Fight fire with fire
CAN THE PUNTERS really be buying whisky in Beijing at between £2 000 (R28 000) and £200 000 a bottle? Yes, that's what the comrade capitalists are paying at a club called Johnnie Walker House where the city's mega-rich and A-list celebrities fall over each other to encounter kilts, the bagpipes and top-notch scotch. It all happens a stone's throw from Tiannanmen Square.
It's slightly dismaying. These are roughly the same fellows who buy ground-up rhino horn to liven up the office parties. If they're prepared to pay that for scotch, what will they not pay the poaching syndicates?
It's time we fought fire with fire. Somehow the wildlife authorities have to combine a "Whisky makes you frisky" campaign – that extols whisky as a libido booster – with a campaign that does the opposite for rhino horn.
Do the folk at KZN Wildlife remember the TV campaign that their predecessors (the Natal Parks Board) ran against the illegal crayfish trade on the South Coast? They said the crayfish sold at the roadside were stored in longdrop latrines and they showed footage of them being removed from the longdrops, maggots and all.
It was actually baloney. But it killed the roadside crayfish trade stone dead, overnight.
Let's have some creative thinking. Rhino horns are stored in longdrop toilets. Taken with whisky, the horn produces not just disgusting disease but hallucinations and the disappearance of libido plus wedding tackle. Get the word out, like with the South Coast crayfish.
What seems hopeless could turn out to be opportunity.
Tony Greig
FORMER England cricket captain Tony Greig died in Australia this week after a long and sometimes controversial career, first as a player and then as a commentator.
Like so many in the current England team, he was in fact a South African. He learned his cricket at Queens College, Queenstown, and played for Border before playing county cricket for Sussex. He was also to turn out for Eastern Province.
I suppose it's OK that we keep on supplying England with cricketers. So long as they don't mind us continuing to remind them.
Natty macacque
MORE news about the tiny macaque monkey in a natty sheepskin jacket who was found in the parking lot outside an Ikea home goods store in Toronto, Canada.
It turns out his name is Darwin and he belongs to a lady named Yasmin Nakhuda, who has launched a legal battle to get him returned to her by the animal control officials who caught him and put him in a sanctuary in Sunderland, Ontario. The macacque's natural range is the tropical regions of Asia.
Miz Nakhuda and supporters staged a noisy protest outside Toronto Animal Services the other day and her lawyer says she is to apply for a court order for Darwin's return.
A Darwinian struggle - survival of the fittest.
Birthday girl
THE FIRST gorilla ever to be born in a zoo turned 56 the other day. Colo, a western lowland gorilla, celebrated in Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Ohio, by unwrapping a pile of presents and munching a cake and some tomatoes while guests sang "Happy Birthday".
Colo is a mother of three and has more than two dozen descendants living at zoos across the US.
Western lowland gorillas are found in the wild in Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Nigeria.
I wonder where Colo and her offspring would prefer to be.
Jobsworths
SURPRISE, surprise! A special investigative panel of the Health and Safety apparat in Britain has found that bans on yo-yos in playgrounds, knives in kitchens and kettles in offices are based on misinterpretation of the law or just plain silliness.
The panel says it is now helping ordinary people to fight back against the decisions and the "jobsworths" that make them.
Jobsworth? That's a minor official who whines that he can't take a rational, sensible decision because "it's more than me jobsworth!"
But who installed the jobsworths? When they ruled that the Royal Marines should instal a safety handrail on one of their assault courses, the Brits really had lost the plot.
Tailpiece
HOW many jugglers does it take to change a light bulb?
One. But he needs at least three bulbs.
Last word
Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.
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