Smartcards and monkeys
MORE depredations by the monkeys. DSTV went off the air suddenly. There was a signal problem, the lady on the Helpline said. I should take in the decoder to be checked.
This I did next day. I needed a new Smartcard (whatever that might be) the smart lady behind the desk said. They'd been reminding me for six months with a message on the screen. (But who reads those messages? They're in an unintelligible alien language anyway).
She sighed and gave me a new Smartcard.
Back to the humble abode. Still no signal. I called in a technician.
"Let's look outside first," he said. "Ah," said. "You've got monkeys?"
Boy, do we have monkeys! Half-eaten bunches of unripe grapes were strewn about the place. He took it all in.
"Yeah, you've got monkeys."
It seems the little blighters have been swinging on the satellite dish and fiddling with everything on it while they munch at the grapes. This is getting beyond a joke. But the techie was on top of it and soon had the dish adjusted – a perfect picture again.
How do we punish and discourage these monkeys? It doesn't seem practical to round them up and force them to watch SABC talk shows (which are what remains when DSTV goes on the blink). It would also be a bit severe.
The only workable solution seems to be the green laser, whose beam (as we have discussed before) turns the blue bits of the male monkeys a fluorescent turquoise, to the consternation and panic of the entire troop. I wonder if this could be incorporated with future satellite dish design.
Smart monkey
MEANWHILE, a monkey wearing a sheepskin jacket caused a stir outside an Ikea furniture store in Canada, appropriately dressed for the cold.
It happened in Toronto. The small, smartly-dressed macaque monkey was spotted in the car park. Security staff cornered him and called the police.
It's as well that they intercepted this fellow. I've no doubt he was headed for the Ikea television and satellite dishes department. He would have caused havoc.
Katzenjammer Kids
I WAS TAKEN to task at the St Clement's soiree by Dr Peter Krumm the other evening for occasionally writing Katzenjammer Kids English when depicting Germans speaking the language. Peter – who is in the physics department at UKZN – said it always reminded him of his own heavy accent.
He also quizzed me in German, Danish and French – where I floundered very badly, trying feebly to riposte with some Portuguese – to illustrate that we English-speakers are not as clever as we think.
Now he sends me a poem given to him by his English teacher at the Martin-Luther Schule in Marburg (Germany, not the KZN South Coast), back in the 1950s. It's called Brush Up Your English.
I take it you already know
Of tough and cough and bough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, trough and through.
Well done! And now you wish perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead: It's said like bed, not bead –
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor are both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword
And do and go and thwart and part –
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five!
Yes, English must be maddening for newcomers. That's what happens when you take the patois of an island of Celts that's been invaded and settled by Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes and Norman-French – and then make it into a world language.
Tailpiece
Why do Germans not play cricket?
Becuz vhen zey put on ze helmet, zey vant to march!
Last word
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.
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