more.
The researchers suggest that Tetris, or a visual-spatial task like it, could be developed as a kind of "cognitive vaccine" against psychological flashbacks. It could become an alternative to current treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Those Oxford psychologists need to extend their research to South Africa, where there's a rich field of flashbacks. At the same time, Tetris needs to be imported in bulk as a matter of urgency.
Every time Glen Aggliotti appears in court charged with all kinds of skullduggery, much of it relating to the former commissioner of police, we get a flashback to when another Aggliotti was in a monster land scandal in which he was in cahoots with the Nats.
Every time a government functionary fulminates over "fronting" to frustrate the BEE programme, we get a flashback to Nat cabinet ministers going incandescent over "fronting" by whites on behalf of Indian businessmen so they could circumvent the Group Areas Act.
Every time Julius Malema or some other politico cries "Racist!" when the parliamentary opposition dissects government non-performance, we get a flashback to PW Botha crying "Boerehaat!" in precisely the same circumstances.
Every time a black academic insists on the vernacular languages becoming the medium of instruction in universities, we get a flashback to Verwoerd saying the same thing - denying black students exposure to the international mainstream.
Every time the minister of sport, or the parliamentary portfolio committee on sport, express themselves on the racial composition of sports teams, we get a flashback to John Vorster saying virtually the same thing.
Every time a politician tells us of the five million jobs in the pipeline, we get a flashback to successive Nat ministers saying "next year" the "Bantu" will start streaming back to their homelands.
Ensovoorts, ensovoorts. So many flashbacks.
Financial turmoil
ALL KINDS of financial turmoil in Europe. Will Ireland have to be bailed out by the EU? When will the Spanish wake up to the fact that they're in a crisis? Are Portugal and Greece still there?
Will the Euro survive as a currency? The stresses are immense. Maybe they'll all go back to their punts, francs, marks, schillings, lira, escudos and so forth.
As we ought to go back to pounds, shillings and pence. It was a far superior currency. When I left school a pint of beer cost 1/6d (15 cents); a cup of coffee cost twopence (2 cents); you could get a mixed grill on the beachfront for 4/6d (45 cents); and you could take a girl out to dinner for a quid.
I rest my case.
Atrocities
THE RHINO poaching atrocities prompt some angry lines from Durban poet Irene Emanuel. She calls her poem The Dark Side:
They live on the dark side
where life means money;
riches taken from the
life-blood of fast-fading species.
Only on the dark side
are these destroyers found
coiling alongside the devil,
making pacts with murderers.
They hack off rhino horns;
shoot tigers for their bones;
torture bears for their bile;
force-feed geese for pate;
rip the fins off sharks;
club seals for their skins;
the list is endless,
the suffering is without merit.
They live on the dark side,
the cold hunters who kill
without compunction,
in the name of ostentatious greed.
Those soul-less executioners
will take the last rhino,
the last tiger and they will kill
until every last bird, fish,
reptile, butterfly and beast
is wiped off the planet.
And then the dark side
will encompass Earth.
Tailpiece
HOW many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
That's not funny!
Last word
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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