Captured for posterity
THE INFAMOUS headbutt by French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane on Italian Marco Materazzi in the 2006 Fifa World Cup (won by Italy) has been captured for posterity in a giant bronze sculpture that has been placed outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Titled "Headbutt", the work is by Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed.
Whatever next? Statues and paintings celebrating such things as illicit seizing of the genitalia of line-out jumpers in rugby? The mind, senor, she boggles!
Meanwhile, Russian media billionaire Alexander Lebedev has been charged with "hooliganism" for punching property developer Sergei Polonsky during a live TV chat show.
Hooliganism is, of course, considered a serious crime in Russia. Members of the female punk group, Pussy Riot, are in jail for their anti-Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral.
Lebedev says the charge levelled at him is political victimisation. He's probably right.
But whatever happens, somebody should commission Adel Abdessemed to capture for posterity "The Punch". It would look good in bronze outside the Kremlin.
Mining aggro
THERE'S lots of aggro at the platinum mine, all kinds of people stirring it up. All kinds of hidden agendas. Some horrific violence. Lots of boozing; quite a bit of sex. Plenty of disturbing underground action.
This flies from the keyboard of my old newspaper colleague Pixie Emslie (Pixie Malherbe in the days I knew her).
No, Pixie isn't writing for one of our more august financial papers about the Marikana hassles (though she almost could be), this is a novel based on her experience of the mining industry, where she produced magazines for various companies.
Cry of the Rocks (Strategic Book Publishing) is fiction. The police break up a couple of bar brawls, they don't open fire on strikers. Ju-Ju doesn't feature. The NUM is there but the breakaway union is not.
Yet parallels with Marikana uncannily are there – the dreadful conditions underground, the constant danger; the proliferation of shanty slums in the post-apartheid era; the manipulation of the workforce; the overseas financial dimension.
Where Marikana has dodgy trade unionists, dead-beat politicians and unsophisticated workers, Pixie introduces a criminal twist with an international dimension - kidnapping, extortion, sabotage. And, of course, some pretty harrowing underground stuff. The plot gets very tight toward the end.
Do the good guys win? I'm not tellin' ya!
Bar fight
OVERHEARD in the Street Shelter for the Over-40s: "So there we were in this bar-fight – two against 10. Boy, did we flatten those two bastards!"
Finger lunch
AN AMERICAN man who lost four fingers in a freak accident on a lake has found one of them – in the stomach of a trout.
Hans Galassi lost the fingers when the rope towing him behind a motorboat on a board tightened on his hand while ski-ing on Priest Lake, Idaho.
Three months later a fisherman hooked a trout eight miles away and made the grisly discovery of a little finger inside the fish.
Police fingerprinted it and traced Galassi, who says he does'nt want it back.
Great coincidence, great police work. And maybe that's why a small trout is known as a fingerling.
Humdinger
AMERICAN scientists have for the first time captured – on high-speed cameras – the biomechanics of the way hummingbirds fly backwards.
Dr Nir Sapir and Robert Dudley, of the University of California, have found that hummingbirds' backward flight uses similar amounts of energy to flying forwards.
According to Dr Sapir, the most important finding of the study is that flying backwards uses a similar amount of energy to flying forwards, both of which are more efficient than hovering.
I'm glad they've established that. It had been keeping me awake at nights.
Prison paintings
ST CLEMENT'S rides again! Except that this month the Monday at Six weekly soiree in support of the arts will be held not at the usual venue in Musgrave Road but at the Alliance Francaise, in Sutton Crescent, Morningside.
Tonight Paulette Barker will put on a slide show of paintings done by inmates of Westville Prison. Table bookings: 031-3682022.
In November the soirees revert to St Clement's restaurant, Musgrave Road.
Tailpiece
| Small boy (lost at the mall): "I've lost my grandpa." Security officer: "What's he like?" Small boy (after a pause): "Jack Daniels and ladies with big boobs." Last word When someone tells you something defies description, you can be pretty sure he's going to have a go at it anyway. |
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