If you're going to San Francisco …
THEY'RE going all puritanical in San Francisco. The local authority has passed a law banning public nudity. All it requires is the signature of the mayor, and he's already said he supports the measure.
Apparently complaints had come from the traditionally free any easy Castro district, where certain folk had taken to going around starkers.
The law bans anyone older than five years from appearing naked in public, with fines starting at $100 (R800) for a first offence and rising to $500 (R4 000) and a year in prison for a third.
Several women in a group of protesters outside the San Francisco city hall stripped as the measure was voted on and carried.
The city official who piloted the measure has the unusual name of Scott Wiener. "Free expression in the abstract is really nice," he says. "Until it comes to your neighbourhood."
Yes, I'm absolutely sick and tired of these vervet monkeys that keep prancing naked about the rooftops in my neighbourhood here in Durban.
Event boundaries
| DO YOU EVER walk into a room with some purpose in mind, only to completely forget what that purpose was?
Passing through a doorway triggers what's known as an event boundary in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the next. Your brain files away the thoughts you had in the previous room and prepares a blank slate for the new locale. That's a big relief. I'd thought I was becoming what the Zulus call "kukile". There's something incredibly interesting that I want to share with you, but unfortunately I thought about it in the room next door and I've crossed the event boundary. Keep buying the paper – it'll come back to me, I'm sure. |
| Clowns AN ORGANISATION called Clowns without Borders is staging a big bash in Durban tomorrow night. No, this is not some sort of internationalisation of the Nkandla Show – there really is such an organisation, modelled on Medicins Sans Frontiers, the doctors who fly into trouble spots. I confess that when a pamphlet was pressed on me the other evening at St Clements, I thought I was having my leg pulled. Do they really parachute in the clowns when there's trouble? But it seems Clowns Without Borders does indeed specialise in bringing entertainment and relief from the appalling realities of existence to all kinds of communities that are under stress or in crisis. The local chapter's clowns, jugglers, storytellers and comedians have operated in Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Israel/Palestine, the Lebanon, Southern Sudan and Ethiopia. An intervention is planned for Kenya. Clowns Without Borders also operates in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, the US and Canada. Tomorrow's fundraising bash (tickets R50 minimum) will be at 5.30 pm in the Corner Café (Brand/Cromwell intersection) in Glenwood. On the bill are Ewok (who has brought the house down on occasion at St Clement's); storyteller Gcina Mhlope (who is an absolute hoot); Nje; Nomusa Xaba; South Jersey Pom-Poms; Thulile Zama; and Tumelo Khoza. It should be a rollicking show. |
Tattooed ladies
OVERHEARD in the Street Shelter for the Over-40s: "Do you realise that in about 30 to 40 years we'll have thousands of old ladies running around with weird tattoos? And rap music will be the golden oldies? That's scarey."
Sparkling poetry
IAN GIBSON, poet laureate of Hillcrest, pens a few lines on the challenges facing contemporary political analysts.
This is a difficult time for political analysts,
Not to mention scribes and panellists;
Strikes all over the place,
Cops trying not to lose face,
Shucks! I'd rather be a deipnosophist.
A deipnosophist is – as I'm sure most of us knew already – a specialist in sparkling dinner table conversation.
Tailpiece
TWO BLONDES are in conversation.
"For a married man, Barrie dresses very smartly."
"Yeah. And fast too."
(The above supplied by a reader who calls himself Barrie with an "ie").
Last word
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
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