Big rush on weddings
MARRIAGE registries across China were besieged last week as thousands of couples flocked to marry. The reason? It was an auspicious day.
It seems that when you say January 4, 2013, in Mandarin, it sounds very similar to the phrase: "I will love you all my life."
They take such things seriously in China. In Beijing alone, 10 000 couples turned up to tie the knot last Friday and extra registry staff had to be drafted in to cope. In Hong Kong, Shanghai and elsewhere, there was also a huge rush.
For tourists and other visitors, this seems worth bearing in mind. Be careful of using the Mandarin phrase book – rather hire an interpreter. A phrase like: "Can you tell me where I can find a laundrette that also does ironing" could sound – when your Mandarin is imperfect – like "I am seized with desire for you and I cannot wait." Next thing she's dragged you not to the laundrette but the marriage registry.
Elephant dung
THE PROBLEM in the US economy is not just the Fiscal Cliff. There's also the Debt Ceiling. There's also the elephant in the room, which recycles money so that those who lend to the US government are repaid in elephant dung.
I think that is what investment analyst Dr James Greener is getting at in his latest grumpy newsletter, in which he appears far from impressed by what is going on.
"The failure to tackle the deficit in a serious and meaningful way unavoidably brings much closer the moment when the US government total debt will bump up against the so-called Debt Ceiling. This is another event which causes all-night meetings and loud shouting and brinkmanship. But inevitably there will be another last minute decision and the Ceiling will be raised. There actually is no alternative. But the debt remains the elephant in the room.
"The fellows in Washington perform these rituals frequently and indeed they can go on doing it almost forever. Or at least until the folk who are lending the US the money to feed Jumbo become concerned that the interest they are being paid is actually their own money coming straight back to them after passing through the pachyderm.
"Normally the scam of getting later investors to fund the returns being enjoyed by those who were earlier to the party is called a Ponzi scheme. But the
It's rather arresting imagery that - the head of the Federal Reserve as a zookeeper with a shovel.
Arson award
MEANWHILE, American satirist Andy Borowitz describes Washington as having been in celebratory mode "after kind of averting a completely unnecessary crisis that was entirely of its own creation."
"In a related story, an arsonist received an award for putting out his own fire."
Sex kitten
BRIGITTE Bardot, screen sex kitten of the sixties, has threatened to emigrate from France to Russia if the authorities don't reprieve two zoo elephants that are due to be euthanased because of disease.
She would follow her actor friend, Gerard Depardieu, a tax exile who has taken out Russian citizenship.
Vladimir Putin must be getting nervous. Depardieu is all very well, but what happens if the activist Bardot should link up with Pussy Riot?
Fuel levy
SOME cynical number crunching on the fuel levy:
We consume 579 000 barrels of crude oil a day in South Africa (according to the Department of Statistics) .
One barrel makes 71.92282 litres of fuel. That - 71.92282 x 579 000 – comes to 41 643 000 litres a day. Over a year – 41 643 000 x 365 days – it comes to 15 200 000 000 litres.
The road levy on that – 15 200 000 000 x R2.50 – comes to R38 billion.
Now multiply that R38 billion by the 21 years that no road maintenance has taken place and you get R798 billion.
Now go out and buy your e-tag and get done over some more.
Tailpiece
"EVERY time we have an argument, my wife gets historical."
"You mean hysterical?"
"No, historical. 'Then there was the time when you …'"
Last word
Most people ignore most poetry
because
most poetry ignores most people.
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